The work was not pleasant, but the
spirit was kind, and the heart delighted in its self-appointed toil.
Work in general, however, that has worth has several elements. First, It
must be individual. It must be joyfully done: there must enter into work
the vitality of a happy spirit. It must be spontaneous. This is why
machine-work can never be thoroughly beautiful: it lacks the spontaneity
of life. The hand never makes two things alike. With the mood, the
weather, the occasion, there are little touches added which a machine
cannot give. Life always varies and thinks of new effects.
When we try to realize what work is, when it is merely an amount of toil
prodded out of man or woman by a hard taskmaster, we have only to look
back to the bondage of Israel in Egypt, or to the time of Scylla, when
there were thirteen million slaves in Italy alone: slaves whose set
tasks were of over two hundred and fifty kinds; who worked on the
road-building, on public works, and in rowing in the galleys of the
slave-propelled ships. In Carthage agriculture was for a time largely
carried on by slave-labor. How different is this slave-labor from the
craft-work of mediaeval times, when, under the protection of the guilds,
manual labor became exalted to an artistic rank, and the workers at the
loom, the metal-workers, the wood-carvers, the tapestry-weavers, and the
workers in pottery and glass produced objects whose beauty has never
been either equalled or surpassed.
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