On the contrary, an amateur with real
innate talent may do, must do, more exquisite work than he could do if
he were a professional. His very ignorance and tentativeness may be,
must be, a means of especial grace. Not knowing `how to do things,'
having no ready-made and ready-working apparatus, and being in
constant fear of failure, he has to grope always in the recesses of
his own soul for the best way to express his soul's meaning. He has to
shift for himself, and to do his very best. Consequently, his work has
a more personal and fresher quality, and a more exquisite `finish,'
than that of a professional, howsoever finely endowed. All of the much
that we admire in Walter Pater's prose comes of the lucky chance that
he was an amateur, and never knew his business. Had Fate thrown him
out of Oxford upon the world, the world would have been the richer for
the prose of another John Addington Symonds, and would have forfeited
Walter Pater's prose. In other words, we should have lost a half-crown
and found a shilling. Had Fate withdrawn from Whistler his vision for
form and colour, leaving him only his taste for words and phrases and
cadences, Whistler would have settled solidly down to the art of
writing, and would have mastered it, and, mastering it, have lost that
especial quality which the Muse grants only to them who approach her
timidly, bashfully, as suitors.
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