Any one, says a writer in The Atlantic Monthly, can hold out a dumb-bell for a few seconds; but in a few more seconds the arm sags; it is only the trained athlete who can endure even to the minute’s end.
For Hawthorne to hold the people of “The Scarlet Letter” steadily in focus from November to February, to say nothing of six years’ preliminary brooding, is surely more of an artistic feat than to write a short story between Tuesday and Friday.
The three years and nine months of unremitting labor devoted to “Middlemarch” does not in itself afford any criterion of the value of the book; but given George Eliot’s brain power and artistic instinct to begin with, and then concentrate them for that period upon a single theme, and it is no wonder that the result is a masterpiece.
“Jan van Eyck was never in a hurry,” says Charles Reade of the great Flemish painter, in “The Cloister and the Hearth,” and therefore the world will not forget him in a hurry. (Text.)
(2294)
Painting the Living—See [Motive, Mercenary].
Palliatives—See [Music as an Anesthetic].
PALLIATIVES VERSUS PREVENTION
The principle indicated in the extract will some day be adopted by Christianity in its treatment of the moral life. Mere palliatives are insufficient: