why--an elated sense of his own superiority. And there is nothing more
dangerous than such an elation to that absolute loyalty towards his
feelings and sensations an author should keep hold of in his most exalted
moments of creation.

To be hopeful in an artistic sense it is not necessary to think that the
world is good. It is enough to believe that there is no impossibility of
its being made so. If the flight of imaginative thought may be allowed
to rise superior to many moralities current amongst mankind, a novelist
who would think himself of a superior essence to other men would miss the
first condition of his calling. To have the gift of words is no such
great matter. A man furnished with a long-range weapon does not become a
hunter or a warrior by the mere possession of a fire-arm; many other
qualities of character and temperament are necessary to make him either
one or the other. Of him from whose armoury of phrases one in a hundred
thousand may perhaps hit the far-distant and elusive mark of art I would
ask that in his dealings with mankind he should be capable of giving a
tender recognition to their obscure virtues. I would not have him
impatient with their small failings and scornful of their errors. I
would not have him expect too much gratitude from that humanity whose
fate, as illustrated in individuals, it is open to him to depict as
ridiculous or terrible. I would wish him to look with a large
forgiveness at men's ideas and prejudices, which are by no means the
outcome of malevolence, but depend on their education, their social
status, even their professions. The good artist should expect no
recognition of his toil and no admiration of his genius, because his toil
can with difficulty be appraised and his genius cannot possibly mean
anything to the illiterate who, even from the dreadful wisdom of their
evoked dead, have, so far, culled nothing but inanities and platitudes. I
would wish him to enlarge his sympathies by patient and loving