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"A JOY FOR EVER";
(AND ITS PRICE IN THE MARKET):
BEING
THE SUBSTANCE (WITH ADDITIONS)
OF
TWO LECTURES ON THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART,
_Delivered at Manchester, July 10th and 13th, 1857._
BY
JOHN RUSKIN, LL.D.,
HONORARY STUDENT OF CHRIST CHURCH, AND HONORARY FELLOW
OF CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE, OXFORD.
"A thing of beauty is a joy for ever."--KEATS.
SIXTEENTH THOUSAND.
LONDON:
GEORGE ALLEN, 156, CHARING CROSS ROAD.
1904.
[_All rights reserved_]
Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
At the Ballantyne Press
PREFACE
TO THE RE-ISSUE OF 1880.
The title of this book,--or, more accurately, of its subject;--for no
author was ever less likely than I have lately become, to hope for
perennial pleasure to his readers from what has cost himself the most
pains,--will be, perhaps, recognised by some as the last clause of the
line chosen from Keats by the good folks of Manchester, to be written in
letters of gold on the cornice, or Holy rood, of the great Exhibition
which inaugurated the career of so many,--since organized, by both
foreign governments and our own, to encourage the production of works of
art, which the producing nations, so far from intending to be their "joy
for ever," only hope to sell as soon as possible. Yet the motto was
chosen with uncomprehended felicity: for there never was, nor can be,
any essential beauty possessed by a work of art, which is not based on
the conception of its honoured permanence, and local influence, as a
part of appointed and precious furniture, either in the cathedral, the
house, or the joyful thoroughfare, of nations which enter their gates
with thanksgiving, and their courts with praise.
"Their" courts--or "His" courts;--in the mind of such races, the
expressions are synonymous: and the habits of life which recognise the
delightfulness, confess also the sacredness, of homes nested round the
seat of a worship unshaken by insolent theory: themselves founded on an
abiding affection for the past, and care for the future; and approached
by paths open only to the activities of honesty, and traversed only by
the footsteps of peace.
The exposition of these truths, to which I have given the chief energy
of my life, will be found in the following pages first undertaken
systematically and in logical sequence; and what I have since written on
the political influence of the Arts has been little more than the
expansion of these first lectures, in the reprint of which not a
sentence is omitted or changed.
The supplementary papers added contain, in briefest form, the aphorisms
respecting principles of art-teaching of which the attention I gave to
this subject during the continuance of my Professorship at Oxford
confirms me in the earnest and contented re-assertion.
JOHN RUSKIN,
BRANTWOOD,
_April 29th, 1880._
PREFACE
TO THE 1857 EDITION.
The greater part of the following treatise remains in the exact form in
which it was read at Manchester; but the more familiar passages of it,
which were trusted to extempore delivery, have been written with greater
explicitness and fulness than I could give them in speaking; and a
considerable number of notes are added, to explain the points which
could not be sufficiently considered in the time I had at my disposal in
the lecture room.
Some apology may be thought due to the reader, for an endeavour to
engage his attention on a subject of which no profound study seems
compatible with the work in which I am usually employed. But profound
study is not, in this case, necessary either to writer or readers,
while accurate study, up to a certain point, is necessary for us all.
Political economy means, in plain English, nothing more than "citizen's
economy"; and its first principles ought, therefore, to be understood by
all who mean to take the responsibility of citizens, as those of
household economy by all who take the responsibility of householders.
Nor are its first principles in the least obscure: they are, many of
them, disagreeable in their practical requirements, and people in
general pretend that they cannot understand, because they are unwilling
to obey them: or rather, by habitual disobedience, destroy their
capacity of understanding them. But there is not one of the really great
principles of the science which is either obscure or disputable,--which
might not be taught to a youth as soon as he can be trusted with an
annual allowance, or to a young lady as soon as she is of age to be
taken into counsel by the housekeeper.
I might, with more appearance of justice, be blamed for thinking it
necessary to enforce what everybody is supposed to know. But this fault
will hardly be found with me, while the commercial events recorded daily
in our journals, and still more the explanations attempted to be given
of them, show that a large number of our so-called merchants are as
ignorant of the nature of money as they are reckless, unjust, and
unfortunate in its employment.
The statements of economical principles given in the text, though I know
that most, if not all, of them are accepted by existing authorities on
the science, are not supported by references, because I have never read
any author on political economy, except Adam Smith, twenty years ago.
Whenever I have taken up any modern book upon this subject, I have
usually found it encumbered with inquiries into accidental or minor
commercial results, for the pursuit of which an ordinary reader could
have no leisure, and by the complication of which, it seemed to me, the
authors themselves had been not unfrequently prevented from seeing to
the root of the business.
