These things are good in their way, but they are very elementary.  Our men of intellect become scientific researchers, historians, erudite persons.  How few living writers there are who unite intellect with emotion!  The truth is that we do not believe in emotion; we think it a thing to play with, a thing to grow out of, not a thing to live by.  If a person discourses or writes of his feelings we think him a sentimentalist, and have an uneasy suspicion that he is violating the canons of good taste.  The result is that we are a sensible, a good-humoured, and a vulgar nation.  When we are dealing with art, we have no respect for any but successful artists.  If the practice of art results in fame and money, we praise the artist in a patronising way; when the artist prophesies, we think him slightly absurd until he commands a hearing, and then we worship him, because his prophecies have a wide circulation.  If the artist is unsuccessful, we consider him a mere dilettante.  Then, too, art suffers grievously from having been annexed by moralists, who talk about art as the handmaid of religion, and praise the artist if he provides incentives for conduct of a commercial type.  It would be better for art if it were frankly snubbed rather than thus unctuously encouraged.  We look upon it all as a matter of influence, for the one thing that we desire is to be felt, to affect other people, to inspire action.  The one thing that we cannot tolerate is that a man should despise and withdraw from the busy conventional world.  If he ends by impressing the world we admire him, and people his solitude with ugly motives.  The fact is that there was never a more unpromising soil for artists than this commonplace, active, strenuous century in which we live.  The temptations we put in the artist’s way are terribly strong; when we have done our work, we like to be amused by books and plays and pictures, and we are ready to pay high prices to the people who can give our heavy souls small sensations of joy and terror and sorrow.  And wealth is a fierce temptation to the artist, because it gives him liberty, freedom of motion, comfort, things of beauty and consideration.  The result is that too many of the artists who appear among us fall victims to the temptations of the world, and become a kind of superior parasite and prostitute, believing in their dignity because they are not openly humiliated.

But the true artist, like the true priest, cares only for the beautiful quality of the thought that he pursues.  The true priest is the man who loves virtue, disinterestedness, truth, and purity with a kind of passion, and only desires to feed the same love in faithful hearts.  He seeks the Kingdom of God first; and if the good things of the world are strewn, as they are apt to be strewn, in the path of the virtuous person, he is never for a moment seduced into believing that they are the object of his search.  His desire is that souls should glow and thrill with high, sacred, and tender emotions, which are their own surpassing reward.