industry. It is what forces the hero, the artist, the poet, to be absorbed in a special office, and decides his choice of it.[1]
The world is equipped with steadfast workers whose natural taste and courageous, strenuous Talent and executive service.labor do not lift them quite above the mediocre. The difference between these, the serviceable rank and file, and the originative leaders, is one of kind, not of degree. However admirable their skill and service in time become, they do not get far apart from impressions common to us all. We cannot dispense with their army in executive and mechanical fields of action. It is a question whether they are so essential to arts of taste and investigation; to philosophy, painting, music; to the creative arts of the novelist and poet. But with respect to these, it would be most unjust to confound them with the upstarts whose condign sup-
- ↑ Nothing of late has seemed apter than a criticism of the Saturday Review upon certain outgivings of the academicians, Sir Frederick Leighton and Sir John Millais, quite in the line of the industrial theory from which the present writer is dissenting. The reviewer, commenting upon these didactic paradoxes, asserts that all the truth which is in them amounts to just this: "That the intuitive perceptions and rapidity of combination which constitute genius, whether in action or speculation, in scientific discovery or inventive art or imaginative creation, open out so many new problems and ideas as to involve in their adjustment and development the most arduous labor and the most unwearied patience. But without the primal perception the labor will be vanity and the patience akin to despair. Perhaps it is important to keep in mind that labor without the appropriate capacity is even more fruitless than aptitude without industry."