Finally, if the reader should feel induced to blame me for too sanguine
a statement of future possibilities in political practice, let him
consider how absurd it would have appeared in the days of Edward I. if
the present state of social economy had been then predicted as
necessary, or even described as possible. And I believe the advance from
the days of Edward I. to our own, great as it is confessedly, consists,
not so much in what we have actually accomplished, as in what we are now
enabled to conceive.
CONTENTS.
LECTURE I.
PAGE
THE DISCOVERY AND APPLICATION OF ART 1
_A Lecture delivered at Manchester, July 10th, 1857._
LECTURE II.
THE ACCUMULATION AND DISTRIBUTION OF ART 70
_Continuation of the previous Lecture; delivered
July 13th, 1857._
ADDENDA.
NOTE 1.--"FATHERLY AUTHORITY" 151
" 2.--"RIGHT TO PUBLIC SUPPORT" 159
" 3.--"TRIAL SCHOOLS" 169
" 4.--"PUBLIC FAVOUR" 180
" 5.--"INVENTION OF NEW WANTS" 183
" 6.--"ECONOMY OF LITERATURE" 187
" 7.--"PILOTS OF THE STATE" 189
" 8.--"SILK AND PURPLE" 193
SUPPLEMENTARY ADDITIONAL PAPERS.
EDUCATION IN ART 213
ART SCHOOL NOTES 229
SOCIAL POLICY 240
"A JOY FOR EVER."
LECTURE I.
THE DISCOVERY AND APPLICATION OF ART.
_A Lecture delivered at Manchester, July 10, 1857._
1. Among the various characteristics of the age in which we live, as
compared with other ages of this not yet _very_ experienced world, one
of the most notable appears to me to be the just and wholesome contempt
in which we hold poverty. I repeat, the _just_ and _wholesome_ contempt;
though I see that some of my hearers look surprised at the expression. I
assure them, I use it in sincerity; and I should not have ventured to
ask you to listen to me this evening, unless I had entertained a
profound respect for wealth--true wealth, that is to say; for, of
course, we ought to respect neither wealth nor anything else that is
false of its kind: and the distinction between real and false wealth is
one of the points on which I shall have a few words presently to say to
you. But true wealth I hold, as I said, in great honour; and sympathize,
for the most part, with that extraordinary feeling of the present age
which publicly pays this honour to riches.
2. I cannot, however, help noticing how extraordinary it is, and how
this epoch of ours differs from all bygone epochs in having no
philosophical nor religious worshippers of the ragged godship of
poverty. In the classical ages, not only were there people who
voluntarily lived in tubs, and who used gravely to maintain the
superiority of tub-life to town-life, but the Greeks and Latins seem to
have looked on these eccentric, and I do not scruple to say, absurd
people, with as much respect as we do upon large capitalists and landed
proprietors; so that really, in those days, no one could be described as
purse proud, but only as empty-purse proud. And no less distinct than
the honour which those curious Greek people pay to their conceited poor,
is the disrespectful manner in which they speak of the rich; so that
one cannot listen long either to them, or to the Roman writers who
imitated them, without finding oneself entangled in all sorts of
plausible absurdities; hard upon being convinced of the uselessness of
collecting that heavy yellow substance which we call gold, and led
generally to doubt all the most established maxims of political economy.
3. Nor are matters much better in the Middle Ages. For the Greeks and
Romans contented themselves with mocking at rich people, and
constructing merry dialogues between Charon and Diogenes or Menippus, in
which the ferryman and the cynic rejoiced together as they saw kings and
rich men coming down to the shore of Acheron, in lamenting and
lamentable crowds, casting their crowns into the dark waters, and
searching, sometimes in vain, for the last coin out of all their
treasures that could ever be of use to them.
4. But these Pagan views of the matter were indulgent, compared with
those which were held in the Middle Ages, when wealth seems to have been
looked upon by the best men not only as contemptible, but as criminal.
The purse round the neck is, then, one of the principal signs of
condemnation in the pictured Inferno; and the Spirit of Poverty is
reverenced with subjection of heart, and faithfulness of affection, like
that of a loyal knight for his lady, or a loyal subject for his queen.
And truly, it requires some boldness to quit ourselves of these
feelings, and to confess their partiality or their error, which,
nevertheless, we are certainly bound to do. For wealth is simply one of
the greatest powers which can be entrusted to human hands: a power, not
indeed to be envied, because it seldom makes us happy; but still less to
be abdicated or despised; while, in these days, and in this country, it
has become a power all the more notable, in that the possessions of a
rich man are not represented, as they used to be, by wedges of gold or
coffers of jewels, but by masses of men variously employed, over whose
bodies and minds the wealth, according to its direction, exercises
harmful or helpful influence, and becomes, in that alternative, Mammon
either of Unrighteousness or of Righteousness.
