industrial conditions have brought us to this pass, that it is no
longer our national aim to direct labour and set it free for other
work that really needs to be done. Our national problem is rather to
find work for people, at times even to invent needs, and to create a
fictitious turnover in trade so that we may not have upon our hands an
enormous increase of the unemployed problem. And as hands go begging,
as we have more hands in the country than we can employ on useful and
fit labour (fit, I mean, for such fine implements as these and for the
brains behind them), therefore hands are inevitably put to degrading
uses, and the joy goes out of work; and for the delight (or at least
the intelligent patience) of true craftsmanship is substituted the
soul-destroying bondage of mechanical labour at something which is not
really worth producing.
You may take that, I think, as a test whether a State is in industrial
health or disease--whether, namely, it tends more in the direction
of setting labour free for other and higher purposes (through the
permanent quality of its products), and so evolving an aristocracy of
labour; or whether (owing to their ephemeral quality) it constantly
tends to invent work of a lower and more trivial kind, and to provide
jobs of an ephemeral character which are not really wanted.
Now bad and wasteful taste is directly productive, not so much of trade
as of fluctuations in trade, because that sort of taste soon tires
and asks for change; and the consequence is that thousands of workers
(especially women, whose industries used to be home industries before
machinery drew them out of the homes) are in this country constantly
being thrown out of one useless employment into another, and very often
have to pass through a fresh apprenticeship at a starvation wage.
And so, when we create frivolous demands for things that we shall not
want the day after to-morrow, we are not (as we too often think) doing
anything that is really good for trade, but only something much more
horrible, which you will understand without my naming it.
You see, then, how very closely the artist’s inclination toward
permanence of taste may be connected with morality. And if that
instinct for permanence (with an accompanying adaptation of material
and design to making things last their full time without waste) is not
present in the craftsmanship of our day, then we have not got the true
basis, either in spirit or material, for Art to build upon.
Now I am going to put before you some quite homely instances, because
I think they will stick best in your memories, in order to show
you that the real struggle of the artist to-day is not so much to
secure appreciation of beauty in line and texture, as honesty of
construction, and real adaptation of form to utility and of production
to lastingness. I have been noticing, with quite simple objects of
domestic use, that the trade-purpose toward them seems almost the
opposite. The trade purpose is to present us with an article which,
apparently sound in construction, will break down at some crucial point
before the rest of it is worn out. A watering can, a carving fork,
a kettle, a dustbin, a coal scuttle, the fixings of a door-handle,
are generally made, I find, on an ignobly artful plan which insures
that they shall break down just at that point where the wear and tear
come hardest, so that an article otherwise complete shall be scrapped
wastefully or go back to the trade to be tinkered.
But leave things the actual design of which you cannot control, and
come to dress, our own daily wearing apparel. I do not know if the men
of my audience are aware that undergarments wear out much quicker if
they are tight-fitting and worn at a stretch than if they are loose,
but that is so. And, in consequence, a smart shopman has the greatest
reluctance to sell you anything that is, as he conceives it, one size
too large for you. The reason being that the looser fit lasts longer
and is bad for trade--that it makes for endurance instead of for
galloping consumption.
In the majority of houses whose cold water systems I have inspected
the pipes are nearly always run at the most exposed angle of the
containing walls, so that if there is a frost, the frost may have a
chance of getting at the pipes and bursting them, and so give the trade
a fresh job. Again, every housewife knows that in the ordinary daily
conflicts between tea-sets and domestic service more cups get broken
than saucers. And I suppose every household in London has got some
corner shelf piled with superfluous saucers (useless widowers mourning
the departure of their better halves); but it is very exceptional--only
in one shop that I know--that one is able to replace the cup (in
certain stock patterns) without encumbering oneself with the saucer
which one does not want. The saucers continue to be made in wasteful
superabundance, because waste of that sort is “good for trade.”
I have been assured by an observant housewife that certain articles do
now and again appear upon the market specially designed to safeguard by
little constructive devices, the main point of wear-and-tear through
which they become useless, and that presently these things disappear
and are unobtainable, presumably because they prove too lasting, and so
are “bad for trade.” And they are allowed to disappear because we, as a
community, have not sufficiently set our hearts and minds against waste
and uselessness. We buy cheaply because we think cheaply, and because
we have lost our sense of honour towards the products of men’s hands,
and toward that wonderful instrument itself which we are content to
put to such base uses, letting the workers themselves see how much we
despise the things they have made.
