If the hours thus spent were even not spent in vain! If they were only bestowed on people of some capacity! If they served to cheer none but truly courageous souls!
But think of the waste of time!—the empty conversations. Think of the amount of valueless stuff in that ocean of intercourse, which neither adds nor bestows one tittle of value to the total!
To sum it up, the real plague spot is the people who are bored, and who must needs kill other men's time, lest their own should kill them by its weight.
To be bored! To bore one's own self. To try every imaginable dodge to get away from oneself! Is there any poverty in all the world so pitiful as this? And what compensation for that which is bestowed on them can be expected from such a class?
There are certain current opinions, the substance of which people seldom trouble themselves to verify, and which form the huge patrimony of the accepted absurdities. One of these is the belief, the self-persuasion, that the sympathy and protection of the social world are indispensable to an artist's success.
Truly, those who accept such an illusion, and cling to it, must have very little experience of the vivifying atmosphere of a profound artistic conviction.
Social support! It is not uncertain merely; it is the most inconstant, changeable thing on God's earth. And further, it is only given, as a rule, to those who no longer need it, just as the courtiers in a certain famous opera overwhelm a young gentleman, who has just become the recipient of royal favour, with their offers of service. But now that material existence takes the first rank in most men's lives, can we wonder that seeming is taken for being, and skilful management for talent? Once the hidden God, the God whose kingdom is within us, is gone from us, we must have idols. Therefore it is that we see so many artists troubled about going here and there and everywhere, leaning on that broken reed of popular advertisement, the fragments of which lie scattered on the weary path of many an uninspired mind and commonplace ambition.
One protection alone is worth the artist's pains, and should be sought by him. His work must be the perfectly sincere expression of his inner feeling. His artistic production must be the outcome of his personal life, the faithful enunciation of his thought. Once that is done, conflicting opinions matter but little to him or it. A work of art can only shed the amount of warmth which has brought it into being, and which it never loses. But the artist must have time to kindle his fire and feed it. Hence a famous composer placed the significant inscription on his door:—
"Those who come to see me do me honour. Those who stay away do me a kindness." In other words, "I am never at home to anybody."
Here, again, is another commonplace, equally popular, and in very frequent use:—