But there are compensations. The creative artist is higher in the scale of existence than the man, as the man is higher than the beatified oyster for whose condition, as Aristotle pointed out, few would be tempted to barter the misery of human existence. The animal has consciousness, man self-consciousness, and the artist over-consciousness. Over-consciousness may be a curse, but, like the primitive curse--labour--there are many who would welcome it! [Sidenote: Professional Ethics] There's no knowing where the artistic temperament may break out. "I don't think that a person ought to come to the binder and just say to him, 'Bind that book for so much money.' I think the binder ought to say, 'Is the book worth binding?' and that if it were not he ought to refuse." The applications of this remarkable principle, enunciated by a bookbinder, are obvious. Applied universally it would reform the race. The tailor, when a man came to be measured, would say, "Yes, but are you worth measuring?" and if he was out of drawing would refuse to dress him, thus extruding deformity from the world and restoring the Olympian gods. The charwoman, inspired by George Herbert, would not only "sweep a room as by God's laws," but would inquire whether it was worth sweeping; the wine merchant would refuse wine to rich customers who did not deserve to drink it; and the doctors would certainly not devote their best energies to keeping gouty old noblemen alive. [Sidenote: Lay Confessors] We writers, as Beaeonsfield said to his sovereign, are a good substitute for the confessional; we like to be allowed peeps into the secret chambers of the heart. The most miserable sinners may be as sure of our secrecy as of our absolution. The more terrible the crime the better we are pleased. So come and ease your labouring consciences, and pour your sorrows into our sympathetic shorthand books, and we will work you up the bare material of your lives so artistically that you are the veriest Philistines if you shall not be rather glad to have sinned and suffered. For deep down in our hearts lurks the belief that, as Jerome wittily puts it, "God created the world to give the literary man something to write about!" [Sidenote: Q. E. D. Novels]