But when the play is over one realises that the laughter of the
witches in 'Macbeth' is as terrible as the laughter of madness in
'Lear,' more terrible than the laughter of Iago in the tragedy of
the Moor. No spectator of art needs a more perfect mood of
receptivity than the spectator of a play. The moment he seeks to
exercise authority he becomes the avowed enemy of Art and of
himself. Art does not mind. It is he who suffers.

With the novel it is the same thing. Popular authority and the
recognition of popular authority are fatal. Thackeray's 'Esmond'
is a beautiful work of art because he wrote it to please himself.
In his other novels, in 'Pendennis,' in 'Philip,' in 'Vanity Fair'
even, at times, he is too conscious of the public, and spoils his
work by appealing directly to the sympathies of the public, or by
directly mocking at them. A true artist takes no notice whatever
of the public. The public are to him non-existent. He has no
poppied or honeyed cakes through which to give the monster sleep or
sustenance. He leaves that to the popular novelist. One
incomparable novelist we have now in England, Mr George Meredith.
There are better artists in France, but France has no one whose
view of life is so large, so varied, so imaginatively true. There
are tellers of stories in Russia who have a more vivid sense of
what pain in fiction may be. But to him belongs philosophy in
fiction. His people not merely live, but they live in thought.
One can see them from myriad points of view. They are suggestive.
There is soul in them and around them. They are interpretative and
symbolic. And he who made them, those wonderful quickly-moving
figures, made them for his own pleasure, and has never asked the
public what they wanted, has never cared to know what they wanted,
has never allowed the public to dictate to him or influence him in