Oh, my dear fellow, if you want to be a gentleman you must give up being an artist. They've got nothing to do with one another. You hear of men painting pot-boilers to keep an aged mother - well, it shows they're excellent sons, but it's no excuse for bad work. They're only tradesmen. An artist would let his mother go to the workhouse.
Quotes about tradesmen (4 Quotes)
Rudolph (the leading character) If you's go stop three tradesmen on the street, and ask the three what it is they live by, they'll reply at once, bread, meat and drink, and they'll be certain of it victuals and drink, like the rhyme in Mother Goose, makes up their diet nothing will be said of faith in things unseen, or following the gleam, just bread and meat and a can of wine to wash it down. But if you know them well, behind the fish-eyes and the bellies, if you know them better than they do, each one burns candles at some alter of his mind in secret in secret often, from himself, each is a priest to some dim mystery by which he lives. Strip him of that, and bread and meat and wine won't nourish him ... without his ... hidden faith, he dies and goes to dust.
As I said just now, the world has gone past me. I don't blame it but I no longer understand it. Tradesmen are not the same as they used to be, apprentices are not the same, business is not the same, business commodities are not the same. Seven-eighths of my stock is old-fashioned. I am an old-fashioned man in an old-fashioned shop, in a street that is not the same as I remember it. I have fallen behind the time, and am too old to catch it again.
Bow, bow, ye lower middle classes Bow, bow, ye tradesmen, bow, ye masses.