not trust themselves for truth extraordinary.  They can face the general judgment, but they should hesitate to produce work that appeals to the last judgment, which is the judgment within.  There is too much reason to divine that a certain number of those who aspire to derive from the greatest of masters have no temperaments worth speaking of, no point of view worth seizing, no vigilance worth awaiting, no mood worth waylaying.  And to be, de parti pris, an Impressionist without these!  O Velasquez!  Nor is literature quite free from a like reproach in her own things.  An author, here and there, will make as though he had a word worth hearing—­nay, worth over-hearing—­a word that seeks to withdraw even while it is uttered; and yet what it seems to dissemble is all too probably a platitude.  But obviously, literature is not—­as is the craft and mystery of painting—­so at the mercy of a half-imposture, so guarded by unprovable honour.  For the art of painting is reserved that shadowy risk, that undefined salvation.  May the gods guard us from the further popularising of Impressionism; for the point of honour is the simple secret of the few.

COMPOSURE

Tribulation, Immortality, the Multitude:  what remedy of composure do these words bring for their own great disquiet!  Without the remoteness of the Latinity the thought would come too close and shake too cruelly.  In order to the sane endurance of the intimate trouble of the soul an aloofness of language is needful.  Johnson feared death.  Did his noble English control and postpone the terror?  Did it keep the fear at some courteous, deferent distance from the centre of that human heart, in the very act of the leap and lapse of mortality?  Doubtless there is in language such an educative power.  Speech is a school.  Every language is a persuasion, an induced habit, an instrument which receives the note indeed but gives the tone.  Every language imposes a quality, teaches a temper, proposes a way, bestows a tradition:  this is the tone—­the voice—­of the instrument.  Every language, by counter-change, replies to the writer’s touch or breath his own intention, articulate:  this is his note.  Much has always been said, many things to the purpose have been thought, of the power and the responsibility of the note.  Of the legislation and influence of the tone I have been led to think by comparing the tranquillity of Johnson and the composure of Canning with the stimulated and close emotion, the interior trouble, of those writers who have entered as disciples in the school of the more Teutonic English.