He seemed troubled and prayed us
to go back with him to his lecture, which a few of us did, and
there he spoke to us not on art this time but on life, saying that
it seemed to him to be wrong that all the best physique and
strength of the young men in England should be spent aimlessly on
cricket ground or river, without any result at all except that if
one rowed well one got a pewter-pot, and if one made a good score,
a cane-handled bat. He thought, he said, that we should be working
at something that would do good to other people, at something by
which we might show that in all labour there was something noble.
Well, we were a good deal moved, and said we would do anything he
wished. So he went out round Oxford and found two villages, Upper
and Lower Hinksey, and between them there lay a great swamp, so
that the villagers could not pass from one to the other without
many miles of a round. And when we came back in winter he asked us
to help him to make a road across this morass for these village
people to use. So out we went, day after day, and learned how to
lay levels and to break stones, and to wheel barrows along a plank
- a very difficult thing to do. And Ruskin worked with us in the
mist and rain and mud of an Oxford winter, and our friends and our
enemies came out and mocked us from the bank. We did not mind it
much then, and we did not mind it afterwards at all, but worked
away for two months at our road. And what became of the road?
Well, like a bad lecture it ended abruptly - in the middle of the
swamp. Ruskin going away to Venice, when we came back for the next
term there was no leader, and the 'diggers,' as they called us,
fell asunder. And I felt that if there was enough spirit amongst
the young men to go out to such work as road-making for the sake of
a noble ideal of life, I could from them create an artistic
movement that might change, as it has changed, the face of England.
So I sought them out - leader they would call me - but there was no
leader: we were all searchers only and we were bound to each other
by noble friendship and by noble art. There was none of us idle:
poets most of us, so ambitious were we: painters some of us, or
workers in metal or modellers, determined that we would try and
create for ourselves beautiful work: for the handicraftsman
beautiful work, for those who love us poems and pictures, for those
who love us not epigrams and paradoxes and scorn.
Well, we have done something in England and we will do something
more. Now, I do not want you, believe me, to ask your brilliant
young men, your beautiful young girls, to go out and make a road on
a swamp for any village in America, but I think you might each of
you have some art to practise.
We must have, as Emerson said, a mechanical craft for our culture,
a basis for our higher accomplishments in the work of our hands -
the uselessness of most people's hands seems to me one of the most
unpractical things. 'No separation from labour can be without some
loss of power or truth to the seer,' says Emerson again. The
heroism which would make on us the impression of Epaminondas must
be that of a domestic conqueror. The hero of the future is he who
shall bravely and gracefully subdue this Gorgon of fashion and of
convention.
When you have chosen your own part, abide by it, and do not weakly
try and reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be
the common nor the common the heroic. Congratulate yourself if you
have done something strange and extravagant and broken the monotony
of a decorous age.
And lastly, let us remember that art is the one thing which Death
cannot harm.
