Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century -- Fiction
The aggregate of labor to make and gild this elephant was not quite one
woman's work (12 hours). Taking 18s. as the true value of the work, for
in this world the workman has commonly to sell his production under
the above disadvantages, forced sale and the conspiracies of the
unimprisoned--we have still 13s. for a day's work by a woman.
From the bull greater things are expected. The cast is from the bull of
the Vatican, a bull true to Nature, and Nature adorned the very meadows
when she produced the bull. What a magnificent animal is a bull! what
a dewlap! what a front! what clean pasterns! what fearless eyes! what a
deep diapason is his voice! of which beholding this his true and massive
effigy in ---- Jail we are reminded. When he stands muscular, majestic,
sonorous, gold, in his meadow pied with daisies, it shall not be “sweet”
and “love” and “duck”--words of beauty but no earthly signification; it
shall be, “There, I forgive Europa.”
And need I say there were more aimed at in all this than pecuniary
profit. Mr. Eden held that the love of production is the natural
specific antidote to the love of stealing. He kindled in his prisoners
the love of producing, of what some by an abuse of language call
“creating.” And the producers rose in the scale of human beings. Their
faces showed it--the untamed look melted away--the white of the eye
showed less, and the pupil and iris more, and better quality.
Gold-leaf when first laid on adheres in visible squares with uncouth
edges, a ragged affair; then the gilder takes a camelhair brush and
under its light and rapid touch the work changes as under a diviner's
rod, so rapidly and majestically come beauty and finish over it. Perhaps
no other art has so delicious a one minute as this is to the gilder. The
first work our prisoner gilded she screamed with delight several times
at this crisis. She begged to have the work left in her cell one day at
least. “It lights up the cell and lights up my heart.”
“Of course it does,” said Mr. Eden. “Aha! what, there are greater
pleasures in the world than sinning, are there?”
“That there are. I never was so pleased in my life. May I have it a few
minutes?”
“My child, you shall have it till its place is taken by others like
it. Keep it before your eyes, feed on it, and ask yourself which is
the best, to work and add something useful or beautiful to the world's
material wealth, or to steal; to be a little benefactor to your kind and
yourself, or a little vermin preying on the industrious. Which is best?”
“I'll never take while I can make.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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