A Joy For Ever; (And Its Price in the Market) | Page 9

John Ruskin
the
sands, or you may make kings' thrones of it, and overlay temple gates
with it, as you choose: but the best you can do with it is always merely
sifting, melting, hammering, purifying--never creating.
21. And there is another thing notable about this artistical gold; not
only is it limited in quantity, but in use. You need not make thrones or
golden gates with it unless you like, but assuredly you can't do anything
else with it. You can't make knives of it, nor armour, nor railroads. The
gold won't cut you, and it won't carry you: put it to a mechanical use,
and you destroy it at once. It is quite true that in the greatest artists,
their proper artistical faculty is united with every other; and you may
make use of the other faculties, and let the artistical one lie dormant.
For aught I know, there may be two or three Leonardo da Vincis
employed at this moment in your harbours and railroads: but you are
not employing their Leonardesque or golden faculty there,--you are
only oppressing and destroying it. And the artistical gift in average men
is not joined with others: your born painter, if you don't make a painter
of him, won't be a first-rate merchant, or lawyer; at all events, whatever
he turns out, his own special gift is unemployed by you; and in no wise
helps him in that other business. So here you have a certain quantity of
a particular sort of intelligence, produced for you annually by
providential laws, which you can only make use of by setting it to its
own proper work, and which any attempt to use otherwise involves the
dead loss of so much human energy.
22. Well then, supposing we wish to employ it, how is it to be best

discovered and refined? It is easily enough discovered. To wish to
employ it is to discover it. All that you need is, a school of trial[4] in
every important town, in which those idle farmers' lads whom their
masters never can keep out of mischief, and those stupid tailors'
'prentices who are always stitching the sleeves in wrong way upwards,
may have a try at this other trade; only this school of trial must not be
entirely regulated by formal laws of art education, but must ultimately
be the workshop of a good master painter, who will try the lads with
one kind of art and another, till he finds out what they are fit for.
[Note 4: See note 3rd, in Addenda.]
23. Next, after your trial school, you want your easy and secure
employment, which is the matter of chief importance. For, even on the
present system, the boys who have really intense art capacity, generally
make painters of themselves; but then, the best half of their early
energy is lost in the battle of life. Before a good painter can get
employment, his mind has always been embittered, and his genius
distorted. A common mind usually stoops, in plastic chill, to whatever
is asked of it, and scrapes or daubs its way complacently into public
favour.[5] But your great men quarrel with you, and you revenge
yourselves by starving them for the first half of their lives. Precisely in
the degree in which any painter possesses original genius, is at present
the increase of moral certainty that during his early years he will have a
hard battle to fight; and that just at the time when his conceptions ought
to be full and happy, his temper gentle, and his hopes enthusiastic--just
at that most critical period, his heart is full of anxieties and household
cares; he is chilled by disappointments, and vexed by injustice; he
becomes obstinate in his errors, no less than in his virtues, and the
arrows of his aims are blunted, as the reeds of his trust are broken.
[Note 5: See note 4th, in Addenda.]
24. What we mainly want, therefore, is a means of sufficient and
unagitated employment: not holding out great prizes for which young
painters are to scramble; but furnishing all with adequate support, and
opportunity to display such power as they possess without rejection or
mortification. I need not say that the best field of labour of this kind

would be presented by the constant progress of public works involving
various decoration; and we will presently examine what kind of public
works may thus, advantageously for the nation, be in constant progress.
But a more important matter even than this of steady employment, is
the kind of criticism with which you, the public, receive the works of
the young men submitted to you. You may do much harm by indiscreet
praise and by indiscreet blame; but remember the chief harm is always
done by blame. It stands
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