Women in an Artist's Life: Lesson of the Master by Henry James

Book Review
Master and Man by Henry James
First published in 1888.

Henry James was an American author who lived most of his life in England. This short story reads as if it were written by a Brit (a bit too Victorian) and takes a while to develop, but it's still a joy...

"St. George smiled as for the candour of his question. “It’s all excellent, my dear fellow—heaven forbid I should deny it. I’ve made a great deal of money; my wife has known how to take care of it, to use it without wasting it, to put a good bit of it by, to make it fructify. I’ve got a loaf on the shelf; I’ve got everything in fact but the great thing.”

“The great thing?” Paul kept echoing.

“The sense of having done the best—the sense which is the real life of the artist and the absence of which is his death, of having drawn from his intellectual instrument the finest music that nature had hidden in it, of having played it as it should be played. He either does that or he doesn’t—and if he doesn’t he isn’t worth speaking of. Therefore, precisely, those who really know don’t speak of him. He may still hear a great chatter, but what he hears most is the incorruptible silence of Fame.
...
Again Paul was silent, but it was all tormenting. “Are there no women who really understand—who can take part in a sacrifice?”

“How can they take part? They themselves are the sacrifice. They’re the idol and the altar and the flame.”

“Isn’t there even one who sees further?” Paul continued.

For a moment St. George made no answer; after which, having torn up his letters, he came back to the point all ironic. “Of course I know the one you mean. But not even Miss Fancourt.”

“I thought you admired her so much.”

“It’s impossible to admire her more. Are you in love with her?” St. George asked.

“Yes,” Paul Overt presently said.

“Well then give it up.”

Paul stared. “Give up my ‘love’?”

“Bless me, no. Your idea.” And then as our hero but still gazed: “The one you talked with her about. The idea of a decent perfection.”

“She’d help it—she’d help it!” the young man cried.

“For about a year—the first year, yes. After that she’d be as a millstone round its neck.”

Paul frankly wondered. “Why she has a passion for the real thing, for good work—for everything you and I care for most.”

“‘You and I’ is charming, my dear fellow!” his friend laughed. “She has it indeed, but she’d have a still greater passion for her children—and very proper too. She’d insist on everything’s being made comfortable, advantageous, propitious for them. That isn’t the artist’s business.”

“The artist—the artist! Isn’t he a man all the same?”

St. George had a grand grimace. “I mostly think not. You know as well as I what he has to do: the concentration, the finish, the independence he must strive for from the moment he begins to wish his work really decent. Ah my young friend, his relation to women, and especially to the one he’s most intimately concerned with, is at the mercy of the damning fact that whereas he can in the nature of things have but one standard, they have about fifty. That’s what makes them so superior,” St. George amusingly added. “Fancy an artist with a change of standards as you’d have a change of shirts or of dinner-plates. To do it—to do it and make it divine—is the only thing he has to think about. ‘Is it done or not?’ is his only question. Not ‘Is it done as well as a proper solicitude for my dear little family will allow?’ He has nothing to do with the relative—he has only to do with the absolute; and a dear little family may represent a dozen relatives.”

“Then you don’t allow him the common passions and affections of men?” Paul asked.

“Hasn’t he a passion, an affection, which includes all the rest? Besides, let him have all the passions he likes—if he only keeps his independence. He must be able to be poor.”"