(Athena in the Heart.)

“Athena the worker, or having rule over work.”  The name was first give to her by the Athenians.

VARIOUS NOTES RELATING TO THE CONCEPTION OF ATHENA AS THE DIRECTRESS OF THE IMAGINATION AND WILL.

101.  I have now only a few words to say, bearing on what seems to me present need, respecting the third function of Athena, conceived as the directress of human passion, resolution, and labor.

Few words, for I am not yet prepared to give accurate distinction between the intellectual rule of Athena and that of the Muses; but, broadly, the Muses, with their king, preside over meditative, historical, and poetic arts, whose end is the discovery of light or truth, and the creation of beauty; but Athena rules over moral passion, and practically useful art.  She does not make men learned, but prudent and subtle; she does not teach them to make their work beautiful, but to make it right.

In different places of my writings, and though many years of endeavor to define the laws of art, I have insisted on this rightness in work, and on its connection with virtue of character, in so many partial ways, that the impression left on the reader’s mind ­if, indeed, it was ever impressed at all ­has been confused and uncertain.  In beginning the series of my corrected works, I wish this principle (in my own mind the foundation of every other) to be made plain, if nothing else is; and will try, therefore, to make it so, as far as, by any effort, I can put it into unmistakable words.  And, at first, here is a very simple statement of it, given lately in a lecture on the Architecture of the Valley of the Somme, which will be better read in this place than in its incidental connection with my account of the porches of Abbeville.

102.  I had used, in a preceding part of the lecture, the expression, “by what faults” this Gothic architecture fell.  We continually speak thus of works of art.  We talk of their faults and merits, as of virtues and vices.  What do we mean by talking of the faults of a picture, or the merits of a piece of stone?

The faults of a work of art are the faults of its workman, and its virtues his virtues.

Great art is the expression of the mind of a great man, and mean art, that of the want of mind of a weak man.  A foolish person builds foolishly, and a wise one, sensibly; a virtuous one, beautifully; and a vicious one, basely.  If stone work is well put together, it means that a thoughtful man planned it, and a careful man cut it, and an honest man cemented it.  If it has too much ornament, it means that its carver was too greedy of pleasure; if too little, that he was rude, or insensitive, or stupid, and the like.  So that when once you have learned how to spell these most precious of all legends, ­pictures and buildings, ­you may read the characters of men, and of nations, in their art, as in a mirror; nay, as in a microscope, and magnified a hundredfold; for the character becomes passionate in the art, and intensifies itself in all its noblest or meanest delights.  Nay, not only as in a microscope, but as under a scalpel, and in dissection; for a man may hide himself from you, or misrepresent himself to you every other way; but he cannot in his work:  there, be sure, you have him to the inmost.  All that he likes, all that he sees, ­all that he can do, ­his imagination, his affections, his perseverance, his impatience, his clumsiness, cleverness, everything is there.  If the work is a cobweb, you know it was made by a spider; if a honey-comb, by a bee; a wormcast is thrown up by a worm, and a nest wreathed by a bird; and a house built by a man, worthily, if he is worthy, and ignobly if he is ignoble.

And always, from the least to the greatest, as the made thing is good or bad, so is the maker of it.

103.  You will use this faculty of judgment more or less, whether you theoretically admit the principle or not.  Take that floral gable; you don’t suppose the man who built Stonehenge could have built that, or that the man who built that, would have built Stonehenge?  Do you think an old Roman would have liked such a piece of filigree work? or that Michael Angelo would have spent his time in twisting these stems of roses in and out?  Or, of modern handicraftsmen, do you think a burglar, or a brute, or a pickpocket could have carved it?  Could Bill Sykes have done it? or the Dodger, dexterous with finger and tool?  You will find in the end, that no man could have done it but exactly the man who did it; and by looking close at it, you may, if you know your letters, read precisely the manner of man he was.

The elaborate pendiment above the central porch at the west end of Rouen Cathedral, pierced into a transparent web of tracery, and enriched with a border of “twisted eglantine.”

104.  Now I must insist on this matter, for a grave reason.  Of all facts concerning art, this is the one most necessary to be known, that, while manufacture is the work of hands only, art is the work of the whole spirit of man; and as that spirit is, so is the deed of it; and by whatever power of vice or virtue any art is produced, the same vice or virtue it reproduces and teaches.  That which is born of evil begets evil; and that which is born of valor and honor, teaches valor and honor.  All art is either infection or education.  It must be one or other of these.

105.  This, I repeat, of all truths respecting art, is the one of which understanding is the most precious, and denial the most deadly.  And I assert it the more, because it has of late been repeatedly, expressly, and with contumely, denied, and that by high authority; and I hold it one of the most sorrowful facts connected with the decline of the arts among us, that English gentlemen, of high standing as scholars and artists, should have been blinded into the acceptance, and betrayed into the assertion of a fallacy which only authority such as theirs could have rendered for an instant credible.  For the contrary of it is written in the history of all great nations; it is the one sentence always inscribed on the steps of their thrones; the one concordant voice in which they speak to us out of their dust.

All such nations first manifest themselves as a pure and beautiful animal race, with intense energy and imagination.  They live lives of hardship by choice, and by grand instinct of manly discipline; they become fierce and irresistible soldiers; the nation is always its own army, and their king, or chief head of government, is always their first soldier.  Pharaoh, or David, or Leonidas, or Valerius, or Barbarossa, or Coeur de Lion, or St. Louis, or Dandalo, or Frederick the Great, ­Egyptian, Jew, Greek, Roman, German, English, French, Venetian, ­that is inviolable law for them all; their king must be their first soldier, or they cannot be in progressive power.  Then, after their great military period, comes the domestic period; in which, without betraying the discipline of war, they add to their great soldiership the delights and possessions of a delicate and tender home-life; and then, for all nations, is the time of their perfect art, which is the fruit, the evidence, the reward of their national idea of character, developed by the finished care of the occupations of peace.  That is the history of all true art that ever was, or can be; palpably the history of it, ­unmistakably, ­written on the forehead of it in letters of light, ­in tongues of fire, by which the seal of virtue is branded as deep as ever iron burnt into a convict’s flesh the seal of crime.  But always, hitherto, after the great period, has followed the day of luxury, and pursuit of the arts for pleasure only.  And all has so ended.

106.  Thus far of Abbeville building.  Now I have here asserted two things, ­first, the foundation of art in moral character; next, the foundation of moral character in war.  I must make both these assertions clearer, and prove them.

First, of the foundation of art in moral character.  Of course art-gift and amiability of disposition are two different things; for a good man is not necessarily a painter, nor does an eye for color necessarily imply an honest mind.  But great art implies the union of both powers; it is the expression, by an art-gift, of a pure soul.  If the gift is not there, we can have no art at all; and if the soul ­and a right soul too ­ is not there, the art is bad, however dexterous.

107.  But also, remember, that the art-gift itself is only the result of the moral character of generations.  A bad woman may have a sweet voice; but that sweetness of voice comes of the past morality of her race.  That she can sing with it at all, she owes to the determination of laws of music by the morality of the past.  Every act, every impulse, of virtue and vice, affects in any creature, face, voice, nervous power, and vigor and harmony of invention, at once.  Perseverance in rightness of human conduct renders, after a certain number of generations, human art possible; every sin that clouds it, be it ever so little a one; and persistent vicious living and following of pleasure render, after a certain number of generations, all art impossible.  Men are deceived by the long-suffering of the laws of nature, and mistake, in a nation, the reward of the virtue of its sires, for the issue of its own sins.  The time of their visitation will come, and that inevitably; for, it is always true, that if the fathers have eaten sour grapes, the children’s teeth are set on edge.  And for the individual, as soon as you have learned to read, you may, as I said, know him to the heart’s core, through his art.  Let his art-gift be never so great, and cultivated to the height by the schools of a great race of men, and it is still but a tapestry thrown over his own being and inner soul; and the bearing of it will show, infallibly, whether it hangs on a man or on a skeleton.  If you are dim-eyed, you may not see the difference in the fall of the folds at first, but learn how to look, and the folds themselves will become transparent, and you shall see through them the death’s shape, or the divine one, making the tissue above it as a cloud of right, or as a winding-sheet.

108.  Then further, observe, I have said (and you will find it true, and that to the uttermost) that, as all lovely art is rooted in virtue, so it bares fruit of virtue, and is didactic in its own nature.  It is often didactic also in actually expressed thought, as Giotto’s, Michael Angelo’s, Duerer’s, and hundreds more; but that is not its special function; it is didactic chiefly by being beautiful; but beautiful with haunting thought, no less than with form, and full of myths that can be read only with the heart.

For instance, at this moment there is open beside me as I write, a page of Persian manuscript, wrought with wreathed azure and gold, and soft green, and violet, and ruby and scarlet, into one field of pure resplendence.  It is wrought to delight the eyes only; and does delight them; and the man who did it assuredly had eyes in his head; but not much more.  It is not didactic art, but its author was happy; and it will do the good, and the harm, that mere pleasure can do.  But, opposite me, is an early Turner drawing of the lake of Geneva, taken about two miles from Geneva, on the Lausanne road, with Mont Blanc in the distance.  The old city is seen lying beyond the waveless waters, veiled with a sweet misty veil of Athena’s weaving; a faint light of morning, peaceful exceedingly, and almost colorless, shed from behind the Voirons, increases into soft amber along the slope of the Saleve, and is just seen, and no more, on the fair warm fields of its summit, between the folds of a white cloud that rests upon the grass, but rises, high and tower-like, into the zenith of dawn above.

