325. Returning, then, from these illustrations drawn from actual automatism to our proper subject of genius, - that happy mixture of subliminal with supraliminal faculty - we may ask ourselves in what kind of subliminal uprush this hidden habit of wider symbolism, of self-communion beyond the limits of speech, will be likely to manifest itself above the conscious threshold.

The obvious answer to this question lies in the one word Art. The inspiration of Art of all kinds consists in the invention of precisely such a wider symbolism as has been above adumbrated. I am not speaking, of course, of symbolism of a forced and mechanical kind - symbolism designed and elaborated as such - but rather of that pre-existent but hidden concordance between visible and invisible things, between matter and thought, between thought and emotion, which the plastic arts, and music, and poetry, do each in their own special field discover and manifest for human wisdom and joy.

In using these words, I must repeat, I am far from adopting the formulae of any special school. The symbolism of which I speak implies nothing of mysticism. Nor indeed, in my view, can there be any real gulf or deep division between so-called realistic and idealistic schools. All that exists is continuous; nor can Art symbolise any one aspect of the universe without also implicitly symbolising aspects which lie beyond.

326. And thus in the Arts we have symbolism at every stage of transparency and obscurity; from symbolisms which merely summarise speech to symbolisms which transcend it. Sometimes, as with Music, it is worse than useless to press for too close an interpretation. Music marches, and will march for ever, through an ideal and unimaginable world. Her melody may be a mighty symbolism, but it is a symbolism to which man has lost the key. Poetry's material, on the other hand, is the very language which she would fain transcend. But her utterance must be subliminal and symbolic, if it is to be poetry indeed; it must rise (as has been already hinted) from a realm profounder than deliberate speech; it must come charged, as Tennyson has it, with that "charm in words, a charm no words can give".

This branch, indeed, of internal audition, - that which involves complexity rather than intensity of imagined sounds, - offers, so to say, the richest opportunities for subliminal manifestation, - the readiest vent-holes for the uprush of the hidden fire. The sounds that rise within our waking consciousness from a source beyond the will do not confine themselves to the mere shaping of scattered sentences, - the airy syllabling of phrases that tend to nought. There is an inward consonance, an obscure concent, which forms the groundwork of Poetry, the fount of Song, - the cradle from whence those " sphere-born harmonious sisters, Voice and Verse," issue in preformed divinity into the common day. This is true not only for Song, strictly so termed, but also for Poetry unaccompanied by music; that is to say, for interrelations of rhythm and articulation taken apart from interrelations of pitch, definite time-intervals, or timbre. For the true poet - as Goethe has somewhere said - the melody of his coming poem floats as a self-created and impalpable entity within him, before words have shaped themselves or thought itself is born. 10 mi son un, said a greater even than Goethe, - "10 mi son un, che quando Amore spira, noto, ed in quel modo Che detta dentro, vo significando".

And here a reflection may be made which, while it clears up (as seems to me) an old confusion, will also well illustrate the latent capacities of the subliminal consciousness; its power to convey potent and intimate messages through mechanism of the slenderest kind. We know that as we advance from sounds non-human to human sounds, from sounds non-vocal to sounds which the human throat can produce, our conception of any given sound increasingly needs, to make it complete, a motor as well as an auditory representation within us. Our grasp, say, of the word London is imperfect if we cannot articulate the word with our mind's voice as well as hear it with our mind's ear.

In all definite inward audition there is, then, probably a motor element as well as a sensory. And I hold that one difference between imagined poetry and imagined music or song lies in the fact that imagined verbal rhythm may be almost wholly motor, while imagined tunes must be largely sensory as well. To those, then, who are perplexed at the fact that many poets have lacked musical ear it may be answered that the mental imagery of such poets may have been mainly motile; - may have consisted in a delicate imagination of such laryngeal movements as are concerned in the utterance of melodious speech. I believe that with careful self-observation many men "with an ear for verse " will recognise that the essential part of poetic excitation has lain in scarcely perceptible changes of tension in the muscles of the throat. The rhythmical modulations, indeed, have their birth beyond the will; but it is about that physical centre of imagined utterance that the emotional stress will gather and the inexplicable promptings throng; through that motor channel the reverberating tremors rise and fall; - and flood the flats of common consciousness as with the earthquake-wave of an unfathomed sea.

And there is yet another and even stranger form of inward audition. There exists among men a mighty complex of conceptions which lie apart from - some say beyond - articulate speech and reasoned thought. There is a march and uprising through ideal spaces which some hold as the only true ascent; there is an architecture which some count as alone abiding, "seeing it is built Of music, therefore never built at all, And, therefore, built for ever".

Whether considered in regard to its development in the race, or to its activity in the individual, Music resembles not so much a product of terrene needs and of natural selection as a subliminal capacity attaining to an accidental manifestation independently of the requirements or of the external stimuli of the supraliminal self. We know the difficulty of explaining its rise on any current theory of the evolution of human faculty. We know that it is like something discovered, not like something manufactured; - like wine found in a walled-up cellar, rather than like furniture made in the workshop above. And the subjective sensations of the musician himself accord with this view of the essentially subliminal character of the gift with which he deals. In no direction is "genius" or "inspiration" more essential to true success. It is not from careful poring over the mutual relations of musical notes that the masterpieces of melody have been born. They have come as they came to Mozart - whose often-quoted words I need not cite again - in an uprush of unsum-moned audition, of unpremeditated and self-revealing joy.

They have come, as to Browning's Abt Vogler, with a sense of irrecoverable commingling of depths of soul and heights of heaven.1 Translating the phrases of poetry into such terms as we here employ, we may say that we have reached a point where the subliminal uprush is felt by the supraliminal personality to be deeper, truer, more permanent than the products of voluntary thought.

Here, too, we must dwell for a moment upon another and higher kind of internal visualisation. I have spoken of the arithmetical prodigy as possessing a kind of internal blackboard, on which he inscribes with ease and permanence his imaginary memoranda. But blackboards are not the only surfaces on which inscriptions can be made. There are other men - prodigies of a different order - whose internal tabula is not of blackened wood, but of canvas or of marble; whose inscriptions are not rows of Arabic numerals, but living lines of colour, or curves of breathing stone. Even the most realistic art is something more than transcript and calculation; and for art's higher imaginative achievements there must needs be moments of inward idealisation when visible beauty seems but the token and symbol of beauty unrevealed; when Praxiteles must "draw from his own heart the archetype of the Eros that he made"; when Tintoret must feel with Heraclitus that " whatsoever we see waking is but deadness, and whatsoever sleeping, is but dream".