The Harvest of Ruskin

Division of Labour goes with the factory system. It was early hailed as one of the great economies obtained by production on a large scale. It was found that by constantly keeping a man or a child to one occupation, an extraordinary degree of sure accuracy and readiness was obtained. Without the necessity for thinking, and so without risk of thinking wrong, the nimble fingers repeated hour by hour their appointed trick, the practised eye ever followed the same mechanism and stopped it at the same point, the same tool in the same place was ready to the same hand. Physiologically we believe that all this means that there is established a rut for the tracks of the brain wheels, a habitual nervous connection between certain sensory centres and certain motor centres, without the need for every piece of news to be transmitted by the sensory centre to the central thinking apparatus in the cerebrum, and a corresponding order sent down from the central control to the motor centre.

When we learn to write, the fashion and shape of every a, b and c have to be thought over; the hands learn painfully to follow an order sent down from the central thinking power in the cerebrum, sent down on information derived through the sensory centres behind the eye, of the shape of the copy. But in ordinary life we could copy pages of manuscript and talk and think about something else the whole time. There is a direct line of nerve flow between the reading apparatus behind the eye and the writing apparatus behind the hand; and thought is not required. We have become so far automatic; we have created a convenient writing machine within us, which works for us and leaves us free to do other things.

So that if we spend our nine hours a day at working a printing machine, or stitching leather or silk, or boring holes, or driving in nails, or sharpening a tool’s edge, or wrapping boxes, or counting or piecing threads, we are really doing the work of a machine. We do not think: to think would interfere with the sure regularity of our work.

Now the growth of this division of labour has been quite irresistible. Its advantages have been such that no manufacturer or nation of manufacturers could stand without it. The social organism has become more complex, and with that the differentiation of function has become more marked. It is a necessary accompaniment of an elaborate social state; and whether it tends or not to the welfare of the individual it greatly extends the productive power of the industrial organism, and so strengthens the organism itself viewed as industrial simply. Thus the highly differentiated organism has survived, though it may have sacrificed the individual worker, regarded as a human being. Is there, therefore, any means whereby we can modify the work of the monotonous mechanical labourer so as to give him some pleasure in it, and afford exercise to his other faculties besides that one called out by the single narrow function he has learnt to repeat day after day? If we can give scope for his higher faculties, his judgment, his invention, his knowledge, we shall be avoiding the present waste by which faculties which might aid production in better ways are wasted on routine.

The greatest cure hitherto found is inherent in the system itself. For when the work is such that it is done by a human machine, the step is not far distant when a machine will be actually invented, with a surer grip of the material, a readier tool for piercing, a straighter edge for cutting. This process is going on in every department of manufacture. Boards are planed, picture frames carved, table legs made, mouldings cut by machinery. Watches and sewing machines are made of interchangeable parts, each the product of a machine. The only limit to the taking over of every manufacture by machines seems to be that a large output is necessary to make it pay to invent and manufacture and sell costly machines. So great have been the triumphs of many-fingered machinery that we are not inclined to limit them. Thus, most of the monotonous, and most of the physically laborious work is done by the man of steel. For every textile operative in the country rather more than one horse power is provided by steam; which is equal to the strength of ten adult men. Self-feeding furnaces are similarly saving of human flesh and eyesight. Thus our manual workers have largely become makers and minders of machines. To help to make a machine, to watch and repair it, and take care of it – even to understand it and to feed it, is a not unworthy form of labour. To care for a complex machine requires intelligence and a wide-awake sense of responsibility. It is much better, at any rate, than hand-loom weaving was, or than nail-making by hand, or match-box-making is. Even so mechanical a task as working a sewing machine, poor as it is, may be a trifle less soul-destroying than working with a needle at plain sewing all day. And though minding looms is monotonous, yet they turn out so much more cloth per operative, that the evil of monotony of which we speak is probably a very small percentage per yard produced, of what it was when weaving was done in the weavers’ cottages by hand.

It is therefore in extending machinery for all articles which have no individual artistic value that we shall get rid of most of the lower and more degrading forms of labour – machinery for ploughing, sowing, reaping, binding, thrashing, dairying, laundry work, baking, cooking, cutting straight and smoothing clean, grinding and polishing, and for the processes of printing. These are true friends of man.