109.  There is not as much color in that low amber light upon the hillside as there is in the palest dead leaf.  The lake is not blue, but gray in mist, passing into deep shadow beneath the Voirons’ pines; a few dark clusters of leaves, a single white flower ­scarcely seen ­are all the gladness given to the rocks of the shore.  One of the ruby spots of the eastern manuscript would give color enough for all the red that is in Turner’s entire drawing.  For the mere pleasure of the eye, there is not so much in all those lines of his, throughout the entire landscape, as in half an inch square of the Persian’s page.  What made him take pleasure in the low color that is only like the brown of a dead leaf? in the cold gray of dawn ­in the one white flower among the rocks ­in these ­and no more than these?

110.  He took pleasure in them because he had been bred among English fields and hills; because the gentleness of a great race was in his heart, and its powers of thought in his brain; because he knew the stories of the Alps, and of the cities at their feet; because he had read the Homeric legends of the clouds, and beheld the gods of dawn, and the givers of dew to the fields; because he knew the faces of the crags, and the imagery of the passionate mountains, as a man knows the face of his friend; because he had in him the wonder and sorrow concerning life and death, which are the inheritance of the Gothic soul from the days of its first sea kings; and also the compassion and the joy that are woven into the innermost fabric of every great imaginative spirit, born now in countries that have lived by the Christian faith with any courage or truth.  And the picture contains also, for us, just this which its maker had in him to give; and can convey it to us, just so far as we are of the temper in which it must be received.  It is didactic if we are worthy to be taught, not otherwise.  The pure heart, it will make more pure; the thoughtful, more thoughtful.  It has in it no words for the reckless or the base.

111.  As I myself look at it, there is no fault nor folly of my life ­and both have been many and great ­that does not rise up against me, and take away my joy, and shorten my power of possession of sight, of understanding.  And every past effort of my life, every gleam of rightness or good in it, is with me now, to help me in my grasp of this art, and its vision.  So far as I can rejoice in, or interpret either, my power is owing to what of right there is in me.  I dare to say it, that, because through all my life I have desired good, and not evil; because I have been kind to many; have wished to be kind to all; have wilfully injured none; and because I have loved much, and not selfishly; therefore, the morning light is yet visible to me on those hills, and you, who read, may trust my thought and word in such work as I have to do for you; and you will be glad afterwards that you have trusted them.

112.  Yet, remember, ­I repeat it again and yet again, ­that I may for once, if possible, make this thing assuredly clear:  the inherited art-gift must be there, as well as the life in some poor measure, or rescued fragment, right.  This art-gift of mine could not have been won by any work or by any conduct:  it belongs to me by birthright, and came by Athena’s will, from the air of English country villages, and Scottish hills.  I will risk whatever charge of folly may come on me, for printing one of my many childish rhymes, written on a frosty day in Glen Farg, just north of Loch Leven.  It bears date 1st January, 1828.  I was born on the 8th of February, 1819; and al that I ever could be, and all that I cannot be, the weak little rhyme already shows.

“Papa, how pretty those icicles are,
That are seen so near, ­that are seen so far;
­Those dropping waters that come from the rocks
And many a hole, like the haunt of a fox. 
That silvery stream that runs babbling along,
Making a murmuring, dancing song. 
Those trees that stand waving upon the rock’s side,
And men, that, like specters, among them glide. 
And waterfalls that are heard from far,
And come in sight when very near. 
And the water-wheel that turns slowly round,
Grinding the corn that ­requires to be ground, ­

(Political Economy of the future!)

­And mountains at a distance seen,
And rivers winding through the plain,
And quarries with their craggy stones,
And the wind among them moans.”

So foretelling Stones of Venice, and this essay on Athena.

Enough now concerning myself.

113.  Of Turner’s life, and of its good and evil, both great, but the good immeasurably the greater, his work is in all things a perfect and transparent evidence.  His biography is simply, “He did this, nor will ever another do its like again.”  Yet read what I have said of him, as compared with the great Italians, in the passages taken from the “Cestus of Aglaia,” farther on, se, pp. 164, 165.

114.  This, then, is the nature of the connection between morals and art.  Now, secondly, I have asserted the foundation of both these, at least hitherto, in war.  The reason of this too manifest fact is, that, until now it has been impossible for any nation, except a warrior one, to fix its mind wholly on its men, instead of their possessions.  Every great soldier nation thinks, necessarily, first of multiplying its bodies and souls of men, in good temper and strict discipline.  As long as this is its political aim, it does not matter what it temporarily suffers, or loses, either in numbers or in wealth; its morality and its arts (if it have national art-gift) advance together; but so soon as it ceases to be a warrior nation, it thinks of its possessions instead of its men; and then the moral and poetic powers vanish together.

115.  It is thus, however, absolutely necessary to the virtue of war that it should be waged by personal strength, not by money or machinery.  A nation that fights with a mercenary force, or with torpedoes instead of its own arms, is dying.  Not but that there is more true courage in modern than even in ancient war; but this is, first, because all the remaining life of European nations is with a morbid intensity thrown into their soldiers; and, secondly, because their present heroism is the culmination of centuries of inbred and traditional valor, which Athena taught them by forcing them to govern the foam of the sea-wave and of the horse, ­not the steam of kettles.

116.  And further, note this, which is vital to us in the present crisis:  If war is to be made by money and machinery, the nation which is the largest and most covetous multitude will win.  You may be as scientific as you choose; the mob that can pay more for sulphuric acid and gunpowder will at last poison its bullets, throw acid in your faces, and make an end of you; of itself, also, in good time, but of you first.  And to the English people the choice of its fate is very near now.  It may spasmodically defend its property with iron walls a fathom thick, a few years longer ­a very few.  No walls will defend either it, or its havings, against the multitude that is breeding and spreading faster than the clouds, over the habitable earth.  We shall be allowed to live by small pedler’s business, and iron-mongery ­since we have chosen those for our line of life ­as long as we are found useful black servants to the Americans, and are content to dig coals and sit in the cinders; and have still coals to dig, ­they once exhausted, or got cheaper elsewhere, we shall be abolished.  But if we think more wisely, while there is yet time, and set our minds again on multiplying Englishmen, and not on cheapening English wares, if we resolve to submit to wholesome laws of labor and economy, and setting our political squabbles aside, try how many strong creatures, friendly and faithful to each other, we can crowd into every spot of English dominion, neither poison nor iron will prevail against us; nor traffic, nor hatred; the noble nation will yet, by the grace of heaven, rule over the ignoble, and force of heart hold its own against fireballs.

117.  But there is yet a further reason for the dependence of the arts on war.  The vice and injustice of the world are constantly springing anew, and are only to be subdued by battle; the keepers of order and law must always be soldiers.  And now, going back to the myth of Athena, we see that though she is first a warrior maid, she detests war for its own sake; she arms Achilles and Ulysses in just quarrels, but she disarms Ares.  She contends, herself, continually against disorder and convulsion, in the earth giants; she stands by Hercules’ side in victory over all monstrous evil; in justice only she judges and makes war.  But in this war of hers she is wholly implacable.  She has little notion of converting criminals.  There is no faculty of mercy in her when she has been resisted.  Her word is only, “I will mock when your fear cometh.”  Note the words that follow:  “when your fear cometh as desolation, and your destruction as a whirlwind;” for her wrath is of irresistible tempest:  once roused, it is blind and deaf, ­rabies ­madness of anger ­ darkness of the Dies Irae.

And that is, indeed, the sorrowfullest fact we have to know about our own several lives.  Wisdom never forgives.  Whatever resistance we have offered to her loaw, she avenges forever; the lost hour can never be redeemed, and the accomplished wrong never atoned for.  The best that can be done afterwards, but for that, had been better; the falsest of all the cries of peace, where there is no peace, is that of the pardon of sin, as the mob expect it.  Wisdom can “put away” sin, but she cannot pardon it; and she is apt, in her haste, to put away the sinner as well, when the black aegis is on her breast.

118.  And this is also a fact we have to know about our national life, that it is ended as soon as it has lost the power of noble Anger.  When it paints over, and apologizes for its pitiful criminalities; and endures its false weights, and its adulterated food; dares not to decide practically between good and evil, and can neither honor the one, nor smite the other, but sneers at the good, as if it were hidden evil, and consoles the evil with pious sympathy, and conserves it in the sugar of its leaden heart, ­the end is come.

119.  The first sign, then, of Athena’s presence with any people is that they become warriors, and that the chief thought of every man of them is to stand rightly in his rank, and not fail from his brother’s side in battle.  Wealth, and pleasure, and even love, are all, under Athena’s orders, sacrificed to this duty of standing fast in the rank of war.

But further:  Athena presides over industry, as well as battle; typically, over women’s industry; that brings comfort with pleasantness.  Her word to us all is:  “Be well exercised, and rightly clothed.  Clothed, and in your right minds; not insane and in rags, nor in soiled fine clothes clutched from each other’s shoulders.  Fight and weave.  Then I myself will answer for the course of the lance, and the colors of the loom.”

