When Professor Taussig assures us that 'the great mass of men are of a humdrum sort, not born with any marked bent or loftiness of character' he is simply denying the Christian religion. To argue the point with him would carry us too far. We will do no more here than remind him that the people to whom the Founder of Christianity preached, and even those who were chosen to be its first disciples, were, like this audience, distinctly humdrum, and that assuredly the American Professor would not have discerned in them promising material for a world-transforming religious movement. What people see in others is often a mirror of themselves. Perhaps Professor Taussig, in spite of his excellent book, is rather a humdrum person himself.

When, however, Professor Taussig declares that 'the greater part of the world's work is not in itself felt to be pleasurable' he is saying what, under existing conditions, we must all recognize to be true. A year or two ago Mr. Graham Wallas made an investigation into this very question, the results of which confirmed the general impression that modern workmen find little happiness in their work.[72] But two of the conclusions which he reached conflict in a rather curious way with the statement of Professor Taussig. Mr. Wallas's evidence, which was largely drawn from students of Ruskin College, led him to the conclusion 'that there is less pleasantness or happiness in work the nearer it approaches the fully organized Great Industry'. The only workman who spoke enthusiastically of his work was an agricultural labourer who 'was very emphatic with regard to the pleasure to be obtained from agricultural work'. Professor Taussig, on the other hand, selects four agricultural occupations, ditching, delving, sowing, and reaping, as characteristically unpleasant and looks to machinery and the apparatus of the Industrial Revolution to counteract this unpleasantness. But the most interesting evidence gathered by Mr. Wallas was that relating to women workers. He had an opportunity of collecting the views of girls employed in the laundries and poorer kind of factories in Boston. 'The answers', he says,[73] 'surprised me greatly. I expected to hear those complaints about bad wages, hard conditions and arbitrary discipline which a body of men working at the same grade of labour would certainly have put forward. But it was obvious that the question "Are you happy?" meant to the girls "Are you happier than you would have been if you had stayed at home instead of going to work?" And almost every one of them answered "Yes".' Why were they unhappy at home? Let Professor Taussig reflect on the answer. Not because they had 'rough' or 'coarse' or 'humdrum' work to do, as in a factory or laundry, but because they had nothing to do, and they had found idleness unbearable. 'One said that work "took up her mind", she had been awfully discontented'. Another that 'you were of some use'. Another thought 'it was because the hours went so much faster. At home one could read, but only for a short time, there was the awful lonesome afternoon ahead of you.' 'Asked a little girl with dyed hair but a good little heart. She enjoyed her work. It made her feel she was worth something.' And Mr. Wallas concludes that it is just because 'everything that is interesting, even though it is laborious, in the women's arts of the old village is gone': because 'clothes are bought ready-made, food is bought either ready-cooked, like bread and jam and fish, or only requiring the simplest kind of cooking': in fact just because physical exertion has been lightened by books and machinery, that 'there results a mass of inarticulate unhappiness whose existence has hardly been indicated by our present method of sociological enquiry'.

It would seem then that the task of associating modern industrial work with happiness is not impossible, if we would only set ourselves to the task. And the task is a two-fold one. It is, first, to make it possible for people to follow the employment for which they are by nature best fitted; and secondly, to study much more closely than heretofore, from the point of view of happiness, the conditions under which work is done. The first task involves a very considerable reversal of current educational and social values. It does not simply mean paving the way for the son of an engine-driver to become a doctor or a lawyer or a cavalryman. It means paving the way for the son of a duke to become, without any sense of social failure, an engine-driver or a merchant seaman or a worker on the land—and to do so not, as to-day, in the decent seclusion of British Columbia or Australia, but in our own country and without losing touch, if he desires it, with his own natural circle of friends. The ladder is an old and outworn metaphor in this connexion. Yet it is still worth remembering that the Angels whom Jacob observed upon it were both ascending and descending. It is one of the fallacies of our social system to believe that a ladder should only be used in one direction—and that the direction which tends to remove men from contact and sympathy with their fellows. But in truth we need to discard the metaphor of the ladder altogether, with its implied suggestion that some tasks of community-service are more honourable and involve more of what the world calls 'success' than others. We do not desire a system of education which picks out for promotion minds gifted with certain kinds of capacity and stimulates them with the offer of material rewards, while the so-called humdrum remainder are left, with their latent talents undiscovered and undeveloped.

Recent educational experiments,[74] and not least that most testing of all school examinations, the war, have shown us that we must revise all our old notions as to cleverness and stupidity. We know now that, short of real mental deficiency, there is or ought to be no such personage as the dunce. Just as the criminal is generally a man of unusual energy and mental power directed into wrong channels, so the dunce is a pupil whose special powers and aptitudes have not revealed themselves in the routine of school life. And just as the criminal points to serious defects in our social system, so the dunce points to serious defects in our educational system. The striking record of our industrial schools and reformatories in the war shows what young criminals and dunces can do when they are given a fair field for their special gifts. One of the chief lessons to be drawn from the war is the need for a new spirit and outlook in our national education from the elementary school to the University. We need a system which treats every child, rich or poor, as a living and developing personality, which enables every English boy and girl to stay at school at least up to the time when his or her natural bent begins to disclose itself, which provides for all classes of the community skilled guidance in the choice of employment based upon psychological study of individual gifts and aptitude,[75] which sets up methods of training and apprenticeship in the different trades—or, as I would prefer to call them the different professions—such as to counteract the deadening influence of premature specialization, and which ensures good conditions and a sense of self-respect and community-service to all in their self-chosen line of life, whether their bent be manual or mechanical or commercial or administrative, or for working on the land or for going to sea, or towards the more special vocations of teaching or scholarship or the law or medicine or the cure of souls. No one can estimate how large a share of the unhappiness associated with our existing social system is due to the fact that, owing to defects in our education and our arrangements for the choice of employment, there are myriads of square pegs in round holes. This applies with especial force to women, to whom many of the square holes are still inaccessible, not simply owing to the lack of opportunities for individuals, but owing to the inhibitions of custom and, in some cases, to narrow and retrograde professional enactments. The war has brought women their chance, not only in the office and the workshop, but in higher administrative and organizing positions, and not the least of its results is the revelation of undreamt-of capacities in these directions.

In the second task, that of perfecting the adaptation between men and their tools, we have much to learn from the industrial history of the past. It is natural for men to enjoy 'talking shop', and this esoteric bond of union has existed between workmen in all ages. We may be sure that there were discussions amongst connoisseurs in the Stone Age as to the respective merits of their flint axes, just as there are to-day between golfers about niblicks and putters, and between surgeons as to the technique of the extraction of an appendix. A good workman loves his tools. He is indeed inseparable from them, as our law acknowledges by forbidding a bankrupt's tools to be sold up. Give a good workman, in town or country, a sympathetic listener and he is only too ready to expatiate on his daily work. This sense of kinship between men and their tools and material is so little understood by some of our modern expert organizers of industry that it is worth while illustrating it at some length. I make no apology, therefore, for quoting a striking passage from an essay by Mr. George Bourne, who is not a trade unionist or a student of Labour politics but an observer of English village life, who has taken the trouble to penetrate the mind of what is commonly regarded as the stupidest and most backward—as it is certainly the least articulate—class of workmen in this country, the agricultural labourer in the southern counties. 'The men', he writes,

are commonly too modest about their work, and too unconscious that it can interest an outsider, to dream of discussing it. What they have to say would not therefore by itself go far in demonstration of their acquirements in technique. Fortunately, for proof of that we are not dependent on talk. Besides talk there exists another kind of evidence open to every one's examination, and the technical skill exercised in country labours may be purely deduced from the aptness and singular beauty of sundry country tools.

