r^EOPLE sfia THINGS H. J. Masstngham )rma al (LIBRARY) UM.V Gnawer CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO 1 PEOPLE AND THINGS * * CL V i L^ jJ0 PEOPLE AND THINGS C, t//;z ^Attempt to connect Art and Humanity By H. J/MASSINGHAM "// all comes bac^ to people and things" Charles Marriott LONDON HEADLEY BROS. PUBLISHERS, LTD. 72 OXFORD STREET, W.i 1919 To CHARLES MARRIOTT and FRANCIS MEYNELL R E F A C E HIS book was written in the spring and early summer of last year, at one of the darkest periods of recorded history. Since then, history has turned vorticist and three events of a supreme importance have taken place. Men's slaughter of their fellows has ceased; the German people has overthrown its Moloch and here, in our own dear land, has come the final exposure of the conspirators who aim at our life and the beginning of the possibly final reaction of the English people against them. The practical question for me is do these prodigious phenomena outpace the argument contained in the first three chapters? Authors have their vanities, whatever they may protest to the contrary, but I think I can say without humbug that I should not be the last to welcome the day when the interest of that argument had become retrospec- tive and academic. That day has not yet arrived, nor may it for years, nor, even when it comes, may it be a happy one. But it is no longer a castle in the air; that distant purple shape which so many of us have taken for a cloud, is, after all, a mountain. What has come to us in the last month, or is immediately coming, is not change, but at last, the lively hope of change. Therefore, almost insensibly, our per- spective is shifting. Before, we only knew the imperative need of change; now, we begin to ask ourselves of the temper, quality and destination of the change in actual prospect. What is our choice of it, what is its most desir- able form, in what way will our present attitude towards it affect its direction and secure its fortunes, to what port or desolate open sea will it lead us and how can it be made most worthy both of the noble volunteers who have fought and died for it in the war, and of those who have been perse- 5 cuted for it at home, of the martyrs for it yesterday, and of Blake, Shelley, Morris, and their fellows who lived for it in a remoter past? Therefore,because I have made an attempt, however insignificant, both to answer those questions and to contemplate what they are an answer to, I have made no alteration in the manuscript, and will ask the reader himself to substitute a "was" for an "is," on the very few occasions when some fact, apart from its relation to ideas, has merci- fully slipped into the past. H. J. M. 'January ', 1919. TABLE OF CHAPTERS i. Introductory p. 9 ii. The Word and the Mob p. 15 in. Man was Made for the Sabbath p. 45 iv. The Sabbath was Made for Man I p. 59 v. The Sabbath was Made for Man II p. 79 vi. Two Sabbath-Breakers p. 101 vn. A Type of the Chosen p. 1 19 vni And His Mental Exodus p. 141 ix. Christ and His Christians: The State and Its Poets p. 159 x. Communal Art: i. Expression and Decoration p. 169 xi. Communal Art: n. A Lmgua-Franca and Work for Its Own Sake p. 185 xn. Communal Art: in. Good Work and a Common Under- standing P. 213 HYPOCRISY and custom make their minds The fanes of many a worship, now outworn. They dare not devise good for man's estate, And yet they know not that they do not dare. The good want power, but to weep barren tears, The powerful goodness want: worse need for them, The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom; And all besl things are thus confused to ill. Shelley BEHOLD thyself by inward optics and the crystalline of thy soul. Sir Thomas Browne I. INTRODUCTORY F books could be left to speak for themselves, rather than the author for himself, there would be fewer "Forewords." All I have to say here is by way of caution, not summary or exposi- tion. The argument must be left to stand on its own legs or fall without prefatorial excuse or sup- port from me. But I ought perhaps to try and clear away one or two possible misunderstandings. To begin with, there are a few verbal ones. Commerce, for instance, is obviously not the same thing as Commercialism. But, as I am dis- cussing the modern transformation of commerce, all my references to it should be taken in that sense. Other references to the "Commercial State" may be more ambiguous, since modern slates are not really slates at all, but the implicit representation of commercial oligarchy. Again, is it necessary to point out that other references I have made to the liberty of the individual do not mean the liberty to housebreak? In W. H. Hudson's "Birds and Man" there is a chapter upon the imminent extinction, by a rabble of collectors and their parasites, of the little furze- wren. A law to prohibit private collections, the author writes, is the only remedy. The Com- mittee appointed by the Government to consider bird protection would not, he thinks, recommend that law, because it "would e aimed at those of 9 PEOPLE AND THINGS their own class, at their friends, at themselves." Interviewing a great landowner, Mr. Hudson gives us his reply "I am a collector myself, and I am perfectly sure that such an interference with the liberty of the subject would not be tolerated." I am not writing this book to advocate that kind of "liberty of the subject." My aim is not so lofty. If again I have not made it clear that society and the individual are in indispensable relation to each other, I have got nowhere. In the same way, my remarks about Socialism, the Press, etc., apply to certain attitudes and states of mind; they do not condemn out of hand. Of course not. The states of mind will absolve or condemn. I have through- out tried to deal with ideas rather than facts. I have again set forth a few notions here about the relation of government to human beings and the pleasant things of a life which my reader will un- derstand and interpret in the spirit rather than to the letter. If modern civilisation is found wanting, a change will have to come a change that will be impotent and destructive unless it be one of thought, attitude and values. Then again, judging man by his actions to-day (I am writing in the spring and summer of 1918) it might seem a little quaint to advocate a trust in the humanities (singular and plural) as the moral of the book. Here again, I beg the reader not to bottle me up too literally. I merely wish to say, after E. M. Forster in "Howard's End," "The confidence trick 10 1N7RODUCTORT is the work of man, but the want of confidence trick is the work of the devil." But that does not commit sensible people to immediate and fantastic ex- pectations of human nature. In the next place, my few references to the war are not intended to take part in the pros and cons of immediate