The Queen of the Air by John Ruskin (general ebook reader txt) 📖

our wide and waste seashores. Not our mountains nor moorland. Our life depends on them, more than on the best arable we have.

III. Harbor-making.--The deficiencies of safe or convenient harborage in our smaller ports to be remedied; other harbors built at dangerous points of coast, and a disciplined body of men always kept in connection with the pilot and life-boat services. There is room for every order of intelligence in this work, and for a large body of superior officers.

Porterage.--All heavy goods, not requiring speed in transit, to be carried (under preventative duty on transit, by railroad) by canal-boats, employing men for draught; and the merchant-shipping service extended by sea; so that no ships may be wrecked for want of hands, while there are idle ones in mischief on shore. Repair of buildings.--A body of men in various trades to be kept at the disposal of the authorities in every large town, for repair of buildings, especially the houses of the poorer orders, who, if no such provision were made, could not employ workmen on their own houses, but would simply live with rent walls and roofs. Dressmaking.--Substantial dress, of standard material and kind, strong shoes, and stout bedding, to be manufactured for the poor, so as to render it unnecessary for them, unless by extremity of improvidence, to wear cast clothes, or be without sufficiency of clothing.

VII. Works of Art.--Schools to be established on thoroughly sound principles of manufacture, and use of materials, and with sample and, for given periods, unalterable modes of work; first, in pottery, and embracing gradually metal work, sculpture, and decorative painting; the two points insisted upon, in distinction from ordinary commercial establishments, being perfectness of material to the utmost attainable degree; and the production of everything by hand-work, for the special purpose of developing personal power and skill in the workman.

The last two departments, and some subordinate branches of others, would include the service of women and children.

I give now, for such further illustrations as they contain of the points I desire most to insist upon with respect both to education and employment, a portion of the series of notes published some time ago in the "Art Journal," on the opposition of Modesty and Liberty, and the unescapable law of wise restraint. I am sorry that they are written obscurely--and it may be thought affectedly; but the fact is, I have always had three different ways of writing: one, with the single view of making myself understood, in which I necessarily omit a great deal of what comes into my head; another, in which I say what I think ought to be said, in what I suppose to be the best words I can find for it (which is in reality an affected style--be it good or bad); and my third way of writing is to say all that comes into my head for my own pleasure, in the first words that come, retouching them afterward into (approximate) grammar. These notes for the "Art Journal" were so written; and I like them myself, of course; but ask the reader's pardon for their confusedness.

"Sir, it cannot be better done."

We will insist, with the reader's permission, on this comfortful saying of Albert Dürer's in order to find out, if we may, what Modesty is; which it will be well for painters, readers, and especially critics, to know, before going farther. What it is; or, rather, who she is, her fingers being among the deftest in laying the ground-threads of Aglaia's cestus.

For this same opinion of Albert's is entertained by many other people respecting their own doings--a very prevalent opinion, indeed, I find it; and the answer itself, though rarely made with the Nuremberger's crushing decision, is nevertheless often enough intimated, with delicacy, by artists of all countries, in their various dialects. Neither can it always be held an entirely modest one, as it assuredly was in the man who would sometimes estimate a piece of his unconquerable work at only the worth of a plate of fruit, or a flask of wine--would have taken even one "fig for it," kindly offered; or given it royally for nothing, to show his hand to a fellow-king of his own, or any other craft--as Gainsborough gave the "Boy at the Stile" for a solo on the violin. An entirely modest saying, I repeat, in him--not always in us. For Modesty is "the measuring virtue," the virtue of modes or limits. She is, indeed, said to be only the third or youngest of the children of the cardinal virtue, Temperance; and apt to be despised, being more given to arithmetic, and other vulgar studies (Cinderella-like), than her elder sisters; but she is useful in the household, and arrives at great results with her yard-measure and slate-pencil--a pretty little Marchande des Modes, cutting her dress always according to the silk (if this be the proper feminine reading of "coat according to the cloth"), so that, consulting with her carefully of a morning, men get to know not only their income, but their in being--to know themselves, that is, in a gauger's manner, round, and up and down--surface and contents; what is in them and what may be got out of them; and in fine, their entire canon of weight and capacity. That yard-measure of Modesty's, lent to those who will use it, is a curious musical reed, and will go round and round waists that are slender enough, with latent melody in every joint of it, the dark root only being soundless, moist from the wave wherein

"Null' altra pianta che facesse fronda O che 'n durasse, vi puote aver vita."*

* "Purgatorio," i. 108, 109.

