But we ourselves have to play our part in the realizing of this universal; the sense of it comes and goes; for the most part we ourselves are not aware of it.  We are merely particulars, like other men, and separated from them by the fact that we are all particulars.  Only, when for a moment we are aware of it, then we are filled with a passion to make it real and permanent; and it is this passion which causes art and the blind instinctive effort at art, at communication, at expression, which we have all experienced.

But it follows from this that the audience to which the artist addresses himself is not any particular men and women:  it is mankind.  The moment he addresses himself to any particular men and women and considers their particular wants and desires, he is giving up that very sense of the universal that impelled him to expression; he is ceasing to be an artist and becoming something else, a tradesman, a philanthropist, a politician.  The artist as artist speaks to mankind, not to any particular set of men; and he speaks not of himself but of that universal which he has experienced.  His effort is to establish that universal relation which he has seen, a universal relation of feeling.  And to him, in his effort, there is neither time nor space.  Mankind are not here or there or of this moment or of that; they are everywhere and for ever.  The voice in Mozart’s music is itself a universal voice speaking to the universe of universal things.  And all art is an acting of the beauty that has been experienced, a perpetuation of it so that all men may share it for ever.  The artist’s effort is to be the sunset he has seen, to eternalize it in his art, but always so that he and all men may be part of this universal by their common experience of it.

So, as I say, the artist must not speak to any particular audience with the aim of pleasing them—­there is that amount of truth in Whistler’s doctrine; and he does fail if he does not communicate, since his aim is communication—­there is that amount of truth in Tolstoy’s doctrine.

But the next question that arises is the attitude of ourselves to the artist.

We have to remember that he is speaking not to us in particular, but to all mankind, and that he speaks, not to please us or to satisfy any particular demand of ours, but to communicate to us that universal he has experienced so that we with him may become part of it.

It follows then that we must not make any particular demands upon him.  We must not come with our own ideas of what he ought to give us.  If we do, we shall be an obstruction between him and that ideal universal audience to which he would address himself.  We shall be tempting him, with our egotistical demands, to comply with them.  But these demands we are always making; and that is why the relation between the artist and any actual public is usually nowadays wrong.  I was once looking at Tintoret’s ‘Crucifixion’ in the Scuola di San Rocco