r;
and this, above all for the Englishman, is excellent. To work grossly at
the trade, to forget sentiment, to think of his material and nothing
else, is, for a while at least, the king's highway of progress. Here, in
England, too many painters and writers dwell dispersed, unshielded,
among the intelligent bourgeois. These, when they are not merely
indifferent, prate to him about the lofty aims and moral influence of
art. And this is the lad's ruin. For art is, first of all and last of
all, a trade. The love of words and not a desire to publish new
discoveries, the love of form and not a novel reading of historical
events, mark the vocation of the writer and the painter. The arabesque,
properly speaking, and even in literature, is the first fancy of the
artist; he first plays with his material as a child plays with a
kaleidoscope; and he is already in a second stage when he begins to use
his pretty counters for the end of representation. In that, he must
pause long and toil faithfully; that is his apprenticeship; and it is
only the few who will really grow beyond it, and go forward, fully
equipped, to do the business of real art--to give life to abstractions
and significance and charm to facts. In the meanwhile, let him dwell
much among his fellow-craftsmen. They alone can take a serious interest
in the childish tasks and pitiful successes of these years. They alone
can behold with equanimity this fingering of the dumb keyboard, this
polishing of empty sentences, this dull and literal painting of dull and
insignificant subjects. Outsiders will spur him on. They will say, "Why
do you not write a great book? paint a great picture?" If his guardian
angel fail him, they may even persuade him to the attempt, and, ten to
one, his hand is coarsened and his style falsified for life.

And this brings me to a warning. The life of the apprentice to any art
is both unstrained and pleasing; it is strewn with small successes in
the midst of a career of failure, patiently supported; the heaviest
scholar is conscious of a certain progress; and if he come not
appreciably nearer to the art of Shakespeare, grows letter-perfect in
the domain of A-B, ab. But the time comes when a man should cease
prelusory gymnastic, stand up, put a violence upon his will, and, for
better or worse, begin the business of creation. This evil day there is
a tendency continually to postpone: above all with painters. They have
made so many studies that it has be