Those who may read these words will be apt to think that it is a selfish business after all; yet that is only because so many people consider the life of the writer an otiose and unnecessary life; but the sacrifices of which I speak are only those that all men who follow an absorbing profession have to make—­barristers, politicians, physicians, men of business.  No one complains if they seclude themselves at certain hours.  Of course, if a writer finds that general society makes no demands upon his nervous force, but is simply a recreation, there is no reason why he should not take that recreation; though I have known men who just missed being great writers because they could not resist the temptation of general society.

The conclusion of the matter is that an artist must cultivate a strict sense of responsibility; if he has a certain thing to say, he must say it with all his force; and he must be content with a secret and silent influence, an impersonal brotherliness, deep and inner relations of soul with soul, that may never express themselves in glance or gesture, in hand-clasp or smile, but which, for all that, are truer and more permanent relations than word or gesture or close embrace can give; a marriage of souls, a bodiless union.

XXVII

I have often thought that in Art, judging by the analogy of previous development, we ought to be able to prophesy more or less the direction in which development is likely to take place.  I mean that in music, for instance, the writers of the stricter ancient music might have seen that the art was likely to develop a greater intricacy of form, an increased richness of harmony, a larger use of discords, suspensions, and chromatic intervals, a tendency to conceal superficial form rather than to emphasise it, and so forth.  Yet it is a curious question whether if Handel, say, could have heard an overture of Wagner’s he would have thought it an advance in beauty or not—­whether it would have seemed to him like the realisation of some incredible dream, a heavenly music, or whether he would have thought it licentious, and even shapeless.  Of course, one knows that there is going to be development in art, but the imagination is unable to forecast it, except in so far as it can forecast a possibility of an increased perfection of technique.  It is the same with painting.  It is a bewildering speculation what Raffaelle or Michelangelo would have thought of the work of Turner or Millais:  whether they would have been delighted by the subtle evolution of their own aims, or confused by the increase of impressional suggestiveness—­whether, indeed, if Raffaelle or Michelangelo had seen a large photograph, say, of a winter scene, or a chromo-lithograph such as appears as a supplement to an illustrated paper, they might not have flung down their brush in a mixture of rapture and despair.