d produces from sheer necessity; where one
is compelled by relentless law; where sacrifice does not count; where
ideas throng the brain and plead for release in expression; where effort
is joy, and the prospect of doing something enduring lures the soul on
to new and ever new endeavour: so I shall never be rich or famous.

What shall I paint to-day? Shall it be the bit of garden underneath my
window, with the tangle of pinks and roses, and the cabbages growing
appetisingly beside the sweet-williams, the woodbine climbing over the
brown stone wall, the wicket-gate, and the cherry-tree with its fruit
hanging red against the whitewashed cottage? Ah, if I could only paint
it so truly that you could hear the drowsy hum of the bees among the
thyme, and smell the scented hay-meadows in the distance, and feel that
it is midsummer in England! That would indeed be truth, and that would
be art. Shall I paint the Bobby baby as he stoops to pick the cowslips
and the flax, his head as yellow and his eyes as blue as the flowers
themselves; or that bank opposite the gate, with its gorse bushes in
golden bloom, its mountain-ash hung with scarlet berries, its tufts
of harebells blossoming in the crevices of rock, and the quaint low
clock-tower at the foot? Can I not paint all these in the full glow of
summer-time in my secret heart whenever I open the door a bit and admit
its life-giving warmth and beauty? I think I can, if I can only quit
dreaming.

I wonder how the great artists worked, and under what circumstances
they threw aside the implements of their craft, impatient of all but
the throb of life itself? Could Raphael paint Madonnas the week of his
betrothal? Did Thackeray write a chapter the day his daughter was
born? Did Plato philosophise freely when he was in love? Were there
interruptions in the world's great revolutions, histories, dramas,
reforms, poems, and marbles when their creators fell for a brief moment
under the spell of the little blind tyrant who makes slaves of us all?
It must have been so. Your chronometer heart, on whose pulsations you
can reckon as on the procession of the equinoxes, never gave anything to
the world unless it were a system of diet, or something quite uncoloured
and unglorified by the imagination.

Chapter XX. A canticle to Jane.

There are many donkeys owned in these nooks among the hills, and some
of the thriftier families keep donkey-chairs (or 'cheers,' as they call
them) to let t