"You'll kill yourself! You work too hard! You really must have some rest! Do come and see us! It will do you good! It will distract your thoughts!"
Distract one's thoughts indeed! Why, that's just what I complain of—what people are much too fond of doing! It's all very well to distract one's thoughts at a set time chosen by oneself. But to have one's thoughts distracted for one, at the wrong time, means to thoroughly confuse them and throw them out of gear.
Work a weariness, an actual danger, forsooth! Those who say so can know very little about it Labour is neither cruel nor ungrateful. It restores the strength we give it a hundredfold, and, unlike your financial operations, the revenue is what brings in the capital.
If there is one incessant worker on the face of God's earth (and He alone knows how various is its toil), it is the heart in man's body. On its regular beat depend not only the continuance of our respiration, but the circulation of our blood, which carries and distributes the different elements necessary to the working of each organ of our frame with such unerring discrimination. This splendid organisation works on incessantly, without a moment's pause, even while we sleep.
Supposing the heart were bidden not to work so hard, to take a little rest—to amuse itself, in short? Now work, to the intellectual life, is what the heart is in our physical life. It is the nourishment, the circulation, the respiration of our intelligence. Like every other sort of gymnastic, it wearies those, and those only, who are not accustomed to it. Work has been described as a punishment, a hardship. It is a healthy and blessed state. Look first at a fertile, well-tilled field, and then at a strip of fallow land? Is not the balance of happiness and charm on the side of cultivation and abundant growth?
It is not labour that kills. It is sterility. To be fruitful is to be young and full of life.
Yet I would not be thought so crotchety, so surly, such a hater of my kind, as to look on an artist as a sort of solitary. It is undoubtedly true, and I willingly acknowledge it, that modern society, in enlarging its borders, has multiplied the artist's opportunities of sharing in various social phases, and meeting many charming and some very useful people.
But what, again, is all that worth, if it costs us those hours of delicious calm—I had almost said of divine hope—when we await (with a longing less frequently disappointed than some would think) the advent of a real emotion, or of some deeply touching truth?
What is all the glare of outside show beside the inner light, serene and glowing, of the beloved Ideal each artist follows without ever wholly reaching it, but which yet draws us on until we feel it loves us more even than we love it?
What then must be the suffering inflicted on the unhappy being torn from a sacred temple and forced into a palace, even were it a thousand times more dazzling than any in the Arabian Nights?