and then spoil it in the doing. An
intellectual laborer will bear anything except that. You may take away
the very table he is writing upon, if you let him have a deal board for
his books and papers; you may take away all his fine editions, if you
leave him common copies that are legible; you may remove his very
candlestick, if you leave him a bottle-neck to stick his candle in, and
he will go on working cheerfully still. But the moment you do anything
to spoil the quality of the work itself, you make him irritable and
miserable. "You think," says Sir Arthur Helps, "to gain a good man to
manage your affairs because he happens to have a small share in your
undertaking. It is a great error. You want him to do something well
which you are going to tell him to do. If he has been wisely chosen, and
is an able man, his pecuniary interest in the matter will be mere dust
in the balance, when compared with the desire which belongs to all such
men to do their work well." Yes, this is the central passion of all men
of true ability, _to do their work well_; their happiness lies in that,
and not in the amount of their profits, or even in their reputation. But
then, on the other hand, they suffer indescribable mental misery when
circumstances compel them to do their work less well than they know
that, under more favorable circumstances, they would be capable of doing
it. The want of money is, in the higher intellectual pursuits, the most
common hindrance to thoroughness and excellence of work. De Senancour,
who, in consequence of a strange concatenation of misfortunes, was all
his life struggling in shallows, suffered not from the privations
themselves, but from the vague feeling that they stunted his
intellectual growth; and any experienced student of human nature must be
aware that De Senancour was right. With larger means he would have seen
more of the world, and known it better, and written of it with riper
wisdom. He said that the man "who only saw in poverty the direct effect
of the money-privation, and only compared, for instance, an eight-penny
dinner to one that cost ten shillings, would have no conception of the
true nature of misfortune, for not to spend money is the least of the
evils of poverty." Bossuet said that he "had no attachment to riches,
and still if he had only what is barely necessary, if he felt himself
narrowed, he would lose more than half his talents." Sainte-Beuve said,
"Only think a little what a differenc