And now I will ask the reader to look with some care through these following passages respecting modern multitudes and their occupations, written long ago, but left in fragmentary form, in which they must now stay, and be of what use they can.

120.  It is not political economy to put a number of strong men down on an acre of ground, with no lodging, and nothing to eat.  Nor is it political economy to build a city on good ground, and fill it with store of corn and treasure, and put a score of lepers to live in it.  Political economy creates together the means of life, and the living persons who are to use them; and of both, the best and the most that it can, but imperatively the best, not the most.  A few good and healthy men, rather than a multitude of diseased rogues; and a little real milk and wine rather than much chalk and petroleum; but the gist of the whole business is that the men and their property must both be produced together ­not one to the loss of the other.  Property must not be created in lands desolate by exile of their people, nor multiplied and depraved humanity, in lands barren of bread.

121.  Nevertheless, though the men and their possessions are to be increased at the same time, the first object of thought is always to be the multiplication of a worthy people.  The strength of the nation is in its multitude, not in its territory; but only in its sound multitude.  It is one thing, both in a man and a nation, to gain flesh, and another to be swollen with putrid humors.  Not that multitude ever ought to be inconsistent with virtue.  Two men should be wiser than one, and two thousand than two; nor do I know another so gross fallacy in the records of human stupidity as that excuse for neglect of crime by greatness of cities.  As if the first purpose of congregation were not to devise laws and repress crimes!  As if bees and wasps could live honestly in flocks ­ men, only in separate dens!  As if it were easy to help one another on the opposite sides of a mountain, and impossible on the opposite sides of a street!  But when the men are true and good, and stand shoulder to shoulder, the strength of any nation is in its quantity of life, not in its land nor gold.  The more good men a state has, in proportion to its territory, the stronger the state.  And as it has been the madness of economists to seek for gold instead of life, so it has been the madness of kings to seek for land instead of life.  They want the town on the other side of the river, and seek it at the spear point; it never enters their stupid heads that to double the honest souls in the town on this side of the river would make them stronger kings; and that this doubling might be done by the ploughshare instead of the spear, and through happiness instead of misery.

Therefore, in brief, this is the only object of all true policy and true economy:  “utmost multitude of good men on every given space of ground” ­ imperatively always good, sound, honest men, ­not a mob of white-faced thieves.  So that, on the one hand all aristocracy is wrong which is inconsistent with numbers; and on the other all numbers are wrong which are inconsistent with breeding.

122.  Then, touching the accumulation of wealth for the maintenance of such men, observe, that you must never use the terms “money” and “wealth” as synonymous.  Wealth consists of the good, and therefore useful, things in the possession of the nation; money is only the written or coined sign of the relative quantities of wealth in each person’s possession.  All money is a divisible title-deed, of immense importance as an expression of right to property, but absolutely valueless as property itself.  Thus, supposing a nation isolated from all others, the money in its possession is, at its maximum value, worth all the property of the nation, and no more, because no more can be got for it.  And the money of all nations is worth, at its maximum, the property of all nations, and no more, for no more can be got for it.  Thus, every article of property produced increases, by its value, the value of all the money in the world, and every article of property destroyed, diminishes the value of all the money in the world.  If ten men are cast away on a rock, with a thousand pounds in their pockets, and there is on the rock, neither food nor shelter, their money is worth simply nothing, for nothing is to be had for it.  If they built ten huts, and recover a cask of biscuit from the wreck, then their thousand pounds, at its maximum value, is worth ten huts and a cask of biscuit.  If they make their thousand pounds into two thousand by writing new notes, their two thousand pounds are still worth ten huts and a cask of biscuit.  And the law of relative value is the same for all the world, and all the people in it, and all their property, as for ten men on a rock.  Therefore, money is truly and finally lost in the degree in which its value is taken from it (ceasing in that degree to be money at all); and it is truly gained in the degree in which value is added to it.  Thus, suppose the money coined by the nation be a fixed sum, and divided very minutely (say into francs and cents), and neither to be added to nor diminished.  Then every grain of food and inch of lodging added to its possessions makes every cent in its pockets worth proportionally more, and every gain of food it consumes, and inch of roof it allows to fall to ruin, makes every cent in its pockets worth less; and this with mathematical precision.  The immediate value of the money at particular times and places depends, indeed, on the humors of the possessors of property; but the nation is in the one case gradually getting richer, and will feel the pressure of poverty steadily everywhere relaxing, whatever the humors of individuals may be; and, in the other case, is gradually growing poorer, and the pressure of its poverty will every day tell more and more, in ways that it cannot explain, but will most bitterly feel.

123.  The actual quantity of money which it coins, in relation to its real property, is therefore only of consequence for convenience of exchange; but the proportion in which this quantity of money is divided among individuals expresses their various rights to greater or less proportions of the national property, and must not, therefore, be tampered with.  The government may at any time, with perfect justice, double its issue of coinage, if it gives every man who has ten pounds in his pocket another ten pounds, and every man who had ten pence another ten pence; for it thus does not make any of them richer; it merely divides their counters for them into twice the number.  But if it gives the newly-issued coins to other people, or keeps them itself, it simply robs the former holders to precisely that extent.  This most important function of money, as a title-deed, on the non-violation of which all national soundness of commerce and peace of life depend, has been never rightly distinguished by economists from the quite unimportant function of money as a means of exchange.  You can exchange goods ­at some inconvenience, indeed, but you can still contrive to do it ­without money at all; but you cannot maintain your claim to the savings of your past life without a document declaring the amount of them, which the nation and its government will respect.

124.  And as economists have lost sight of this great function of money in relation to individual rights, so they have equally lost sight of its function as a representative of good things.  That, for every good thing produced, so much money is put into everybody’s pocket, is the one simple and primal truth for the public to know, and for economists to teach.  How many of them have taught it?  Some have; but only incidentally; and others will say it is a truism.  If it be, do the public know it?  Does your ordinary English householder know that every costly dinner he gives has destroyed forever as much money as it is worth?  Does every well-educated girl ­do even the women in high political position ­know that every fine dress they wear themselves, or cause to be worn, destroys precisely so much of the national money as the labor and material of it are worth?  If this be a truism, it is one that needs proclaiming somewhat louder.

125.  That, then, is the relation of money and goods.  So much goods, so much money; so little goods, so little money.  But, as there is this true relation between money and “goods,” or good things, so there is a false relation between money and “bads,” or bad things.  Many bad things will fetch a price in exchange; but they do not increase the wealth of the country.  Good wine is wealth, drugged wine is not; good meat is wealth, putrid meat is not; good pictures are wealth, bad pictures are not.  A thing is worth precisely what it can do for you; not what you choose to pay for it.  You may pay a thousand pounds for a cracked pipkin, if you please; but you do not by that transaction make the cracked pipkin worth one that will hold water, nor that, nor any pipkin whatsoever, worth more than it was before you paid such sum for it.  You may, perhaps, induce many potters to manufacture fissured pots, and many amateurs of clay to buy them; but the nation is, through the whole business so encouraged, rich by the addition to its wealth of so many potsherds, ­and there an end.  The thing is worth what it can do for you, not what you think it can; and most national luxuries, nowadays, are a form of potsherd, provided for the solace of a self-complacent Job, voluntary sedent on his ash-heap.

126.  And, also, so far as good things already exist, and have become media of exchange, the variations in their prices are absolutely indifferent to the nation.  Whether Mr. A. buys a Titian from Mr. B. for twenty, or for two thousand, pounds, matters not sixpence to the national revenue; that is to say, it matters in nowise to the revenue whether Mr. A. has the picture, and Mr. B. the money, or Mr. B. the picture, and Mr. A. the money.  Which of them will spend the money most wisely, and which of them will keep the picture most carefully, is, indeed, a matter of some importance; but this cannot be known by the mere fact of exchange.

127.  The wealth of a nation then, first, and its peace and well-being besides, depend on the number of persons it can employ in making good and useful things.  I say its well-being also, for the character of men depends more on their occupations than on any teaching we can give them, or principles with which we can imbue them.  The employment forms the habits of body and mind, and these are the constitution of the man, ­the greater part of his moral or persistent nature, whatever effort, under special excitement, he may make to change or overcome them.  Employment is the half, and the primal half, of education ­it is the warp of it; and the fineness or the endurance of all subsequently woven pattern depends wholly on its straightness and strength.  And, whatever difficulty there may be in tracing through past history the remoter connections of event and cause, one chain of sequence is always clear:  the formation, namely, of the character of nations by their employments, and the determination of their final fate by their character.  The moment, and the first direction of decisive revolutions, often depend on accident; but their persistent course, and their consequences, depend wholly on the nature of the people.  The passing of the Reform Bill by the late English Parliament may have been more or less accidental; the results of the measure now rest on the character of the English people, as it has been developed by their recent interests, occupations, and habits of life.  Whether, as a body, they employ their new powers for good or evil will depend, not on their facilities of knowledge, nor even on the general intelligence they may possess, but on the number of persons among them whom wholesome employments have rendered familiar with the duties, and modest in their estimate of the promises, of life.

128.  But especially in framing laws respecting the treatment or employment of improvident and more or less vicious persons, it is to be remembered that as men are not made heroes by the performance of an act of heroism, but must be brave before they can perform it, so they are not made villains by the commission of a crime, but were villains before they committed it; and the right of public interference with their conduct begins when they begin to corrupt themselves, ­not merely at the moment when they have proved themselves hopelessly corrupt.

