A Joy For Ever

J >> John Ruskin >> A Joy For Ever

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13

14. In the various awkward and unfortunate efforts which the French have
made at the development of a social system, they have at least stated
one true principle, that of fraternity or brotherhood. Do not be
alarmed; they got all wrong in their experiments, because they quite
forgot that this fact of fraternity implied another fact quite as
important--that of paternity, or fatherhood. That is to say, if they
were to regard the nation as one family, the condition of unity in that
family consisted no less in their having a head, or a father, than in
their being faithful and affectionate members, or brothers. But we must
not forget this, for we have long confessed it with our lips, though we
refuse to confess it in our lives. For half an hour every Sunday we
expect a man in a black gown, supposed to be telling us truth, to
address us as brethren, though we should be shocked at the notion of any
brotherhood existing among us out of church. And we can hardly read a
few sentences on any political subject without running a chance of
crossing the phrase "paternal government," though we should be utterly
horror-struck at the idea of governments claiming anything like a
father's authority over us. Now, I believe those two formal phrases are
in both instances perfectly binding and accurate, and that the image of
the farm and its servants which I have hitherto used, as expressing a
wholesome national organization, fails only of doing so, not because it
is too domestic, but because it is not domestic enough; because the real
type of a well-organized nation must be presented, not by a farm
cultivated by servants who wrought for hire, and might be turned away if
they refused to labour, but by a farm in which the master was a father,
and in which all the servants were sons; which implied, therefore, in
all its regulations, not merely the order of expediency, but the bonds
of affection and responsibilities of relationship; and in which all acts
and services were not only to be sweetened by brotherly concord, but to
be enforced by fatherly authority.[2]

[Note 2: See note 1st, in Addenda.]

15. Observe, I do not mean in the least that we ought to place such an
authority in the hands of any one person, or of any class or body of
persons. But I do mean to say that as an individual who conducts himself
wisely must make laws for himself which at some time or other may appear
irksome or injurious, but which, precisely at the time they appear most
irksome, it is most necessary he should obey, so a nation which means to
conduct itself wisely, must establish authority over itself, vested
either in kings, councils, or laws, which it must resolve to obey, even
at times when the law or authority appears irksome to the body of the
people, or injurious to certain masses of it. And this kind of national
law has hitherto been only judicial; contented, that is, with an
endeavour to prevent and punish violence and crime: but, as we advance
in our social knowledge, we shall endeavour to make our government
paternal as well as judicial; that is, to establish such laws and
authorities as may at once direct us in our occupations, protect us
against our follies, and visit us in our distresses: a government which
shall repress dishonesty, as now it punishes theft; which shall show how
the discipline of the masses may be brought to aid the toils of peace,
as discipline of the masses has hitherto knit the sinews of battle; a
government which shall have its soldiers of the ploughshare as well as
its soldiers of the sword, and which shall distribute more proudly its
golden crosses of industry--golden as the glow of the harvest, than now
it grants its bronze crosses of honour--bronzed with the crimson of
blood.

16. I have not, of course, time to insist on the nature or details of
government of this kind; only I wish to plead for your several and
future consideration of this one truth, that the notion of Discipline
and Interference lies at the very root of all human progress or power;
that the "Let-alone" principle is, in all things which man has to do
with, the principle of death; that it is ruin to him, certain and total,
if he lets his land alone--if he lets his fellow-men alone--if he lets
his own soul alone. That his whole life, on the contrary, must, if it is
healthy life, be continually one of ploughing and pruning, rebuking and
helping, governing and punishing; and that therefore it is only in the
concession of some great principle of restraint and interference in
national action that he can ever hope to find the secret of protection
against national degradation. I believe that the masses have a right to
claim education from their government; but only so far as they
acknowledge the duty of yielding obedience to their government. I
believe they have a right to claim employment from their governors; but
only so far as they yield to the governor the direction and discipline
of their labour; and it is only so far as they grant to the men whom
they may set over them the father's authority to check the
childishnesses of national fancy, and direct the waywardnesses of
national energy, that they have a right to ask that none of their
distresses should be unrelieved, none of their weaknesses unwatched; and
that no grief, nor nakedness, nor peril, should exist for them, against
which the father's hand was not outstretched, or the father's shield
uplifted.[3]

