#letter 280

The present has something hectic and harried about it for which I do not care, and it’s just as if death has touched everything. I’d like your expectation ‘that the desired change will come’ to prove true, but in my view it isn’t ‘in the nature of things’.

Might not the cause of this also lie in the lives and characters of the artists? I don’t know what your experience is, but do you find many people these days prepared to go for a long walk in grey weather, for example? You would do it gladly, and enjoy it too, as I would, but for many it would be a chore. Equally, I was struck by the fact that when one talks to painters, in most cases, by far, the conversation is not interesting.

Two things that remain eternally true and complement each other, in my view are: don’t snuff out your inspiration and power of imagination, don’t become a slave to the model; and, the other, take a model and study it, for otherwise your inspiration won’t take on material form.

Dickens has some nice things to say about the painters of his age and their wrong way of working, namely slavishly and yet only half sticking to the model. He says: Fellows, do understand that your model isn’t your ultimate goal but a means for giving body and vigour to your ideas and inspiration.

Naturally, while working one always feels and ought to feel a sort of dissatisfaction with oneself, a desire to be able to do it much better, but still it’s delightful and enjoyable to gradually assemble all kinds of figures — although the more one makes, the more one realizes one needs.

That — namely, talking — isn’t what one needs to do — one must work, though with sorrow in the heart. Those who later cry out the loudest about decadence will themselves belong to it the most. I repeat: by this shall ye know them,6 by their work, and it won’t be the most eloquent who say the truest things.

If one reaches that high zone, one is amid an equality of geniuses, but one can’t climb higher than the top of the mountain.