naturally conclude at once that it will; but you will have hard work to
convince your modern architects of that. They will put twenty men to
work, to carve twenty capitals; and all shall be the same. If I could
show you the architects' yards in England just now, all open at once,
perhaps you might see a thousand clever men, all employed in carving the
same design. Of the degradation and deathfulness to the art-intellect of
the country involved in such a habit, I have more or less been led to
speak before now; but I have not hitherto marked its definite tendency
to increase the price of _work_, as such. When men are employed
continually in carving the same ornaments, they get into a monotonous
and methodical habit of labour--precisely correspondent to that in which
they would break stones, or paint house-walls. Of course, what they do
so constantly, they do easily; and if you excite them temporarily by an
increase of wages, you may get much work done by them in a little time.
But, unless so stimulated, men condemned to a monotonous exertion,
work--and always, by the laws of human nature, _must_ work--only at a
tranquil rate, not producing by any means a maximum result in a given
time. But if you allow them to vary their designs, and thus interest
their heads and hearts in what they are doing, you will find them become
eager, first, to get their ideas expressed, and then to finish the
expression of them; and the moral energy thus brought to bear on the
matter quickens, and therefore cheapens, the production in a most
important degree. Sir Thomas Deane, the architect of the new Museum at
Oxford, told me, as I passed through Oxford on my way here, that he
found that, owing to this cause alone, capitals of various design could
be executed cheaper than capitals of similar design (the amount of hand
labour in each being the same) by about 30 per cent.
33. Well, that is the first way, then, in which you will employ your
intellect well; and the simple observance of this plain rule of
political economy will effect a noble revolution in your architecture,
such as you cannot at present so much as conceive. Then the second way
in which we are to guard against waste is by setting our men to the
easiest, and therefore the quickest, work which will answer the purpose.
Marble, for instance, lasts quite as long as granite, and is much softer
to work; therefore, when you get hold of a good sculptor, give him
marble to carve--not granite.
34. That, you say, is obvious enough. Yes; but it is not so obvious how
much of your workmen's time you waste annually in making them cut glass,
after it has got hard, when you ought to make them mould it while it is
soft. It is not so obvious how much expense you waste in cutting
diamonds and rubies, which are the hardest things you can find, into
shapes that mean nothing, when the same men might be cutting sandstone
and freestone into shapes that meant something. It is not so obvious how
much of the artists' time in Italy you waste, by forcing them to make
wretched little pictures for you out of crumbs of stone glued together
at enormous cost, when the tenth of the time would make good and noble
pictures for you out of water-colour.
35. I could go on giving you almost numberless instances of this great
commercial mistake; but I should only weary and confuse you. I therefore
commend also this head of our subject to your own meditation, and
proceed to the last I named--the last I shall task your patience with
to-night. You know we are now considering how to apply our genius; and
we were to do it as economists, in three ways:--
To _various_ work;
To _easy_ work;
To _lasting_ work.
36. This lasting of the work, then, is our final question.
Many of you may perhaps remember that Michael Angelo was once commanded
by Pietro di Medici to mould a statue out of snow, and that he obeyed
the command.[6] I am glad, and we have all reason to be glad, that such
a fancy ever came into the mind of the unworthy prince, and for this
cause: that Pietro di Medici then gave, at the period of one great epoch
of consummate power in the arts, the perfect, accurate, and intensest
possible type of the greatest error which nations and princes can
commit, respecting the power of genius entrusted to their guidance. You
had there, observe, the strongest genius in the most perfect obedience;
capable of iron independence, yet wholly submissive to the patron's
will; at once the most highly accomplished and the most original,
capable of doing as much as man could do, in any direction that man
could ask. And its governor, and guide, and patron sets it to build a
statue in snow--to put itself into the service of annihilation--to make
a cloud of itself, and pass away from the earth.
[Note 6: See the noble passage on this tradition in "Casa Guidi
Windows."]
37. Now this, so precisely and completely done by Pietro di Medici, is
what we are all doing, exactly in the degree in which we direct the
genius under our patronage to work in more or less perishable materials.
So far as we induce painters to work in fading colours, or architects to
build with imperfect structure, or in any other way consult only
immediate ease and cheapness in the production of what we want, to the
exclusion of provident thought as to its permanence and serviceableness
in after ages; so far we are forcing our Michael Angelos to carve in
snow. The first duty of the economist in art is, to see that no
intellect shall thus glitter merely in the manner of hoar-frost; but
that it shall be well vitrified, like a painted window, and shall be set
so between shafts of stone and bands of iron, that it shall bear the
sunshine upon it, and send the sunshine through it, from generation to
generation.
