Tennyson and Montepin make handsome
livelihoods; but we cannot all hope to be Tennyson, and we do not
all perhaps desire to be Montepin. If you adopt an art to be your
trade, weed your mind at the outset of all desire of money. What
you may decently expect, if you have some talent and much industry,
is such an income as a clerk will earn with a tenth or perhaps a
twentieth of your nervous output. Nor have you the right to look
for more; in the wages of the life, not in the wages of the trade,
lies your reward; the work is here the wages. It will be seen I
have little sympathy with the common lamentations of the artist
class. Perhaps they do not remember the hire of the field
labourer; or do they think no parallel will lie? Perhaps they have
never observed what is the retiring allowance of a field officer;
or do they suppose their contributions to the arts of pleasing more
important than the services of a colonel? Perhaps they forget on
how little Millet was content to live; or do they think, because
they have less genius, they stand excused from the display of equal
virtues? But upon one point there should be no dubiety: if a man
be not frugal, he has no business in the arts.
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