Chapter 10

LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN WHO PROPOSES TO EMBRACE THE CAREER OF ART

WITH the agreeable frankness of youth, you address me on a point of
some practical importance to yourself and (it is even conceivable)
of some gravity to the world: Should you or should you not become
an artist? It is one which you must decide entirely for yourself;
all that I can do is to bring under your notice some of the
materials of that decision; and I will begin, as I shall probably
conclude also, by assuring you that all depends on the vocation.

To know what you like is the beginning of wisdom and of old age.
Youth is wholly experimental. The essence and charm of that
unquiet and delightful epoch is ignorance of self as well as
ignorance of life. These two unknowns the young man brings
together again and again, now in the airiest touch, now with a
bitter hug; now with exquisite pleasure, now with cutting pain; but
never with indifference, to which he is a total stranger, and never
with that near kinsman of indifference, contentment. If he be a
youth of dainty senses or a brain easily heated, the interest of
this series of experiments grows upon him out of all proportion to
the pleasure he receives. It is not beauty that he loves, nor
pleasure that he seeks, though he may think so; his design and his
sufficient reward is to verify his own existence and taste the
variety of human fate. To him, before the razor-edge of curiosity
is dulled, all that is not actual living and the hot chase of
experience wears a face of a disgusting dryness difficult to recall
in later days; or if there be any exception - and here destiny
steps in - it is in those moments when, wearied or surfeited of the
primary activity of the senses, he calls up before memory the image
of transacted pains and pleasures. Thus it is that such an one
shies from all cut-and-dry professions, and inclines insensibly
toward that career of art which consists only in the tasting and
recording of experience.

This, which is not so much a vocation for art as an impatience of
all other honest trades, frequently exists alone; and so existing,
it will pass gently away in the course of years. Emphatically, it
is not to be regarded; it is not a vocation, but a temptation; and
when your father the other day so fiercely and (in my view) so
properly discouraged your ambition, he was recalling not improbably
some similar passage in his own experience. For the temptation is
perhaps nearly as common as the vocation is rare. But again we
have vocations which are imperfect; we have men whose minds are
bound up, not so much in any art, as in the general ARS ARTIUM and
common base of all creative work; who will now dip into painting,
and now study counterpoint, and anon