bove all things--a sort of courage of which the vulgar have
no conception, and which has never perhaps been described till now.

Driven by the dreadful stress of poverty, goaded by Lisbeth, and kept
by her in blinders, as a horse is, to hinder it from seeing to the
right and left of its road, lashed on by that hard woman, the
personification of Necessity, a sort of deputy Fate, Wenceslas, a born
poet and dreamer, had gone on from conception to execution, and
overleaped, without sounding it, the gulf that divides these two
hemispheres of Art. To muse, to dream, to conceive of fine works, is a
delightful occupation. It is like smoking a magic cigar or leading the
life of a courtesan who follows her own fancy. The work then floats in
all the grace of infancy, in the mad joy of conception, with the
fragrant beauty of a flower, and the aromatic juices of a fruit
enjoyed in anticipation.

The man who can sketch his purpose beforehand in words is regarded as
a wonder, and every artist and writer possesses that faculty. But
gestation, fruition, the laborious rearing of the offspring, putting
it to bed every night full fed with milk, embracing it anew every
morning with the inexhaustible affection of a mother's heart, licking
it clean, dressing it a hundred times in the richest garb only to be
instantly destroyed; then never to be cast down at the convulsions of
this headlong life till the living masterpiece is perfected which in
sculpture speaks to every eye, in literature to every intellect, in
painting to every memory, in music to every heart!--This is the task
of execution. The hand must be ready at every instant to come forward
and obey the brain. But the brain has no more a creative power at
command than love has a perennial spring.

The habit of creativeness, the indefatigable love of motherhood which
makes a mother--that miracle of nature which Raphael so perfectly
understood--the maternity of the brain, in short, which is so
difficult to develop, is lost with prodigious ease. Inspiration is the
opportunity of genius. She does not indeed dance on the razor's edge,
she is in the air and flies away with the suspicious swiftness of a
crow; she wears no scarf by which the poet can clutch her; her hair is
a flame; she vanishes like the lovely rose and white flamingo, the
sportsman's despair. And work, again, is a weariful struggle, alike
dreaded and delighted in by these lofty and powerful natures who are
often broken by i