an its origin, is but wasted and unreal
work, and the constancy of the artist cannot be to any definite rule or
system of living, but to that principle of beauty only through which the
inconstant shadows of his life are in their most fleeting moment arrested
and made permanent. He will not, for instance, in intellectual matters
acquiesce in that facile orthodoxy of our day which is so reasonable and
so artistically uninteresting, nor yet will he desire that fiery faith of
the antique time which, while it intensified, yet limited the vision;
still less will he allow the calm of his culture to be marred by the
discordant despair of doubt or the sadness of a sterile scepticism; for
the Valley Perilous, where ignorant armies clash by night, is no resting-
place meet for her to whom the gods have assigned the clear upland, the
serene height, and the sunlit air,--rather will he be always curiously
testing new forms of belief, tinging his nature with the sentiment that
still lingers about some beautiful creeds, and searching for experience
itself, and not for the fruits of experience; when he has got its secret,
he will leave without regret much that was once very precious to him. 'I
am always insincere,' says Emerson somewhere, 'as knowing that there are
other moods': 'Les emotions,' wrote Theophile Gautier once in a review of
Arsene Houssaye, 'Les emotions ne se ressemblent pas, mais etre emu--voila
l'important.'

Now, this is the secret of the art of the modern romantic school, and
gives one the right keynote for its apprehension; but the real quality of
all work which, like Mr. Rodd's, aims, as I said, at a purely artistic
effect, cannot be described in terms of intellectual criticism; it is too
intangible for that. One can perhaps convey it best in terms of the
other arts, and by reference to them; and, indeed, some of these poems
are as iridescent and as exquisite as a lovely fragment of Venetian
glass; others as delicate in perfect workmanship and as single in natural
motive as an etching by Whistler is, or one of those beautiful little
Greek figures which in the olive woods round Tanagra men can still find,
with the faint gilding and the fading crimson not yet fled from hair and
lips and raiment; and many of them seem like one of Corot's twilights
just passing into music; for not merely in visible colour, but in
sentiment also--which is the colour of poetry--may there be a kind of
tone.

But I think that the best l