[Note 3: Compare Wordsworth's Essay on the Poor Law Amendment Bill.
I quote one important passage: "But, if it be not safe to touch the
abstract question of man's right in a social state to help himself even
in the last extremity, may we not still contend for the duty of a
Christian government, standing _in loco parentis_ towards all its
subjects, to make such effectual provision that no one shall be in
danger of perishing either through the neglect or harshness of its
legislation? Or, waiving this, is it not indisputable that the claim of
the State to the allegiance, involves the protection of the subject?
And, as all rights in one party impose a correlative duty upon another,
it follows that the right of the State to require the services of its
members, even to the jeopardizing of their lives in the common defence,
establishes a right in the people (not to be gainsaid by utilitarians
and economists) to public support when, from any cause, they may be
unable to support themselves."--(See note 2nd, in Addenda.)]

17. Now, I have pressed this upon you at more length than is needful or
proportioned to our present purposes of inquiry, because I would not for
the first time speak to you on this subject of political economy without
clearly stating what I believe to be its first grand principle. But its
bearing on the matter in hand is chiefly to prevent you from at once too
violently dissenting from me when what I may state to you as advisable
economy in art appears to imply too much restraint or interference with
the freedom of the patron or artist. We are a little apt, though on the
whole a prudent nation, to act too immediately on our impulses, even in
matters merely commercial; much more in those involving continual
appeals to our fancies. How far, therefore, the proposed systems or
restraints may be advisable, it is for you to judge; only I pray you not
to be offended with them merely because they _are_ systems and
restraints.

18. Do you at all recollect that interesting passage of Carlyle, in
which he compares, in this country and at this day, the understood and
commercial value of man and horse; and in which he wonders that the
horse, with its inferior brains and its awkward hoofiness, instead of
handiness, should be always worth so many tens or scores of pounds in
the market, while the man, so far from always commanding his price in
the market, would often be thought to confer a service on the community
by simply killing himself out of their way? Well, Carlyle does not
answer his own question, because he supposes we shall at once see the
answer. The value of the horse consists simply in the fact of your being
able to put a bridle on him. The value of the man consists precisely in
the same thing. If you can bridle him, or, which is better, if he can
bridle himself, he will be a valuable creature directly. Otherwise, in a
commercial point of view, his value is either nothing, or accidental
only. Only, of course, the proper bridle of man is not a leathern one:
what kind of texture it is rightly made of, we find from that command,
"Be ye not as the horse or as the mule which have no understanding,
whose mouths must be held in with bit and bridle." You are not to be
without the reins, indeed; but they are to be of another kind: "I will
guide thee with mine Eye." So the bridle of man is to be the Eye of God;
and if he rejects that guidance, then the next best for him is the
horse's and the mule's, which have no understanding; and if he rejects
that, and takes the bit fairly in his teeth, then there is nothing left
for him than the blood that comes out of the city, up to the
horse-bridles.

19. Quitting, however, at last these general and serious laws of
government--or rather bringing them down to our own business in hand--we
have to consider three points of discipline in that particular branch of
human labour which is concerned, not with procuring of food, but the
expression of emotion; we have to consider respecting art: first, how to
apply our labour to it; then, how to accumulate or preserve the results
of labour; and then, how to distribute them. But since in art the labour
which we have to employ is the labour of a particular class of men--men
who have special genius for the business--we have not only to consider
how to apply the labour, but, first of all, how to produce the labourer;
and thus the question in this particular case becomes fourfold: first,
how to get your man of genius; then, how to employ your man of genius;
then, how to accumulate and preserve his work in the greatest quantity;
and, lastly, how to distribute his work to the best national advantage.
Let us take up these questions in succession.

