The most beautiful of all such scenes is the tale of the maiden-wife in the stable at Bethlehem, with the pain and horror and shame of the tragic experience, in all its squalid publicity, told in those simple words, which I never hear without a smile that is full of tears, because there was no room for them in the inn.  We poor human souls, knowing what that event has meant for the race, make the bare, ugly place seemly and lovely, surrounding the Babe with a tapestry of heavenly forms, holy lights, rapturous sounds; taking the terror and the meanness of the scene away, and thereby, by our clumsy handling, losing the divine seal of the great mystery, the fact that hope can spring, in unstained and sublime radiance, from the vilest, lowest, meanest, noisiest conditions that can well be conceived.

November 20, 1888.

I wonder aimlessly what it is that makes a book, a picture, a piece of music, a poem, great.  When any of these things has become a part of one’s mind and soul, utterly and entirely familiar, one is tempted to think that the precise form of them is inevitable.  That is a great mistake.

Here is a tiny instance.  I see that in the “Lycidas” Milton wrote:—­

    “Who would not sing for Lycidas?  He well knew
     Himself to sing and build the lofty rhyme.”

The word “well” occurs in two MSS., and it seems to have been struck out in the proof.  The introduction of the word seems barbarous, unmetrical, an outrage on the beauty of the line.  Yet Milton must have thought that it was needed, and have only decided by an after-thought that it was better away.  If it had been printed so, we should equally have thought its omission barbarous and inartistic.

And thus, to an artist, there must be many ways of working out a conception.  I do not believe in the theory that the form is so inevitable, because what great artist was ever perfectly content with the form?  The greater the artist, the more conscious he probably is of the imperfection of his work; and if it could be bettered, how is it then inevitable?  It is only our familiarity with it that gives it inevitableness.  A beautiful building gains its mellow outline by a hundred accidents of wear and weather, never contemplated by the designer’s mind.  We love it so, we would not have it otherwise; but we should have loved it just as intensely if it had been otherwise.  Only a small part, then, of the greatness of artistic work is what we ourselves bring to it; and it becomes great, not only from itself, but from the fact that it fits our minds as the dagger fits the sheath.  The greatness of a conception depends largely upon its being near enough to our own conceptions, and yet a little greater, just as the vault of a great church gives one a larger sense of immensity than the sky with its sailing clouds.  Indeed it is often the very minuteness of a conception rather than its vastness that makes it great.  It must not be outside our range.  As to the form, it depends upon some curious felicity of hand, and touch, and thought.  Suppose that a great painter gave a rough pencil-sketch of a picture to a hundred students, and told them all to work it out in colour.  Some few of the results would be beautiful, the majority would be still uninteresting and tame.