Chapter 10 - Page 2

will be inditing a sonnet:
all these with equal interest, all often with genuine knowledge.
And of this temper, when it stands alone, I find it difficult to
speak; but I should counsel such an one to take to letters, for in
literature (which drags with so wide a net) all his information may
be found some day useful, and if he should go on as he has begun,
and turn at last into the critic, he will have learned to use the
necessary tools. Lastly we come to those vocations which are at
once decisive and precise; to the men who are born with the love of
pigments, the passion of drawing, the gift of music, or the impulse
to create with words, just as other and perhaps the same men are
born with the love of hunting, or the sea, or horses, or the
turning-lathe. These are predestined; if a man love the labour of
any trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods
have called him. He may have the general vocation too: he may
have a taste for all the arts, and I think he often has; but the
mark of his calling is this laborious partiality for one, this
inextinguishable zest in its technical successes, and (perhaps
above all) a certain candour of mind to take his very trifling
enterprise with a gravity that would befit the cares of empire, and
to think the smallest improvement worth accomplishing at any
expense of time and industry. The book, the statue, the sonata,
must be gone upon with the unreasoning good faith and the
unflagging spirit of children at their play. IS IT WORTH DOING? -
when it shall have occurred to any artist to ask himself that
question, it is implicitly answered in the negative. It does not
occur to the child as he plays at being a pirate on the dining-room
sofa, nor to the hunter as he pursues his quarry; and the candour
of the one and the ardour of the other should be united in the
bosom of the artist.

If you recognise in yourself some such decisive taste, there is no
room for hesitation: follow your bent. And observe (lest I should
too much discourage you) that the disposition does not usually burn
so brightly at the first, or rather not so constantly. Habit and
practice sharpen gifts; the necessity of toil grows less
disgusting, grows even welcome, in the course of years; a small
taste (if it be only genuine) waxes with indulgence into an
exclusive passion. Enough, just now, if you can look back over a
fair interval, and see that your chosen art has a little more than
held its own among the thronging interests of youth. Time will do
the rest, if devotion help it; and soon your every thought will be
engrossed in that beloved occupation.

But even with devotion, you may remind me, even with unfaltering
and delighted industry, many thousand artists spend their