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Page 36
MAKING THE BEST OF IT {9}
I have to-night to talk to you about certain things which my
experience in my own craft has led me to notice, and which have bred
in my mind something like a set of rules or maxims, which guide my
practice. Every one who has followed a craft for long has such
rules in his mind, and cannot help following them himself, and
insisting on them practically in dealing with his pupils or workmen
if he is in any degree a master; and when these rules, or if you
will, impulses, are filling the minds and guiding the hands of many
craftsmen at one time, they are busy forming a distinct school, and
the art they represent is sure to be at least alive, however rude,
timid, or lacking it may be; and the more imperious these rules are,
the wider these impulses are spread, the more vigorously alive will
be the art they produce; whereas in times when they are felt but
lightly and rarely, when one man's maxims seem absurd or trivial to
his brother craftsman, art is either sick or slumbering, or so
thinly scattered amongst the great mass of men as to influence the
general life of the world little or nothing.
For though this kind of rules of a craft may seem to some arbitrary,
I think that it is because they are the result of such intricate
combinations of circumstances, that only a great philosopher, if
even he, could express in words the sources of them, and give us
reasons for them all, and we who are craftsmen must be content to
prove them in practice, believing that their roots are founded in
human nature, even as we know that their first-fruits are to be
found in that most wonderful of all histories, the history of the
arts.
Will you, therefore, look upon me as a craftsman who shares certain
impulses with many others, which impulses forbid him to question the
rules they have forced on him? so looking on me you may afford
perhaps to be more indulgent to me if I seem to dogmatise over much.
Yet I cannot claim to represent any one craft. The division of
labour, which has played so great a part in furthering competitive
commerce, till it has become a machine with powers both reproductive
and destructive, which few dare to resist, and none can control or
foresee the result of, has pressed specially hard on that part of
the field of human culture in which I was born to labour. That
field of the arts, whose harvest should be the chief part of human
joy, hope, and consolation, has been, I say, dealt hardly with by
the division of labour, once the servant, and now the master of
competitive commerce, itself once the servant, and now the master of
civilisation; nay, so searching has been this tyranny, that it has
not passed by my own insignificant corner of labour, but as it has
thwarted me in many ways, so chiefly perhaps in this, that it has so
stood in the way of my getting the help from others which my art
forces me to crave, that I have been compelled to learn many crafts,
and belike, according to the proverb, forbidden to master any, so
that I fear my lecture will seem to you both to run over too many
things and not to go deep enough into any.
I cannot help it. That above-mentioned tyranny has turned some of
us from being, as we should be, contented craftsmen, into being
discontented agitators against it, so that our minds are not at
rest, even when we have to talk over workshop receipts and maxims;
indeed I must confess that I should hold my peace on all matters
connected with the arts, if I had not a lurking hope to stir up both
others and myself to discontent with and rebellion against things as
they are, clinging to the further hope that our discontent may be
fruitful and our rebellion steadfast, at least to the end of our own
lives, since we believe that we are rebels not against the laws of
Nature, but the customs of folly.
Nevertheless, since even rebels desire to live, and since even they
must sometimes crave for rest and peace--nay, since they must, as it
were, make for themselves strongholds from whence to carry on the
strife--we ought not to be accused of inconsistency, if to-night we
consider how to make the best of it. By what forethought, pains,
and patience, can we make endurable those strange dwellings--the
basest, the ugliest, and the most inconvenient that men have ever
built for themselves, and which our own haste, necessity, and
stupidity, compel almost all of us to live in? That is our present
question.
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