The first sensation of a great public success is strange to one who has long been accustomed to live unnoticed and unhonoured by the world.

It is at first incomprehensible that one should have suddenly grown to be an object of interest and curiosity to one's fellow-creatures, after having been so long a looker-on.

At first a man does not realise that the thing he has laboured over, and studied, and worked on, can be actually anything remarkable.

The production of the every-day task has long grown a habit, and the details which the artist grows to admire and love so earnestly have each brought with them their own reward.
Every difficulty vanquished, every image of beauty embodied, every new facility of skill acquired, has been in itself a real and enduring satisfaction for its own sake, and for the sake of its fitness to the whole,--the beautiful perfect whole he has conceived.
But he must necessarily forget, if he loves his work, that those who come after, and are to see the expression of his thought, or hear the mastery of his song, see or hear it all at once; so that the assemblage of the lesser beauties, over each of which the artist has had great joy, must produce a suddenly multiplied impression upon the understanding of the outside world, which sees first the embodiment of the thought, and has then the after-pleasure of appreciating the details.

The hearer is thrilled with a sense of impassioned beauty, which the singer may perhaps feel when he first conceives the interpretation of the printed notes, but which goes over farther from him as he strives to approach it and realise it; and so his admiration for his own song is lost in dissatisfaction with the failings which others have not time to see.
Before he is aware of the change, a singer has become famous, and all men are striving for a sight of him, or a hearing.