e
of believing art to be the deepest thing in the world; it is to such an
one more like the lily which floats upwards, to bloom on the surface of
some dim pool, a thing exquisitely fair and symbolical of mysteries;
but all growing out of the depths of life, and not a thing which is
deeper and truer than life.

It is useless to try to dive deeper than the secrets of personality and
temperament. One must merely be grateful for the beauty which springs
from them. We must reflect that the hard, vigorous, hammered quality,
which is characteristic of the best art, can only be produced, in a
mood of blind and unquestioning faith, by a temperament which believes
that such production is its highest end. But one who stands a little
apart from the artistic world, and yet ardently loves it, can see that,
beautiful as is the dream of the artist, true and pure as his
aspiration is, there is yet a deeper mystery of life still, of which
art is nothing but a symbol and an evidence. Perhaps that very belief
may of itself weaken a man's possibilities in art. But, for myself, I
know that I regard the absorption in art as a terrible and strong
temptation for one whose chief pleasure lies in the delight of
expression, and who seems, in the zest of shaping a melodious sentence
to express as perfectly and lucidly as possible the shape of the
thought within, to touch the highest joy of which the spirit is
capable. A thought, a scene of beauty comes home with an irresistible
sense of power and meaning to the mind or eye; for God to have devised
the pale liquid green of the enamelled evening sky, to have set the
dark forms of trees against it, and to have hung a star in the
thickening gloom--to have done this, and to see that it is good, seems,
in certain moods, to be the dearest work of the Divine mind; and the
desire to express it, to speak simply of the sight, and of the joy that
it arouses, comes upon the mind with a sweet agony; an irresistible
spell; life would seem to have been well spent if one had only caught a
few such imperishable ecstasies, and written them down in a record that
might convey the same joy to others. But behind this rises the deeper
conviction that this is not the end; that there are deeper and sweeter
secrets in the heavenly treasure-house; and then comes in the shadow of
a fear that, in yielding thus delightedly to these imperative joys, one
is blinding the inner eye to the perception of the remoter and more
divine t