Their happiest performance is too nearly of
the same color with their permanent consciousness to be seen in relief:
work less sincere--that is, more related and bound to some partial state
or particular mood--would stand out more to the eye of the doer. To this
error he will be less exposed who learns--as most assuredly every artist
should--to estimate his work, not as it seems to him _striking_, but as
it echoes to his ear the earliest murmurs of his childhood, and reclaims
for the heart its wandered memories. Perhaps it is common for one's
happiest thoughts, in the moment of their apparition in words, to affect
him with a gentle surprise and sense of newness; but soon afterwards
they may probably come to touch him, on the contrary, with a vague
sense of reminiscence, as if his mother had sung them by his cradle, or
somewhere under the rosy east of life he had heard them from others.
A statement of our own which seems to us _very_ new and striking is
probably partial, is in some degree foreign to our hearts; that which
one, being the soul he is, could not do otherwise than say is probably
what he was created for the purpose of saying, and will be found his
most significant and living word. Yet just in proportion as one's speech
is a pure and simple efflux of his spirit, just in proportion as its
utterance lies in the order and inevitable procedure of his life, he
will be _liable_ to undervalue it.
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