The altar fire by A.C. Benson

Perhaps my trial comes to me that it may test my faith in art; perhaps to show me that the artist's creed is a false and shallow one after all. What is it that we artists do? In a happy hour I should have said glibly that we discern and interpret beauty. But now it seems to me that no man can ever live upon beauty. I think I have gone wrong in busying myself so ardently in trying to discern the quality of beauty in all things. I seem to have submitted everything -- virtue, honour, life itself -- to that test. I appear to myself like an artist who has devoted himself entirely to the appreciation of colour, who is suddenly struck colour-blind; he sees the forms of things as clearly as ever, but they are dreary and meaningless. I seem to have tried everything, even conduct, by an artistic standard, and the quality which I have devoted myself to discerning has passed suddenly out of life.

And my mistake has been all the more grievous, because I have always believed that it was life of which I was in search. There are three great writers -- two of them artists as well -- whose personality has always interested me profoundly -- Ruskin, Carlyle, Rossetti. But I have never been able wholly to admire the formal and deliberate products of their minds. Ruskin as an art-critic -- how profoundly unfair, prejudiced, unjust he is! He has made up his mind about the merit of an artist; he will lay down a principle about accuracy in art, and to what extent imagination may improve upon vision; and then he will abuse Claude for modifying a scene, in the same breath, and for the same reasons, with which he will praise Turner for exaggerating one. He will use the same stick that he throws for one dog to fetch, to beat another dog that he dislikes.