A work of art is a collaboration between two artists, whom, for purposes of reference, I shall call the speaker and the listener. But, before it is a collaboration, a re-creation, in which form we commonly know it, it is an independent act performed by the speaker alone. He, as first creator, isolates some from the flux of impressions in which he lives. It is as if he were to arrest that flux, and momentarily to stop its flow. He holds back the sun and the moon in their courses, and, for a moment, the world stands motionless before him, embodied in the dominating impressions given him by a single moment of its and his existence. This one moment he disentangles from all others; the world, the universe, at that moment, for him, he fashions into a memory, clearer than life, and owing its clarity to his refusal to allow it to have a before or an after, an above or a below, other than those which itself implies. He isolates that moment with its implications. The resulting clarity is as if he had suddenly stopped the cross-currents of a stream, and the stream, losing the opaqueness of its tangled motion, had become crystal. He isolates that moment by surrounding it with his own consciousness, while other moments fly past taking with them shreds of that tattered veil, no more.... There is a choice of moments, and because the choice is not reasonable, but determined by the moment itself, the speaker feels himself inspired. That which attracts him, seduces him, compels him to catch it as it passes and hold it fast, instead of letting it break free and join the myriad others with their worthless trophies of incomplete comprehension, is a moment whose impressions present themselves as melody, gesture, words, shape, or ordered colour, or the promise of such. Two bars are heard as it goes by, a significant arm swings out of the flood, a jumble of words, like those of a sleeper, startle his mind, the ghost of an unpainted picture wakes his eyes.... These things are pledges. He seizes them and, warily, lest he lose them, listens for the rest of the melody, watchfully draws out of the flood the figure whose gesture had seemed to be the moment itself, pieces the brittle words together, and shapes the picture in his brain. He allows the moment to redeem the pledge it has given, his care being not to impede it by forestalling its further appearance with something contradictory to the original fragment, something that the character of that fragment has not determined. He seeks only to be true to the original promise, and the good artist is known by the fact that it is impossible to tell with what he began, the bad artist by the fragment he has surrounded with baser metal that does not ring with its note, or the phantom whose vitality he has blurred by clothing it with flesh uninformed by its peculiar vitality.