pline in self-abnegation, but
only in negation; it looses us from self, it does not link us to others.
The real and natural remedy for the egotism of youth is Life, not
necessarily the haunting of _cafes_, or even the watching of football
matches, but strenuous activity in the simplest human relations of daily
happenings. "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might."

* * * * *

There is always apt to be some discord between the artist and the large
practical world in which he lives, but those ages are happiest in which
the discord is least. The nineteenth century, amid its splendid
achievements in science and industry, in government and learning, and
above all in humanity, illustrates this conflict in an interesting way.
To literature, an art which can explain itself, the great public world
lent on the whole a reverent and intelligent ear. Its great prose
writers were at peace with their audience and were inspired by great
public interests. Some of the greatest, for example Tolstoy, produced
their finest work on widely human subjects, and numbered their readers
and admirers probably by the million. Writers like Dickens, Thackeray,
Kingsley, Mill, and Carlyle, even poets like Tennyson and Browning, were
full of great public interests and causes, and, in different degrees and
at different stages of their lives, were thoroughly and immensely
popular. On the other hand, one can find, at the beginning of the
period, figures like Blake and Shelley, and all through it a number of
painters--the pre-Raphaelites, the Impressionists--walking like aliens
in a Philistine world. Even great figures like Burne-Jones and Whistler
were for the greater part of their lives unrecognized or mocked at.
Millais reached the attention of the world, but was thought by the
stricter fraternity to have in some sense or other sold his soul and
committed the great sin of considering the bourgeois. The bourgeois
should be despised not partially but completely. His life, his
interests, his code of ethics and conduct must all be matters of entire
indifference or amused contempt, to the true artist who intends to do
his own true work and call his soul his own.

At a certain moment, during the eighties and nineties, it looked as if
these doctrines were generally accepted, and the divorce between art and
the community had become permanent. But it seems as if this attitude,
which coincided with a period of react