"From the point of view of the onlooker, perhaps," said Herries, "but not from the point of view of the craftsman. The pleasure of art, for the craftsman, is to see what the difficulty was, and to discern how the artist triumphed over it. Think of the delightful individual roughness of old work as opposed to modern machine-made things. There is an appropriate irregularity, according to the medium employed. The workmanship of a gem is not the same as that of a building; the essence of the gem is to be flawless; but in the building there is a pleasure in the tool-dints, like the pleasure of the rake-marks on the gravel path. Of course music must be flawless too--firm, resolute, inevitable, because the medium demands it; but in a big picture--why, the other day I saw a great oil-painting, a noble piece of art--I came upon it in the Academy, by a side door close upon it. The background was a great tangled mass of raw crude smears, more like coloured rags patched together than paint; but a few paces off, the whole melted into a great river-valley, with deep water-meadows of summer grass and big clumps of trees. That is the perfect combination. The man knew exactly what he wanted--he got his effect--the structure was complete, and yet there was the added pleasure of seeing how he achieved it. That is the kind of finish I desire." "Yes, of course," said Musgrave, "we should all agree about that; but my feeling would be that the way to do it is for the artist to fill himself to the brim with the subject, and to let it burst out. I do not at all believe in the painful pinching and pulling together of a particular bit of work. That sort of process is excellent practice, but it seems to me like the receipt in one of Edwin Lear's Nonsense Books for making some noisome dish, into which all sorts of ingredients of a loathsome kind were to be put; and the directions end with the words: 'Serve up in a cloth, and throw all out of the window as soon as possible.' It is an excellent thing to take all the trouble, if you throw it away when it is done; you will do your next piece of real work all the better; but for a piece of work to have the best kind of vitality, it must flow, I believe, easily and sweetly from the teeming mind. Take such a book as Newman's Apologia, written in a few weeks, a piece of perfect art--but then it was written in tears." "But on the other hand," said I, "look at Ariosto's Orlando; it took ten years to write and sixteen more to correct--and there is not a forced or a languid line in the whole of it."