conduct of a commercial type. It would be
better for art if it were frankly snubbed rather than thus unctuously
encouraged. We look upon it all as a matter of influence, for the one
thing that we desire is to be felt, to affect other people, to inspire
action. The one thing that we cannot tolerate is that a man should
despise and withdraw from the busy conventional world. If he ends by
impressing the world we admire him, and people his solitude with ugly
motives. The fact is that there was never a more unpromising soil for
artists than this commonplace, active, strenuous century in which we
live. The temptations we put in the artist's way are terribly strong;
when we have done our work, we like to be amused by books and plays and
pictures, and we are ready to pay high prices to the people who can
give our heavy souls small sensations of joy and terror and sorrow. And
wealth is a fierce temptation to the artist, because it gives him
liberty, freedom of motion, comfort, things of beauty and
consideration. The result is that too many of the artists who appear
among us fall victims to the temptations of the world, and become a
kind of superior parasite and prostitute, believing in their dignity
because they are not openly humiliated.

But the true artist, like the true priest, cares only for the beautiful
quality of the thought that he pursues. The true priest is the man who
loves virtue, disinterestedness, truth, and purity with a kind of
passion, and only desires to feed the same love in faithful hearts. He
seeks the Kingdom of God first; and if the good things of the world are
strewn, as they are apt to be strewn, in the path of the virtuous
person, he is never for a moment seduced into believing that they are
the object of his search. His desire is that souls should glow and
thrill with high, sacred, and tender emotions, which are their own
surpassing reward.

So, too, the artist is concerned solely with the beautiful
thing--whether it is the beauty of the eager relationships of men and
women, or the ever-changing exquisite forms and colours of nature, or
the effect of all these things upon the desirous soul of man. And it is
here that his danger lies, that he may grow to be preoccupied with the
changing and blended texture of his own soul, into which flow so many
sweet influences and gracious visions--if, like the Lady of Shalott,
he grows to think of the live things that move on the river-side only
as objects that