The Harvest of Ruskin

by John W. Graham

§ 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.