did not write _La Belle Dame sans Merci_ in order that
it might be printed in a school edition, with a little biography
dealing with the paternal livery-stable. It may be doubted whether any
very vital imaginative work is ever produced with a view to its effect
even upon its immediate readers. A great novelist does not write with a
moral purpose, and still less with an intellectual purpose. He sees the
thing like a picture; the personalities move, mingle, affect each
other, appear, vanish, and he is haunted by the desire to give
permanence to the scene. For the time being he is under the thrall of a
strong desire to make something musical, beautiful, true, life-like. It
is a criticism of life that all writers, from the highest to the
humblest, aim at. They are amazed, thrilled, enchanted by the sight and
the scene, by the relationships and personalities they see round them.
These they must depict; and in a life where so much is fleeting, they
must seek to stamp the impression in some lasting medium. It is the
beauty and strangeness of life that overpowers the artist. He has
little time to devote himself to things of a different value, to the
getting of position or influence or wealth. He cannot give himself up
to filling his leisure pleasantly, by society or amusement. These are
but things to fill a vacant space of weariness or of gestation. For him
the one important thing is the shock, the surprise, the delight, the
wonder of a thousand impressions on his perceptive personality. And his
success, his effect, his range, depend upon the uniqueness of his
personality in part, and in part upon his power of expressing that
personality.

Of course, there are natures whose perceptiveness outruns their power
of expression--and these are, as a rule, the dissatisfied, unhappy
temperaments that one encounters; there are others whose power of
expression outruns their perceptiveness, and these are facile, fluent,
empty, agreeable writers.

There are some who attain, after infinite delays, a due power of
expression, and these are often the happiest of all writers, because
they have the sense of successful effort. And then, lastly, there are a
divine few, like Shakespeare, in whom both the perception and the power
of expression seem limitless.

But if a man has once embraced the artistic ideal, he must embark upon
what is the most terrible of all risks. There is a small chance that he
may find his exact subject and his exact mediu