ngless. 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
minds. Ruskin as an art-critic--how profoundly unfair, prejudiced,
unjust he is! He has made up his mind about the merit of an artist; he
will lay down a principle about accuracy in art, and to what extent
imagination may improve upon vision; and then he will abuse Claude for
modifying a scene, in the same breath, and for the same reasons, with
which he will praise Turner for exaggerating one. He will use the same
stick that he throws for one dog to fetch, to beat another dog that he
dislikes. Of course he says fine and suggestive things by the way, and
he did a great work in inspiring people to look for beauty, though he
misled many feeble spirits into substituting one convention for
another. I cannot read a page of his formal writings without anger and
disgust. Yet what a beautiful, pathetic, noble spirit he had! The
moment he writes, simply and tenderly, from his own harrowed heart, he
becomes a dear and honoured friend. In Praeterita, in his diaries and
letters, in his familiar and unconsidered utterances, he is perfectly
delightful, conscious of his own waywardness and whimsicality; but when
he lectures and dictates, he is like a man blowing wild blasts upon a
shrill trumpet. Then Carlyle--his big books, his great tawdry, smoky
pictures of scenes, his loud and clumsy moralisations, his perpetual
thrusting of himself into the foreground, like some obstreperous
showman; he wearies and dizzies my brain with his raucous clamour, his
uncouth convolutions. I saw the other day a little Japanese picture of
a boat in a stormy sea, the waves beating over it; three warriors in
the boat lie prostrate and rigid with terror and misery. Above, through
a rent in the clouds, is visible an ugly grotesque figure, with a
demoniacal leer on his face, beating upon a number of drums. The
picture is entitled "The Thunder-God beats his drums." Well, Carlyle
seems to me like that; he has no pity for humanity, he only likes to
add