Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook: Ten Lectures on Social Subjects

by Laurence Housman

Of course, you may say that is use; but it is use in which the spiritualities, faith, hope and love, begin to appear; and in the gentleness of its intention it forms a basis for the up-growth of beauty. Now all the arts are, in the same way, first of all structural—having for their starting-point a sound and economic use of the material on which they are based. Music, architecture, poetry, and the rest were all, to begin with, the result of an instinctive choice or selection, directed to the elimination of superfluities, accidents, excrescences—which to the craftsman’s purpose are nothing.

Nature, in her seed-sowing, has gone to work to propagate by profusion; her method is to sow a million seeds so as to make sure that some may live; thus she meets and out-matches the chances that are against her. The seed of Art sprang up differently; maker-man took hold of the one selected seed, not of a dozen, or of a thousand dozen promiscuously, and bent his faculties on making that one seed (his chosen material) fit to face life and its chances: if a house—walls and roof calculated to keep out the rain and resist the force of storms: if a textile—fabric of a staple sufficient to resist the wear and tear to which it would be subjected: if a putting together of words meant to outlast the brief occasion of their utterance—then in a form likely to be impressive, and therefore memorable; so that in an age before writing was known they might find a safe tabernacle, travelling from place to place in the minds of men. And similarly with music—a system of sounds so ruled by structural law as to be capable of transmission either by instrument, or by voice disciplined and trained to a certain code of limitations. And being thus made memorable and passed from mouth to mouth, from one place to another, and from age to age, they acquired a social significance and importance; till, seeing them thus lifted above chance, man set himself to give them new forms of beauty and adornment.

And the governing motive was, and always has been, first man’s wish to leave memorable records—beyond the limits of his own generation—of what life has meant for him; and secondly (and this is the more intimate phase) the delight of the craftsman in his work, the exuberance of vital energy (secure of its structural ground-work) breaking out into play. “See,” it says, “how I dance, and gambol, and triumph! This superfluity of strength proves me a victor in my struggle to live.”

Nothing else does; for if (having survived the struggle) man only lives miserably—scrapes through as it were—the question in the face of so poverty-stricken a result, may still be—“Was the struggle worth it?” And so by his arts and graces, by his adornment of his streets, temples and theatres, by his huge delight in himself, so soon as the essentials of mere material existence are secured to him, man has really shown that life is good in itself, that he can do well enough without the assurance of personal immortality held out to him by the theologians. Whether that be or be not his reward hereafter, he will still strive to express himself; but for that end mere use alone will not satisfy him.

We have seen, then, how man, in his social surroundings, begins to secure something over and above the mere necessities of life; and so, after providing himself with a certain competence of food, clothing and shelter, has means and energy left for the supply of luxuries, ornaments, delights—call them what you will. And according to the direction in which he flings out for the acquisition of these superfluities—so will his whole manhood develop, or his type of racial culture be moulded.

Far back in the beginnings of civilization one of the first forms taken by this surplus of power and energy over mere necessity was the acquisition of slaves and wives. Civilization then began to ornament itself with two modes of body-service—the menial attendance of the slave upon his master, and the polygamous sexual attendance of the woman upon her lord.

To-day we think that both those things were, from a moral point of view, bad ornament. But you cannot look into the history of any civilization conducted on those lines without seeing that they decorated it—and that, out of their acceptance, came colour, pomp, splendour, means for leisure, for enjoyment—for a very keen self-realisation of a kind by the few at the expense of the many. And the masterful few made that form of decorated civilization more sure for themselves by extending a good deal of the decorative element to the subservient lives around them. The slaves wore fine liveries and lorded it over lower slaves, the favourite wives lived in luxury and laziness, eating sweets and spending their days in the frivolous mysteries of the toilet.

At a certain point in the social scale this form of ornamental existence produced great misery, great hardships, great abasement. But it was not instituted and maintained for that reason. Those underlying conditions were a drawback, they were a misuse of human nature employed as a basis for that ornamental superstructure to build on. And out of that underlying misuse came the weakness and the eventual decay of that once flourishing school of ornament.

But when that school of ornament was threatened by other schools, it was ready to fight to the death for its ornamental superfluities—for polygamy, for slavery, for power over others, which had come to mean for it all that made life worth living! Life was quite capable of being carried on without those things—was, and is, happily lived by other races to the accompaniment of another set of ornaments which those races think more enjoyable. But no race will consent to live without some sort of ornament of its own choosing; and when its choice of ornaments, or of social superfluities, over and above the needs of existence, is seriously threatened from without it declares that it is fighting not merely for liberty but for existence. Yet we know quite well that the people of invaded and conquered States continue in the main to exist—they continue even to wear ornaments; but these are apt to be imposed ornaments galling to the national pride. And so to-day, in the midst of a vast belligerency, we have committees and consultations going on, to see to it lest, at the end of the war, under German dominance, our women should have their future fashions imposed on them from Berlin instead of from Paris, a fearful doom for any lady of taste to contemplate.

The example may seem frivolous, but it is a parable of the truth; we call our ornaments our liberties, and if we cannot ourselves die fighting for them, we make others die for us.