controversy. I am looking at the war as a European phenomenon, whose ancestry and heritage are not actually affected by the question of who began it and how it will end. Everybody knows who fired the rick; the Germans themselves know it, or would know it if they were allowed. It would, indeed, be an easy matter to select Germany from the family of European nations and let her bear the weight of the sins of Europe. No chastisement that other hands can inflict upon her can measure that with which she will scourge herself, in victory or defeat. The spirit has its own way of taking revenge for the outrages committed upon it. The outrage itself is the revenge, for the spirit departs. But the unspeakably vile corruption of the Prussian spirit is not the sins of Europe; it is a caricature of them a matter of some difficulty, triumphantly achieved. ii ~VT ATIONS are not built up by the repetition of words, .1^1 but by the organising of intellectual forces. A. E. T) UT he's got nothing on. Hans Andersen PIGMIES are pigmies still tho' perched on Alps And pyramids are pyramids in vales. Hudibras HE knows what's what and that's as high As metaphysic wit can fly. Hudibras THE fellow's tongue is at his fingers' ends. Cook's "Green's Tu Quoque" THE Creator, who out of clay first tempered and made us up, put into the composition of our humanity more than a pound of passions to an ounce of reason; and reason he confined to the narrow cells of the brain, whereas he left passions the whole body to range in. Erasmus 'VJ O law of that country must exceed in words the num- -L ^J ber of letters in their alphabet, which consists only in two-and-twenty. Swift IT is not the clear-sighted who teach the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm, mental fog. Joseph Conrad / "T"" V O repeat is to prove. Anatole France GIVE me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all other liberties. John Milton 13 B THE tyrant on the throne Is the morning and evening press, In all the land his spies, A little folk but strong, A second plague of flies, Buzz of the right and the wrong; Swarm in our ears and our eyes News and scandal and lies. Men stand upon the brink Of a precipice every day; A drop of printer's ink Their poise may overweigh; So they think what the papers think, And do as the papers say. Who reads the daily press, His soul's lost here and now; Who writes for it is less Than the beast who tugs a plough. 'John Davidson BUSINESS men boast of their skill and cunning, But in philosophy they are like little children. Bragging to each other of successful depredations, They neglect to consider the ultimate fate of the body What should they know of the Master of Dark Truth Who saw the wide world in a jade cup, By illumined conception got clear of Heaven and Earth : On the chariot of Mutation entered the Gate of Immu- tability? Ch-en TzZ-ang (seventh century) II. THE WORD AND THE MOB "APOLEON, one of those children who, like Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Alexander, Pyrrhus and their kind, never grew up (a little child shall lead them to the slaughter-house, as one might say), used to call us, as all the world knows, a nation of shopkeepers. It was a good one for Napoleon, whose wisdom (apart from his capacity for mischief) never rose above the level of the un- trained school-boy with his honour rooted in destroying all the birds' ne&s he can find. The grand historians who live at Oxford and Cambridge, again, call us by the flattering name of a "de- mocracy," as if "democracy" were not only an end in itself, but an achieved end.* Nobody can possi- bly know what a democracy is or means (we are, for instance, at present ruled by what might be called a commercial-autocratic-demagogy)because classes, parties and persons, divided by incompatible aims * This is a point, which, simple as it is, sadly needs clarifying. All parties in the country, Liberal, Tory, Radical and Labour, are bondholders to the idea that a thing cannot be right and true unless a certain number of people believe and say that they believe it to be so. Here is a sample. Lord Lansdowne (a survival of a type of excellent Tory long, long ago at resl) writes a letter advo- cating a certain policy. The Times dismisses his argument. On what grounds? By the ripofte that Lord Lansdowne only represents himself. How does the other side retaliate upon that? By arguing that what Lord Lansdowne says is right and true, though he only represents the Man in the Moon ? by the ftate- ment that as a matter of fact he represents the opinions of quite a number of I B2 PEOPLE AND THINGS and interests, are all united in a passion for and a pride in democracy. Without knowing what it means any more than they do, I cannot feel that if democracy is an achieved end, it is a desirable one. Possibly, too, the enthusiasm of the shopkeepers for democracy may suggest to a cautious intelli- gence the idea that democracy and shopkeeping are no more at odds with each other than are average Liberals and Tories. It all comes back to language. Nobody knows what designations in topical use really mean, and so everybody special- ises in them for all they are worth. Democracy itself has come to be a mere word, a shrivelled phrase as meaningless as the appendix, and no less dangerous. How many millions of human beings have been done to death for a question begged, a verbal cart put before the horse or an "undistributed middle"? Similarly both in peace and war pretended foes can make real hatreds among natural friends, and un- natural foes promote the mutual aims of secret allies. The object of the business man (of whom the shopkeeper is the chrysalis) is to make power and people. The point is trivial enough, but it illustrates how farcically irrelevant the modern "democratic" attitude to representation really is. In an age less barren than ours and irrigated by the milk of human kindness, sense and toler- ance, majority rule would no longer be the insoluble problem it now it. But when suppressio vert, suggeftio falsi, are rammed down on people's heads or, rather, clapped on poor Truth down at the bottom of her well, not one person in a hundred knows his own mind, and if he do, the fewer adherents he has the more likely for the truth to be in him. The Holy Ghost no longer descends of its own will upon us in the likeness of a dove. It is bawled out of heaven and comet tumbling down dead with the shock. 