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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Across The Plains by Robert Louis Stevenson: painters and writers dwell dispersed, unshielded, among the
intelligent bourgeois. These, when they are not merely
indifferent, prate to him about the lofty aims and moral influence
of art. And this is the lad's ruin. For art is, first of all and
last of all, a trade. The love of words and not a desire to
publish new discoveries, the love of form and not a novel reading
of historical events, mark the vocation of the writer and the
painter. The arabesque, properly speaking, and even in literature,
is the first fancy of the artist; he first plays with his material
as a child plays with a kaleidoscope; and he is already in a second
stage when he begins to use his pretty counters for the end of
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