The beauty of tools is not accidental, but inherent and essential. The contours of a ship's sail bellying in the wind are not more inevitable, nor more graceful, than the curves of an adze-head or of a plough-share. Cast in iron or steel, the gracefulness of a plough-share is more indestructible than the metal, yet pliant (in the limits of its type) as a line of English blank verse. It changes for different soils: it is widened out or narrowed; it is deep-grooved or shallow; not because of caprice at the foundry or to satisfy an artistic fad, but to meet the technical demands of the expert ploughman. The most familiar example of beauty indicating subtle technique is supplied by the admired shape of boats, which, however, is so variable (the statement is made on the authority of an old coast-guardsman) that the boat best adapted for one stretch of shore may be dangerous, if not entirely useless, at another stretch ten miles away. And as technique determines the design of a boat, or of a waggon, or of a plough-share, so it controls absolutely the fashioning of tools, and is responsible for any beauty of form they may possess. Of all tools none, of course, is more exquisite than a fiddle-bow. But the fiddle-bow never could have been perfected, because there would have been no call for its tapering delicacy, its calculated balance of lightness and strength, had not the violinist's technique reached such marvellous fineness of power. For it is the accomplished artist who is fastidious as to his tools; the bungling beginner can bungle with anything. The fiddle-bow, however, affords only one example of a rule which is equally well exemplified by many humbler tools. Quarryman's peck, coachman's whip, cricket-bat, fishing-rod, trowel, all have their intimate relation to the skill of those who use them; and like animals and plants, adapting themselves each to its own place in the universal order, they attain to beauty by force of being fit. That law of adaptation which shapes the wings of a swallow and prescribes the poise and elegance of the branches of trees is the same that demands symmetry in the corn-rick and convexity in the beer-barrel; the same that, exerting itself with matchless precision through the trained senses of haymakers and woodmen, gives the final curve to the handles of their scythes and the shafts of their axes. Hence the beauty of a tool is an unfailing sign that in the proper handling of it technique is present ...

'It is not the well-informed and those eager to teach', he says in another passage,

who know the primitive necessary lore of civilization; it is the illiterate. In California, Louis Stevenson found men studying the quality of vines grown on different pockets of earth, just as the peasants of Burgundy and the Rhine have done for ages. And even so the English generations have watched the produce of their varying soils. When or how was it learnt—was it at Oxford or at Cambridge?—that the apples of Devonshire are so specially fit for cider? Or how is it that hops are growing—some of them planted before living memory—all along the strip of green sand which encircles the Weald—that curious strip to which text-books at last point triumphantly as being singularly adapted for hops? Until it got into the books, this piece of knowledge was not thought of as learning; it had merely been acted upon during some centuries. But such knowledge exists, boundless, in whatever direction one follows it: the knowledge of fitting means to ends: excellent rule-of-thumb knowledge, as good as the chemist uses for analyzing water. When the peculiar values of a plot of land have been established—as, for instance, that it is a clay 'too strong' for bricks—then further forms of localized knowledge are brought to supplement this, until at last the bricks are made. Next, they must be removed from the field; and immediately new problems arise. The old farm-cart, designed for roots or manure, has not the most suitable shape for brick-carting. Probably, too, its wide wheels, which were intended for the softness of ploughed land, are needlessly clumsy for the hard road. Soon, therefore, the local wheelwright begins to lighten his spokes and felloes, and to make the wheels a trifle less 'dished'; while his blacksmith binds them in a narrower but thicker tyre, to which he gives a shade more tightness. For the wheelwright learns from the carter—that ignorant fellow—the answer to the new problems set by a load of bricks. A good carter, for his part, is able to adjust his labour to his locality. A part of his duty consists in knowing what constitutes a fair load for his horse in the district where he is working. So many hundred stock bricks, so many more fewer of the red or wire-cut, such and such a quantity of sand, or timber, or straw, or coal, or drain-pipes, or slates, according to their kinds and sizes, will make as much as an average horse can draw in this neighbourhood; but in London the loads are bigger and the vehicles heavier; while in more hilly parts (as you may see any day in the West Country) two horses are put before a cart and load which the London carter would deem hardly too much for a costermonger's donkey.

So it goes throughout civilization: there is not an industry but produces its own special knowledge relating to unclassified details of adjustment.[76]

It is this craft-knowledge and common professional feeling which is at the basis of all associations of workpeople, from the semi-religious societies of ancient times, which met in secret to worship their patron-god—Hephaestos, the god of the metal-workers, or Asclepios, the god of the doctors—through the great guilds of the Middle Ages to the trade unions and professional organizations of to-day. Trade unions do not exist simply to raise wages or to fight the capitalist, any more than the British Medical Association exists simply to raise fees and to bargain with the Government. They exist to serve a professional need: to unite men who are doing the same work and to promote the welfare and dignity of that work. It is this which renders so difficult the problems of adjustment which arise owing to the introduction of new and unfamiliar processes. Professional associations are, and are bound to be, conservative: their conservatism is honourable and to their credit: for they are the transmitters of a great tradition. The problem in every case is to ensure the progress necessary to the community without injury to that sense of 'fellowship in the mystery' on which the social spirit of the particular class of workmen depends. It is from this point of view that recent American proposals in the direction of 'scientific management' are most open to criticism: for they involve the break-up of the craft-spirit without setting anything comparable in its place. In fact, Mr. F. W. Taylor, one of the inventors of what is called the 'system' of scientific management, frankly ignores or despises the craft-spirit and proposes to treat the workman as a being incapable of understanding the principles underlying the practice of his art. He goes so far as to lay it down as a general principle that 'in almost all the mechanic arts the science which underlies each act of each workman is so great and amounts to so much that the workman who is best suited to actually doing the work is incapable of fully understanding this science, without the guidance and help of those who are working with him or over him, either through lack of education or through insufficient mental capacity'.[77] Along the lines of this philosophy no permanent industrial advance is possible. It may improve the product for a time, but only at the cost of degrading the producer. If we are to make happiness our test, and to stand by our definition of happiness as involving free activity, such a system, destructive as it is of any real or intense relationship between the workman and his work, stands self-condemned. If we are looking for real industrial progress it is elsewhere that we must turn.

This leads us naturally on to the second great division of our subject: progress in the methods of co-operation between man and man in doing industrial work. For if man is a social animal his power to do his bit and his consequent happiness must be derived, in part at least, from his social environment. The lonely craftsman perfecting his art in the solitude of a one-man workshop does not correspond with our industrial ideal any more than the hermit or the monk corresponds with our general religious ideal. It was the great apostle of craftsmanship, William Morris, who best set forth the social ideal of industry in his immortal sentence: 'Fellowship is Life and lack of Fellowship is Death.' Our study of the workman, then, is not complete when we have seen him with his tools: we must see him also among his workmates. We must see industry not simply as a process of production but as a form of association; and we must realize that the association of human beings for the purpose of industrial work involves what is just as much a problem of government as their association in the great political community which we call the State.

It is difficult to see the record of the progress of industrial government in clear perspective for the simple reason that the world is still so backward as regards the organization of this side of its common life. The theory and practice of industrial government is generations, even centuries, behind the theory and practice of politics. We are still accustomed in industry to attitudes of mind and methods of management which the political thought of the Western World has long since discarded as incompatible with its ideals. Two instances must suffice to illustrate this. It is constantly being said, both by employers and by politicians, and even by writers in sympathy with working-class aspirations, that all that the workman needs in his life is security. Give him work under decent conditions, runs the argument, with reasonable security of tenure and adequate guarantees against sickness, disablement and unemployment, and all will be well. This theory of what constitutes industrial welfare is, of course, when one thinks it out, some six centuries out of date. It embodies the ideal of the old feudal system, but without the personal tie between master and man which humanized the feudal relationship. Feudalism, as we saw in our study of political government, was a system of contract between the lord and the labourer by which the lord and master ran the risks, set on foot the enterprises (chiefly military), and enjoyed the spoils, incidental to mediaeval life, while the labourer stuck to his work and received security and protection in exchange. Feudalism broke down because it involved too irksome a dependence, because it was found to be incompatible with the personal independence which is the birthright of a modern man. So it is idle to expect that the ideal of security will carry us very far by itself towards the perfect industrial commonwealth.

Take a second example of the wide gulf that still subsists between men's ideas of politics and men's ideas of industry. It is quite common, even in these latter days, and among those who have freely sacrificed their nearest and dearest to the claims of the State, to hear manufacturers and merchants say that they have a 'right to a good profit'. The President of the Board of Trade remarked openly in the House of Commons after many months of war that it was more than one could expect of human nature for coal-owners not to get the highest price they could. Such a standpoint is not merely indecent: it is hopelessly out-of-date. Looked at from the political point of view it is a pure anachronism. There used to be times when men made large fortunes out of the service of government, as men still make them out of the service of the community in trade and industry to-day. In the days of St. Matthew, when tax-gathering was let out by contract, the apostle's partners would probably have declared, as Mr. Runciman does to-day, that it was more than one could expect of human nature that a publican who had a government contract for the collection of the taxes should not get all he could out of the tax-payer. It is, indeed, little more than a century ago since it was a matter of course in this country to look upon oversea colonies merely as plantations—that is, as business investments rather than as communities of human beings. The existence of Chartered Company government marks a survival of this habit of mind. The old colonial system, which embodied this point of view, proved demoralizing not only to the home government but to the colonists, as a similar view is to the working class, and it led to the loss of the American colonies as surely as a similar attitude on the part of employers leads to unrest and rebellion among workpeople to-day.

