Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook: Ten Lectures on Social Subjects

by Laurence Housman

That same quality of outrage and degradation attends on all labour that is subject, within the worker’s knowledge, to wanton destruction, or is obviously of no real use or of “faked” value. And the finer the skill employed the greater the anguish of mind, or else the hard callousness of indifference which must result. Call upon men to make useless things, or things which you mean wantonly to destroy the day after to-morrow, or to which by the conditions you tolerate you make a fair length of life impossible—call upon labour to do those things, and you are either filling its spirit with misery and depression, or you are making it, in self-defence, callous and hard.

Industrial conditions which encourage the building of houses that are only intended to last a lease; which permit the destruction of our canal system because that means of transit has proved a dangerous rival to the railway system; which impose a quick change in fashions on which depend various kinds of ephemeral and parasitic industries; which encourage a vast production of ephemeral journalism and magazine illustration which after a single reading is thrown aside and wasted—all these things, which have become nationalised in our midst, are a national anti-Art training. We English have, as the result of these things, no national school of architecture; we have no national costume (though I myself can remember the time when in our Midland counties not only the farm labourer, but the small yeoman farmer himself went to church as well as to labour in the beautiful smock-frock worn by their forefathers) and we have killed out from our midst one of the most beautiful national schools of popular art that ever existed, the school of the illustrators of the ’sixties; and we have done these things mainly from our increasing haste to get hold of something new, and our almost equal haste, when we have it, to throw it away again.

We have cast our bread upon the waters. The sort of wealth to the pursuit of which nations have committed themselves needs (it now appears) an enormous amount of protection. And it cannot have been without some demoralising effect upon the mind of the community that we have been driven by our outstanding necessities to build every year six or seven of those enormous engines of destruction called “Dreadnoughts,” whose effective lease of life is about 20 years, something considerably shorter than the lease of life which we allow for our most jerry-built lodging-houses! And on these short-lived products of industry (which are to-day the sign and symbol and safeguard of our world-power), our aristocracy of labour has been spending its strength, and the nation has now to depend on them for its safety. The cost of building a “Dreadnought” is about the same as the cost of building St. Paul’s Cathedral. Imagine to yourself a nation building every year six or seven St. Paul’s Cathedrals, with the consciousness that in twenty-five or thirty years they will all again be levelled to the dust, and you will get from that picture something of the horror which an artist is bound to feel at the necessity which thus drives us forward, even in peace-time, to the continuous destruction, on such a colossal scale, of the labour of men’s hands. And the more it is revealed to us to-day (by the present catastrophe) as an absolute political necessity, the more is the disorder of civilization we have arrived at condemned.

Well, I must leave now, in that example I have set before you, the wasteful aspect of modern industry, in order to touch briefly on another, and an almost equally hateful aspect, which I will call “the vivisection of modern industry.” I mean its subdivision into so many separate departments, or rather fragments, that it loses for the mind of the worker all relation to the thing made—that time-saving device at the expense of the human hand and brain, which we glorify under the term “specialisation.” Now, however much you may defend that system on ground of trade competition, the artist is bound by his principles to regard it as a national evil; for anything which tends to take away the worker’s joy and pride in the distinctiveness of his trade and to undo its human elements is anti-Art training. And so that inhuman specialisation which (for the sake of trade cheapness) sets down a man to the performance of one particular mechanical action all his life, in the making of some one particular part of some article which in its further stages he is never to handle, or a woman to stamp out the tin skeleton of a button, with her eyes glued to one spot for ten hours of the day—all these dehumanising things are anti-Art because they are destructive of life-values. We have erected them into a system, and while cutting prices by such means at one end, we are mounting up costs at the other. We are promoting, maybe, a quicker circulation of the currency of the realm, but we are impoverishing the currency of the race. For that hard mechanical efficiency we are paying a price which is eating up all our real profits; quite apart from its effect in the increase of lunacy and of the unfit birth-rate and death-rate among children, it is helping to implant in the whole world of labour a bitter and a revengeful spirit which we have no right to wonder at or to blame. And the results affect us not only in our workshops but in our pastimes, by driving those whose labour is so conditioned into a more consumptive form of pleasure-seeking and relaxation. You cannot put people into inhuman conditions for long hours of each day, and expect them to be normal and humane when you turn them out to their short hours of leisure. I am pointing to conditions which you know probably as well as, or better than, I do; but I am pointing to them for the express purpose of saying that you cannot dissociate them from your national appreciation of Art. The more you can connect the worker with the raw material on the one hand and the finished product on the other, the more surely you are establishing conditions out of which national Art can grow; and the more you dissociate him from these two ends of his material the more you make national Art impossible.

