The Arts & Crafts Movement. Oscar Lovell Triggs

Morris, Philip Webb and John Henry Dearle (for the design) and the Merton Abbey Workshop (for the production), The Forest, 1887.

      Tapestry, woven wool and silk on a cotton warp, 121.9 × 452 cm.

      Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

      The ground is now cleared for understanding Ruskin’s teachings respecting industry. He had proclaimed that art must spring from the people, that its test was its lowliness and its universality. He now reversed the proposition, and announced the necessity of ennobling the people through association with art – an association to be attained by means of their labour. The separation that had occurred between the artist and the artisan had worked injury to both kinds of products. The artists had become effeminate because they were not used to handling rough materials; workmen had become debased because they could not exercise their faculties in designing. The problem was to universalise art and to ennoble labour. Whether labour was dignified or not depended upon its character; whether rough and exhausting or with elements of recreation; whether done under conditions of slavery or freedom. Some work is degrading by its physical conditions; other work is dangerous to health; still other work destroys moral character. Labour can be dignified only as it has the character of dignity. In The Seven Lamps it is written that “objects are noble or ignoble in proportion to the amount of the energy of that mind which has visibly been employed upon them.” But fullness of life involves a large degree of freedom.

      The sight of a degraded workman caused Ruskin the deepest gloom, while that of a free workman aroused his highest enthusiasm.

      He observed and commended in the free workman the hand’s muscular firmness and subtlety, the brain’s instantaneously selective and ordinant energy, the will’s unceasing governance, and the whole being’s joyful play and exertion – a joy such as the eagle seems to take in the wave of his wings. His defense of Gothic architecture as against the Greek is based upon the nature of the Gothic as involving the liberty of the workman in its design and execution, and he went so far as to assert that, in order to raise up the workman of the present day into a living soul, the whole system of Greek architecture as now practised – the system, that is, of ordered and deindividualised work – must be annihilated. To produce a free workman education and science should strive, for surely these are made for man and not man for them. The modern industrial problem is to decrease the number of employments involving degradation, and to raise the character of others by allowing the utmost possible freedom to the workmen.

      William Morris, Wild Tulip, 1884.

      Pattern for wallpaper.

      Dining Room, Wightwick Manor.

      Wightwick Bank.

      Richard Norman Shaw (architect) and various designers, The Yellow Bedroom, 1883–1884.

      Cragside House, Garden and Estate, Rothbury.

      William Morris, Single Stem, c. 1905.

      Wallpaper, colour print from woodblocks.

      Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

      Another fundamental proposition in Ruskin’s theory of industry is that all good work must be free hand-work. Probably Ruskin would admit to himself that his antagonism to the machine was too extreme; but to cry out against the machine is one way of insisting upon the value of human life. If the machine was always employed in the service of man, to relieve him of drudgery and of all work debasing in its nature, if it always did work for him, and produce the things he needed, little could be said against it. But in the service of mammon and greed, compelling men to be its slave and lackey, it is anything but a lovely spectacle, and to Ruskin’s eyes it appeared in the guise of a monster and not of a minister. And there is this to be said, that as soon as the principles of art are applied to industry the machine ceases to have much importance, and we can agree with the twenty-fifth aphorism of The Seven Lamps, that “All good work must be free hand-work.”

      The social wrong wrought by division of labour is another phase of Ruskin’s arraignment of current industrialism. A profitable device from the point of view of production, considered as mere quantity, division of labour, especially in association with machinery and forced by competition, does injury to the producer and eventually to the consumer. It is a social wrong to the workman because it tends to degrade him to a mechanism, exercises but a single set of faculties, and dissociates him from the completed product, a knowledge of which alone makes his labour rational. “It is not the labour that is divided, but the men – divided into mere segments and crumbs of life.” It is a social wrong to the consumer because production, though increased in quantity, is lessened in quality, and the true utility of the goods is correspondingly lowered. In other words, the mercantile value of machinery and division of labour does not coincide with their social value, which is the true economy. “It comes to this,” says J. A. Hobsors, remarking upon this point, “that only good work can produce real utilities; excessive division of labour, in degrading the character of labour, degrades the quality of commodities, and a progress estimated quantitatively in increase of low-class material forms of wealth is not true progress.” The demand of art is for a whole man, a rational process, and a valuable result. Its expression is qualitative and not quantitative. And this explains why artists and those associated in art production are the first to protest against an industrial system that enforces bad workmanship.

      Other aspects of his doctrine of work are presented in an early essay on pre-Raphaelitism and though this special passage was written with reference to the artist, it applies to all workers:

      “It may be proved, with much certainty, that God intends no man to live in this world without working; but it seems to me no less evident that he intends every man to be happy in his work.

      Richard Norman Shaw (architect) and Morris & Co. (for the stained-glass windows), library, 1883–1884.

      Carved oak ceiling and wainscoting.

      Cragside House, Garden and Estate, Rothbury.

      William Morris, Wandle (name of the river next to Morris’ workshop), 1884.

      Indigo-discharged and block-printed cotton, 165 × 92 cm.

      Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

      Richard Norman Shaw (architect) and his assistant, W. R. Lethby (for the design of the chimneypiece), drawing room, 1883–1884.

      Carved Italian marble inglenook and fireplace.

      Cragside House, Garden and Estate, Rothbury.

      It is written, ‘in the sweat of thy brow,’ but it was never written ‘in the breaking of thine heart,’ thou shalt eat bread; and I find that, as on the one hand, infinite misery is caused by idle people, who both fail in doing what was appointed for them to do, and set in motion various springs of mischief in matters in which they should have had no concern, so on the other hand, no small misery is caused by overworked and unhappy people, in the dark views which they necessarily take up themselves, and force upon others, of work itself. Were it not so, I believe the fact of their being unhappy is in itself a violation of divine law, and sign of some kind of folly or sin in their way of life. Now in order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: they must be fit for it; they must not do too much of it; and they must have a sense of success in it – not a doubtful sense, such as needs some testimony of other people for its confirmation, but a sure sense, or rather knowledge, that so much work has been done well, and faithfully done, whatever the world may say or think about it. So that in order that a man maybe happy, it is necessary that he should not only be capable of his work, but a good judge of his work.”

      In other words a certain amount of