this
cause: that Pietro di Medici then gave, at the period of one great epoch
of consummate power in the arts, the perfect, accurate, and intensest
possible type of the greatest error which nations and princes can
commit, respecting the power of genius entrusted to their guidance. You
had there, observe, the strongest genius in the most perfect obedience;
capable of iron independence, yet wholly submissive to the patron's
will; at once the most highly accomplished and the most original,
capable of doing as much as man could do, in any direction that man
could ask. And its governor, and guide, and patron sets it to build a
statue in snow--to put itself into the service of annihilation--to make
a cloud of itself, and pass away from the earth.

[Note 6: See the noble passage on this tradition in "Casa Guidi
Windows."]

37. Now this, so precisely and completely done by Pietro di Medici, is
what we are all doing, exactly in the degree in which we direct the
genius under our patronage to work in more or less perishable materials.
So far as we induce painters to work in fading colours, or architects to
build with imperfect structure, or in any other way consult only
immediate ease and cheapness in the production of what we want, to the
exclusion of provident thought as to its permanence and serviceableness
in after ages; so far we are forcing our Michael Angelos to carve in
snow. The first duty of the economist in art is, to see that no
intellect shall thus glitter merely in the manner of hoar-frost; but
that it shall be well vitrified, like a painted window, and shall be set
so between shafts of stone and bands of iron, that it shall bear the
sunshine upon it, and send the sunshine through it, from generation to
generation.

38. I can conceive, however, some political economist to interrupt me
here, and say, "If you make your art wear too well, you will soon have
too much of it; you will throw your artists quite out of work. Better
allow for a little wholesome evanescence--beneficent destruction: let
each age provide art for itself, or we shall soon have so many good
pictures that we shall not know what to do with them."

Remember, my dear hearers, who are thus thinking, that political
economy, like every other subject, cannot be dealt with effectively if
we try to solve two questions at a time instead of one. It is one
question, how to get plenty of a thing; and another, whether plenty of
it will be good for us. Co