All measures of reformation are effective in exact proportion to their timeliness:  partial decay may be cut away and cleansed; incipient error corrected; but there is a point at which corruption can be no more stayed, nor wandering recalled.  It has been the manner of modern philanthropy to remain passive until that precise period, and to leave the sick to perish, and the foolish to stray, while it spends itself in frantic exertions to raise the dead, and reform the dust.

The recent direction of a great weight of public opinion against capital punishment is, I trust, the sign of an awakening perception that punishment is the last and worst instrument in the hands of the legislator for the prevention of crime.  The true instruments of reformation are employment and reward; not punishment.  Aid the willing, honour the virtuous, and compel the idle into occupation, and there will be no deed for the compelling of any into the great and last indolence of death.

129.  The beginning of all true reformation among the criminal classes depends on the establishment of institutions for their active employment, while their criminality is still unripe, and their feelings of self-respect, capacities of affection, and sense of justice, not altogether quenched.  That those who are desirous of employment should always be able to find it, will hardly, at the present day, be disputed; but that those who are undesirous of employment should of all persons be the most strictly compelled to it, the public are hardly yet convinced; and they must be convinced.  If the danger of the principal thoroughfares in their capital city, and the multiplication of crimes more ghastly than ever yet disgraced a nominal civilization, are not enough, they will not have to wait long before they receive sterner lessons.  For our neglect of the lower orders has reached a point at which it begins to bear its necessary fruit, and every day makes the fields, not whiter, but more stable, to harvest.

130.  The general principles by which employment should be regulated may be briefly stated as follows: 

I. There being three great classes of mechanical powers at our disposal, namely, (a) vital or muscular power; (b) natural mechanical power of wind, water, and electricity; and (c) artificially produced mechanical power; it is the first principle of economy to use all available vital power first, then the inexpensive natural forces, and only at last have recourse to artificial power.  And this because it is always better for a man to work with his own hands to feed and clothe himself, than to stand idle while a machine works for him; and if he cannot by all the labor healthily possible to him feed and clothe himself, then it is better to use an inexpensive machine ­as a windmill or watermill ­than a costly one like a steam-engine, so long as we have natural force enough at our disposal.  Whereas at present we continually hear economists regret that the water-power of the cascades or streams of a country should be lost, but hardly ever that the muscular power of its idle inhabitants should be lost; and, again, we see vast districts, as the south of Provence, where a strong wind blows steadily all day long for six days out of seven throughout the year, without a windmill, while men are continually employed at a hundred miles to the north, in digging fuel to obtain artificial power.  But the principal point of all to be kept in view is, that in every idle arm and shoulder throughout the country there is a certain quantity of force, equivalent to the force of so much fuel; and that it is mere insane waste to dig for coal for our force, while the vital force is unused, and not only unused, but in being so, corrupting and polluting itself.  We waste our coal, and spoil our humanity at one and the same instant.  Therefore, wherever there is an idle arm, always save coal with it, and the stores of England will last all the longer.  And precisely the same argument answers the common one about “taking employment out of the hands of the industrious laborer.”  Why, what is “employment” but the putting out of vital force instead of mechanical force?  We are continually in search of means to pull, to hammer, to fetch, to carry.  We waste our future resources to get this strength, while we leave all the living fuel to burn itself out in mere pestiferous breath, and production of its variously noisome forms of ashes!  Clearly, if we want fire for force, we want men for force first.  The industrious hands must already have so much to do that they can do no more, or else we need not use machines to help them.  Then use the idle hands first.  Instead of dragging petroleum with a steam-engine, put it on a canal, and drag it with human arms and shoulders.  Petroluem cannot possibly be in a hurry to arrive anywhere.  We can always order that, and many other things, time enough before we want it.  So, the carriage of everything which does not spoil by keeping may most wholesomely and safely be done by water-traction and sailing-vessels; and no healthier work can men be put to, nor better discipline, than such active porterage.

In order fully to utilize this natural power, we only require machinery to turn the variable into a constant velocity ­no insurmountable difficulty.

131. (2d.) In employing all the muscular power at our disposal we are to make the employments we choose as educational as possible; for a wholesome human employment is the first and best method of education, mental as well as bodily.  A man taught to plough, row, or steer well, and a woman taught to cook properly, and make a dress neatly, are already educated in many essential moral habits.  Labor considered as a discipline has hitherto been thought of only for criminals; but the real and noblest function of labor is to prevent crime, and not to be Reformatory, but Formatory.

132.  The third great principle of employment is, that whenever there is pressure of poverty to be met, all enforced occupation should be directed to the production of useful articles only; that is to say, of food, of simple clothing, of lodging, or of the means of conveying, distributing, and preserving these.  It is yet little understood by economists, and not at all by the public, that the employment of persons in a useless business cannot relieve ultimate distress.  The money given to employ riband-makers at Coventry is merely so much money withdrawn from what would have employed lace-makers at Honiton; or makers of something else, as useless, elsewhere.  We must spend our money in some way, at some time, and it cannot at any time be spent without employing somebody.  If we gamble it away, the person who wins it must spend it; if we lose it in a railroad speculation, it has gone into some one else’s pockets, or merely gone to pay navies for making a useless embankment, instead of to pay riband or button makers for making useless ribands or buttons; we cannot lose it (unless by actually destroying it) without giving employment of some kind; and, therefore, whatever quantity of money exists, the relative quantity of employment must some day come out of it; but the distress of the nation signifies that the employments given have produced nothing that will support its existence.  Men cannot live on ribands, or buttons, or velvet, or by going quickly from place to place; and every coin spent in useless ornament, or useless motion, is so much withdrawn from the national means of life.  One of the most beautiful uses of railroads is to enable A to travel from the town of X to take away the business of B in the town of Y; while, in the mean time, B travels from the town of Y to take away A’s business in the town of X. But the national wealth is not increased by these operations.  Whereas every coin spent in cultivating ground, in repairing lodging, in making necessary and good roads, in preventing danger by sea or land, and in carriage of food or fuel where they are required, is so much absolute and direct gain to the whole nation.  To cultivate land round Coventry makes living easier at Honiton, and every acre of sand gained from the sea in Lincolnshire, makes life easier all over England.

4th, and lastly.  Since for every idle person some one else must be working somewhere to provide him with clothes and food, and doing, therefore, double the quantity of work that would be enough for his own needs, it is only a matter of pure justice to compel the idle person to work for his maintenance himself.  The conscription has been used in many countries to take away laborers who supported their families, from their useful work, and maintain them for purposes chiefly of military display at the public expense.  Since this has been long endured by the most civilized nations, let it not be thought they would not much more gladly endure a conscription which should seize only the vicious and idle, already living by criminal procedures at the public expense; and which should discipline and educate them to labor which would not only maintain themselves, but be serviceable to the commonwealth.  The question is simply this:  we must feed the drunkard, vagabond, and thief; but shall we do so by letting them steal their food, and do no work for it? or shall we give them their food in appointed quantity, and enforce their doing work which shall be worth it, and which, in process of time, will redeem their own characters and make them happy and serviceable members of society?

I find by me a violent little fragment of undelivered lecture, which puts this, perhaps, still more clearly.  Your idle people (it says), as they are now, are not merely waste coal-beds.  They are explosive coal-beds, which you pay a high annual rent for.  You are keeping all these idle persons, remember, at far greater cost than if they were busy.  Do you think a vicious person eats less than an honest one? or that it is cheaper to keep a bad man drunk, than a good man sober?  There is, I suppose, a dim idea in the mind of the public, that they don’t pay for the maintenance of people they don’t employ.  Those staggering rascals at the street corner, grouped around its splendid angle of public-house, we fancy that they are no servants of ours! that we pay them no wages! that no cash out of our pockets is spent over that beer-stained counter!

Whose cash is it then they are spending?  It is not got honestly by work.  You know that much.  Where do they get it from?  Who has paid for their dinner and their pot?  Those fellows can only live in one of two ways ­by pillage or beggary.  Their annual income by thieving comes out of the public pocket, you will admit.  They are not cheaply fed, so far as they are fed by theft.  But the rest of their living ­all that they don’t steal ­they must beg.  Not with success from you, you think.  Wise, as benevolent, you never gave a penny in “indiscriminate charity.”  Well, I congratulate you on the freedom of your conscience from that sin, mine being bitterly burdened with the memory of many a sixpence given to beggars of whom I knew nothing but that they had pale faces and thin waists.  But it is not that kind of street beggary that is the worst beggars’ trade.  Home alms which it is their worst degradation to receive.  Those scamps know well enough that you and your wisdom are worth nothing to them.  They won’t beg of you.  They will beg of their sisters, and mothers, and wives, and children, and of any one else who is enough ashamed of being of the same blood with them to pay to keep them out of sight.  Every one of those blackguards is the bane of a family.  That is the deadly “indiscriminate charity” ­the charity which each household pays to maintain its own private curse.

