My good young people, this is the foolishest, quite pre-eminently—perhaps almost the harmfullest—notion that could possibly be put into your empty little eggshells of heads. There is not one in a million of you who can ever be great in any thing. To be greater than the greatest that have been, is permitted perhaps to one man in Europe in the course of two or three centuries. But because you cannot be Handel and Mozart—is it any reason why you should not learn to sing "God save the Queen" properly, when you have a mind to? Because a girl cannot be prima donna in the Italian Opera, is it any reason that she should not learn to play a jig for her brothers and sisters in good time, or a soft little tune for her tired mother, or that she should not sing to please herself, among the dew, on a May morning? Believe me, joy, humility, and usefulness, always go together: as insolence with misery, and these both with destructiveness. You may learn with proud teachers how to throw down the Vendôme Column, and burn the Louvre, but never how to lay so much as one touch of safe colour, or one layer of steady stone: and if indeed there be among you a youth of true genius, be assured that he will distinguish himself first, not by petulance or by disdain, but by discerning firmly what to admire, and whom to obey.
169. It will, I hope, be the result of the interest lately awakened in art through our provinces, to enable each town of importance to obtain, in permanent possession, a few—and it is desirable there should be no more than a few—examples of consummate and masterful art: an engraving or two by Dürer—a single portrait by Reynolds—a fifteenth century Florentine drawing—a thirteenth century French piece of painted glass, and the like; and that, in every town occupied in a given manufacture, examples of unquestionable excellence in that manufacture should be made easily accessible in its civic museum.
I must ask you, however, to observe very carefully that I use the word manufacture in its literal and proper sense. It means the making of things by the hand. It does not mean the making them by machinery. And, while I plead with you for a true humility in rivalship with the works of others, I plead with you also for a just pride in what you really can honestly do yourself.
You must neither think your work the best ever done by man:—nor, on the other hand, think that the tongs and poker can do better—and that, although you are wiser than Solomon, all this wisdom of yours can be outshone by a shovelful of coke.
170. Let me take, for instance, the manufacture of lace, for which, I believe, your neighbouring town of Nottingham enjoys renown. There is still some distinction between machine-made and hand-made lace. I will suppose that distinction so far done away with, that, a pattern once invented, you can spin lace as fast as you now do thread. Everybody then might wear, not only lace collars, but lace gowns. Do you think they would be more comfortable in them than they are now in plain stuff—or that, when everybody could wear them, anybody would be proud of wearing them? A spider may perhaps be rationally proud of his own cobweb, even though all the fields in the morning are covered with the like, for he made it himself—but suppose a machine spun it for him?
Suppose all the gossamer were Nottingham-made, would a sensible spider be either prouder, or happier, think you?
A sensible spider! You cannot perhaps imagine such a creature. Yet surely a spider is clever enough for his own ends?
You think him an insensible spider, only because he cannot understand yours—and is apt to impede yours. Well, be assured of this, sense in human creatures is shown also, not by cleverness in promoting their own ends and interests, but by quickness in understanding other people's ends and interests, and by putting our own work and keeping our own wishes in harmony with theirs.
171. But I return to my point, of cheapness. You don't think that it would be convenient, or even creditable, for women to wash the doorsteps or dish the dinners in lace gowns? Nay, even for the most ladylike occupations—reading, or writing, or playing with her children—do you think a lace gown, or even a lace collar, so great an advantage or dignity to a woman? If you think of it, you will find the whole value of lace, as a possession, depends on the fact of its having a beauty which has been the reward of industry and attention.
That the thing itself is a prize—a thing which everybody cannot have. That it proves, by the look of it, the ability of its maker; that it proves, by the rarity of it, the dignity of its wearer—either that she has been so industrious as to save money, which can buy, say, a piece of jewellery, of gold tissue, or of fine lace—or else, that she is a noble person, to whom her neighbours concede, as an honour, the privilege of wearing finer dresses than they.