5. Now, it seemed to me that since, in the name you have given to this
great gathering of British pictures, you recognize them as
Treasures--that is, I suppose, as part and parcel of the real wealth of
the country--you might not be uninterested in tracing certain commercial
questions connected with this particular form of wealth. Most persons
express themselves as surprised at its quantity; not having known before
to what an extent good art had been accumulated in England: and it will,
therefore, I should think, be held a worthy subject of consideration,
what are the political interests involved in such accumulations, what
kind of labour they represent, and how this labour may in general be
applied and economized, so as to produce the richest results.
6. Now, you must have patience with me, if in approaching the specialty
of this subject, I dwell a little on certain points of general political
science already known or established: for though thus, as I believe,
established, some which I shall have occasion to rest arguments on are
not yet by any means universally accepted; and therefore, though I will
not lose time in any detailed defence of them, it is necessary that I
should distinctly tell you in what form I receive, and wish to argue
from them; and this the more, because there may perhaps be a part of my
audience who have not interested themselves in political economy, as it
bears on ordinary fields of labour, but may yet wish to hear in what way
its principles can be applied to Art. I shall, therefore, take leave to
trespass on your patience with a few elementary statements in the
outset, and with the expression of some general principles, here and
there, in the course of our particular inquiry.
7. To begin, then, with one of these necessary truisms: all economy,
whether of states, households, or individuals, may be defined to be the
art of managing labour. The world is so regulated by the laws of
Providence, that a man's labour, well applied, is always amply
sufficient to provide him during his life with all things needful to
him, and not only with those, but with many pleasant objects of luxury;
and yet farther, to procure him large intervals of healthful rest and
serviceable leisure. And a nation's labour, well applied, is, in like
manner, amply sufficient to provide its whole population with good food
and comfortable habitation; and not with those only, but with good
education besides, and objects of luxury, art treasures, such as these
you have around you now. But by those same laws of Nature and
Providence, if the labour of the nation or of the individual be
misapplied, and much more if it be insufficient,--if the nation or man
be indolent and unwise,--suffering and want result, exactly in
proportion to the indolence and improvidence--to the refusal of labour,
or to the misapplication of it. Wherever you see want, or misery, or
degradation, in this world about you, there, be sure, either industry
has been wanting, or industry has been in error. It is not accident, it
is not Heaven-commanded calamity, it is not the original and inevitable
evil of man's nature, which fill your streets with lamentation, and your
graves with prey. It is only that, when there should have been
providence, there has been waste; when there should have been labour,
there has been lasciviousness; and wilfulness, when there should have
been subordination.[1]
[Note 1: Proverbs xiii. 23: "Much food is in the tillage of the
poor, but there is that is destroyed for want of judgment."]
8. Now, we have warped the word "economy" in our English language into a
meaning which it has no business whatever to bear. In our use of it, it
constantly signifies merely sparing or saving; economy of money means
saving money--economy of time, sparing time, and so on. But that is a
wholly barbarous use of the word--barbarous in a double sense, for it is
not English, and it is bad Greek; barbarous in a treble sense, for it is
not English, it is bad Greek, and it is worse sense. Economy no more
means saving money than it means spending money. It means, the
administration of a house; its stewardship; spending or saving, that is,
whether money or time, or anything else, to the best possible advantage.
In the simplest and clearest definition of it, economy, whether public
or private, means the wise management of labour; and it means this
mainly in three senses: namely, first, _applying_ your labour
rationally; secondly, _preserving_ its produce carefully; lastly,
_distributing_ its produce seasonably.
9. I say first, applying your labour rationally; that is, so as to
obtain the most precious things you can, and the most lasting things, by
it: not growing oats in land where you can grow wheat, nor putting fine
embroidery on a stuff that will not wear. Secondly, preserving its
produce carefully; that is to say, laying up your wheat wisely in
storehouses for the time of famine, and keeping your embroidery
watchfully from the moth: and lastly, distributing its produce
seasonably; that is to say, being able to carry your corn at once to the
place where the people are hungry, and your embroideries to the places
where they are gay; so fulfilling in all ways the Wise Man's
description, whether of the queenly housewife or queenly nation: "She
riseth while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household, and a
portion to her maidens. She maketh herself coverings of tapestry, her
clothing is silk and purple. Strength and honour are in her clothing,
and she shall rejoice in time to come."
10. Now, you will observe that in this description of the perfect
economist, or mistress of a household, there is a studied expression of
the balanced division of her care between the two great objects of
utility and splendour: in her right hand, food and flax, for life and
clothing; in her left hand, the purple and the needlework, for honour
and for beauty. All perfect housewifery or national economy is known by
these two divisions; wherever either is wanting, the economy is
imperfect. If the motive of pomp prevails, and the care of the national
economist is directed only to the accumulation of gold, and of pictures,
and of silk and marble, you know at once that the time must soon come
when all these treasures shall be scattered and blasted in national
ruin. If, on the contrary, the element of utility prevails, and the
nation disdains to occupy itself in any wise with the arts of beauty or
delight, not only a certain quantity of its energy calculated for
exercise in those arts alone must be entirely wasted, which is bad
economy, but also the passions connected with the utilities of property
become morbidly strong, and a mean lust of accumulation merely for the
sake of accumulation, or even of labour merely for the sake of labour,
will banish at last the serenity and the morality of life, as
completely, and perhaps more ignobly, than even the lavishness of pride,
and the likeness of pleasure. And similarly, and much more visibly, in
private and household economy, you may judge always of its perfectness
by its fair balance between the use and the pleasure of its possessions.
