The Harvest of Ruskin

by John W. Graham

This is all on Ruskin’s lines; very central to the preservation of all he loved. How pervasive was this enemy he did not fully see fifty years ago. He noted the deterioration of climate in England, during his lifetime, in two lectures on The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century. They were much derided at the time; and they contain curious passages in which the lack of light, the restless ugly clouds, the choppy breezes, the cold gloomy summers, were put down to the wrath of heaven for the sins of the people. They had in fact one simple explanation—Smoke. A man of Ruskin’s power of perception, constantly admiring beauty of landscape, could hardly have been wrong in his impression, fortified by his diaries, that there had been a change for the worse in the air and skies during his lifetime. The production of manufacturing smoke over a third (say) of England covered that period. Over all our coal fields solid particles embarrassed the air currents, and darkened the sky, and the oily products adhered stickily to the clouds and to the rain. The weather was, in truth, nature’s punishment for the haste, the greed, the popular carelessness, which tolerated the factory and furnace chimneys, and the ill-regulated firesides of thirty-five millions of people in the British Isles.[118]

Coal ought not to be burnt raw, any more than meat should be eaten raw. It should be made into gas, coke, tar and sulphate of ammonia—and all of it be used. A smokeless domestic fuel made of half coked coal could be made in all gas works, and should be used everywhere, to economize our now costly coal. Electric power stations, smokelessly operated, would save much wasteful private production of power. More rigid and conscientious smoke inspection, abandoned as unpatriotic on a short view during the war, should be restored. The law should be amended and its loopholes fastened up.[119] There are many beautiful inventions ready to be used to make an end of this most gratuitous of our evils, which renders life in the industrial districts dark, dirty and ugly to the best and cleanest of the workpeople. Most municipalities in England impose an extra rate on those who use gas and electricity by taking money for the rates from those departments.

We condemn the town cottage housewife to ceaseless toil, with her dirty doorstep and window sills, her kitchen floor, her children who play in the street, and her intolerably swollen laundry. The glorious light of the country summer is never seen through the smoke haze of the industrial districts. Look down any long straight town street on any day, and note the limit of visibility. Fogs are often caused and always aggravated and prolonged by smoke—and after every long fog the death rate from lung diseases goes steeply up. Among the many signs of government incompetence, of narrow popular apathy, and lack of a true political sense, the present riotous licence of the makers of smoke is conspicuous. And the reform is all on Ruskin’s lines.

After dirt, drink. They are not unconnected; for the dull grey street, the worried wife, the ill-tempered children, all tend to tempt a man to the cosy blaze of the bar-room, and to the excitement of a shilling on the next race. Men and women will make life interesting somehow, and if they are denied the sound pleasures appropriate to their natures they will find others.[120]

We will now hear the Prophet on our machine civilization. The passages are in the famous chapter on The Nature of Gothic in the Second Volume of The Stones of Venice §§ XI, XII, XIII and others. These passages are among Ruskin’s earliest social writing. He was led from the examination of the characters of Byzantine, Gothic and Renaissance architecture, to inquire into the character of their builders; and so was led from Art to Man as the subject matter of his life-work. This is an important transition passage, written about 1850, ten years before the decisive year when he became an economist always and an Art Professor at intervals.

§ XI. “The modern English mind ... intensely desires in all things, the 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.”