It is to be noted that every increase of the gross output which machinery enables man to produce, increases the demand for the more skilled portions of the work, for those which require judgment and character. The multiplication of the printing output of the country has increased the number of writers, of reporters, of proof-readers, of overlookers, and of men who can tastefully arrange a title page. It has also multiplied the demand for men who can draw, can photograph, or can reproduce illustrations. Similarly the “hands” who work the machines on a farm are fewer but are probably more intelligent than the agricultural labourer in a backward country.

It will be observed that this inquiry has left untouched and unaffected —

1. The skilled artistic crafts where a sense of the beautiful and a special value in human thought goes to each article.

2. The mass of unskilled and unspecialized labour at the bottom of the social ladder which division of labour and machine production leave largely untouched.

To the cleansing, quieting, moralizing of machinery, then, not to its extinction or supersession, social reformers should apply themselves. To the compulsory consumption of smoke, to sanitary factories and workshops, to the substitution of gas or electricity for steam, we must look with hope.

Therefore, out of the industrial hurly-burly, we must look forward, not back – accept the industrialization of the world which marked the nineteenth century, and go on to find a home for humanity in it. It is a world phenomenon, and it is the result of one thing, the exploitation of coal.

It is in the abuse of this very coal, on which all manufacturing and transport depends, that the most obvious wrong has been done to humanity. The first condition of human happiness to-day is to be found in the abolition or sufficient abatement of smoke, so keeping our skins and clothes clean.

This is all on Ruskin’s lines; very central to the preservation of all he loved. How pervasive was this enemy he did not fully see fifty years ago. He noted the deterioration of climate in England, during his lifetime, in two lectures on The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century. They were much derided at the time; and they contain curious passages in which the lack of light, the restless ugly clouds, the choppy breezes, the cold gloomy summers, were put down to the wrath of heaven for the sins of the people. They had in fact one simple explanation – Smoke. A man of Ruskin’s power of perception, constantly admiring beauty of landscape, could hardly have been wrong in his impression, fortified by his diaries, that there had been a change for the worse in the air and skies during his lifetime. The production of manufacturing smoke over a third (say) of England covered that period. Over all our coal fields solid particles embarrassed the air currents, and darkened the sky, and the oily products adhered stickily to the clouds and to the rain. The weather was, in truth, nature’s punishment for the haste, the greed, the popular carelessness, which tolerated the factory and furnace chimneys, and the ill-regulated firesides of thirty-five millions of people in the British Isles.118

Coal ought not to be burnt raw, any more than meat should be eaten raw. It should be made into gas, coke, tar and sulphate of ammonia – and all of it be used. A smokeless domestic fuel made of half coked coal could be made in all gas works, and should be used everywhere, to economize our now costly coal. Electric power stations, smokelessly operated, would save much wasteful private production of power. More rigid and conscientious smoke inspection, abandoned as unpatriotic on a short view during the war, should be restored. The law should be amended and its loopholes fastened up.119 There are many beautiful inventions ready to be used to make an end of this most gratuitous of our evils, which renders life in the industrial districts dark, dirty and ugly to the best and cleanest of the workpeople. Most municipalities in England impose an extra rate on those who use gas and electricity by taking money for the rates from those departments.

We condemn the town cottage housewife to ceaseless toil, with her dirty doorstep and window sills, her kitchen floor, her children who play in the street, and her intolerably swollen laundry. The glorious light of the country summer is never seen through the smoke haze of the industrial districts. Look down any long straight town street on any day, and note the limit of visibility. Fogs are often caused and always aggravated and prolonged by smoke – and after every long fog the death rate from lung diseases goes steeply up. Among the many signs of government incompetence, of narrow popular apathy, and lack of a true political sense, the present riotous licence of the makers of smoke is conspicuous. And the reform is all on Ruskin’s lines.

After dirt, drink. They are not unconnected; for the dull grey street, the worried wife, the ill-tempered children, all tend to tempt a man to the cosy blaze of the bar-room, and to the excitement of a shilling on the next race. Men and women will make life interesting somehow, and if they are denied the sound pleasures appropriate to their natures they will find others.120

We will now hear the Prophet on our machine civilization. The passages are in the famous chapter on The Nature of Gothic in the Second Volume of The Stones of Venice §§ XI, XII, XIII and others. These passages are among Ruskin’s earliest social writing. He was led from the examination of the characters of Byzantine, Gothic and Renaissance architecture, to inquire into the character of their builders; and so was led from Art to Man as the subject matter of his life-work. This is an important transition passage, written about 1850, ten years before the decisive year when he became an economist always and an Art Professor at intervals.

