n fed for as many days as are necessary on
bread and water, or perhaps we may say with as many onions as will keep
him in good humour. That is the way by which you will always get most
for your money; no mechanical multiplication or ingenuity of commercial
arrangements will ever get you a better penny's worth of art than that.

42. Without, however, pushing our calculations quite to this
prison-discipline extreme, we may lay it down as a rule in art-economy,
that original work is, on the whole, cheapest and best worth having. But
precisely in proportion to the value of it as a production, becomes the
importance of having it executed in permanent materials. And here we
come to note the second main error of the day, that we not only ask our
workmen for bad art, but we make them put it into bad substance. We
have, for example, put a great quantity of genius, within the last
twenty years, into water-colour drawing, and we have done this with the
most reckless disregard whether either the colours or the paper will
stand. In most instances, neither will. By accident, it may happen that
the colours in a given drawing have been of good quality, and its paper
uninjured by chemical processes. But you take not the least care to
ensure these being so; I have myself seen the most destructive changes
take place in water-colour drawings within twenty years after they were
painted; and from all I can gather respecting the recklessness of modern
paper manufacture, my belief is, that though you may still handle an
Albert Duerer engraving, two hundred years old, fearlessly, not one-half
of that time will have passed over your modern water-colours, before
most of them will be reduced to mere white or brown rags; and your
descendants, twitching them contemptuously into fragments between finger
and thumb, will mutter against you, half in scorn and half in anger,
"Those wretched nineteenth century people! they kept vapouring and
fuming about the world, doing what they called business, and they
couldn't make a sheet of paper that wasn't rotten."

43. And note that this is no unimportant portion of your art economy at
this time. Your water-colour painters are becoming every day capable of
expressing greater and better things; and their material is especially
adapted to the turn of your best artists' minds. The value which you
could accumulate in work of this kind would soon become a most important
item in the national art-wealth, if only yo