d pierces through the silence (as a green reed bud swells
and pierces its soft scaly core) and dies away, making you suddenly very
conscious of twitter of sparrows and chucking of jackdaws; bringing
suddenly close home to you, with the silence, a sense of solid reality.
So, instead of saying what I wished, it seems to me most evident that
there is nothing to say, that there scarcely could have been anything
worth saying. It is enervate, I suppose; but so it is. I wonder how any
one can ever have felt inclined to write about art--how art can ever
have been worth writing about. Everything around seems so incomparably
more interesting does it not, than art; so entirely beyond the power
of writing to convey or imitate. Above, high up, there are two great
branches of lime, apparently printed distinctly on to the pale blue sky,
black wood dividing and subdividing and projecting, green leaves and
light yellow blossom, the sun shining straight through; it seems so
simple. But try and paint it: those two branches, which seem at first so
well-defined, so close together, so closely clapped against the sky, do
you now see how far apart they really are, how separated by a gulf of
luminous air, how freely suspended, poised, at infinite distance, in the
far receding pale blue; those green leaves and yellow blossoms, which
are not green nor yellow, but something shadowy and at the same time
luminous, are clearly defined and yet undefinable; the sunshine which we
thought at first one plain beam of light is now a white, vague sheen, a
shimmer; now one light spark, one tremulous star between the leaves, or
a waving network of rays, long, then short, white, coloured, iridescent,
shaking, shifting, dancing. Paint it, describe it if you have a mind to,
my friend the poet, my friend the painter; I have not.

This is one of those moments when reality, and the enjoyment thereof,
fill one with a sense, self-contemptuous, sceptical, almost cynical, and
yet pleasureable and stoically self-flattering in the recognition of
our own importance, a pervading illogical sense of the futility, the
unreality, the museum-glass-case uselessness of art. It seems as if art
were enjoyed because it has been produced, not produced because it is to
be enjoyed; as if mankind had acquired an elaborate pleasure in its
own works because they are its own works; as if all of us, instead of
passively receiving the impression of beauty in the same way that we
passively perc