and you make him into current
coin, or household plate, but not one grain of him can you originally
produce. A certain quantity of art-intellect is born annually in every
nation, greater or less according to the nature and cultivation of the
nation, or race of men; but a perfectly fixed quantity annually, not
increasable by one grain. You may lose it, or you may gather it; you may
let it lie loose in the ravine, and buried in the sands, or you may make
kings' thrones of it, and overlay temple gates with it, as you choose:
but the best you can do with it is always merely sifting, melting,
hammering, purifying--never creating.

21. And there is another thing notable about this artistical gold; not
only is it limited in quantity, but in use. You need not make thrones or
golden gates with it unless you like, but assuredly you can't do
anything else with it. You can't make knives of it, nor armour, nor
railroads. The gold won't cut you, and it won't carry you: put it to a
mechanical use, and you destroy it at once. It is quite true that in the
greatest artists, their proper artistical faculty is united with every
other; and you may make use of the other faculties, and let the
artistical one lie dormant. For aught I know, there may be two or three
Leonardo da Vincis employed at this moment in your harbours and
railroads: but you are not employing their Leonardesque or golden
faculty there,--you are only oppressing and destroying it. And the
artistical gift in average men is not joined with others: your born
painter, if you don't make a painter of him, won't be a first-rate
merchant, or lawyer; at all events, whatever he turns out, his own
special gift is unemployed by you; and in no wise helps him in that
other business. So here you have a certain quantity of a particular sort
of intelligence, produced for you annually by providential laws, which
you can only make use of by setting it to its own proper work, and which
any attempt to use otherwise involves the dead loss of so much human
energy.

22. Well then, supposing we wish to employ it, how is it to be best
discovered and refined? It is easily enough discovered. To wish to
employ it is to discover it. All that you need is, a school of trial[4]
in every important town, in which those idle farmers' lads whom their
masters never can keep out of mischief, and those stupid tailors'
'prentices who are always stitching the sleeves in wrong way upwards,
may have a try at t