Mediaeval Sinhalese Art c3.18

c3.18

One of the most interesting and difficult distinctions that can be drawn is that between a tool and a machine. It is, however, one that the craftsman can always draw for himself, when he is free to do so. Thus the carpet loom is a tool, a contrivance for holding warp threads at a stretch, for the pile to be woven round them by the craftsman's fingers; but the power loom is a machine, for it does the essential part of the work, and in so doing imposes limitations on the spontaneity and freedom of the design and on the intelligence of the worker. The gouge and chisel are tools, but the mechanical carver is a machine, perhaps the most stupid yet invented. It is essential, then, for a re-union of art with labour, that machinery should be controlled; and this control can be properly exercised only by the craftsman himself. The place of machinery in a true civilisation will be that of a hewer of wood and drawer of water, a servant, not a master; its concern will be rather with the preparation than with the subsequent manipulation of materials. Its purpose will be, not to rob the craftsmen of that part of labour which is very craft itself, but to save him from the heaviest and least interesting work, and to carry out only the simpler and most mechanical processes of manufacture. It is, of course, true that even in the preparation of materials, and the execution of monotonous labour, the machine is in many cases inferior to the hand. Thus, to take a single example, the hand-woven textile is, *ceteris paribus*, more durable than the machine woven, owing to the regularity and mechanical character of the strains put upon the threads of the latter; and the surface, even if quite unornamented, is artistically superior. So again, a machine-stamped binding, or a machine-planed table, or a lathe-spun bowl, lack the peculiar surface characteristic of each material, and developed by hand-work on it; the technical perfection of the surface in the one case is simply uninteresting, in the other varied. The machine, however, has come to stay, and, rightly used, may be transformed from a curse into a blessing. The problem is not how to abolish machinery, but how to regulate it that it shall serve without enslaving man; how to stop competition between machine and hand-work, by defining and delimiting intelligently the proper spheres of each. The community cannot afford to dispense with the intellectual and* imaginative forces, the educational and ethical factors which go with the existence of skilled craftsmen and small workshops. It must, therefore, protect these in their proper sphere. This can be done only by restoring the entire control of production to the actual workers, as in the old guild systems; or by the endowment of craftsmanship as in Ceylon, in the feudal manner, but substituting for the king or overlord the democratic community as patron. The first method may perhaps be achieved through a development of the trade-unions of the West, historically the representatives of the old guild associations of producers.* The second may be achieved by the action of the community in appointing as its servants, for life or good conduct, its craftsmen and its artists, just as it now appoints its judges, its preachers, its professors and medical officers.