On Something | Page 6

of good work
and the circumstances under which it is achieved, and the variety of
taste also between different times and places, one begins to understand
what is at first so astonishing.
There are writers who have ascribed this frequent ignorance of ours to
all sorts of heroic moods, to the self-sacrifice or the humility of a whole
epoch or of particular artists: that is the least satisfactory of the reasons
one could find. All men desire, if not fame, at least the one poor
inalienable right of authorship, and unless one can find very good
reasons indeed why a painter or a writer or a sculptor should
deliberately have hidden himself one must look for some other cause.
Among such causes the first two, I think, are the multiplicity of good
work, and its chance character. Not that any one ever does very good
work for once and then never again--at least, such an accident is
extremely rare--but that many a man who has achieved some skill by
long labour does now and then strike out a sort of spark quite
individual and separate from the rest. Often you will find that a man
who is remembered for but one picture or one poem is worth research.
You will find that he did much more. It is to be remembered that for a
long time Ronsard himself was thought to be a man of one poem.
The multiplicity of good work also and the way in which accident helps
it is a cause. There are bits of architecture (and architecture is the most
anonymous of all the arts) which depend for their effect to-day very
largely upon situation and the process of time, and there are a thousand
corners in Europe intended merely for some utility which happen

almost without deliberate design to have proved perfect: this is
especially true of bridges.
Then there is this element in the anonymity of good work, that a man
very often has no idea how good the work is which he has done. The
anecdotes (such as that famous one of Keats) which tell us of poets
desiring to destroy their work, or, at any rate, casting it aside as of little
value, are not all false. We still have the letter in which Burns enclosed
"Scots wha' hae," and it is curious to note his misjudgment of the verse;
and side by side with that kind of misjudgment we have men picking
out for singular affection and with a full expectation of glory some
piece of work of theirs to which posterity will have nothing to say. This
is especially true of work recast by men in mature age. Writers and
painters (sculptors luckily are restrained by the nature of their
art--unless they deliberately go and break up their work with a hammer)
retouch and change, in the years when they have become more critical
and less creative, what they think to be the insufficient achievements of
their youth: yet it is the vigour and the simplicity of their youthful work
which other men often prefer to remember. On this account any number
of good things remain anonymous, because the good writer or the good
painter or the good sculptor was ashamed of them.
Then there is this reason for anonymity, that at times--for quite a short
few years--a sort of universality of good work in one or more
departments of art seems to fall upon the world or upon some district.
Nowhere do you see this more strikingly than in the carvings of the
first third of the sixteenth century in Northern and Central France and
on the Flemish border.
Men seemed at that moment incapable of doing work that was not
marvellous when they once began to express the human figure.
Sometimes their mere name remains, more often it is doubtful,
sometimes it is entirely lost. More curious still, you often have for this
period a mixture of names. You come across some astonishing series of
reliefs in a forgotten church of a small provincial town. You know at
once that it is work of the moment when the flood of the Renaissance
had at last reached the old country of the Gothic. You can swear that if
it were not made in the time of Francis I or Henry II it was at least
made by men who could remember or had seen those times. But when
you turn to the names the names are nobodies.

By far the most famous of these famous things, or at any rate the most
deserving of fame, is the miracle of Brou. It is a whole world. You
would say that either one transcendent genius had modelled every face
and figure of those thousands (so individual are they), or that a
company of