The artist's eyes are able to see life in focus, as it were, though it
has appeared to men of less harmonious spirit as
A many-sided mirror,
Which could distort to many a shape of error
This true, fair world of things.
[Footnote: Shelley, _Prometheus Unbound_.]
It is as if the world were a jumbled picture puzzle, which only the
artist is capable of putting together, and the fact that the essence of
things, as he conceives of them, thus forms a harmonious whole is to him
irrefutable proof that the intuition that leads him to see things in
this way is not leading him astray. James Russell Lowell has described
the poet's achievement:
With a sorrowful and conquering beauty,
The soul of all looked grandly from his eyes.
[Footnote: _Ode_.]
"The soul of all," that is the artist's revelation. To him the world is
truly a universe, not a heterogeneity of unrelated things. In different
mode from Lowell, Mrs. Browning expresses the same conception of the
artist's imitation of life, inquiring,
What is art
But life upon the larger scale, the higher,
When, graduating up a spiral line
Of still expanding and ascending gyres
It pushes toward the intense significance
Of all things, hungry for the infinite.
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