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 meani