I. SAVAGENESS VI. THE NATURE OF GOTHIC 201

to show elsewhere;¹ it is not so much to our purpose here as to mark the other and more fatal error of despising manual labour when governed by intellect; for it is no less fatal an error to despise it when thus regulated by intellect, than to value it for its own sake. We are always in these days endeavouring to separate the two; we want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always working, and we call one a gentleman, and the other an operative; whereas the workman ought often to be thinking, and the thinker often to be working, and both should be gentlemen, in the best sense. As it is, we make both ungentle, the one envying, the other despising, his brother; and the mass of society is made up of morbid thinkers, and miserable workers. Now it is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity. It would be well if all of us were good handicraftsmen in some kind,² and the dishonour of manual labour done away with altogether; so that though there should still be a trenchant distinction of race between nobles and commoners, there should not, among the latter, be a trenchant distinction of employment, as between idle and working men, or between men of liberal and illiberal professions. All professions should be liberal, and there should be less pride felt in peculiarity of employment, and more in excellence of achievement. And yet more, in each several profession, on master should be too proud to do its hardest work. The painter should grind his own colours; the architect work in the mason’s yard with his men;³ the master-manufacturer be himself a more skilful operative than any man in his mills; and the distinction between

¹ [See Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. iii. § 21, where Invention is laid down as one of the distinguishing characteristics between Higher and Lower Art.]

² [This was a constant theme with Ruskin in later times. See, for instance, Munera Pulveris, § 109, and Aratra Pentelici, § 97: “Resolve upon this one thing at least, that you will enable yourselves daily to do actually with your hands, something that is useful to mankind.” Hence the road-making by his pupils which he superintended at Hincksey during his Professorship at Oxford in 1874-1875.]

³ [See below, ch. viii. § 117, p. 418, where this passage is illustrated from a capital on the Ducal Palace.]

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