As it is fatal to the highest art that it should have been done for
money, so it seems hardly less fatal that it should be done with a
view to those uses that tend towards money.
And yet, was not the Iliad written mainly with a view to money? Did
not Shakespeare make money by his plays, Handel by his music, and the
noblest painters by their art? True; but in all these cases, I take
it, love of fame and that most potent and, at the same time,
unpractical form of it, the lust after fame beyond the grave, was the
mainspring of the action, the money being but a concomitant accident.
Money is like the wind that bloweth whithersoever it listeth,
sometimes it chooses to attach itself to high feats of literature and
art and music, but more commonly it prefers lower company . . .
I can continue this note no further, for there is no end to it.
Briefly, the world resolves itself into two great classes--those who
hold that honour after death is better worth having than any honour a
man can get and know anything about, and those who doubt this; to my
mind, those who hold it, and hold it firmly, are the only people
worth thinking about. They will also hold that, important as the
physical world obviously is, the spiritual world, of which we know
little beyond its bare existence, is more important still.
Genius
i
Genius is akin both to madness and inspiration and, as every one is
both more or less inspired and more or less mad, every one has more
or less genius.
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