I have seen in London a comic music-hall “turn” in which the comedy
largely consisted in a continuous breakage of piles of plates by a
burlesque waiter, who, in the course of his duties, either drops them,
falls against them, sits on them, or kicks them. During the turn I
should say some thirty or forty plates get broken. They were cheap
plates, no doubt; but it seems to me that if there is any fun in this
monotonous repetition of destruction, then the greater the cost and
waste of human labour the more irresistibly comic should the situation
appear; and the management which provided Worcester or Dresden china
for its low-comedy wits to play upon would have logical grounds for
considering that it was thereby supplying its audience with livelier
entertainment more satisfying to its taste.[2]
Now what I want you to see is that such a production would not be
entertaining to an audience which had not come to regard the labour of
man’s hands with a licentious indifference--which had not developed the
gambler’s contempt for the true relations between labour and value.
And here I want to put before you a proposition which may at first
shock you, but which I hope to prove true. And that is that labour in
itself, apart from its justification in some useful result, is bad and
degrading; the man who is put to work which he knows is to have no
result comes from that work more degraded and crushed in spirit than
the man who merely “loafs” and lives “naturally.”
Perhaps the readiest example of that is the old treadmill system which
was once employed in our prisons, where the prisoner was set to grind
at a crank artificially adjusted to his physical strength, but having
no useful result; and I believe that the main reason why prisoners
on those machines were not allowed to grind their own bread or put
their strength to any self-supporting industry was because it was “bad
for trade” and brought them into competition with the contractors who
supplied food to his Majesty’s prisons. It was not the monotony half
so much as the consciousness that it was without result which made
that form of labour so degrading and so utterly exhausting to mind and
body. You might think it was the compulsion; but I am not sure that
compulsion to work may not sometimes be very moral and salutary. At any
rate, here is an instance of the same thing presented under voluntary
conditions. A man out of work applied to a farmer for a job; the
farmer had no job for him, and told him so; but as the man persisted
he started him at half a crown a day to move a heap of stones from one
side of the road to the other. And when the man had done that and asked
what next he was to do, he told him to move them back again! But though
that man was out of work, and was on his way to earn the half-crown,
rather than submit his body to the conscious degradation of such
useless labour, he did as the farmer had calculated on his doing, and
threw up the job.
That same quality of outrage and degradation attends on all labour that
is subject, within the worker’s knowledge, to wanton destruction, or is
obviously of no real use or of “faked” value. And the finer the skill
employed the greater the anguish of mind, or else the hard callousness
of indifference which must result. Call upon men to make useless
things, or things which you mean wantonly to destroy the day after
to-morrow, or to which by the conditions you tolerate you make a fair
length of life impossible--call upon labour to do those things, and you
are either filling its spirit with misery and depression, or you are
making it, in self-defence, callous and hard.
Industrial conditions which encourage the building of houses that are
only intended to last a lease; which permit the destruction of our
canal system because that means of transit has proved a dangerous
rival to the railway system; which impose a quick change in fashions
on which depend various kinds of ephemeral and parasitic industries;
which encourage a vast production of ephemeral journalism and
magazine illustration which after a single reading is thrown aside
and wasted--all these things, which have become nationalised in our
midst, are a national anti-Art training. We English have, as the
result of these things, no national school of architecture; we have
no national costume (though I myself can remember the time when in
our Midland counties not only the farm labourer, but the small yeoman
farmer himself went to church as well as to labour in the beautiful
smock-frock worn by their forefathers) and we have killed out from our
midst one of the most beautiful national schools of popular art that
ever existed, the school of the illustrators of the ’sixties; and we
have done these things mainly from our increasing haste to get hold of
something new, and our almost equal haste, when we have it, to throw it
away again.
We have cast our bread upon the waters. The sort of wealth to the
pursuit of which nations have committed themselves needs (it now
appears) an enormous amount of protection. And it cannot have been
without some demoralising effect upon the mind of the community that
we have been driven by our outstanding necessities to build every
year six or seven of those enormous engines of destruction called
“Dreadnoughts,” whose effective lease of life is about 20 years,
something considerably shorter than the lease of life which we allow
for our most jerry-built lodging-houses! And on these short-lived
products of industry (which are to-day the sign and symbol and
safeguard of our world-power), our aristocracy of labour has been
spending its strength, and the nation has now to depend on them for
its safety. The cost of building a “Dreadnought” is about the same
as the cost of building St. Paul’s Cathedral. Imagine to yourself a
nation building every year six or seven St. Paul’s Cathedrals, with the
consciousness that in twenty-five or thirty years they will all again
be levelled to the dust, and you will get from that picture something
of the horror which an artist is bound to feel at the necessity
which thus drives us forward, even in peace-time, to the continuous
destruction, on such a colossal scale, of the labour of men’s hands.
And the more it is revealed to us to-day (by the present catastrophe)
as an absolute political necessity, the more is the disorder of
civilization we have arrived at condemned.
