Page:Selected letters of Mendelssohn 1894.djvu/119

Rh , 1st August, 1838. ,—What you say of your increased occupation gives me great pleasure. You know how often we have talked over the question, but still I cannot admit your opinion that one profession is to be preferred to another. I persist in thinking that anything which the ordinary right sort of man can put his heart into and get well hold of is in itself a noble calling. The only things I could not feel a very strong interest in are precisely those in which there is no personal element, in which the individual disappears, such as the military career in times of peace, and of that Berlin has sufficient examples. But your whole contention is more or less untrue. In comparing one profession to another, people generally take the naked reality of one, and the most imposing ideal of the other, so, naturally, the decision is easy. And how easy it is for an artist to feel the bare realities of his trade, and then perhaps to envy practical men who have the chance of observing all the relations of life, and knowing all the diversities there are among men, to envy them especially when