§ XI. “The modern English mind … intensely desires in all things, the utmost completion or perfection compatible with their nature. This is a noble character in the abstract, but becomes ignoble when it causes us to forget the relative dignities of that nature itself, and to prefer the perfectness of the lower nature to the imperfection of the higher; not considering that, as judged by such a rule, all the brute animals would be preferable to man because more perfect in their functions and kind, and yet are always held inferior to him, so also in the works of man, those which are more perfect in their kind are always inferior to those which are, in their nature, liable to more faults and shortcomings. For the finer the nature the more flaws it will show through the clearness of it; and it is a law of this Universe, that the best things shall be seldomest seen in their best form. The wild grass grows well and strongly, one year with another; but the wheat is, according to the greater nobleness of its nature, liable to the bitterer blight. And therefore, while in all things that we see or do, we are to desire perfection, and strive for it, we are nevertheless not to set the meaner thing, in its narrow accomplishment, above the nobler thing, in its mighty progress; not to esteem smooth minuteness above shattered majesty, not to prefer mean victory to honourable defeat; not to lower the level of our aim, that we may the more surely enjoy the complacency of success. But, above all, in our dealings with the souls of other men, we are to take care how we check, by severe requirement or narrow caution, efforts which might otherwise lead to a noble issue; and, still more, how we withhold our admiration from great excellences, because they are mingled with rough faults. Now, in the make and nature of every man, however rude or simple, whom we employ in manual labour, there are some powers for better things: some tardy imagination, torpid capacity of emotion, tottering steps of thought, there are, even at the worst; and in most cases it is all our own fault that they are tardy or torpid. But they cannot be strengthened, unless we are content to take them in their feebleness, and unless we prize and honour them in their imperfection above the best and most perfect manual skill. And this is what we have to do with all labourers; to look for the thoughtful part of them, and get that out of them, whatever we lose for it, whatever faults or errors we are obliged to take with it. For the best that is in them cannot manifest itself, but in company with much error. Understand this clearly: You can teach a man to draw a straight line, and to cut one; to strike a curved line and to carve it; and to copy and carve any number of given lines or forms, with admirable speed and perfect precision; and you find his work perfect of its kind: but if you ask him to think about any of those forms, to consider if he cannot find any better in his own head, he stops; his execution becomes hesitating; he thinks, and ten to one he thinks wrong; ten to one he makes a mistake in the first touch he gives to his work as a thinking being. But you have made a man of him for all that. He was only a machine before, an animated tool.”

§ XII. “And observe, you are put to stern choice in this matter. You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them. All the energy of their spirits must be given to make cogs and compasses of themselves. All their attention and strength must go to the accomplishment of the mean act. The eye of the soul must be bent upon the finger point, and the soul’s force must fill all the invisible nerves that guide it, ten hours a day, that it may not err from its steely precision, and so soul and sight be worn away, and the whole human being be lost at last – a heap of sawdust, so far as its intellectual work in this world is concerned; saved only by its Heart, which cannot go into the form of cogs and compasses, but expands, after the ten hours are over, into fireside humanity. On the other hand if you will make a man of the working creature, you cannot make a tool. Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once. Out come all his roughness, all his dulness, all his incapability; shame upon shame, failure upon failure, pause after pause: but out comes the whole majesty of him also; and we know the height of it only when we see the clouds settling upon him. And whether the clouds be bright or dark, there will be transfiguration behind and within them.”

§ XIII. “And, now, reader, look around this English room of yours, about which you have been proud so often, because the work of it was so good and strong, and the ornaments so finished. Examine again all those accurate mouldings, and perfect polishings, and unerring adjustments of the seasoned wood and tempered steel. Many a time you have exulted over them, and thought how great England was, because her slightest work was done so thoroughly. Alas! if read rightly, these perfectnesses are signs of a slavery in our England a thousand times more bitter and more degrading than that of the scourged African or helot Greek. Men may be beaten, chained, tormented, yoked like cattle, slaughtered like summer flies, and yet remain, in one sense, and the best sense, free. But to smother their souls within them, to blight and hew into rotting pollards, the suckling branches of their human intelligence, to make the flesh and skin, which after the worm’s work on it, is to see God, into leathern thongs to yoke machinery with – this it is to be slave masters indeed; and there might be more freedom in England, though her feudal lords’ lightest words were worth men’s lives, and though the blood of the vexed husbandman dropped in the furrows of her fields, than there is while the animation of her multitudes is sent like fuel to feed the factory smoke, and the strength of them is given daily to be wasted into the fineness of a web, or racked into the exactness of a line.”

