“Poor little Clara!” said Tracey, sighing also, “must, like other poor dear little loving women, take her chance. If her Henry succeed, how proud she will be to congratulate him! if he fail, how proud she will be to console him!” “Ah, Tracey!” said I, rising, “in all you have said I recognise your acute discernment and your depth of reasoning. But when you not only concede to, but approve, the motive power which renders this young man restless, pray forgive so old a friend for wondering why you yourself have never found some motive power which might, long ere this, have rendered you renowned.” “Hush!” said Tracey, with his winning, matchless smile—“hush, look out on yon woods and waters. Has not the life which Nature bestows on any man who devoutly loves her a serener happiness than can be found in the enjoyments that estrange us from her charms? How few understand the distinction between life artificial and life artistic! Artificial existence is a reverence for the talk of men; artistic existence is in the supreme indifference to the talk of men. You and I, in different ways, seek to complete our being on earth, not artificially, but artistically. Neither of us can be insincere mouthpieces of talk in which we have no faith. You cannot write in a book—you cannot say in a speech—that which you know to be a falsehood. But the artificial folks are the very echoes of falsehood; the noise they make is in repeating its last sounds. An artist must be true to nature, even though he add to nature something from his soul of man which nature cannot give in her representations of truth. Is it not so?” “Certainly,” said I, with warmth. “I could neither write nor speak what I did not believe to be, in the main, truthful. A man may or may not, according to the quality of his mind, give to nature that which clearly never can be in nature—viz., the soul or the intellect of man. But soul or intellect he must give to nature—that is, to everything which external objects present to his senses as truthful—or he is in art a charlatan, and in action a knave. But then truth, as Humanity knows it, is not what the schoolmen call it, One and Indivisible; it is like light, and splits not only into elementary colours, but into numberless tints. Truth with Raffaelle is not the same as truth with Titian; truth with Shakespeare is not the same as truth with Milton; truth with St Xavier is not the same as truth with Luther; truth with Pitt is not the same as truth with Fox. Each man takes from life his favourite truth, as each man takes from light his favourite colour.” “Bravo!” cried Tracey, clapping his hands.