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An Essay on Morals A Science of Philip Wylie

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.That the ordinary workman should or could be an artist, could be a man whom we could trust with any sort of responsibility for the work he does, or proud of anything but that kind of craftsmanship which means skill and attention as a machine operator (and that responsibility is a purely moral one) is an idea now widely held to be ridiculous; and the widespreadness of this opinion proves my point as well as I could wish.When I say no ordinary workman is an artist, no one will say I am lying; on the contrary, everyone will say: Of course not.¶ Such is the state of affairs, and its consequences should be obvious.That they are not is the cause of the muddle in which manufacture is at present to be found.For in a world in which all workmen but a few survivals from pre-industrial times, a number so small as to be now quite negligible, are as irresponsible as hammers and chisels & tools of transport, it should be obvious that certain kinds of work which were the products proper to men for whom work was the natural expression of their intellectual convictions, needs & sympathies, as it was of those who bought it, are no longer either natural or desirable.If you are going to employ men to build a wall, and if those men are to be treated simply as tools, it is imbecility to make such a design for your wall as depends upon your having masons who are artists.The 19th century architects’ practice of designing ornamental walls and drawing out full size on paper every detail of ornament is now at last seen to be ridiculous even by architects; it is now understood that ornament is a kind of exuberance and that you cannot be exuberant by proxy; nineteenth century attempts at so being are desolate, and a world which desires pleasure more than anything else finds itself surrounded by things that please no one but fools.¶ It is now clearly understood that modern building must not rely upon ornament, it must rely simply upon grandeur, that is integrity and size.There are things which can be measured; with these alone can the modern architect, employing the modern workman, concern himself.Of beauty there need be no lack, for the beautiful is that which pleases being seen, and those things are pleasing when seen which are as nearly perfect as may be in their adaptation to function.Such is the beauty of bones, of beetles, of well-built railway arches, of factory chimneys (when they have the sense to leave out the ornamental frills at the top), of the new concrete bridge across the Rhine at Cologne, of plain brick walls.¶ There is nothing specifically human about such things or in such beauty.They are not redolent of man’s delight in himself or of his love of God.But that is neither here nor there.We have elected to order manufacture upon inhuman lines; why should we ask for humanity in the product? Whether the present system will or can endure is simply irrelevant to this essay.The manifold injustices and miseries which seem to be its accompaniment may or may not be inevitable, & in any case are not here our concern; the conditions under which things are made, the material conditions, the technical conditions, are alone relevant.We are simply concerned to discover what kind of things can be made under a system of manufacture which, whatever its ethical sanction or lack of sanction, is certainly the system we have, the system of which we are proud and the system few desire to alter.¶ It is necessary to say a few more words about the word ‘artist’.We affirm that the word Art means skill, that a work of art is a work of skill, and an artist one who is skilful at making things.It would appear therefore that all things made are works of art, for skill is required in the making of anything.And in spite of industrialism this remains true.But, as we have said, the ordinary workman has been reduced to the level of a mere tool used by someone else.However much skill he may have in his fingers and conscientiousness in his mind, he can no longer be regarded as an artist, because his skill is not that of a man making things; he is simply a tool used by a designer and the designer is alone the artist.¶ Another thing that must be made clear is that we are not at all oblivious of the real distinction between what the ordinary person nowadays calls art, and the other things.Picture-painting, sculpture, music, are indeed art par excellence, but that they alone are now called art is not because they alone are or can be art, but because they alone to-day are the work of men not only skilful, and not tools in the hands of another, but workmen responsible for the things they make.¶ Even those higher flights of human skill, about which the critics make so much trouble, those paintings, sculptures, & compositions of music in which human emotion seems to play so large a part that it seems as though emotion were the substance of such works, even these are things demanding skill in their making, and we prefer to call them ‘Fine Art’ to distinguish them, rather than to deny the name of Art to things whose primary purpose is to supply merely physical conveniences.¶ The ordinary workman, then, is not an artist; he is a tool in the hands of another.He is a morally sensitive tool, but now, in spite of the continued survival of the old fashioned workman (tho’ such survivals are necessarily becoming rarer in the ranks of ordinary workmen), he is not intellectually sensitive.It is clear, therefore, that no demand must be made upon him which calls for anything but good will [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]