The Norton Anthology of English literature. Volume 2

was only a machine before, an animated tool. And observe, you are put to stern choice in this matter. You must either

make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men

were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect

in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their

fingers measure degrees like cogwheels, and their arms strike curves like com

passes, you must unhumanize them. All the energy of their spirits must be

given to make cogs and compasses of themselves. All their attention and

strength must go to the accomplishment of the mean act. The eye of the soul

must be bent upon the finger point, and the soul's force must fill all the invis

ible nerves that guide it, ten hours a day, that it may not err from its steely

precision, and so soul and sight be worn away, and the whole human being

be lost at last�a heap of sawdust, so far as its intellectual work in this world

is concerned; saved only by its Heart, which cannot go into the form of cogs

and compasses, but expands, after the ten hours are over, into fireside human

ity. On the other hand, if you will make a man of the working creature, you

cannot make a tool. Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do any

thing worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once. Out come

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).

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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