existence there are not a few: youth and the arts preoccupied with
youth may serve as a model for us at one moment: at another we may
like to think that, in its subtlety and sensitiveness of
impression, its suggestion of a spirit dwelling in external things
and making its raiment of earth and air, of mist and city alike,
and in its morbid sympathy of its moods, and tones, and colours,
modern landscape art is realising for us pictorially what was
realised in such plastic perfection by the Greeks. Music, in which
all subject is absorbed in expression and cannot be separated from
it, is a complex example, and a flower or a child a simple example,
of what I mean; but sorrow is the ultimate type both in life and
art.

Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard
and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain,
unlike pleasure, wears no mask. Truth in art is not any
correspondence between the essential idea and the accidental
existence; it is not the resemblance of shape to shadow, or of the
form mirrored in the crystal to the form itself; it is no echo
coming from a hollow hill, any more than it is a silver well of
water in the valley that shows the moon to the moon and Narcissus
to Narcissus. Truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself:
the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made
incarnate: the body instinct with spirit. For this reason there
is no truth comparable to sorrow. There are times when sorrow
seems to me to be the only truth. Other things may be illusions of
the eye or the appetite, made to blind the one and cloy the other,
but out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a
child or a star there is pain.