ter thing of
them. Few of them are doing the best that they can do, and they know
it. They are not doing it because the world does not ask them to do
it; indeed, the world takes care that they shall have no opportunity of
doing it. A certain faculty for arithmetic represents a man who has
many higher faculties; and thus the man is forced to live by one
capacity which is perhaps his least worthy and significant. This is
not the case in what we call the liberal professions and the arts. The
architect, the barrister, the humblest journalist needs his whole mind
for his task, and hence his work is a delight. The artist, if he be a
true artist, does the one thing that he was born to do, and so 'the
hours pass away untold, without chagrin, and without weariness,' nor
would he wish them to pass otherwise. Many times as I took my way to
the dreary labours of my desk I stopped to watch, and sometimes to talk
with, a smiling industrious little Frenchman, who repaired china and
bronzes in a dingy shop in Welbeck Street. He was an expert at his
trade; knew all the distinctive marks of old china, and could assign
with certainty the right date of any piece of bronze he handled; and to
hear him discourse on these things would have been a liberal education
to a budding connoisseur. I never knew a man so indefatigably happy in
his work; his eye lit up at any special glow of colour or delicacy of
design; he used his tools as though he loved them; and if he dreamed at
night, I doubt not that his canopies were coloured with the hues of
Sevres, and that bronze angels from the hand of Benvenuto stood about
his bed. Plainly the man was happy because his work engaged his whole
attention; and to every cunning rivet that he fashioned he gave the
entire forces of his mind. Here was a man who not merely got a living
but lived; and I, chained to my desk, knew well enough that his life
was much more satisfactory than mine.

Money has little to do with this problem of satisfactory living; I
think that this was the first discovery I made in the direction of a
better mode of life. My French workman earned perhaps two pounds a
week: I earned four or five; but he bought happiness with his work,
whereas I bought discontent and weariness. Money may be bought at too
dear a rate. The average citizen, if he did but know it, is always
buying money too dear. He earns, let us say, four hundred pounds a
year; but the larger proportion of this sum g