We have thus a long way to travel before the ideals of politics have been assimilated into the industrial life of the community and have found fitting embodiment in its kindred and more complex problems. But at least we have reached a point where we can see what the problem of industrial government is. We can say with assurance that a system which treats human beings purely as instruments or as passive servants, and atrophies their self-determination and their sense of individual and corporate responsibility, is as far from perfection in industry as the Roman Empire was in politics. Renan's words about 'the intolerable sadness' incidental to such a method of organization apply with redoubled force to occupations which take up the best part of the day of the mass of the working population. The bleak and loveless buildings, with their belching chimneys, which arrest the eye of the thoughtful traveller in the industrial districts of England are not prisons or workhouses. But they often look as if they were, and they resemble them in this—that they too often stand for similarly authoritarian ideas of government and direction. Industry is still an autocracy, as politics was in the days before the supremacy of Parliament. Power still descends from above instead of springing from below. It is a power limited no doubt by trade union action and parliamentary and administrative control: but it is in essence as autocratic as the government of England used to be before the transference of sovereignty from the monarch to the representatives of his subjects. It was recently announced in the press that Lord Rhondda had bought a group of Welsh collieries for 2 millions, and that as a result 'Lord Rhondda now controls over 3-1/2 millions of capital, pays 2-1/2 millions in wages every year, and is virtually the dictator of the economic destiny of a quarter of a million miners. Rumours are also current', the extract continues, 'that Lord Rhondda is extending his control over the press of Wales'.[78] The existence of such power in this twentieth century in the hands of single individuals, not selected from the mass for their special wisdom or humanity, is a stupendous fact which must give pause to any one who is inclined to feel complacent about modern industrial progress. In days gone by political power was as irresponsible as the economic power wielded to-day by Lord Rhondda; and it descended from father to son by hereditary right in the same way as the control over the lives of countless American workers descends to-day as a matter of course from John D. Rockefeller senior to John D. Rockefeller junior. If there is any reality at all in our political faith we must believe that a similar development towards self-government can and must take place in industry. It may be that generations will elapse before the problems of industrial government find a final and satisfactory constitutional solution. But at least we can say that there is only one basis for that solution which is compatible with a sound ideal of government, or indeed with any reasoned view of morality or religion—the basis of individual and corporate freedom with its corresponding obligations of responsibility and self-respect. No nation, as Abraham Lincoln said, can remain half-slave and half-free: and it was a greater than Lincoln who warned us that we cannot serve both God and Mammon. It is this underlying conflict of ideals in the organization of our existing economic system which is the real cause of the 'Labour unrest' of which we have heard so much in recent years.

With this warning in our minds as to the imperfections of our modern industrial organization, let us briefly survey the record of the forms of economic association which preceded it.

The earliest form of industrial grouping is, of course, the family; and the family, as we all know, still retains its primitive character in some occupations as a convenient form of productive association. This is particularly the case in agriculture in communities where peasant holdings prevail. But the family is so much more than an industrial group that it hardly falls to us to consider it further here.

Outside the family proper, industrial work among primitive peoples is often carried on by slaves. It was a step forward in human progress when primitive man found that it was more advantageous to capture his enemies than to kill or eat them; and it was a still greater step forward when he found that there was more to be got out of slaves by kind treatment than by compulsion. This is not the place in which to go into the vexed questions connected with various forms of slavery. Suffice it to say that it is a profound mistake to dismiss the whole system in one undiscriminating condemnation. Slavery involves the denial of freedom, and as such it can never be good. But other systems besides slavery implicitly involve the denial of freedom. Some of the finest artistic work in the world has been done by slaves—and by slaves not working under compulsion but in the company of free men and on terms of industrial equality with them. This should serve to remind us that, in judging of systems of industry, we must look behind the letter of the law to the spirit of the times and of social institutions. Slavery at its best merges insensibly into wage-labour at its lower end. Many of the skilled slaves of ancient Greece and Rome are hardly distinguishable in status from a modern workman bound by an unusually long and strict indenture and paid for his work not only in money but partly in truck. In order to stimulate their productive capacity it was found necessary in Greece and Rome to allow skilled slaves to earn and retain money—although in the eye of the law they were not entitled to do so; and they were thus frequently in a position to purchase their own freedom and become independent craftsmen. Slavery in the household and in small workshops is open to many and serious dangers, which need not be particularized here; but the worst abuses of slavery have always taken place where slaves have been easily recruited, as in the early days of European contact with Africa, and when there were large openings for their employment in gangs on work of a rough and unskilled character. The problem of slavery in its worse forms is thus at bottom a cheap-labour problem analogous to that which confronts North America and South Africa to-day; and there is an essential difference which is often ignored between the educated slave in a Roman Government office who did the work of a First Division Civil Servant for his imperial master and his compeer working in the fields of South Italy: and between the household servants of a Virginian family and the plantation-slaves of the farther South. Let us remember, in passing judgement on what is admittedly an indefensible system, that during the war which resulted in the freeing of the American slaves the slaveholders of the South trusted their household slaves to protect the women and children during their absence from home and that that trust was nowhere betrayed. There is another side to Uncle Tom's Cabin as surely as there is another side to Mr. Carnegie's paean of modern industrialism in his Triumphant Democracy.

Systems of serfdom or caste which bind the workman to his work without permitting him to be sold like a slave may be regarded as one step higher than slavery proper. Such systems are common in stable and custom-bound countries, and persisted throughout the European Middle Ages. We need not describe how the rising tide of change gradually broke up the system in this country and left the old-time villein a free but often a landless and property less man. The transition from serfdom to the system of wage-labour which succeeded it was a transition from legal dependence to legal freedom, and as such it marked an advance. But it was also a transition from a fixed and, as it were, a professional position of service to the community to a blind and precarious individualism. It was a transition, as Sir Henry Maine put it, from status to contract. This famous nineteenth-century aphorism is eloquent of the limitations of that too purely commercial age. Every thinking man would admit to-day that status at its best is a better thing than contract at its best—that the soldier is a nobler figure than the army contractor, and that corporate feeling and professional honour are a better stimulus to right action than business competition and a laudable keenness to give satisfaction to a valuable customer. We have always suffered from the temptation in this country of adapting business methods and ideals to politics rather than political ideals and methods to business. Our eighteenth-century thinkers explained citizenship itself, not as a duty to our neighbours but as the fulfilment of an unwritten contract. Our nineteenth-century legal writers elevated the idea of free contract almost to an industrial ideal; while, in somewhat the same spirit, the gutter journalists of to-day, when they are at a loss for a popular watchword, call for a business government. Such theories and battle-cries may serve for a 'nation of shopkeepers'; but that opprobrious phrase has never been true of the great mass of the English people, and it was never less true than to-day.

The idea of industrial work as the fulfilment of a contract, whether freely or forcibly made, is thus essentially at variance with the ideal of community service. It is difficult for a man who makes his livelihood by hiring himself out as an individual for what he can get out of one piece of work after another to feel the same sense of community service or professional pride as the man who is serving a vocation and has dedicated his talents to some continuous and recognized form of work. It is this which makes the system of wage-labour so unsatisfactory in principle compared with the guilds of the town workmen in the Middle Ages and with the organized professions of to-day; and it is this which explains why trade unions of recent years have come to concern themselves more and more with questions of status rather than of wages and to regard the occupation which they represent more and more as a profession rather than a trade. No one has laid bare the deficiencies of the wage-system more clearly than Adam Smith in the famous chapter in which he foreshadows the principle of collective bargaining. 'What are the common wages of labour', he there remarks,[79]

'depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between those two parties, whose interests are by no means the same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little, as possible. The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower, the wages of labour.... We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit but constant and uniform combination not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. To violate this combination is everywhere a most unpopular action and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals. We seldom, indeed, hear of this combination, because it is the usual, and one may say, the natural state of things which nobody ever hears of. Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate. These are always conducted with the utmost secrecy till the moment of execution; and, when the workmen yield, as they sometimes do without resistance, though severely felt by them, they are never heard of by other people. Such combinations, however, are frequently resisted by a contrary defensive combination of the workmen, who sometimes, too, without any provocation of this kind, combine of their own accord to raise the price of labour. Their usual pretences are, sometimes the high price of provisions, sometimes the great profit which their masters make by their work.'