You will see the wise cottager's garden trimly divided between its
well-set vegetables, and its fragrant flowers; you will see the good
housewife taking pride in her pretty table-cloth, and her glittering
shelves, no less than in her well-dressed dish, and her full storeroom;
the care in her countenance will alternate with gaiety, and though you
will reverence her in her seriousness, you will know her best by her
smile.
11. Now, as you will have anticipated, I am going to address you, on
this and our succeeding evening, chiefly on the subject of that economy
which relates rather to the garden than the farm-yard. I shall ask you
to consider with me the kind of laws by which we shall best distribute
the beds of our national garden, and raise in it the sweetest succession
of trees pleasant to the sight, and (in no forbidden sense) to be
desired to make us wise. But, before proceeding to open this specialty
of our subject, let me pause for a few moments to plead with you for the
acceptance of that principle of government or authority which must be at
the root of all economy, whether for use or for pleasure. I said, a few
minutes ago, that a nation's labour, well applied, was amply sufficient
to provide its whole population with good food, comfortable clothing,
and pleasant luxury. But the good, instant, and constant application is
everything. We must not, when our strong hands are thrown out of work,
look wildly about for want of something to do with them. If ever we feel
that want, it is a sign that all our household is out of order. Fancy a
farmer's wife, to whom one or two of her servants should come at twelve
o'clock at noon, crying that they had got nothing to do; that they did
not know what to do next: and fancy still farther, the said farmer's
wife looking hopelessly about her rooms and yard, they being all the
while considerably in disorder, not knowing where to set the spare
handmaidens to work, and at last complaining bitterly that she had been
obliged to give them their dinner for nothing. That's the type of the
kind of political economy we practise too often in England. Would you
not at once assert of such a mistress that she knew nothing of her
duties? and would you not be certain, if the household were rightly
managed, the mistress would be only too glad at any moment to have the
help of any number of spare hands; that she would know in an instant
what to set them to;--in an instant what part of to-morrow's work might
be most serviceably forwarded, what part of next month's work most
wisely provided for, or what new task of some profitable kind
undertaken; and when the evening came, and she dismissed her servants to
their recreation or their rest, or gathered them to the reading round
the work-table, under the eaves in the sunset, would you not be sure to
find that none of them had been overtasked by her, just because none had
been left idle; that everything had been accomplished because all had
been employed; that the kindness of the mistress had aided her presence
of mind, and the slight labour had been entrusted to the weak, and the
formidable to the strong; and that as none had been dishonoured by
inactivity, so none had been broken by toil?
12. Now, the precise counterpart of such a household would be seen in a
nation in which political economy was rightly understood. You complain
of the difficulty of finding work for your men. Depend upon it, the real
difficulty rather is to find men for your work. The serious question for
you is not how many you have to feed, but how much you have to do; it
is our inactivity, not our hunger, that ruins us: let us never fear that
our servants should have a good appetite--our wealth is in their
strength, not in their starvation. Look around this island of yours, and
see what you have to do in it. The sea roars against your harbourless
cliffs--you have to build the breakwater, and dig the port of refuge;
the unclean pestilence ravins in your streets--you have to bring the
full stream from the hills, and to send the free winds through the
thoroughfare; the famine blanches your lips and eats away your
flesh--you have to dig the moor and dry the marsh, to bid the morass
give forth instead of engulfing, and to wring the honey and oil out of
the rock. These things, and thousands such, we have to do, and shall
have to do constantly, on this great farm of ours; for do not suppose
that it is anything else than that. Precisely the same laws of economy
which apply to the cultivation of a farm or an estate, apply to the
cultivation of a province or of an island. Whatever rebuke you would
address to the improvident master of an ill-managed patrimony,
precisely that rebuke we should address to ourselves, so far as we
leave our population in idleness and our country in disorder. What would
you say to the lord of an estate who complained to you of his poverty
and disabilities, and when you pointed out to him that his land was half
of it overrun with weeds, and that his fences were all in ruin, and that
his cattle-sheds were roofless, and his labourers lying under the hedges
faint for want of food, he answered to you that it would ruin him to
weed his land or to roof his sheds--that those were too costly
operations for him to undertake, and that he knew not how to feed his
labourers nor pay them? Would you not instantly answer, that instead of
ruining him to weed his fields, it would save him; that his inactivity
was his destruction, and that to set his labourers to work was to feed
them? Now, you may add acre to acre, and estate to estate, as far as you
like, but you will never reach a compass of ground which shall escape
from the authority of these simple laws. The principles which are right
in the administration of a few fields, are right also in the
administration of a great country from horizon to horizon: idleness
does not cease to be ruinous because it is extensive, nor labour to be
productive because it is universal.
