Be his talent great or
little, he must ask himself who will care should he leave the last
seven pillars unfinished? Think of the writer of stories! Two, three,
or four more stories are required to make up a requisite number of
pages. The dusk has interrupted his labour, and he rises from his
writing-table asking who will care whether the last stories are
written or left unwritten? If he write them his ideas will flicker
green for a brief springtime, they will enjoy a little summer; when
his garden is fading in the autumn his leaves will be well-nigh
forgotten; winter will overtake them sooner than it overtakes his
garden, perhaps. The flowers he deemed immortal are more mortal than
the rose. "Why," he asks, "should any one be interested in my stories
any more than in the thousand and one stories published this year?
Mine are among the number of trivial things that compose the tedium
which we call life." His thoughts will flit back over the past, and
his own life will seem hardly more real than the day's work on the
easel if he be a painter, on the secretaire if he be a writer. He will
seem to himself like a horse going round and round a well. But the
horse is pumping water--water is necessary; but art, even if his work
is good enough to be called art, is not, so far as he knows, necessary
to any one.
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