16 THE WORD AND THE MOB money for himself money to make power and power to make money. Living in a period favour- able above all others to his view of life, he will, if he is a successful money-maker, possess power, and if he possess power he will use it, or rather abuse it, since he has achieved it by the exercise of qualities other than spiritual and intellectual. We need not attach horns and hooves to his extremities. The poor thing is the automatic product of a system, a system of grab and cheat. Being the machine of a machine, the object of his mechanical existence is to put and keep the machinery of his dominion in motion. He is confronted, therefore, by a double problem. He has not merely to domin- ate the matter which provides him his wealth, but the mind which provides him his power. An in- dustrial system, that is to say, is impossible without a mental system to match it and to prevent indus- trialism from appearing the grotesque anomaly it really is. He has to establish, he has established, an empire over the "things of the mind," for even he has to recognise that the things of the flesh cannot be made for him without them. That the public may supply him with what he wants, he (as he in- genuously puts it to himself) supplies the public with what it wants. He does nothing of the kind. He imposes upon the public a supply of what he wants them to buy, to read and to think. Thanks to the instinctive decep- tiveness of the whole system, both he and the public 17 PEOPLE AND THINGS are probably under the delusion that he is supplying and they are receiving exactly what they want. Nevertheless, it is a fatal error to assume that busi- ness and popular tastes are identical. In the matter of all commodities nowadays, including the arts, thought and the emotions, the old Smilesian political economy has, like Max Beerbohm's cari- cature of Bernard Shaw, to be made to stand on its head. The supply creates the demand, not the demand the supply. Sweet are the uses of adver- tisement. A demand for an article is worked up by a copious and ineluctable supply thereof. That the public taste is vitiated in the process is obvious ; indeed, an identity of tastes is the result between that of the business man and the Lowest Common Multiple of the public consciousness. But it will not do to confuse this artificial demand with an actual want to confuse people themselves with the things they are forced to think, have and believe. That actual want is #, a quantity unknown, because it never gets the chance to reveal itself. Possibly yet another identity emerges here : that of the shopkeeper (in the more modern sense of finance, which moves further and further away from the shop) with his democracy. For the business of business developing not according to a set plan, but as a natural sequence is to turn the single mind into a mass-mind, the people into a mob, into a machine for registering the interested promptings and impressions thrust upon it. The gerontocracy THE WORD AND THE MOB engenders and dandles its child, the apple of its eye the mobocracy. Physics say that a compound body differs as an entity from the atoms that com- pose it. Let us pray that this mass-mind, this mob, is not representative (of course it is not) of the indi- vidual Englishmen who are supposed to congeal into it. For the way to realise it is to study the Scarlet Press, our Lady of Babylon, which repre- sents it, because it creates it. Indeed, one has a fellow-feeling with Shakespeare in approaching this mob. There were mobs in his days, and large portions of the chronicle plays are a compromise between popular fashion and personal inclination, between Shakespeare's artistic conscience and the audience at the Globe. His emphatic hatred and contempt of the mob were derived in part from a realisation of the crude indulgences which that mob had compelled from him. He too felt the commer- cial pinch. A rare editor the Antony of "Julius Caesar" would have made for Carmelite House! But to discuss this Press is too painful a subject for men who love their country. When Pepys had been to the theatre and had heard wind-music, he related how the enchantment of it upon him made him feel sick, as sick as he felt "when I was in love with my wife." Extremes meet and this Press makes us feel sick. Yet neither this Press nor any gutter Govern- ment it may create lays plans founded upon princi- ples. It has not the head for them. Its strength re- 19 PEOPLE AND THINGS sides in the ignorance and prejudice of the mob which its own ignorance and interested prejudice have fashioned of a mob accustomed to learn by being told things over and over again ("with the public to repeat is to prove") instead of thinking them out. It tells the mob things congenial to its lower mental powers. Everything is presented ex- cept intelligence, the purpose (whether conscious or not) being to prevent people from thinking by providing them, day in and evening out, with the peppered pap of exclamation, invective, sensation, rhetorical appeal, fabrication, hyperbole, raw generalisation, dressed in every kind of stylistic har- lotry that can excite the physical passions. All this gawdy sensuality of language, if it does not actually suppress the power of the mind's resistance, leaves uncommonly little to be suppressed. As for poor Truth, she remains at the bottom of her well, and in wars, as everybody knows, the wells are always poisoned. Nor is atrophy of thought the only result. The lower mental faculties cultivated by the Press will not only paralyse thought, but hate it; not only hate it, but denounce it, since denunciation is so much easier than comprehension. It is so much easier to say that a man is a Bolshevik than to explain what he really thinks and is, how he came to think and to be so, wherein he is right or wrong, trustworthy or untrustworthy, or even what you mean by a Bolshevik. So much easier to read that sort of 20 THE WORD AND THE MOB thing in the train, so much easier and more ex- citing to repeat it. The credulity and suspicion thus generated are, perhaps, the worst by-products of the war. Private incentives to revenge and black- mail are encouraged by them; rank growths of hysterical hatreds and fears spread upon their swampy soil ; every man's distrust is turned against his neighbour, and every generous impulse, every frank emotion, all warmth and confidence in hu- man relations are dry-rotted. A fungus-growth of superstition overspreads the tree of life. It were well for the witch-doctors of such passions to take heed to themselves ; for authority itself to beware lest, having brewed such venom it, too, as well as all things fair, be poisoned by it. The reaction against authority, conspicuous in the shameful Billing case, is a warning to all who have eyes to see and noses to hold. Yet the purpose behind this Press cannot be called a fiendish one. Not at all. The business spirit is at work upon creating a de- mand for a cheap and shoddy article. The legiti- mate deduction to make (to come back to our identities) is the infallible correspondency, the un- erring likeness between the business instinct, and what is worst in life and thought. This cozenage and quackery of thought result in something which is its reverse. What a poetic