mankind.




ON UNKNOWN PEOPLE


You will often hear it said that it is astonishing such and such work
should be present and enduring in the world, and yet the name of its
author not known; but when one considers the variety 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