utmost completion or perfection compatible with their nature. This is a
noble character in the abstract, but becomes ignoble when it causes us
to forget the relative dignities of that nature itself, and to prefer
the perfectness of the lower nature to the imperfection of the higher;
not considering that, as judged by such a rule, all the brute animals
would be preferable to man because more perfect in their functions and
kind, and yet are always held inferior to him, so also in the works of
man, those which are more perfect in their kind are always inferior to
those which are, in their nature, liable to more faults and
shortcomings. For the finer the nature the more flaws it will show
through the clearness of it; and it is a law of this Universe, that the
best things shall be seldomest seen in their best form. The wild grass
grows well and strongly, one year with another; but the wheat is,
according to the greater nobleness of its nature, liable to the bitterer
blight. And therefore, while in all things that we see or do, we are to
desire perfection, and strive for it, we are nevertheless not to set the
meaner thing, in its narrow accomplishment, above the nobler thing, in
its mighty progress; not to esteem smooth minuteness above shattered
majesty, not to prefer mean victory to honourable defeat; not to lower
the level of our aim, that we may the more surely enjoy the complacency
of success. But, above all, in our dealings with the souls of other men,
we are to take care how we check, by severe requirement or narrow
caution, efforts which might otherwise lead to a noble issue; and, still
more, how we withhold our admiration from great excellences, because
they are mingled with rough faults. Now, in the make and nature of every
man, however rude or simple, whom we employ in manual labour, there are
some powers for better things: some tardy imagination, torpid capacity
of emotion, tottering steps of thought, there are, even at the worst;
and in most cases it is all our own fault that they _are_ tardy or
torpid. But they cannot be strengthened, unless we are content to take
them in their feebleness, and unless we prize and honour them in their
imperfection above the best and most perfect manual skill. And this is
what we have to do with all labourers; to look for the thoughtful part
of them, and get that out of them, whatever we lose for it, whatever
faults or errors we are obliged to take with it. For the best that is in
them cannot manifest itself, but in company with much error. Understand
this clearly: You can teach a man to draw a straight line, and to cut
one; to strike a curved line and to carve it; and to copy and carve any
number of given lines or forms, with admirable speed and perfect
precision; and you find his work perfect of its kind: but if you ask him
to think about any of those forms, to consider if he cannot find any
better in his own head, he stops; his execution becomes hesitating; he
thinks, and ten to one he thinks wrong; ten to one he makes a mistake in
the first touch he gives to his work as a thinking being. But you have
made a man of him for all that. He was only a machine before, an
animated tool.”
§ XII. “And observe, you are put to stern choice in this matter. You
must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot
make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to
be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that
precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog
wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize
them. All the energy of their spirits must be given to make cogs and
compasses of themselves. All their attention and strength must go to the
accomplishment of the mean act. The eye of the soul must be bent upon
the finger point, and the soul’s force must fill all the invisible
nerves that guide it, ten hours a day, that it may not err from its
steely precision, and so soul and sight be worn away, and the whole
human being be lost at last--a heap of sawdust, so far as its
intellectual work in this world is concerned; saved only by its Heart,
which cannot go into the form of cogs and compasses, but expands, after
the ten hours are over, into fireside humanity. On the other hand if you
will make a man of the working creature, you cannot make a tool. Let him
but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing; and
the engine-turned precision is lost at once. Out come all his roughness,
all his dulness, all his incapability; shame upon shame, failure upon
failure, pause after pause: but out comes the whole majesty of him also;
and we know the height of it only when we see the clouds settling upon
him. And whether the clouds be bright or dark, there will be
transfiguration behind and within them.”
§ XIII. “And, now, reader, look around this English room of yours, about
which you have been proud so often, because the work of it was so good
and strong, and the ornaments so finished. Examine again all those
accurate mouldings, and perfect polishings, and unerring adjustments of
the seasoned wood and tempered steel. Many a time you have exulted over
them, and thought how great England was, because her slightest work was
done so thoroughly. Alas! if read rightly, these perfectnesses are signs
of a slavery in our England a thousand times more bitter and more
degrading than that of the scourged African or helot Greek. Men may be
beaten, chained, tormented, yoked like cattle, slaughtered like summer
flies, and yet remain, in one sense, and the best sense, free. But to
smother their souls within them, to blight and hew into rotting
pollards, the suckling branches of their human intelligence, to make the
flesh and skin, which after the worm’s work on it, is to see God, into
leathern thongs to yoke machinery with--this it is to be slave masters
indeed; and there might be more freedom in England, though her feudal
lords’ lightest words were worth men’s lives, and though the blood of
the vexed husbandman dropped in the furrows of her fields, than there is
while the animation of her multitudes is sent like fuel to feed the
factory smoke, and the strength of them is given daily to be wasted into
the fineness of a web, or racked into the exactness of a line.”
