relative, like Einstein's theory, will never lose its
ever-new and unique quality-perfect proportion; for Truth, to the human
consciousness at least, is but that vitally just relation of part to
whole which is the very condition of life itself. And the task before
the imaginative writer, whether at the end of the last century or all
these aeons later, is the presentation of a vision which to eye and ear
and mind has the implicit proportions of Truth.

I confess to have always looked for a certain flavour in the writings of
others, and craved it for my own, believing that all true vision is so
coloured by the temperament of the seer, as to have not only the just
proportions but the essential novelty of a living thing for, after all,
no two living things are alike. A work of fiction should carry the hall
mark of its author as surely as a Goya, a Daumier, a Velasquez, and a
Mathew Maris, should be the unmistakable creations of those masters. This
is not to speak of tricks and manners which lend themselves to that
facile elf, the caricaturist, but of a certain individual way of seeing
and feeling. A young poet once said of another and more popular poet:
"Oh! yes, but be cuts no ice." And, when one came to think of it, he did
not; a certain flabbiness of spirit, a lack of temperament, an absence,
perhaps, of the ironic, or passionate, view, insubstantiated his work; it
had no edge--just a felicity which passed for distinction with the crowd.

Let me not be understood to imply that a novel should be a sort of
sandwich, in which the author's mood or philosophy is the slice of ham.
One's demand is for a far more subtle impregnation of flavour; just that,
for instance, which makes De Maupassant a more poignant and fascinating
writer than his master Flaubert, Dickens and Thackeray more living and
permanent than George Eliot or Trollope. It once fell to my lot to be the
preliminary critic of a book on painting, designed to prove that the
artist's sole function was the impersonal elucidation of the truths of
nature. I was regretfully compelled to observe that there were no such
things as the truths of Nature, for the purposes of art, apart from the
individual vision of the artist. Seer and thing seen, inextricably
involved one with the other, form the texture of any masterpiece; and I,
at least, demand therefrom a distinct impression of temperament. I never
saw, in the flesh, either De Maupassant or Tchekov--those masters of s