And the writers read what the critics said and sighed, and gave up
writing books, and went off and hoed potatoes; as advised. They had
had no experience in hoeing potatoes, and they hoed very badly; and
the people whose potatoes they hoed strongly recommended them to leave
hoeing potatoes, and to go back and write books. But you can't do
what everybody advises.

There were artists also in this strange world, at first, and they
painted pictures, which the critics came and looked at through
eyeglasses.

"Nothing whatever original in them," said the critics; "same old
colors, same old perspective and form, same old sunset, same old sea
and land, and sky and figures. Why do these poor men waste their
time, painting pictures, when they might be so much more
satisfactorily employed on ladders painting houses?"

Nothing, by the by, you may have noticed, troubles your critic more
than the idea that the artist is wasting his time. It is the waste of
time that vexes the critic; he has such an exalted idea of the value
of other people's time. "Dear, dear me!" he says to himself, "why, in
the time the man must have taken to paint this picture or to write
this book, he might have blacked fifteen thousand pairs of boots, or
have carried fifteen thousand hods of mortar up a ladder. This is how
the time of the world is lost!"

It never occurs to him that, but for that picture or book, the artist
would, in all probability, have been mouching about with a pipe in his
mouth, getting into trouble.