still. From the Kensington Museum I went to an afternoon tea, at a
house where I was sure to meet some nice people. And among the first
I met was an old friend who had been hearing some lectures on botany
at the Kensington Museum, and been delighted by them. She is the kind
of person who gets good out of everything, and she was quite right
in being delighted; besides that, as I found by her account of them,
the lectures were really interesting, and pleasantly given. She had
expected botany to be dull, and had not found it so, and "had learned
so much." On hearing this, I proceeded naturally to inquire what;
for my idea of her was that before she went to the lectures at all,
she had known more botany than she was likely to learn by them. So she
told me that she had learned first of all that "there were seven sorts
of leaves." Now I have always a great suspicion of the number Seven;
because when I wrote the Seven Lamps of Architecture, it required all
the ingenuity I was master of to prevent them from becoming Eight, or
even Nine, on my hands. So I thought to myself that it would be very
charming if there were only seven sorts of leaves; but that, perhaps,
if one looked the woods and forests of the world carefully through,
it was just possible that one might discover as many as eight sorts;
and then where would my friend's new knowledge of Botany be? So I said,
"That was very pretty; but what more?" Then my friend told me that she
had no idea, before, that petals were leaves. On which, I thought to
myself that it would not have been any great harm to her if she had
remained under her old impression that petals were petals. But I said,
"That was very pretty, too; and what more?" So then my friend told me
that the lecturer said, "the object of his lectures would be entirely
accomplished if he could convince his hearers that there was no such
thing as a flower." Now, in that sentence you have the most perfect
and admirable summary given you of the general temper and purposes
of modern science. It gives lectures on Botany, of which the object
is to show that there is no such thing as a flower; on Humanity,
to show that there is no such thing as a Man; and on Theology,
to show there is no such thing as a God. No such thing as a Man,
but only a Mechanism; no such thing as a God, but only a series of
forces. The two faiths are essentially one: if you feel yourself to
be only a machine, constructed to be a Regulator of minor machinery,
you will put your statue of such science on your Holborn Viaduct,
and necessarily recognize only major machinery as regulating you.
I must explain the real meaning to you, however, of that saying of
the Botanical lecturer, for it has a wide bearing. Some fifty years
ago the poet Goethe discovered that all the parts of plants had a
kind of common nature, and would change into each other. Now this
was a true discovery, and a notable one; and you will find that,
in fact, all plants are composed of essentially two parts--the leaf
and root--one loving the light, the other darkness; one liking to be
clean, the other to be dirty; one liking to grow for the most part
up, the other for the most part down; and each having faculties and
purposes of its own. But the pure one which loves the light has, above
all things, the purpose of being married to another leaf, and having
child-leaves, and children's children of leaves, to make the earth
fair for ever. And when the leaves marry, they put on wedding-robes,
and are more glorious than Solomon in all his glory, and they have
feasts of honey, and we call them "Flowers."
In a certain sense, therefore, you see the Botanical lecturer was quite
right. There are no such things as Flowers--there are only Leaves. Nay,
farther than this, there may be a dignity in the less happy, but
unwithering leaf, which is, in some sort, better than the brief lily
of its bloom;--which the great poets always knew,--well;--Chaucer,
before Goethe; and the writer of the first Psalm, before Chaucer. The
Botanical lecturer was, in a deeper sense than he knew, right.
But in the deepest sense of all, the Botanical lecturer was, to the
extremity of wrongness, wrong; for leaf, and root, and fruit, exist,
all of them, only--that there may be flowers. He disregarded the life
and passion of the creature, which were its essence. Had he looked for
these, he would have recognized that in the thought of Nature herself,
there is, in a plant, nothing else but its flowers.
Now in exactly the sense that modern Science declares there is no such
thing as a Flower, it has declared there is no such thing as a Man,
but only a transitional form of Ascidians and apes. It may, or may
not be true--it is not of the smallest consequence whether it be or
not. The real fact is, that, seen with human eyes, there is nothing
else but man; that all animals and beings beside him are only made
that they may change into him; that the world truly exists only in the
presence of Man, acts only in the passion of Man. The essence of light
is in his eyes,--the centre of Force in his soul,--the pertinence of
action in his deeds.