13. Nay, but you reply, there is one vast difference between the
nation's economy and the private man's: the farmer has full authority
over his labourers; he can direct them to do what is needed to be done,
whether they like it or not; and he can turn them away if they refuse to
work, or impede others in their working, or are disobedient, or
quarrelsome. There _is_ this great difference; it is precisely this
difference on which I wish to fix your attention, for it is precisely
this difference which you have to do away with. We know the necessity of
authority in farm, or in fleet, or in army; but we commonly refuse to
admit it in the body of the nation. Let us consider this point a little.
14. In the various awkward and unfortunate efforts which the French have
made at the development of a social system, they have at least stated
one true principle, that of fraternity or brotherhood. Do not be
alarmed; they got all wrong in their experiments, because they quite
forgot that this fact of fraternity implied another fact quite as
important--that of paternity, or fatherhood. That is to say, if they
were to regard the nation as one family, the condition of unity in that
family consisted no less in their having a head, or a father, than in
their being faithful and affectionate members, or brothers. But we must
not forget this, for we have long confessed it with our lips, though we
refuse to confess it in our lives. For half an hour every Sunday we
expect a man in a black gown, supposed to be telling us truth, to
address us as brethren, though we should be shocked at the notion of any
brotherhood existing among us out of church. And we can hardly read a
few sentences on any political subject without running a chance of
crossing the phrase "paternal government," though we should be utterly
horror-struck at the idea of governments claiming anything like a
father's authority over us. Now, I believe those two formal phrases are
in both instances perfectly binding and accurate, and that the image of
the farm and its servants which I have hitherto used, as expressing a
wholesome national organization, fails only of doing so, not because it
is too domestic, but because it is not domestic enough; because the real
type of a well-organized nation must be presented, not by a farm
cultivated by servants who wrought for hire, and might be turned away if
they refused to labour, but by a farm in which the master was a father,
and in which all the servants were sons; which implied, therefore, in
all its regulations, not merely the order of expediency, but the bonds
of affection and responsibilities of relationship; and in which all acts
and services were not only to be sweetened by brotherly concord, but to
be enforced by fatherly authority.[2]
[Note 2: See note 1st, in Addenda.]
15. Observe, I do not mean in the least that we ought to place such an
authority in the hands of any one person, or of any class or body of
persons. But I do mean to say that as an individual who conducts himself
wisely must make laws for himself which at some time or other may appear
irksome or injurious, but which, precisely at the time they appear most
irksome, it is most necessary he should obey, so a nation which means to
conduct itself wisely, must establish authority over itself, vested
either in kings, councils, or laws, which it must resolve to obey, even
at times when the law or authority appears irksome to the body of the
people, or injurious to certain masses of it. And this kind of national
law has hitherto been only judicial; contented, that is, with an
endeavour to prevent and punish violence and crime: but, as we advance
in our social knowledge, we shall endeavour to make our government
paternal as well as judicial; that is, to establish such laws and
authorities as may at once direct us in our occupations, protect us
against our follies, and visit us in our distresses: a government which
shall repress dishonesty, as now it punishes theft; which shall show how
the discipline of the masses may be brought to aid the toils of peace,
as discipline of the masses has hitherto knit the sinews of battle; a
government which shall have its soldiers of the ploughshare as well as
its soldiers of the sword, and which shall distribute more proudly its
golden crosses of industry--golden as the glow of the harvest, than now
it grants its bronze crosses of honour--bronzed with the crimson of
blood.
16. I have not, of course, time to insist on the nature or details of
government of this kind; only I wish to plead for your several and
future consideration of this one truth, that the notion of Discipline
and Interference lies at the very root of all human progress or power;
that the "Let-alone" principle is, in all things which man has to do
with, the principle of death; that it is ruin to him, certain and total,
if he lets his land alone--if he lets his fellow-men alone--if he lets
his own soul alone. That his whole life, on the contrary, must, if it is
healthy life, be continually one of ploughing and pruning, rebuking and
helping, governing and punishing; and that therefore it is only in the
concession of some great principle of restraint and interference in
national action that he can ever hope to find the secret of protection
against national degradation. I believe that the masses have a right to
claim education from their government; but only so far as they
acknowledge the duty of yielding obedience to their government. I
believe they have a right to claim employment from their governors; but
only so far as they yield to the governor the direction and discipline
of their labour; and it is only so far as they grant to the men whom
they may set over them the father's authority to check the
childishnesses of national fancy, and direct the waywardnesses of
national energy, that they have a right to ask that none of their
distresses should be unrelieved, none of their weaknesses unwatched; and
that no grief, nor nakedness, nor peril, should exist for them, against
which the father's hand was not outstretched, or the father's shield
uplifted.[3]
[Note 3: Compare Wordsworth's Essay on the Poor Law Amendment Bill.
