best at every point, and that they could not buy or beg or
borrow such a habit for the simple reason that nobody who had it could
sell or give or lend it.

Besides, as Eugenio very well perceived, his correspondents were not
only young now, but were always intending to be so. He remembered how it
used to be with himself, and that was how it used to be. He saw
abundance of old, or older, people about him, but he himself
instinctively expected to live on and on, without getting older, and to
hive up honey from experience without the beeswax which alone they
seemed to have stored from the opening flowers of the past. Yet, in due
course of time, he found himself an old or older man simply through
living on and on and not dying earlier. Upon the whole, he liked it and
would not have gone back and died earlier if he could. But he felt that
it would be useless trying to convince his youthful correspondents that,
whether they liked it or not, they too would grow old, or older, if they
lived. How, then, teach them by precept, if they would not learn by
universal example, that unless they were to be very miserable old men,
and even miserable old women, they must have the habit of work? How
instruct them further that unless they had the habit of good work,
patient, faithful, fine work, the habit which no one can buy, beg, or
borrow, because no one can sell, give, or lend it, they were worse than
idle, cumberers of the earth, with no excuse for being above it?

If he had set out to do that, they might have retorted upon him that he
was making a petty personal matter of art, which was not only so much
longer than life, but so much wider, deeper, and higher. In this event
he saw that he would have nothing for it but to confirm his
correspondents in their disappointment with him by declaring that art
_was_ a personal matter, and that though longer, it was not wider,
deeper, or higher than life, and could not be. It might be mysterious in
being personal, but it was not necessarily petty. It would be great if
the artist was so, but not otherwise; it could be fine on no other
terms. There was a theory and an appearance that it existed somehow
apart from the artist and that it made him. But the fact was he made it,
partly wittingly, partly unwittingly; and it had no being except in his
achievement. The power of imagining a work of art was the gift of
nature, as being long or short, dark or fair was. The concern of him it
was given to wa