A Joy For Ever

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53. And it would be strange, if at any great assembly which, while it
dazzled the young and the thoughtless, beguiled the gentler hearts that
beat beneath the embroidery, with a placid sensation of luxurious
benevolence--as if by all that they wore in waywardness of beauty,
comfort had been first given to the distressed, and aid to the indigent;
it would be strange, I say, if, for a moment, the spirits of Truth and
of Terror, which walk invisibly among the masques of the earth, would
lift the dimness from our erring thoughts, and show us how--inasmuch as
the sums exhausted for that magnificence would have given back the
failing breath to many an unsheltered outcast on moor and street--they
who wear it have literally entered into partnership with Death; and
dressed themselves in his spoils. Yes, if the veil could be lifted not
only from your thoughts, but from your human sight, you would see--the
angels do see--on those gay white dresses of yours, strange dark spots,
and crimson patterns that you knew not of--spots of the inextinguishable
red that all the seas cannot wash away; yes, and among the pleasant
flowers that crown your fair heads, and glow on your wreathed hair, you
would see that one weed was always twisted which no one thought of--the
grass that grows on graves.

54. It was not, however, this last, this clearest and most appalling
view of our subject, that I intended to ask you to take this evening;
only it is impossible to set any part of the matter in its true light,
until we go to the root of it. But the point which it is our special
business to consider is, not whether costliness of dress is contrary to
charity; but whether it is not contrary to mere worldly wisdom: whether,
even supposing we knew that splendour of dress did not cost suffering or
hunger, we might not put the splendour better in other things than
dress. And, supposing our mode of dress were really graceful or
beautiful, this might be a very doubtful question; for I believe true
nobleness of dress to be an important means of education, as it
certainly is a necessity to any nation which wishes to possess living
art, concerned with portraiture of human nature. No good historical
painting ever yet existed, or ever can exist, where the dresses of the
people of the time are not beautiful: and had it not been for the lovely
and fantastic dressing of the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries,
neither French, nor Florentine, nor Venetian art could have risen to
anything like the rank it reached. Still, even then, the best dressing
was never the costliest; and its effect depended much more on its
beautiful and, in early times, modest, arrangement, and on the simple
and lovely masses of its colour, than on gorgeousness of clasp or
embroidery.

55. Whether we can ever return to any of those more perfect types of
form, is questionable; but there can be no more question that all the
money we spend on the forms of dress at present worn, is, so far as any
good purpose is concerned, wholly lost. Mind, in saying this, I reckon
among good purposes the purpose which young ladies are said sometimes
to entertain--of being married; but they would be married quite as soon
(and probably to wiser and better husbands) by dressing quietly, as by
dressing brilliantly: and I believe it would only be needed to lay
fairly and largely before them the real good which might be effected by
the sums they spend in toilettes, to make them trust at once only to
their bright eyes and braided hair for all the mischief they have a
mind to. I wish we could, for once, get the statistics of a London
season. There was much complaining talk in Parliament, last week,
of the vast sum the nation has given for the best Paul Veronese in
Venice--14,000_l._: I wonder what the nation meanwhile has given for its
ball-dresses! Suppose we could see the London milliners' bills, simply
for unnecessary breadths of slip and flounce, from April to July; I
wonder whether 14,000_l._ would cover _them_. But the breadths of slip
and flounce are by this time as much lost and vanished as last year's
snow; only they have done less good: but the Paul Veronese will last for
centuries, if we take care of it; and yet, we grumble at the price given
for the painting, while no one grumbles at the price of pride.

56. Time does not permit me to go into any farther illustration of the
various modes in which we build our statue out of snow, and waste our
labour on things that vanish. I must leave you to follow out the subject
for yourselves, as I said I should, and proceed, in our next lecture, to
examine the two other branches of our subject--namely, how to accumulate
our art, and how to distribute it. But, in closing, as we have been much
on the topic of good government, both of ourselves and others, let me
just give you one more illustration of what it means, from that old art
of which, next evening, I shall try to convince you that the value, both
moral and mercantile, is greater than we usually suppose.

