to bare, austere, simple, uncomforted virtue? Ought we to try to
think of art only as an innocent amusement and diversion for our
leisure hours? As a quest to which no man may vow himself, save at
the cost of walking in a vain shadow all his days? Ought we to
steel our hearts against the temptation, which seems to be
implanted as deep as anything in my own nature--nay, deeper--to
hold that what one calls ugliness and bad taste is of the nature of
sin? But what then is the meaning of the tyrannous instinct to
select and to represent, to capture beauty? Ought it to be enough
to see beauty in the things around us, in flowers and light, to
hear it in the bird's song and the falling stream--to perceive it
thus gratefully and thankfully, and to go back to our simple lives?
I do not know; it is all a great mystery; it is so hard to believe
that God should put these ardent, delicious, sweet, and solemn
instincts into our spirits, simply that we may learn our error in
following them. And yet I feel with a sad certainty to-day that I
have somehow missed the way, and that God cannot or will not help
me to find it. Are we then bidden and driven to wander? Or is there
indeed some deep and perfect secret of peace and tranquillity,
which we are meant to find? Does it perhaps lie open to our eyes--
as when one searches a table over and over for some familiar
object, which all the while is there before us, plain to touch or
sight?



January 3, 1889.


There is a tiny vignette of Blake's, a woodcut, I think, in which