133.  And you think that is no affair of yours? and that every family ought to watch over and subdue its own living plague?  Put it to yourselves this way, then:  suppose you knew every one of those families kept an idol in an inner room ­a big-bellied bronze figure, to which daily sacrifice and oblation was made; at whose feet so much beer and brandy was poured out every morning on the ground; and before which, every night, good meat, enough for two men’s keep, was set, and left, till it was putrid, and then carried out and thrown on the dunghill; you would put an end to that form of idolatry with your best diligence, I suppose.  You would understand then that the beer, and brandy, and meat, were wasted; and that the burden imposed by each household on itself lay heavily through them on the whole community?  But, suppose further, that this idol were not of silent and quiet bronze only, but an ingenious mechanism, wound up every morning, to run itself down into automatic blasphemies; that it struck and tore with its hands the people who set food before it; that it was anointed with poisonous unguents, and infected the air for miles round.  You would interfere with the idolatry then, straightway?  Will you not interfere with it now, when the infection that they venomous idol spreads is not merely death, but sin?

134.  So far the old lecture.  Returning to cool English, the end of the matter is, that, sooner or later, we shall have to register our people; and to know how they live; and to make sure, if they are capable of work, that right work is given them to do.

The different classes of work for which bodies of men could be consistently organized, might ultimately become numerous; these following divisions of occupation may all at once be suggested: 

I. Road-making. ­Good roads to be made, wherever needed, and kept in repair; and the annual loss on unfrequented roads, in spoiled horses, strained wheels, and time, done away with.

II.  Bringing in of waste land. ­All waste lands not necessary for public health, to be made accessible and gradually reclaimed; chiefly our wide and waste seashores.  Not our mountains nor moorland.  Our life depends on them, more than on the best arable we have.

III.  Harbor-making. ­The deficiencies of safe or convenient harborage in our smaller ports to be remedied; other harbors built at dangerous points of coast, and a disciplined body of men always kept in connection with the pilot and life-boat services.  There is room for every order of intelligence in this work, and for a large body of superior officers.

IV.  Porterage. ­All heavy goods, not requiring speed in transit, to be carried (under preventative duty on transit, by railroad) by canal-boats, employing men for draught; and the merchant-shipping service extended by sea; so that no ships may be wrecked for want of hands, while there are idle ones in mischief on shore.

V. Repair of buildings. ­A body of men in various trades to be kept at the disposal of the authorities in every large town, for repair of buildings, especially the houses of the poorer orders, who, if no such provision were made, could not employ workmen on their own houses, but would simply live with rent walls and roofs.

VI.  Dressmaking. ­Substantial dress, of standard material and kind, strong shoes, and stout bedding, to be manufactured for the poor, so as to render it unnecessary for them, unless by extremity of improvidence, to wear cast clothes, or be without sufficiency of clothing.

VII.  Works of Art. ­Schools to be established on thoroughly sound principles of manufacture, and use of materials, and with sample and, for given periods, unalterable modes of work; first, in pottery, and embracing gradually metal work, sculpture, and decorative painting; the two points insisted upon, in distinction from ordinary commercial establishments, being perfectness of material to the utmost attainable degree; and the production of everything by hand-work, for the special purpose of developing personal power and skill in the workman.

The last two departments, and some subordinate branches of others, would include the service of women and children.

I give now, for such further illustrations as they contain of the points I desire most to insist upon with respect both to education and employment, a portion of the series of notes published some time ago in the “Art Journal,” on the opposition of Modesty and Liberty, and the unescapable law of wise restraint.  I am sorry that they are written obscurely ­and it may be thought affectedly; but the fact is, I have always had three different ways of writing:  one, with the single view of making myself understood, in which I necessarily omit a great deal of what comes into my head; another, in which I say what I think ought to be said, in what I suppose to be the best words I can find for it (which is in reality an affected style ­be it good or bad); and my third way of writing is to say all that comes into my head for my own pleasure, in the first words that come, retouching them afterward into (approximate) grammar.  These notes for the “Art Journal” were so written; and I like them myself, of course; but ask the reader’s pardon for their confusedness.

135.  “Sir, it cannot be better done.”

We will insist, with the reader’s permission, on this comfortful saying of Albert Duerer’s in order to find out, if we may, what Modesty is; which it will be well for painters, readers, and especially critics, to know, before going farther.  What it is; or, rather, who she is, her fingers being among the deftest in laying the ground-threads of Aglaia’s cestus.

For this same opinion of Albert’s is entertained by many other people respecting their own doings ­a very prevalent opinion, indeed, I find it; and the answer itself, though rarely made with the Nuremberger’s crushing decision, is nevertheless often enough intimated, with delicacy, by artists of all countries, in their various dialects.  Neither can it always be held an entirely modest one, as it assuredly was in the man who would sometimes estimate a piece of his unconquerable work at only the worth of a plate of fruit, or a flask of wine ­would have taken even one “fig for it,” kindly offered; or given it royally for nothing, to show his hand to a fellow-king of his own, or any other craft ­as Gainsborough gave the “Boy at the Stile” for a solo on the violin.  An entirely modest saying, I repeat, in him ­not always in us.  For Modesty is “the measuring virtue,” the virtue of modes or limits.  She is, indeed, said to be only the third or youngest of the children of the cardinal virtue, Temperance; and apt to be despised, being more given to arithmetic, and other vulgar studies (Cinderella-like), than her elder sisters; but she is useful in the household, and arrives at great results with her yard-measure and slate-pencil ­a pretty little Marchande des Modes, cutting her dress always according to the silk (if this be the proper feminine reading of “coat according to the cloth"), so that, consulting with her carefully of a morning, men get to know not only their income, but their in being ­to know themselves, that is, in a gauger’s manner, round, and up and down ­surface and contents; what is in them and what may be got out of them; and in fine, their entire canon of weight and capacity.  That yard-measure of Modesty’s, lent to those who will use it, is a curious musical reed, and will go round and round waists that are slender enough, with latent melody in every joint of it, the dark root only being soundless, moist from the wave wherein

“Null’ altra pianta che facesse fronda
O che ’n durasse, vi puote aver vita."

“Purgatorio,” , 109.

But when the little sister herself takes it in hand, to measure things outside of us with, the joints shoot out in an amazing manner:  the four-square walls even of celestial cities being measurable enough by that reed; and the way pointed to them, though only to be followed, or even seen, in the dim starlight shed down from worlds amidst which there is no name of Measure any more, though the reality of it always.  For, indeed, to all true modesty the necessary business is not inlook, but outlook, and especially uplook:  it is only her sister Shamefacedness, who is known by the drooping lashes ­Modesty, quite otherwise, by her large eyes full of wonder; for she never contemns herself, nor is ashamed of herself, but forgets herself ­at least until she has done something worth memory.  It is easy to peep and potter about one’s own deficiencies in a quiet immodest discontent; but Modesty is so pleased with other people’s doings, that she has no leisure to lament her own:  and thus, knowing the fresh feeling of contentment, unstained with thought of self, she does not fear being pleased, when there is cause, with her own rightness, as with another’s, as with another’s, saying calmly, “Be it mine or yours, or whose else’s it may, it is no matter; this also is well.”  But the right to say such a thing depends on continual reverence and manifold sense of failure.  If you have known yourself to have failed, you may trust, when it comes, the strange consciousness of success; if you have faithfully loved the noble work of others, you need not fear to speak with respect of things duly done, of your own.

136.  But the principal good that comes of art being followed in this reverent feeling is of it.  Men who know their place can take it and keep it, be it low or high, contentedly and firmly, neither yielding nor grasping; and the harmony of hand and thought follows, rendering all great deeds of art possible ­deeds in which the souls of men meet like the jewels in the windows of Aladdin’s palace, the little gems and the large all equally pure, needing no cement but the fitting of facets; while the associative work of immodest men is all jointless, and astir with wormy ambition; putridly dissolute, and forever on the crawl:  so that if it come together for a time, it can only be by metamorphosis through a flash of volcanic fire out of the vale of Siddim, vitrifying the clay of it, and fastening the slime, only to end in wilder scattering; according to the fate of those oldest, mightiest, immodestest of builders, of whom it is told in scorn, “They had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar.”

137.  The first function of Modesty, then, being this recognition of place, her second is the recognition of law, and delight in it, for the sake of law itself, whether her part be to assert it, or obey.  For as it belongs to all immodesty to defy or deny law, and assert privilege and license, according to its own pleasure (it being therefore rightly called “insolent,” that is, “custom-breaking,” violating some usual and appointed order to attain for itself greater forwardness or power), so it is the habit of all modesty to love the constancy and “solemnity,” or, literally, “accustomedness,” of law, seeking first what are the solemn, appointed, inviolable customs and general orders of nature, and of the Master of nature, touching the matter in hand; and striving to put itself, as habitually and inviolably, in compliance with them.  Out of which habit, once established, arises what is rightly called “conscience,” nor “science” merely, but “with-science,” a science “with us,” such as only modest creatures can have ­with or within them ­and within all creation besides, every member of it, strong or weak, witnessing together, and joining in the happy consciousness that each one’s work is good; the bee also being profoundly of that opinion; and the lark; and the swallow, in that noisy, but modestly upside-down, Babel of hers, under the eaves, with its unvolcanic slime for mortar; and the two ants who are asking of each other at the turn of that little ant’s-foot-worn bath through the moss “lor via e lor fortuna;” and the builders also, who built yonder pile of cloud-marble in the west, and the gilder who gilded it, and is gone down behind it.

138.  But I think we shall better understand what we ought of the nature of Modesty, and of her opposite, by taking a simple instance of both, in the practice of that art of music which the wisest have agreed in thinking the first element of education; only I must ask the reader’s patience with me through a parenthesis.