I quote one important passage: "But, if it be not safe to touch the
abstract question of man's right in a social state to help himself even
in the last extremity, may we not still contend for the duty of a
Christian government, standing _in loco parentis_ towards all its
subjects, to make such effectual provision that no one shall be in
danger of perishing either through the neglect or harshness of its
legislation? Or, waiving this, is it not indisputable that the claim of
the State to the allegiance, involves the protection of the subject?
And, as all rights in one party impose a correlative duty upon another,
it follows that the right of the State to require the services of its
members, even to the jeopardizing of their lives in the common defence,
establishes a right in the people (not to be gainsaid by utilitarians
and economists) to public support when, from any cause, they may be
unable to support themselves."--(See note 2nd, in Addenda.)]
17. Now, I have pressed this upon you at more length than is needful or
proportioned to our present purposes of inquiry, because I would not for
the first time speak to you on this subject of political economy without
clearly stating what I believe to be its first grand principle. But its
bearing on the matter in hand is chiefly to prevent you from at once too
violently dissenting from me when what I may state to you as advisable
economy in art appears to imply too much restraint or interference with
the freedom of the patron or artist. We are a little apt, though on the
whole a prudent nation, to act too immediately on our impulses, even in
matters merely commercial; much more in those involving continual
appeals to our fancies. How far, therefore, the proposed systems or
restraints may be advisable, it is for you to judge; only I pray you not
to be offended with them merely because they _are_ systems and
restraints.
18. Do you at all recollect that interesting passage of Carlyle, in
which he compares, in this country and at this day, the understood and
commercial value of man and horse; and in which he wonders that the
horse, with its inferior brains and its awkward hoofiness, instead of
handiness, should be always worth so many tens or scores of pounds in
the market, while the man, so far from always commanding his price in
the market, would often be thought to confer a service on the community
by simply killing himself out of their way? Well, Carlyle does not
answer his own question, because he supposes we shall at once see the
answer. The value of the horse consists simply in the fact of your being
able to put a bridle on him. The value of the man consists precisely in
the same thing. If you can bridle him, or, which is better, if he can
bridle himself, he will be a valuable creature directly. Otherwise, in a
commercial point of view, his value is either nothing, or accidental
only. Only, of course, the proper bridle of man is not a leathern one:
what kind of texture it is rightly made of, we find from that command,
"Be ye not as the horse or as the mule which have no understanding,
whose mouths must be held in with bit and bridle." You are not to be
without the reins, indeed; but they are to be of another kind: "I will
guide thee with mine Eye." So the bridle of man is to be the Eye of God;
and if he rejects that guidance, then the next best for him is the
horse's and the mule's, which have no understanding; and if he rejects
that, and takes the bit fairly in his teeth, then there is nothing left
for him than the blood that comes out of the city, up to the
horse-bridles.
19. Quitting, however, at last these general and serious laws of
government--or rather bringing them down to our own business in hand--we
have to consider three points of discipline in that particular branch of
human labour which is concerned, not with procuring of food, but the
expression of emotion; we have to consider respecting art: first, how to
apply our labour to it; then, how to accumulate or preserve the results
of labour; and then, how to distribute them. But since in art the labour
which we have to employ is the labour of a particular class of men--men
who have special genius for the business--we have not only to consider
how to apply the labour, but, first of all, how to produce the labourer;
and thus the question in this particular case becomes fourfold: first,
how to get your man of genius; then, how to employ your man of genius;
then, how to accumulate and preserve his work in the greatest quantity;
and, lastly, how to distribute his work to the best national advantage.
Let us take up these questions in succession.
20. I. Discovery.--How are we to get our men of genius: that is to say,
by what means may we produce among us, at any given time, the greatest
quantity of effective art-intellect? A wide question, you say, involving
an account of all the best means of art education. Yes, but I do not
mean to go into the consideration of those; I want only to state the few
principles which lie at the foundation of the matter. Of these, the
first is that you have always to find your artist, not to make him; you
can't manufacture him, any more than you can manufacture gold. You can
find him, and refine him: you dig him out as he lies nugget-fashion in
the mountain-stream; you bring him home; and you make him into current
coin, or household plate, but not one grain of him can you originally
produce. A certain quantity of art-intellect is born annually in every
nation, greater or less according to the nature and cultivation of the
nation, or race of men; but a perfectly fixed quantity annually, not
increasable by one grain. You may lose it, or you may gather it; you may
let it lie loose in the ravine, and buried in the sands, or you may make
kings' thrones of it, and overlay temple gates with it, as you choose:
but the best you can do with it is always merely sifting, melting,
hammering, purifying--never creating.
