Part 13

I remember, in this connection, a Quaker acquaintance whose friends descended upon him at the time of his marriage with certain household monstrosities which he was expected thereafter to live down to. It was a cataclysm which he could not avert; but he found a remedy. He became a passive resister to the Education rate, and year by year he placed at the disposal of the distraining authorities a selection of his wedding-presents till his house was purged of them. I have said that you cannot separate Art-training from general education; and here, at all events, you find the two happily combined--a war on bad art and on a bad educational system joined economically in one.

So much, then, for thoughtless superfluity as an impediment to a recognition of true values. I want now to come to the importance of permanence as a condition underlying the aim of all production if it is to be wholesome in its social results. I have said that an instinct for permanence is what differentiates artistic from supposed trade interests. Take architecture. Do you imagine that architects or builders are likely to design or build in the same style for a system of short leaseholds as they might for freeholds? And is the building which is calculated just to “save its face” until the lease expires likely to be so good either in design or workmanship?

Read, in that connection, what Coventry Patmore says in his essay on “Greatness in Architecture”:

“The house and cottage builder of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was,” he says, “fully aware that the strength of a rafter lay rather in its depth than its breadth, and that, for a time at least, a few boards two inches thick and ten inches deep, set edgeways, would suffice to carry the roof, which nevertheless it pleased him better to lay upon a succession of beams ten inches square. It is the reality, and the modest ostentation of the reality, of such superfluous substantiality that constitutes the whole secret of effect in many an old house that strikes us as “architectural,” though it may not contain a single item of architectural ornament; and, in the very few instances in which modern buildings have been raised in the same fashion, the beholder at once feels that their generous regard for the far future is of almost as poetical a character as the aged retrospect of a similar house of the time of Henry VII. or Elizabeth. A man,” he goes on, “now hires a bit of ground for eighty or ninety years; and, if he has something to spare to spend on beauty, he says to himself: ‘I will build me a house that will last my time, and what money I have to spare I will spend in decorating it. Why should I waste my means in raising wall and roof which will last five times as long as I or mine shall want them?’ The answer is: Because that very ‘waste’ is the truest and most striking ornament; and though your and your family’s enjoyment of a house thus magnanimously built may last but a tenth of its natural age, there lies in that very fact an ‘ornament’ of the most noble and touching kind, which will be obvious at all seasons to yourself and every beholder, though the consciousness of its cause may be dormant; whereas the meanness of the other plan will be only the more apparent with every penny you spend in making it meretricious.”

Again, are you likely to get so good an architectural design where you cannot be fairly sure that the use for which the building is raised is likely to be permanent? And do our modern trade conditions and present enormous demand for thoughtless superfluities tend to make that prospect more probable? If not, then instability of trade, or trade directed to the satisfaction of frivolous and ephemeral demands is bad for architecture, and hinders any worthy development in it of national characteristics.

But there, mind you, in trade, lies to-day the very life of the nation; for the life of our teeming millions depends on it. By our industrial specialisation in the pursuit of wealth vast numbers of us have ceased to be self-supporting in the necessaries of life. And the question for artists is, are we basing our national life on conditions that cannot secure permanence and stability in the things which we produce? Is it a necessary condition of our industrial development that things should have a shorter life and we a shorter use for them than in the old days? To the artist the drawback of machine-made things is not necessarily in the mechanism of their production (for in some cases your machine relieves the human hand of a hard and wearing monotony), but there is a very obvious drawback if it imposes upon the worker merely another form of hard and wearing monotony, and at the same time shortens the life of the thing produced. If handicraft does not offer to the worker worthier conditions for hand and brain, and insure longer life in the thing produced, it is no good pinning our faith to it. Eliminate it, and let machinery take its place. You have not, then, in the transfer, destroyed any right values, and you are not going counter to the conditions which tend to produce national Art.

