e 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 such different methods entirely devoid of
didacticism--but their work leaves on me a strangely potent sense of
personality. Such subtle intermingling of seer with thing seen is the
outcome only of long an