21. And there is another thing notable about this artistical gold; not
only is it limited in quantity, but in use. You need not make thrones or
golden gates with it unless you like, but assuredly you can't do
anything else with it. You can't make knives of it, nor armour, nor
railroads. The gold won't cut you, and it won't carry you: put it to a
mechanical use, and you destroy it at once. It is quite true that in the
greatest artists, their proper artistical faculty is united with every
other; and you may make use of the other faculties, and let the
artistical one lie dormant. For aught I know, there may be two or three
Leonardo da Vincis employed at this moment in your harbours and
railroads: but you are not employing their Leonardesque or golden
faculty there,--you are only oppressing and destroying it. And the
artistical gift in average men is not joined with others: your born
painter, if you don't make a painter of him, won't be a first-rate
merchant, or lawyer; at all events, whatever he turns out, his own
special gift is unemployed by you; and in no wise helps him in that
other business. So here you have a certain quantity of a particular sort
of intelligence, produced for you annually by providential laws, which
you can only make use of by setting it to its own proper work, and which
any attempt to use otherwise involves the dead loss of so much human
energy.
22. Well then, supposing we wish to employ it, how is it to be best
discovered and refined? It is easily enough discovered. To wish to
employ it is to discover it. All that you need is, a school of trial[4]
in every important town, in which those idle farmers' lads whom their
masters never can keep out of mischief, and those stupid tailors'
'prentices who are always stitching the sleeves in wrong way upwards,
may have a try at this other trade; only this school of trial must not
be entirely regulated by formal laws of art education, but must
ultimately be the workshop of a good master painter, who will try the
lads with one kind of art and another, till he finds out what they are
fit for.
[Note 4: See note 3rd, in Addenda.]
23. Next, after your trial school, you want your easy and secure
employment, which is the matter of chief importance. For, even on the
present system, the boys who have really intense art capacity, generally
make painters of themselves; but then, the best half of their early
energy is lost in the battle of life. Before a good painter can get
employment, his mind has always been embittered, and his genius
distorted. A common mind usually stoops, in plastic chill, to whatever
is asked of it, and scrapes or daubs its way complacently into public
favour.[5] But your great men quarrel with you, and you revenge
yourselves by starving them for the first half of their lives. Precisely
in the degree in which any painter possesses original genius, is at
present the increase of moral certainty that during his early years he
will have a hard battle to fight; and that just at the time when his
conceptions ought to be full and happy, his temper gentle, and his
hopes enthusiastic--just at that most critical period, his heart is full
of anxieties and household cares; he is chilled by disappointments, and
vexed by injustice; he becomes obstinate in his errors, no less than in
his virtues, and the arrows of his aims are blunted, as the reeds of his
trust are broken.
[Note 5: See note 4th, in Addenda.]
24. What we mainly want, therefore, is a means of sufficient and
unagitated employment: not holding out great prizes for which young
painters are to scramble; but furnishing all with adequate support, and
opportunity to display such power as they possess without rejection or
mortification. I need not say that the best field of labour of this kind
would be presented by the constant progress of public works involving
various decoration; and we will presently examine what kind of public
works may thus, advantageously for the nation, be in constant progress.
But a more important matter even than this of steady employment, is the
kind of criticism with which you, the public, receive the works of the
young men submitted to you. You may do much harm by indiscreet praise
and by indiscreet blame; but remember the chief harm is always done by
blame. It stands to reason that a young man's work cannot be perfect. It
_must_ be more or less ignorant; it must be more or less feeble; it is
likely that it may be more or less experimental, and if experimental,
here and there mistaken. If, therefore, you allow yourself to launch out
into sudden barking at the first faults you see, the probability is that
you are abusing the youth for some defect naturally and inevitably
belonging to that stage of his progress; and that you might just as
rationally find fault with a child for not being as prudent as a privy
councillor, or with a kitten for not being as grave as a cat.
25. But there is one fault which you may be quite sure is unnecessary,
and therefore a real and blamable fault: that is haste, involving
negligence. Whenever you see that a young man's work is either bold or
slovenly, then you may attack it firmly; sure of being right. If his
work is bold, it is insolent; repress his insolence: if it is slovenly,
it is indolent; spur his indolence. So long as he works in that dashing
or impetuous way, the best hope for him is in your contempt: and it is
only by the fact of his seeming not to seek your approbation that you
may conjecture he deserves it.
26. But if he does deserve it, be sure that you give it him, else you
not only run a chance of driving him from the right road by want of
encouragement, but you deprive yourselves of the happiest privilege you
will ever have of rewarding his labour. For it is only the young who can
receive much reward from men's praise: the old, when they are great, get
too far beyond and above you to care what you think of them. You may
urge them then with sympathy, and surround them then with acclamation;
but they will doubt your pleasure, and despise your praise. You might
have cheered them in their race through the asphodel meadows of their
youth; you might have brought the proud, bright scarlet into their
faces, if you had but cried once to them "Well done," as they dashed up
to the first goal of their early ambition. But now, their pleasure is in
memory, and their ambition is in heaven. They can be kind to you, but
you nevermore can be kind to them. You may be fed with the fruit and
fulness of their old age, but you were as the nipping blight to them in
their blossoming, and your praise is only as the warm winds of autumn
to the dying branches.