justice for the sleights of jiggery-pokery that they should merge into a flat, arid standardisation of thought and idiom. The red herring has not a flap 21 PEOPLE AND THINGS in its du&y carcase. In topics of "national import- ance," that is to say, nobody knows what anyone else means, but everybody expects it to be said, "The Man in the Street" (viz., the personified em- bodiment of the mob) is a simple quantity; his hearer knows exactly what he is going to say be- cause he is never allowed to think. He responds only to the few organised and fallacious cliches^ half-truths and catchwords which are diurnally pumped into him. He becomes actually a kind of incarnated headline; so that he does not talk, he rustles like the leaves of a newspaper. Poor paper- machine, with his endless twaddle about the affairs of the world, how shall we see either in him or his words a concrete, living being, telling its own story and evoking its own reactions, how discover in him the sweetness, novelty and ardour of the human reality? Poor beggared phrase-maker, strutting in his paper doss-house as though it were a palace ! Surely one of the reasons why the frank materi- alism of Falstaff is so delightful is because it digs holes into the drab pattern of preconceived ideas in which we are all now enmeshed. For this duplicity of cant leads inevitably into the monotony of the average. In a way it is a comfort that it does, for if we perceive excellence and a kind of integrity in the harmony of the universe, so like- wise should we read there distinction, freshness and an infinite diversity. But in the falsification of the Press and its mass-mind, the neutrality of 22 THE WORD AND THE MOB custom covers as by a dank mist the bacchanial revels. There cannot be anything more tedious than a routine of artificially stimulated excitement. Uniform dullness, then, is the consequence of the written inebriety which is given out by a mob- ridden Press and taken in by a Press-ridden mob. They themselves again are the products of the business principle, as our educational methods of teaching mental discipline by dull routine are a pre- parative to the dull mechanism of business. The vicious wheel comes its full circle. Dullness and business must always go together. It is not inter- esting to read in our papers and solve in our lives problems of how to get money, wheji and where to spend it, how to gain more than our neighbour, how to avoid the consequences of having less, where to put it so that nobody else can get it, how to die with plenty and live with little. Such interests tend to make us forget that man alone of the creatures can see the flowers in the sky and the stars on the earth. It is a reproach against our country that we make a fetish of dullness. But whatever our frailties, we are, after all, human beings, and they who call out upon us, 'Xro up, ye dullards !" are as dull as we are, since they, too, are taught to be dull in youth, to prepare the way for leading still duller lives in man- hood. Dr. Skinner, the routine monger, in "The Way of all Flesh," is the headmaster, not only of Roughborough School, but of Dotheboys Hall. It is a sad imbroglio. Our schools teach us the routine 23 PEOPLE AND THINGS of dullness, our business manufactures dullness, and our Press, relieving us from dullness by de- lirium in order to make our dull lives tolerable and ourselves submissive to the normal dullness of our lives, is most damnably dull. If anybody should ask why this age has forgotten Christ, the answer should be because it changes the wine of life into pepper- mint water. In a metallic age, thought might seem to be hard and flat, but still tangible, something that had a solid if ugly ring in it. But nowadays the corresponding thought is half-and-half stuff; its substance is of a viscid semi-liquidity; it is prosaic and sentimental at the same time, and the pulpy heart sticks to the sleeve. It is a reminder of chaos, which is neither hard nor soft, wet nor dry, hot nor cold ; but which is yet cold under its apparent heat. But chaos is not. It is Nought and denies the Coglto^ ergo sum of all created life. We ought not to be talking about thought at all, even "canalised" thought; language, a ready-made clothing for dummy ideas, has been substituted for thought and, worse still, for feeling. This separation [of [words from things has a natural corollary in that of deeds from thoughts. The business man is the "man of action." He likes to regard himself as sharp, ready, prompt, clear, decisive, crisp and methodical. In his documents he aims at conciseness and brevity by omitting the prepositions and pronouns (as being the arabesques 24 THE WORD AND THE MOB to the plain structure of language), leaving the cor- pulent nouns and docking the tails of his speci- mens of tag Latin. Cobbett in his "Advice to Young Men" warns them against "your sauntering, soft-stepping girls, from whom you may never ex- pect ardent and lasting affection." The girl he ad- vises is one with "a quick step and a somewhat heavy tread^ showing that the foot comes down with a hearty good will and, if the body leans a little for- ward and the eyes keep steadily in the same direc- tion while the feet are going, so much the better, for these discover earnestness to arrive at the in- tended point" Mere words, then, accompany mere acts. There were two famous apples in the world, the apple of discord (words) and the apple of Eve (their meaning). The one was made of shavings; the other is still an honest russet. It was a pity that Adam and Eve only took two bites out of it and then threw it away, for we have only one left. "Certain it is," writes Burke, "that the influence of most things on our passions is not so much from the things themselves as from our opinions con- cerning them, and these again depend very much on the opinions of other men, conveyable for the most part by words alone." A word, a phrase, born out of itself by some mysterious parthenogenic pro- cess, can commit whole hosts of men to sacrifice. The menace of words is that they may be anything or nothing angels, devils, village idiots, Chan- PEOPLE AND THINGS cellors of the Exchequer, and the seven plagues are upon us once the word escapes from the thing or the idea. There was the Kaiser saying God was on his side. Sections of our Press hurl the word back into the fence of his teeth: "You lie, blasphemer, He is on our side!" The rational man may well pause before adding his voice to the fierce invoca- tions and recriminations of polytheistic tribalism. Lord Roberts said: "War is as inevitable as death; it is salutary, necessary, and the only natural tonic that can be prescribed." Hellish words, but still only words, romantically bombinating in vacuo. The bookstalls in their gay coverings minister still more to our romantic feelings. A pleasantly vague