unconscious that it can interest an outsider, to dream of
discussing it. What they have to say would not therefore by
itself go far in demonstration of their acquirements in
technique. Fortunately, for proof of that we are not
dependent on talk. Besides talk there exists another kind of
evidence open to every one's examination, and the technical
skill exercised in country labours may be purely deduced
from the aptness and singular beauty of sundry country
tools.

The beauty of tools is not accidental, but inherent and
essential. The contours of a ship's sail bellying in the
wind are not more inevitable, nor more graceful, than the
curves of an adze-head or of a plough-share. Cast in iron or
steel, the gracefulness of a plough-share is more
indestructible than the metal, yet pliant (in the limits of
its type) as a line of English blank verse. It changes for
different soils: it is widened out or narrowed; it is
deep-grooved or shallow; not because of caprice at the
foundry or to satisfy an artistic fad, but to meet the
technical demands of the expert ploughman. The most familiar
example of beauty indicating subtle technique is supplied by
the admired shape of boats, which, however, is so variable
(the statement is made on the authority of an old
coast-guardsman) that the boat best adapted for one stretch
of shore may be dangerous, if not entirely useless, at
another stretch ten miles away. And as technique determines
the design of a boat, or of a waggon, or of a plough-share,
so it controls absolutely the fashioning of tools, and is
responsible for any beauty of form they may possess. Of all
tools none, of course, is more exquisite than a fiddle-bow.
But the fiddle-bow never could have been perfected, because
there would have been no call for its tapering delicacy, its
calculated balance of lightness and strength, had not the
violinist's technique reached such marvellous fineness of
power. For it is the accomplished artist who is fastidious
as to his tools; the bungling beginner can bungle with
anything. The fiddle-bow, however, affords only one example
of a rule which is equally well exemplified by many humbler
tools. Quarryman's peck, coachman's whip, cricket-bat,
fishing-rod, trowel, all have their intimate relation to the