Whilst it is each man’s interest, that, not only ease and convenience of
living, but also wealth or surplus product should exist somewhere, it
need not be in his hands. Often it is very undesirable to him. Goethe
said well, "nobody should be rich but those who understand it." Some
men are born to own, and can animate all their possessions. Others
cannot: their owning is not graceful; seems to be a compromise of their
character: they seem to steal their own dividends. They should own who
can administer; not they who hoard and conceal; not they who, the
greater proprietors they are, are only the greater beggars, but they
whose work carves out work for more, opens a path for all. For he is
the rich man in whom the people are rich, and he is the poor man in whom
the people are poor: and how to give all access to the masterpieces of
art and nature, is the problem of civilization. The socialism of our
day has done good service in setting men on thinking how certain
civilizing benefits, now only enjoyed by the opulent, can be enjoyed by
all. For example, the providing to each man the means and apparatus of
science, and of the arts. There are many articles good for occasional
use, which few men are able to own. Every man wishes to see the ring of
Saturn, the satellites and belts of Jupiter and Mars; the mountains and
craters in the moon: yet how few can buy a telescope! and of those,
scarcely one would like the trouble of keeping it in order, and
exhibiting it. So of electrical and chemical apparatus, and many the
like things. Every man may have occasion to consult books which he does
not care to possess, such as cyclopedias, dictionaries, tables, charts,
maps, and public documents: pictures also of birds, beasts, fishes,
shells, trees, flowers, whose names he desires to know.
There is a refining influence from the arts of Design on a prepared
mind, which is as positive as that of music, and not to be supplied from
any other source. But pictures, engravings, statues, and casts, beside
their first cost, entail expenses, as of galleries and keepers for the
exhibition; and the use which any man can make of them is rare, and
their value, too, is much enhanced by the numbers of men who can share
their enjoyment. In the Greek cities, it was reckoned profane, that any
person should pretend a property in a work of art, which belonged to all
who could behold it. I think sometimes,—could I only have music on my
own terms;—could I live in a great city, and know where I could go
whenever I wished the ablution and inundation of musical waves,—that
were a bath and a medicine.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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