§ XV. ” ...It is not that men are ill fed, but that they have no
pleasure in the work by which they make their bread, and therefore look
to wealth as the only means of pleasure. It is not that men are pained
by the scorn of the upper classes, but they cannot endure their own; for
they feel that the kind of labour to which they are condemned is verily
a degrading one, and makes them less than men.... In all ages and in all
countries reverence has been paid and sacrifice made by men to each
other, not only without complaint but rejoicingly; and famine and peril
and sword and all evil and all shame have been borne willingly in the
causes of masters and kings; for all these gifts of the heart ennobled
the men who gave, not less than the men who received them, and nature
prompted and God rewarded the sacrifice. But to feel their souls
withering within them, unthanked, to find their whole being sunk into an
unrecognized abyss, to be counted off into a heap of mechanism, numbered
with its wheels, and weighted with its hammer strokes--this nature bade
not--this God blesses not--this humanity for no long time is able to
endure.”
§ XVI. “We have much studied, and much perfected, of late, the great
civilized invention of the Division of Labour; only we give it a false
name. It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the
men:--Divided into mere segments of men--broken into small fragments and
crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is
left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts
itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail. Now it is a
good and desirable thing, truly, to make many pins in a day; but if we
could only see with what crystal sand their points were polished,--sand
of human soul, much to be magnified before it can be discussed what it
is--we should think there might be some loss in it also. And the great
cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than their
furnace blast, is all in very deed for this--that we manufacture
everything there except men--we blanch cotton and strengthen steel and
refine sugar and shape pottery--but to brighten, to strengthen, to
refine or to reform a single living spirit, never enters into our
estimate of advantages. And all the evil to which that cry is urging our
myriads can be met only ... by a right understanding on the part of all
classes, of what kinds of labour are good for men, raising them, and
making them happy; by a determined sacrifice of such convenience or
beauty or cheapness as is to be got only by the degradation of the
workman, and by equally determined demand for the products and results
of healthy and ennobling labour.”
§ XVII. “And how, it will be asked, are these products to be recognized,
and this demand to be regulated? Easily: by the observance of three
broad and simple rules:
“1. Never encourage the manufacture of any article not absolutely
necessary, in the production of which Invention has no share.
“2. Never demand an exact finish for its own sake, but only for some
practical or noble end.
“3. Never encourage imitation or copying of any kind, except for the
sake of preserving records of great works.”
This magnificent passage, central as to Ruskin’s teaching and very
typical of the literary power with which his spirit was armed, is
probably of more value as a principle than as a specific cure. We can
without great difficulty obey this three precepts, and do some good
thereby. We can avoid mere meretricious glory of finish; we can choose
our purchases so as to favour originality, when we are buying articles
in gold or silver or glass or bronze or leather or porcelain or wood;
but the great mass of the evil remains untouched. How are we to
cultivate invention when we buy a mackintosh, or a pair of boots, or
common crockery, or pens and paper--and even in an article so full of
inventions as a bicycle, the invention is not due to the mechanic who
makes it. We are not really carried much beyond the æsthetic furnishings
of our existence. So far, however, the advice is excellent and human; it
is likely to lead persons of moderate means to prefer the products of
Switzerland or Japan, hand made and invented, to the machine products of
Birmingham.
