more. It is to be remembered that for a long time Ronsard himself was
thought to be a man of one poem.

The multiplicity of good work also and the way in which accident helps it
is a cause. There are bits of architecture (and architecture is the most
anonymous of all the arts) which depend for their effect to-day very
largely upon situation and the process of time, and there are a thousand
corners in Europe intended merely for some utility which happen almost
without deliberate design to have proved perfect: this is especially true
of bridges.

Then there is this element in the anonymity of good work, that a man very
often has no idea how good the work is which he has done. The anecdotes
(such as that famous one of Keats) which tell us of poets desiring to
destroy their work, or, at any rate, casting it aside as of little value,
are not all false. We still have the letter in which Burns enclosed "Scots
wha' hae," and it is curious to note his misjudgment of the verse; and
side by side with that kind of misjudgment we have men picking out for
singular affection and with a full expectation of glory some piece of
work of theirs to which posterity will have nothing to say. This is
especially true of work recast by men in mature age. Writers and painters
(sculptors luckily are restrained by the nature of their art--unless they
deliberately go and break up their work with a hammer) retouch and change,
in the years when they have become more critical and less creative, what
they think to be the insufficient achievements of their youth: yet it is
the vigour and the simplicity of their youthful work which other men often
prefer to remember. On this account any number of good things remain
anonymous, because the good writer or the good painter or the good
sculptor was ashamed of them.