a routine
embodying the reverse of these four things has upon the mind of those
who should be artists. Under this influence not only is the subdivision
of labour which places each successive operation in separate hands
accepted as a matter of course, but into each operation itself this
separation imports a spirit of lassitude and dulness and compliance with
false conditions and limited aims which would seem almost incredible in
those practising what should be an inspiring art. To men so trained, so
employed, all counsels of perfection are foolishness; all idea of
tentative work, experiment, modification while in progress, is looked
upon as mere delusion. To them work consists of a series of never-varied
formulas, all fitting into each other and combined to aim at producing a
definite result, the like of which they have produced a thousand times
before and will produce a thousand times again.

"With us," once said, to a friend of the writer, a man so trained, "it's
a matter of judgment and experience. It's all nonsense this talk about
seeing work at a distance and against the sky, and so forth, while as to
the ever taking it down again for retouching after once erecting it,
that could only be done by an amateur. We paint a good deal of the work
on the bench, and never see it as a whole until it's leaded up; but then
we know what we want and get it."

"We know what we want!" To what a pass have we come that such a thing
could be spoken by any one engaged in the arts! Were it wholly and
universally true, nothing more would be needed in condemnation of wide
fields of modern practice in the architectural and applied arts, for,
most assuredly it is a sentence that could never be spoken of any one
worthy of the name of artist that ever lived. Whence would you like
instances quoted? Literature? Painting? Sculpture? Music? Their name is
legion in the history of all these arts, and in the lives of the great
men who wrought in them.

For a taste--

Did Michael Angelo "know what he wanted" when, half-way through his
figure, he found the block not large enough, and had to make the limb
too short?

Did Beethoven know, when he evolved a movement in one of his concerted
pieces out of a quarrel with his landlady? and another, "from singing or
rather roaring up and down the scale," until at last he said, "I think I
have found a motive"--as one of his biographers relates? Tennyson, when
he corrected and re-corrected his poems from y