done, nor choose decisively any
method which he may follow with the accuracy and confidence necessary to
success. He is not even sure if his thoughts are his own; for the whole
atmosphere round him is full of floating suggestion: those which are his
own he cannot keep pure, for he breathes a dust of decayed ideas, wreck
of the souls of dead nations, driven by contrary winds. He may stiffen
himself (and all the worse for him) into an iron self-will, but if the
iron has any magnetism in it, he cannot pass a day without finding
himself, at the end of it, instead of sharpened or tempered, covered
with a ragged fringe of iron filings. If there be anything better than
iron--living wood fiber--in him, he cannot be allowed any natural
growth, but gets hacked in every extremity, and bossed over with lumps
of frozen clay;--grafts of incongruous blossom that will never set;
while some even recognize no need of knife or clay (though both are good
in a gardener's hand), but deck themselves out with incongruous
glittering, like a Christmas-tree. Even were the style chosen true to
his own nature, and persisted in, there is harm in the very eminence of
the models set before him at the beginning of his career. If he feels
their power, they make him restless and impatient, it may be despondent,
it may be madly and fruitlessly ambitious. If he does not feel it, he is
sure to be struck by what is weakest or slightest of their peculiar
qualities; fancies that _this_ is what they are praised for; tries to
catch the trick of it; and whatever easy vice or mechanical habit the
master may have been betrayed or warped into, the unhappy pupil watches
and adopts, triumphant in its ease:--has not sense to steal the
peacock's feather, but imitates its voice. Better for him, far better,
never to have seen what had been accomplished by others, but to have
gained gradually his own quiet way, or at least with his guide only a
step in advance of him, and the lantern low on the difficult path.
Better even, it has lately seemed, to be guideless and lightless;
fortunate those who, by desolate effort, trying hither and thither, have
groped their way to some independent power. So, from Cornish rock, from
St. Giles's Lane, from Thames mudshore, you get your Prout, your Hunt,
your Turner; not, indeed, any of them well able to spell English, nor
taught so much of their own business as to lay a color safely; but yet
at last, or first, doing somehow something, wholl