An’ organs sweet are pleyin.”
Rosley Fair.
The Great Exhibition of the Industry of all Countries is the first public national expression ever made in this country, as to the dignity and artistic quality of labour.
Our “working men,” until within the last few years, we have been in the habit of looking upon as mere labourers—as muscular machines—creatures with whom the spinning-jenny and the power-loom might be brought into competition, and whom the sense of fatigue, and consequent demand for rest, rendered immeasurably inferior “as producers,” to the instruments of brass and iron.
It is only within the last ten years, perhaps, that we have got to acknowledge the artistic and intellectual quality of many forms of manual labour, speaking of certain classes of operatives no longer as handicraftsmen—that is to say, as men who, from long habit, acquired a dexterity of finger which fitted them for the “automatic” performance of certain operations,—but styling them artisans, or the artists of our manufactures. It is because we have been so slow to perceive and express this “great fact”—the artistic character of artisanship—that so much intellectual power has been lost to society, and there has been so much more toil and suffering in the world than there has been any necessity for.
Had we, as a really great people, been impressed with the sense of the heavy debt we owed to labour, we should long ago have sought to acknowledge and respect the mental operations connected with many forms of it, and have striven to have ennobled and embellished and enlivened the intellect of those several modes of industry that still remained as purely physical employments among us. Had the men of mind done as much for the men of labour, as these had done for those, we might long ago have learned how to have made toil pleasant rather than irksome, and to have rendered it noble instead of mean.
The ploughman, at the tail of the plough, has been allowed to continue with us almost the same animal as the horses in front of it, with no other incentive to work but the craving of his stomach.
Had we striven to elevate ploughing into an art, and the ploughman into an artist—teaching him to understand the several subtle laws and forces concerned in the cultivation of every plant—and more especially of those with which he was dealing—had we thus made the turning up of the soil not a brute operation, but an intellectual process, we might have rendered the work a pleasure, and the workman a man of thought, dignity, and refinement.
As yet, the art-exhibitions of this country have been confined solely to the handiworks of artists-proper. We have been led to suppose, by the restricted sense which we have given to the term artist, that Art was confined solely to the several forms of pleasing—pictorially, musically, or literarily. A more comprehensive view of the subject, however, is now teaching us that the different modes of operating on the intellectual emotions, of attracting attention, of exciting interest, of producing a feeling of astonishment, beauty, sublimity, or ludicrousness in others, are but one species of Art, for not only are the means of affecting the intellect, of inducing a sense of truth and causation an equally artistic operation, but, assuredly, the affection of material objects in a desired manner is just as worthy of being ranked in the same category. Whether the wished-for object be to operate upon mental, moral, or physical nature—whether it be to induce in the intellect, the heart, or the unconscious substances around us a certain predetermined state, such an end can be brought about solely by conforming to the laws of the object on which we seek to operate.
Art, literally rendered, is cunning, and cunning is “kenning,” or knowing. It means, simply and strictly, intellectual power. Ars is the power of mind, in contradistinction to the In-ers, or power of matter.