The best art
is inspired more by an intellectual force than by a vital sympathy.
Of course to succeed as a novelist in England to-day, one must have
a dash of the moralist, because an English audience is far more
preoccupied with moral ideals than with either intellectual or
artistic ideals. The reading public desires that love should be
loyal rather than passionate; it thinks ultimate success a more
impressive thing than ultimate failure; it loves sadness as a
contrast and preface to laughter. It prefers that the patriarch Job
should end by having a nice new family of children and abundant
flocks, rather than that he should sink into death among the ashes,
refusing to curse God for his reverses. Its view of existence after
death is that Dives should join Lazarus in Abraham's bosom. To
succeed, one must compromise with this comfortable feeing,
sacrificing, if needs be, the artistic conscience, because the place
of the minstrel in England is after the banquet, when the warriors
are pleasantly tired, have put off the desire of meat and drink, and
the fire roars and crackles in the hearth. When Ruskin deserted his
clouds and peaks, his sunsets and sunrises, and devoured his soul
over the brutalities and uglinesses and sordid inequalities of life,
it was all put down to the obscure pressure of mental disease.
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