you shall fag for me.' The state of things we produce by submitting to
this, bad enough even at first, becomes intolerable when the mediocre or
foolish descendants of the clever fellows claim to have inherited their
privileges. Now, no men are greater sticklers for the arbitrary dominion
of genius and talent than your artists. The great painter is not
satisfied with being sought after and admired because his hands can do
more than ordinary hands, which they truly can, but he wants to be fed
as if his stomach needed more food than ordinary stomachs, which it does
not. A day's work is a day's work, neither more nor less, and the man
who does it needs a day's sustenance, a night's repose, and due leisure,
whether he be painter or ploughman. But the rascal of a painter,
poet, novelist, or other voluptuary in labor, is not content with
his advantage in popular esteem over the ploughman; he also wants an
advantage in money, as if there were more hours in a day spent in the
studio or library than in the field; or as if he needed more food to
enable him to do his work than the ploughman to enable him to do his. He
talks of the higher quality of his work, as if the higher quality of it
were of his own making--as if it gave him a right to work less for his
neighbor than his neighbor works for him--as if the ploughman could not
do better without him than he without the ploughman--as if the value of
the most celebrated pictures has not been questioned more than that
of any straight furrow in the arable world--as if it did not take an
apprenticeship of as many years to train the hand and eye of a mason or
blacksmith as of an artist--as if, in short, the fellow were a god, as
canting brain worshippers have for years past been assuring him he is.
Artists are the high priests of the modern Moloch. Nine out of ten of
them are diseased creatures, just sane enough to trade on their own
neuroses. The only quality of theirs which extorts my respect is a
certain sublime selfishness which makes them willing to starve and to
let their families starve sooner than do any work they don't like."