As if his whole vocation
Were endless imitation.

So the artist insists to himself upon the value of hard work. He is
impatient of all the talk about inspiration; for he knows that, though
nothing can be done without it, it comes only with command of the
medium. And this command, like all craftsmanship, is traditional, handed
down from one generation to another. Any kind of expression in this
imperfect world is as difficult as virtue itself. For expression, like
virtue, is a kind of transcendence. In it the natural man rises above
his animal functions, above living so that he may continue to live; he
triumphs over those animal functions which hold him down to the earth as
incessantly as the attraction of gravity itself. But, like the airman,
he can triumph only by material means, and by means gradually perfected
in the practice of others. Yet there is always this difference, that in
mechanics anyone can learn to make use of an invention; but in the
higher activities, invention, if it becomes mechanical, destroys the
activity itself, even in the original inventor. The medium is always a
medium, not merely a material; and if it becomes merely a material to be
manipulated, it ceases to be a medium.

Now professionalism is the result of a false analogy between mechanical
invention and the higher activities. It happens whenever the medium is
regarded merely as material to be manipulated, when the artist thinks
that he can learn to fly by mastering some other artist's machine, when
his art is to him a matter of invention gradually perfected and
necessarily progressing through the advance of knowledge and skill. One
often finds this false analogy in books about the history of the arts,
especially of painting and music. It is assumed, for instance, that
Italian painting progressed mechanically from Giotto to Titian, that
Titian had a greater power of expression than Giotto because he had
command of a number of inventions in anatomy and perspective and the
like that were unknown to Giotto. So we have histories of the
development of the symphony, in which Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven are
treated as if they were mechanical inventors each profiting by the
discoveries of his predecessors. Beethoven was the greatest of the three
because he had the luck to be born last, and Beethoven's earliest
symphonies are necessarily better than Mozart's latest because they were
composed later. But in s