That is your main
nineteenth-century faith, or infidelity. You think you can get
everything by grinding--music, literature, and painting. You will find
it grievously not so; you can get nothing but dust by mere grinding.
Even to have the barley-meal out of it, you must have the barley
first; and that comes by growth, not grinding. But essentially, we
have lost our delight in Skill; in that majesty of it which I was
trying to make clear to you in my last address, and which long
ago[187] I tried to express, under the head of ideas of power. The
entire sense of that, we have lost, because we ourselves do not take
pains enough to do right, and have no conception of what the right
costs; so that all the joy and reverence we ought to feel in looking
at a strong man's work have ceased in us. We keep them yet a little in
looking at a honeycomb or a bird's-nest; we understand that these
differ, by divinity of skill, from a lump of wax or a cluster of
sticks. But a picture, which is a much more wonderful thing than a
honeycomb or a bird's-nest,--have we not known people, and sensible
people too, who expected to be taught to produce that, in six lessons?
Well, you must have the skill, you must have the beauty, which is the
highest moral element; and then, lastly, you must have the verity or
utility, which is not the moral, but the vital element; and this
desire for verity and use is the one aim of the three that always
leads in great schools, and in the minds of great masters, without any
exception.
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