38. I can conceive, however, some political economist to interrupt me
here, and say, "If you make your art wear too well, you will soon have
too much of it; you will throw your artists quite out of work. Better
allow for a little wholesome evanescence--beneficent destruction: let
each age provide art for itself, or we shall soon have so many good
pictures that we shall not know what to do with them."
Remember, my dear hearers, who are thus thinking, that political
economy, like every other subject, cannot be dealt with effectively if
we try to solve two questions at a time instead of one. It is one
question, how to get plenty of a thing; and another, whether plenty of
it will be good for us. Consider these two matters separately; never
confuse yourself by interweaving one with the other. It is one question,
how to treat your fields so as to get a good harvest; another, whether
you wish to have a good harvest, or would rather like to keep up the
price of corn. It is one question, how to graft your trees so as to grow
most apples; and quite another, whether having such a heap of apples in
the storeroom will not make them all rot.
39. Now, therefore, that we are talking only about grafting and growing,
pray do not vex yourselves with thinking what you are to do with the
pippins. It may be desirable for us to have much art, or little--we will
examine that by-and-bye; but just now, let us keep to the simple
consideration how to get plenty of good art if we want it. Perhaps it
might be just as well that a man of moderate income should be able to
possess a good picture, as that any work of real merit should cost
500_l._ or 1,000_l._; at all events, it is certainly one of the branches
of political economy to ascertain how, if we like, we can get things in
quantities--plenty of corn, plenty of wine, plenty of gold, or plenty of
pictures.
It has just been said, that the first great secret is to produce work
that will last. Now, the conditions of work lasting are twofold: it must
not only be in materials that will last, but it must be itself of a
quality that will last--it must be good enough to bear the test of time.
If it is not good, we shall tire of it quickly, and throw it aside--we
shall have no pleasure in the accumulation of it. So that the first
question of a good art-economist respecting any work is, Will it lose
its flavour by keeping? It may be very amusing now, and look much like a
work of genius; but what will be its value a hundred years hence?
You cannot always ascertain this. You may get what you fancy to be work
of the best quality, and yet find to your astonishment that it won't
keep. But of one thing you may be sure, that art which is produced
hastily will also perish hastily; and that what is cheapest to you now,
is likely to be dearest in the end.
40. I am sorry to say, the great tendency of this age is to expend its
genius in perishable art of this kind, as if it were a triumph to burn
its thoughts away in bonfires. There is a vast quantity of intellect and
of labour consumed annually in our cheap illustrated publications; you
triumph in them; and you think it so grand a thing to get so many
woodcuts for a penny. Why, woodcuts, penny and all, are as much lost to
you as if you had invested your money in gossamer. More lost, for the
gossamer could only tickle your face, and glitter in your eyes; it could
not catch your feet and trip you up: but the bad art can, and does; for
you can't like good woodcuts as long as you look at the bad ones. If we
were at this moment to come across a Titian woodcut, or a Dürer woodcut,
we should not like it--those of us at least who are accustomed to the
cheap work of the day. We don't like, and can't like, _that_ long; but
when we are tired of one bad cheap thing, we throw it aside and buy
another bad cheap thing; and so keep looking at bad things all our
lives. Now, the very men who do all that quick bad work for us are
capable of doing perfect work. Only, perfect work can't be hurried, and
therefore it can't be cheap beyond a certain point. But suppose you pay
twelve times as much as you do now, and you have one woodcut for a
shilling instead of twelve; and the one woodcut for a shilling is as
good as art can be, so that you will never tire of looking at it; and is
struck on good paper with good ink, so that you will never wear it out
by handling it; while you are sick of your penny-each cuts by the end of
the week, and have torn them mostly in half too. Isn't your shilling's
worth the best bargain?
41. It is not, however, only in getting prints or woodcuts of the best
kind that you will practise economy. There is a certain quality about an
original drawing which you cannot get in a woodcut, and the best part of
the genius of many men is only expressible in original work, whether
with pen or ink--pencil or colours. This is not always the case; but in
general, the best men are those who can only express themselves on paper
or canvas; and you will therefore, in the long run, get most for your
money by buying original work; proceeding on the principle already laid
down, that the best is likely to be the cheapest in the end. Of course,
original work cannot be produced under a certain cost. If you want a
man to make you a drawing which takes him six days, you must, at all
events, keep him for six days in bread and water, fire and lodging; that
is the lowest price at which he can do it for you, but that is not very
dear: and the best bargain which can possibly be made honestly in
art--the very ideal of a cheap purchase to the purchaser--is the
original work of a great man fed for as many days as are necessary on
bread and water, or perhaps we may say with as many onions as will keep
him in good humour. That is the way by which you will always get most
for your money; no mechanical multiplication or ingenuity of commercial
arrangements will ever get you a better penny's worth of art than that.
