Let him work on and on as speeding
Work’s end, but not dream of succeeding!
Because if success were intended,
Why, heaven would begin ere earth ended.
—Browning.
(3498)
See [Genius and Work].
Work a Necessity—See [Industry and Longevity].
WORK AND ART
Between digging a ditch to drain a meadow and composing a sonnet, what is there in common? Nevertheless, if we look closely into the matter, the ditch and the sonnet are much the same thing. We might even fairly challenge that category of “useful” and “fine.” The useful are surely fine, for nothing is finer than use; and the fine, if they be not in a high sense useful, are not fine after all. The ditch is dug to increase the serviceableness to man of nature; the sonnet is composed to enable man to discern in nature a beauty (or serviceableness) to which he had heretofore been blind. From a broad standpoint, there is little to choose between them. The ditch is nothing in itself, but neither, strictly speaking, is the sonnet. They are both means to ends. The ditch is, perhaps, more distant from its end than the sonnet, but it is a link in the same chain. Moreover, the ditch will always be an honest ditch, but the sonnet may be false or artificial, and in that case counts for nothing, or less. The real difference resides in the person doing much more than in the thing done. A workman, building a wall, may have a perception of the value of the use he is performing, or he may not; only in the former case, of course, does he deserve the name of artist. The seamstress who plies her needle in our attic, or the poor man’s wife who must needs wash and scrub and darn and work all day long, and from year’s end to year’s end, if she realize the universal bearings of her industry, is an artist, and a nobler and more adorable one than she who sings for $5,000 a night.—America.