PART I.
Ethics and Character.
Ethical Fragments.
1.
Bacon says, how wisely! that “there is often as great vanity in withdrawing and retiring men’s conceits from the world, as in obtruding them.” Extreme vanity sometimes hides under the garb of ultra modesty. When I see people haunted by the idea of self—spreading their hands before their faces lest they meet the reflection of it in every other face, as if the world were to them like a French drawing-room, panelled with looking glass—always fussily putting their obtrusive self behind them, or dragging over it a scanty drapery of consciousness, miscalled modesty—always on their defence against compliments, or mistaking sympathy for compliment, which is as great an error, and a more vulgar one than mistaking flattery for sympathy—when I see all this, as I have seen it, I am inclined to attribute it to the immaturity of the character, or to what is worse, a total want of simplicity. To some characters fame is like an intoxicating cup placed to the lips—they do well to turn away from it, who fear it will turn their heads. But to others, fame is “love disguised,” the love that answers to love, in its widest most exalted sense. It seems to me, that we should all bring the best that is in us (according to the diversity of gifts which God has given us), and lay it a reverend offering on the altar of humanity—if not to burn and enlighten, at least to rise in incense to heaven. So will the pure in heart, and the unselfish do; and they will not heed if those who can bring nothing or will bring nothing, unless they can blaze like a beacon, call out “VANITY!”
2.
There are truths which, by perpetual repetition, have subsided into passive truisms, till, in some moment of feeling or experience, they kindle into conviction, start to life and light, and the truism becomes again a vital truth.
3.
It It is well that we obtain what we require at the cheapest possible rate; yet those who cheapen goods, or beat down the price of a good article, or buy in preference to what is good and genuine of its kind an inferior article at an inferior price, sometimes do much mischief. Not only do they discourage the production of a better article, but if they be anxious about the education of the lower classes they undo with one hand what they do with the other; they encourage the mere mechanic and the production of what may be produced without effort of mind and without education, and they discourage and wrong the skilled workman for whom education has done much more and whose education has cost much more.
Every work so merely and basely mechanical, that a man can throw into it no part of his own life and soul, does, in the long run, degrade the human being. It is only by giving him some kind of mental and moral interest in the labour of his hands, making it an exercise of his understanding, and an object of his sympathy, that we can really elevate the workman; and this is not the case with very cheap production of any kind. (Southampton, Dec. 1849.)
Since this was written the same idea has been carried out, with far more eloquent reasoning, in a noble passage which I have just found in Mr. Ruskin’s last volume of “The Stones of Venice” (the Sea Stories). As I do not always subscribe to his theories of Art, I am the more delighted with this anticipation of a moral agreement between us.
“We have much studied and much perfected of late, the great civilised 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 are polished—sand of human soul, much to be magnified before it can be discerned for 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 form 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 in one way—not by teaching nor preaching; for to teach them is but to show them their misery; and to preach to them—if we do nothing more than preach—is to mock at it. It 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 a healthy and ennobling labour.” …
“We are always in these days trying to separate the two (intellect and work). We want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always working; and we call one a gentleman and the other an operative; whereas, the workman ought to be often thinking, and the thinker often working, and both should be gentlemen in the best sense. It is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy; and the two cannot be separated with impunity.”
Wordsworth, however, had said the same thing before either of us:
| “Our life is turn’d Out of her course wherever man is made An offering or a sacrifice—a tool Or implement—a passive thing employed As a brute mean, without acknowledgment Of common right or interest in the end, Used or abused as selfishness may prompt. Say what can follow for a rational soul Perverted thus, but weakness in all good And strength in evil?” |
And this leads us to the consideration of another mistake, analogous with the above, but referable in its results chiefly to the higher, or what Mr. Ruskin calls the thinking, classes of the community.
It is not good for