There must be always a measure of tedious soul killing work to be done;
and few entirely escape it. Our professions, as well as our trades, let
alone manual occupations, do us some harm, narrow our outlook, make us
peculiar. I am told that even teachers can be recognized as such, and
the weighty medical manner is well known. You can neither serve behind a
counter nor occupy a pulpit without some of the manner of it becoming
part of yourself. Even so, the day labourer suffers from the lack of
intelligence he is called upon for. We must all find the balance outside
our work. By the reasonable shortening of hours, even the dull routine
labourer may have a chance of exercising his faculties as a man. The
fact that labour is specialized and monotonous constitutes the proper
physiological reason for the eight hour-day or shorter hours still in
some trades. Moreover, to do the dull rough work of the world, there is
no denying that there are annually born a certain number of dull but
strong people, whose gifts lie in the absence of thinking. They are born
into all classes, unfortunately; but born they are. But Ruskin is fully
alive to this solution of the ultimate difficulty, and frequently
alludes to it.
“It is in the wholesome indisposition of the average mind for
intellectual labour that due provision is made for the quantity of dull
work which must be done in stubbing the Thornaby wastes of the
world.”[121]
“I have said ... that the rough and worthless may be set to the roughest
and foulest work, and the finest to the finest; the rough and rude work
being, you will in time perceive, the best of charities to the rough and
rude people.”[122]
Moreover, a measure of routine labour is good, as recreation, for us
all--it is a relief from thinking, planning, inventing. Good spade and
hatchet work, if only one can perspire enough over it, is a condition of
good work in higher ways. Ruskin thinks so too, and set the Oxford
undergraduates to their famous road-making for exercise; surely the
greatest academic triumph a professor ever achieved.
Ruskin’s attack on Machinery, when carefully read, applies only to steam
machinery, with its soot, smoke, sulphurous gases and noise. Wind or
water power he allows and encourages; a vast scheme of mills worked by
tidal water power is outlined in _Fors_.[123] And oddly enough he
prophesies, so long ago, that electricity will supersede steam; and
therefore if we can generate electrical energy with very much less
publicly vomited smoke than we now make for steam power, we shall be on
right lines, and shall have the Master’s goodwill. Not by vain
retrogression, but by determined reforms on possible lines may we some
day get back an England good to live in. At present we are wasteful and
dirty, and we do not care.
Ruskin writes: “What is required of the members of St. George’s Company
is, not that they should never travel by railroads, nor that they
should abjure machinery, but that they should never travel
unnecessarily, or in wanton haste; and that they should never do with a
machine what can be done with hands and arms, while hands and arms are
idle.”[124]
There is no subject which causes more merriment amongst the Philistines
than Ruskin’s objection to railways, combined with the frequent
locomotion indulged in by his most devoted followers. But Ruskin’s
objection to railways was never so absolute as was popularly supposed.
He always approved of them on through main routes, and only objected to
their intrusion into the peace of quiet valleys off the main tracks. He
objected to what appeared to him the excessive provision by which a
lovely valley was spoiled “in order that every fool in Buxton could be
in Bakewell in half an hour.” We must remember that the railway mania of
1844 occurred when Ruskin was five and twenty, at the formative period
of his life, and that he saw all around him rough destruction of that
beauty which affected his soul with a thrill like a lover’s (as he tells
us in the Third Volume of _Modern Painters_, pages 295-298, quoted in
Chapter I). The countryside must have been sadly ruined in the forties,
while the railway embankments were creeping along through the pastures.
Possibly not all of us know the remarkable passage in the _Cestus of
Aglaia_ in praise of a locomotive:[125]
“I cannot express the amazed awe, the crushed humility, with which I
sometimes watch a locomotive take its breath at a railway station, and
think what work there is in its bars and wheels, and what manner of men
they must be who dig brown ironstone out of the ground, and forge it
into that! What assemblage of accurate and mighty faculties in them;
more than fleshly power over melting crag and coiling fire, fettered,
and finessed at last into the precision of watchmaking; Titanian
hammer-strokes beating, out of lava, these glittering cylinders and
timely-respondent valves, and fine ribbed rods, which touch each other
as a serpent writhes, in noiseless gliding, and omnipotence of grasp;
infinitely complex anatomy of active steel, compared with which the
skeleton of a living creature would seem, to a careless observer, clumsy
and vile--a mere morbid secretion and phosphatous drop of flesh! What
would the men who thought out this--who beat it out, who touched it
into its polished calm of power, who set it to its appointed task, and
triumphantly saw it fulfil this task to the utmost of their will, feel
or think about this weak hand of mine, timidly leading a little stain of
shadow of something else--mere failure in every motion, and endless
disappointment; what, I repeat, would these Iron-dominant Genii think of
me? and what ought I to think of them?
