Nevertheless, he who lives by the machine alone lives but half a life;
while he who uses his hand to contrive and to adorn drives dullness from
his path. A true artist and a true artisan are one. Hand-craft, the
power to shape, to curve, to beautify, to create, gives pleasure and
dignity to labor.
In other times and in other lands, hand-craft has had more honor than it
has had with us. Let me give some examples. Not long ago, I went to one
of the shrines of education, the Sorbonne in Paris. Two paintings adorn
the chapel walls, not of saints or martyrs, nor of apostles or
prophets, perhaps I should say of both saints and prophets, _Labor_ and
_Humilitas_, Industry and Modesty.
The touch of Phidias was his own, and so inimitable that a few months
ago, an American, scanning, with his practiced eye, the galleries of the
Louvre, recognized a fragment of the work of Phidias, long separated
from the Parthenon frieze which Lord Elgin sent to London. The
sculptor's touch could not be mistaken. It was as truly his own as his
signature, his autograph. Ruskin, in a lecture on the relation of Art to
Morals, calls attention to a note which Durer made on some drawings sent
him by Raphael: "These figures Raphael drew and sent to Albert Durer
in Nurnberg, to show him his hand, '_sein hand zu weisen_.
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