§ XV. ” …It is not that men are ill fed, but that they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their bread, and therefore look to wealth as the only means of pleasure. It is not that men are pained by the scorn of the upper classes, but they cannot endure their own; for they feel that the kind of labour to which they are condemned is verily a degrading one, and makes them less than men… In all ages and in all countries reverence has been paid and sacrifice made by men to each other, not only without complaint but rejoicingly; and famine and peril and sword and all evil and all shame have been borne willingly in the causes of masters and kings; for all these gifts of the heart ennobled the men who gave, not less than the men who received them, and nature prompted and God rewarded the sacrifice. But to feel their souls withering within them, unthanked, to find their whole being sunk into an unrecognized abyss, to be counted off into a heap of mechanism, numbered with its wheels, and weighted with its hammer strokes – this nature bade not – this God blesses not – this humanity for no long time is able to endure.”

§ XVI. “We have much studied, and much perfected, of late, the great civilized invention of the Division of Labour; only we give it a false name. It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men: – Divided into mere segments of men – broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail. Now it is a good and desirable thing, truly, to make many pins in a day; but if we could only see with what crystal sand their points were polished, – sand of human soul, much to be magnified before it can be discussed what it is – we should think there might be some loss in it also. And the great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for this – that we manufacture everything there except men – we blanch cotton and strengthen steel and refine sugar and shape pottery – but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine or to reform a single living spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantages. And all the evil to which that cry is urging our myriads can be met only … by a right understanding on the part of all classes, of what kinds of labour are good for men, raising them, and making them happy; by a determined sacrifice of such convenience or beauty or cheapness as is to be got only by the degradation of the workman, and by equally determined demand for the products and results of healthy and ennobling labour.”

§ XVII. “And how, it will be asked, are these products to be recognized, and this demand to be regulated? Easily: by the observance of three broad and simple rules:

“1. Never encourage the manufacture of any article not absolutely necessary, in the production of which Invention has no share.

“2. Never demand an exact finish for its own sake, but only for some practical or noble end.

“3. Never encourage imitation or copying of any kind, except for the sake of preserving records of great works.”

This magnificent passage, central as to Ruskin’s teaching and very typical of the literary power with which his spirit was armed, is probably of more value as a principle than as a specific cure. We can without great difficulty obey this three precepts, and do some good thereby. We can avoid mere meretricious glory of finish; we can choose our purchases so as to favour originality, when we are buying articles in gold or silver or glass or bronze or leather or porcelain or wood; but the great mass of the evil remains untouched. How are we to cultivate invention when we buy a mackintosh, or a pair of boots, or common crockery, or pens and paper – and even in an article so full of inventions as a bicycle, the invention is not due to the mechanic who makes it. We are not really carried much beyond the æsthetic furnishings of our existence. So far, however, the advice is excellent and human; it is likely to lead persons of moderate means to prefer the products of Switzerland or Japan, hand made and invented, to the machine products of Birmingham.

There must be always a measure of tedious soul killing work to be done; and few entirely escape it. Our professions, as well as our trades, let alone manual occupations, do us some harm, narrow our outlook, make us peculiar. I am told that even teachers can be recognized as such, and the weighty medical manner is well known. You can neither serve behind a counter nor occupy a pulpit without some of the manner of it becoming part of yourself. Even so, the day labourer suffers from the lack of intelligence he is called upon for. We must all find the balance outside our work. By the reasonable shortening of hours, even the dull routine labourer may have a chance of exercising his faculties as a man. The fact that labour is specialized and monotonous constitutes the proper physiological reason for the eight hour-day or shorter hours still in some trades. Moreover, to do the dull rough work of the world, there is no denying that there are annually born a certain number of dull but strong people, whose gifts lie in the absence of thinking. They are born into all classes, unfortunately; but born they are. But Ruskin is fully alive to this solution of the ultimate difficulty, and frequently alludes to it.

“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.