hat is full of tears,
BECAUSE THERE WAS NO ROOM FOR THEM IN THE INN. We poor human souls,
knowing what that event has meant for the race, make the bare, ugly
place seemly and lovely, surrounding the Babe with a tapestry of
heavenly forms, holy lights, rapturous sounds; taking the terror and
the meanness of the scene away, and thereby, by our clumsy handling,
losing the divine seal of the great mystery, the fact that hope can
spring, in unstained and sublime radiance, from the vilest, lowest,
meanest, noisiest conditions that can well be conceived.

November 20, 1888.

I wonder aimlessly what it is that makes a book, a picture, a piece of
music, a poem, great. When any of these things has become a part of
one's mind and soul, utterly and entirely familiar, one is tempted to
think that the precise form of them is inevitable. That is a great
mistake.

Here is a tiny instance. I see that in the "Lycidas" Milton wrote:--

"Who would not sing for Lycidas? He WELL knew
Himself to sing and build the lofty rhyme."

The word "well" occurs in two MSS., and it seems to have been struck
out in the proof. The introduction of the word seems barbarous,
unmetrical, an outrage on the beauty of the line. Yet Milton must have
thought that it was needed, and have only decided by an after-thought
that it was better away. If it had been printed so, we should equally
have thought its omission barbarous and inartistic.

And thus, to an artist, there must be many ways of working out a
conception. I do not believe in the theory that the form is so
inevitable, because what great artist was ever perfectly content with
the form? The greater the artist, the more conscious he probably is of
the imperfection of his work; and if it could be bettered, how is it
then inevitable? It is only our familiarity with it that gives it
inevitableness. A beautiful building gains its mellow outline by a
hundred accidents of wear and weather, never contemplated by the
designer's mind. We love it so, we would not have it otherwise; but we
should have loved it just as intensely if it had been otherwise. Only a
small part, then, of the greatness of artistic work is what we
ourselves bring to it; and it becomes great, not only from itself, but
from the fact that it fits our minds as the dagger fits the sheath. The
greatness of a conception depends largely upon its being near enough to
our own conceptions, and yet a little greater, just as the vault