It is this that makes art so strange and sad an occupation, that one lives in a beautiful world, which does not seem to be of one’s own designing, but from which one is awakened, in terror and disgust, by bodily pain, discomfort, anxiety, loss.  Yet it seems useless to say that life is real and imagination unreal.  They are both there, both real.  The danger is to use life to feed the imagination, not to use imagination to feed life.  In these sad weeks I have been like a sleeper awakened.  The world of imagination, in which I have lived and moved, has crumbled into pieces over my head; the wind and rain beat through the flimsy dwelling, and I must arise and go.  I have sported with life as though it were a pretty plaything; and I find it turn upon me like a wild beast, gaunt, hungry, angry.  I am terrified by its evil motions, I sicken at its odour.  That is the deep mystery and horror of life, that one yields unerringly to blind and imperious instincts, not knowing which may lead us into green and fertile pastures of hope and happy labour, and which may draw us into thorny wildernesses.  The old fables are true, that one must not trust the smiling presences, the beguiling words.  Yet how is one to know which of the forms that beckon us we may trust.  Must we learn the lesson by sad betrayals, by dark catastrophes?  I have wandered, it seems, along a flowery path—­and yet I have not gathered the poisonous herbs of sin; I have loved innocence and goodness; but for all that I have followed a phantom, and now that it is too late to retrace my steps, I find that I have been betrayed.  I feel

   “As some bold seer in a trance
    Seeing all his own mischance.”

Well, at least one may still be bold!

December 22, 1888.

Perhaps my trial comes to me that it may test my faith in art; perhaps to show me that the artist’s creed is a false and shallow one after all.  What is it that we artists do?  In a happy hour I should have said glibly that we discern and interpret beauty.  But now it seems to me that no man can ever live upon beauty.  I think I have gone wrong in busying myself so ardently in trying to discern the quality of beauty in all things.  I seem to have submitted everything—­virtue, honour, life itself—­to that test.  I appear to myself like an artist who has devoted himself entirely to the appreciation of colour, who is suddenly struck colour-blind; he sees the forms of things as clearly as ever, but they are dreary and meaningless.  I seem to have tried everything, even conduct, by an artistic standard, and the quality which I have devoted myself to discerning has passed suddenly out of life.  And my mistake has been all the more grievous, because I have always believed that it was life of which I was in search.  There are three great writers—­ two of them artists as well—­whose personality has always interested me profoundly—­Ruskin, Carlyle, Rossetti.  But I have never been able wholly to admire the formal and deliberate products of their