Other men pay, and pay dearly, for pleasures less
desirable.
Nor will the practice of art afford you pleasure only; it affords
besides an admirable training. For the artist works entirely upon
honour. The public knows little or nothing of those merits in the
quest of which you are condemned to spend the bulk of your
endeavours. Merits of design, the merit of first-hand energy, the
merit of a certain cheap accomplishment which a man of the artistic
temper easily acquires - these they can recognise, and these they
value. But to those more exquisite refinements of proficiency and
finish, which the artist so ardently desires and so keenly feels,
for which (in the vigorous words of Balzac) he must toil "like a
miner buried in a landslip," for which, day after day, he recasts
and revises and rejects - the gross mass of the public must be ever
blind. To those lost pains, suppose you attain the highest pitch
of merit, posterity may possibly do justice; suppose, as is so
probable, you fall by even a hair's breadth of the highest, rest
certain they shall never be observed. Under the shadow of this
cold thought, alone in his studio, the artist must preserve from
day to day his constancy to the ideal.
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