dge--Intellectual value of skill and of professional discipline.

It is not a graceful thing for me to say, nor pleasant for you to hear,
that what you have done hitherto in art and literature is neither of
any value in itself nor likely to lead you to that which is truly and
permanently satisfying. I believe you have natural ability, though it
would not be easy for any critic to measure its degree when it has never
been developed by properly-directed work. Most critics would probably
err on the unfavorable side, for we are easily blind to powers that are
little more than latent. To see anything encouraging in your present
performance, it would need the sympathy and intelligence of the American
sculptor Greenough, of whom it was said that "his recognition was not
limited to achievement, but extended to latent powers." The world,
however, recognizes nothing short of performance, because the
performance is what it needs, and promises are of no use to it.

In this rough justice of the world there is a natural distribution of
rewards. You will be paid, in fame and money, for all excellent work;
and you will be paid, in money, though not in fame, for all work that is
even simply good, provided it be of a kind that the world needs, or
fancies that it needs. But you will never be paid at all for botch-work,
neither in money nor in fame, nor by your own inward approval.

For we all of us either know that our botch-work is worthless, or else
have serious misgivings about it. That which is less commonly realized
by those who have not undergone the test of professional labor is the
vastness of the interval that separates botch-work from handicraft, and
the difficulty of getting over it. "There are few delusions," Charles
Lever said in "The Bramleighs," "more common with well-to-do people than
the belief that if 'put to it' they could earn their own livelihood in a
variety of ways. Almost every man has some two or three or more
accomplishments which he fancies would be quite adequate to his support;
and remembering with what success the exercise of these gifts has ever
been hailed in the society of his friends, he has a sort of generous
dislike to be obliged to eclipse some poor drudge of a professional,
who, of course, will be consigned to utter oblivion after his own
performance. Augustus Bramleigh was certainly not a conceited or a vain
man, and yet he had often in his palmy days imagined how easy it would
be for him to provide