Among the foremost men whose power has had to assert itself, though with conquest, yet with countless loss, through peculiarly English disadvantages of circumstance, are assuredly to be ranked together, both for honor, and for mourning, Thomas Bewick and George Cruikshank.  There is, however, less cause for regret in the instance of Bewick.  We may understand that it was well for us once to see what an entirely keen and true man’s temper, could achieve, together, unhelped, but also unharmed, among the black bans and wolds of Tyne.  But the genius of Cruikshank has been cast away in an utterly ghastly and lamentable manner:  his superb line-work, worthy of any class of subject, and his powers of conception and composition, of which I cannot venture to estimate the range in their degraded application, having been condemned, by his fate, to be spent either in rude jesting, or in vain war with conditions of vice too low alike for record or rebuke, among the dregs of the British populace.  Yet perhaps I am wrong in regretting even this:  it may be an appointed lesson for futurity, that the art of the best English etcher in the nineteenth century, spent on illustrations of the lives of burglars and drunkards, should one day be seen in museums beneath Greek vases fretted with drawings of the wars of Troy, or side by side with Duerer’s “Knight and Death.”

139.  Be that as it may, I am at present glad to be able to refer to one of these perpétuations, by his strong hand, of such human character as our faultless British constitution occasionally produces in out-of-the-way corners.  It is among his illustrations of the Irish Rebellion, and represents the pillage and destruction of a gentleman’s house by the mob.  They have made a heap in the drawing-room of the furniture and books, to set first fire to; and are tearing up the floor for its more easily kindled planks, the less busily-disposed meanwhile hacking round in rage, with axes, and smashing what they can with butt-ends of guns.  I do not care to follow with words the ghastly truth of the picture into its detail; but the most expressive incident of the whole, and the one immediately to my purpose, is this, that one fellow has sat himself at the piano, on which, hitting down fiercely with his clenched fists, he plays, grinning, such tune as may be so producible, to which melody two of his companions, flourishing knotted sticks, dance, after their manner, on the top of the instrument.

140.  I think we have in this conception as perfect an instance as we require of the lowest supposable phase of immodest or licentious art in music; the “inner consciousness of good” being dim, even in the musician and his audience, and wholly unsympathized with, and unacknowledged by the Delphian, Vestal, and all other prophetic and cosmic powers.  This represented scene came into my mind suddenly one evening, a few weeks ago, in contrast with another which I was watching in its reality; namely, a group of gentle school-girls, leaning over Mr. Charles Halle, as he was playing a variation on “Home, Sweet Home.”  They had sustained with unwonted courage the glance of subdued indignation with which, having just closed a rippling melody of Sebastian Bach’s (much like what one might fancy the singing of nightingales would be if they fed on honey instead of flies), he turned to the slight, popular air.  But they had their own associations with it, and besought for, and obtained it, and pressed close, at first, in vain, to see what no glance could follow, the traversing of the fingers.  They soon thought no more of seeing.  The wet eyes, round-open, and the little scarlet upper lips, lifted, and drawn slightly together, in passionate glow of utter wonder, became picture-like, porcelain-like, in motionless joy, as the sweet multitude of low notes fell, in their timely infinities, like summer rain.  Only La Robbia himself (nor even he, unless with tenderer use of color than is usual in his work) could have rendered some image of that listening.

141.  But if the reader can give due vitality in his fancy to these two scenes, he will have in them representative types, clear enough for all future purpose, of the several agencies of debased and perfect art.  And the interval may easily and continuously be filled by mediate gradations.  Between the entirely immodeset, unmeasured, and (in evil sense) unmannered, execution with the fist; and the entirely modest, measured, and (in the noblest sense) mannered, or moral’d execution with the finger; between the impatient and unpractised doing, containing in itself the witness of lasting impatience and idleness through all previous life, and the patient and practised doing, containing in itself the witness of self-restraint and unwearied toil through all previous life; between the expressed subject and sentiment of home violation, and the expressed subject and sentiment of home love; between the sympathy of audience, given in irreverent and contemptuous rage, joyless as the rabidness of a dog, and the sympathy of audience given in an almost appalled humility of intense, rapturous, and yet entirely reasoning and reasonable pleasure; between these two limits of octave, the reader will find he can class, according to its modesty, usefulness and grace, or becomingness, all other musical art.  For although purity of purpose and fineness of execution by no means go together, degree to degree (since fine, and indeed all but the finest, work is often spent in the most wanton purpose ­as in all our modern opera ­and the rudest execution is again often joined with purest purpose, as in a mother’s song to her child), still the entire accomplishment of music is only in the union of both.  For the difference between that “all but” finest and “finest” is an infinite one; and besides this, however the power of the performer, once attained, may be afterwards misdirected, in slavery to popular passion or childishness, and spend itself, at its sweetest, in idle melodies, cold and ephemeral (like Michael Angelo’s snow statue in the other art), or else in vicious difficulty and miserable noise ­crackling of thorns under the pot of public sensuality ­still, the attainment of this power, and the maintenance of it, involve always in the executant some virtue or courage of high kind; the understanding of which, and of the difference between the discipline which develops it and the disorderly efforts of the amateur, it will be one of our first businesses to estimate rightly.  And though not indeed by degree to degree, yet in essential relation (as of winds to waves, the one being always the true cause of the other, though they are not necessarily of equal force at the same time,) we shall find vice in its varieties, with art-failure, ­and virtue in its varieties, with art-success, ­fall and rise together; the peasant-girl’s song at her spinning-wheel, the peasant laborer’s “to the oaks and rills,” ­domestic music, feebly yet sensitively skilful, ­music for the multitude, of beneficent or of traitorous power, ­dance-melodies, pure and orderly, or foul and frantic, ­march-music, blatant in mere fever of animal pugnacity, or majestic with force of national duty and memory, ­ song-music, reckless, sensual, sickly, slovenly, forgetful even of the foolish words it effaces with foolish noise, ­or thoughtful, sacred, healthful, artful, forever sanctifying noble thought with separately distinguished loveliness of belonging sound, ­all these families and graduations of good or evil, however mingled, follow, in so far as they are good, one constant law of virtue (or “life-strength,” which is the literal meaning of the word, and its intended one, in wise men’s mouths), and in so far as they are evil, are evil by outlawry and unvirtue, or death-weakness.  Then, passing wholly beyond the domain of death, we may still imagine the ascendant nobleness of the art, through all the concordant life of incorrupt creatures, and a continually deeper harmony of “puissant words and murmurs made to bless,” until we reach

      “The undisturbed song of pure consent,
      Aye sung before the sapphire-colored throne.”

142.  And so far as the sister arts can be conceived to have place or office, their virtues are subject to a law absolutely the same as that of music, only extending its authority into more various conditions, owing to the introduction of a distinctly representative and historical power, which acts under logical as well as mathematical restrictions, and is capable of endlessly changeful fault, fallacy, and defeat, as well as of endlessly manifold victory.

143.  Next to Modesty, and her delight in measures, let us reflect a little on the character of her adversary, the Goddess of Liberty, and her delight in absence of measures, or in false ones.  It is true that there are liberties and liberties.  Yonder torrent, crystal-clear, and arrow-swift, with its spray leaping into the air like white troops of fawns, is free enough.  Lost, presently, amidst bankless, boundless marsh ­soaking in slow shallowness, as it will, hither and thither, listless among the poisonous reeds and unresisting slime ­it is free also.  We may choose which liberty we like, ­the restraint of voiceful rock, or the dumb and edgeless shore of darkened sand.  Of that evil liberty which men are now glorifying and proclaiming as essence of gospel to all the earth, and will presently, I suppose, proclaim also to the stars, with invitation to them out of their courses, ­and of its opposite continence, which is the clasp and ‘chrusee péroné’ of Aglaia’s cestus, we must try to find out something true.  For no quality of Art has been more powerful in its influence on public mind; none is more frequently the subject of popular praise, or the end of vulgar effort, than what we call “Freedom.”  It is necessary to determine the justice or injustice of this popular praise.

144.  I said, a little while ago, that the practical teaching of the masters of Art was summed by the O of Giotto.  “You may judge my masterhood of craft,” Giotto tells us, “by seeing that I can draw a circle unerringly.”  And we may safely believe him, understanding him to mean that, though more may be necessary to an artist than such a power, at least this power is necessary.  The qualities of hand and eye needful to do this are the first conditions of artistic craft.

145.  Try to draw a circle yourself with the “free” hand, and with a single line.  You cannot do it if your hand trembles, nor if it is in the common sense of the word “free.”  So far from being free, it must be as if it were fastened to an inflexible bar of steel.  And yet it must move, under this necessary control, with perfect, untormented serenity of ease.

146.  That is the condition of all good work whatsoever.  All freedom is error.  Every line you lay down is either right or wrong; it may be timidly and awkwardly wrong, or fearlessly and impudently wrong.  The aspect of the impudent wrongness is pleasurable to vulgar persons, and is what they commonly call “free” execution; the timid, tottering, hesitating wrongness is rarely so attractive; yet sometimes, if accompanied with good qualities, and right aims in other directions, it becomes in a manner charming, like the inarticulateness of a child; but, whatever the charm or manner of the error, there is but one question ultimately to be asked respecting every line you draw, Is it right or wrong?  If right, it most assuredly is not a “free” line, but an intensely continent, restrained, and considered line; and the action of the hand in laying it is just as decisive, and just as “free,” as the hand of a first-rate surgeon in a critical incision.  A great operator told me that his hand could check itself within about the two-hundredth of an inch, in penetrating a membrane; and this, of course, without the help of sight, by sensation only.  With help of sight, and in action on a substance which does not quiver or yield, a fine artist’s line is measurable in its proposed direction to considerably less than the thousandth of an inch.