42. Without, however, pushing our calculations quite to this
prison-discipline extreme, we may lay it down as a rule in art-economy,
that original work is, on the whole, cheapest and best worth having. But
precisely in proportion to the value of it as a production, becomes the
importance of having it executed in permanent materials. And here we
come to note the second main error of the day, that we not only ask our
workmen for bad art, but we make them put it into bad substance. We
have, for example, put a great quantity of genius, within the last
twenty years, into water-colour drawing, and we have done this with the
most reckless disregard whether either the colours or the paper will
stand. In most instances, neither will. By accident, it may happen that
the colours in a given drawing have been of good quality, and its paper
uninjured by chemical processes. But you take not the least care to
ensure these being so; I have myself seen the most destructive changes
take place in water-colour drawings within twenty years after they were
painted; and from all I can gather respecting the recklessness of modern
paper manufacture, my belief is, that though you may still handle an
Albert Dürer engraving, two hundred years old, fearlessly, not one-half
of that time will have passed over your modern water-colours, before
most of them will be reduced to mere white or brown rags; and your
descendants, twitching them contemptuously into fragments between finger
and thumb, will mutter against you, half in scorn and half in anger,
"Those wretched nineteenth century people! they kept vapouring and
fuming about the world, doing what they called business, and they
couldn't make a sheet of paper that wasn't rotten."
43. And note that this is no unimportant portion of your art economy at
this time. Your water-colour painters are becoming every day capable of
expressing greater and better things; and their material is especially
adapted to the turn of your best artists' minds. The value which you
could accumulate in work of this kind would soon become a most important
item in the national art-wealth, if only you would take the little pains
necessary to secure its permanence. I am inclined to think, myself, that
water-colour ought not to be used on paper at all, but only on vellum,
and then, if properly taken care of, the drawing would be almost
imperishable. Still, paper is a much more convenient material for rapid
work; and it is an infinite absurdity not to secure the goodness of its
quality, when we could do so without the slightest trouble. Among the
many favours which I am going to ask from our paternal government, when
we get it, will be that it will supply its little boys with good paper.
You have nothing to do but to let the government establish a paper
manufactory, under the superintendence of any of our leading chemists,
who should be answerable for the safety and completeness of all the
processes of the manufacture. The government stamp on the corner of your
sheet of drawing-paper, made in the perfect way, should cost you a
shilling, which would add something to the revenue; and when you bought
a water-colour drawing for fifty or a hundred guineas, you would have
merely to look in the corner for your stamp, and pay your extra shilling
for the security that your hundred guineas were given really for a
drawing, and not for a coloured rag. There need be no monopoly or
restriction in the matter; let the paper manufacturers compete with the
government, and if people liked to save their shilling, and take their
chance, let them; only, the artist and purchaser might then be sure of
good material, if they liked, and now they cannot be.
44. I should like also to have a government colour manufactory; though
that is not so necessary, as the quality of colour is more within the
artist's power of testing, and I have no doubt that any painter may get
permanent colour from the respectable manufacturers, if he chooses. I
will not attempt to follow the subject out at all as it respects
architecture, and our methods of modern building; respecting which I
have had occasion to speak before now.
45. But I cannot pass without some brief notice our habit--continually,
as it seems to me, gaining strength--of putting a large quantity of
thought and work, annually, into things which are either in their nature
necessarily perishable, as dress; or else into compliances with the
fashion of the day, in things not necessarily perishable, as plate. I am
afraid almost the first idea of a young rich couple setting up house in
London, is, that they must have new plate. Their father's plate may be
very handsome, but the fashion is changed. They will have a new service
from the leading manufacturer, and the old plate, except a few apostle
spoons, and a cup which Charles the Second drank a health in to their
pretty ancestress, is sent to be melted down, and made up with new
flourishes and fresh lustre. Now, so long as this is the case--so long,
observe, as fashion has influence on the manufacture of plate--so long
_you cannot have a goldsmith's art in this country_. Do you suppose any
workman worthy the name will put his brains into a cup, or an urn, which
he knows is to go to the melting-pot in half a score years? He will not;
you don't ask or expect it of him. You ask of him nothing but a little
quick handicraft--a clever twist of a handle here, and a foot there, a
convolvulus from the newest school of design, a pheasant from Landseer's
game cards; a couple of sentimental figures for supporters, in the style
of the signs of insurance offices, then a clever touch with the
burnisher, and there's your epergne, the admiration of all the footmen
at the wedding-breakfast, and the torment of some unfortunate youth who
cannot see the pretty girl opposite to him, through its tyrannous
branches.
