WILLIAM L. PRICE OF THE ROSE VALLEY SHOP
Man at first was a naked,
cold, hungry animal in a cold and strenuous world: and out of that,
because of that, man is becoming worthwhile. That
very weakness, that very nakedness, tested the ingenuity of
man—compelled him to invent. Out of such invention two things came to
him—in the first place, a great joy in the sense of creation; in the
second place, a development because of that work. Man then endeavored
to express his new point of view; because with his development came a
new outlook, a new meaning to the rolling cloud and to the rushing
water and to the lightning—to the song of the birds; and so art was
born.
Art is not, as has been said, "the visible evidence of man's joy in his work," because it is that very joy and that very work itself. If art was the visible evidence of man's joy in his work. then the rich would indeed—as they think they do—possess the hoarded treasures of the world; whereas they but gather the crumbs that fall from the artist's table. The real joy, the real good there is in art (and by art I mean the art of making the dishpan as much as a statue of Phidias)—the real motive of art after all, when you analyze it, is simply to make us worth while, to make us fit to love and be loved, fit to live together.
It seems to me that we have fallen on a troublous time—those of us who
believe that the making of things rather than the having of things is
the important fact. We have fallen on a time of tremendous n tremendous
discovery, altogether good in itself, but which. I fear, has led us
astray; because we have assumed that the way to get the thing we are
after, which is the development of the individual (all our pleasure,
all our labor, is for that and no other end—the development of the
individual —is for us to amass wealth enough with as little labor as
possible to go out into the market and buy development. One of the
Vanderbilts has stated that it is almost impossible for the man born
rich to amount to anything. He is distinctly handicapped, because he
has firmly ground into him the idea that this thing that is worth while
can be bought; and he is not a whit different from any of the rest of
us, because we all have the same idea. But we have left out of account
how development comes. Since the world began it has come by one way and
never will come by any other, and that is through doing creative work.
We are beginning to recognize it in our schools, in our kindergartens.
We no longer believe that the child goes to school simply to gather
knowledge by the mere hearing of certain things and sentiments. That
does not give growth. Only so far as the child is able to explain to
himself how two and two make four does any good come to him—does growth
come. The manual training school system is said to be a new thing. All
revolutions seem to be new things, but they none of them are: they are
simply the visible evidences of evolution; it is simply that the thing
at the moment strikes us as fresh. It is not fresh; it is not new: we
have merely realized that this time we have got so far in our general
daily life from the natural and normal way of growth that we have to
apply it. We have to go to school to learn how to grow and to get
growth; but the pity of it is that we stop there. Your manual training
fits you-- suppose fits your lawyer for his work, fits your doctor for
his work: no man but could do better for it; but it also fits the
burglar for his work. In itself it has nothing to do with the big thing
of life. It is the preparation for it. The man who comes out and
because of his development monopolizes the bounties of nature and kills
the rest of us is the product of the manual training school just as
much as the man who does righteousness. We have got to look beyond the
preparation for life: we have got to carry our school on into our life.
When the real college comes, the real university—as come it will—you
will not know where it is: you will not be able to tell where the
school stops and the workshop commences, because they will overlap.
There will be no preparation for life: there will be simply separate, different stages of life. The kindergarten is just as much a part of life as the end of it, and we must recognize that fact. . We have not as a- mass gone in the way that leads toward the thing that we are after. Mechanical invention, as I said, has been tremendous, and discovery has been tremendous; we have gone machine-mad with the thought that if we could only rig up these machines wonderfully, intricately enough, all we would have to do would be to push buttons. Well, we are coming to that result pretty fast.
A couple of years ago some of us tried to start some little shops at
Rose Valley. I went to one of the oldest and best cabinet makers in the
city of Philadelphia and asked him if he could get me two or three
good, all-round cabinet makers. He said: "Well, I think I could get you
two." That is, only two in a city of over a million people. I said: "I
want young men." "Oh!" he exclaimed, "these men are so old they will
probably die before ycu get them out there." He added: "You cannot find
a young cabinet maker because there is no use for him. I can get you a
good dowel sticker, or a good man on the lathe or mortise machine, but
there is no such thing as a cabinet maker in the cabinet making shop."
That, of course, is not absolutely true; but nearly all the good men
are foreigners—very few of them are Americans. That is the situation in
one of the most simple, direct and important of the crafts left to us.
I would have to go to Norway or somewhere else to get men.
That is typical of our methods. We have not reached the point, yet,
where the majority of us to nothing but push buttons, but we are fast
approaching it. What then? Suppose you made wealth in enormous
quantities; suppose it was divided equally or equitably; what then? You
think a republic could stand that was composed nine-tenths of button
pushers and the other tenth of captains of industry? The few
designers—the few men who had the development, who had designed these
marvelous tissues and- patterns which were to be worked—would have got
their growth and their development; but the nation could not remain a
republic. - In the dark ages when they wanted to torture a man beyond
all possibility of his holding up under it they did not torture him
with thumbscrews, or the maiden, or the boot. They put him in a room
without interests, where there was nothing to do, nothing to see, and
dropped a drop of water with deadly regularity on his head, and he
invariably went mad. I accuse the present system of doing precisely
that thing. The nran that has to stand at the tailor the man or the
woman or the child (as it has got to be now the child can do it almost
as well as the man 'in many industries) who has to stand eight hours,
ten hours,. thirteen hours , if you will, a day, at the tail of a
machine, doing uninteresting work---monotonous, regular, but without
any interest, without any volition—is in exactly the same position as
the man with the water dropping on his head. That is so true that in
the factories right here in Philadelphia where they make cigarettes
they have to employ performers to go there and play the piano and
entertain the people while they are rolling cigarettes to keep them
from going altogether to the bad. That may be industry, but it is a
mighty poor kind of industry; it may make goods, but it does not make
character; and you cannot get character as a by-product of such labor.