These words were written 140 years ago, but, as we all know, they are still true of the working of the system to-day. Indeed the war has served to emphasize their truth by showing us how deeply entrenched are the habits of bargaining and of latent antagonism which the working of the wage-system has engendered. It is the defect of the wage-system, as Adam Smith makes clear to us, that it lays stress on just those points in the industrial process where the interests of employers and workpeople run contrary to one another, whilst obscuring those far more important aspects in which they are partners and fellow-workers in the service of the community. This defect cannot be overcome by strengthening one party to the contract at the expense of the other, by crushing trade unions or dissolving employers' combinations, or even by establishing the principle of collective bargaining. It can only be overcome by the recognition on both sides that industry is in essence not a matter of contract and bargaining at all, but of mutual interdependence and community service: and by the growth of a new ideal of status, a new sense of professional pride and corporate duty and self-respect among all who are engaged in the same function. No one can say how long it may take to bring about such a fundamental change of attitude, especially among those who have most to lose, in the material sense, by an alteration in the existing distribution of economic power. But the war has cleared away so much of prejudice and set so much of our life in a new light that the dim ideals of to-day may well be the realities of to-morrow. This at least we can say: that no country in the world is in a better position than we are to redeem modern industry from the reproach of materialism and to set it firmly upon a spiritual basis, and that the country which shall first have had the wisdom and the courage to do so will be the pioneer in a vast extension of human liberty and happiness and will have shown that along this road and no other lies the industrial progress of mankind.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

1. Economics:

H. Clay, Economics for the General Reader. 1916.

Ruskin, Unto this last.

Smart, Second Thoughts of an Economist. 1916.

2. Man and his Tools:

Marvin, The Living Past. 1913.

F. W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management. 1911.

Hoxie, Scientific Management and Labour. 1916.

3. Industrial Government:

Aristotle, Politics (Book I, chapters on Slavery).

Zimmern, The Greek Commonwealth (chapters on Slavery). 1911.

Ashley, The Economic Organization of England. 1914.

Unwin, Industrial Organization in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.

S. and B. Webb, The History of Trade Unionism.

Macgregor, The Evolution of Industry (Home University Library).

Wallas, The Great Society. 1914.

G. D. H. Cole, The World of Labour. 1915.

Round Table, June 1916 (Article on the Labour Movement and the Future of British Industry).

FOOTNOTES:

[67] Including the well-being of the producers—a point which is too often overlooked.

[68] On this point see Poverty and Waste, by Hartley Withers, 1914, written before the war, which has driven its lessons home.

[69] The Living Past, pp. 20, 21.

[70] Second Thoughts of an Economist, p. 89.

[71] Principles of Economics, vol. i, p. 11. It is interesting to note that in his latest book, Inventors and Money-making, lectures on some relations between Economics and Psychology (1915), Professor Taussig to some extent goes back upon the point of view of the extract given above.

[72] A similar inquiry on a much larger scale was made by Adolf Levinstein in his book Die Arbeiterfrage (Munich, 1910). He examined 4,000 workpeople, consisting of coalminers, cotton operatives, and engineers. With the exception of a few turners and fitters almost all replied that they found little or no pleasure in their work.

[73] The Great Society, p. 363.

[74] Especially the wonderful results obtained from the young criminals at the Little Commonwealth in Dorsetshire.

[75] See Readings in Vocational Guidance by Meyer Bloomfield (Boston, 1915).

[76] Lucy Bettesworth, pp. 178-80, and 214-16.

[77] This sentence is practically an unconscious paraphrase of a passage from Aristotle's defence of slavery.

[78] The Welsh Outlook, August 1916, p. 272.

[79] Wealth of Nations, Book I, ch. viii.



IX

PROGRESS IN ART

A. CLUTTON BROCK

It is often said that there can be no such thing as progress in art. At one time the arts flourish, at another they decay: but, as Whistler put it, art happens as men of genius happen; and men cannot make it happen. They cannot discover what circumstances favour art, and therefore they cannot attempt to produce those circumstances. There are periods of course in which the arts, or some one particular art, progress. One generation may excel the last; through several generations an art may seem to be rushing to its consummation. This happened with Greek sculpture and the Greek drama in the sixth and fifth centuries; with architecture and all kindred arts in western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and at the same time with many arts in China. It happened with painting and sculpture in Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with literature in England in the sixteenth century, with music in Germany in the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. But in all these cases there followed a decline, often quite unconscious at the time and one of which we cannot discover the causes. Attempts are made by historians of the arts to state the causes; but they satisfy only those who make them, for they are, in fact, only statements of the symptoms of decline. They tell us what happened, not why it happened. And they all seem to point to two conclusions about the course of the arts, both of which would make us despair of any settled progress in them. The first is that the practice of any art by any particular people always follows a certain natural course of growth, culmination, and decay. At least it always follows this course where an art is practised naturally and therefore with success. Art in fact, in its actual manifestations, is like the life of an individual human being and subject to inexorable natural laws. It is born, as men are born, without the exercise of will; and in the same way it passes through youth, maturity, and old age. The second conclusion follows from this, and it is that one nation or age cannot take up an art where another has left it. That is where art seems to differ from science. The mass of knowledge acquired in one country can, if that country loses energy to apply or increase it, be utilized by another. But we cannot so make use of the art of the Greeks or of the Italian Renaissance or of our own Middle Ages. In the Gothic revival we tried to make use of the art of the Middle Ages and we failed disastrously. We imitated without understanding, and we could not understand because we were not ourselves living in the Middle Ages. Art, in fact, is always a growth of its own time which cannot be transplanted, and no one can tell why it grows in one time and among one people and not in another.

That is what we are always told, and yet we never quite believe all of it. For, as art is a product of the human mind, it must also be a product of the human will, unless it is altogether unconscious like a dream. But that it is not; for men produce it in their waking hours and with the conscious exercise of their faculties. If a man paints a picture he does so because he wants to paint one. He exercises will and choice in all his actions, and the man who buys a picture does the same. We talk of inspiration in the arts as something that cannot be commanded, but there is also inspiration in the sciences. No man can make a scientific discovery by the pure exercise of his will. It jumps into one mind and not into another just like an artistic inspiration. And further we are taught and trained in the arts as in the sciences; and success in both depends a great deal upon the nature of the training. In both good training will not give genius or inspiration to those who are without it; but it will enable those who possess it to make the most of it; and, what is more, it will enable even the mediocre to produce work of some value. What strikes us most about the Florentine school of painting of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is the fact that its second-rate painters are so good, that we can enjoy their works even when they are merely imitative. But the Florentine school excelled all others of the time in its teaching; most painters of other schools in Italy learnt from Florence; and the inspiration came to them from Florence, they were quickened from Florence, however much their art kept its own natural character. But this school which had the best teaching also produced the most painters of genius. Its level was higher and its heights were higher; and for this reason, that the whole Florentine intellect went both into the teaching and into the practice of painting and sculpture. The Florentine was able to put all his mind, the scientific faculties as well as the aesthetic, into his art. He never relied merely on his temperament or his mood. He was eager for knowledge. It was not enough for him to paint things as he saw them; he tried to discover how they were made, what were the laws of their growth and construction; and his knowledge of these things changed the character of his vision, made him see the human body, for instance, as no mediaeval artist had ever seen it; made him see it as an engineer sees a machine. Just as an engineer sees more in a machine than a man who does not understand its working, so the Florentine saw more in the human body than a mediaeval artist. He saw it with a scientific as well as an aesthetic passion, and all this science of his enriched his art so that there has never since been drawing like the Florentine, drawing at once so logical and so expressive.