“But as I reach this point of reverence, the unreasonable thing is sure
to give a shriek as of a thousand unanimous vultures, which leaves me
shuddering in real physical pain for some half minute following; and
assures me, during slow recovery, that a people which can endure such
fluting and piping among them is not likely soon to have its modest ear
pleased by aught of oaten stop, or pastoral song. Perhaps I am then led
on into meditation respecting the spiritual nature of the Tenth Muse,
who invented this gracious instrument, and guides its modulation by
stokers’ fingers; meditation, also, as to the influence of her invention
amidst the other parts of the Parnassian melody of English education.”
He further concedes that “steam, or any mode of heat power, may only be
employed, justifiably, under extreme or special conditions of need; and
for speed on main lines of communication, and raising water from great
depths, or other such work beyond human strength.” This is a very large
concession, and may be received with large gratitude. He even permits
steam machinery for such purposes as “the deepening of large river
channels; changing the surfaces of mountainous districts; irrigating
tracts of desert in the torrid zone; breaking up and thus rendering
capable of quicker fusion, edges of ice in the northern and southern
Arctic seas, etc., so rendering parts of the earth habitable, which
hitherto have been lifeless.”[126]
The teaching of Ruskin is not really revolutionary in immediate
practice; he advises a manufacturer to go on using his machinery; he
merely wants us to set our faces towards the restoration of nature’s
gifts of beauty and peace to the lives of toilers; and for ceasing to
uproot sentiments of cleanliness, reverence and order by unnatural,
foul, crowded and vulgar surroundings. His tastes and instincts are
vehemently against machinery; but his actual requirings are moderate.
It is the machine-made society we live in that distresses him, and
distresses us; its occasional rough coarseness, its physical ill-health.
There are, of course, scattered through _Fors_ many outbursts against
machinery in general, not so carefully limited as his more weighty
pronouncements. In Letter V, pp. 10, 11, for instance, the assertion is
made that a man and his family can, by their own labour, given land,
feed and clothe themselves without machinery; and that therefore all
labour-saving appliances are so many aids to idleness. I do not know
where is the proof or disproof of the assertion. All we know is that
savage tribes do so live, but no others, and that it is in the time and
strength saved from labour for sheer food and clothing that the best
activities of humanity find room: and that civilization began with the
existence of a leisured class.
And now, turning to the human product of industrialism, we will take a
sober view, not debiting to the factory system the evils which are
inherent in human nature, but only those due to crowded town life and to
employment in large rooms full of noisy machinery. If we have cured the
smoke evil, and reduced hours to their present reasonable length, what
remains to be done, and will it be on Ruskin’s lines?
South Lancashire is often taken as the type of industrial England. There
I was born and brought up, and I have lived there for the greater part
of my life. I have known very intimately a great many of the working
people. They are far more pale and undersized than they ought to be.
Their beauty has been taken from them. The half-time system, now
perishing, has interfered with their education. The damp atmosphere in
the hot rooms is bad for their lungs, and minding machines is utterly
monotonous. But they are excellent people--they will stand comparison
with the upper classes. There is every type, of course, they are as
varied as are men at the Universities, or as the ladies who go to any
Church. But, speaking as we must, in general, there is a level of
conduct and intelligence in those mean streets, not different except in
manner from that of the suburbs. The degeneracy is, I believe, only
physical, so far as it is to be debited to the conditions of their work.
This bad physique is a real evil. The lack of room for cricket and
football, the remoteness of the fields and woods, the ugliness of the
grey streets, the lack of quiet, added to the humid factories and the
smoke, have produced this. Parks and playgrounds and all sorts of open
spaces, including extensive fields and woods and ponds accessible on a
half-holiday, should be provided far more than they have been, and
should be less doctored by parks’ superintendents.
Then there is a great sphere of service open to the familiar agencies
for good. The Drink traffic should be curtailed, and put out of the
reach of private profit, and better opportunities for sociability, music
and dancing, provided, not as part of the bait of the drink seller, but
by a democratic municipality. The usefulness of picture galleries will
not be fully reached till oral teaching about the pictures is added, and
the great educational value of comparatively cheap coloured
reproductions is perceived. Into the work of founding the Art Museum in
Ancoats, a working class district of Manchester, on exactly these lines,
Mr. Ruskin threw himself heartily. It was indeed an inspiration derived
from his writings by Mr. T. C. Horsfall which caused that Museum to be
founded. It has recently been taken over by the Corporation.
