The process of the speaker in the first creation of a work of art is a process of finding out. He is engaged in _knowing_ the uttermost implications of the fragment of impression caught by him from the flux of unconscious or semi-conscious life. He is making the whole of that impression his own by his profound, his complete consciousness of it. That is why the artist can never understand those people, not artists, who ask him how he can prefer art to life; imitation to the real thing. He cannot believe that such people mean what they say. In his humility he assumes that they too have the modesty to admit to themselves that their life is unconscious, or semi-conscious, and he believes that this process of _knowing_, of becoming conscious, is the intensest form of living that there is. Then, when the work of art is as we know it, we, the listener, collaborate with that other artist, the speaker, and from what he has said, in stone, music, paint or words, try to reconstruct the fragment of life that he has made his own and to share his consciousness of it. Accurately speaking, this is impossible. We become conscious of a moment of life different from his. We cannot give his words the precise atmosphere they had for him, we cannot see with exactly his eyes, or hear with his ears, we are without his private and individual memory. We can but be inaccurate translators. We can, however, perceive, uncertainly, that he has been successful himself in allowing a moment of life to redeem the pledge it had given him, that his work does not contradict itself, and so is true to the original inspiration bedded in it or clothed by it. And this perception suggests to us that, if it were possible, we should find, certainly, what we already believe, that his share in the collaboration is perfect. We then say that a work of art is beautiful; the wistfulness with which we sometimes say it, the tears that sometimes dim our eyes as we close a book or turn from a picture that we believe to be beautiful, and the sadness that has often been associated with the name of beauty, are due to the half-conscious knowledge that our share in the collaboration is imperfect, since we can never stand exactly where he stood. Our judgment of the beautiful then depends on our belief that, were certain unalterable facts altered in the constitution of the universe and of ourselves, we should be sharing a perfect expression, an expression, that is to say, in perfect unity with itself. Art then for art’s sake, perfection of expression first. But what is this expression in perfect unity with itself, but a moment of conscious living, isolated from all else, lifted from the unconscious flux and given us--to live?