simply the rule in every part of art,—to know what one is doing, not to go sheeplike with the flock, ignorantly, unthinkingly, heedlessly, but to mould speech to expression the most truly one knows how. If, indeed, we are seeking clarity and the precise expression of thought, there is nothing we may not do if only we know how to do it—but that “if” might well be in capitals. One who has spent the best part of his life in trying to write things that had not been written before, and that were very difficult to write, may perhaps be allowed to confess the hardness of this task. To write is thus an arduous intellectual task, a process which calls for the highest tension of the muscles in the escalade of a heaven which the strongest and bravest and alertest can never hope to take by violence. He has to be true,—whether it is in the external world he is working or in his own internal world,—and as truth can only be seen through his own temperament, he is engaged in moulding the expression of a combination which has never been seen in the world before. It is sometimes said that the great writer seldom quotes, and that in the main is true, for he finds it difficult to mix an alien music of thought and speech with his own. Montaigne, it is also said, is an exception, but that is scarcely true. What Montaigne quoted he often translated and so moulded to the pattern of his own mind. The same may be said of Robert Burton. If it had not been so these writers (almost certainly Burton) could scarcely have attained to the rank of great authors. The significant fact to note, however, is not that the great writer rarely quotes, but that he knows how to quote. Schopenhauer was here a master. He possessed a marvellous flair for fine sayings in remote books, and these he would now and again let fall like jewels on his page, with so happy a skill that they seem to be created for the spot on which they fell. It is the little writer rather than the great writer who seems never to quote, and the reason is that he is really never doing anything else.[57] It is not in writing only, in all art, in all science, the task before each is that defined by Bacon: _man added to Nature_. It is so also in painting, as a great artist of modern time, Cézanne, recognised even in those same words: “He who wishes to make art,” he once said to Vollard, “must follow Bacon, who defined the artist as ‘Homo additus Naturæ.’” So it is that the artist, if he has succeeded in being true to his function, is necessarily one who makes all things new.[58] That remarkable artist who wrote the Book of the Revelation has expressed this in his allegorical, perhaps unconscious, Oriental way, for he represents the artist as hearing the divine spirit from the throne within him uttering the command: “Behold, I make all things new. Write!” The command is similar whatever the art may be, though it is here the privilege of the writer to find his own art set forth as the inspired ensample of all art.