If, therefore, a man goes to admiring his own skill, or airing his own powers, or imitating the choice touches of others, or heeding the breath of conventional applause; if he yields to any strain of self-complacency, or turns to practising smiles, or to taking pleasure in his self-begotten graces and beauties and fancies;—­in this giddy and vertiginous state he will be sure to fall into intellectual and artistic sin.  The man, in such a case, is no more smitten with a genuine love of Art than Malvolio was with a genuine love of Virtue:  like that hero of conceit, he is merely “sick of self-love, and tastes with a distempered appetite.”  And his giddiness of self-love will take from him the power of seeing things as they are; and because he sees them as they are not, therefore he will think he sees them better than they are.  A man cannot find Nature by gazing in a looking-glass; and it is vanity or some undisinterested force, and not any inspiration of truth or genius, that puts a man upon doing so.  And, in the condition supposed, the mind becomes a prism to sophisticate and falsify the light of truth into striking and brilliant colours, instead of being a clear and perfect lens to concentrate that light in its natural whiteness and purity.  For, assuredly, the proper worth, health, strength, virtue, joy, and life of Art is to be the interpreter and discoverer of Truth, to “feel the soul of Nature, and see things as they are”; and when, instead of this, it turns to glorifying its own powers and achievements, or sets up any end apart from such discovery and interpretation, it becomes sickly, feeble, foolish, frivolous, vicious, joyless, and moribund; and meanness, cruelty, sensuality, impiety, and irreligion are the companions of it.

It is indeed true that an artist may find one of the main spurs to his art-work in the needs, duties, and affections of his earthly being.  The support of himself, of his wife, or her whom he wishes to be his wife, of his children, his parents, or remoter kin; the desire of being independent, of having the respect of society, or of doing the charities of a Christian; an honest, manly yearning after fame, an ambition to achieve something that “the world will not willingly let die,”—­all these, and yet others, may justly be among the determining motives of his pursuit, and the thought of them may add fresh life and vigour to his efforts:  nevertheless he will not succeed, nor deserve to succeed, in his art, except he have such an earnest and disinterested love for it, and such a passion for artistic truth, as will find the work its own exceeding great reward.  In a word, his heart and soul must be in it as an end, and not merely or chiefly as a means.  However prudence may suggest and shape his plans, love must preside over the execution; and here, as elsewhere,

                         “Love’s not love
    When it is mingled with respects that stand
    Aloof from the entire point.”