The Florentines in fact did exercise their will upon their art more than any other modern artists, more, perhaps, than any other artists known to us, and their painting and sculpture were the greatest of the modern world. Yet the fact remains that Florentine art declined suddenly and irresistibly, and that all the Florentine intellect, which still remained remarkable and produced men of science like Galileo, could not arrest that decline. Indeed the Florentines themselves seem not to have been conscious of it. They thought that the dull imitators of Michelangelo were greater than his great predecessors. As we say, their taste became bad, their values were perverted; and with that perversion all their natural genius for the arts was wasted. To this day Carlo Dolci is the favourite painter of the ordinary Florentine. He was a man of some ability, and he painted pictures at once feeble and revolting because he himself and his public liked such pictures.

There is no accounting for tastes, we say, and in saying that we despair of progress in the arts. For it is ultimately this unaccountable thing called taste, and not the absence or presence of genius, which determines whether the arts shall thrive or decay in any particular age or country. People often say that they know nothing about art, but that they do know what they like; and what they imply is that there is nothing to be known about art except your own likes and dislikes, and further that no man can control those. The Florentines of the seventeenth century happened to like Carlo Dolci, where the Florentines of the fifteenth had liked Botticelli. That is the only explanation we can give of the decline of Florentine painting.

It is of course no explanation; and because no explanation beyond it has been given, we are told that there can be no such thing as progress in the arts. That is the lesson of history. We are far beyond the Egyptians in science, but certainly not beyond them in art. Indeed one might say that there has been a continual slow decline in all the arts of Europe, except music, since the year 1500, and that music itself has been slowly declining since the death of Beethoven. But with this slow inexorable decline of the arts there has been a great advance in nearly everything else, in knowledge, in power, even in morality. Upon everything man has been able to exercise his will except upon the arts. Where he has really wished for progress there he has got it, except in this one case. Therefore it seems that upon the arts he cannot exercise his will, and that they alone of all his activities are not capable of progress. What do we mean by progress except the successful exercise of the human will in a right direction? That is what distinguishes progress from natural growth; that alone can preserve it from natural processes of decay. There are people who say that it does not exist, that everything which happens to man is a natural process of growth or decay. Whether that is so or not, we do mean by progress something different from these natural processes. When we speak of it we do imply the exercise of the human will, man's command over circumstances; and those who deny progress altogether deny that man has any will or any command over circumstances. For them things happen to man and that is all, it is not man's will that makes things happen. But if we use the word progress at all, we imply that it is man's will that makes things happen. And since man is evidently liable to decline as well as progress, it follows that if we believe man to be capable of exercising his will in a right direction we must also believe that he can and does exercise it in a wrong direction. I assume that man has this power both for good and for evil. If I did not, I should not be addressing you upon the question whether man is capable of progress in the arts, but upon the question whether he is capable of progress at all. And I should be trying to prove that he is not.

As it is, the question I have to discuss is whether he has the power of exercising for good or evil his will upon the arts as upon other things; and hitherto I have been giving you certain facts in the history of the arts which seem to prove that he is not. They all amount to this—that man has not hitherto succeeded in exercising his will upon the arts; that he has not produced good art because he wished to produce it. We, for instance, wish to excel in the arts; we have far more power than the ancient Greeks or Egyptians; but we have not been able to apply that power to the arts. In them we are conscious of a strange impotence. We cannot build like our forefathers of the Middle Ages, we cannot make furniture like our great-grandfathers of the eighteenth century. Go into an old churchyard and look at the tombstones of the past and present. You will see that the lettering is always fine up to the first generation of the nineteenth century. In that generation there is a rapid decline; and since about 1830 there has been no decent lettering upon tombstones except what has been produced in the last ten years or so by the conscious effort of a few individual artists of great natural talent and high training. If I want good lettering on a tombstone I have to employ one of these artists and to pay him a high price for his talent and his training. But that is only one example of a universal decline in all the arts of use, a decline which happened roughly between the years 1800 and 1830. And the significant fact about it is that when it happened no one was aware of it. So far as I know, this artistic catastrophe, far the swiftest and most universal known to us in the whole course of history, was never even mentioned in contemporary literature. The poets, the lovers of beauty, did not speak of it. They talked about nature, not about art. There is not a hint of it in the letters of Shelley or Keats. There is just a hint of it in some sayings of Blake; but that is all. One would suppose that such a catastrophe would have filled the minds of all men who were not entirely occupied with the struggle for life, that all would have seen that a glory was passing away from the earth, and would have made some desperate struggle to preserve it. But, as I say, they saw nothing of it. They were not aware that a universal ugliness was taking the place of beauty in all things made by man; and therefore the new ugliness must have pleased them as much as the old beauty. So it appears once again that there is no accounting for tastes, and no test that we can apply to them. When science declines, men at least know that they have less power. They are more subject to pestilence when they forget medicine and sanitation; their machines become useless to them when they no longer know how to work them; there is anarchy when they lose their political goodwill. But when their taste decays they do not know that it has decayed. And with it decays their artistic capacity, so that, quite complacently, they lose the power of doing decently a thousand things that their fathers did excellently.

But here suddenly I am brought to a stop by a new fact in human history. The arts have declined, but our complacency over their decline has ceased. The first man who disturbed it was Ruskin. It was he who saw the catastrophe that had happened. Suddenly he was aware of it; suddenly he escaped from the universal tyranny of the bad taste of his time. He was the first to deny that there was no accounting for tastes; the first to deny, indeed, that the ordinary man did know what he liked. And he was followed with more knowledge and practical power, in fact with more science, by William Morris. What both of these great men really said was that taste is not unaccountable; that the mass of men do not know what they like, that they do not apply their intellect and will to what they suppose to be their likes and dislikes, and that they could apply their intellect and will to these things if they chose.

When we say that there is no accounting for tastes we imply that tastes are always real, that, whether good or bad, they happen to men without any exercise of their will. But Ruskin and Morris implied that we must exercise our will and our intelligence to discover what our tastes really are; that this discovery is not at all easy, but that, if we do not make it, we are at the mercy, not of our own real tastes, but of an unreal thing which is called the public taste, or of equally unreal reactions against it. We think that we like what we suppose other people to like, and these other people too think that they like what no one really likes. Or in mere blind reaction we think that we dislike what the mob likes. But in either case our likes and dislikes are not ours at all and, what is more, they are no one's. Taste in fact is bad because it is not any one's taste, because no one's will is exercised in it or upon it. When it is good, it is always real taste, that is to say some real person's taste. In the work of art the artist does what he really likes to do and expresses some real passion of his own, not some passion which he believes that he, as an artist, ought to express. Art, said Morris, is the expression of the workman's pleasure in his work. It cannot be real art unless it is a real pleasure. And so the public will not demand real art unless they too take a real pleasure in it. If they do not know what they really like, they will not demand of the artist what they really like or what he really likes. They will demand something tiresome and insincere, and by the tyranny of their demand will set him to produce it.

That was what happened at the beginning of the nineteenth century in nearly all the arts and especially in the arts of use. It had happened before in different ages and countries, especially in painting, sculpture, architecture, and the arts of use as they were patronized by the vulgar rich, such as the court of Louis XV. But now it happened suddenly and universally to all arts. There were no longer vulgar rich only but also vulgar poor and vulgar middle-classes. Everywhere there spread a kind of aesthetic snobbery which obscured real tastes. Of this I will give one simple and homely example. The beautiful flowers of the cottage garden were no longer grown in the gardens of the well-to-do, because they were the flowers of the poor. Instead were grown lobelias, geraniums, and calceolarias, combined in a hideous mixture, not because any one thought them more beautiful, but because, since they were grown in green-houses, they implied the possession of green-houses and so of wealth. They did not, of course, even do that, since they could be bought very cheaply from nurserymen. They implied only the bad taste of snobbery which is the absence of all real taste. For it is physically impossible for any one to like such a combination of plants better than larkspurs and lilies and roses. What they did enjoy was not the flowers themselves but their association with gentility. But so strong was the contagion of this association that cottagers themselves began to throw away their beautiful cottage-garden flowers and to grow these plants, so detestable in combination. And to this day one can see often in cottage gardens pathetic imitations of a taste that never was real and which now is discredited among the rich, so that a border of lobelias, calceolarias, and geraniums has become a mark of social inferiority as it was once one of social superiority. But what it never was and never could be was an expression of a genuine liking.