20. I. Discovery.--How are we to get our men of genius: that is to say,
by what means may we produce among us, at any given time, the greatest
quantity of effective art-intellect? A wide question, you say, involving
an account of all the best means of art education. Yes, but I do not
mean to go into the consideration of those; I want only to state the few
principles which lie at the foundation of the matter. Of these, the
first is that you have always to find your artist, not to make him; you
can't manufacture him, any more than you can manufacture gold. You can
find him, and refine him: you dig him out as he lies nugget-fashion in
the mountain-stream; you bring him home; and you make him into current
coin, or household plate, but not one grain of him can you originally
produce. A certain quantity of art-intellect is born annually in every
nation, greater or less according to the nature and cultivation of the
nation, or race of men; but a perfectly fixed quantity annually, not
increasable by one grain. You may lose it, or you may gather it; you may
let it lie loose in the ravine, and buried in the sands, or you may make
kings' thrones of it, and overlay temple gates with it, as you choose:
but the best you can do with it is always merely sifting, melting,
hammering, purifying--never creating.

21. And there is another thing notable about this artistical gold; not
only is it limited in quantity, but in use. You need not make thrones or
golden gates with it unless you like, but assuredly you can't do
anything else with it. You can't make knives of it, nor armour, nor
railroads. The gold won't cut you, and it won't carry you: put it to a
mechanical use, and you destroy it at once. It is quite true that in the
greatest artists, their proper artistical faculty is united with every
other; and you may make use of the other faculties, and let the
artistical one lie dormant. For aught I know, there may be two or three
Leonardo da Vincis employed at this moment in your harbours and
railroads: but you are not employing their Leonardesque or golden
faculty there,--you are only oppressing and destroying it. And the
artistical gift in average men is not joined with others: your born
painter, if you don't make a painter of him, won't be a first-rate
merchant, or lawyer; at all events, whatever he turns out, his own
special gift is unemployed by you; and in no wise helps him in that
other business. So here you have a certain quantity of a particular sort
of intelligence, produced for you annually by providential laws, which
you can only make use of by setting it to its own proper work, and which
any attempt to use otherwise involves the dead loss of so much human
energy.

22. Well then, supposing we wish to employ it, how is it to be best
discovered and refined? It is easily enough discovered. To wish to
employ it is to discover it. All that you need is, a school of trial[4]
in every important town, in which those idle farmers' lads whom their
masters never can keep out of mischief, and those stupid tailors'
'prentices who are always stitching the sleeves in wrong way upwards,
may have a try at this other trade; only this school of trial must not
be entirely regulated by formal laws of art education, but must
ultimately be the workshop of a good master painter, who will try the
lads with one kind of art and another, till he finds out what they are
fit for.

[Note 4: See note 3rd, in Addenda.]

23. Next, after your trial school, you want your easy and secure
employment, which is the matter of chief importance. For, even on the
present system, the boys who have really intense art capacity, generally
make painters of themselves; but then, the best half of their early
energy is lost in the battle of life. Before a good painter can get
employment, his mind has always been embittered, and his genius
distorted. A common mind usually stoops, in plastic chill, to whatever
is asked of it, and scrapes or daubs its way complacently into public
favour.[5] But your great men quarrel with you, and you revenge
yourselves by starving them for the first half of their lives. Precisely
in the degree in which any painter possesses original genius, is at
present the increase of moral certainty that during his early years he
will have a hard battle to fight; and that just at the time when his
conceptions ought to be full and happy, his temper gentle, and his
hopes enthusiastic--just at that most critical period, his heart is full
of anxieties and household cares; he is chilled by disappointments, and
vexed by injustice; he becomes obstinate in his errors, no less than in
his virtues, and the arrows of his aims are blunted, as the reeds of his
trust are broken.

[Note 5: See note 4th, in Addenda.]

