“Nor will the practice of art afford you pleasure only; it affords besides an admirable training. For the artist works entirely upon honor. The public knows little or nothing of those merits in the quest of which you are condemned to spend the bulk of your endeavors. Merits of design, the merit of firsthand energy, the merit of a certain cheap accomplishment which a man of the artistic temperament easily acquires — these they can recognize, and these they value. But to those more exquisite refinements of proficiency and finish, which the artist so ardently desires and so keenly feels, for which (in the vigorous words of Balzac) he must toil ‘like a miner buried in a landslip,’ for which, day after day, he recasts and revises and rejects — the gross mass of the public must be ever blind. To those lost pains, suppose you attain the highest pitch of merit, posterity may possibly do justice; suppose, as is so probable, you fail by even a hair’s breadth of the highest, rest certain they shall never be observed. Under the shadow of this cold thought, alone in his studio, the artist must preserve from day to day his constancy to the ideal. It is this which makes his life noble; it is by this that the practice of his craft strengthens and matures his character; it is for this that even the serious countenance of the great emperor was turned approvingly (if only for a moment) on the followers of Apollo, and that sternly gentle voice bade the artist cherish his art.”—Robert Louis Stevenson, from “Letter to a Young Gentleman Who Proposes to Embrace the Career of Art” (found in Across the Plains, [1892])
See also: "Harold Bloom on Reading As Listening"
