The third condition, the sincerity of the artist, is more obscure. Tolstoy’s own elucidation carries us but a little way. What is this force with which an experience occurs? Certainly experiences may be of the utmost intensity without thereby being any more easy to convey. A lightning flash, for example, which just misses one upon a summit, is much more difficult to describe than the same flash seen from the valley. Tolstoy, however, is speaking of the experience as evoked by the artist in the course of communication, of the “emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation”, which then “is gradually produced and does itself exist in the mind”, to quote Wordsworth’s celebrated account of the source of poetry. He is speaking of the fullness, steadiness and clearness with which the experience to be communicated develops in the mind of the communicator at the moment of expression. Inrushes of emotion, accompanied by scraps and odd bits of imagery, thought and incipient activity, are not uncommon, and the process of jotting down what comes to mind at the moment is all that the would-be poet can achieve. Round him much embryo, much abortion lay, Much future ode and abdicated play: Nonsense precipitate like running lead, Which slipped through cracks and zigzags of the head. Opposed to him is the poet who “described in _ideal_ perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity. . . .” His is “a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order; judgment ever awake, and steady self-possession, with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement[60].” As so often, Coleridge drops the invaluable hint almost inadvertently. The wholeness of the mind in the creative moment is the essential consideration, the free participation in the evocation of the experience of all the impulses, conscious or unconscious, relevant to it, without suppressions or restrictions. As we have seen, this completeness or wholeness is the rarest and the most difficult condition required for supreme communicative ability. How it works we have also seen, and if this is, as doubtless it must be, what Tolstoy meant by sincerity, however queer some of his tests for it were, we have found yet another indication of how great his contribution to critical theory, under happier circumstances, might have been. [58] _Vision and Design_, p. 194. [59] _What is Art_, Sect. XV. [60] _Biographia Literaria_, Vol. 11, Ch. XIV, p. 12. CHAPTER XXIV The Normality of the Artist Prose is an uninterrupted, polite warfare with poetry . . . every abstraction wants to have a jibe at poetry and wishes to be uttered with a mocking voice.—_The Joyful Wisdom_.