A baker rhymes for his pursuit,
Candlestick-maker much acquaints
His soul with song, or haply mute
Blows out his brains upon the flute.

Stevenson touched on the same insular sentiment when he said that many
men he knew, who were meat-salesmen to the outward eye, might in the
life of contemplation sit with the saints. Now the extraordinary
achievement of the American meat-salesman is that his poetic enthusiasm
can really be for meat sales; not for money but for meat. An American
commercial traveller asked me, with a religious fire in his eyes,
whether I did not think that salesmanship could be an art. In England
there are many salesmen who are sincerely fond of art; but seldom of the
art of salesmanship. Art is with them a hobby; a thing of leisure and
liberty. That is why the English traveller talks, if not of art, then of
sport. That is why the two city men in the London train, if they are not
talking about golf, may be talking about gardening. If they are not
talking about dollars, or the equivalent of dollars, the reason lies
much deeper than any superficial praise or blame touching the desire for
wealth. In the English case, at least, it lies very deep in the English
spirit. Many of the greatest English things have had this lighter and
looser character of a hobby or a holiday experiment. Even a masterpiece
has often been a by-product. The works of Shakespeare come out so
casually that they can be attributed to the most improbable people; even
to Bacon. The sonnets of Shakespeare are picked up afterwards as if out
of a wastepaper basket. The immortality of Dr. Johnson does not rest on
the written leaves he collected, but entirely on the words he wasted,
the words he scattered to the winds. So great a thing as Pickwick is
almost a kind of accident; it began as something secondary and grew into
something primary and pre-eminent. It began with mere words written to
illustrate somebody else's pictures; and swelled like an epic expanded
from an epigram. It might almost be said that in the case of Pickwick
the author began as the servant of the artist. But, as in the same story
of Pickwick, the servant became greater than the master. This
incalculable and accidental quality, like all national qualities, has
its strength and weakness; but it does represent a certain reserve fund
of interests in the Englishman's life; and distinguishes him from the
other extreme type, of the millionaire who works till he d