42. The dabbler does not know in any art what it is all about -- he imitates like a monkey -- and has no sense of the essential course of art. The true painter etc. certainly can distinguish the picturesque from the unpicturesque everywhere. So it is with the poet, the novelist, the travel writer. The writer of chronicles is the dabbler in history -- he wants to give everything and gives nothing. So it is throughout. Every art has its individual sphere -- he who does not know this exactly or have some sense of it -- will never be an artist.
[Novalis, Logological Fragments II, in Novalis: Philosophical Writings, Margaret Mahony Stoljar, ed. and tr., SUNY Press (Albany, NY: 1997), p. 42.]