Well, I must leave now, in that example I have set before you, the
wasteful aspect of modern industry, in order to touch briefly on
another, and an almost equally hateful aspect, which I will call “the
vivisection of modern industry.” I mean its subdivision into so many
separate departments, or rather fragments, that it loses for the mind
of the worker all relation to the thing made--that time-saving device
at the expense of the human hand and brain, which we glorify under the
term “specialisation.” Now, however much you may defend that system on
ground of trade competition, the artist is bound by his principles to
regard it as a national evil; for anything which tends to take away
the worker’s joy and pride in the distinctiveness of his trade and
to undo its human elements is anti-Art training. And so that inhuman
specialisation which (for the sake of trade cheapness) sets down a man
to the performance of one particular mechanical action all his life,
in the making of some one particular part of some article which in its
further stages he is never to handle, or a woman to stamp out the tin
skeleton of a button, with her eyes glued to one spot for ten hours
of the day--all these dehumanising things are anti-Art because they
are destructive of life-values. We have erected them into a system,
and while cutting prices by such means at one end, we are mounting up
costs at the other. We are promoting, maybe, a quicker circulation of
the currency of the realm, but we are impoverishing the currency of
the race. For that hard mechanical efficiency we are paying a price
which is eating up all our real profits; quite apart from its effect
in the increase of lunacy and of the unfit birth-rate and death-rate
among children, it is helping to implant in the whole world of labour
a bitter and a revengeful spirit which we have no right to wonder at
or to blame. And the results affect us not only in our workshops but
in our pastimes, by driving those whose labour is so conditioned into
a more consumptive form of pleasure-seeking and relaxation. You cannot
put people into inhuman conditions for long hours of each day, and
expect them to be normal and humane when you turn them out to their
short hours of leisure. I am pointing to conditions which you know
probably as well as, or better than, I do; but I am pointing to them
for the express purpose of saying that you cannot dissociate them from
your national appreciation of Art. The more you can connect the worker
with the raw material on the one hand and the finished product on the
other, the more surely you are establishing conditions out of which
national Art can grow; and the more you dissociate him from these two
ends of his material the more you make national Art impossible.
I will give you an instance, quite away from sweated labour conditions,
where you will see at once how wasteful and opposed to Art is this
system of breaking up craftsmanship into departments. It was an
architect who told me that the following system is quite frequently
followed in dealing with the stone out of which we build the outside
walls of our modern churches. It is hewn at the quarries into a rough
surface, thoroughly expressive of the stonemason’s craft, and not in
any way too rough for its purpose. It is then taken and submitted by
machinery to a grinding process which makes it mechanically smooth, and
it is then handed over to other workmen who give back to it a chiselled
surface of an absolutely uniform and mechanical character which
expresses nothing. And with that wanton and wasteful lie we are content
to set up temples to the God of Truth!
Now if the Church has become so blind to the values of life, and so
lacking in any standard of honour toward the labour of men’s hands, as
to allow itself to be so clothed in falsehood, yet I do still plead
that those who call themselves artists shall protest by all means in
their power against the systematisation of such indignities toward
handicraft. That is the sort of thing against which any national Art
training we have ought to fight.
How can we fight? Best of all, I believe, by establishing a standard
of honour toward manual labour; and, quite definitely, wherever we
have Art schools, by training all students to hate and despise shams
and to loathe all waste of labour. But, perhaps, the most direct way
would be for the State to set up, in every town, in connection with
its Art schools and its technical schools, a standard of honesty by
practical demonstration, in the staple industry of the locality. I
would not trouble, so long as that industry had a useful purpose,
how much or how little it was connected with Art; but I would give
the youth of that place the chance of an honest apprenticeship under
true human conditions to the trade in which they might be called upon
to spend their lives. I would not have those schools of labour adopt
any amateurishness of method or standard; they should not obstinately
reject the aid of machinery where machinery can relieve monotony, but
they should very carefully consider at what stage the dehumanising
element came in, either by substituting mechanism for skill, or by
separating the worker too much from his work in its completed form.
And from those schools of labour I would allow people to purchase all
the work of these State-apprentices which their master-craftsmen could
pass as being of a standard quality. They would not compete in point
of cheapness with the trade article, for their price would almost
certainly be higher, but they would, I trust, compete in point of
quality and design; and by exhibiting a standard, and making the thing
procurable, they might create a demand which the very trade itself
would at last be forced to recognise.
This is but a very bald and brief statement of the kind of extension I
mean; but what I want to put to you is this, that wherever a nation has
turned from agriculture to trade, there, if you want national Art you
must invade those trade conditions and set up your standard of honour,
not outside, but in the trades themselves; you must get hold of those
who are going to be your workers and craftsmen and put into them (by
exhibiting to them manual labour under right human conditions) the old
craftsman’s pride which existed in the days of the Guilds, when the
trade unions were not merely organisations to secure good wages, but
to secure good work, and to maintain a standard of honour in labour.
