is
in this direction, I think, he will succeed best. He wants a story to
keep him from beating musical and ineffective wings in the void. I have
not said half what I want to say about Seumas O'Sullivan's verses, but
I know the world will not listen long to the musings of one verse-writer
on another. I only hope this note may send some readers to their
bookseller for Seumas O'Sullivan's poems, and that it may help them to
study with more understanding a mind that I love.

1909

ART AND LITERATURE

A LECTURE ON THE ART OF G. F. WATTS

After the publication of The Gentle Art of Making Enemies the writer who
ventures to speak of art and literature in the same breath needs
some courage. Since the death of Whistler, his opinions about the
independence of art from the moral ideas with which literature is
preoccupied have been generally accepted in the studios. The artist
who is praised by a literary man would hardly be human if he was not
pleased; but he listens with impatience to any criticism or suggestion
about the substance of his art or the form it should take. I had a
friend, an artist of genius, and when we were both young we argued
together about art on equal terms. It had not then occurred to him that
any intelligence I might have displayed in writing verse did not entitle
me to an opinion about modeling; but one day I found him reading Mr.
Whistler's Ten O'clock. The revolt of art against literature had reached
Ireland. After that, while we were still good friends, he made me feel
that I was an outsider, and when I ventured to plead for a national
character in sculpture, his righteous anger--I might say his
ferocity--forced me to talk of something else.

I was not convinced he was right, but years after I began to use the
brush a little, and I remember painting a twilight from love of some
strange colors and harmonious lines, and when one of my literary friends
found that its interest depended on color and form, and that the idea
in it could not readily be translated into words, and that it left
him wishing that I would illustrate my poems or something that had a
meaning, I veered round at once and understood Whistler, and how foolish
I was to argue with John Hughes. I joined in the general insurrection
of art against the domination of literature. But being a writer and
much concerned with abstract ideas, I have never had the comfort and
happiness of those who embrace this opinion with their whole