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The same thing is true, of course, not only about the state of the crafts but about the status of the craftsman. The best proof that the system of the guilds had an undeveloped good in it is that the most advanced modern men are now going back five hundred years to get the good out of it.
The pride of the knights, the avarice of the priests, and the gradual abasement of character in the craftsman, changing him from a citizen able to wield either tools in peace or weapons in war, to a dull tradesman, forced to pay mercenary troops to defend his shop door, are the direct causes of common ruin towards the close of the sixteenth century.
When towards the close of the nineteenth century some inventive craftsman hit upon the idea of an automatic machine to supply candy, a box of cigarettes, or a whiff of perfumery, he may or may not have borrowed his idea from the slot-machine of Hero; but in any event, instead of being an innovator he was really two thousand years behind the times, for the slot-machine of Hero is the precise prototype of these modern ones.
Doubtless the vanity of the craftsman demands satisfaction; but chiefly the child wishes to assure itself that some impartial judge can interpret its notation. One definitely artistic gift, however, many children do possess, and that is a sense of the decorative possibilities of their medium.
It is a grotesque misapprehension which sees in art no more than a craft comprehensible perfectly only to the craftsman: art is a manifestation of emotion, and emotion speaks a language that all may understand. But I will allow that the critic who has not a practical knowledge of technique is seldom able to say anything on the subject of real value, and my ignorance of painting is extreme.
Before he was made bishop, Bernward was tutor to the young Emperor Otto III. He was a student of art all his life, and a practical craftsman, working largely in metals, and training up a Guild of followers in the Cathedral School. He was extremely versatile: one of the great geniuses of history.
"You will not meet with such an old man, or such a young lover," he said after a pause, "because you love your daughter too well to hand her over to the manoeuvres of an old libertine, and because you the Baronne Hulot, sister of the old Lieutenant-General who commanded the veteran Grenadiers of the Old Guard will not condescend to take a man of spirit wherever you may find him; for he might be a mere craftsman, as many a millionaire of to-day was ten years ago, a working artisan, or the foreman of a factory.
I doubt if he has a stiver left. I know he drew some money from the Craftsman yesterday." "What, does he write for that scurrilous, venomous print?" cried Gay, visibly disturbed. "Not of his own will. He hates the paper and he hates Amherst, who owns it. But what is a man to do when poverty knocks at the door?" "That may be.
Supreme craftsman as he was, it protected him from the craftsman's delusion rife under the inappropriate name of "art for art's sake" in these uninstinctive, over-dextrous days that subtle treatment can dignify all subjects equally, and that expression, irrespective of the foregoing impression in the artist and the subsequent impression in the audience, is the aim of art.
That large collective portrait of the hero, slowly emerging from sympathies and censures, from judgments and panegyrics, seems dim indeed and visionary, when compared with some sharply indented description by a brilliant literary craftsman. It has the vagueness of a photograph produced by superimposing many negatives of the same face one upon the other. It lacks the pungent piquancy of an etching.
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