ly bread upon such joyful terms. The
soldier and the explorer have moments of a worthier excitement, but they
are purchased by cruel hardships and periods of tedium that beggar
language. In the life of the artist there need be no hour without its
pleasure. I take the author, with whose career I am best acquainted; and
it is true he works in a rebellious material, and that the act of
writing is cramped and trying both to the eyes and the temper; but
remark him in his study when matter crowds upon him and words are not
wanting--in what a continual series of small successes time flows by;
with what a sense of power, as of one moving mountains, he marshals his
petty characters; with what pleasures, both of the ear and eye, he sees
his airy structure growing on the page; and how he labours in a craft to
which the whole material of his life is tributary, and which opens a
door to all his tastes, his loves, his hatreds, and his convictions, so
that what he writes is only what he longed to utter. He may have enjoyed
many things in this big, tragic playground of the world; but what shall
he have enjoyed more fully than a morning of successful work? Suppose it
ill-paid: the wonder is it should be paid at all. Other men pay, and pay
dearly, for pleasures less desirable.

Nor will the practice of art afford you pleasure only; it affords
besides an admirable training. For the artist works entirely upon
honour. The public knows little or nothing of those merits in the quest
of which you are condemned to spend the bulk of your endeavours. Merits
of design, the merit of first-hand energy, the merit of a certain cheap
accomplishment which a man of the artistic temper easily acquires--these
they can recognise, and these they value. But to those more exquisite
refinements of proficiency and finish, which the artist so ardently
desires and so keenly feels, for which (in the vigorous words of Balzac)
he must toil "like a miner buried in a landslip," for which, day after
day, he recasts and revises and rejects--the gross mass of the public
must be ever blind. To those lost pains, suppose you attain the highest
pitch of merit, posterity may possibly do justice; suppose, as is so
probable, you fail by even a hair's breadth of the highest, rest certain
they shall never be observed. Under the shadow of this cold thought,
alone in his studio, the artist must preserve from day to day his
constancy to the ideal. It is this which makes his life noble