epigrams three hours after the occasion for them has arisen, how pleasant to draw the man who says the neat, witty, appropriate, consoling thing!  If one suffers from timidity, from meanness, from selfishness, what a delight to depict the man who is brave, generous, unselfish!  Of course the quality of a man’s mind flows into and over his work, but that is rather like the varnish of the picture than its tints—­it is the medium rather than the design.  The artistic creation of ideal situations is often a sort of refuge to the man who knows that he makes a mess of the beautiful and simple relations of life.  The artist is fastidious and moody, feeling the pressure of strained nerves and tired faculties, easily discouraged, disgusted by the superficial defect, the tiny blot that spoils alike the noble character, the charming prospect, the attractive face.  He sees, let us say, a person with a beautiful face and an ugly hand.  The normal person thinks of the face and forgets the hand.  The artist thinks with pain of the hand and forgets the face.  He desires an impossible perfection, and flies for safety to the little world that he can make and sway.  That is why artists, as a rule, love twilight hours, shaded rooms, half-tones, subdued hues, because what is common, staring, tasteless, is blurred and hidden.  Men of rich vitality are generally too much occupied with life as it is, its richness, its variety, its colour and fragrance, to think wistfully of life as it might be.  The unbridled, sensuous, luxurious strain, that one finds in so many artists, comes from a lack of moral temperance, a snatching at delights.  They fear dreariness and ugliness so much that they welcome any intoxication of pleasure.  But after all, it is clearness of vision that makes the artist, the power of disentangling the central feature from the surrounding details, the power of subordinating accessories, of seeing which minister to the innermost impression, and which distract and blur.  An artist who creates a great character need not necessarily even desire to attain the great qualities which he discerns; he sees them, as he sees the vertebrae of the mountain ridge under pasture and woodland, as he sees the structure of the tree under its mist of green; but to see beauty is not necessarily to desire it; for, as in the mountain and the tree, it may have no ethical significance at all, only a symbolical meaning.  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