And all true science--which my Savoyard guide rightly scorned me when
he thought I had not,--all true science is "savoir vivre." But all
your modern science is the contrary of that. It is "savoir mourir."
And of its very discoveries, such as they are, it cannot make use.
That telegraphic signalling was a discovery; and conceivably, some day,
may be a useful one. And there was some excuse for your being a little
proud when, about last sixth of April (Coeur de Lion's death-day,
and Albert Durer's), you knotted a copper wire all the way to Bombay,
and flashed a message along it, and back.
But what was the message, and what the answer? Is India the better
for what you said to her? Are you the better for what she replied?
If not, you have only wasted an all-round-the-world's length of copper
wire,--which is, indeed, about the sum of your doing. If you had had,
perchance, two words of common sense to say, though you had taken
wearisome time and trouble to send them;--though you had written
them slowly in gold, and sealed them with a hundred seals, and sent a
squadron of ships of the line to carry the scroll, and the squadron had
fought its way round the Cape of Good Hope, through a year of storms,
with loss of all its ships but one,--the two words of common sense
would have been worth the carriage, and more. But you have not anything
like so much as that to say, either to India, or to any other place.
You think it a great triumph to make the sun draw brown landscapes for
you. That was also a discovery, and some day may be useful. But the
sun had drawn landscapes before for you, not in brown, but in green,
and blue, and all imaginable colours, here in England. Not one of you
ever looked at them then; not one of you cares for the loss of them
now, when you have shut the sun out with smoke, so that he can draw
nothing more, except brown blots through a hole in a box. There was
a rocky valley between Buxton and Bakewell, once upon a time, divine
as the Vale of Tempe; you might have seen the Gods there morning and
evening--Apollo and all the sweet Muses of the light--walking in fair
procession on the lawns of it, and to and fro among the pinnacles
of its crags. You cared neither for Gods nor grass, but for cash
(which you did not know the way to get); you thought you could get
it by what the Times calls "Railroad Enterprise." You Enterprised
a Railroad through the valley--you blasted its rocks away, heaped
thousands of tons of shale into its lovely stream. The valley is
gone, and the Gods with it; and now, every fool in Buxton can be
at Bakewell in half an hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton;
which you think a lucrative process of exchange--you Fools Everywhere.
To talk at a distance, when you have nothing to say, though you were
ever so near; to go fast from this place to that, with nothing to do
either at one or the other: these are powers certainly. Much more,
power of increased Production, if you, indeed, had got it, would be
something to boast of. But are you so entirely sure that you have
got it--that the mortal disease of plenty, and afflictive affluence
of good things, are all you have to dread?
Observe. A man and a woman, with their children, properly trained,
are able easy to cultivate as much ground as will feed them; to build
as much wall and roof as will lodge them, and to build and weave as
much cloth as will clothe them. They can all be perfectly happy and
healthy in doing this. Supposing that they invent machinery which
will build, plough, thresh, cook, and weave, and that they have
none of these things any more to do, but may read, or play croquet,
or cricket, all day long, I believe myself that they will neither be
so good nor so happy as without the machines. But I waive my belief
in this matter for the time. I will assume that they become more
refined and moral persons, and that idleness is in future to be the
mother of all good. But observe, I repeat, the power of your machine
is only in enabling them to be idle. It will not enable them to live
better than they did before, nor to live in greater numbers. Get
your heads quite clear on this matter. Out of so much ground, only
so much living is to be got, with or without machinery. You may set
a million of steam-ploughs to work on an acre, if you like--out of
that acre only a given number of grains of corn will grow, scratch or
scorch it as you will. So that the question is not at all whether, by
having more machines, more of you can live. No machines will increase
the possibilities of life. They only increase the possibilities
of idleness. Suppose, for instance, you could get the oxen in your
plough driven by a goblin, who would ask for no pay, not even a cream
bowl,--(you have nearly managed to get it driven by an iron goblin,
as it is;)--Well, your furrow will take no more seeds than if you
had held the stilts yourself. But, instead of holding them, you sit,
I presume, on a bank beside the field, under an eglantine;--watch the
goblin at his work, and read poetry. Meantime, your wife in the house
has also got a goblin to weave and wash for her. And she is lying on
the sofa reading poetry.
