ght become, what nature never meant
him to be--an artist. All along, when he has made any excuse, it has been
'art.' But, more likely, he has not been asked for excuse, he has lived
under the shelter of the 'genius' superstition. He has worn the air of
making great sacrifices for the goddess, and in these his intimates have
felt a proud sense of awful participation, as of a family whom the gods
love. They have never understood that art is a particular form of
self-indulgence, by no means confined to artists; that it often becomes no
less a vice than opium-eating, and that the same question has to be asked
of both--whether the dreams are worth the cost. This might occasionally be
asked of the world's famous: not only of those whose art has been the
evilly exquisite outcome of spiritual disease, but even of the great sane
successful reputations.

There is, too, especially about the latter, perhaps, a touch of comic
suggestiveness in the sublime preoccupation to which we owe their great
legacies, that look of Atlas which is always pathetic, when it is not
foolish, on the face of a mortal: the grand air of a Goethe, the colossal
absorption of a Balzac. Their attitude offends one's sense of the relation
of things, and we feel that, after all, we could have spared half their
works for a larger share of that delicate instinct for proportion, which
is one of the most precious attributes of what we call a gentleman. But
the demi-god has always much of the _nouveau riche_ about him, and a
gentleman is, after all, an exquisite product. Indeed, the world has, one
may think, quite enough genius to go on with. It could well do with a few
more gentlemen.

A BORROWED SOVEREIGN

(TO MR. AND MRS. WELCH)

Jim lent me a sovereign. He was working hard to make his home, and was
saving every penny. However, I took it, for I was really in sore straits.
If you have ever known what it is absolutely to need a sovereign, when you
have neither banking account nor employment, and your evening clothes are
no longer accessible for the last, you will be in a position to understand
the transfiguring properties of one small piece of gold. You leave your
friend's rooms a different man. Like the virtuous in the Buddhistic round,
you go in a beggar and come out a prince. To vary Carlyle's phrase, you
can pay for dinners, you can call hansoms, you can take stalls; in fact,
you are a prince--to the extent of a sovereign.

And oh! how wooingly doe