He had in him at least as much of the French artist as of the middle-class Englishman; and if in all his life, he never ceased from self-education, but went unswervingly in the pursuit of culture, it was out of love for his art and because his conscience as an artist would not let him do otherwise.
“Unswervingly”?—no, not unswervingly. No great genius that ever was has marched unswervingly on. As a condition of becoming a great artist he must be more sensitive than his fellows; as a result of that sensitiveness he will doubt, hesitate, draw back to leap the better. The very success of his latest book, his latest picture, alarms him. “Oh yes,” the true artist says to his heart, “popularity is sweet; money is sweet; and I can hold both in my hand by the simple process of repeating myself.” And the temptations are many and great. You have on the profits of your first and second books, and a reasonable hope of continuance, enlarged your way of life, incurred responsibilities, built a charming house not yet paid for, married a wife who adores you (shall we say?) and is proud of your celebrity, but for these very reasons—and chiefly for love—will on any diminution of your fame, fret secretly even if she does not nag actively. Against this we have, opposed, the urge in the true artist who—having done a thing—tosses it over his shoulder and thinks no more of it; can only think of how to do something further and do it better. I indicate the strength of the temptation. There are, of course, sundry ways of getting round it. For instance, as I read the life of Shakespeare from the few hints left to us, Shakespeare dodged it by the Gordian-knot solution of leaving his wife and bolting to London: a solution in this particular instance happy for us, yet not even on that account to be recommended in general to young literary aspirants. I mention Shakespeare here less for this, than as an exemplar of the true artist, never content with his best, to repeat it. Why, having written a Hamlet, an Othello, did he, instead of reproducing Hamlets and Othellos, go on to have a shy at a Cymbeline? For the self-same reason, Sirs, why Ulysses—if I may quote a poet none too popular just now—could not bide at home after even such tribulations of wandering as had become a proverb:
I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;