All depends on the artist being in league with his day; if he is born too early or too late, he has no hold on the world, no message for it.  Either he is a voice out of the past, an echo of old joys, piping a forgotten message, or he is fanciful, unreal, visionary, if he sees and tries to utter what shall be.  By the time that events confirm his foresight, the vitality of his prophecy is gone, and he is only looked at with a curious admiration, as one that had a certain clearness of vision, but no more; he is called into court by the historian of tendency, but he has had no hold on living men.

One sees men of great artistic gifts who suffer from each of these disadvantages.  One sees poets, born in a prosaic age, who would have won high fame if they had been born in an age of poets.  And one sees, too, men who seem to struggle with big, unintelligible thoughts, thoughts which do not seem to fit on to anything existing.  The happy artist is the man who touches the note which awakens a responsive echo in many hearts; the man who instinctively uses the medium of the time, and who neither regrets the old nor portends the new.

Karl Katz must content himself, if he can find a corner and a crust, with the memory of the day when the sun lay hot among the ruins, with the thought of the pleasant coolness of the vault, the leaping shower of corn, the thunder of the imprisoned feet, the heroic players, the heady wine.  That must be enough for him.  He has had a taste, let him remember, of marvels hidden from common eyes and ears.  Let it be for him to muse in the sun, and to be grateful for the space of recollection given him.  If he had lived the life of the world, he would but have had a treasure of simple memories, much that was sordid, much that was sad.

But now he has his own dreams, and he must pay the price in heaviness and dreariness!

December 14, 1888.

The danger of art as an occupation is that one uses life, looks at life, as so much material for one’s art.  Life becomes a province of art, instead of art being a province of life.  That is all a sad mistake, perhaps an irreparable mistake!  I walked to-day on the crisp frozen snow, down the valley, by field-paths, among leafless copses and wood-ends.  The stream ran dark and cold, between its brambly banks; the snow lay pure and smooth on the high-sloping fields.  It made a heart of whiteness in the covert, the trees all delicately outlined, the hazels weaving an intricate pattern.  All perfectly and exquisitely beautiful.  Sight after sight of subtle and mysterious beauty, vignette after vignette, picture after picture.  If I could but sing it, or say it, depict or record it, I thought to myself!  Yet I could not analyse what the desire was.  I do not think I wished to interpret the sight to others, or even to capture it for myself.  No matter at what season of the year I pass through the valley, it is always filled from end to end with