27. There is one thought still, the saddest of all, bearing on this
withholding of early help. It is possible, in some noble natures, that
the warmth and the affections of childhood may remain unchilled, though
unanswered; and that the old man's heart may still be capable of
gladness, when the long-withheld sympathy is given at last. But in these
noble natures it nearly always happens that the chief motive of earthly
ambition has not been to give delight to themselves, but to their
parents. Every noble youth looks back, as to the chiefest joy which this
world's honour ever gave him, to the moment when first he saw his
father's eyes flash with pride, and his mother turn away her head, lest
he should take her tears for tears of sorrow. Even the lover's joy, when
some worthiness of his is acknowledged before his mistress, is not so
great as that, for it is not so pure--the desire to exalt himself in her
eyes mixes with that of giving her delight; but he does not need to
exalt himself in his parents' eyes: it is with the pure hope of giving
them pleasure that he comes to tell them what he has done, or what has
been said of him; and therefore he has a purer pleasure of his own. And
this purest and best of rewards you keep from him if you can: you feed
him in his tender youth with ashes and dishonour; and then you come to
him, obsequious, but too late, with your sharp laurel crown, the dew all
dried from off its leaves; and you thrust it into his languid hand, and
he looks at you wistfully. What shall he do with it? What can he do, but
go and lay it on his mother's grave?
28. Thus, then, you see that you have to provide for your young men:
first, the searching or discovering school; then the calm employment;
then the justice of praise: one thing more you have to do for them in
preparing them for full service--namely, to make, in the noble sense of
the word, gentlemen of them; that is to say, to take care that their
minds receive such training, that in all they paint they shall see and
feel the noblest things. I am sorry to say, that of all parts of an
artist's education, this is the most neglected among us; and that even
where the natural taste and feeling of the youth have been pure and
true, where there was the right stuff in him to make a gentleman of, you
may too frequently discern some jarring rents in his mind, and elements
of degradation in his treatment of subject, owing to want of gentle
training, and of the liberal influence of literature. This is quite
visible in our greatest artists, even in men like Turner and
Gainsborough; while in the common grade of our second-rate painters the
evil attains a pitch which is far too sadly manifest to need my dwelling
upon it. Now, no branch of art economy is more important than that of
making the intellect at your disposal pure as well as powerful; so that
it may always gather for you the sweetest and fairest things. The same
quantity of labour from the same man's hand, will, according as you have
trained him, produce a lovely and useful work, or a base and hurtful
one; and depend upon it, whatever value it may possess, by reason of the
painter's skill, its chief and final value, to any nation, depends upon
its being able to exalt and refine, as well as to please; and that the
picture which most truly deserves the name of an art-treasure is that
which has been painted by a good man.
29. You cannot but see how far this would lead, if I were to enlarge
upon it. I must take it up as a separate subject some other time: only
noticing at present that no money could be better spent by a nation than
in providing a liberal and disciplined education for its painters, as
they advance into the critical period of their youth; and that, also, a
large part of their power during life depends upon the kind of subjects
which you, the public, ask them for, and therefore the kind of thoughts
with which you require them to be habitually familiar. I shall have more
to say on this head when we come to consider what employment they should
have in public buildings.
30. There are many other points of nearly as much importance as these,
to be explained with reference to the development of genius; but I
should have to ask you to come and hear six lectures instead of two if I
were to go into their detail. For instance, I have not spoken of the way
in which you ought to look for those artificers in various manual
trades, who, without possessing the order of genius which you would
desire to devote to higher purposes, yet possess wit, and humour, and
sense of colour, and fancy for form--all commercially valuable as
quantities of intellect, and all more or less expressible in the lower
arts of iron-work, pottery, decorative sculpture, and such like. But
these details, interesting as they are, I must commend to your own
consideration, or leave for some future inquiry. I want just now only to
set the bearings of the entire subject broadly before you, with enough
of detailed illustration to make it intelligible; and therefore I must
quit the first head of it here, and pass to the second--namely, how best
to employ the genius we discover. A certain quantity of able hands and
heads being placed at our disposal, what shall we most advisably set
them upon?
31. II. APPLICATION.--There are three main points the economist has to
attend to in this.
First, To set his men to various work.
Secondly, To easy work.
Thirdly, To lasting work.
I shall briefly touch on the first two, for I want to arrest your
attention on the last.
32. I say first to various work. Supposing you have two men of equal
power as landscape painters--and both of them have an hour at your
disposal. You would not set them both to paint the same piece of
landscape. You would, of course, rather have two subjects than a
repetition of one.