all his roughness, all his dullness, all his incapability; shame upon shame,
failure upon failure, pause after pause: but out comes the whole majesty of
him also; and we know the height of it only, when we see the clouds settling
upon him. And, whether the clouds be bright or dark, there will be transfig
uration behind and within them. And now, reader, look around this English room of yours, about which you
have been proud so often, because the work of it was so good and strong, and
the ornaments of it so finished. Examine again all those accurate moldings,
and perfect polishings, and unerring adjustments of the seasoned wood and
tempered steel. Many a time you have exulted over them, and thought how
great England was, because her slightest work was done so thoroughly. Alas!
if read rightly, these perfectnesses are signs of a slavery in our England a
thousand times more bitter and more degrading than that of the scourged
African, or helot8 Greek. Men may be beaten, chained, tormented, yoked like
cattle, slaughtered like summer flies, and yet remain in one sense, and the
best sense, free. But to smother their souls within them, to blight and hew
into rotting pollards9 the suckling branches of their human intelligence, to
make the flesh and skin which, after the worm's work on it, is to see God,1
into leathern thongs to yoke machinery with?this it is to be slave-masters
indeed; and there might be more freedom in England, though her feudal lords'
lightest words were worth men's lives, and though the blood of the vexed
husbandman dropped in the furrows of her fields, than there is while the
animation of her multitudes is sent like fuel to feed the factory smoke, and
8. A class of serfs in ancient Sparta. 1. 'And though, after my skin, worms destroy this 9. Trees with top branches cut back to the trunk. body, yet in my flesh shall 1 see God' (Job 19.26).
.
THE STONES OF VENICE / 1329
the strength of them is given daily to be wasted into the fineness of a web, or
racked into the exactness of a line.
And, on the other hand, go forth again to gaze upon the old cathedral front,
where you have smiled so often at the fantastic2 ignorance of the old sculptors:
examine once more those ugly goblins, and formless monsters, and stern stat
ues, anatomiless3 and rigid; but do not mock at them, for they are signs of the
life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone; a freedom of thought,
and rank in scale of being, such as no laws, no charters, no charities can
secure; but which it must be the first aim of all Europe at this day to regain
for her children. Let me not be thought to speak wildly or extravagantly. It is verily this deg
radation of the operative into a machine, which, more than any other evil of
the times, is leading the mass of the nations everywhere into vain, incoherent,
destructive struggling for a freedom of which they cannot explain the nature
to themselves. Their universal outcry against wealth, and against nobility, is
not forced from them either by the pressure of famine, or the sting of mortified
pride. These do much, and have done much in all ages; but the foundations
of society were never yet shaken as they are at this day. It is not that men are
ill fed, but that they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their
bread, and therefore look to wealth as the only means of pleasure. It is not
that men are pained by the scorn of the upper classes, but they cannot endure
their own; for they feel that the kind of labor to which they are condemned is
verily a degrading one, and makes them less than men. Never had the upper
classes so much sympathy with the lower, or charity for them, as they have at
this day, and yet never were they so much hated by them: for, of old, the
