Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook: Ten Lectures on Social SubjectsHousman, Laurence
Philosophy
Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook: Ten Lectures on Social Subjects
Housman, Laurence
Social ethics; Social sciences
But the man, or woman, who embarks whole-heartedly on Art-training
must in the end find himself involved in a struggle for the recovery
of those true social values which have been lost (or the acquisition
of those which are as yet unrealised) and for the substitution, among
other things, of true for false economics. He cannot afford to live
a life of aloof specialisation, when the conditions out of which he
derives and into which he is throwing his work are of a complementarily
disturbing kind. If, that is to say, the give-and-take conditions
between artistic supply and social demand have become vitiated, if
the conditions of the market, or of society, are unfavourable to the
reception of products of true worth, then the artist must to some
extent be an active party in the struggle for getting things set right.
That does not mean that, if he has a gift for the designing of
stage-scenery, he should necessarily be involved in a struggle to
secure a good drainage system (though even that should have an interest
for him) but it does mean very much that he should be tremendously
interested in the education of his own and the public mind to the point
of receiving good drama rather than bad, in order that his art may have
worthy material to work upon; and as good drama largely arises from a
lively conscience and the quickening in the community of new ideas, he
will wish his public a keen and open mind on all social questions.
Similarly a man who designs for textile fabrics should be very much
concerned indeed in getting cleanly conditions and pure air in the
towns and dwelling-houses where his designs have to live and look
beautiful, or grow ugly and rot. And there you get set before you in
small, the opposition between the interests of Art and the supposed
interests of trade. It is--or it is supposed to be--in the interest of
trade that things should wear out or get broken, and be replaced by
other things. It is in the interest of Art that they should not wear
out, that they should last; that everything worthy which is given to
man’s hand to do should have secured to it the greatest possible length
of life. And the reason is that the artist, if he be a true artist,
realises the value of things, the life value; that he is on the side of
creation and not of destruction, of preservation and not of waste. He
has within his nature an instinct that the greatest possible longevity
is the right condition for all manual labour; that when a man sets his
hand to a thing he should have it as his main aim to give good value,
to make it so that it will endure. And in this connection I would like
to substitute for the words “art training” the word “education.” It
is in the interests of education that things should be made to last,
and that only things should be made of any lasting material that
deserve lasting. Nothing should be produced the value of which will
become negligible before it is honestly worn out. And so it is in the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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