The Harvest of Ruskin

by John W. Graham

The pastoral happiness of peasant life Ruskin thought he found in Bavaria, in Savoy, in Tuscany. He never really lived among the peasantry, nor was he, the shy visitor to the best hotels, with his courier and his portfolio, accustomed to familiar intercourse, particularly on money matters, with the worthy sons and daughters of toil whose industrious and quiet lives he admired. Neither in England, Scotland, Ireland, nor the Continent can the “merrie England” ideal of peasant life ever have existed.

In Switzerland or France, where there have been since the Revolution no feudal landlords, it had a good chance; and also among the “statesmen” of Cumberland and Westmorland while they survived. The Canton Bern is to-day to the tourist’s eye a happy and prosperous land, and the other Protestant cantons resemble it. But we know most about our own northern “statesmen”; the Swiss or French small proprietor’s life must have been much the same as theirs. It was a hard, narrow life, absorbed in “money grubbing,” which was in their case no fault but a chief virtue, being necessary to survival. If a statesman was of a large and genial nature, the public-house was his common resort; and most of the stocks of statesmen came to grief by the recklessness or misfortunes of one generation. The estate was first mortgaged and then foreclosed and sold. A succession of steady cultivators, careful of the pence, hardly ever succeeded in making a family well to do or even comfortable, with reserves to meet disaster. I speak here of my own forbears. The holdings were too small. They worked all day and every day, in all weathers, lived and slept in quarters not conducive to delicate sensitiveness of feeling. A big attic, separated by a curtain into two, was the sleeping place of the children and servants, if there were any.[116] Books, education, travel, were denied them. On a lower level is the life of the peasants of the Rhone Valley, in dirt and hopelessness and overwork. It makes for degradation. But where feudal landlords exist, as they do in most places, the case is worse. The condition of the peasantry of Eastern Europe has been brought before us since the War in the daily papers so vividly that none can miss it. The system has broken down in revolution. It appears to an astonished English public, that the mass of the people have lived under local tyranny and very near the margin of maintenance, in Russia and her border states, in Roumania, Poland, Hungary, Prussia, and in the Balkan lands. This is what we find before industrial development comes in. There is no need to dwell on the squalor, on the diseases, on the recurring famines, on the contempt of the proud. It transpires that the peasants to whom the land has now come by revolution, are described as so covetous, narrow and selfish—their trade their politics—that Socialists and idealists are baffled by them. They will starve a city like Buda-Pesth or Petrograd, when their supplies are abundant. They do not seem capable at present of a national or international consciousness, nor of any true democracy larger than the village.

In England, too, the rustic life which the Industrial Revolution overthrew, was, in the landlord counties, servile and suffering. The wages and the politics of the South of England until recent times are survivals of the system.[117]

We are bound to conclude that to this system we ought not to recur. With all their faults and disadvantages the people of the industrial districts are the most educated, the most independent, the most virile. Numerous economic writers have destroyed, like a sentimental mirage, our view of the old English village, with its homely comfort and peaceful independence. We think more now of its toils, its diseases, its infant mortality, its lost Commons.

It was natural for Ruskin, with his love of white thatched cottages and leafy lanes bordered by neglected wasteful hedges full of wild flowers—with his wealthy upbringing, and ignorance of the value of money and of the direness of most people’s need of it, it was natural and inevitable that he should loathe the dreadful new mining villages—rows of cheap insanitary brick houses—and the belching smoke of the colliery chimney. He preferred Coniston to Barrow. But there is no practical guidance in that revolt, except indeed the revolt itself; and that was a message to his time, and is still a message to ours.

There is nothing particularly elevating about farm work, in spite of Corydon and other shepherds described by the town bred makers of fantasies. Sheep are the most unpleasant creatures to look after, the dirtiest and the stupidest. Their scab, fluke, ticks and footrot need much attention. Apart from their diseases, the scene of the shepherd’s happy labours will be in winter a turnip field, the crop being eaten off by sheep. The dirt and squalor of the dung and the animals and the turnips, the cold and damp, the sleet and the mud and the smells—these things are not good subjects for poetry. The farmer’s calling is to make his living out of the death of his animals, and out of their sufferings when alive, their castration and imprisonment, and their labour. He measures them by a purely economic test. It is not for us who live on meat and milk, butter and cheese, and the products of the pig-sty, to blame farmers for this. They do it for us. But it is not particularly “improving”; it approaches the calling of the butcher, which is equally necessary. Why the world is thus built is not, luckily for me, the subject of this book.

The rest of the labours of the farm are a struggle with the earth—with weeds and with weather. It is all primitive and built into the bone and marrow of the race; but it is not more moralizing, nor more romantic, in practice than working at looms or ledgers. The labourer does not go to the land as to a leisurely summer home. Hitherto, no way has been found in England for inducing young people to stay in the villages. We ought to try to succeed in this. If we do it will be in a new kind of village, and it will be effected by cheap and rapid transit, and by widely scattering the ownership or holding of land. Then Ruskin’s aims will be realized, but not by the only methods he could see in his day. In fact, railways and domestic machinery would be essential.

Division of Labour goes with the factory system. It was early hailed as one of the great economies obtained by production on a large scale. It was found that by constantly keeping a man or a child to one occupation, an extraordinary degree of sure accuracy and readiness was obtained. Without the necessity for thinking, and so without risk of thinking wrong, the nimble fingers repeated hour by hour their appointed trick, the practised eye ever followed the same mechanism and stopped it at the same point, the same tool in the same place was ready to the same hand. Physiologically we believe that all this means that there is established a rut for the tracks of the brain wheels, a habitual nervous connection between certain sensory centres and certain motor centres, without the need for every piece of news to be transmitted by the sensory centre to the central thinking apparatus in the cerebrum, and a corresponding order sent down from the central control to the motor centre.

When we learn to write, the fashion and shape of every a, b and c have to be thought over; the hands learn painfully to follow an order sent down from the central thinking power in the cerebrum, sent down on information derived through the sensory centres behind the eye, of the shape of the copy. But in ordinary life we could copy pages of manuscript and talk and think about something else the whole time. There is a direct line of nerve flow between the reading apparatus behind the eye and the writing apparatus behind the hand; and thought is not required. We have become so far automatic; we have created a convenient writing machine within us, which works for us and leaves us free to do other things.

So that if we spend our nine hours a day at working a printing machine, or stitching leather or silk, or boring holes, or driving in nails, or sharpening a tool’s edge, or wrapping boxes, or counting or piecing threads, we are really doing the work of a machine. We do not think: to think would interfere with the sure regularity of our work.