and painting new 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 still lingers about some
beautiful creeds, and searching for experience itself, and not for
the fruits of experience; when he has got its secret, he will leave
without regret much that was once very precious to him. "I am
always insincere," says Emerson somewhere, "as knowing that there
are other moods": "Les emotions," wrote Theophile Gautier once in
a review of Arsene Houssaye, "Les emotions, ne se ressemblent pas,
mais etre emu--voila l'important."

Now, this is the secret of the art of the modern romantic school,
and gives one the right keynote for its apprehension; but the real
quality of all work which, like Mr. Rodd's, aims, as I said, at a