The Harvest of Ruskin

“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.

Ruskin writes: “What is required of the members of St. George’s Company is, not that they should never travel by railroads, nor that they should abjure machinery, but that they should never travel unnecessarily, or in wanton haste; and that they should never do with a machine what can be done with hands and arms, while hands and arms are idle.”124

There is no subject which causes more merriment amongst the Philistines than Ruskin’s objection to railways, combined with the frequent locomotion indulged in by his most devoted followers. But Ruskin’s objection to railways was never so absolute as was popularly supposed. He always approved of them on through main routes, and only objected to their intrusion into the peace of quiet valleys off the main tracks. He objected to what appeared to him the excessive provision by which a lovely valley was spoiled “in order that every fool in Buxton could be in Bakewell in half an hour.” We must remember that the railway mania of 1844 occurred when Ruskin was five and twenty, at the formative period of his life, and that he saw all around him rough destruction of that beauty which affected his soul with a thrill like a lover’s (as he tells us in the Third Volume of Modern Painters, pages 295-298, quoted in Chapter I). The countryside must have been sadly ruined in the forties, while the railway embankments were creeping along through the pastures.

Possibly not all of us know the remarkable passage in the Cestus of Aglaia in praise of a locomotive:125

“I cannot express the amazed awe, the crushed humility, with which I sometimes watch a locomotive take its breath at a railway station, and think what work there is in its bars and wheels, and what manner of men they must be who dig brown ironstone out of the ground, and forge it into that! What assemblage of accurate and mighty faculties in them; more than fleshly power over melting crag and coiling fire, fettered, and finessed at last into the precision of watchmaking; Titanian hammer-strokes beating, out of lava, these glittering cylinders and timely-respondent valves, and fine ribbed rods, which touch each other as a serpent writhes, in noiseless gliding, and omnipotence of grasp; infinitely complex anatomy of active steel, compared with which the skeleton of a living creature would seem, to a careless observer, clumsy and vile – a mere morbid secretion and phosphatous drop of flesh! What would the men who thought out this – who beat it out, who touched it into its polished calm of power, who set it to its appointed task, and triumphantly saw it fulfil this task to the utmost of their will, feel or think about this weak hand of mine, timidly leading a little stain of shadow of something else – mere failure in every motion, and endless disappointment; what, I repeat, would these Iron-dominant Genii think of me? and what ought I to think of them?

“But as I reach this point of reverence, the unreasonable thing is sure to give a shriek as of a thousand unanimous vultures, which leaves me shuddering in real physical pain for some half minute following; and assures me, during slow recovery, that a people which can endure such fluting and piping among them is not likely soon to have its modest ear pleased by aught of oaten stop, or pastoral song. Perhaps I am then led on into meditation respecting the spiritual nature of the Tenth Muse, who invented this gracious instrument, and guides its modulation by stokers’ fingers; meditation, also, as to the influence of her invention amidst the other parts of the Parnassian melody of English education.”

He further concedes that “steam, or any mode of heat power, may only be employed, justifiably, under extreme or special conditions of need; and for speed on main lines of communication, and raising water from great depths, or other such work beyond human strength.” This is a very large concession, and may be received with large gratitude. He even permits steam machinery for such purposes as “the deepening of large river channels; changing the surfaces of mountainous districts; irrigating tracts of desert in the torrid zone; breaking up and thus rendering capable of quicker fusion, edges of ice in the northern and southern Arctic seas, etc., so rendering parts of the earth habitable, which hitherto have been lifeless.”126

The teaching of Ruskin is not really revolutionary in immediate practice; he advises a manufacturer to go on using his machinery; he merely wants us to set our faces towards the restoration of nature’s gifts of beauty and peace to the lives of toilers; and for ceasing to uproot sentiments of cleanliness, reverence and order by unnatural, foul, crowded and vulgar surroundings. His tastes and instincts are vehemently against machinery; but his actual requirings are moderate.

It is the machine-made society we live in that distresses him, and distresses us; its occasional rough coarseness, its physical ill-health. There are, of course, scattered through Fors many outbursts against machinery in general, not so carefully limited as his more weighty pronouncements. In Letter V, pp. 10, 11, for instance, the assertion is made that a man and his family can, by their own labour, given land, feed and clothe themselves without machinery; and that therefore all labour-saving appliances are so many aids to idleness. I do not know where is the proof or disproof of the assertion. All we know is that savage tribes do so live, but no others, and that it is in the time and strength saved from labour for sheer food and clothing that the best activities of humanity find room: and that civilization began with the existence of a leisured class.

