trength will carry him, to go undeterred by faltering,
weariness or reproach, is the only valid justification for the worker in
prose. And if his conscience is clear, his answer to those who in the
fulness of a wisdom which looks for immediate profit, demand
specifically to be edified, consoled, amused; who demand to be promptly
improved, or encouraged, or frightened, or shocked, or charmed, must run
thus:--My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the
written word to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to
make you _see_. That--and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed,
you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement,
consolation, fear, charm--all you demand--and, perhaps, also that
glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.

To snatch in a moment of courage, from the remorseless rush of time, a
passing phase of life, is only the beginning of the task. The task
approached in tenderness and faith is to hold up unquestioningly,
without choice and without fear, the rescued fragment before all eyes in
the light of a sincere mood. It is to show its vibration, its colour,
its form; and through its movement, its form, and its colour, reveal the
substance of its truth--disclose its inspiring secret: the stress and
passion within the core of each convincing moment. In a single-minded
attempt of that kind, if one be deserving and fortunate, one may
perchance attain to such clearness of sincerity that at last the
presented vision of regret or pity, of terror or mirth, shall awaken in
the hearts of the beholders that feeling of unavoidable solidarity; of
the solidarity in mysterious origin, in toil, in joy, in hope, in
uncertain fate, which binds men to each other and all mankind to the
visible world.

It is evident that he who, rightly or wrongly, holds by the convictions
expressed above cannot be faithful to any one of the temporary formulas
of his craft. The enduring part of them--the truth which each only
imperfectly veils--should abide with him as the most precious of his
possessions, but they all: Realism, Romanticism, Naturalism, even the
unofficial sentimentalism (which, like the poor, is exceedingly
difficult to get rid of), all these gods must, after a short period of
fellowship, abandon him--even on the very threshold of the temple--to
the stammerings of his conscience and to the outspoken consciousness of
the difficulties of his work. In that uneasy solitude