Now I owe the very fact that I am able to give this account of a simple perversion of taste to Ruskin and Morris. It was they who first made the world aware that its taste was perverted and that most of its art was therefore bad. It was they who filled us with the conviction of artistic sin, and who also in a manner entirely scientific tried to discover what was the nature of this sin and how it had come about. First Ruskin tentatively, and afterwards Morris systematically and out of his own vast artistic experience, connected this decay of the arts with certain social conditions. It was not merely that taste had decayed or that the arts had developed to a point beyond which there was nothing for them but decline. Morris insisted that there were causes for the decay of taste and the decline of the arts, causes as much subject to the will of man as the causes of any kind of social decay or iniquity. He insisted that a work of art is not an irrational mystery, not something that happens and may happen well or ill; but that all art is intimately connected with the whole of our social well-being. It is in fact an expression of what we value, and if we value noble things it will be noble, if we pretend to value base things it will be base.

Whistler said that this was not so. He insisted that genius is born, not made, and that some peoples have artistic capacity, some have not. Now it is true that nations vary very much in their artistic capacity and in the strength of their desire to produce art. But even the nations which have little artistic capacity and little desire to produce art have in their more primitive state produced charming works of real art. Whistler gave the case of the Swiss as an excellent people with little capacity for art. But the old Swiss chalets are full of character and beauty, and there are churches in Switzerland which have all the beauty of the Middle Ages. The cuckoo clocks and other Swiss articles of commerce which Whistler despised are contemptible, not because they are Swiss, but because they are tourist trash produced by workmen who express no pleasure of their own in them for visitors who buy them only because they think they are characteristic of Switzerland. They are, in fact, not the expression of any genuine taste or liking whatever, like the tourist trash that is sold in the Rue de Rivoli. Probably the Swiss would never be capable of producing works of art like Chartres Cathedral or Don Giovanni, but they have in the past possessed a genuine and delightful art of their own like nearly every European nation in the Middle Ages.

So, though genius is born, it is also made, and though nations differ in artistic capacity, they all have some artistic capacity so long as they know what they like and express only their own liking in their art, so long as they are not infected with artistic snobbism or commercialism. This we know now, and we have developed a new and remarkable power of seeing and enjoying all the genuine art of the past. This power is part of the historical sense which is itself modern. In the past, until the nineteenth century, very few people could see any beauty or meaning in any art of the past that did not resemble the art of their own time and country. The whole art of the Middle Ages, for instance, was thought to be merely barbarous until the Gothic revival, and so was the art of all the past so far as it was known, except the later art of Greece and Rome. For our ancestors' taste did indeed happen as art happened, and they could not escape from the taste which circumstances imposed on them; any art that was not according to that taste was for them as it were in an unknown tongue. But we have made this great progress in taste, at least, if not in the production of art, that we can understand nearly all artistic languages, and that what used to be called classical art has lost its old superstitious prestige for us. Not only can we enjoy the art of our own Middle Ages; but many of us can enjoy and understand just as well the great art of Egypt and China, and can see as clearly when that art is good or bad as if it were of our own time. We have, in fact, in the matter of artistic appreciation gained the freedom of all the ages, and this is a thing that has never, so far as we know, happened before in the history of the human mind.

But still this freedom of all the ages has not enabled us to produce a great art of our own. There are some, indeed, who think that it has hindered us from doing so, that we are becoming merely universal connoisseurs who can criticize anything and produce nothing. We have the most wonderful museums that ever were, and the most wonderful power of enjoying all that is in them, but, with all our riches from the past, our present is barren; and it is barren because our rich men would rather pay great prices for past treasures than encourage artists to produce masterpieces now. If that is so, if that is all that is coming to us from our freedom of all the ages, there is certainly not progress in it. Better that we should produce and enjoy the humblest genuine art of our own than that we should continue in this learned impotence.

But this power of enjoying the art of all ages, though it certainly has had some unfortunate results, must be good in itself. It is sympathy, and that is always better than indifference or antipathy. It is knowledge, and that is always better than ignorance. And we have to remember that it has existed only for a short time and is, therefore, not yet to be judged by its fruits. We are still gasping at all the artistic treasures of the past that have been revealed to us like a new world; and still they are being revealed to our new perceptions. Only in the last ten years, for instance, have we discovered that Chinese painting is the rival of Italian, or that the golden age of Chinese pottery was centuries before the time of that Chinese porcelain which we have hitherto admired so much. The knowledge, the delight, is still being gathered in with both hands. It is too soon to look for its effects upon the mind of Europe.

But it is not the result of mere barren connoisseurship or scholasticism. Rather it is a new renaissance, a new effort of the human spirit, and an effort after what? An effort to exert the human will in the matter of art far more consciously than it has exerted ever before. It is to be noted that Morris himself, the man who first told us that we must exert our wills in art, was also himself eager in the discovery and enjoyment of all kinds of art in the past. He had his prejudices, the prejudices of a very wilful man and a working artist. 'What can I see in Rome,' he said, 'that I cannot see in Whitechapel?' But he enjoyed the art of most ages and countries more than he enjoyed his prejudices. He had the historical sense in art to a very high degree. He knew what the artist long dead meant by his work as if it were a poem in his own language, and from the art of the past which he loved he saw what was wrong with the art of our time. So did Ruskin and so do many now. Further we are not in the least content to admire the art of the past without producing any of our own. There is incessant restless experiment, incessant speculation about aesthetics, incessant effort to apply them to the actual production of art, in fact to exert the conscious human will upon art as it has never been exerted before.

So, if one wished in a sentence to state the peculiarity of the last century in the history of art, one would say that it is the first age in which men have rebelled against the process of decadence in art, in which they have been completely conscious of that process and have tried to arrest it by a common effort of will. We cannot yet say that that effort has succeeded, but we cannot say either that it has failed. We may be discontented with the art of our own time, but at least we must allow that it is, with all its faults, extravagances, morbidities and blind experiments, utterly unlike the art of any former age of decadence known to us. There may be confusion and anarchy, but there is not mere pedantry and stagnation. Artists perhaps are over-conscious, always following some new prophet, but at least there is the conviction of sin in them, which is exactly what all the decadent artists of the past have lacked.

The artistic decadence of the past which is most familiar to us is that of the later Graeco-Roman art. It was a long process which began at least as early as the age of Alexander and continued until the fall of the Western Roman Empire and afterwards, until, indeed, the decadent classical art was utterly supplanted by the art which we call Romanesque and Byzantine, and which seems to us now at its best to be as great as any art that has ever been.

But a hundred years ago this Romanesque and Byzantine art was thought to be only a barbarous corruption of the classical art. For then the classical art even in its last feebleness still kept its immense and unique prestige. Shelley said that the effect of Christianity seemed to have been to destroy the last remains of pure taste, and he said this when he had been looking at the great masterpieces of Byzantine mosaic at Ravenna. Now we know with an utter certainty that he was wrong. He was himself a great artist, but to him there was only one rational and beautiful and civilized art, and that was the decadent Graeco-Roman art. To him works like the Apollo Belvedere were the masterpieces of the world, and all other art was good as it resembled them. He and in fact most people of his time were still overawed by the immense complacency of that art. They had not the historical sense at all. They had no notion of certain psychological facts about art which are now familiar to every educated man. They did not know that art cannot be good unless it expresses the character of the people who produce it; that characterless art, however accomplished, is uninteresting; that there may be more life and so more beauty in the idol of an African savage than in the Laocoon.

This later Greek and Graeco-Roman art was doomed to inevitable decay because of its immense complacency. The artists had discovered, as they thought, the right way to produce works of art, and they went on producing them in that way without asking themselves whether they meant anything by them or whether they enjoyed them. They knew, in fact, what was the proper thing to do just as conventional people now know what is the proper thing to talk about at a tea party; and their art was as uninteresting as the conversation of such people. In both the talk and the art there is no expression of real values and so no expression of real will. The past lies heavy upon both. So people have talked, so artists have worked, and so evidently people must talk and artists must work for evermore.

