are requisite for the best work. Given, then, ideal conditions for work, what profits should a man have for his labour?
The essential reward lies naturally in the happiness which the work engenders. Labour that is wholesome exercise, involving the skill and intelligence and character of the individual, is not really labour in the Ruskinian sense, for there is in it no expense of life. By the recognition of the human values of labour the question of wages is rendered of secondary moment. The real demand of workmen who have not been degraded or corrupted by the mammonism of the day is not for higher wages but for better conditions of labour. The assumption that a man is a repository of energy to be elicited by wages alone is unworthy any observer of men. The wage system is simply one stage better than the slave system it superseded, and wages high or low is still a token of industrial bondage. The distinguishing sign of slavery, Ruskin said, “is to have a price and to be bought for it.” The best work of artists, poets, and scientists is never paid for, nor can the value of toil in these fields be ever measured in terms of money. “The largest quantity of work,” our economist declares, “will not be done by this curious engine (the Soul) for pay, or under pressure. It will be done only when the motive force, that is to say, the will or spirit of the creatures is brought up to the greatest strength by its own proper fuel, namely, by the affections.” Could workmen today direct their united energies toward self-education, so that the nature by which they are surrounded and the life with which they are connected might mean more to them, and so that the things they possess might be more highly valued; could employers understand that work is done well only when it is done with a will and that no man has a thoroughly sound will unless he has character and is contented, knowing he is what he should be and is in his place; could this higher ideal of labour be generally accepted and acted upon, then would the battle between those who have and those who have not be speedily ended.
Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., Moon, 1866–1868.
Panel.
The Green Dining Room, Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., Elderflowers, 1866–1868.
Panel.
The Green Dining Room, Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
The real labour problem is not that of shorter hours or of higher wages, but it is to change the character of work so that work will be its own reward. It will be remembered that Ruskin promised as the fruit of ideal labour a crown of wild olive, symbolising by this token grey honour and sweet rest. “Free-heartedness, and graciousness, and undisturbed trust, and requited love, and the sight of the peace of others, and the ministry of their pain; these – and the blue sky above you, and the sweet waters and flowers of the earth beneath; and mysteries and presences, innumerable, of living things – may yet be your riches, untormenting and divine; serviceable for the life that now is; nor, it may be, without promise of that which is to come.”
Ruskin wrote a pamphlet pleading for the preservation of the great buildings of the past, then neglected and falling to ruins, and out of this suggestion came the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings, in the work of which William Morris figured so conspicuously. As a writer, manufacturer, and distributer of books, he tried to apply the principles of commercial integrity and honour he had advocated. He would not advertise; he employed no middlemen; he gave no discounts; he engaged in no competitive struggle for a market; he looked out for the welfare of the workmen employed in manufacture; he used the best paper he could procure, and took extraordinary care with the printing; he began the sale of his books from a little Kentish village, at one price, and without credit. Of like nature was his experiment with a London tea-shop: putting a salaried servant in charge, he built up a successful business in tea, without advertisement or any trick of the trade, and was enabled later to turn the shop over to Miss Hill as a part of his good-tenement scheme. He was not above street-cleaning or road-making, as was shown by his forming a company to keep a certain length of London street “clean as the deck of a ship” for a given season, and by his joining in with Oxford undergraduates in mending the Hinksey road. The most considerable of his practical schemes for reform was the St. George’s Company, which began to take definite shape about 1875. The general purpose of this company or guild was to socialise both capital and labour, and incidentally to demonstrate two economic propositions – one, that agriculture formed the only genuine basis of national life, and the other that happiness was derived from honest and contented co-operative labour. It was his object to collect from persons of means a fund of money sufficient to buy land, at first for a small colony of Ruskinites, who should form an ideal nucleus of perfectly just persons, and from whom the idea of justice should radiate, until the whole social body was shaped to its image.
Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., The Green Dining Room, 1866–1868.
Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
As the idea of a perfect social order matured in Ruskin’s mind he turned his thoughts more and more to the possibility of showing to the world, in the St. George’s Guild, a copy of his vision of the new feudalism. With insufficient means for the experiment, and with no marked public approval, there was no opportunity in Ruskin’s lifetime for the dream to be realised. Like many another social dream, the St. George’s Guild remains a paper Utopia – though its conception by no means lacks potential for the future. As the agricultural proposition could not be proved, the guild funds were devoted to the establishment of the Ruskin Gallery in Sheffield, originally called the Museum of St. George. As this museum embodies certain of the master’s ideas on education, thus much of his original plan may be said to be realised. The finer examples of man’s and nature’s created forms are here placed in view with reference to their ethnic, scientific, and artistic significance, and the museum is so conducted that the objects displayed minister at once to delight and instruction. With this museum as a nucleus, and with the many societies organised in England and America for the study of Ruskin’s writings, the general ideal, if not all the specific ones, of the St. George’s Guild may yet be realised. Already the modern revival of various home industries, particularly in spinning and weaving, is due directly to Ruskin’s teachings. It was one of his opinions that workers should engage in some useful craft under wholesome and humane conditions, and another that the people, the consuming class, should have the opportunity of using sound and serviceable goods instead of being compelled to buy what Carlyle called “cheap and nasty” ones. He thought that home industry might still exist by the side of the machine-driven factory. Two opportunities for reviving the spinning and weaving industries presented themselves in Ruskin’s lifetime – one on the Isle of Man, where the industry was languishing, and another among the Westmoreland cottages, where the art had long since passed away. The successful revival of these local industries was the initial phase of a general economic movement that had for social support the Home Arts and Industries Association, now the Art Workers Guild, which has succeeded in establishing many of the handicrafts on a permanent economic basis. This movement is not to be understood as a fanatical protest against machinery, and not as a return to the abandoned domestic system of mediaeval days, but rather as a modern conscious effort to advance a step beyond the factory stage of industry, and to inaugurate a new industrialism wherein the interests of both the producing and consuming classes are guarded – the one class demanding the opportunity of individual expression, and the other the satisfaction of its higher wants. So it is today that in nearly every instance of organised effort to create better industrial conditions the informing mind of Ruskin is somewhere apparent. In whatever direction, one advances it is discovered that this pioneer mind has gone on before – and as the world advances but slowly it will be long before he can be passed by.
Edward Burne-Jones (for the design and decoration), Ladies and Animals sideboard, 1860.
Pine painted in oil paint, with gold and silver leaf, 116.8 × 152.4 × 73.7 cm.
Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
Charles