may minister to the richness of the web that he weaves.
He must keep his eye intent upon the power, whatever it may be, that is
behind all these gracious manifestations; they must all be symbols to
him of some unrevealed mystery, or he will grow to love the gem for its
colour, the flower for its form, the cloud for its whiteness or
empurpled gloom, the far-off hill for its azure tints, and so forget to
discern the spirit that thus gleams and flashes from its shrouding
vapours.

And then, too, in art as in love, the artist must lose himself that he
may find himself. If he considers all things in relation to his own
sensitive and perceptive temperament, he will become immured in a
chilly egotism, a narrow selfishness, from which he will not dare to
emerge. He must fling himself whole-heartedly into a passionate worship
of what is beautiful, not desiring it only that it may thrill and
satisfy him, but longing to draw near to its innermost essence. The
artist may know, indeed, that he is following the wrong path when he
loves the artistic presentation of a thing better than the thing
presented, when he is moved more by a single picture of a perfect scene
than by the ten thousand lovely things which he may see in a single
country walk. He must, indeed, select emotions and beautiful objects by
their quality; he must compare and distinguish; but if he once believes
that his concern is with representation rather than with life, he goes
downward. He must not be concerned for a single instant with the
thought, "How will this that I perceive affect others as I represent
it?" but he must rather be so amazed and carried out of himself by the
beauty of what he sees, that the representing of it is only a necessary
consequence of the vision; as a child may tell an adventure
breathlessly and intently to its mother or its nurse, absorbed in the
recollection.

And thus the true artist will not weigh and ponder the most effective
medium for his expression; the thought must be so overpowering that the
choice of a medium will be a matter of pure instinct. The most, indeed,
of what he feels and perceives he will recognise to be frankly
untranslatable in speech or pigment or musical notes, too high, too
sacred, too sublime. His work will be no more selfish than the work of
the pilot or the general is selfish. The responsibility, the crisis,
the claim of the moment, will outweigh and obliterate all personal, all
fruitless considerations. He m