Now, as I said, I don't believe you would be happier so, but I
am willing to believe it; only, since you are already such brave
mechanists, show me at least one or two places where you are
happier. Let me see one small example of approach to this seraphic
condition. I can show you examples, millions of them, of happy people,
made happy by their own industry. Farm after farm I can show you, in
Bavaria, Switzerland, the Tyrol, and such other places, where men and
women are perfectly happy and good, without any iron servants. Show
me, therefore, some English family, with its fiery familiar, happier
than these. Or bring me,--for I am not inconvincible by any kind
of evidence,--bring me the testimony of an English family or two
to their increased felicity. Or if you cannot do so much as that,
can you convince even themselves of it? They are perhaps happy, if
only they knew how happy they were; Virgil thought so, long ago,
of simple rustics; but you hear at present your steam-propelled
rustics are crying out that they are anything else than happy, and
that they regard their boasted progress "in the light of a monstrous
Sham." I must tell you one little thing, however, which greatly
perplexes my imagination of the relieved ploughman sitting under his
rose bower, reading poetry. I have told it you before indeed, but I
forget where. There was really a great festivity, and expression of
satisfaction in the new order of things, down in Cumberland, a little
while ago; some first of May, I think it was, a country festival,
such as the old heathens, who had no iron servants, used to keep
with piping and dancing. So I thought, from the liberated country
people--their work all done for them by goblins--we should have some
extraordinary piping and dancing. But there was no dancing at all,
and they could not even provide their own piping. They had their goblin
to pipe for them. They walked in procession after their steam plough,
and their steam plough whistled to them occasionally in the most
melodious manner it could. Which seemed to me, indeed, a return to
more than Arcadian simplicity; for in old Arcadia, ploughboys truly
whistled as they went, for want of thought; whereas, here was verily
a large company walking without thought, but not having any more even
the capacity of doing their own whistling.
But next, as to the inside of the house. Before you got your
power-looms, a woman could always make herself a chemise and
petticoat of bright and pretty appearance. I have seen a Bavarian
peasant-woman at church in Munich, looking a much grander creature,
and more beautifully dressed, than any of the crossed and embroidered
angels in Hesse's high-art frescoes; (which happened to be just above
her, so that I could look from one to the other). Well, here you are,
in England, served by household demons, with five hundred fingers, at
least, weaving, for one that used to weave in the days of Minerva. You
ought to be able to show me five hundred dresses for one that used to
be; tidiness ought to have become five hundred-fold tidier; tapestry
should be increased into cinque-cento-fold iridescence of tapestry. Not
only your peasant-girl ought to be lying on the sofa reading poetry,
but she ought to have in her wardrobe five hundred petticoats instead
of one. Is that, indeed, your issue? or are you only on a curiously
crooked way to it?
It is just possible, indeed, that you may not have been allowed to
get the use of the goblin's work--that other people may have got the
use of it, and you none; because, perhaps, you have not been able to
evoke goblins wholly for your own personal service: but have been
borrowing goblins from the capitalist, and paying interest, in the
"position of William," on ghostly self-going planes; but suppose you
had laid by capital enough, yourselves, to hire all the demons in the
world,--nay,--all that are inside of it; are you quite sure you know
what you might best set them to work at? and what "useful things"
you should command them to make for you? I told you, last month,
that no economist going (whether by steam or ghost) knew what are
useful things and what are not. Very few of you know, yourselves,
except by bitter experience of the want of them. And no demons,
either of iron or spirit, can ever make them.
There are three Material things, not only useful, but essential to
Life. No one "knows how to live" till he has got them.
These are, Pure Air, Water, and Earth.
There are three Immaterial things, not only useful, but essential to
Life. No one knows how to live till he has got them.
These are, Admiration, Hope, and Love. [11]
Admiration--the power of discerning and taking delight in what
is beautiful in visible Form, and lovely in human Character; and,
necessarily, striving to produce what is beautiful in form, and to
become what is lovely in character.
Hope--the recognition, by true Foresight, of better things to
be reached hereafter, whether by ourselves or others; necessarily
issuing in the straightforward and undisappointable effort to advance,
according to our proper power, the gaining of them.