57. One of the frescoes by Ambrozio Lorenzetti, in the town-hall of
Siena, represents, by means of symbolical figures, the principles of
Good Civic Government and of Good Government in general. The figure
representing this noble Civic Government is enthroned, and surrounded by
figures representing the Virtues, variously supporting or administering
its authority. Now, observe what work is given to each of these
virtues. Three winged ones--Faith, Hope, and Charity--surround the head
of the figure; not in mere compliance with the common and heraldic laws
of precedence among Virtues, such as we moderns observe habitually, but
with peculiar purpose on the part of the painter. Faith, as thus
represented ruling the thoughts of the Good Governor, does not mean
merely religious faith, understood in those times to be necessary to all
persons--governed no less than governors--but it means the faith which
enables work to be carried out steadily, in spite of adverse appearances
and expediencies; the faith in great principles, by which a civic ruler
looks past all the immediate checks and shadows that would daunt a
common man, knowing that what is rightly done will have a right issue,
and holding his way in spite of pullings at his cloak and whisperings in
his ear, enduring, as having in him a faith which is evidence of things
unseen.

58. And Hope, in like manner, is here not the heavenward hope which
ought to animate the hearts of all men; but she attends upon Good
Government, to show that all such government is _expectant_ as well as
_conservative_; that if it ceases to be hopeful of better things, it
ceases to be a wise guardian of present things: that it ought never, as
long as the world lasts, to be wholly content with any existing state of
institution or possession, but to be hopeful still of more wisdom and
power; not clutching at it restlessly or hastily, but feeling that its
real life consists in steady ascent from high to higher: conservative,
indeed, and jealously conservative of old things, but conservative of
them as pillars, not as pinnacles--as aids, but not as idols; and
hopeful chiefly, and active, in times of national trial or distress,
according to those first and notable words describing the queenly
nation: "She riseth, _while it is yet night_."

59. And again, the winged Charity which is attendant on Good Government
has, in this fresco, a peculiar office. Can you guess what? If you
consider the character of contest which so often takes place among kings
for their crowns, and the selfish and tyrannous means they commonly take
to aggrandize or secure their power, you will, perhaps, be surprised to
hear that the office of Charity is to crown the King. And yet, if you
think of it a little, you will see the beauty of the thought which sets
her in this function: since, in the first place, all the authority of a
good governor should be desired by him only for the good of his people,
so that it is only Love that makes him accept or guard his crown: in the
second place, his chief greatness consists in the exercise of this love,
and he is truly to be revered only so far as his acts and thoughts are
those of kindness; so that Love is the light of his crown, as well as
the giver of it: lastly, because his strength depends on the affections
of his people, and it is only their love which can securely crown him,
and for ever. So that Love is the strength of his crown as well as the
light of it.

60. Then, surrounding the King, or in various obedience to him, appear
the dependent virtues, as Fortitude, Temperance, Truth, and other
attendant spirits, of all which I cannot now give account, wishing you
only to notice the one to whom are entrusted the guidance and
administration of the public revenues. Can you guess which it is likely
to be? Charity, you would have thought, should have something to do with
the business; but not so, for she is too hot to attend carefully to it.
Prudence, perhaps, you think of in the next place. No, she is too timid,
and loses opportunities in making up her mind. Can it be Liberality
then? No: Liberality is entrusted with some small sums; but she is a bad
accountant, and is allowed no important place in the exchequer. But the
treasures are given in charge to a virtue of which we hear too little in
modern times, as distinct from others; Magnanimity: largeness of heart:
not softness or weakness of heart, mind you--but capacity of heart--the
great _measuring_ virtue, which weighs in heavenly balances all that may
be given, and all that may be gained; and sees how to do noblest things
in noblest ways: which of two goods comprehends and therefore chooses
the greater: which of two personal sacrifices dares and accepts the
larger: which, out of the avenues of beneficence, treads always that
which opens farthest into the blue fields of futurity: that character,
in fine, which, in those words taken by us at first for the description
of a Queen among the nations, looks less to the present power than to
the distant promise; "Strength and honour are in her clothing,--and she
shall rejoice IN TIME TO COME."

LECTURE II.

THE ACCUMULATION AND DISTRIBUTION OF ART.