But you must not stop there. To make your training in any true sense
national you must make it characteristic, or rather it must make
itself. It must aim at bringing out racial and local character; and
before it can do so we must recover that love of locality which we have
so largely lost. A mere multiplication of schools and classes where a
departmental system evolved at some city centre is put in force, is not
national: it is only metropolitan, perhaps only departmental. You can
put such a system, in a certain superficial way, into the heads and
hands of your local students, but you cannot put it into the blood.
Unless your Art training enters into and links up the lives of those
you would teach with a larger sense of citizenship, it isn’t national.
They won’t carry it away with them into their daily pursuits, they
won’t make a spontaneous and instinctive application of it; they will
only come to it at class-hours, and, when class-hours are over, quit
again. I have spoken of the necessity of a standard of honour toward
labour, but we need also a standard of honour toward life. It is still,
you see, values--life-values--that I am trying to get at as a basis for
Art.
Now to some of you I must have seemed, in all conscience, gloomy
and pessimistic in my outlook on present conditions; and therefore,
before I end, I will try to emit a ray of hope. There are certain
social developments going on around us which make me hope that we
may yet emerge from this valley of the shadows through which we are
still stumbling. One is that there has been in the last generation a
very general breakdown of the old artificial class notion of the kind
of work which was compatible with “gentility.” And one meets to-day
people, whose culture has given them every chance to develop that
standard of honour toward life (without which their claim to be gentry
means nothing); you meet with many such people nowadays who have come
back to manual labour in various forms, in farming, in horticulture,
and in craftsmanship--some also, I am glad to say, who have become
shopkeepers--and who are bringing, presumably, their standard of honour
to bear on those trades on which they no longer foolishly look down.
Among these a definite revival of handicraft is taking place, and
where they are doing their work honestly and well they are undoubtedly
inculcating a better taste. It is especially among this class which
has come back to handicraft that one meets with domestic interiors of
a fine and scrupulous simplicity which we may eventually see imitated
(meretriciously, perhaps, but on the whole beneficially) even in
lodging-houses which are at present the dust-hung mausoleums of the
aesthetic movement of thirty years ago.
Another matter for congratulation--not a movement, but a survival--is
the unspoiled tradition of beauty which still exists in the cottage
gardens of England. There, in our villages, you find a note of beauty
that has scarcely been touched by the evil of our modern conditions.
And I take it as a proof that where, by some happy chance, we have
managed to “let well alone,” there the instinct for beauty and for
fitness is still a natural ingredient of industrial life. That survival
of taste in our cottage gardens is culture in the best sense of the
word; and it is still popular. We do not yet dig our gardens by
machinery; when we do they will die the death.
And two other bright points of movement, which I look to as having in
them the basis of a true Art training, are the widespread revival,
in so many of our towns and villages, through the efforts of Miss
Mary Neal, Mr. Cecil Sharp and others, of our old folk-songs and
Morris dances, and lastly--perhaps I shall surprise you--the Boy Scout
movement.
Coming into contact with these two movements, I have found that they
have in them certain elements in common. Instituted with a rare
combination of tact and enthusiasm, they have taken hold of the blood;
they have got home at a certain point in boy and girl nature which has
already made them become native. I find that these two organisations
tend to develop among their members grace and vigour of movement, good
manners, a cheerful spirit, a more alert interest in the things about
them, a feeling of comradeship, and best of all, a certain sense of
honour toward life. And therefore, even in a place technically devoted
to the training of students, I say boldly that I see nowhere better
hope of a sound basis for national Art than in this revival of village
dancing and folk-song and in the Boy Scout movement.
The assertion may perhaps seem strange and ironic to some of you
that it is not from a study of beautiful objects that the sense of
beauty can be made national, but only in the recovery of an ordered
plan for our social and industrial life, and in the finding of a true
and worthy purpose for all that our hands are put to do. But in that
connection you may remember how Ruskin maintained that great Art has
only flourished in countries which produced in abundance either wine or
corn; in countries, that is to say, where the greatest industries were
those with which we most readily associate that note of joy which has
become proverbial, the joy of the harvest. It is perhaps too much to
dream that we shall ever again see England living upon its own corn;
and the greatest forms of Art may, therefore, remain for ever beyond
our reach. But until a nation does honour to the human hand as the
most perfect and beautiful of all instruments under the sun, by giving
it only honourable and useful tasks--until then I must rather wish
you to be good valuers, keen--indignantly keen--to destroy the false
values which you see about you, than that you should be either good
draughtsmen or good artists.
You can do honest and good work as designers and illustrators and
architects, as workers in wood and metal and stone; but you are
hampered and bound by the conditions of your day, and you cannot by
your best efforts make Art national till you have established joy in
labour. No great school of Art can ever arise in our midst in such a
form as to carry with it through all the world its national character,
until the nation itself has found that voice (which to-day seems so
conspicuously absent, even when we close our shops to make holiday); I
mean the voice of joy.
FOOTNOTE: