placed in bondage to a despot, are, no less than those Legislators, proud
of their calling, conscious of their duty, and jealous of their honour.
1909.




VAGUE THOUGHTS ON ART

It was on a day of rare beauty that I went out into the fields to try and
gather these few thoughts. So golden and sweetly hot it was, that they
came lazily, and with a flight no more coherent or responsible than the
swoop of the very swallows; and, as in a play or poem, the result is
conditioned by the conceiving mood, so I knew would be the nature of my
diving, dipping, pale-throated, fork-tailed words. But, after all--I
thought, sitting there--I need not take my critical pronouncements
seriously. I have not the firm soul of the critic. It is not my
profession to know 'things for certain, and to make others feel that
certainty. On the contrary, I am often wrong--a luxury no critic can
afford. And so, invading as I was the realm of others, I advanced with a
light pen, feeling that none, and least of all myself, need expect me to
be right.

What then--I thought--is Art? For I perceived that to think about it I
must first define it; and I almost stopped thinking at all before the
fearsome nature of that task. Then slowly in my mind gathered this group
of words:

Art is that imaginative expression of human energy, which, through
technical concretion of feeling and perception, tends to reconcile the