But alas! it may happen only too often that he who gives
a fine work to the world afterwards feels like a maker of fireworks,
who displays with enthusiasm the wonders that have taken him so much
time and trouble to prepare, and then learns that he has come to the
wrong place, and that the fancied spectators were one and all inmates
of an asylum for the blind. Still even that is better than if his
public had consisted entirely of men who made fireworks themselves; as
in this case, if his display had been extraordinarily good, it might
possibly have cost him his head.
The source of all pleasure and delight is the feeling of kinship. Even
with the sense of beauty it is unquestionably our own species in the
animal world, and then again our own race, that appears to us the
fairest. So, too, in intercourse with others, every man shows a
decided preference for those who resemble him; and a blockhead will
find the society of another blockhead incomparably more pleasant
than that of any number of great minds put together. Every man must
necessarily take his chief pleasure in his own work, because it is the
mirror of his own mind, the echo of his own thought; and next in order
will come the work of people like him; that is to say, a dull, shallow
and perverse man, a dealer in mere words, will give his sincere and
hearty applause only to that which is dull, shallow, perverse or
merely verbose.
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