the noises that human beings make with their tongues and
lips and teeth--lie within our grasp like the fragments of a
jig-saw puzzle, and we fit them into faulty pictures until our hands
grow weary and our eyes can no longer pretend to see the truth. In
order to illustrate an infinitesimal fraction of our lives by
means of this preposterous game we are willing to sacrifice all
the rest. While ordinary efficient men and women are enjoying the
promise of the morning, the fulfilment of the afternoon, the
tranquillity of evening, we are still trying to discover a fitting
epithet for the dew of dawn. For us Spring paves the woods with
beautiful words rather than flowers, and when we look into the
eyes of our mistress we see nothing but adjectives. Love is an
occasion for songs; Death but the overburdened father of all our
saddest phrases. We are of those who are born crying into the
world because they cannot speak, and we end, like Stevenson, by
looking forward to our death because we have written a good
epitaph. Sometimes in the course of our frequent descents from
heaven to the waste-paper basket we feel that we lose too much to
accomplish so little. Does a handful of love-songs really outweigh
the smile of a pretty girl, or a hardly-written romance compensate
the author for months of lost adventure? We have only one life to
live, and we spend the greater part of it writing the history of
dead hours. Our lives lack balance because we find it hard to
discover a mean between the triolet we wrote last I night and the
big book we are going to start tomorrow, and also because living
only with our heads we tend to become top-heavy. We justify our
present discomfort with the promise of a bright future of flowers
and sunshine and gladdest life, though we know that in the garden
of art there are many chrysalides and few butterflies. Few of us
are fortunate enough to accomplish anything that was in the least
worth doing, so we fall back on the arid philosophy that it is
effort alone that counts.

Luckily--or suicide would be the rule rather than the exception
for artists--the long process of disillusionment is broken by
hours when even the most self-critical feel nobly and indubitably
great; and this is the only reward that most artists ever have for
their labours, if we set a higher price on art than money. On the
whole, I am inclined to think that the artist is fully rewarded,
for the common man can have no conception of the Joy