f sketches and impressions.
The only coherence they possess is that, at the time when they were
written, I was much preoccupied with the wonder as to whether an
optimistic view of life was justified. The world is a very mysterious
place, and at first sight it presents a sad scene of confusion. The
wrong people often seem to be punished; blessings, such as those heaped
upon the head of the patriarch Job, do not seem to be accumulated upon
the righteous. In fact, the old epigram that prosperity is the
blessing of the Old Testament, adversity the blessing of the New, seems
frequently justified. But, after all, the only soul-history that one
knows well enough to say whether or not the experience of life is
adapted to the qualities of the particular soul, is one's own history;
and, speaking for myself, I can but say, looking back upon my life,
that it does seem to have been regulated hitherto by a very tender and
intimate kind of guidance, though I did not always see how delicate the
adaptation of it was at the time. The idea of this book, that there is
a certain golden thread of hope and love interwoven with all our lives,
running consistently through the coarsest and darkest fabric, was what
I set out to illustrate rather than to prove. Everything that bore
upon this fact, while the book was being written, I tried to express as
simply and as lucidly as I could. The people who have thought the book
formless or lacking in structure, are perfectly right. It is not, and
it did not set out to be, a finished picture, with a due subordination
of groups and backgrounds. To me personally, though a finished picture
is a beautiful and an admirable thing, the loose, unconsidered sketches
and studies of an artist have a special charm. Of an artist, I say;
have I then a claim to be considered an artist? I cannot answer that
question, but I will go further and say that the sketches of the
humblest amateur have an interest for me, which their finished pictures
often lack. One sees a revelation of personality, one sees what sort
of things strike an individual mind as beautiful, one sees the method
with which it deals with artistic difficulties. The most interesting
things of the kind I have ever seen are the portfolios of sketches by
Leonardo da Vinci in the Royal library at Windsor; outlines of heads,
features, flowers, backgrounds, strange engines of war, wings of
birds--the _debris_, almost, of the studio--are there piled up