200 THE STONES OF VENICE I. SAVAGENESS

uninventive workmen, other Venetian glass is so lovely in its forms that no price is too great for it; and we never see the same form in it twice.¹ Now you cannot have the finish and the varied form too. If the workman is thinking about his edges, he cannot be thinking of his design; if of his design, he cannot think of his edges. Choose whether you will pay for the lovely form or the perfect finish, and choose at the same moment whether you will make the worker a man or a grindstone.

§ 21. Nay, but the reader interrupts me,-“If the workman can design beautifully, I would not have him kept at the furnace. Let him be taken away and made a gentleman, and have a studio, and design his glass there, and I will have it blown and cut for him by common workmen, and so I will have my design and my finish too.”

All ideas of this kind are founded upon two mistaken suppositions: the first, that one man’s thoughts can be, or ought to be, executed by another man’s hands; the second, that manual labour is a degradation, when it is governed by intellect.

On a large scale, and in work determinable by line and rule, it is indeed both possible and necessary that the thoughts of one man should be carried out by the labour of others; in this sense I have already defined the best architecture to be the expression of the mind of manhood by the hands of childhood.² But on a smaller scale, and in a design which cannot be mathematically defined, one man’s thoughts can never be expressed by another: and the difference between the spirit of touch of the man who is inventing, and of the man who is obeying directions, is often all the difference between a great and a common work of art. How wide the separation is between original and second-hand execution, I shall endeavour

¹ [These points may be studied in the collection of Venetian glass in the British Museum. It is worth nothing in connection with the general argument that the Venetian glass makers had their own Libro d’Oro and ranked with patricians; “nobles gave their daughters in marriage to glass workers, and their children retained their nobility” (see M. A. Wallace-Dunlop’s Glass in the Old World, p. 144, and T. Okey’s Venice, 1903, p. 213).]

² [See Vol. IX. p. 290.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]