Love, both of family and neighbour, faithful, and satisfied.
These are the six chiefly useful things to be got by Political Economy,
when it has become a science. I will briefly tell you what modern
Political Economy--the great "savoir mourir"--is doing with them.
The first three, I said, are Pure Air, Water, and Earth.
Heaven gives you the main elements of these. You can destroy them
at your pleasure, or increase, almost without limit, the available
qualities of them.
You can vitiate the air by your manner of life, and of death, to any
extent. You might easily vitiate it so as to bring such a pestilence
on the globe as would end all of you. You or your fellows, German and
French, are at present busy in vitiating it to the best of your power
in every direction; chiefly at this moment with corpses, and animal
and vegetable ruin in war: changing men, horses, and garden-stuff
into noxious gas. But everywhere, and all day long, you are vitiating
it with foul chemical exhalations; and the horrible nests, which you
call towns, are little more than laboratories for the distillation
into heaven of venomous smokes and smells, mixed with effluvia from
decaying animal matter, and infectious miasmata from purulent disease.
On the other hand, your power of purifying the air, by dealing
properly and swiftly with all substances in corruption; by absolutely
forbidding noxious manufactures; and by planting in all soils the
trees which cleanse and invigorate earth and atmosphere,--is literally
infinite. You might make every breath of air you draw, food.
Secondly, your power over the rain and river-waters of the earth is
infinite. You can bring rain where you will, by planting wisely and
tending carefully;--drought where you will, by ravage of woods and
neglect of the soil. You might have the rivers of England as pure as
the crystal of the rock; beautiful in falls, in lakes, in living pools;
so full of fish that you might take them out with your hands instead
of nets. Or you may do always as you have done now, turn every river
of England into a common sewer, so that you cannot so much as baptize
an English baby but with filth, unless you hold its face out in the
rain; and even that falls dirty.
Then for the third, Earth,--meant to be nourishing for you, and
blossoming. You have learned, about it, that there is no such thing as
a flower; and as far as your scientific hands and scientific brains,
inventive of explosive and deathful, instead of blossoming and
life giving, Dust, can contrive, you have turned the Mother-Earth,
Demeter, [12] into the Avenger-Earth, Tisiphone--with the voice of
your brother's blood crying out of it, in one wild harmony round all
its murderous sphere.
This is what you have done for the Three Material Useful Things.
Then for the Three Immaterial Useful Things. For Admiration, you have
learnt contempt and conceit. There is no lovely thing ever yet done by
man that you care for, or can understand; but you are persuaded you
are able to do much finer things yourselves. You gather, and exhibit
together, as if equally instructive, what is infinitely bad, with what
is infinitely good. You do not know which is which; you instinctively
prefer the Bad, and do more of it. You instinctively hate the Good,
and destroy it. [13]
Then, secondly, for Hope. You have not so much spirit of it in you
as to begin any plan which will not pay for ten years; nor so much
intelligence of it in you, (either politicians or workmen), as to
be able to form one clear idea of what you would like your country
to become.
Then, thirdly, for Love. You were ordered by the Founder of your
religion to love your neighbour as yourselves.
You have founded an entire Science of Political Economy, on what you
have stated to be the constant instinct of man--the desire to defraud
his neighbour.
And you have driven your women mad, so that they ask no more for
Love, nor for fellowship with you; but stand against you, and ask for
"justice."
Are there any of you who are tired of all this? Any of you, Landlords
or Tenants? Employers or Workmen?
Are there any landlords,--any masters,--who would like better to be
served by men than by iron devils?
Any tenants, any workmen, who can be true to their leaders and to
each other? who can vow to work and to live faithfully, for the sake
of the joy of their homes?
Will any such give the tenth of what they have, and of what they
earn,--not to emigrate with, but to stay in England with; and do what
is in their hands and hearts to make her a happy England?