impression steals upon us as soft as that made by a man of flesh upon a very yielding arm-chair. The impression is Paradisal a romantic sense of how comfortable, heroic, grand, powerful, tender, true-hearted, virile, simple, clean-living, radiant, happy, stern, practical, unselfish, devoted, dashing, delicious and well-off the British Empire is. It is unmannerly, we exclaim, to interrupt these hymns of self-glorification by the reflection that every silver lining has a cloud. The romance of business follows. But the pen falters. Talking of novels, a notable example of words for things was presented me some weeks ago by a novel called "Valour." The hero, Hammersley, an ardent young individualist, disobeys his colonel's 26 THE WORD AND THE MOB orders at Gallipoli, is discharged from the Army, casts off his "sneering, critical selfishness," learns "a few simple and stable truths," realises that he is a Socialist that is to say, that he believes in dis- cipline for all; re-enlists as a private, makes a "useful mess" of the Germans and wins the Victoria Cross and a life-partner whose pride has recovered. The shocking thing is that a few mis- guided readers might be led to feel for Ham- mersley No. I, rather than for Hammersley No. 2. "He hated authority ; he hated routine. . . . vul- garity and caddishness and red-tape and the beastly cheap cynicism that you hear in the average mess" ; he would have liked "to send some of the comfort- able middle-aged people out there, the men who are so cheerful and well-fed, and who say, 'Oh, we have only to go on long enough and we are bound to win'"; he rebels against his colonel, Barnack, "who had Prussian ideas" and "no sympathy, no pity, no imagination," who "sent men to death with an imperturbable and grim face," He discovers "the realities behind the glamour such things as mean fear, servility, bombs, flies on jam, corpses over the parapet, stenches, yellow soul-sick faces, men covered with sores"; he feels "the machine of war crushing people and rolling on." "All the mad murder, this sacrificing of young men by the old at home!" he exclaims; "the devilish absurdity of the whole thing" infuriate him. "Civilisation ending in rat-holes and blood and little stinking chemical 27 PEOPLE AND THINGS atrocities! Mobs rushing together, losing their heads, getting drunk on phrases!" The author's readers (the sane majority of them) will not wonder that the colonel called this Hammersley fellow "over-civilised and degenerate," and that the Jekyll-Hammersley, having overthrown the Hyde- Hammersley, thoroughly agreed with him. The darkest hour precedes the dawn, the hooting of the owls gives place to the sweet jargonings of the early morning birds and Hammersley comes to his senses . Foiled egoism leaves its spiritual prey and our hero mens sana in corpore sano "began to realise that the war was no newspaper affair, no sensational inter- lude, but that it was life itself, remorseless and splendid, a stark fight for elemental things." The reader, who turns to the voyage to Laputa, will peruse the {following : "They can discover a close stool to signify a privy-council; a flock of geese a senate; a lame doe an invader; the plague a standing army; a buzzard a prime minister; the gout a high priest; a gibbet a secretary of state; a chamber a committee of grandees; a sieve a court lady ; a broom a revolution ; a mouse-trap an employment; a bottomless pit a treasury; a sink a court; a cap and bells a favourite; a broken reed a court of justice; an empty tun a general; a running sore the administration." For every crime, every superstition and false- hood can be justified and are continually justified by the irrelevant word ; by the abracadabra'of mock- 28 THE WORD AND THE MOB dignified and sanctimonious words words that are not representations of" but substitutes for things and ideas. Bacon wrote : "It was great blasphemy when the devil said, ' I will ascend and be like the Highest,' but it is greater blasphemy to personate God and bring him in saying, ' I will descend and be like the Prince of Darkness.' ' Misappro- priated terms, verbal sophism and rhetoric, the specious phrase language, that is to say, which is no longer the bright glass of truth and thought and actuality, released language, the first parent of pre- judice, error and the passions of mankind can accomplish the transformation with ease. Surely false language is as good a test of a false man as anything in the world. "Language most shows a man," said Ben Jonson, "speak that I may see thec. No glass renders a man's form or likeness as true as his speech. Nay, it is likened to a man; and as we consider feature and composition in a man, so words in language; in the greatness, aptness, sound struc- ture and harmony of it." Out of the mouth, the heart speaketh. The word divorced from the thing or idea is man exiled from God. So with the deed. The heartless and mindless deed is father and son of the heartless and mindless word and both of them sin against people and things. But the reality behind the illusion, the per- manent through the transitory, the thought be- hind the word or deed, what have they to do with the machine-made system of business and politics 29 c PEOPLE AND THINGS under which we live? The business man looks neither to the right hand nor to the left; he sees one thing and that the nearest one; without thinking upon the matter he grasps it. All education, indeed, is worthless which does not choose, not the first and the nearest, but that which is best. For its concern should be not with speaking and doing, but with being. Mr. Overton says to his son, who had criticised the first Mr. Pontifex: "I tell you, Edward, we must judge men not so much by what they do, as by what they make us feel that they have it in them to do. If a man has done enough in painting, music, or the affairs of life to make me feel that I might trust him in an emergency, he has done enough. It is not by what a man has actually put upon his canvas, nor yet by the acts which he has set down, so to speak, upon the canvas of his life, that I will judge him, but by what he makes me feel that he felt and aimed at. If he has made me feel that he felt those things to be lovable which I hold lovable myself, I ask no more," Words and deeds, indeed, are not absolute but relative, valuable so far as they reveal, worth- less so far as they obscure the secret mines of being. The real, the vivid, the practical person is he who seeks the less conscious self and dives for the pearls of reality hidden in the depths. Let us come back to the mob-mind, to this albuminous clot (pondus immobile, vis weni^r saltum; and without an adequate bridge over the chasm, we shall all fall into it and never set foot 82 THE SABBATH WAS MADE FOR MAN upon the promised land. It was just the same with the old Social Democratic Federation. When one enquired how production for profit was to be changed into production for use, the answer always was : "Oh, the workers will take over the instru- ments of production," or "Those things will come right of themselves when the time comes." Modern Socialism, too, like modern society, has suffered a paralysis of the spirit for which a prolonged war is partly responsible. I say partly, because its own mechanical officialism impotent, academic, opini- onated, uncultivated left its constitution unable to resisl the spiritual negation of the war. Its in- adequate and really bad, though very natural ideal of a minimum of work for a maximum of pay has not been strong enough to stand up against the general collapse of 1914.