PREFACE x i 



sympathies, and in the training of the intellectual and moral part 

 of me, as I could hope to be. ... Who can judge for himself? 

 We must see ourselves in the mirror of others, not in the 

 mirror of the reviews. They have their place in forming the 

 jury, which condemns or acquits the inner man. But they 

 do not enable one so narrowly to test the decline or the growth 

 in himself, as what a friend, who knows and loves him, says. 

 Henry Sidgwick here has helped me in the same way or a 

 similar. These Essays have suggested for twelve days con- 

 stantly recurring conversations, and have set speculation on 

 the wing. They would not have done so with him had they 

 not had stuff, and do you know I was beginning to fear I had no 

 stuff left in me. So through my friends I feel that, if I am 

 allowed some years of energy, I may go on to new things with 

 freshly trained faculties.' There is a long and interesting 

 letter addressed to Messrs. Holt & Co., of New York, dated 

 August 7. Whether the letter was ever sent I do not know. 

 In the course of it Symonds says : 



1 1 wish to explain to you a scheme which has been suggested 

 to me by a distinguished American painter (Mr. Richards) 

 of the Munich school, well-known in Europe, and also in the 

 United States. He thinks that the Essays in this book upon the 

 principles of art are original, sensible, and convincing enough 

 to deserve separate publication with illustrations. 



' What I have attempted to demonstrate in these Essays 

 is that the personality of the artist inevitably makes itself 

 felt in any attempt to imitate nature, and that this fact 

 renders a thorough realism in art impossible, while it forces 

 idealism of one sort or another on the artist's work. 



' Now, to prove this, we propose to offer a prize for the best 

 studies from the same nude figure to be competed for in the 

 famous Ecole Julien, at Paris. When the best studies have 

 been selected by impartial judges, we propose to photograph 

 the model in the several attitudes copied by the students, and 

 then to reproduce both the photograph of the model and the 

 studies of the successful draughtsmen by a mechanical process 

 of first-rate excellence invented by Herr Obernetter, of 

 Munich.' The scheme, however, was never carried through. 