As manual training teachers you should realize that it is not enough to
take the children into your school rooms and give them a glimpse of
heaven if hell lies just outside of the door. Here is this great
school; of industrial art which teaches people year in and year out how
to design beautifully, how to weave properly, how to dye properly, and
then gets them jobs which require them to do the very reverse. There
are few of them who dare to come back here and show their designs;
there are few of them who would hang their designs on the wall before
us. The demand is not for the best thing that that man does but the
worst—for the purely commercial thing. That is not enough. That is why
I am making this plea for the arts and crafts; that is the connection
that I see between the Arts and Crafts movement and the manual training
school. The~manual training school has done much to make the Arts and
Crafts movement possible. I have no statistics for this statement; you
do not need. statistics for such things—you simply know them: you
cannot go on teaching and training these young people for twenty-five
years that it is right to do things that are worth while and not have
some of them adopt the teaching. There are two thousand arts and crafts
associations in the United States alone, without any organized
movement. They are simply, spontaneous protests against things as -they
are and as they are going to be. That means a lot. It means a lot to
you people; because you can guarantee that the men and women who are
now working in arts and crafts shops, who are working because they want to work at those
things, are going to back your work up and make it more and more
important. To me the average college of the old type i:: worse than
useless: it is as useless, it seems to me, as the pulling of straps to
get strength. You can get just as much strength out of pushing a plane
as out of pulling a strap, and when you are done you have got something
more than muscle. With the children there is no trouble—you do not have
to chase them to the manual training school; you have to chase them
out; you have to bar the doors to keep them out. There, as our friend
said about the entrance to the graveyard, "they have come to stay"; but
they have come to stay on the other side of that gate, just as the
manual training has. Manual training and the Arts and Crafts movement
is a move from the inside of that cemetery out—from death back into
life.
History has simply been a series of rises--of gradual growths: you will
have not gradual falls, but slumps—drops. We do not descend the same
way we come up. When they were tearing down a brick Rome to build a
marble Rome in the time of Augustus, when their poetry and their
literature were becoming more and more refined, they did not dream that
that was the beginning of the end, though it surely was. If we have
political corruption, if we have business corruption (which is at the
bottom of all political corruption), it is because we have accepted
this false ideal: it is because we have believed that we could buy the
things that are worth while with cash—usually with somebody's else
cash. The practical business man thinks most of us dreamers. He thinks
the artist a dreamer. He says: "The artist is not a practical man." It
is practical to pay fifty thousand dollars for the painting of a dead
man but it is not practical to make the painting—it is practical to buy
the evidence of another man's growth, but it is not practical to do the
kind of work by which men grow. He does not want the all-round man: he
wants the specialist. But the specialist that is worth while is always
the round man.
There is more really fine doctors' work done by the all- round country
doctor than there is by any number of city specialists. I know of that
for a fact. I know of a woman who, being desperately ill, recently had
one of the best known specialists in the city of Philadelphia attend
her—a specialist in her particu lar trouble. She would have died with
that man in the house had he not called in a country doctor who did
something that saved her. The country doctor did not possess one-tenth
the specialist's knowledge about that particular disease; but he knew
something about the whole woman—not the woman's liver alone. Now,
specialization is all right; but the specialization must be founded on
the round man. Your work tends to round the man. The Arts and Crafts
movement is simply an extension of your work; it is a carrying of your
work on into life; it is a protest against the acceptance of the
machine ideal. "Now," you will ask, "are you attacking the machine?"
Not at all; I am attackivg the machine ideal. There is a Iine—a
perfectly clear one, it seems to me—that we can draw on the machine,
and that is the line where the machine ceases to be a tool. No matter
how costly, therefore, or complicated the tool is, so long as it is a
tool with which a man expresses himself, it is an advantage and a
benefit to that man. The moment it ceases to be that, the moment it
becomes a thing which does the thinking, into which the unthinking man
feeds the material, we reject it.
The things of truth always lie with the minority. Emerson said:
"One with God is a majority."
In your hands—in the hands of the teachers who are working along your line, whether they be manual training teachers or kindergarten teachers—lies a power out of all proportion to your numbers.
The work that
you do in the schools is the work that draws and that interests and
rivets the attention of the students in the schools. Is not that true?
You have no trouble to get your children interested in their manual
work; therefore your influence with them is tremendous. Now, as an
artsman, as one who desires to extend this into life, I have to ask you
to go on, not only in your work but in impressing on these
people---these young people who when they come into your hands are so
plastic—that school is not enough: that it is very well to go out into
the world and make beautiful things; that it is very well to go out
into the world and make useful things; but that to be worth while in
the world they must be makers—they -must be creators. Our Revolutionary
forefathers were not very well organized; it did not seem possible that
they could successfully cope with a great power such as England was;
but they stood for certain elemental truths among which they said were
"life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Now, life in the sense of
not being dead is not enough; liberty in the sense of being outside of
jail is not enough; the opportunity to pursue happiness carries with it
the opportunity to work in the kind of work that produces happiness;
because it is, after all, six days that we must labor and only one that
we may idle. We must get our development and our growth not through the
expenditure of the income of labor but through the labor itself if we
are ever again to enjoy any leadership in the world's history.