out to ask, of all who
may be able to give me a serviceable answer, and with and for all who
are anxious for such answer, what arts should be generally taught to the
English boy and girl,--by what methods,--and to what ends? How well, or
how imperfectly, our youth of the higher classes should be disciplined
in the practice of music and painting?--how far, among the lower
classes, exercise in certain mechanical arts might become a part of
their school life?--how far, in the adult life of this nation, the Fine
Arts may advisably supersede or regulate the mechanical Arts? Plain
questions these, enough; clearly also important ones; and, as clearly,
boundless ones--mountainous--infinite in contents--only to be mined into
in a scrambling manner by poor inquirers, as their present tools and
sight may serve.

33. I have often been accused of dogmatism, and confess to the holding
strong opinions on some matters; but I tell the reader in sincerity, and
entreat him in sincerity to believe, that I do not think myself able to
dictate anything positive respecting questions of this magnitude. The
one thing I am sure of is, the need of some form of dictation; or, where
that is as yet impossible, at least of consistent experiment, for the
just solution of doubts which present themselves every day in more
significant and more impatient temper of interrogation.

Here is one, for instance, lying at the base of all the rest--namely,
what may be the real dignity of mechanical Art itself? I cannot express
the amazed awe, the crushed humility, with which I sometimes watch a
locomotive take its breath at a railway station, and think what work
there is in its bars and wheels, and what manner of men they must be who
dig brown iron-stone out of the ground, and forge it into THAT! What
assemblage of accurate and mighty faculties in them; more than fleshly
power over melting crag and coiling fire, fettered, and finessed at last
into the precision of watchmaking; Titanian hammer-strokes beating, out
of lava, these glittering cylinders and timely-respondent valves, and
fine ribbed rods, which touch each other as a serpent writhes, in
noiseless gliding, and omnipotence of grasp; infinitely complex anatomy
of active steel, compared with which the skeleton of a living creature
would seem, to a careless observer, clumsy and vile--a mere morbid
secretion and phosphatous prop of flesh! What would the men who thought
out this--who beat it out, who touched i