PRE-RAPHAELITISM 345

be done easily; that, when it is needed to be done, there is perhaps only one man in the world who can do it; but he can do it without any trouble-without more trouble, that is, than it costs small people to do small things; nay, perhaps, with less. And yet what truth lies more openly on the surface of all human phenomena? Is not the evidence of Ease on the very front of all the greatest works in existence? Do they not say plainly to us, not, “there has been a great effort here,” but, “there has been a great power here”? It is not the weariness of mortality, but the strength of divinity, which we have to recognize in all mighty things; and that is just what we now never recognize, but think that we are to do great things, by help of iron bars and perspiration:-alas! we shall do nothing that way but lose some pounds of our own weight.

6. Yet let me not be misunderstood, nor this great truth be supposed anywise resolvable into the favourite dogma of young men, that they need not work if they have genius. The fact is that a man of genius is always far more ready to work than other people, and gets so much more good from the work that he does, and is often so little conscious of the inherent divinity in himself, that he is very apt to ascribe all his capacity to his work, and to tell those who ask how he came to be what he is: “If I am anything, which I much doubt, I made myself so merely by labour.” This was Newton’s way of talking, and I suppose it would be the general tone of men whose genius had been devoted to the physical sciences. Genius in the Arts must commonly be more self-conscious, but in whatever field, it will always be distinguished by its perpetual, steady, well-directed, happy, and faithful labour in accumulating and disciplining its powers, as well as by its gigantic, incomunicable facility in exercising them.¹ Therefore, literally,

¹ [To this effect are the sayings of Reynolds cited by Ruskin in Lectures on Art, §§ 48, 145; and compare Two Paths, § 98 (“when I hear a young man spoken of as giving promise of high genius ... I ask ‘Does he work?’ ”). So also Carlyle: “Genius means transcendent capacity of taking trouble” (Friedrich, book iv. ch. iii.); and Buffon: “Genius is nothing but a great capacity for patience.” Compare also Lectures on Architecture and Painting, above, § 96, p. 125.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]