“It is in the wholesome indisposition of the average mind for intellectual labour that due provision is made for the quantity of dull work which must be done in stubbing the Thornaby wastes of the world.”[121]
“I have said ... that the rough and worthless may be set to the roughest and foulest work, and the finest to the finest; the rough and rude work being, you will in time perceive, the best of charities to the rough and rude people.”[122]
Moreover, a measure of routine labour is good, as recreation, for us all--it is a relief from thinking, planning, inventing. Good spade and hatchet work, if only one can perspire enough over it, is a condition of good work in higher ways. Ruskin thinks so too, and set the Oxford undergraduates to their famous road-making for exercise; surely the greatest academic triumph a professor ever achieved.
Ruskin’s attack on Machinery, when carefully read, applies only to steam machinery, with its soot, smoke, sulphurous gases and noise. Wind or water power he allows and encourages; a vast scheme of mills worked by tidal water power is outlined in _Fors_.[123] And oddly enough he prophesies, so long ago, that electricity will supersede steam; and therefore if we can generate electrical energy with very much less publicly vomited smoke than we now make for steam power, we shall be on right lines, and shall have the Master’s goodwill. Not by vain retrogression, but by determined reforms on possible lines may we some day get back an England good to live in. At present we are wasteful and dirty, and we do not care.
Ruskin writes: “What is required of the members of St. George’s Company is, not that they should never travel by railroads, nor that they should abjure machinery, but that they should never travel unnecessarily, or in wanton haste; and that they should never do with a machine what can be done with hands and arms, while hands and arms are idle.”[124]
There is no subject which causes more merriment amongst the Philistines than Ruskin’s objection to railways, combined with the frequent locomotion indulged in by his most devoted followers. But Ruskin’s objection to railways was never so absolute as was popularly supposed. He always approved of them on through main routes, and only objected to their intrusion into the peace of quiet valleys off the main tracks. He objected to what appeared to him the excessive provision by which a lovely valley was spoiled “in order that every fool in Buxton could be in Bakewell in half an hour.” We must remember that the railway mania of 1844 occurred when Ruskin was five and twenty, at the formative period of his life, and that he saw all around him rough destruction of that beauty which affected his soul with a thrill like a lover’s (as he tells us in the Third Volume of _Modern Painters_, pages 295-298, quoted in Chapter I). The countryside must have been sadly ruined in the forties, while the railway embankments were creeping along through the pastures.