But, as an example of the particular value which does sometimes attach to hand labour (irrespective of its artistic value), I have here a small unused sample of chair-cover material of English make, produced about eighty years ago, at a probable cost--so I am told by experts--of under £2 the square yard. The chairs it was made to cover are now in my possession. During the twenty-five years of my own personal acquaintance with them they have had plenty of hard wear; but even at the corners that material has not yet begun to wear out; and the colour has only become softer and more mellow in quality.

Within the last ten years I endeavoured to get that covering matched in a modern material, and I paid for the nearest match I could get about one-fifth of the price I have quoted. That material has already gone shabby; and where it is most worn and faded the colour, instead of mellowing, has gone dead and dirty in quality. The older material will probably outlast my time.

There, then, are the comparative values of the old and the new material. You pay the higher price for the old, but in the end it is more economical. And it has this double advantage (or what would be a double advantage in a State where industrial conditions were sound), that it inclines its possessor to adopt a more permanent style of furnishing, by making age beautiful and change unnecessary; and so it sets free a great amount of human labour for other purposes; not merely the labour of the textile workers who have not to provide new covers, but the labour of the upholsterers, who are not called upon to rip off a series of old covers and fit on new ones, dragging old nails out and driving fresh nails in, with the result that the framework of the chair itself is presently worn out and a new one required in its place. All that labour is saved.

That small example is important because it exemplifies those possibilities of permanence attaching to certain forms of hand-labour out of which can be developed a school of textile manufacture indigenous in character--indigenous in that you give it time to become embedded in its domestic setting, and to make for itself domestic history. It enables you to develop an appreciation for subtleties of colour, and to secure tones and harmonies which you cannot get ready-made in a shop: it gives to a piece of furniture life-value.

But it is bad for trade!

Now why is it bad for trade? It is bad for trade because our modern industrial conditions have brought us to this pass, that it is no longer our national aim to direct labour and set it free for other work that really needs to be done. Our national problem is rather to find work for people, at times even to invent needs, and to create a fictitious turnover in trade so that we may not have upon our hands an enormous increase of the unemployed problem. And as hands go begging, as we have more hands in the country than we can employ on useful and fit labour (fit, I mean, for such fine implements as these and for the brains behind them), therefore hands are inevitably put to degrading uses, and the joy goes out of work; and for the delight (or at least the intelligent patience) of true craftsmanship is substituted the soul-destroying bondage of mechanical labour at something which is not really worth producing.

You may take that, I think, as a test whether a State is in industrial health or disease--whether, namely, it tends more in the direction of setting labour free for other and higher purposes (through the permanent quality of its products), and so evolving an aristocracy of labour; or whether (owing to their ephemeral quality) it constantly tends to invent work of a lower and more trivial kind, and to provide jobs of an ephemeral character which are not really wanted.

Now bad and wasteful taste is directly productive, not so much of trade as of fluctuations in trade, because that sort of taste soon tires and asks for change; and the consequence is that thousands of workers (especially women, whose industries used to be home industries before machinery drew them out of the homes) are in this country constantly being thrown out of one useless employment into another, and very often have to pass through a fresh apprenticeship at a starvation wage. And so, when we create frivolous demands for things that we shall not want the day after to-morrow, we are not (as we too often think) doing anything that is really good for trade, but only something much more horrible, which you will understand without my naming it.

You see, then, how very closely the artist’s inclination toward permanence of taste may be connected with morality. And if that instinct for permanence (with an accompanying adaptation of material and design to making things last their full time without waste) is not present in the craftsmanship of our day, then we have not got the true basis, either in spirit or material, for Art to build upon.

Now I am going to put before you some quite homely instances, because I think they will stick best in your memories, in order to show you that the real struggle of the artist to-day is not so much to secure appreciation of beauty in line and texture, as honesty of construction, and real adaptation of form to utility and of production to lastingness. I have been noticing, with quite simple objects of domestic use, that the trade-purpose toward them seems almost the opposite. The trade purpose is to present us with an article which, apparently sound in construction, will break down at some crucial point before the rest of it is worn out. A watering can, a carving fork, a kettle, a dustbin, a coal scuttle, the fixings of a door-handle, are generally made, I find, on an ignobly artful plan which insures that they shall break down just at that point where the wear and tear come hardest, so that an article otherwise complete shall be scrapped wastefully or go back to the trade to be tinkered.

