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344 REVIEWS AND PAMPHLETS ON ART
content with the little that is indeed necessary to their happiness. I have only a word or two to say about one special cause of overwork-the ambitious desire of doing great or clever things, and the hope of accomplishing them by immense efforts: hope as vain as it is pernicious; not only making men overwork themselves, but rendering all the work they do unwholesome to them. I say it is a vain hope, and let the reader be assured of this (it is a truth all-important to the best interests of humanity): No great intellectual thing was ever done by great effort; a great thing can only be done by a great man, and he does it without effort.1 Nothing is, at present, less understood by us than this-nothing is more necessary to be understood. Let me try to say it as clearly and explain it as fully as I may.
4. I have said no great intellectual thing: for I do not mean the assertion to extend to things moral. On the contrary, it seems to me that just because we are intended, as long as we live, to be in a state of intense moral effort, we are not intended to be in intense physical or intellectual effort. Our full energies are to be given to the soul’s work-to the great fight with the Dragon-the taking the kingdom of heaven by force.2 But the body’s work and head’s work are to be done quietly, and comparatively without effort. Neither limbs nor brain are ever to be strained to their utmost; that is not the way in which the greatest quantity of work is to be got out of them: they are never to be worked furiously, but with tranquillity and constancy. We are to follow the plough from sunrise to sunset, but not to pull in race-boats at the twilight: we shall get no fruit of that kind of work, only disease of the heart.
5. How many pangs would be spared to thousands, if this great truth and law were but once sincerely, humbly understood-that if a great thing can be done at all, it can
1 [Compare on this subject p. 387 below; Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. xvi. § 17; Two Paths, App. iv.; and Eagle’s Nest, § 85.]
2 [Matthew xi. 12.]
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[Version 0.04: March 2008]