* Is the remedy Pacifism, Radicalism, a Minimum Wage,fetc.? Though good philosophies in their way, they will not prevent tyranny, exploitation or the wearisome divisions of classes and feuds of * These lines were written months ago, and adding this note at the beginning of December, 1918, I see reason to believe that official Labour has not only a policy, but a vision. Upon the expansion of that vision depends the future of mankind. But if that vision is contracted by narrow and sectarian aims, if it docs not involve a new philosophy of life, radically different from the negation of life it is destined to replace, there will be no health in it, nor will England be that community of individuals which it is our hope to see replace the Labour Party. f As for Liberalism and Toryism: "For above seventy moons past there have been two struggling parties in this Empire under the names of Tramechsan and Shamechsan, from the high and low heels of their shoes, by which they dis- tinguish themselves." 83 PEOPLE AND THINGS nations. For they do not sound the heart or test the blood, or redress the nervous system of men. They rearrange and redistribute the mechanism of life upon its existing basis. There is little more meaning to life under them, beneficent as they are, than under the present system. The anxiety, strain and tragedy of living are eased off, but not encountered in their strongholds, upon their first principles. I have no desire to scout these and other reme- dies, being neither politician nor sociologist, and so hardly qualified either to discuss or reject these "isms." But, I confess distrust of them, unless behind their proposals there is a faith in the restoration of the human being. Otherwise, the "masses" will still be toiling to live, living to toil under the same fetish of production for production's sake, and the same destiny of infernal drudgery. They will not feel the spiritual desire to do their work well, so long as that work is not worth doing well. The fact that they are adequately paid for it, or have a nominal or even actual representative in Parlia- ment, that they do not have to fight to prevent the covetous of other lands from making a ferocious bid for its results, what difference do these things make? I repeat that so long as men do their work merely for the material advantages they or others can get out of it, they will envy one another and so fear one another and so fight one another, and the old cycle of wars and militarism and dictator States return. 84 THE SABBATH WAS MADE FOR MAN Nostrums, palliatives and douceurs may be very well in their way, but Whitley Reports, arbitra- tion treaties (international or industrial), even such plausible remedies as Universal Suffrage will be no more than the lopping of branches, unless the whole philosophy of this system is got at, not the effects of that philosophy in action. The volcanic eruption of the war itself is the effect of the sub- terranean fires below. Free Will and Fate are really the cause and effect of existence. It is the divine law that man actually creates his own world in which he lives. Every conceivable condition, cir- cumstance, sensation, a<5t, environment are before him and await his sovereign choice. But he must infallibly accept the consequences of that choice. Now that he has betrayed the gift of choice by sur- rendering it, and has suffered the consequences, it befits him to exercise power of choice afresh. "Isms," then, are either stumbling-blocks or temporary expedients. The only system that can finally replace the existing one of material Power is a rule of life which will gradually slough systems off.* "The kingdom of God cometh not with ob- servation, neither shall they say, Lo here! or Lo there! for behold the kingdom of God is within you" not outside in the Houses of Parliament or Government Offices, or the Cabinet, or the Churches, or the Fabian Society, or the Mansion * To put it feebly. If man must resign his power, when necessary (as on ship- board) to others, let it be at his own choice and determination. 85 PEOPLE AND THINGS House, or the Chamber of Commerce, or the Labour Party, or MatthewArnold's external embodiment of our "besl selves." There is nothing Utopian about it. The kingdom of God it within us, not might be or shall be or ought to be. Or if we concede a point and allow it to be an ideal, then in the words of Conrad "an ideal is but a flaming vision of reality."* Some such conclusion is inevitable. External and irrespon- sible Power is obsolete, its doctrine is played out; it is a tale told by a State idiot, fit only to draw old men from the chimney-corner. It is an obstinate pe- dantism and hardly needs the acute particular, the th power of German submissiveness and Ger- man Hubris, to prove the absurdity of its universal application. Men are gentlefolk; they are the ser- vants of the divine law, the law of the divine freedom within them. One remembers that mar- vellous scene of the rejection of Falslaff, in which the mob of the theatre thought they had their way, but in which Shakespeare really had his. For it was not a cold-blooded young scoundrel throwing over his boon companion when it suited his ends. The issue was broader than that. Ruthless, con- scienceless Power, in the person of Henry V, threw over the free human element in the person of Falstaff. Shakespeare knew it and slated the facts. * Cultivate a child's imagination; develop his sensibilities; teach him true values and a respect for life (human and natural); turn him loose into it with the assurance that he will never want (why do the majority of men pass their lives in seeking to make money ? To be able to live), and put congenial work in his way is this the Aladdin's lamp of a Utopian magician? 