24. What we mainly want, therefore, is a means of sufficient and
unagitated employment: not holding out great prizes for which young
painters are to scramble; but furnishing all with adequate support, and
opportunity to display such power as they possess without rejection or
mortification. I need not say that the best field of labour of this kind
would be presented by the constant progress of public works involving
various decoration; and we will presently examine what kind of public
works may thus, advantageously for the nation, be in constant progress.
But a more important matter even than this of steady employment, is the
kind of criticism with which you, the public, receive the works of the
young men submitted to you. You may do much harm by indiscreet praise
and by indiscreet blame; but remember the chief harm is always done by
blame. It stands to reason that a young man's work cannot be perfect. It
_must_ be more or less ignorant; it must be more or less feeble; it is
likely that it may be more or less experimental, and if experimental,
here and there mistaken. If, therefore, you allow yourself to launch out
into sudden barking at the first faults you see, the probability is that
you are abusing the youth for some defect naturally and inevitably
belonging to that stage of his progress; and that you might just as
rationally find fault with a child for not being as prudent as a privy
councillor, or with a kitten for not being as grave as a cat.

25. But there is one fault which you may be quite sure is unnecessary,
and therefore a real and blamable fault: that is haste, involving
negligence. Whenever you see that a young man's work is either bold or
slovenly, then you may attack it firmly; sure of being right. If his
work is bold, it is insolent; repress his insolence: if it is slovenly,
it is indolent; spur his indolence. So long as he works in that dashing
or impetuous way, the best hope for him is in your contempt: and it is
only by the fact of his seeming not to seek your approbation that you
may conjecture he deserves it.

26. But if he does deserve it, be sure that you give it him, else you
not only run a chance of driving him from the right road by want of
encouragement, but you deprive yourselves of the happiest privilege you
will ever have of rewarding his labour. For it is only the young who can
receive much reward from men's praise: the old, when they are great, get
too far beyond and above you to care what you think of them. You may
urge them then with sympathy, and surround them then with acclamation;
but they will doubt your pleasure, and despise your praise. You might
have cheered them in their race through the asphodel meadows of their
youth; you might have brought the proud, bright scarlet into their
faces, if you had but cried once to them "Well done," as they dashed up
to the first goal of their early ambition. But now, their pleasure is in
memory, and their ambition is in heaven. They can be kind to you, but
you nevermore can be kind to them. You may be fed with the fruit and
fulness of their old age, but you were as the nipping blight to them in
their blossoming, and your praise is only as the warm winds of autumn
to the dying branches.

27. There is one thought still, the saddest of all, bearing on this
withholding of early help. It is possible, in some noble natures, that
the warmth and the affections of childhood may remain unchilled, though
unanswered; and that the old man's heart may still be capable of
gladness, when the long-withheld sympathy is given at last. But in these
noble natures it nearly always happens that the chief motive of earthly
ambition has not been to give delight to themselves, but to their
parents. Every noble youth looks back, as to the chiefest joy which this
world's honour ever gave him, to the moment when first he saw his
father's eyes flash with pride, and his mother turn away her head, lest
he should take her tears for tears of sorrow. Even the lover's joy, when
some worthiness of his is acknowledged before his mistress, is not so
great as that, for it is not so pure--the desire to exalt himself in her
eyes mixes with that of giving her delight; but he does not need to
exalt himself in his parents' eyes: it is with the pure hope of giving
them pleasure that he comes to tell them what he has done, or what has
been said of him; and therefore he has a purer pleasure of his own. And
this purest and best of rewards you keep from him if you can: you feed
him in his tender youth with ashes and dishonour; and then you come to
him, obsequious, but too late, with your sharp laurel crown, the dew all
dried from off its leaves; and you thrust it into his languid hand, and
he looks at you wistfully. What shall he do with it? What can he do, but
go and lay it on his mother's grave?

28. Thus, then, you see that you have to provide for your young men:
first, the searching or discovering school; then the calm employment;
then the justice of praise: one thing more you have to do for them in
preparing them for full service--namely, to make, in the noble sense of
the word, gentlemen of them; that is to say, to take care that their
minds receive such training, that in all they paint they shall see and
feel the noblest things. I am sorry to say, that of all parts of an
artist's education, this is the most neglected among us; and that even
where the natural taste and feeling of the youth have been pure and
true, where there was the right stuff in him to make a gentleman of, you
may too frequently discern some jarring rents in his mind, and elements
of degradation in his treatment of subject, owing to want of gentle
training, and of the liberal influence of literature. This is quite
visible in our greatest artists, even in men like Turner and
Gainsborough; while in the common grade of our second-rate painters the
evil attains a pitch which is far too sadly manifest to need my dwelling
upon it. Now, no branch of art economy is more important than that of
making the intellect at your disposal pure as well as powerful; so that
it may always gather for you the sweetest and fairest things. The same
quantity of labour from the same man's hand, will, according as you have
trained him, produce a lovely and useful work, or a base and hurtful
one; and depend upon it, whatever value it may possess, by reason of the
painter's skill, its chief and final value, to any nation, depends upon
its being able to exalt and refine, as well as to please; and that the
picture which most truly deserves the name of an art-treasure is that
which has been painted by a good man.

