A Joy For Ever (and Its Price in the Market)Ruskin, John
Philosophy
A Joy For Ever (and Its Price in the Market)
Ruskin, John
Art
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 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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