86 THE SABBA-IH WAS MADE FOR MAN Mere rebelliousness leads nowhere, and the only catchword admissible is the common good of in- dividuals. That, perhaps, is the one rubric which promises the happiness and development of every human being in the community to the extreme capacity of his actual wants and powers, as dis- tinguished from his illusory appetites. As Charles Marriott, one of the very few practical visionaries of the times, says: "The truly personal is the truly universal." For the personal is only truly realised in the universal (as every individual work of art tells the tale) and there is finally no quarrel between the individual and the community. We have to achieve separateness not only before we achieve unity, but in order to achieve it. The differences between the individual and the community only become acute in a society maintained upon gross inequalities and upon a distribution of work, enjoyment and re- sponsibility so partial as to support the individual at the cost of the community and the community at the expense of the individual. Those who think ill of the world make ill of it, and men's minds being warped by a 'competitive system whose ethic is mistrust, bad faith and self-interest, conceive society as always sacrificing the individual to its own alien ends and the individual exploiting society for what he can get out of his chances. Society now actually nourishes and protects the individuals that do it the most injury. These false glosses overlay the essential truths 8? PEOPLE AND THINGS that it is in men's own interest to get rid of the lex talionis*\ that man cannot get on without his fellows or his fellows without him; that he is a social creature and not the gregarious brute war tries to make him; that the instinct for moral truth which man alone preserves unchanged through all the fashions of all the ages is compatible with the corresponding instinct for joy; that men encroach upon their neighbours to their own as well as their neighbours' loss; that society by encouraging a few favoured individuals to prey upon the rest, fosters the abnormal on the one hand and the subnormal on the other, and so on. We are told that men's wants must always trespass beyond their natural boundaries, and by restricting those of other men, create a slate of per- petual war only to be regulated by penalty and con- straint. But since an artificial society supplies and cultivates fictitious wants, the categorical imperative has no authority. We cannot afford to make these absolute hypotheses about human nature when we remember that for the past hundred years we have been selecting for survival not the best, but the most predatory type. The alternative of the common good must be tried if only as a means to self-preservation. The individual has his best chance in a co-operative * It is to be feared that the law claims a far wider obedience than that which is granted it within the narrow limits of war. It is not confined to the Laputan practice of killing a German applewoman in nominal revenge for the murder of an English sempstress. 88 THE SABBATH WAS MADE FOR MAN fellowship; the fellowship where its members are not units but persons with what diversity and vitality they possess to lend to the community and receive back in greater measure. We cannot con- tinue for ever to be ruled on the principle of cutting off the nose to spite the face. History, indeed, gives no testimony for men's collective greed and ambi- tion ; it is a witness rather to their excess of modesty. They are so modest that history is apt to ignore them for less shrinking human beasts of prey. In spite of its vagueness as a phrase, the idea of and respect for the human being are a genuine way out of the "Sabbath" theory. He is the basis of civilisation; the stone that the builders of civilisa- tion have rejected. To venture more definitely, the restoration of people to themselves and their work to its intrinsic interest might possibly begin by a drastic decen- tralisation. Centralisation is like a dull, obese belly draining the members of their health and vitality like a neutral-tinted map of England with a staring red blot for London. People might at any rate acquire a new self-importance, a new opportunity for exploring themselves and one another, were they less conscious of being swung gloomily and fatally at the end of strings round a rusty iron may- pole. Were some kind of centrifugal movement to set in and the magnetic attraction of a hard and re- mote force weakened, then people, escaped from the limited liability company of fear, hatred, gain, 89 ' PEOPLE AND THINGS and all human unprofitableness might take slock of one another. Little communities (one becomes enamoured of little things, "things that you may touch and see" in a world of monstrous chimeras) might be formed according to men's tastes and affinities, communi- cating by fresh streams of thought, interest and ex- change with other communities, like a chain of lakes and streams. Little townships are not the prerogative of the Middle Ages, but the privilege of imagination, and, therefore, hostages of reality. These settlements, stable, but not stagnant, would be self-supporting and self-creative. They would make their own public buildings and their own houses and meet in their own halls. The more they learned to rely on themselves, the less would they refer to any central authority. The unit of govern- ment would be the free township; of labour the free association according to trade. The township would run the raw material, the association its product. Each community would produce and own its own resources and employ them to the best advantage of utility and beauty. Other groups might be itinerant. Bands of players, for instance, would visit the townships, hire their theatres and act their own plays in them.* Painters with their apprentices would hire their bottega from the town- ship, decorate its halls and libraries and at the " Sec two admirable articles signed "B" upon this subjeft of the drama in wcceisive number* of the Nation (March, 1918). 90 THE SABBATH WAS MADE FOR MAN same time realise an informal bond of association with the bottegas of other towns. Or take printing. Each township would possess its own founts and presses; the printers in close co-operation with the authors would publish books from them. What an art of printing should we have ! To go upon actual evidence alone, compare the delightfully varied and beautiful types at Douay, Lyons, Tours, etc., in sixteenth-century France with the dull uni- formity of latter-day printing in the capitals of the great nations. The noble fraternity of cooks would lease the town kitchens. . . .