life?--I had found small edification, mostly, in a critical
pretension that had neglected from the first all delimitation of
ground and all definition of terms. The air of my earlier time
shows, to memory, as darkened, all round, with that vanity--
unless the difference to-day be just in one's own final
impatience, the lapse of one's attention. There is, I think, no
more nutritive or suggestive truth in this connexion than that of
the perfect dependence of the "moral" sense of a work of art on
the amount of felt life concerned in producing it. The question
comes back thus, obviously, to the kind and the degree of the
artist's prime sensibility, which is the soil out of which his
subject springs. The quality and capacity of that soil, its
ability to "grow" with due freshness and straightness any vision
of life, represents, strongly or weakly, the projected morality.
That element is but another name for the more or less close
connexion of the subject with some mark made on the intelligence,
with some sincere experience. By which, at the same time, of
course, one is far from contending that this enveloping air of
the artist's humanity--which gives the last touch to the worth of
the work--is not a widely and wondrously varying element; being
on one occasion a rich and magnificent medium and on another a
comparatively poor and ungenerous one. Here we get exactly the
high price of the novel as a literary form--its power not only,
while preserving that form with closeness, to range through all
the differences of the individual relation to its general
subject-matter, all the varieties of outlook on life, of
disposition to reflect and project, created by conditions that
are never the same from man to man (or, so far as that goes, from
man to woman), but positively to appear more true to its
character in proportion as it strains, or tends to burst, with a