may be sure that it is worth
while to try to do good work, and mainly because you may hope to do as
good work as you want to do. That is, precisely as good work as you
are willing to take the trouble to learn to do. Talent is only another
name for love of a thing. If you love a thing enough to try to find
out what is good, to train your judgment; and to train your abilities
up to what that judgment tells you is good, the good work is only a
matter of time.

You will notice that you must train your judgment as well as your
ability; not all at once, of course. But how can you hope to do good
work if you do not know what good work is when you see it? If you have
no point of view, how can you tell what you are working for, what you
are aiming at? And if you do not know what you are aiming at, are you
likely to hit anything?

=Train Your Judgment.=--Let us say, then, that you must train your
critical judgment. How are you to set about it?

In the first place, don't set up your own liking as a criterion. Make
up your mind that when it comes to a choice between your personal
taste and that of some one who may be supposed to know, between what
you think and what has been consented to by all the men who have ever
had an opinion worthy of respect, you may rest assured that you are
wrong. And when you have made up your mind to that, when you have
reached that mental attitude, you have taken a long step towards
training your judgment; for you have admitted a standard outside of
mere opinion.

Another attitude that you should place your mind in is one of
catholicity--one of openness to the possibility of there being many
ways of being right. Don't allow yourself to take it for granted that
any one school or way of painting or looking at things is the only
right one, and that all the other ways are wrong. That point of view
may do for a man who has studied and thought, and finally arrived at
that conclusion which suits his mind and his nature,--but it will not
do for a student. Such an attitude is a sure bar to progress. It
results in narrowness of idea, narrowness of perception, and
narrowness of appreciation. You should try all things, and hold fast
to that which is good. And having found what is good, and even while
holding fast to it, you should remember that what is good and true for
you is not necessarily the only good and true for some one else. You
must not only hold to your own liberty of choice, but recognize the
same