ABSTRACT
There is a sense in which life and reason may be said to vivify the arts, but this sense is recondite and remote from the conceit and rashness with which people speak of the “spirit” in history or of “reason” in the universe. It is not at all true that, as Virgil says, mind agitates a lump of formless matter and mixes itself with the vast body of nature. 1 Mind would have to become matter before it could do that. Nor is it true even in the human fine arts or in eloquence that there is a previous purely mental image that the sculptor’s hand or the speaker’s words retrace when they are inspired. A deliberate speaker may, in conversation or argument, think of what he will say before he says it; but that thought is itself a form of words coming spontaneously into his mind by gift of his unforeseen vital fertility. The physical agitation issuing in that inspiration is felt strongly in the body, and noticed by the listener. Were that total bodily action wanting there would be no true eloquence, but only the cold recitation of a phrase not then being bred in the man’s heart. The good actor must train his pose and features to imitate the gesture of all the passions, so as to seem to feel them: whether he feels them a little or not is immaterial. 2
