insuring to the person making use of it an impression distinct from every other. 

He and his neighbors are watching the same show, but one seeing more where the other sees less, one seeing black where the other sees white, one seeing big where the other sees small, one seeing coarse where the other sees fine. And so on, and so on; there is fortunately no saying on what, for the particular pair of eyes, the window may _not_ open; "fortunately" by reason, precisely, of this incalculability of range. 

The spreading field, the human scene, is the "choice of subject"; the pierced aperture, either broad or balconied or slit-like and low-browed, is the "literary form"; but they are, singly or together, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher--without, in other words, the consciousness of the artist. 

Tell me what the artist is, and I will tell you of what he has _been_ conscious. Thereby I shall express to you at once his boundless freedom and his "moral" reference. 

All this is a long way round, however, for my word about my dim first move toward "The Portrait," which was exactly my grasp of a single character--an acquisition I had made, moreover, after a fashion not here to be retraced. 

Enough that I was, as seemed to me, in complete possession of it, that I had been so for a long time, that this had made it familiar and yet had not blurred its charm, and that, all urgently, all tormentingly, I saw it in motion and, so to speak, in transit. 

This amounts to saying that I saw it as bent upon its fate--some fate or other; which, among the possibilities, being precisely the question. Thus I had my vivid individual--vivid, so strangely, in spite of being still at large, not confined by the conditions, not engaged in the tangle, to which we look for much of the impress that constitutes an identity. 

If the apparition was still all to be placed how came it to be vivid?--since we puzzle such quantities out, mostly, just by the business of placing them. One could answer such a question beautifully, doubtless, if one could do so subtle, if not so monstrous, a thing as to write the history of the growth of one's imagination. 

One would describe then what, at a given time, had extraordinarily happened to it, and one would so, for instance, be in a position to tell, with an approach to clearness, how, under favour of occasion, it had been able to take over (take over 

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