Laurence Housman

“ Until we have joy in our labour, all labour is a form of waste—for it wastes the bodies and souls which are put to it, and is destructive [Pg 4] of the most wonderful and valuable commodity which this planet has yet produced—human nature. Labour without joy causes it to deteriorate; and if a man is put to work wherein it is impossible to find joy, then it were better for the wealth of the nation, as well as for the wealth of his own individual soul, that he should be free from it. ”

“ All great possessions materially founded come at last to that, and the heart that clings to them must go down after them to the grave.
It is the same when we base our delight of human relationship in an insistence upon possession: it serves only to accentuate the place of death in the world and to give it size. The man, or woman, whose idea of love lies in the claim to possess and to control others, dies many deaths before he reaches his final end, and walks daily with his foot in the grave. These tragedies of possession, so impoverishing to the spirit, are all round us ”

“ Our schools, prisons, law courts, State institutions, ministries, diplomacies—all those things on which we most pride ourselves—are just as liable, perhaps more liable, to hardness of heart and contempt of God’s word and commandments as we ourselves, for they are all part of us. It is, indeed, one of our social devices to get rid of our consciences by making them institutional. There is a certain class of mind which thinks that if it has established legality it has established a right over conscience—that if it has established order it has established virtue. ”

“ Imagine that for every prisoner sentenced, a lot fell on someone else, calling upon him or her to go and share in that demonstration of society’s failure to produce only good citizens. Imagine the Prime Minister, about to make an important statement in the House of Commons, called suddenly by lot to share the incarceration of a defender of the liberty of the press or of a robber of hen-roosts! Should we have to wait a month—a week—to have our prisons transformed into places where human nature was no longer thrown to waste, with its energies cut off from sane employment and development? ”

“ Yet possession—in the sense of realising each one for himself the wealth and enjoyment which life has to offer—is so deep an instinct, is so knit up with the adventurous and progressive spirit out of which the higher human consciousness is built—that it is useless to turn on man and say to him: “Possess nothing—rid yourself of all joys, of all the delights of the senses and the understanding—so only shall you attain to the heavenly stature.” ”

“ But of what worth, you may ask, is this moral sanction of a majority? I am not myself greatly enamoured of majority rule in the sense of a majority exercising compulsion on a minority. Compulsion by a majority I should often think it a duty to resist. But to the testimony of a majority that refrained from compulsion I should attach the greatest possible weight. There you would get a public opinion which by its own self-restraint and scrupulous moderation of conduct would be of the highest moral value. ”

“ Is it not almost ludicrous to suggest that that communal instinct will cease to play, if the hope of individual reward after death is withdrawn from the human race? Will man—because he is nobler than the beast, because at his best he does things more altruistic, more self-sacrificing, more self-forgetting, more self-transcending than any of these—do less nobly because he envisages destiny, which (if he see it as destiny) he will see as the logical outcome of evolutionary law? ”

“ For some reason or another, which is occasionally hard to define, you find pleasure in a thing over and above its use; and I want to persuade you that the finer instinct, the genius of the human race, tends always in that direction—not to rest content with the mere use of a thing, but to lay upon it that additional touch of adornment—whether by well-selected material, or craftsman’s skill, or social amenity, which shall make it a thing delightful to our senses or to our intelligence. ”

“ Wherever man has tried to possess others he has lost possession of himself. That is the price inevitably paid by any class or section of the community which seeks to dominate the lives and restrict the liberty of its fellows. [Pg 20] Tyranny does not strengthen but weakens the moral nature of those who exercise it, and he who owns slaves cannot himself be free. Domination is as destructive to human worth and more destructive to moral integrity than subjection. If “possession is nine points of the law” on the material plane, the tenth point—spiritual in its working—is anarchy to the soul. ”

“ Let the future involve him in anonymity as impenetrable as it liked, he would still go on expressing himself in ornament; self-realisation would still be the law of his being.
That is the psychology of the artist mind—of that part of humanity which produces things that come nearest, of all which earth has to show, to conditions of immortality, and so presumably are the most satisfying to man’s wish for continued individual existence. The makers of beauty do not set any great store on the continuance of their names—the continuance of their self-realisation is what they care about. ”

“ Do not these objectors forget not merely how considerable a part of human nature already moves and has its being on the lines of a diffused and rather decentralised subconsciousness, but also how largely the genius of the human race has committed to such conditions of separation from all possible enjoyment by the Ego, some of the rarest gifts and highest efforts at self-realisation that the world has ever seen? It is a condition attaching to all the more permanent forms of expression in the arts, to everything that man designs and makes for the delight of the generations that come after. ”

“ How can you extract truth from an unwilling witness, or labour from a subjugated race, except by compulsion and force?” The answer to that apparently insoluble problem now stands written in history—a history which has not eliminated untruth from the witness-box, or indolence from the labour market; yet torture and slavery alike have ceased to be practical politics, except where the State still answers with regard to war as it used to answer with regard to these: “I cannot do without.” There, in their last real stronghold, unaffected by Christian ethics, slavery and torture still stand. ”

“ The seed of Art sprang up differently; maker-man took hold of the one selected seed, not of a dozen, or of a thousand dozen promiscuously, and bent his faculties on making that one seed (his chosen material) fit to face life and its chances: if a house—walls and roof calculated to keep out the rain and resist the force of storms: if a textile—fabric of a staple sufficient to resist the wear and tear to which it would be subjected: if a putting together of words meant to outlast the brief occasion of their utterance—then in a form likely to be impressive, and therefore memorable ”