try and reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be
the common nor the common the heroic. Congratulate yourself if you
have done something strange and extravagant and broken the monotony
of a decorous age.

And lastly, let us remember that art is the one thing which Death
cannot harm. The little house at Concord may be desolate, but the
wisdom of New England's Plato is not silenced nor the brilliancy of
that Attic genius dimmed: the lips of Longfellow are still musical
for us though his dust be turning into the flowers which he loved:
and as it is with the greater artists, poet and philosopher and
song-bird, so let it be with you.




LECTURE TO ART STUDENTS




IN the lecture which it is my privilege to deliver before you to-
night I do not desire to give you any abstract definition of beauty
at all. For we who are working in art cannot accept any theory of
beauty in exchange for beauty itself, and, so far from desiring to
isolate it in a formula appealing to the intellect, we, on the
contrary, seek to materialise it in a form that gives joy to the
soul through the senses. We want to create it, not to define it.
The definition should follow the work: the work should not adapt
itself to the definition.