Laurence Housman

“ It is perhaps too much to dream that we shall ever again see England living upon its own corn; and the greatest forms of Art may, therefore, remain for ever beyond our reach. But until a nation does honour to the human hand as the most perfect and beautiful of all instruments under the sun, by giving it only honourable and useful tasks—until then I must rather wish you to be good valuers, keen—indignantly keen—to destroy the false values which you see about you, than that you should be either good draughtsmen or good artists. ”

“ Every department of mental activity has its ornament—the culminating expression of that particular direction of the human will. Faith is the ornament of destiny, Hope the ornament of knowledge, Love the ornament of sex. Without these ornaments destiny and knowledge and sex would have no beauty that the soul of man should desire them. Those additions or glosses were quite unnecessary to existence—up to a point; for millions of years the world did without them, and Evolution managed to scramble along without faith, without hope, without love. But Evolution itself brought them into being ”

“ May one not prefer the idea of interchange between life and life, to the notion that one is to remain for ever fixed and self-possessed—a thing apart? The more we are compounded of other lives, the more we have contributed to the lives of others—the more can we recognise our entrance into the only eternal life that we can demonstrably be sure about, or that can (so it must seem to many of us) , be sensibly desired or deserved. Is Eternal Bliss, in the individual sense, a more tolerable doctrine than eternal Hell-fire? ”

“ 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. For Society fearlessly to admit the full and open advocacy of that which it disapproves is the finest proof I can imagine of its moral stability, and of its faith in the social principles it lives by. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But ought not that obvious fact to make us very humble about our present stage of political development—and humble in general about the position to which we have attained in our moral evolution? Is it not a little premature to call ourselves a Free Nation? Is any Nation really free till it has found itself on peace and good-will to all?
Now I have put before you these sorry spectacles to show that where the true social ideal of brotherhood and goodwill breaks down, you arrive at some ethical absurdity of which you have to be ashamed—you find yourself driven into inconsistency, into impurity. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Examining life from that standpoint I know of nothing that gives me more delight than the decoration and embellishment with which man has overlaid all the mere uses of existence—things which without those embellishments might not delight us at all—or only as a dry crust of bread delights in his necessity the starving beggar, or ditch-water one dying of thirst.
I can scarcely think of a use in life which I enjoy, that I do not enjoy more because of the embellishment placed about it by man, who claims to have been made "in God's image." ”

“ All beautiful work, all work which is of real use and benefit to the community, bears implicitly within it this mark of parentage—of the way it has been come by, through patience, skill, ingenuity, something more intimate and subtle than the dead impenetrable surface of a thing mechanically formed without the accompaniment either of hope or joy.
This creation of new values by association (which you can trace through all right processes of labour) is seen even in things which have very little of human about them. ”

“ Yet where the need is of a worthy and genuine kind, art never ceases to rejoice at the use that is underlying it. This can be clearly seen in architecture, where the beauty of design, the proportion, the capacity of the edifice—though far transcending the physical need which called it into being—remain nevertheless in subtle relation thereto, and give to it a new expression—useless indeed to the body—but of this use to the mind, that it awakens, kindles, enlivens, sensitizes—making it to be in some sort creative, by perception of and response to the creative purpose which evoked that form. ”

“ Man throws into life his whole capital, body, soul, and spirit; and as a result of that investment Nature steadily returns to him year by year—not detached portions of his original outlay, but something new and different. Out of every contact between man's energy and Nature's, something new arises. And yet, though new, it is not strange; it has features of familiarity; it is partly his, partly hers; and if his spirit rises above the merely mechanical, it is endeared to him by and derives its fullest value from association. ”

“ Nothing that stops at utility has anything like the same value, for the revelation of the human spirit, as that which finds its setting in the Arts—the sculptures of Egypt and Greece, the Gothic and Romanesque cathedrals of France, England, Germany and Italy, the paintings of the Renaissance, the masterpieces of Bach and Beethoven, the poems and writings all down the ages of men comparatively poor in monetary wealth, but rich beyond the dreams of avarice in their power to communicate their own souls to things material and to leave them there, when their own bodies have turned to dust. ”

“ It is ridiculous to impose the moral emblem unless you grant also the justifying conditions.
Because the bee and the ant live unconscious of their impending doom, are we, therefore, to regard them as a hoodwinked race, set to labour at the dictates of the Creative capitalist on terms which contain in them no adequate reward? Suppose, for a moment, that revelation could descend upon ants' nest and hive, and tell these workers that beyond death the future held for them no store—that their immortality was the immortality not of individual but of race ”

“ The maker of beautiful inlay would not lose all wish to do inlay if the knowledge that he, individually, as the craftsman were destined to oblivion. 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. ”

“ And war is only one form or aspect of that great strife for possession which has afflicted every race in its progress from the cradle to the grave—merely a larger and more apparent version of the conflict between folly and wisdom which goes on in every human breast. Possession is the great illusion through which man physically or intellectually strong seeks to secure power, and succeeds only in securing weakness—not only for himself but for others. ”

“ And if we can—as we are going to—if we can leave injustice when done in conspicuous high places to the natural and logical consequences, without applying the penal code, why cannot we trust natural consequences a very great deal more, where smaller and more humble misdemeanours are concerned, and give to those natural consequences a greater unity of effect by irradiating them with the true spirit of man—love, joy, gentleness, peace, against which there is no law? ”

“ And if, by this gift of sight, it has opened to us so vast a space for our understanding to dwell in—bestowing so huge a conception of life on this frail vessel of clay—if by so giving of itself through long aeons of time it has opened to us so much more than it knows itself, cannot we render back without grudging these shorter, frailer lives of ours, whose brevity, perhaps, is the very price required of us for their enjoyment, since without such limits our far-reaching comprehension of space and its possessions could never have been gained. ”

“ 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? Would it not bring home to us—as perhaps nothing else would—the mill-stone weight on the life of the nation of all punishment that is not purely reformative and curative? ”

“ Surely, for the whole of that part of your life you are under a strict obligation to render service in return—equal to that which you claim. And if you, by your service, cannot insure to others an equality of possession in things material (and make as good and wholesome a use of them as they could make) , those material possessions should be a weight upon your conscience, till you have got matters more fairly adjusted. Take it as your standard of life to consume no more than you, by your own labour, in your own lifetime, could produce. ”

“ So long as miracles appealed to the human mind as a moral and not a licentious expedient for the Creator of the universe to indulge in, they remained acceptable to the human understanding and were easily believed. Their real dethronement began when it was seen that a belief in them gave the greatest possible assistance to the cruel, grasping, and criminal instincts of the human race—that, from the social point of view, they opened a way for the terrorising of the weak, for fraud, for covetousness, for murder, for theft—in a word for priest-craft in all its worst forms. ”

“ 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? ”

“ It is not an honourable position, for that which holds fiduciary together with compulsory powers, to say to one whom it has falsely imprisoned or unjustly charged—"You, on the whole, benefit by government, and, therefore, must yourself bear this hurt of government which has fallen upon you." The State or the community which permits such individual hardship to result from its imposition of a fallible code is not just in its government or dutiful to its neighbour. And if it so acts, it undermines in the governed their sense of its moral sanction. ”

“ Every class-interest, every trade-interest, every party-interest that stands combined for its own benefit does all it can to evade the punishment of its members by the larger and more impersonal authority of the State. Scandals are hushed up in the police; scandals are hushed up in the Army; scandals are hushed up in the Cabinet; everything possible is done to prevent our penal code from acting equally on the vested interests in which we specially are concerned. ”