_Continuation of the previous Lecture; delivered July 13, 1857._

61. The heads of our subject which remain for our consideration this
evening are, you will remember, the accumulation and the distribution of
works of art. Our complete inquiry fell into four divisions--first, how
to get our genius; then, how to apply our genius; then, how to
accumulate its results; and lastly, how to distribute them. We
considered, last evening, how to discover and apply it;--we have
to-night to examine the modes of its preservation and distribution.

62. III. ACCUMULATION.--And now, in the outset, it will be well to face
that objection which we put aside a little while ago; namely, that
perhaps it is not well to have a great deal of good art; and that it
should not be made too cheap.

"Nay," I can imagine some of the more generous among you exclaiming, "we
will not trouble you to disprove that objection; of course it is a
selfish and base one: good art, as well as other good things, ought to
be made as cheap as possible, and put as far as we can within the reach
of everybody."

63. Pardon me, I am not prepared to admit that. I rather side with the
selfish objectors, and believe that art ought not to be made cheap,
beyond a certain point; for the amount of pleasure that you can receive
from any great work, depends wholly on the quantity of attention and
energy of mind you can bring to bear upon it. Now, that attention and
energy depend much more on the freshness of the thing than you would at
all suppose; unless you very carefully studied the movements of your own
minds. If you see things of the same kind and of equal value very
frequently, your reverence for them is infallibly diminished, your
powers of attention get gradually wearied, and your interest and
enthusiasm worn out; and you cannot in that state bring to any given
work the energy necessary to enjoy it. If, indeed, the question were
only between enjoying a great many pictures each a little, or one
picture very much, the sum of enjoyment being in each case the same, you
might rationally desire to possess rather the larger quantity than the
small; both because one work of art always in some sort illustrates
another, and because quantity diminishes the chances of destruction.

64. But the question is not a merely arithmetical one of this kind. Your
fragments of broken admirations will not, when they are put together,
make up one whole admiration; two and two, in this case, do not make
four, nor anything like four. Your good picture, or book, or work of art
of any kind, is always in some degree fenced and closed about with
difficulty. You may think of it as of a kind of cocoanut, with very
often rather an unseemly shell, but good milk and kernel inside. Now, if
you possess twenty cocoanuts, and being thirsty, go impatiently from one
to the other, giving only a single scratch with the point of your knife
to the shell of each, you will get no milk from all the twenty. But if
you leave nineteen of them alone, and give twenty cuts to the shell of
one, you will get through it, and at the milk of it. And the tendency of
the human mind is always to get tired before it has made its twenty
cuts; and to try another nut: and moreover, even if it has perseverance
enough to crack its nuts, it is sure to try to eat too many, and to
choke itself. Hence, it is wisely appointed for us that few of the
things we desire can be had without considerable labour, and at
considerable intervals of time. We cannot generally get our dinner
without working for it, and that gives us appetite for it, we cannot get
our holiday without waiting for it, and that gives us zest for it; and
we ought not to get our picture without paying for it, and that gives us
a mind to look at it.

65. Nay, I will even go so far as to say that we ought not to get books
too cheaply. No book, I believe, is ever worth half so much to its
reader as one that has been coveted for a year at a bookstall, and
bought out of saved halfpence; and perhaps a day or two's fasting.
That's the way to get at the cream of a book. And I should say more on
this matter, and protest as energetically as I could against the plague
of cheap literature, with which we are just now afflicted, but that I
fear your calling me to order, as being unpractical, because I don't
quite see my way at present to making everybody fast for their books.
But one may see that a thing is desirable and possible, even though one
may not at once know the best way to it,--and in my island of Barataria,
when I get it well into order, I assure you no book shall be sold for
less than a pound sterling; if it can be published cheaper than that,
the surplus shall all go into my treasury, and save my subjects taxation
in other directions; only people really poor, who cannot pay the pound,
shall be supplied with the books they want for nothing, in a certain
limited quantity. I haven't made up my mind about the number yet, and
there are several other points in the system yet unsettled; when they
are all determined, if you will allow me, I will come and give you
another lecture, on the political economy of literature.[10]

[Note 10: See note 6th, in Addenda.]

