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The vessels lay alongside the wharves ay, head on, so that their bowsprits stuck up out over the strand like rows of bayonets. Over it, too, sprawled the mermaids, goddesses, madonnas, and other figure-heads in carved and painted wood which gave names to the ships all worn by sea-water, split, mildewed, and dripping.
Just as, in a well-ordered state, the happiness of no individual or class of individuals is sacrificed to that of other individuals or classes; so in art, each part must be elaborated and perfected, not merely for the sake of its contribution to the whole, but for its own sake. There should be no mere figure-heads or machinery. Loving care of detail, of the incidental, characterizes the best art.
Boat builders had their yards along the bank; mastmakers, sail-makers, rope-makers, block-makers; there were repairing docks dotted about all down the river, each able to hold one ship at a time, like one or two still remaining at Rotherhithe, there were ship-building yards of considerable importance; all these places employed a vast number of workmen carpenters, caulkers, painters, riggers, carvers of figure-heads, block-makers, stevedores, lightermen, watermen, victuallers, tavern-keepers, and all the roguery and ribauderie that always gather round mercantile Jack ashore.
His father carved wooden figure-heads for ships, and intended his son to follow the same calling. Bertel, however, soon showed talent and inclination for something better, and was sent to the Free School of the Art Academy, there making great progress. He received very little education beyond what the Art School gave him, and his youthful days were hard and poverty-stricken.
These handsome buildings, with their chemical laboratories, lecture rooms, and English professors, seem at the first glance strangely remote from the homely farmer in his native village, and the first inclination is to suggest that these colleges will only produce a crop of ornamental figure-heads, who will graduate in agriculture, but who will make no practical use of the knowledge which they have acquired.
They remind us of what Herodotus affirms concerning the Phoenician pataikoi, which were used for the figure-heads of ships, and which he compares to the Egyptian images of Phthah, or Ptah, the god of creation. They are ugly dwarf figures, with a large misshapen head, a bushy beard, short arms, fat bodies, a short striped tunic, and thick clumsy legs.
These were the fine figure-heads of the finest ships afloat.
Captain Runacles guessed by this that the four-year-old's question had reference to one of the figure-heads disposed along the hedge. "What is a nymph?" "A sort of girl." "I don't like this sort of girl. She's got no legs." "Come over here and look at this tulip." "There's a much better sort of girl next door," Tristram continued, unheeding.
'Ha! cries he, flapping his empty sleeve at me again, 'and nice figure-heads you made of yourselves with your ridiculous stocks and skin-tight breeches, and indeed," said his Lordship, stooping to catch a side-view of his imprisoned legs, "they are a most excellent fit, I think you'll agree." "Marvellous!" sighed Barnabas, observing them with the eyes of envy.
But the great scope of his business lay in the manufacture of figure-heads for vessels.
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