29. You cannot but see how far this would lead, if I were to enlarge
upon it. I must take it up as a separate subject some other time: only
noticing at present that no money could be better spent by a nation than
in providing a liberal and disciplined education for its painters, as
they advance into the critical period of their youth; and that, also, a
large part of their power during life depends upon the kind of subjects
which you, the public, ask them for, and therefore the kind of thoughts
with which you require them to be habitually familiar. I shall have more
to say on this head when we come to consider what employment they should
have in public buildings.

30. There are many other points of nearly as much importance as these,
to be explained with reference to the development of genius; but I
should have to ask you to come and hear six lectures instead of two if I
were to go into their detail. For instance, I have not spoken of the way
in which you ought to look for those artificers in various manual
trades, who, without possessing the order of genius which you would
desire to devote to higher purposes, yet possess wit, and humour, and
sense of colour, and fancy for form--all commercially valuable as
quantities of intellect, and all more or less expressible in the lower
arts of iron-work, pottery, decorative sculpture, and such like. But
these details, interesting as they are, I must commend to your own
consideration, or leave for some future inquiry. I want just now only to
set the bearings of the entire subject broadly before you, with enough
of detailed illustration to make it intelligible; and therefore I must
quit the first head of it here, and pass to the second--namely, how best
to employ the genius we discover. A certain quantity of able hands and
heads being placed at our disposal, what shall we most advisably set
them upon?

31. II. APPLICATION.--There are three main points the economist has to
attend to in this.

First, To set his men to various work.

Secondly, To easy work.

Thirdly, To lasting work.

I shall briefly touch on the first two, for I want to arrest your
attention on the last.

32. I say first to various work. Supposing you have two men of equal
power as landscape painters--and both of them have an hour at your
disposal. You would not set them both to paint the same piece of
landscape. You would, of course, rather have two subjects than a
repetition of one.

Well, supposing them sculptors, will not the same rule hold? You
naturally conclude at once that it will; but you will have hard work to
convince your modern architects of that. They will put twenty men to
work, to carve twenty capitals; and all shall be the same. If I could
show you the architects' yards in England just now, all open at once,
perhaps you might see a thousand clever men, all employed in carving the
same design. Of the degradation and deathfulness to the art-intellect of
the country involved in such a habit, I have more or less been led to
speak before now; but I have not hitherto marked its definite tendency
to increase the price of _work_, as such. When men are employed
continually in carving the same ornaments, they get into a monotonous
and methodical habit of labour--precisely correspondent to that in which
they would break stones, or paint house-walls. Of course, what they do
so constantly, they do easily; and if you excite them temporarily by an
increase of wages, you may get much work done by them in a little time.
But, unless so stimulated, men condemned to a monotonous exertion,
work--and always, by the laws of human nature, _must_ work--only at a
tranquil rate, not producing by any means a maximum result in a given
time. But if you allow them to vary their designs, and thus interest
their heads and hearts in what they are doing, you will find them become
eager, first, to get their ideas expressed, and then to finish the
expression of them; and the moral energy thus brought to bear on the
matter quickens, and therefore cheapens, the production in a most
important degree. Sir Thomas Deane, the architect of the new Museum at
Oxford, told me, as I passed through Oxford on my way here, that he
found that, owing to this cause alone, capitals of various design could
be executed cheaper than capitals of similar design (the amount of hand
labour in each being the same) by about 30 per cent.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13