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
This is but a very bald and brief statement of the kind of extension I
mean; but what I want to put to you is this, that wherever a nation has
turned from agriculture to trade, there, if you want national Art you
must invade those trade conditions and set up your standard of honour,
not outside, but in the trades themselves; you must get hold of those
who are going to be your workers and craftsmen and put into them (by
exhibiting to them manual labour under right human conditions) the old
craftsman’s pride which existed in the days of the Guilds, when the
trade unions were not merely organisations to secure good wages, but
to secure good work, and to maintain a standard of honour in labour.
But you must not stop there. To make your training in any true sense
national you must make it characteristic, or rather it must make
itself. It must aim at bringing out racial and local character; and
before it can do so we must recover that love of locality which we have
so largely lost. A mere multiplication of schools and classes where a
departmental system evolved at some city centre is put in force, is not
national: it is only metropolitan, perhaps only departmental. You can
put such a system, in a certain superficial way, into the heads and
hands of your local students, but you cannot put it into the blood.
Unless your Art training enters into and links up the lives of those
you would teach with a larger sense of citizenship, it isn’t national.
They won’t carry it away with them into their daily pursuits, they
won’t make a spontaneous and instinctive application of it; they will
only come to it at class-hours, and, when class-hours are over, quit
again. I have spoken of the necessity of a standard of honour toward
labour, but we need also a standard of honour toward life. It is still,
you see, values--life-values--that I am trying to get at as a basis for
Art.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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