What shall I paint to-day? Shall it be the bit of garden underneath
my window, with the tangle of pinks and roses, and the cabbages
growing appetisingly beside the sweet-williams, the woodbine
climbing over the brown stone wall, the wicket-gate, and the cherry-
tree with its fruit hanging red against the whitewashed cottage?
Ah, if I could only paint it so truly that you could hear the drowsy
hum of the bees among the thyme, and smell the scented hay-meadows
in the distance, and feel that it is midsummer in England! That
would indeed be truth, and that would be art. Shall I paint the
Bobby baby as he stoops to pick the cowslips and the flax, his head
as yellow and his eyes as blue as the flowers themselves; or that
bank opposite the gate, with its gorse bushes in golden bloom, its
mountain-ash hung with scarlet berries, its tufts of harebells
blossoming in the crevices of rock, and the quaint low clock-tower
at the foot? Can I not paint all these in the full glow of summer-
time in my secret heart whenever I open the door a bit and admit its
life-giving warmth and beauty? I think I can, if I can only quit
dreaming.
I wonder how the great artists worked, and under what circumstances
they threw aside the implements of their craft, impatient of all but
the throb of life itself? Could Raphael paint Madonnas the week of
his betrothal? Did Thackeray write a chapter the day his daughter
was born? Did Plato philosophise freely when he was in love? Were
there interruptions in the world's great revolutions, histories,
dramas, reforms, poems, and marbles when their creators fell for a
brief moment under the spell of the little blind tyrant who makes
slaves of us all? It must have been so.
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