In saying this I am not claiming to be a Walter Scott or a Charles Lamb.  But I can imagine a friend of the latter imploring him not to waste his time, with his critical gifts, upon writing slender, trifling essays; and I maintain that if Charles Lamb knew that such essays were the work that he did best, with ease and delight, he had the right to rebuff the hand that held out a volume of Marlowe and begged him to annotate it.  What spoils our hold on life for so many of us is this false sense of conventional dignity.  In art there is no great and small.  Whatever a mind can conceive clearly and express beautifully, that is good art, whether it be a harrowing tragedy in which murders and adulteries cluster as thick as flies, or the shaking of a reed in a stream as the current plucks it softly from below.  If a man can communicate to others his amazed bewilderment in the presence of the tragedy, or his exquisite delight in the form and texture and motion of the reed, he is an artist.  Of course, there will always be more people who will be affected by a melodrama, by strange and ghastly events, by the extremes of horror and pathos, than will be affected by the delicate grace of familiar things—­the tastes of the multitude are coarse and immature.  But a man must not measure his success by the range of his audience, though the largest art will appeal to the widest circle.  Art can be great and perfect without being large and surprising.  And thus the function of the artist is to determine what he can see clearly and perfectly, and to take that as his subject.  It may be to build a cathedral or to engrave a gem; but the art will be great in proportion as he sees his end with absolute distinctness, and loves the detail of the labour that makes the execution flawless and perfect.  The artist, if he would prevail, must not be seduced by any temptation, any extraneous desire, any peevish criticism, any well-meant rebuke, into trying a subject that he knows is too large for him.  He must be his own severest critic.  No artistic effort can be effective, if it is a joyless straining after things falteringly grasped.  Joy is the essential quality; it need not always be a present, a momentary joy.  There are weary spaces, as when a footsore traveller plods along the interminable road that leads him to the city where he would be.  But he must know in his heart that the joy of arrival will outweigh all the dreariness of the road, and he must, above all things, mean to arrive.  If at any moment the artist feels that he is not making way, and doubts whether the object of his quest is really worth the trouble, then he had better abandon the quest; unless, indeed, he has some moral motive, apart from the artistic motive, in continuing it.  For the end of art is delight and the quickening of the pulse of emotion; and delight cannot be imparted by one who is weary of the aim, and the pulse cannot be quickened by one whose heart is failing him.  There may, as I say,