A Joy For Ever; (And Its Price in the Market) | Page 8

as
advisable economy in art appears to imply too much restraint or
interference with the freedom of the patron or artist. We are a little apt,
though on the whole a prudent nation, to act too immediately on our
impulses, even in matters merely commercial; much more in those
involving continual appeals to our fancies. How far, therefore, the
proposed systems or restraints may be advisable, it is for you to judge;
only I pray you not to be offended with them merely because they are
systems and restraints.
18. Do you at all recollect that interesting passage of Carlyle, in which
he compares, in this country and at this day, the understood and
commercial value of man and horse; and in which he wonders that the
horse, with its inferior brains and its awkward hoofiness, instead of
handiness, should be always worth so many tens or scores of pounds in
the market, while the man, so far from always commanding his price in
the market, would often be thought to confer a service on the
community by simply killing himself out of their way? Well, Carlyle
does not answer his own question, because he supposes we shall at

once see the answer. The value of the horse consists simply in the fact
of your being able to put a bridle on him. The value of the man consists
precisely in the same thing. If you can bridle him, or, which is better, if
he can bridle himself, he will be a valuable creature directly. Otherwise,
in a commercial point of view, his value is either nothing, or accidental
only. Only, of course, the proper bridle of man is not a leathern one:
what kind of texture it is rightly made of, we find from that command,
"Be ye not as the horse or as the mule which have no understanding,
whose mouths must be held in with bit and bridle." You are not to be
without the reins, indeed; but they are to be of another kind: "I will
guide thee with mine Eye." So the bridle of man is to be the Eye of God;
and if he rejects that guidance, then the next best for him is the horse's
and the mule's, which have no understanding; and if he rejects that, and
takes the bit fairly in his teeth, then there is nothing left for him than
the blood that comes out of the city, up to the horse-bridles.
19. Quitting, however, at last these general and serious laws of
government--or rather bringing them down to our own business in
hand--we have to consider three points of discipline in that particular
branch of human labour which is concerned, not with procuring of food,
but the expression of emotion; we have to consider respecting art: first,
how to apply our labour to it; then, how to accumulate or preserve the
results of labour; and then, how to distribute them. But since in art the
labour which we have to employ is the labour of a particular class of
men--men who have special genius for the business--we have not only
to consider how to apply the labour, but, first of all, how to produce the
labourer; and thus the question in this particular case becomes fourfold:
first, how to get your man of genius; then, how to employ your man of
genius; then, how to accumulate and preserve his work in the greatest
quantity; and, lastly, how to distribute his work to the best national
advantage. Let us take up these questions in succession.
20. I. Discovery.--How are we to get our men of genius: that is to say,
by what means may we produce among us, at any given time, the
greatest quantity of effective art-intellect? A wide question, you say,
involving an account of all the best means of art education. Yes, but I
do not mean to go into the consideration of those; I want only to state

the few principles which lie at the foundation of the matter. Of these,
the first is that you have always to find your artist, not to make him;
you can't manufacture him, any more than you can manufacture gold.
You can find him, and refine him: you dig him out as he lies
nugget-fashion in the mountain-stream; you bring him home; and you
make him into current coin, or household plate, but not one grain of
him can you originally produce. A certain quantity of art-intellect is
born annually in every nation, greater or less according to the nature
and cultivation of the nation, or race of men; but a perfectly fixed
quantity annually, not increasable by one grain. You may lose it, or you
may gather it; you may let it lie loose in the ravine, and buried in