46. But you don't suppose that _that's_ goldsmith's work? Goldsmith's
work is made to last, and made with the men's whole heart and soul in
it; true goldsmith's work, when it exists, is generally the means of
education of the greatest painters and sculptors of the day. Francia was
a goldsmith; Francia was not his own name, but that of his master the
jeweller; and he signed his pictures almost always, "Francia, the
goldsmith," for love of his master; Ghirlandajo was a goldsmith, and was
the master of Michael Angelo; Verrocchio was a goldsmith, and was the
master of Leonardo da Vinci. Ghiberti was a goldsmith, and beat out the
bronze gates which Michael Angelo said might serve for gates of
Paradise.[7] But if ever you want work like theirs again, you must keep
it, though it should have the misfortune to become old-fashioned. You
must not break it up, nor melt it any more. There is no economy in that;
you could not easily waste intellect more grievously. Nature may melt
her goldsmith's work at every sunset if she chooses; and beat it out
into chased bars again at every sunrise; but you must not. The way to
have a truly noble service of plate, is to keep adding to it, not
melting it. At every marriage, and at every birth, get a new piece of
gold or silver if you will, but with noble workmanship on it, done for
all time, and put it among your treasures; that is one of the chief
things which gold was made for, and made incorruptible for. When we know
a little more of political economy, we shall find that none but
partially savage nations need, imperatively, gold for their currency;[8]
but gold has been given us, among other things, that we might put
beautiful work into its imperishable splendour, and that the artists who
have the most wilful fancies may have a material which will drag out,
and beat out, as their dreams require, and will hold itself together
with fantastic tenacity, whatever rare and delicate service they set it
upon.
[Note 7: Several reasons may account for the fact that goldsmith's
work is so wholesome for young artists: first, that it gives great
firmness of hand to deal for some time with a solid substance; again,
that it induces caution and steadiness--a boy trusted with chalk and
paper suffers an immediate temptation to scrawl upon it and play with
it, but he dares not scrawl on gold, and he cannot play with it; and,
lastly, that it gives great delicacy and precision of touch to work upon
minute forms, and to aim at producing richness and finish of design
correspondent to the preciousness of the material.]
[Note 8: See note in Addenda on the nature of property.]
47. So here is one branch of decorative art in which rich people may
indulge themselves unselfishly; if they ask for good art in it, they may
be sure in buying gold and silver plate that they are enforcing useful
education on young artists. But there is another branch of decorative
art in which I am sorry to say we cannot, at least under existing
circumstances, indulge ourselves, with the hope of doing good to
anybody: I mean the great and subtle art of dress.
48. And here I must interrupt the pursuit of our subject for a moment or
two, in order to state one of the principles of political economy,
which, though it is, I believe, now sufficiently understood and asserted
by the leading masters of the science, is not yet, I grieve to say,
acted upon by the plurality of those who have the management of riches.
Whenever we spend money, we of course set people to work: that is the
meaning of spending money; we may, indeed, lose it without employing
anybody; but, whenever we spend it, we set a number of people to work,
greater or less, of course, according to the rate of wages, but, in the
long run, proportioned to the sum we spend. Well, your shallow people,
because they see that however they spend money they are always employing
somebody, and, therefore, doing some good, think and say to themselves,
that it is all one _how_ they spend it--that all their apparently
selfish luxury is, in reality, unselfish, and is doing just as much
good as if they gave all their money away, or perhaps more good; and I
have heard foolish people even declare it as a principle of political
economy, that whoever invented a new want[9] conferred a good on the
community. I have not words strong enough--at least, I could not,
without shocking you, use the words which would be strong enough--to
express my estimate of the absurdity and the mischievousness of this
popular fallacy. So, putting a great restraint upon myself, and using no
hard words, I will simply try to state the nature of it, and the extent
of its influence.
[Note 9: See note 5th, in Addenda.]
49. Granted, that whenever we spend money for whatever purpose, we set
people to work; and passing by, for the moment, the question whether the
work we set them to is all equally healthy and good for them, we will
assume that whenever we spend a guinea we provide an equal number of
people with healthy maintenance for a given time. But, by the way in
which we spend it, we entirely direct the labour of those people during
that given time. We become their masters or mistresses, and we compel
them to produce, within a certain period, a certain article. Now, that
article may be a useful and lasting one, or it may be a useless and
perishable one--it may be one useful to the whole community, or useful
only to ourselves. And our selfishness and folly, or our virtue and
prudence, are shown, not by our spending money, but by our spending it
for the wrong or the right thing; and we are wise and kind, not in
maintaining a certain number of people for a given period, but only in
requiring them to produce during that period, the kind of things which
shall be useful to society, instead of those which are only useful to
ourselves.