ere had gone out
of the world and left nothing but the ambition to be at this point or
that without the trouble of having reached it. He smiled as he recalled
the stock criticism of the connoisseur in _The Vicar of Wakefield_, that
the picture would have been better if the painter had taken more pains;
but he did not smile gayly: there seemed to him a sum of pathetic wisdom
in the saying which might well weigh down the blithest spirit. It had
occurred to him in connection with an old essay of Hazlitt's, which he
had been reading, on the comparative methods of English and French
painters in their work. The essayist held, almost literally, that the
French pictures were better because the French painters had taken more
pains, and taken especial pains in the least interesting parts of their
pictures. He was dealing more specifically with copying, but his words
applied to the respective schools in their highest work, and he could
only save his patriotic pride, so far as he might, by saying: "Courage
is pure will without regard to consequences, and this the English have
in perfection. Poetry is our element, for the essence of poetry is will
and passion. The English fail as a people in the fine arts, namely,
because the end with them absorbs the means."

Eugenio knew nothing practically and very little theoretically of
painting; but it appeared to him that what Hazlitt said was of equal
force with respect to the fine art of literature; and that in his own
American field the English race failed, as far as it had failed, for the
same reason as that given by Hazlitt for its failure in painting. In his
mind he went further than Hazlitt, or came short of him, in refusing the
consolation of our race's superiority in poetry because it was will and
passion. As far as they had excelled in that, it was because they had
tried hard and not neglected the means for the end. Where they had
excelled most, it was quite imaginable that the poem would still have
been better if the poet had taken more pains. In the case of prose, he
thought we failed of the end because we were impatient of the means, and
as elderly men will, he accused the present of being more hasty and
indifferent to form than the past. He recalled the time when he was
apprentice in the art in which he could not yet call himself a master
workman, and thought how he tried to make what he did beautiful, and
fashioned his work with tireless pains after some high model. Perhaps
the