In some such way as this we could gather up these strewn and scattered
petals of song into one perfect rose of life, and yet, perhaps, in so
doing, we might be missing the true quality of the poems; one's real life
is so often the life that one does not lead; and beautiful poems, like
threads of beautiful silks, may be woven into many patterns and to suit
many designs, all wonderful and all different: and romantic poetry, too,
is essentially the poetry of impressions, being like that latest school
of painting, the school of Whistler and Albert Moore, in its choice of
situation as opposed to subject; in its dealing with the exceptions
rather than with the types of life; in its brief intensity; in what one
might call its fiery-coloured momentariness, it being indeed the
momentary situations of life, the momentary aspects of nature, which
poetry and painting now seek to render for us. Sincerity and constancy
will the artist, indeed, have always; but sincerity in art is merely that
plastic perfection of execution without which a poem or a painting,
however noble its sentiment or human its origin, is but wasted and unreal
work, and the constancy of the artist cannot be to any definite rule or
system of living, but to that principle of beauty only through which the
inconstant shadows of his life are in their most fleeting moment arrested
and made permanent. He will not, for instance, in intellectual matters
acquiesce in that facile orthodoxy of our day which is so reasonable and
so artistically uninteresting, nor yet will he desire that fiery faith of
the antique time which, while it intensified, yet limited the vision;
still less will he allow the calm of his culture to be marred by the
discordant despair of doubt or the sadness of a sterile scepticism; for
the Valley Perilous, where ignorant armies clash by night, is no resting-
place meet for her to whom the gods have assigned the clear upland, the
serene height, and the sunlit air,--rather will he be always curiously
testing new forms of belief, tinging his nature with the sentiment that