OF THE DIGNITY OF THE FOUR FINE ARTS; AND OF THE PROPER SYSTEM OF
RETAIL TRADE.
_April 15, 1867._
127. I return now to the part of the subject at which I was
interrupted--the inquiry as to the proper means of finding persons
willing to maintain themselves and others by degrading occupations.
That, on the whole, simply manual occupations _are_ degrading, I
suppose I may assume you to admit; at all events, the fact is so,
and I suppose few general readers will have any doubt of it.[A]
[A] Many of my working readers have disputed this statement
eagerly, feeling the good effect of work in themselves; but
observe, I only say, _simply_ or _totally_ manual work; and
that, alone, _is_ degrading, though often in measure,
refreshing, wholesome, and necessary. So it is highly
necessary and wholesome to eat sometimes; but degrading to
eat all day, as to labor with the hands all day. But it is
not degrading to think all day--if you can. A highly-bred
court lady, rightly interested in politics and literature,
is a much finer type of the human creature than a servant of
all work, however clever and honest.
Granting this, it follows as a direct consequence that it is the duty
of all persons in higher stations of life, by every means in their
power to diminish their demand for work of such kind, _and to live
with as little aid from the lower trades_, as they can possibly
contrive.
128. I suppose you see that this conclusion is not a little at
variance with received notions on political economy? It is popularly
supposed that it benefits a nation to invent a want. But the fact is,
that the true benefit is in extinguishing a want--in living with as
few wants as possible.
I cannot tell you the contempt I feel for the common writers on
political economy, in their stupefied missing of this first principle
of all human economy--individual or political--to live, namely, with
as few wants as possible, and to waste nothing of what is given you to
supply them.
129. This ought to be the first lesson of every rich man's political
code. "Sir," his tutor should early say to him, "you are so placed in
society,--it may be for your misfortune, it _must_ be for your
trial--that you are likely to be maintained all your life by the labor
of other men. You will have to make shoes for nobody, but some one
will have to make a great many for you. You will have to dig ground
for nobody, but some one will have to dig through every summer's hot
day for you. You will build houses and make clothes for no one, but
many a rough hand must knead clay, and many an elbow be crooked to the
stitch, to keep that body of yours warm and fine. Now remember,
whatever you and your work may be worth, the less your keep costs, the
better. It does not cost money only. It costs degradation. You do not
merely employ these people. You also tread upon them. It cannot be
helped;--you have your place, and they have theirs; but see that you
tread as lightly as possible, and on as few as possible. What food,
and clothes, and lodging, you honestly need, for your health and
peace, you may righteously take. See that you take the plainest you
can serve yourself with--that you waste or wear nothing vainly--and
that you employ no man in furnishing you with any useless luxury."
130. That is the first lesson of Christian--or human--economy; and
depend upon it, my friend, it is a sound one, and has every voice and
vote of the spirits of Heaven and earth to back it, whatever views the
Manchester men, or any other manner of men, may take respecting
"demand and supply." Demand what you deserve, and you shall be
supplied with it, for your good. Demand what you do _not_ deserve, and
you shall be supplied with something which you have not demanded, and
which Nature perceives that you deserve, quite to the contrary of your
good. That is the law of your existence, and if you do not make it the
law of your resolved acts, so much, precisely, the worse for you and
all connected with you.
131. Yet observe, though it is out of its proper place said here, this
law forbids no luxury which men are not degraded in providing. You may
have Paul Veronese to paint your ceiling, if you like, or Benvenuto
Cellini to make cups for you. But you must not employ a hundred divers
to find beads to stitch over your sleeve. (Did you see the account of
the sales of the Esterhazy jewels the other day?)
And the degree in which you recognize the difference between these two
kinds of services, is precisely what makes the difference between your
being a civilized person or a barbarian. If you keep slaves to furnish
forth your dress--to glut your stomach--sustain your indolence--or
deck your pride, you are a barbarian. If you keep servants, properly
cared for, to furnish you with what you verily want, and no more than
that--you are a "civil" person--a person capable of the qualities of
citizenship.[A]
[A] Compare 'The Crown of Wild Olive,' Sec.Sec. 79, 118, and 122.
132. Now, farther, observe that in a truly civilized and disciplined
state, no man would be allowed to meddle with any material who did not
know how to make the best of it. In other words, the arts of working
in wood, clay, stone, and metal, would all be _fine_ arts (working in
iron for machinery becoming an entirely distinct business). There
would be no joiner's work, no smith's, no pottery nor stone-cutting,
so debased in character as to be entirely unconnected with the finer
branches of the same art; and to at least one of these finer branches
(generally in metal-work) every painter and sculptor would be
necessarily apprenticed during some years of his education. There
would be room, in these four trades alone, for nearly every grade of
practical intelligence and productive imagination.
133. But it should not be artists alone who are exercised early in
these crafts. It would be part of my scheme of physical education that
every youth in the state--from the King's son downwards,--should learn
to do something finely and thoroughly with his hand, so as to let him
know what _touch_ meant; and what stout craftsmanship meant; and to
inform him of many things besides, which no man can learn but by some
severely accurate discipline in doing. Let him once learn to take a
straight shaving off a plank, or draw a fine curve without faltering,
or lay a brick level in its mortar; and he has learned a multitude of
other matters which no lips of man could ever teach him. He might
choose his craft, but whatever it was, he should learn it to some
sufficient degree of true dexterity: and the result would be, in after
life, that among the middle classes a good deal of their house
furniture would be made, and a good deal of rough work, more or less
clumsily, but not ineffectively, got through, by the master himself
and his sons, with much furtherance of their general health and peace
of mind, and increase of innocent domestic pride and pleasure, and to
the extinction of a great deal of vulgar upholstery and other mean
handicraft.
134. Farther. A great deal of the vulgarity, and nearly all the vice,
of retail commerce, involving the degradation of persons occupied in
it, depends simply on the fact that their minds are always occupied by
the vital (or rather mortal) question of profits. I should at once put
an end to this source of baseness by making all retail dealers merely
salaried officers in the employ of the trade guilds; the stewards,
that is to say, of the salable properties of those guilds, and
purveyors of such and such articles to a given number of families. A
perfectly well-educated person might, without the least degradation,
hold such an office as this, however poorly paid; and it would be
precisely the fact of his being well educated which would enable him
to fulfil his duties to the public without the stimulus of direct
profit. Of course the current objection to such a system would be that
no man, for a regularly paid salary, would take pains to please his
customers; and the answer to that objection is, that if you can train
a man to so much unselfishness as to offer himself fearlessly to the
chance of being shot, in the course of his daily duty, you can most
assuredly, if you make it also a point of honor with him, train him to
the amount of self-denial involved in looking you out with care such a
piece of cheese or bacon as you have asked for.
135. You see that I have already much diminished the number of
employments involving degradation; and raised the character of many of
those that are left. There remain to be considered the necessarily
painful or mechanical works of mining, forging, and the like: the
unclean, noisome, or paltry manufactures--the various kinds of
transport--(by merchant shipping, etc.) and the conditions of menial
service.
It will facilitate the examination of these if we put them for the
moment aside, and pass to the other division of our dilemma, the
question, namely, what kind of lives our gentlemen and ladies are to
live, for whom all this hard work is to be done.