66. Meantime, returning to our immediate subject, I say to my generous
hearers, who want to shower Titians and Turners upon us, like falling
leaves, "Pictures ought not to be too cheap;" but in much stronger tone
I would say to those who want to keep up the prices of pictorial
property, that pictures ought not to be too dear--that is to say, not as
dear as they are. For, as matters at present stand, it is wholly
impossible for any man in the ordinary circumstances of English life to
possess himself of a piece of great art. A modern drawing of average
merit, or a first-class engraving, may, perhaps, not without some
self-reproach, be purchased out of his savings by a man of narrow
income; but a satisfactory example of first-rate art--masterhands'
work--is wholly out of his reach. And we are so accustomed to look upon
this as the natural course and necessity of things, that we never set
ourselves in any wise to diminish the evil; and yet it is an evil
perfectly capable of diminution.

67. It is an evil precisely similar in kind to that which existed in the
Middle Ages, respecting good books, and which everybody then, I suppose,
thought as natural as we do now our small supply of good pictures. You
could not then study the work of a great historian, or great poet, any
more than you can now study that of a great painter, but at heavy cost.
If you wanted a book, you had to get it written out for you, or to write
it out for yourself. But printing came, and the poor man may read his
Dante and his Homer; and Dante and Homer are none the worse for that.
But it is only in literature that private persons of moderate fortune
can possess and study greatness: they can study at home no greatness in
art; and the object of that accumulation which we are at present aiming
at, as our third object in political economy, is to bring great art in
some degree within the reach of the multitude; and, both in larger and
more numerous galleries than we now possess, and by distribution,
according to his wealth and wish, in each man's home, to render the
influence of art somewhat correspondent in extent to that of literature.
Here, then, is the subtle balance which your economist has to strike: to
accumulate so much art as to be able to give the whole nation a supply
of it, according to its need, and yet to regulate its distribution so
that there shall be no glut of it, nor contempt.

68. A difficult balance, indeed, for us to hold, if it were left merely
to our skill to poise; but the just point between poverty and profusion
has been fixed for us accurately by the wise laws of Providence. If you
carefully watch for all the genius you can detect, apply it to good
service, and then reverently preserve what it produces, you will never
have too little art; and if, on the other hand, you never force an
artist to work hurriedly, for daily bread, nor imperfectly, because you
would rather have showy works than complete ones, you will never have
too much. Do not force the multiplication of art, and you will not have
it too cheap; do not wantonly destroy it, and you will not have it too
dear.

69. "But who wantonly destroys it?" you will ask. Why, we all do.
Perhaps you thought, when I came to this part of our subject,
corresponding to that set forth in our housewife's economy by the
"keeping her embroidery from the moth," that I was going to tell you
only how to take better care of pictures, how to clean them, and varnish
them, and where to put them away safely when you went out of town. Ah,
not at all. The utmost I have to ask of you is, that you will not pull
them to pieces, and trample them under your feet. "What!" you will say,
"when do we do such things? Haven't we built a perfectly beautiful
gallery for all the pictures we have to take care of?" Yes, you have,
for the pictures which are definitely sent to Manchester to be taken
care of. But there are quantities of pictures out of Manchester which it
is your business, and mine too, to take care of no less than of these,
and which we are at this moment employing ourselves in pulling to pieces
by deputy. I will tell you what they are, and where they are, in a
minute; only first let me state one more of those main principles of
political economy on which the matter hinges.

70. I must begin a little apparently wide of the mark, and ask you to
reflect if there is any way in which we waste money more in England than
in building fine tombs? Our respect for the dead, when they are _just_
dead, is something wonderful, and the way we show it more wonderful
still. We show it with black feathers and black horses; we show it with
black dresses and bright heraldries; we show it with costly obelisks and
sculptures of sorrow, which spoil half of our most beautiful cathedrals.
We show it with frightful gratings and vaults, and lids of dismal stone,
in the midst of the quiet grass; and last, and not least, we show it by
permitting ourselves to tell any number of lies we think amiable or
credible, in the epitaph. This feeling is common to the poor as well as
the rich; and we all know how many a poor family will nearly ruin
themselves, to testify their respect for some member of it in his
coffin, whom they never much cared for when he was out of it; and how
often it happens that a poor old woman will starve herself to death, in
order that she may be respectably buried.