A wide freedom, truly!

147.  The conditions of popular art which most foster the common ideas about freedom, are merely results of irregularly energetic effort by men imperfectly educated; these conditions being variously mingled with cruder mannerisms resulting from timidity, or actual imperfection of body.  Northern hands and eyes are, of course, never so subtle as Southern; and in very cold countries, artistic execution is palsied.  The effort to break through this timidity, or to refine the bluntness, may lead to a licentious impetuosity, or an ostentatious minuteness.  Every man’s manner has this kind of relation to some defect in his physical powers or modes of thought; so that in the greatest work there is no manner visible.  It is at first uninteresting from its quietness; the majesty of restrained power only dawns gradually upon us, as we walk towards its horizon.

There is, indeed, often great delightfulness in the innocent manners of artists who have real power and honesty, and draw in this way or that, as best they can, under such and such untoward circumstances of life.  But the greater part of the looseness, flimsiness, or audacity of modern work is the expression of an inner spirit of license in mind and heart, connected, as I said, with the peculiar folly of this age, its hope of, and trust in, “liberty,” of which we must reason a little in more general terms.

148.  I believe we can nowhere find a better type of a perfectly free creature than in the common house-fly.  Nor free only, but brave; and irreverent to a degree which I think no human republican could by any philosophy exalt himself to.  There is no courtesy in him; he does not care whether it is king or clown whom he teases; and in every step of his swift mechanical march, and in every pause of his resolute observation, there is one and the same expression of perfect egotism, perfect independence and self-confidence, and conviction of the world’s having been made for flies.  Strike at him with your hand, and to him, the mechanical fact and external aspect of the matter is, what to you it would be if an acre of red clay, ten feet thick, tore itself up from the ground in one massive field, hovered over you in the air for a second, and came crashing down with an aim.  That is the external aspect of it; the inner aspect, to his fly’s mind, is of a quite natural and unimportant occurrence ­one of the momentary conditions of his active life.  He steps out of the way of your hand, and alights on the back of it.  You cannot terrify him, nor govern him, nor persuade him, nor convince him.  He has his own positive opinion on all matters; not an unwise one, usually, for his own ends; and will ask no advice of yours.  He has no work to do ­no tyrannical instinct to obey.  The earthworm has his digging; the bee her gathering and building; the spider her cunning network; the ant her treasury and accounts.  All these are comparatively slaves, or people of vulgar business.  But your fly, free in the air, free in the chamber ­a black incarnation of caprice, wandering, investigating, flitting, flirting, feasting at his will, with rich variety of choice in feast, from the heaped sweets in the grocer’s window to those of the butcher’s back-yard, and from the galled place on your cab-horse’s back, to the brown spot in the road, from which, as the hoof disturbs him, he rises with angry republican buzz ­what freedom is like his?

149.  For captivity, again, perhaps your poor watch-dog is as sorrowful a type as you will easily find.  Mine certainly is.  The day is lovely, but I must write this, and cannot go out with him.  He is chained in the yard because I do not like dogs in rooms, and the gardener does not like dogs in gardens.  He has no books, ­nothing but his own weary thoughts for company, and a group of those free flies, whom he snaps at, with sullen ill success.  Such dim hope as he may have that I may take him out with me, will be, hour by hour, wearily disappointed; or, worse, darkened at once into a leaden despair by an authoritative “No” ­too well understood.  His fidelity only seals his fate; if he would not watch for me, he would be sent away, and go hunting with some happier master:  but he watches, and is wise, and faithful, and miserable; and his high animal intellect only gives him the wistful powers of wonder, and sorrow, and desire, and affection, which embitter his captivity.  Yet of the two, would we rather be watch-dog or fly?

150.  Indeed, the first point we have all to determine is not how free we are, but what kind of creatures we are.  It is of small importance to any of us whether we get liberty; but of the greatest that we deserve it.  Whether we can win it, fate must determine; but that we will be worthy of it we may ourselves determine; and the sorrowfullest fate of all that we can suffer is to have it without deserving it.

151.  I have hardly patience to hold my pen and go on writing, as I remember (I would that it were possible for a few consecutive instants to forget) the infinite follies of modern thought in this matter, centred in the notion that liberty is good for a man, irrespectively of the use he is likely to make of it.  Folly unfathomable! unspeakable! unendurable to look in the full face of, as the laugh of a cretin.  You will send your child, will you, into a room where the table is loaded with sweet wine and fruit ­some poisoned, some not? ­you will say to him, “Choose freely, my little child!  It is so good for you to have freedom of choice; it forms your character ­your individuality!  If you take the wrong cup or the wrong berry, you will die before the day is over, but you will have acquired the dignity of a Free child?”

152.  You think that puts the case too sharply?  I tell you, lover of liberty, there is no choice offered to you, but it is similarly between life and death.  There is no act, nor option of act, possible, but the wrong deed or option has poison in it which will stay in your veins thereafter forever.  Never more to all eternity can you be as you might have been had you not done that ­chosen that.  You have “formed your character,” forsooth!  No; if you have chosen ill, you have De-formed it, and that for ever!  In some choices it had been better for you that a red-hot iron bar struck you aside, scarred and helpless, than that you had so chosen.  “You will know better next time!” No.  Next time will never come.  Next time the choice will be in quite another aspect ­ between quite different things, ­you, weaker than you were by the evil into which you have fallen; it, more doubtful than it was, by the increased dimness of your sight.  No one ever gets wiser by doing wrong, nor stronger.  You will get wiser and stronger only by doing right, whether forced or not; the prime, the one need is to do that, under whatever compulsion, until you can do it without compulsion.  And then you are a Man.

153.  “What!” a wayward youth might perhaps answer, incredulously, “no one ever gets wiser by doing wrong?  Shall I not know the world best by trying the wrong of it, and repenting?  Have I not, even as it is, learned much by many of my errors?” Indeed, the effort by which partially you recovered yourself was precious; that part of your thought by which you discerned the error was precious.  What wisdom and strength you kept, and rightly used, are rewarded; and in the pain and the repentance, and in the acquaintance with the aspects of folly and sin, you have learned something; how much less than you would have learned in right paths can never be told, but that it is less is certain.  Your liberty of choice has simply destroyed for you so much life and strength never regainable.  It is true, you now know the habits of swine, and the taste of husks; do you think your father could not have taught you to know better habits and pleasanter tastes, if you had stayed in his house; and that the knowledge you have lost would not have been more, as well as sweeter, than that you have gained?  But “it so forms my individuality to be free!” Your individuality was given you by God, and in your race, and if you have any to speak of, you will want no liberty.  You will want a den to work in, and peace, and light ­no more, ­in absolute need; if more, in anywise, it will still not be liberty, but direction, instruction, reproof, and sympathy.  But if you have no individuality, if there is no true character nor true desire in you, then you will indeed want to be free.  You will begin early, and, as a boy, desire to be a man; and, as a man, think yourself as good as every other.  You will choose freely to eat, freely to drink, freely to stagger and fall, freely, at last, to curse yourself and die.  Death is the only real freedom possible to us; and that is consummate freedom, permission for every particle in the rotting body to leave its neighbor particle, and shift for itself.  You call it “corruption” in the flesh; but before it comes to that, all liberty is an equal corruption in mind.  You ask for freedom of thought; but if you have not sufficient grounds for thought, you have no business to think; and if you have sufficient grounds, you have no business to think wrong.  Only one thought is possible to you if you are wise ­your liberty is geometrically proportionate to your folly.

154.  “But all this glory and activity of our age; what are they owing to, but to freedom of thought?” In a measure, they are owing ­what good is in them ­to the discovery of many lies, and the escape from the power of evil.  Not to liberty, but to the deliverance from evil or cruel masters.  Brave men have dared to examine lies which had long been taught, not because they were free-thinkers, but because they were such stern and close thinkers that the lie could no longer escape them.  Of course the restriction of thought, or of its expression, by persecution, is merely a form of violence, justifiable or not, as other violence is, according to the character of the persons against whom it is exercised, and the divine and eternal laws which it vindicates or violates.  We must not burn a man alive for saying that the Athanasian creed is ungrammatical, nor stop a bishop’s salary because we are getting the worst of an argument with him; neither must we let drunken men howl in the public streets at night.  There is much that is true in the part of Mr. Mill’s essay on Liberty which treats of freedom of thought; some important truths are there beautifully expressed, but many, quite vital, are omitted; and the balance, therefore, is wrongly struck.  The liberty of expression, with a great nation, would become like that in a well-educated company, in which there is indeed freedom of speech, but not of clamor; or like that in an orderly senate, in which men who deserve to be heard, are heard in due time, and under determined restrictions.  The degree of liberty you can rightly grant to a number of men is in the inverse ratio of their desire for it; and a general hush, or call to order, would be often very desirable in this England of ours.  For the rest, of any good or evil extent, it is impossible to say what measure is owing to restraint, and what to license where the right is balanced between them.  I was not a little provoked one day, a summer or two since, in Scotland, because the Duke of Athol hindered me from examining the gneiss and slate junctions in Glen Tilt, at the hour convenient to me; but I saw them at last, and in quietness; and to the very restriction that annoyed me, owed, probably, the fact of their being in existence, instead of being blasted away by a mob-company; while the “free” paths and inlets of Loch Katrine and the Lake of Geneva are forever trampled down and destroyed, not by one duke, but by tens of thousands of ignorant tyrants.

