But if by any chance they should recoil, and thus make answer:  “We are ready at all times to submit to the Law and the People’s will, and to bow to their demands, but we cannot and must not be asked to place our calling, our duty, and our honour beneath the irresponsible rule of an arbitrary autocrat, however sympathetic with the generality he may chance to be!” Then, we would ask:  “Sirs, did you ever hear of that great saying:  ‘Do unto others as ye would they should do unto you!’” For it is but fair presumption that the Dramatists, whom our Legislators have placed in bondage to a despot, are, no less than those Legislators, proud of their calling, conscious of their duty, and jealous of their honour. 1909.

VAGUE THOUGHTS ON ART

It was on a day of rare beauty that I went out into the fields to try and gather these few thoughts.  So golden and sweetly hot it was, that they came lazily, and with a flight no more coherent or responsible than the swoop of the very swallows; and, as in a play or poem, the result is conditioned by the conceiving mood, so I knew would be the nature of my diving, dipping, pale-throated, fork-tailed words.  But, after all—­I thought, sitting there—­I need not take my critical pronouncements seriously.  I have not the firm soul of the critic.  It is not my profession to know ’things for certain, and to make others feel that certainty.  On the contrary, I am often wrong—­a luxury no critic can afford.  And so, invading as I was the realm of others, I advanced with a light pen, feeling that none, and least of all myself, need expect me to be right.

What then—­I thought—­is Art?  For I perceived that to think about it I must first define it; and I almost stopped thinking at all before the fearsome nature of that task.  Then slowly in my mind gathered this group of words: 

Art is that imaginative expression of human energy, which, through technical concretion of feeling and perception, tends to reconcile the individual with the universal, by exciting in him impersonal emotion.  And the greatest Art is that which excites the greatest impersonal emotion in an hypothecated perfect human being.

Impersonal emotion!  And what—­I thought do I mean by that?  Surely I mean:  That is not Art, which, while I, am contemplating it, inspires me with any active or directive impulse; that is Art, when, for however brief a moment, it replaces within me interest in myself by interest in itself.  For, let me suppose myself in the presence of a carved marble bath.  If my thoughts be “What could I buy that for?” Impulse of acquisition; or:  “From what quarry did it come?” Impulse of inquiry; or:  “Which would be the right end for my head?” Mixed impulse of inquiry and acquisition—­I am at that moment insensible to it as a work of Art.  But, if I stand before it vibrating at sight of its colour and forms, if ever so little and for ever so short a time, unhaunted by