The artist feels this more perhaps than other workers. He feels it because his feelings are more prominent, and more often handled, than those of the workman in the more mechanical trades. A man may make tremendous engines or run them; and never “feel himself work” so much as the maker of very inconsiderable poems. This is because the poet is so highly socialised a product. His power to be a poet is a social power. What he feels is the heart of his people, and he, poor man! thinks it is his own. He thinks his heart is far more exquisitely sensitive than theirs, whereas it is their hearts he is feeling! His capacity for pain and for pleasure is their capacity; it is greater because he is _more people_, or at least is the specialised point of sensation and expression for more people. “Let me write the songs of a people and let who will make their laws.” The songs _of a people_—not his songs forced down upon them, but their songs forced up through him. “The proof of a poet shall be sternly deferred until his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.” Artists, of all men, are most exquisitely specialised to the social service. Their work, of all men’s, is least valuable to themselves, most valuable to others. They are absolutely _for_ other people to so extreme a degree as nearly always to warp and injure their personal relations, even under the fairest conditions. They must do the work for which they are built, cost what it may, and this compelling power, this insistent force from within which will out through whatever medium is at hand, this they call “self-expression”! An artist, they say, must not consider social service in the least; he must express himself. It is a true recognition of the kind of work he must do; he must indeed express that which is good in him quite regardless of whether the people around him want it or not; will pay him for it or not; will kill him for it or not. But that unfaltering expression _is_ his social service, his true function, what he was built for. And it is not “himself” that he is expressing, it is “themself.” He is, of that people and that time, a voice, an eye, an ear, a hand to do. Holland made the Dutch painters, not they Holland. They in return in their accomplished work made Holland Hollander, so to speak, but the lives of many generations of Dutchmen and Dutchwomen went to form those painters first.