155.  So, a Dean and Chapter may, perhaps, unjustifiably charge me twopence for seeing a cathedral; but your free mob pulls spire and all down about my ears, and I can see it no more forever.  And even if I cannot get up to the granite junctions in the glen, the stream comes down from them pure to the Garry; but in Beddington Park I am stopped by the newly-erected fence of a building speculator; and the bright Wandel, divine of waters as Castaly, is filled by the free public with old shoes, obscene crockery, and ashes.

156.  In fine, the arguments for liberty may in general be summed in a few very simple forms, as follows: 

Misguiding is mischievous:  therefore guiding is.

If the blind lead the blind, both fall into the ditch:  therefore, nobody should lead anybody.

Lambs and fawns should be left free in the fields; much more bears and wolves.

If a man’s gun and shot are his own, he may fire in any direction he pleases.

A fence across a road is inconvenient; much more one at the side of it.

Babes should not be swaddled with their hands bound down to their sides:  therefore they should be thrown out to roll in the kennels naked.

None of these arguments are good, and the practical issues of them are worse.  For there are certain eternal laws for human conduct which are quite clearly discernible by human reason.  So far as these are discovered and obeyed, by whatever machinery or authority the obedience is procured, there follow life and strength.  So far as they are disobeyed, by whatever good intention the disobedience is brought about, there follow ruin and sorrow.  And the first duty of every man in the world is to find his true master, and, for his own good, submit to him; and to find his true inferior, and, for that inferior’s good, conquer him.  The punishment is sure, if we either refuse the reverence, or are too cowardly and indolent to enforce the compulsion.  A base nation crucifies or poisons its wise men, and lets its fools rave and rot in the streets.  A wise nation obeys the one, restrains the other, and cherishes all.

157.  The best examples of the results of wise normal evidence in Art will be found in whatever evidence remains respecting the lives of great Italian painters, though, unhappily, in eras of progress, but just in proportion to the admirableness and efficiency of the life, will be usually the scantiness of its history.  The individualities and liberties which are causes of destruction may be recorded; but the loyal conditions of daily breath are never told.  Because Leonardo made models of machines, dug canals, built fortifications, and dissipated half his art-power in capricious ingenuities, we have many anecdotes of him; ­but no picture of importance on canvas, and only a few withered stains of one upon a wall.  But because his pupil, or reputed pupil, Luini, labored in constant and successful simplicity, we have no anecdotes of him; ­only hundreds of noble works.  Luini is, perhaps, the best central type of the highly-trained Italian painter.  He is the only man who entirely united the religious temper which was the spirit-life of art, with the physical power which was its bodily life.  He joins the purity and passion of Angelico to the strength of Veronese:  the two elements, poised in perfect balance, are so calmed and restrained, each by the other, that most of us lose the sense of both.  The artist does not see the strength, by reason of the chastened spirit in which it is used:  and the religious visionary does not recognize the passion, by reason of the frank human truth with which it is rendered.  He is a man ten times greater than Leonardo; ­a mighty colorist, while Leonardo was only a fine draughtsman in black, staining the chiaroscuro drawing, like a colored print:  he perceived and rendered the delicatest types of human beauty that have been painted since the days of the Greeks, while Leonardo depraved his finer instincts by caricature, and remained to the end of his days the slave of an archaic smile:  and he is a designer as frank, instinctive, and exhaustless as Tintoret, while Leonardo’s design is only an agony of science, admired chiefly because it is painful, and capable of analysis in its best accomplishment.  Luini has left nothing behind him that is not lovely; but of his life I believe hardly anything is known beyond remnants of tradition which murmur about Lugano and Saronno, and which remain ungleaned.  This only is certain, that he was born in the loveliest district of North Italy, where hills, and streams, and air meet in softest harmonies.  Child of the Alps, and of their divinest lake, he is taught, without doubt or dismay, a lofty religious creed, and a sufficient law of life, and of its mechanical arts.  Whether lessoned by Leonardo himself, or merely one of many disciplined in the system of the Milanese school, he learns unerringly to draw, unerringly and enduringly to paint.  His tasks are set him without question day by day, by men who are justly satisfied with his work, and who accept it without any harmful praise, or senseless blame.  Place, scale, and subject are determined for him on the cloister wall or the church dome; as he is required, and for sufficient daily bread, and little more, he paints what he has been taught to design wisely, and has passion to realize gloriously:  every touch he lays is eternal, every thought he conceives is beautiful and pure:  his hand moves always in radiance of blessing; from day to day his life enlarges in power and peace; it passes away cloudlessly, the starry twilight remaining arched far against the night.

158.  Oppose to such a life as this that of a great painter amidst the elements of modern English liberty.  Take the life of Turner, in whom the artistic energy and inherent love of beauty were at least as strong as in Luini:  but, amidst the disorder and ghastliness of the lower streets of London, his instincts in early infancy were warped into toleration of evil, or even into delight in it.  He gathers what he can of instruction by questioning and prying among half-informed masters; spells out some knowledge of classical fable; educates himself, by an admirable force, to the production of wildly majestic or pathetically tender and pure pictures, by which he cannot live.  There is no one to judge them, or to command him:  only some of the English upper classes hire him to paint their houses and parks, and destroy the drawings afterwards by the most wanton neglect.  Tired of laboring carefully, without either reward or praise, he dashes out into various experimental and popular works ­makes himself the servant of the lower public, and is dragged hither and thither at their will; while yet, helpless and guideless, he indulges his idiosyncrasies till they change into insanities; the strength of his soul increasing its sufferings, and giving force to its errors; all the purpose of life degenerating into instinct; and the web of his work wrought, at last, of beauties too subtle to be understood, his liberty, with vices too singular to be forgiven ­all useless, because magnificent idiosyncrasy had become solitude, or contention, in the midst of a reckless populace, instead of submitting itself in loyal harmony to the Art-laws of an understanding nation.  And the life passed away in darkness; and its final work, in all the best beauty of it, has already perished, only enough remaining to teach us what we have lost.

159.  These are the opposite effects of Law and of Liberty on men of the highest powers.  In the case of inferiors the contrast is still more fatal:  under strict law, they become the subordinate workers in great schools, healthily aiding, echoing, or supplying, with multitudinous force of hand, the mind of the leading masters:  they are the nameless carvers of great architecture ­stainers of glass ­hammerers of iron ­ helpful scholars, whose work ranks round, if not with, their master’s, and never disgraces it.  But the inferiors under a system of license for the most part perish in miserable effort; a few struggle into pernicious eminence ­harmful alike to themselves and to all who admire them; many die of starvation; many insane, either in weakness of insolent egotism, like Haydon, or in a conscientious agony of beautiful purpose and warped power, like Blake.  There is no probability of the persistence of a licentious school in any good accidentally discovered by them; there is an approximate certainty of their gathering, with acclaim, round any shadow of evil, and following it to whatever quarter of destruction it may lead.

As I correct this sheet for press, my “Pall Mall Gazette” of last Saturday, April 17, is lying on the table by me.  I print a few lines out of it: 

“An artist’s death. ­A sad story was told at an inquest held in St. Pancras last night by Dr. Lankester on the body of . . ., aged fifty-nine, a French artist who was found dead in his bed at his rooms in . . .  Street.  M. . . ., also an artist, said he had known the deceased for fifteen years.  He once held a high position, and being anxious to make a name in the world, he five years ago commenced a large picture, which he hoped, when completed, to have in the gallery at Versailles; and with that view he sent a photograph of it to the French Emperor.  He also had an idea of sending it to the English Royal Academy.  He labored on this picture, neglecting other work which would have paid him well, and gradually sank lower and lower into poverty.  His friends assisted him, but being absorbed in his great work, he did not heed their advice, and they left him.  He was, however, assisted by the French Ambassador, and last Saturday, he (the witness) saw deceased, who was much depressed in spirits, as he expected the brokers to be put in possession for rent.  He said his troubles were so great that he feared his brain would give way.  The witness gave him a shilling for which he appeared very thankful.  On Monday the witness called upon him, but received no answer to his knock.  He went again on Tuesday, and entered the deceased’s bedroom and found him dead.  Dr. George Ross said that when called into the deceased he had been dead at least two days.  The room was in a filthy, dirty condition, and the picture referred to ­certainly a very fine one ­was in that room.  The post-mortem examination showed that the cause of death was fatty degeneration of the heart, the latter probably having ceased its action through the mental excitement of the deceased.”

160.  Thus far the notes of Freedom.  Now, lastly, here is some talk which I tried at the time to make intelligible; and with which I close this volume, because it will serve sufficiently to express the practical relation in which I think the art and imagination of the Greeks stand to our own; and will show the reader that my view of that relation is unchanged, from the first day on which I began to write, until now.