But leave things the actual design of which you cannot control, and come to dress, our own daily wearing apparel. I do not know if the men of my audience are aware that undergarments wear out much quicker if they are tight-fitting and worn at a stretch than if they are loose, but that is so. And, in consequence, a smart shopman has the greatest reluctance to sell you anything that is, as he conceives it, one size too large for you. The reason being that the looser fit lasts longer and is bad for trade--that it makes for endurance instead of for galloping consumption.

In the majority of houses whose cold water systems I have inspected the pipes are nearly always run at the most exposed angle of the containing walls, so that if there is a frost, the frost may have a chance of getting at the pipes and bursting them, and so give the trade a fresh job. Again, every housewife knows that in the ordinary daily conflicts between tea-sets and domestic service more cups get broken than saucers. And I suppose every household in London has got some corner shelf piled with superfluous saucers (useless widowers mourning the departure of their better halves); but it is very exceptional--only in one shop that I know--that one is able to replace the cup (in certain stock patterns) without encumbering oneself with the saucer which one does not want. The saucers continue to be made in wasteful superabundance, because waste of that sort is “good for trade.”

I have been assured by an observant housewife that certain articles do now and again appear upon the market specially designed to safeguard by little constructive devices, the main point of wear-and-tear through which they become useless, and that presently these things disappear and are unobtainable, presumably because they prove too lasting, and so are “bad for trade.” And they are allowed to disappear because we, as a community, have not sufficiently set our hearts and minds against waste and uselessness. We buy cheaply because we think cheaply, and because we have lost our sense of honour towards the products of men’s hands, and toward that wonderful instrument itself which we are content to put to such base uses, letting the workers themselves see how much we despise the things they have made.

I have seen in London a comic music-hall “turn” in which the comedy largely consisted in a continuous breakage of piles of plates by a burlesque waiter, who, in the course of his duties, either drops them, falls against them, sits on them, or kicks them. During the turn I should say some thirty or forty plates get broken. They were cheap plates, no doubt; but it seems to me that if there is any fun in this monotonous repetition of destruction, then the greater the cost and waste of human labour the more irresistibly comic should the situation appear; and the management which provided Worcester or Dresden china for its low-comedy wits to play upon would have logical grounds for considering that it was thereby supplying its audience with livelier entertainment more satisfying to its taste.[2]

Now what I want you to see is that such a production would not be entertaining to an audience which had not come to regard the labour of man’s hands with a licentious indifference--which had not developed the gambler’s contempt for the true relations between labour and value. And here I want to put before you a proposition which may at first shock you, but which I hope to prove true. And that is that labour in itself, apart from its justification in some useful result, is bad and degrading; the man who is put to work which he knows is to have no result comes from that work more degraded and crushed in spirit than the man who merely “loafs” and lives “naturally.”

Perhaps the readiest example of that is the old treadmill system which was once employed in our prisons, where the prisoner was set to grind at a crank artificially adjusted to his physical strength, but having no useful result; and I believe that the main reason why prisoners on those machines were not allowed to grind their own bread or put their strength to any self-supporting industry was because it was “bad for trade” and brought them into competition with the contractors who supplied food to his Majesty’s prisons. It was not the monotony half so much as the consciousness that it was without result which made that form of labour so degrading and so utterly exhausting to mind and body. You might think it was the compulsion; but I am not sure that compulsion to work may not sometimes be very moral and salutary. At any rate, here is an instance of the same thing presented under voluntary conditions. A man out of work applied to a farmer for a job; the farmer had no job for him, and told him so; but as the man persisted he started him at half a crown a day to move a heap of stones from one side of the road to the other. And when the man had done that and asked what next he was to do, he told him to move them back again! But though that man was out of work, and was on his way to earn the half-crown, rather than submit his body to the conscious degradation of such useless labour, he did as the farmer had calculated on his doing, and threw up the job.

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.