ded a handle or a lip without a new fancy in it. And therefore,
though some Venetian glass is ugly and clumsy enough when made by
clumsy and uninventive workmen, other Venetian glass is so lovely in
its forms that no price is too great for it; and we never see the same
form in it twice. Now you cannot have the finish and the varied form
too. If the workman is thinking about his edges, he cannot be thinking
of his design; if of his design, he cannot think of his edges. Choose
whether you will pay for the lovely form or the perfect finish, and
choose at the same moment whether you will make the worker a man or a
grindstone.

Nay, but the reader interrupts me,--"If the workman can design
beautifully, I would not have him kept at the furnace. Let him be taken
away and made a gentleman, and have a studio, and design his glass
there, and I will have it blown and cut for him by common workmen, and
so I will have my design and my finish too."

All ideas of this kind are founded upon two mistaken suppositions: the
first, that one man's thoughts can be, or ought to be, executed by
another man's hands; the second, that manual labour is a degradation,
when it is governed by intellect.

On a large scale, and in work determinable by line and rule, it is
indeed both possible and necessary that the thoughts of one man should
be carried out by the labour of others; in this sense I have already
defined the best architecture to be the expression of the mind of
manhood by the hands of childhood. But on a smaller scale, and in a
design which cannot be mathematically defined, one man's thoughts can
never be expressed by another: and the difference between the spirit of
touch of the man who is inventing, and of the man who is obeying
directions, is often all the difference between a great and a common
work of art. How wide the separation is between original and
second-hand execution, I shall endeavour to show elsewhere; it is not
so much to our purpose here as to mark the other and more fatal error
of despising manual labour when governed by intellect; for it is no
less fatal an error to despise it when thus regulated by intellect,
than to value it for its own sake. We are always in these days
endeavouring to separate the two; we want one man to be always
thinking, and another to be always working, and we call one a
gentleman, and the other an operative; whereas the workman ought often
to be thinking, and the thinker often to be working, a