The artist, he imagined, standing in the position of mediator between the world of his experience and the world of his dreams—"a mediator, consequently gifted with twin faculties, a selective faculty and a reproductive faculty." To equate these faculties was the secret of artistic success: the artist who could disentangle the subtle soul of the image from its mesh of defining circumstances most exactly and "re-embody" it in artistic circumstances chosen as the most exact for it in its new office, he was the supreme artist.
