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It has become a platitude that an artist’s life should be hard, should be blood and sweat, tears and disappointment, struggle and exhaustion. This fight, I believe, should be in his attitude towards the world: his difficulty lies always in keeping himself apart, intellectually and creatively, maintaining his own identity at the same time he identifies himself with society. But in his own work, there should be none of this pain. He creates a thing because he has mastered it and is familiar with it. He produces it easily, having once taken his idea in his bosom. A great struggle in composition is apparent in his work, and shows it to be an artificial, foreign, and most of all, a feeble and unsure thing. Great work has come easily: I do not mean fluently, but easily, from this sense of mastery, and has been later if necessary polished and changed at leisure, and cheerfully.