in ideas, in literature, art, and
music is rather a dilettante business. I was reminded of a memorable
conversation I once had with a man of some note, a great landowner and
prominent politician. He was talking confidentially to me about his
sons and their professions. One of the boys manifested a really
remarkable artistic gift; he was a draughtsman of extraordinary skill,
and I said something about his taking up art seriously. The great man
said that it would never do. 'I consider it almost a misfortune,' he
added, 'that the boy is so clever an artist, because it would be out of
the question for him, in his position, to take up what is, after all,
rather a disreputable profession. I have talked to him seriously about
it, and I have said that there is no harm in his amusing himself in
that way; but he must have a serious occupation._'

"_That is a very fair instance of the way in which the pursuit of art
is regarded among our solid classes--as distinctly a trade for an
adventurer. It will be a long time before we alter that. But the
truth is that this kind of conventionalism is what makes us so stupid a
nation. We have no sort of taste for simplicity in life. A man who
lived in a cottage, occupied in quiet and intellectual pursuits, would
be held to be a failure, even if he lived in innocent happiness to the
age of eighty. My own firm belief is that this is all wrong. It opens
up all sorts of obscure and bewildering questions as to why we are sent
into the world at all; but my idea is that we are meant to be happy if
we can, and that a great many people miss happiness, because they have
not the courage to pursue it in their own way. I cannot believe myself
that the complicated creature, so frail of frame, so limitless in
dreams and hopes, is the result of a vortex. I cannot believe that we
can be created except by a power that in a certain degree resembles
ourselves. If we have remote dreams of love and liberty, of justice
and truth, I believe that those ideas must exist in a sublime degree in
the mind of our Maker. I believe, on the whole, though there are many
difficulties in the way of the theory, that life is meant for most of
us to be an educative process; that we are meant to quit the world
wiser, nobler, more patient than we entered it; why the whole business
is so intolerably slow, why we are so hampered by traditions and
instincts that retard the process, I cannot conceive; but my belief is
tha