Well, after all, is there not, to one who regards it curiously, a certain selfishness, even, in this desire to perpetuate oneself or the work of one’s hands; as the most austere saints have found selfishness at the root of the soul’s too conscious, or too exclusive, longing after eternal life?  To have created beauty for an instant is to have achieved an equal result in art with one who has created beauty which will last many thousands of years.  Art is concerned only with accomplishment, not with duration.  The rest is a question partly of vanity, partly of business.  An artist to whom posterity means anything very definite, and to whom the admiration of those who will live after him can seem to promise much warmth in the grave, may indeed refuse to waste his time, as it seems to him, over temporary successes.  Or he may shrink from the continuing ardour of one to whom art has to be made over again with the same energy, the same sureness, every time that he acts on the stage or draws music out of his instrument.  One may indeed be listless enough to prefer to have finished one’s work, and to be able to point to it, as it stands on its pedestal, or comes to meet all the world, with the democratic freedom of the book.  All that is a natural feeling in the artist, but it has nothing to do with art.  Art has to do only with the creation of beauty, whether it be in words, or sounds, or colour, or outline, or rhythmical movement; and the man who writes music is no more truly an artist than the man who plays that music, the poet who composes rhythms in words no more truly an artist than the dancer who composes rhythms with the body, and the one is no more to be preferred to the other, than the painter is to be preferred to the sculptor, or the musician to the poet, in those forms of art which we have agreed to recognise as of equal value.

BY THE SAME WRITER

Poems (Collected Edition in two volumes), 1902.

An Introduction to the Study of Browning, 1886, 1906.

Aubrey Beardsley, 1898, 1905.

The Symbolist Movement in Literature, 1899, 1908.

Cities, 1903.

Studies in Prose and Verse, 1904.

A Book of Twenty Songs, 1905.

Spiritual Adventures, 1905.

The Fool of the World, and Other Poems, 1906.

Studies in Seven Arts, 1906.

William Blake, 1907.

Cities of Italy, 1907.