the situation
as indifferent to that support; but I have not lost the sense of the
value for me, at the time, of the admirable Russian's testimony to my
not needing, all superstitiously, to try and perform any such gymnastic.
Other echoes from the same source linger with me, I confess, as
unfadingly--if it be not all indeed one much-embracing echo. It was
impossible after that not to read, for one's uses, high lucidity into
the tormented and disfigured and bemuddled question of the objective
value, and even quite into that of the critical appreciation, of
"subject" in the novel.

One had had from an early time, for that matter, the instinct of the
right estimate of such values and of its reducing to the inane the
dull dispute over the "immoral" subject and the moral. Recognising so
promptly the one measure of the worth of a given subject, the question
about it that, rightly answered, disposes of all others--is it valid,
in a word, is it genuine, is it sincere, the result of some direct
impression or perception of life?--I had found small edification,
mostly, in a critical pretension that had neglected from the first
all delimitation of ground and all definition of terms. The air of
my earlier time shows, to memory, as darkened, all round, with that
vanity--unless the difference to-day be just in one's own final
impatience, the lapse of one's attention. There is, I think, no more
nutritive or suggestive truth in this connexion than that of the perfect
dependence of the "moral" sense of a work of art on the amount of felt
life concerned in producing it. The question comes back thus, obviously,
to the kind and the degree of the artist's prime sensibility, which is
the soil out of which his subject springs. The quality and capacity of
that soil, its ability to "grow" with due freshness and straightness any
vision of life, represents, strongly or weakly, the projected morality.
That element is but another name for the more or less close connexion of
the subject with some mark made on the intelligence, with some sincere
experience. By which, at the same time, of course, one is far from
contending that this enveloping air of the artist's humanity--which
gives the last touch to the worth of the work--is not a widely and
wondrously varying element; being on one occasion a rich and magnificent
medium and on another a comparatively poor and ungenerous one. Here we
get exactly the high price of the novel as a literary form--its po