I will give you an instance, quite away from sweated labour conditions, where you will see at once how wasteful and opposed to Art is this system of breaking up craftsmanship into departments. It was an architect who told me that the following system is quite frequently followed in dealing with the stone out of which we build the outside walls of our modern churches. It is hewn at the quarries into a rough surface, thoroughly expressive of the stonemason’s craft, and not in any way too rough for its purpose. It is then taken and submitted by machinery to a grinding process which makes it mechanically smooth, and it is then handed over to other workmen who give back to it a chiselled surface of an absolutely uniform and mechanical character which expresses nothing. And with that wanton and wasteful lie we are content to set up temples to the God of Truth!

Now if the Church has become so blind to the values of life, and so lacking in any standard of honour toward the labour of men’s hands, as to allow itself to be so clothed in falsehood, yet I do still plead that those who call themselves artists shall protest by all means in their power against the systematisation of such indignities toward handicraft. That is the sort of thing against which any national Art training we have ought to fight.

How can we fight? Best of all, I believe, by establishing a standard of honour toward manual labour; and, quite definitely, wherever we have Art schools, by training all students to hate and despise shams and to loathe all waste of labour. But, perhaps, the most direct way would be for the State to set up, in every town, in connection with its Art schools and its technical schools, a standard of honesty by practical demonstration, in the staple industry of the locality. I would not trouble, so long as that industry had a useful purpose, how much or how little it was connected with Art; but I would give the youth of that place the chance of an honest apprenticeship under true human conditions to the trade in which they might be called upon to spend their lives. I would not have those schools of labour adopt any amateurishness of method or standard; they should not obstinately reject the aid of machinery where machinery can relieve monotony, but they should very carefully consider at what stage the dehumanising element came in, either by substituting mechanism for skill, or by separating the worker too much from his work in its completed form. And from those schools of labour I would allow people to purchase all the work of these State-apprentices which their master-craftsmen could pass as being of a standard quality. They would not compete in point of cheapness with the trade article, for their price would almost certainly be higher, but they would, I trust, compete in point of quality and design; and by exhibiting a standard, and making the thing procurable, they might create a demand which the very trade itself would at last be forced to recognise.

This is but a very bald and brief statement of the kind of extension I mean; but what I want to put to you is this, that wherever a nation has turned from agriculture to trade, there, if you want national Art you must invade those trade conditions and set up your standard of honour, not outside, but in the trades themselves; you must get hold of those who are going to be your workers and craftsmen and put into them (by exhibiting to them manual labour under right human conditions) the old craftsman’s pride which existed in the days of the Guilds, when the trade unions were not merely organisations to secure good wages, but to secure good work, and to maintain a standard of honour in labour. But you must not stop there. To make your training in any true sense national you must make it characteristic, or rather it must make itself. It must aim at bringing out racial and local character; and before it can do so we must recover that love of locality which we have so largely lost. A mere multiplication of schools and classes where a departmental system evolved at some city centre is put in force, is not national: it is only metropolitan, perhaps only departmental. You can put such a system, in a certain superficial way, into the heads and hands of your local students, but you cannot put it into the blood. Unless your Art training enters into and links up the lives of those you would teach with a larger sense of citizenship, it isn’t national. They won’t carry it away with them into their daily pursuits, they won’t make a spontaneous and instinctive application of it; they will only come to it at class-hours, and, when class-hours are over, quit again. I have spoken of the necessity of a standard of honour toward labour, but we need also a standard of honour toward life. It is still, you see, values—life-values—that I am trying to get at as a basis for Art.

Now to some of you I must have seemed, in all conscience, gloomy and pessimistic in my outlook on present conditions; and therefore, before I end, I will try to emit a ray of hope. There are certain social developments going on around us which make me hope that we may yet emerge from this valley of the shadows through which we are still stumbling. One is that there has been in the last generation a very general breakdown of the old artificial class notion of the kind of work which was compatible with “gentility.” And one meets to-day people, whose culture has given them every chance to develop that standard of honour toward life (without which their claim to be gentry means nothing); you meet with many such people nowadays who have come back to manual labour in various forms, in farming, in horticulture, and in craftsmanship—some also, I am glad to say, who have become shopkeepers—and who are bringing, presumably, their standard of honour to bear on those trades on which they no longer foolishly look down. Among these a definite revival of handicraft is taking place, and where they are doing their work honestly and well they are undoubtedly inculcating a better taste. It is especially among this class which has come back to handicraft that one meets with domestic interiors of a fine and scrupulous simplicity which we may eventually see imitated (meretriciously, perhaps, but on the whole beneficially) even in lodging-houses which are at present the dust-hung mausoleums of the aesthetic movement of thirty years ago.

Another matter for congratulation—not a movement, but a survival—is the unspoiled tradition of beauty which still exists in the cottage gardens of England. There, in our villages, you find a note of beauty that has scarcely been touched by the evil of our modern conditions. And I take it as a proof that where, by some happy chance, we have managed to “let well alone,” there the instinct for beauty and for fitness is still a natural ingredient of industrial life. That survival of taste in our cottage gardens is culture in the best sense of the word; and it is still popular. We do not yet dig our gardens by machinery; when we do they will die the death.