work in art, that you should
put your whole strength, all the powers of mind and body into every
touch. Nothing less will do than that. You must face it in drawing from
the life. Try it in its acutest form, not from the posed, professional
model, who will sit like a stone; try it with children, two years old or
so; the despair of it, the exhaustion: and then, in a flash, when you
thought you had really done somewhat, a still more captivating,
fascinating gesture, which makes all you have done look like lead. Can
you screw your exhaustion up _again,_ sacrifice all you have done, and
face the labour of wrestling with the new idea? And if you do? You are
sick with doubt between the new and the old. You ask your friends; you
probably choose wrong; your judgment is clouded by the fatigue of your
previous toil.

But you have gained strength. That is the real point of the thing. It is
not what you have done in this instance, but what you have become in
doing it. Next time, fresh and strong, you will dash the beautiful
sudden thought upon the paper and leave it, happy to make others happy,
but only through the pains you took before, which are a small price to
pay for the joy of the strength you have gained.

This is the rule of great work. Puzzle and hesitation and compromise can
only occur because you have left some factor of the problem out of
count, and this should never be. Your business is to take all into
account and to sacrifice everything, however fascinating and tempting it
may be in itself, if it does not fit in as part of an harmonious
_whole_. Remember in this case, when loth to make such sacrifice, the
old saying that "there's as good fish in the sea as ever came out."
Brace yourself to try for something still better. Recast your
composition. If it is defective, the defect all comes from some want of
strenuousness as you went along. It is like getting a bit of your figure
out of drawing because your eye only measured some portion of it with
one or two portions of the rest and not with the whole figure and
attitude. Every student knows the feeling. So in your composition: you
may get impossible levels, impossible relations between the subject and
the surrounding canopy: perhaps one coming in front of the other at one
point and the reverse at another point. You drew the thing dreamily: you
were not alert enough. And now you must waste what you had got to love,
because though it's so pretty it is not fitting.

But