Now we have been threatened with just the same kind of artistic decadence, and we are still threatened with it; so that it would be very easy to argue that, when men reach a certain stage in that organization of their lives which we call civilization, they must inevitably fall into artistic decadence. The Roman Empire did attain to a high stage of such organization, and all the life went out of its art. We have reached perhaps a still higher or at least more elaborate stage of it, and the life has gone or is going out of our art. It has become even more mechanical than the Graeco-Roman. We, too, have lost the power of expressing ourselves, our real values, our real will, in it; and we had better submit to that impotence and not make a fuss about it. Indeed art really is an activity proper to a more childish stage of the human mind, and we shall do well not to waste our time and energy upon it. That is the only way in which we can be superior to the Graeco-Roman world in the matter of art. We can give it up altogether or rather put it all into museums as a curiosity of the past to be studied for historical and scientific purposes.

But I have only to say that to prove that we will not be contented with such a counsel of despair. The Romans went on producing art, even if it was bad art, and we shall certainly go on producing art whether it is good or bad. We have produced an immense mass of bad art, worse perhaps than any that the Roman world produced. But there is this difference between us and the Romans, that we are not content with it. We have the conviction of artistic sin and they had not. Therefore we do not think that their example need make us despair. They were not exercising their will on their art. It was to them what a purely conventional morality is to a morally decadent people. It went from bad to worse, just as conventional morals do, when no man arises and says: 'This is wrong, although you think it right. I know what is right from my own sense of values, and I will do it in spite of you.' So far as we know, there were no rebels of that kind in the art of the Graeco-Roman world. But our world of art is full of such rebels and has been ever since the artistic debacle at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In fact the chief and the unique characteristic of the art of the last hundred years has been the constant succession of artistic rebels. All our greatest artists have been men who were determined to exercise their own wills in their art, whatever the mass of men might think of it. And what has always happened is that they have been first bitterly abused and then passionately praised. This, so far as I know, has never happened before. There have been rebel artists like Rembrandt, but only a few of them. Most great artists before the nineteenth century have been admired in their own time. But in the nineteenth century, and more and more towards the end of it, the great artists have had to conquer the world with their rebellion, they have had to exercise their own individual wills against the common convention. And it seems to us now the mark of the great artist so to exercise his individual will, so to rebel and conquer the world with his rebellion, even if he kills himself in the process. Think of Constable and even Turner, of our pre-Raphaelites, and above all of nearly all the great French artists, of Millet, of Manet, of Cezanne, Gauguin, of Rodin himself, who has conquered the world now, but only in his old age. Think of Beethoven, of Schubert, of Wagner, and of all the rebel musicians of to-day. But in the past the great artists, Michelangelo, Titian, even the great innovator Giorgione; Mozart, Bach, Handel; none of these were thought of as rebels. They had not to conquer the world against its will. They came into the world, and the world knew them. So, we may be sure, the decadent artists of the Graeco-Roman world were not rebels. There they were like Michelangelo and Raphael, if they were like them in nothing else. If they had been rebels we might not yawn at their works now.

Now, clearly, this rebellion is not so good a thing as the harmony between the artist and his public which has prevailed in all great ages of art. But it is better than the harmony of dull and complacent convention which prevailed in the Graeco-Roman decadence. For it means that our artists are not content with such complacence, that they will not accept decadence as an inevitable process. And the fact that we do passionately admire them for their rebellion as soon as we understand what it means, that this rebellion seems to us a glorious and heroic thing, is a proof that we, the public, also are not content to sink into the Graeco-Roman complacency. We may stone our prophets at first, but like the Hebrews, we produce prophets as well as priests, that is to say academicians. And we treasure their works as the Hebrews treasured the books of the prophets.

Art, in fact, is a human activity in which we try to exercise our wills. We are aware that it is threatened with decadence by the mere process of our civilization, that it is much more difficult for us to produce living art than it was for our forefathers of the Middle Ages. But still we are not content to produce dead art. Half unconsciously we are making the effort to exercise our wills upon our art, as upon our science, our morals, our politics, to avoid decadence in art as we try to avoid it in other human activities; and this effort is the great experiment, the peculiar feature, of the art of the last century.

It is an effort not merely aesthetic but also intellectual. There is a great interest in aesthetics and a constant and growing effort to charge them with actual experience and to put them to some practical end. In the past they have been the most backward, the most futile and barren, kind of philosophy because men wrote about them who had never really experienced works of art and who saw no connexion between their philosophy and the production of works of art. They talked about the nature of the beautiful, as schoolmen talked about the nature of God. And they knew no more about the nature of the beautiful from their own experience of it than schoolmen knew about the nature of God. But now men are interested in the beautiful because they miss it so much in the present works of men and because they so passionately desire it; and their speculation has the aim of recovering it. So aesthetics, whatever some artists in their peculiar and pontifical narrowness may say, is of great importance now; they are part of the effort which the modern world is making to exercise its will in the production of works of art, and they are bound, if that effort is successful, to have more and more effect upon that production.

But is that effort going to be successful? That is a question which no one can answer yet. But my object is to insist that in our age, because of its effort, an effort which has never been made so consciously and resolutely before, there is a possibility of a progress in art of the same nature as progress in other human activities. If we can escape from what has seemed to some men this inexorable process of decadence in art, we shall have accomplished one of the greatest achievements of the human will. We shall have redeemed art from the tyranny of mere fate.

What we have to do now is to understand what it is that causes decadence in art, we have to apply a conscious science to the production of it. We have to see what are the social causes that produce excellence and decay in it. And we have made a great beginning in this. For we are all aware that art is not an isolated thing, that it does not merely happen, as Whistler said. We know that it is a symptom of something right or wrong with the whole mind of man and with the circumstances that affect that mind. We know at last that there is a connexion between the art of man and his intellect and his conscience. It was because William Morris saw that connexion that he, from being a pure artist, became a socialist and spoke at street corners. Such a change, such a waste and perversion as it seemed to many, would have been impossible in any former age. It was possible and inevitable, it was a natural process for Morris in the nineteenth century, because he was determined to exercise his will upon art, just as men in the past had exercised their will upon religion or politics; because he no longer believed that art happened as the weather happens and that the artist is a charming but irresponsible child swayed merely by the caprices of his own private subconsciousness. Was he right or wrong? I myself firmly believe that he was right. That if man has a will at all, if he is not a mere piece of matter moulded by circumstances, he has a will in art as in all other things. And, further, if he has a common will which can express itself in his other activities, in religion or politics, that common will must also be able to express itself in art. It has not hitherto done so consciously, because man in all periods of artistic success has been content to succeed without asking why he succeeded, and in all periods of artistic failure he has been content to fail without asking why he has failed. We have been for long living in a period of artistic failure, but we have asked, we are asking always more insistently, why we fail. And that is where our time differs from any former period of artistic decadence, why, I believe, it is not a period of decadence but one of experiment, and of experiment which will not be wasted, however much it may seem at the moment to fail. But if out of all this conscious effort and experiment we do arrest the process of decadence, if we do pass from failure to success, then we shall have accomplished a progress in art such as has never been accomplished before even in the greatest ages. For whereas men have never been able to learn from the experience of those ages, whereas the Greeks and the men of the thirteenth century have not taught men how to avoid decadence in art, we and our children will teach them how to avoid it. We shall then have given a security to art such as it has never enjoyed before; and we shall do that by applying science to it, by using the conscious intelligence upon it.

We may fail, of course, but even so our effort will not have been in vain. And some future age in happier circumstances may profit by it, and achieve that progress, that application of science to art, which we are now attempting.

Many people, especially artists, tell us that the attempt is a mere absurdity. But ignorance even about art need not be eternal. Ignorance is eternal only when it is despairing or contented. Twenty years ago many people said that men never would be able to fly, yet they are flying now because they were resolved to fly. So we are more and more resolved to have great art. Every year we feel the lack of it more and more. Every year more people exercise their wills more and more consciously in the effort to achieve it. This, I repeat, has never happened before in the history of the world. And the consequence is that our art, what real art we have, is unlike any that there has been in the world before. It is so strange and so rebellious that we ourselves are shocked and amazed by it. Much of it, no doubt, is merely strange and rebellious, as much of early Christianity was merely strange and rebellious and so provoked the resentment and persecution of self-respecting pagans. Every great effort of the human mind attracts those who merely desire their own salvation, and so it is with the artistic effort now. There are cubists and futurists and post-impressionists who are as silly as human beings can be, because they hope to attain to artistic salvation by rushing to extremes. They are religious egotists, in fact, and nothing can be more disagreeable than a religious egotist. But there were no doubt many of them among the early Christians. Yet Christianity was a great creative religious effort which came because life and truth had died out of the religions of the past, and men could not endure to live without life and truth in their religion. So now they cannot endure to live without life and truth in their art. They are determined to have an art which shall express all that they have themselves experienced of the beauty of the universe, which shall not merely utter platitudes of the past about that beauty.

