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Page 20
Nor until these latter days has man ever rejected this universal
gift, but always, when he has not been too much perplexed, too much
bound by disease or beaten down by trouble, has striven to make his
work at least happy. Pain he has too often found in his pleasure,
and weariness in his rest, to trust to these. What matter if his
happiness lie with what must be always with him--his work?
And, once more, shall we, who have gained so much, forego this gain,
the earliest, most natural gain of mankind? If we have to a great
extent done so, as I verily fear we have, what strange fog-lights
must have misled us; or rather let me say, how hard pressed we must
have been in the battle with the evils we have overcome, to have
forgotten the greatest of all evils. I cannot call it less than
that. If a man has work to do which he despises, which does not
satisfy his natural and rightful desire for pleasure, the greater
part of his life must pass unhappily and without self-respect.
Consider, I beg of you, what that means, and what ruin must come of
it in the end.
If I could only persuade you of this, that the chief duty of the
civilised world to-day is to set about making labour happy for all,
to do its utmost to minimise the amount of unhappy labour--nay, if I
could only persuade some two or three of you here present--I should
have made a good night's work of it.
Do not, at any rate, shelter yourselves from any misgiving you may
have behind the fallacy that the art-lacking labour of to-day is
happy work: for the most of men it is not so. It would take long,
perhaps, to show you, and make you fully understand that the would-
be art which it produces is joyless. But there is another token of
its being most unhappy work, which you cannot fail to understand at
once--a grievous thing that token is--and I beg of you to believe
that I feel the full shame of it, as I stand here speaking of it;
but if we do not admit that we are sick, how can we be healed? This
hapless token is, that the work done by the civilised world is
mostly dishonest work. Look now: I admit that civilisation does
make certain things well, things which it knows, consciously or
unconsciously, are necessary to its present unhealthy condition.
These things, to speak shortly, are chiefly machines for carrying on
the competition in buying and selling, called falsely commerce; and
machines for the violent destruction of life--that is to say,
materials for two kinds of war; of which kinds the last is no doubt
the worst, not so much in itself perhaps, but because on this point
the conscience of the world is beginning to be somewhat pricked.
But, on the other hand, matters for the carrying on of a dignified
daily life, that life of mutual trust, forbearance, and help, which
is the only real life of thinking men--these things the civilised
world makes ill, and even increasingly worse and worse.
If I am wrong in saying this, you know well I am only saying what is
widely thought, nay widely said too, for that matter. Let me give
an instance, familiar enough, of that wide-spread opinion. There is
a very clever book of pictures {4} now being sold at the railway
bookstalls, called 'The British Working Man, by one who does not
believe in him,'--a title and a book which make me both angry and
ashamed, because the two express much injustice, and not a little
truth in their quaint, and necessarily exaggerated way. It is quite
true, and very sad to say, that if any one nowadays wants a piece of
ordinary work done by gardener, carpenter, mason, dyer, weaver,
smith, what you will, he will be a lucky rarity if he get it well
done. He will, on the contrary, meet on every side with evasion of
plain duties, and disregard of other men's rights; yet I cannot see
how the 'British Working Man' is to be made to bear the whole burden
of this blame, or indeed the chief part of it. I doubt if it be
possible for a whole mass of men to do work to which they are
driven, and in which there is no hope and no pleasure, without
trying to shirk it--at any rate, shirked it has always been under
such circumstances. On the other hand, I know that there are some
men so right-minded, that they will, in despite of irksomeness and
hopelessness, drive right through their work. Such men are the salt
of the earth. But must there not be something wrong with a state of
society which drives these into that bitter heroism, and the most
part into shirking, into the depths often of half-conscious self-
contempt and degradation? Be sure that there is, that the blindness
and hurry of civilisation, as it now is, have to answer a heavy
charge as to that enormous amount of pleasureless work--work that
tries every muscle of the body and every atom of the brain, and
which is done without pleasure and without aim--work which everybody
who has to do with tries to shuffle off in the speediest way that
dread of starvation or ruin will allow him.
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