I am not rich, (as people now estimate riches,) and great part of what
I have is already engaged in maintaining art-workmen, or for other
objects more or less of public utility. The tenth of whatever is left
to me, estimated as accurately as I can, (you shall see the accounts,)
I will make over to you in perpetuity, with the best security that
English law can give, on Christmas Day of this year, with engagement
to add the tithe of whatever I earn afterwards. Who else will help,
with little or much? the object of such fund being, to begin, and
gradually--no matter how slowly--to increase, the buying and securing
of land in England, which shall not be built upon, but cultivated by
Englishmen, with their own hands, and such help of force as they can
find in wind and wave.
I do not care with how many, or how few, this thing is begun,
nor on what inconsiderable scale,--if it be but in two or three
poor men's gardens. So much, at least, I can buy, myself, and
give them. If no help come, I have done and said what I could,
and there will be an end. If any help come to me, it is to be on
the following conditions:--We will try to take some small piece of
English ground, beautiful, peaceful, and fruitful. We will have no
steam-engines upon it, and no railroads; we will have no untended
or unthought-of creatures on it; none wretched, but the sick; none
idle, but the dead. We will have no liberty upon it; but instant
obedience to known law, and appointed persons: no equality upon it;
but recognition of every betterness that we can find, and reprobation
of every worseness. When we want to go anywhere, we will go there
quietly and safely, not at forty miles an hour in the risk of our
lives; when we want to carry anything anywhere, we will carry it
either on the backs of beasts, or on our own, or in carts, or boats;
we will have plenty of flowers and vegetables in our gardens, plenty
of corn and grass in our fields,--and few bricks. We will have some
music and poetry; the children shall learn to dance to it and sing
it;--perhaps some of the old people, in time, may also. We will
have some art, moreover; we will at least try if, like the Greeks,
we can't make some pots. The Greeks used to paint pictures of gods
on their pots; we probably, cannot do as much, but we may put some
pictures of insects on them, and reptiles;--butterflies, and frogs,
if nothing better. There was an excellent old potter in France who
used to put frogs and vipers into his dishes, to the admiration of
mankind; we can surely put something nicer than that. Little by little,
some higher art and imagination may manifest themselves among us;
and feeble rays of science may dawn for us. Botany, though too dull
to dispute the existence of flowers; and history, though too simple
to question the nativity of men;--nay--even perhaps an uncalculating
and uncovetous wisdom, as of rude Magi, presenting, at such nativity,
gifts of gold and frankincense.
Faithfully yours,
JOHN RUSKIN.
FORS CLAVIGERA.
LETTER VI.
Denmark Hill,
1st June, 1871. [14]
My Friends,
The main purpose of these letters having been stated in the last
of them, it is needful that I should tell you why I approach the
discussion of it in this so desultory way, writing (as it is too true
that I must continue to write,) "of things that you little care for,
in words that you cannot easily understand."
I write of things you care little for, knowing that what you least
care for is, at this juncture, of the greatest moment to you.
And I write in words you are little likely to understand, because
I have no wish (rather the contrary) to tell you anything that you
can understand without taking trouble. You usually read so fast that
you can catch nothing but the echo of your own opinions, which, of
course, you are pleased to see in print. I neither wish to please,
nor displease you; but to provoke you to think; to lead you to think
accurately; and help you to form, perhaps, some different opinions
from those you have now.
Therefore, I choose that you shall pay me the price of two pots of
beer, twelve times in the year, for my advice, each of you who wants
it. If you like to think of me as a quack doctor, you are welcome;
and you may consider the large margins, and thick paper, and ugly
pictures of my book, as my caravan, drum, and skeleton. You would
probably, if invited in that manner, buy my pills; and I should
make a great deal of money out of you; but being an honest doctor,
I still mean you to pay me what you ought. You fancy, doubtless,
that I write--as most other political writers do--my 'opinions';
and that one man's opinion is as good as another's. You are much
mistaken. When I only opine things, I hold my tongue; and work till
I more than opine--until I know them. If the things prove unknowable,
I, with final perseverance, hold my tongue about them, and recommend
a like practice to other people. If the things prove knowable, as
soon as I know them, I am ready to write about them, if need be;
not till then. That is what people call my 'arrogance.' They write
and talk themselves, habitually, of what they know nothing about;
they cannot in anywise conceive the state of mind of a person who will
not speak till he knows; and then tells them, serenely, "This is so;
you may find it out for yourselves, if you choose; but, however little
you may choose it, the thing is still so."