pictures, persevere in ‘d——­d bad acting’; and it fulfils that duty with an energy known only to mediocrity.  The literary variety, probably, has the characteristics of the type most fully developed.  No one takes himself with more touching seriousness.  Day by day he grows in conceit, neglects his temper, especially at home, with a wife who is worth ten of him and all his ‘works,’ and generally behaves, as the phrase goes, ’as if anything becomes him.’  If you visit him en famille, you will find him especially characteristic at meals, during which he is wont to sit absorbed, with an air of ‘I cannot shake off the god’; and when they are over he goes off, moodily chewing a toothpick, to his den, where, maybe, the genius finds vent in a dissertation on ‘Peg-Tops,’ for The Boy’s Own, or ’The Noses of Great Men,’ for Chambers’ Journal.

But if such genius as this be chiefly comic, its work cannot but awaken in one a deep sense of the pathetic.  To stand before the poor little picture that has been so much to its painter, and yet holds no spark of vitality or touch of distinction; to take up the poor little book into which all the toil of so many wasted days could breathe no breath of life, formless, uninspired, unnecessary.  Think of the pathos of the illusion that has waved ‘its purple wings’ around these lifeless products, endowing with sensitive expression the wooden lineaments that have really been dead and unexpressive all the time, never glowed at all save to the wistful yearning eye of their befooled creator.  Yet if nature be thus cruel to afflict, she is no less kind to console:  for the victim of this species of hallucination seldom wakens from the dream.  That essay on Self-Reliance is with him to the end.

Yet no less pathetic is it to reflect how his whole development has suffered for this mistake, all his life-blood gone to feed this abortive thing.  The gentler charities of life have been neglected, fine qualities atrophied, the man has grown narrow and selfish, all the real things have been lost for this shadow:  that he might become, what nature never meant him to be—­an artist.  All along, when he has made any excuse, it has been ‘art.’  But, more likely, he has not been asked for excuse, he has lived under the shelter of the ‘genius’ superstition.  He has worn the air of making great sacrifices for the goddess, and in these his intimates have felt a proud sense of awful participation, as of a family whom the gods love.  They have never understood that art is a particular form of self-indulgence, by no means confined to artists; that it often becomes no less a vice than opium-eating, and that the same question has to be asked of both—­whether the dreams are worth the cost.  This might occasionally be asked of the world’s famous:  not only of those whose art has been the evilly exquisite outcome of spiritual disease, but even of the great sane successful reputations.