All of which is charming—yet would be infinitely more so if here at once ambiguity didn’t yawn; the unreality of the sharp distinction, where the interest of observation is at stake, between doing and feeling. In the immediate field of life, for action, for application, for getting through a job, nothing may so much matter perhaps as the descent of a suspended weight on this, that or the other spot, with all its subjective concomitants quite secondary and irrelevant. But the affair of the painter is not the immediate, it is the reflected field of life, the realm not of application, but of _appreciation_—a truth that makes our measure of effect altogether different. My report of people’s experience—my report as a “story-teller”—is essentially my appreciation of it, and there is no “interest” for me in what my hero, my heroine or any one else does save through that admirable process. As soon as I begin to appreciate simplification is imperilled: the sharply distinguished parts of any adventure, any case of endurance and performance, melt together as an appeal. I then see their “doing,” that of the persons just mentioned, as, immensely, their feeling, their feeling as their doing; since I can have none of the conveyed sense and taste of their situation without becoming intimate with them. I can’t be intimate without that sense and taste, and I can’t appreciate save by intimacy, any more than I can report save by a projected light. Intimacy with a man’s specific behaviour, with his given case, is desperately certain to make us see it as a whole—in which event arbitrary limitations of our vision lose whatever beauty they may on occasion have pretended to. What a man thinks and what he feels are the history and the character of what he does; on all of which things the logic of intensity rests. Without intensity where is vividness, and without vividness where is presentability? If I have called the most general state of one’s most exposed and assaulted figures the state of bewilderment—the condition for instance on which Thackeray so much insists in the interest of _his_ exhibited careers, the condition of a humble heart, a bowed head, a patient wonder, a suspended judgement, before the “awful will” and the mysterious decrees of Providence—so it is rather witless to talk of merely getting rid of that displayed mode of reaction, one of the oft-encountered, one of the highly recommended, categories of feeling.