Solemnly, then, and with due fear and doubt, considering the horror and
difficulty of the case, let us resolutely set ourselves to see if, under
the world of machinery, we can live good and healthy lives. The present
products of our civilization are far from satisfactory to any of us. Are
the crowds of girls who rush forth from the factory when the hour of
freedom strikes, having pieced threads in a hot damp atmosphere, and
shouted across the whirl of wheels all day to one another--are they on
the way to make fit, self-respecting and physically strong wives and
mothers and trainers of children? There are some three hundred thousand
of these girls in the Lancashire factories, who will be mothers of a
million English babies. Or take the young men. Go by a football train on
a Saturday afternoon, when holiday is written on every bloomless and
vulgar and swaggering young face:--what do you hear and see as you crowd
fifteen to a carriage? Bets, ribaldry, ill nature, the carriage floor a
mess, the whole scene an explosion of pent-up spirits of self-assertion
and banal hilarity.[127]
These young people are undoubtedly products of the age of machinery; but
for machine production they would never have been born, nor their
surroundings formed; but the question is, cannot their tastes and
characters be reformed even while they remain machine-hands? Are not
excellent lives possible, and healthy surroundings obtainable, in
industrial England? For factory life we can confidently point to such.
Bournville, New Earswick, Port Sunlight, and of an earlier date,
Saltaire, Bessbrook, and some other centres which have not a special
local name, show that the thing can be done. For colliers the case is
harder. There are colliery villages on the Tyne which once ran extension
lectures; but the villages themselves are horrible. There are good
colliery villages near Doncaster, one built round a private Park.
Collieries have special difficulties. The coal mine will not last for
ever; and when it is worked out the houses may become useless. They are
therefore built to last only for from thirty to fifty years. They are
erected all at one time; and large rows of houses exactly alike are the
cheapest. They are often outside any municipality with its possibly
watchful surveyor and inspectors. They are completely owned by the
colliery company, which has no competitor as landlord. It is the classic
case in England of the failure of pure competition to care for human
welfare.
_EPILOGUE_
I am kindly permitted by the Council of the Society for Psychical
Research to reprint here the beautiful tribute by F. W. H. Myers, which
appeared in their _Journal_ for March, 1900; and has been reprinted in
Mr. Myers’s _Fragments of Prose and Poetry_, pp. 89-94.
Ω οὗτος, οὗτος, Οίδίπους, τί μέλλομεν
χωρείν; πάλαι δἠ τάπὀ σοῦ βραδύνεται
Ruskin, then, has sunk to rest. The bracken and bilberries of the
Lake-land which he loved so well have hidden the mortal shape of the
greatest man of letters, the loftiest influence which earth still
retained;--have enwrapped “the man dear to the Muses, and by the Nymphs
not unbeloved"--
τὀν Μώσαις ϕίλον ἀνδρα, τὀν οὐ Νὐμϕαίσιν ἀπεϰθῆ
We may rejoice that the long waiting is over; but memory all the more
“goes slipping back to that delightful time” when he was with us in his
force and fire; when it was still granted to hearken to his utterance;
to feel the germ of virtue quickened by his benignant soul. For those
who had the privilege of knowing Ruskin, the author came second to the
man; and in this brief notice of his Honorary Membership of our Society
I may perhaps be pardoned if I dwell in reminiscence, without attempting
any formal review.
I met him first in my own earliest home, beneath the spurs of
Skiddaw,--its long slopes “bronzed with deepest radiance,” as the boy
Wordsworth had seen them long since in even such an evening’s glow.
Since early morning Ruskin had lain and wandered in the folds and
hollows of the hill; and he came back grave as from a solemn service
from day-long gazing on the heather and the blue. Later came many
another scene;--pacings in the Old Court of Trinity with Edmund Gurney,
who met those generous paradoxes with humorous play; graver hours at
Oxford, in the sick-room of the Duke of Albany, who, coming back to
earth-life from perilous illness, found nowhere a guidance fitter than
Ruskin’s for eager and royal youth.