71. Now, this being one of the most complete and special ways of wasting
money,--no money being less productive of good, or of any percentage
whatever, than that which we shake away from the ends of undertakers'
plumes,--it is of course the duty of all good economists, and kind
persons, to prove and proclaim continually, to the poor as well as the
rich, that respect for the dead is not really shown by laying great
stones on them to tell us where they are laid; but by remembering where
they are laid, without a stone to help us; trusting them to the sacred
grass and saddened flowers; and still more, that respect and love are
shown to them, not by great monuments to them which we build with _our_
hands, but by letting the monuments stand, which they built with _their
own_. And this is the point now in question.

72. Observe, there are two great reciprocal duties concerning industry,
constantly to be exchanged between the living and the dead. We, as we
live and work, are to be always thinking of those who are to come after
us; that what we do may be serviceable, as far as we can make it so, to
them, as well as to us. Then, when we die, it is the duty of those who
come after us to accept this work of ours with thanks and remembrance,
not thrusting it aside or tearing it down the moment they think they
have no use for it. And each generation will only be happy or powerful
to the pitch that it ought to be, in fulfilling these two duties to the
Past and the Future. Its own work will never be rightly done, even for
itself--never good, or noble, or pleasurable to its own eyes--if it does
not prepare it also for the eyes of generations yet to come. And its own
possessions will never be enough for it, and its own wisdom never enough
for it, unless it avails itself gratefully and tenderly of the treasures
and the wisdom bequeathed to it by its ancestors.

73. For, be assured, that all the best things and treasures of this
world are not to be produced by each generation for itself; but we are
all intended, not to carve our work in snow that will melt, but each and
all of us to be continually rolling a great white gathering snowball,
higher and higher--larger and larger--along the Alps of human power.
Thus the science of nations is to be accumulative from father to son:
each learning a little more and a little more; each receiving all that
was known, and adding its own gain: the history and poetry of nations
are to be accumulative; each generation treasuring the history and the
songs of its ancestors, adding its own history and its own songs: and
the art of nations is to be accumulative, just as science and history
are; the work of living men is not superseding, but building itself
upon the work of the past. Nearly every great and intellectual race of
the world has produced, at every period of its career, an art with some
peculiar and precious character about it, wholly unattainable by any
other race, and at any other time; and the intention of Providence
concerning that art, is evidently that it should all grow together into
one mighty temple; the rough stones and the smooth all finding their
place, and rising, day by day, in richer and higher pinnacles to heaven.

74. Now, just fancy what a position the world, considered as one great
workroom--one great factory in the form of a globe--would have been in
by this time, if it had in the least understood this duty, or been
capable of it. Fancy what we should have had around us now, if, instead
of quarrelling and fighting over their work, the nations had aided each
other in their work, or if even in their conquests, instead of effacing
the memorials of those they succeeded and subdued, they had guarded the
spoils of their victories. Fancy what Europe would be now, if the
delicate statues and temples of the Greeks--if the broad roads and
massy walls of the Romans--if the noble and pathetic architecture of the
middle ages, had not been ground to dust by mere human rage. You talk of
the scythe of Time, and the tooth of Time: I tell you, Time is
scytheless and toothless; it is we who gnaw like the worm--we who smite
like the scythe. It is ourselves who abolish--ourselves who consume: we
are the mildew, and the flame; and the soul of man is to its own work as
the moth that frets when it cannot fly, and as the hidden flame that
blasts where it cannot illuminate. All these lost treasures of human
intellect have been wholly destroyed by human industry of destruction;
the marble would have stood its two thousand years as well in the
polished statue as in the Parian cliff; but we men have ground it to
powder, and mixed it with our own ashes. The walls and the ways would
have stood--it is we who have left not one stone upon another, and
restored its pathlessness to the desert; the great cathedrals of old
religion would have stood--it is we who have dashed down the carved work
with axes and hammers, and bid the mountain-grass bloom upon the
pavement, and the sea-winds chant in the galleries.

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