Seeing all his own mischance."


Well, at least one may still be bold!



December 22, 1888.


Perhaps my trial comes to me that it may test my faith in art;
perhaps to show me that the artist's creed is a false and shallow
one after all. What is it that we artists do? In a happy hour I
should have said glibly that we discern and interpret beauty. But
now it seems to me that no man can ever live upon beauty. I think I
have gone wrong in busying myself so ardently in trying to discern
the quality of beauty in all things. I seem to have submitted
everything--virtue, honour, life itself--to that test. I appear to
myself like an artist who has devoted himself entirely to the
appreciation of colour, who is suddenly struck colour-blind; he
sees the forms of things as clearly as ever, but they are dreary
and meaningless. I seem to have tried everything, even conduct, by
an artistic standard, and the quality which I have devoted myself
to discerning has passed suddenly out of life. And my mistake has
been all the more grievous, because I have always believed that it
was life of which I was in search. There are three great writers--
two of them artists as well--whose personality has always
interested me profoundly--Ruskin, Carlyle, Rossetti. But I have
never been able wholly to admire the formal and deliberate products
of their minds. Ruskin as an art-critic--how profoundly unfair,