But when the little sister herself takes it in hand, to measure things outside of us with, the joints shoot out in an amazing manner: the four-square walls even of celestial cities being measurable enough by that reed; and the way pointed to them, though only to be followed, or even seen, in the dim starlight shed down from worlds amidst which there is no name of Measure any more, though the reality of it always. For, indeed, to all true modesty the necessary business is not inlook, but outlook, and especially uplook: it is only her sister Shamefacedness, who is known by the drooping lashes--Modesty, quite otherwise, by her large eyes full of wonder; for she never contemns herself, nor is ashamed of herself, but forgets herself--at least until she has done something worth memory. It is easy to peep and potter about one's own deficiencies in a quiet immodest discontent; but Modesty is so pleased with other people's doings, that she has no leisure to lament her own: and thus, knowing the fresh feeling of contentment, unstained with thought of self, she does not fear being pleased, when there is cause, with her own rightness, as with another's, as with another's, saying calmly, "Be it mine or yours, or whose else's it may, it is no matter; this also is well." But the right to say such a thing depends on continual reverence and manifold sense of failure. If you have known yourself to have failed, you may trust, when it comes, the strange consciousness of success; if you have faithfully loved the noble work of others, you need not fear to speak with respect of things duly done, of your own.

But the principal good that comes of art being followed in this reverent feeling is of it. Men who know their place can take it and keep it, be it low or high, contentedly and firmly, neither yielding nor grasping; and the harmony of hand and thought follows, rendering all great deeds of art possible--deeds in which the souls of men meet like the jewels in the windows of Aladdin's palace, the little gems and the large all equally pure, needing no cement but the fitting of facets; while the associative work of immodest men is all jointless, and astir with wormy ambition; putridly dissolute, and forever on the crawl: so that if it come together for a time, it can only be by metamorphosis through a flash of volcanic fire out of the vale of Siddim, vitrifying the clay of it, and fastening the slime, only to end in wilder scattering; according to the fate of those oldest, mightiest, immodestest of builders, of whom it is told in scorn, "They had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar." The first function of Modesty, then, being this recognition of place, her second is the recognition of law, and delight in it, for the sake of law itself, whether her part be to assert it, or obey. For as it belongs to all immodesty to defy or deny law, and assert privilege and license, according to its own pleasure (it being therefore rightly called "insolent," that is, "custom-breaking," violating some usual and appointed order to attain for itself greater forwardness or power), so it is the habit of all modesty to love the constancy and "solemnity," or, literally, "accustomedness," of law, seeking first what are the solemn, appointed, inviolable customs and general orders of nature, and of the Master of nature, touching the matter in hand; and striving to put itself, as habitually and inviolably, in compliance with them. Out of which habit, once established, arises what is rightly called "conscience," nor "science" merely, but "with-science," a science "with us," such as only modest creatures can have--with or within them--and within all creation besides, every member of it, strong or weak, witnessing together, and joining in the happy consciousness that each one's work is good; the bee also being profoundly of that opinion; and the lark; and the swallow, in that noisy, but modestly upside-down, Babel of hers, under the eaves, with its unvolcanic slime for mortar; and the two ants who are asking of each other at the turn of that little ant's-foot-worn bath through the moss "lor via e lor fortuna;" and the builders also, who built yonder pile of cloud-marble in the west, and the gilder who gilded it, and is gone down behind it. But I think we shall better understand what we ought of the nature of Modesty, and of her opposite, by taking a simple instance of both, in the practice of that art of music which the wisest have agreed in thinking the first element of education; only I must ask the reader's patience with me through a parenthesis.

Among the foremost men whose power has had to assert itself, though with conquest, yet with countless loss, through peculiarly English disadvantages of circumstance, are assuredly to be ranked together, both for honor, and for mourning, Thomas Bewick and George Cruikshank. There is, however, less cause for regret in the instance of Bewick. We may understand that it was well for us once to see what an entirely keen and true man's temper, could achieve, together, unhelped, but also unharmed, among the black bans and wolds of Tyne. But the genius of Cruikshank has been cast away in an utterly ghastly and lamentable manner: his superb line-work, worthy of any class of subject, and his powers of conception and composition, of which I cannot venture to estimate the range in their degraded application, having been condemned, by his fate, to be spent either in rude jesting, or in vain war with conditions of vice too low alike for record or rebuke, among the dregs of the British populace. Yet perhaps I am wrong in regretting even this: it may be an appointed lesson for futurity, that the art of the best English etcher in the nineteenth century, spent on illustrations of the lives of burglars and drunkards, should one day be seen in museums beneath Greek vases fretted with drawings of the wars of Troy, or side by side with Dürer's "Knight and Death."

Be that as it may, I am at present glad to be able to refer to one of these perpetuations, by his strong hand, of such human character as our