And now, turning to the human product of industrialism, we will take a sober view, not debiting to the factory system the evils which are inherent in human nature, but only those due to crowded town life and to employment in large rooms full of noisy machinery. If we have cured the smoke evil, and reduced hours to their present reasonable length, what remains to be done, and will it be on Ruskin’s lines?

South Lancashire is often taken as the type of industrial England. There I was born and brought up, and I have lived there for the greater part of my life. I have known very intimately a great many of the working people. They are far more pale and undersized than they ought to be. Their beauty has been taken from them. The half-time system, now perishing, has interfered with their education. The damp atmosphere in the hot rooms is bad for their lungs, and minding machines is utterly monotonous. But they are excellent people – they will stand comparison with the upper classes. There is every type, of course, they are as varied as are men at the Universities, or as the ladies who go to any Church. But, speaking as we must, in general, there is a level of conduct and intelligence in those mean streets, not different except in manner from that of the suburbs. The degeneracy is, I believe, only physical, so far as it is to be debited to the conditions of their work.

This bad physique is a real evil. The lack of room for cricket and football, the remoteness of the fields and woods, the ugliness of the grey streets, the lack of quiet, added to the humid factories and the smoke, have produced this. Parks and playgrounds and all sorts of open spaces, including extensive fields and woods and ponds accessible on a half-holiday, should be provided far more than they have been, and should be less doctored by parks’ superintendents.

Then there is a great sphere of service open to the familiar agencies for good. The Drink traffic should be curtailed, and put out of the reach of private profit, and better opportunities for sociability, music and dancing, provided, not as part of the bait of the drink seller, but by a democratic municipality. The usefulness of picture galleries will not be fully reached till oral teaching about the pictures is added, and the great educational value of comparatively cheap coloured reproductions is perceived. Into the work of founding the Art Museum in Ancoats, a working class district of Manchester, on exactly these lines, Mr. Ruskin threw himself heartily. It was indeed an inspiration derived from his writings by Mr. T. C. Horsfall which caused that Museum to be founded. It has recently been taken over by the Corporation.

Solemnly, then, and with due fear and doubt, considering the horror and difficulty of the case, let us resolutely set ourselves to see if, under the world of machinery, we can live good and healthy lives. The present products of our civilization are far from satisfactory to any of us. Are the crowds of girls who rush forth from the factory when the hour of freedom strikes, having pieced threads in a hot damp atmosphere, and shouted across the whirl of wheels all day to one another – are they on the way to make fit, self-respecting and physically strong wives and mothers and trainers of children? There are some three hundred thousand of these girls in the Lancashire factories, who will be mothers of a million English babies. Or take the young men. Go by a football train on a Saturday afternoon, when holiday is written on every bloomless and vulgar and swaggering young face: – what do you hear and see as you crowd fifteen to a carriage? Bets, ribaldry, ill nature, the carriage floor a mess, the whole scene an explosion of pent-up spirits of self-assertion and banal hilarity.127

These young people are undoubtedly products of the age of machinery; but for machine production they would never have been born, nor their surroundings formed; but the question is, cannot their tastes and characters be reformed even while they remain machine-hands? Are not excellent lives possible, and healthy surroundings obtainable, in industrial England? For factory life we can confidently point to such. Bournville, New Earswick, Port Sunlight, and of an earlier date, Saltaire, Bessbrook, and some other centres which have not a special local name, show that the thing can be done. For colliers the case is harder. There are colliery villages on the Tyne which once ran extension lectures; but the villages themselves are horrible. There are good colliery villages near Doncaster, one built round a private Park. Collieries have special difficulties. The coal mine will not last for ever; and when it is worked out the houses may become useless. They are therefore built to last only for from thirty to fifty years. They are erected all at one time; and large rows of houses exactly alike are the cheapest. They are often outside any municipality with its possibly watchful surveyor and inspectors. They are completely owned by the colliery company, which has no competitor as landlord. It is the classic case in England of the failure of pure competition to care for human welfare.