So far perhaps there is little but the effort at expression, an effort strange, contorted, self-conscious. You can say your worst about it and laugh at all its failures. Yet they are failures different in kind from the artistic failures of the past, for they are failures of the conscious will, not of mere complacency. And it is such failures in all human activities that prepare the way for successes.

Let us remember then, always, that art is a human activity, not a fairy chance that happens to the mind of man now and again. And let us remember, too, that it does not consist merely of pictures or statues or of music performed in concert-rooms. It is, indeed, rather a quality of all things made by man, a quality that may be good or bad but which is always in them. That is one of the facts about art that was discovered in the nineteenth century, when men began to miss the excellence of art in all their works and to wish passionately that its excellence might return to them. And this discovery which was then made about art was of the greatest practical importance. For then men became aware that they could not have good pictures or architecture or sculpture unless the quality of art became good again in all their works. So much they learnt about the science of art. They began, or some of them did, to think about their furniture and cottages and pots and pans and spoons and forks, and even about their tombstones, as well as about what had been called their works of art. And in all these humbler things an advance, a conscious resolute wilful advance, has been made. We begin to see when and also why spoons and forks and pots and pans are good or bad. We are less at the mercy of chance or blind fashion in such things than our fathers were. We know our vulgarity and the naughtiness of our own hearts. The advance, the self-knowledge, is not general yet, but it grows more general every year and the conviction of sin spreads. No doubt, like all conviction of sin, it often produces unpleasant results. The consciously artistic person often has a more irritating house than his innocently philistine grandfather had. So, no doubt, many simple pagan people were much nicer than those early Christians who were out for their own salvation. But there was progress in Christianity and there was none in paganism.

The title of this book is Progress and History, and it may justly be complained that the progress of which I have been talking is not historic, but a progress that has not yet happened and may never happen at all. But that I think is a defect of my particular branch of the subject. Progress in art, if progress is anything more than a natural process of growth to be followed inevitably by a natural process of decay, has never yet happened in art; but there is now an effort to make it happen, an effort to exercise the human will in art more completely and consciously than it has ever been exercised before. Therefore I could do nothing but attempt to describe that effort and to speculate upon its success.



X

PROGRESS IN SCIENCE

F.S. MARVIN

'L'Esprit travaillant sur les donnees de l'experience.'

The French phrase, neater as usual than our own, may be taken as the starting-point in our discussion. We shall put aside such questions as what an experience is, or how much the mind itself supplies in each experience, or what, if anything, is the not-mind upon which the mind works. We must leave something for the chapter on philosophy; and the present chapter is primarily historical. Having defined what we mean by science, we are to consider at what stage in history the working of the mind on experience can be called scientific, in what great strides science has leapt forward since its definite formation, and in what ways this growth of science has affected general progress, both by its action on the individual and on the welfare and unity of mankind.

Our French motto must be qualified in order to give us precision in our definition and a starting-point in history for science in the strict sense. In a general sense the action of the mind upon the given in experience has been going on from the beginning of animal life. But science, strictly so-called, does not appear till men have been civilized and settled in large communities for a considerable time. We cannot ascribe 'science' to the isolated savage gnawing bones in his cave, though the germs are there, in every observation that he makes of the world around him and every word that he utters to his mates. But we may begin to speak of science when we reach those large and ordered societies which are found in the great river-basins and sedentary civilizations of East and West, especially in Egypt and Chaldea.

When we turn to the quality of the thing itself, we note in the first place that while science may be said to begin with mere description, it implies from the first a certain degree of order and accuracy, and this order and accuracy increase steadily as science advances. It is thus a type of progress, for it is a constant growth in the fullness, accuracy and simplification of our experience. From the dawn of science, therefore, man must have acquired standards and instruments of measurement and means of handing on his observations to others. Thus writing must have been invented. But in the second place, there is always involved in this orderly description, so far as it is scientific, the element of prediction. The particular description is not scientific. 'I saw a bird fly' is not a scientific description, however accurate; but 'The bird flies by stretching out its wings' is. It contains that causal connexion or element of generality which enables us to predict.

Before entering on a historical sketch of the most perfect example of human progress, it is of the first importance to realize its social foundation. This is the key-note, and it connects science throughout with the other aspects of our subject. Knowledge depends upon the free intercourse of mind with mind, and man advances with the increase and better direction of his knowledge. But when we consider the implications of any generalization which we can call 'a law of nature' the social co-operation involved becomes still more apparent. Geometry and astronomy—the measurement of the earth and the measurement of the heavens—dispute the honour of the first place in the historical order. Both, of course, involved the still more fundamental conception of number and the acceptance of some unit for measurement. Now in each case and at every step a long previous elaboration is implied of intellectual conventions and agreements—conscious and unconscious—between many minds stretching back to the beginnings of conscious life: the simplest element of thought involves the co-operation of individual minds in a common product. Language is such a common product of social life and it prepares the ground for science. But science, as the exact formulation of general truths, attains a higher degree of social value, because it rises above the idioms of person or race and is universally acceptable in form and essence. Such is the intrinsic nature of the process, and the historical circumstances of its beginnings make it clear. It was the quick mind of the Greek which acted as the spark to fire the trains of thought and observation which had been accumulating for ages through the agency of the priests in Egypt and Babylonia. The Greeks lived and travelled between the two centres, and their earliest sages and philosophers were men of the most varied intercourse and occupation. Their genius was fed by a wide sympathy and an all-embracing curiosity. No other people could have demonstrated so well the social nature of science from its inception, and they were planting in a soil well prepared. In Egypt conspicuously and in Chaldea also to a less extent there had been a social order which before the convulsions of the last millennium B.C. had lasted substantially unchanged for scores of centuries. This order was based upon a religious discipline which connected the sovereigns on earth with the divine power ruling men from the sky. Hence the supreme importance of the priesthood and their study of the movements of the heavenly bodies. The calendar, which they were the first to frame, was thus not only or even primarily a work of practical utility but of religious meaning and obligation. The priests had to fix in advance the feast days of gods and kings by astronomical prediction. Their standards and their means of measurement were rough approximations. Thus the 360 degrees into which the Babylonians taught us to divide the circle are thought to have been the nearest round number to the days of the year. The same men were also capable of the more accurate discovery that the side of a hexagon inscribed in a circle was equal to the radius and gave us our division of sixty minutes and sixty seconds with all its advantages for calculation. In Egypt, if the surveyors were unaware of the true relation between a triangle and the rectangle on the same base, they had yet established the carpenter's rule of 3, 4 and 5 for the sides of a right-angled triangle.

How much the Greeks drew from the ancient priesthoods we shall never know, nor how far the priests had advanced in those theories of general relations which we call scientific. But one or two general conclusions as to this initial stage of scientific preparation may well be drawn.

One is that a certain degree of settlement and civilization was necessary for the birth of science. This we find in these great theocracies, where sufficient wealth enabled a class of leisured and honoured men to devote themselves to joint labour in observing nature and recording their observations. Another point is clear, namely, that the results of these early observations, crude as they were, contributed powerfully to give stability to the societies in which they arose. The younger Pliny points out later the calming effect of Greek astronomy on the minds of the Eastern peoples, and we are bound to carry back the same idea into the ancient settled communities where astronomy began and where so remarkable an order prevailed for so long during its preparation.

But however great the value we allow to the observations of the priests, it is to the Ionian Greeks that we owe the definite foundation of science in the proper sense; it was they who gave the raw material the needed accuracy and generality of application, A comparison of the societies in the nearer East to which we have referred, with the history of China affords the strongest presumption of this. In the later millenniums B.C. the Chinese were in many points ahead of the Babylonians and Egyptians. They had made earlier predictions of eclipses and more accurate observations of the distance of the sun from the zenith at various places. They had, too, seen the advantages of a decimal system both in weights and measures and in the calculations of time. But no Greek genius came to build the house with the bricks that they had fashioned, and in spite of the achievements of the Chinese they remained until our own day the type in the world of a settled and contented, although unprogressive, conservatism.