* The intensity of local life, character and art need never harden into prejudice and exclusiveness, if a constant "to-ing and fro-ing" of independent pro- ducers kept the towns aerated with new ideas and diverse manners. Ownership and creation, move- ment and stability should always balance, fructify and interpenetrate each other. "Fay ce que voudras" would be carved in letters of oak over the town-hall. For a pure and absolute Communism is * Morris in his evidence before the Royal Commission on Technical Instruc- tion emphasised the dislocation between the artist and the designer. Unless the artist and the craftsman are in touch, unless both understand the material and the process from beginning to end, unless final value is estimated not according to the design, but according to the actual thing turned out, quality can never be guaranteed; nor which is a greater matter can the divisions between one class of men and another be healed. This community of work existed, needless to say, in the Art Workers' Guild, but is, of course, absent from the modern conception of industry. Indeed, one of the great evils of modern commerce can be traced to the separation of the business man from actual contact with the thing being made. So far from being a responsible person, he has no share in the work at all. 9 1 PEOPLE AND THINGS the ultimate end of goodwill, whether people ack- nowledge it or not, or whether they judge it too remote or impossible for effort. Its hypothesis is unchallengeable. "News from Nowhere" is not only a charming playground of the idealist, it is an imaginative projection of first principles in terms of life. But these hypothetics of a "Federation of Inde- pendent Communities," of course stretching over and beyond national limits, are idle, not because they are a crust thrown to starving fantasy, but because, if the art of life does become the conquest of men, their notions of intercourse, their ideas of growth and security and their creative methods will readily fall into a practical harmony and pro- portion. If, on the other hand, force, plunder and waste (supported by our hatreds, fears and resigna- tion) call upon us after the war for still greater sacrifices of our hopes, still more complete sur- renders of our vitality, it were better for us that, with the paper-roll already tied about our necks, we should be cast into the basements of Carmelite House. An article by an American woman describing her experiences of the Bolshevik revolution in Petrograd, contained these two sentences : "The average Russian has a dual personality he is both a brute and an angel. But if you expect him to be an angel he'll be one." So w th all mankind. The existing order expects every man to be a brute; or 92 THE SABBATH fTAS MADE FOR MAN bullies him into brutishness;or defrauds him of his angelic qualities. Humanity is coming to a pass at which it must trust itself or its idols : "Though floods shall fail and empty holes Gape for the great bright eyes of seas, And fires devour stone walls and trees Thou, soul of mine, dost think to live Safe in thy light and laugh at these?" We come to the conclusion then that just as words are used for expressing things, so the Sabbath is made for man. The person creates the institution for his benefit and not for the benefit of the institution. But this is not enough. The mass-man is usually more degenerate than the man himself. Yet man is necessarily a microcosm of society, to whatever ex- tent society distorts him. Just as the theory of the modern autocratic State has long ceased to express man, so in the little State of himself he has to fall back upon the inner consciousness, which is to him what he is to the State. Some men, debauched by power, have in themselves done to that conscious- ness what, as representatives of the absolute State they have done to men in general. Yet even in this apotheosis of human folly, vile men are few if fools are many. It is only that their activities have more scope and their crimes spread wider devastation. But men and women, in so far as they are obedient dupes of automatism, must bear something of the 93 G PEOPLE AND THINGS consequences. Qui vu/t decipi decipiatur. The in- nocent are always paying for the guilty, the intel- ligent for the stupid, the seers for the blind. On their shoulders are borne the sins of the world. But innocence, clairvoyance and reason are rarer even than vileness. The soul of man, like property nowadays, is somewhat unevenly distributed.* People require, that is to say, a plan and tools with which to conslrucl: a fellowship. They require a natural vent for the exercise, the display in action of goodwill. It is no good building ships unless there is water to sail them on. What should be possible is to find a common reckoning for any * It may interest my readers to know that shortly after I had written this book, I received a letter from a young soldier with whom I had talked over my subj eft-matter. "Since my experiences," he writes, "I have become an out and out aristocrat of the old order, viewing the mob with disgust and abhorrence. Eighty per cent, of the people I meet "are totally ignorant; fifteen per cent, have a little knowledge worse than no knowledge ; five per cent, are intelligent" "They believe what is told them like a flock of sheep"; "their height of amusement is halfpenny nap, the height of joy is a drunken bout." "They fight over their food like jackals." "Dirt,bestiality, sexual intercourse, the foulest talk from morning to night, the most brutal types predominant, a welter of de- graded passions, a moral and physical putrescence" "indescribable" such is his bitter refrain, culminating in: "I have no use for this rabble." I quote his letter and confess its heavy weight upon me, that I may not be dismissed as altogether a theory-spinner, and wandering as far away from truth as a successful politician. Does this cry of pain invalidate my case for the prosecution? Such is the path of war. For the defence? If my readers think the latter, it is their affair. I think otherwise, but I must leave it to them. If there is no hope in the spirit of man, if there are no substantial grounds for a belief in the restoration of the human being, if an iron rule is all we are fit for and art and love are the vanity of specula- tive intellects then the sooner the human race gives place either to the innocent animals or a higher order of being, the better for the self-respect of the universe. Who believes that? Poor wretches, denied all the blessings of life, freedom, a sane, natural and healthy environment, the comradeship of women, security, joy. worthiness of labour in short, everything worth having who are we to scorn them? 94 THE SABBATH WAS MADE FOR MAN proposal made a common appliance for a com- mon agreement. "The bird a net, the spider a web, man friendship."* The work of man's hand, heart and brain is the cement, the shape, and the fruit of that friendship. People have to be supplemented by things, life to find its complement in art. The theologian taught men to love things in God; the time has come round again to love God in things. For we are not faced by different genera of per- dition, however different the species. We read with a proper shame the pronundamientos (sayings are too modes! for them) of that poor, self-intoxicated Zimri of the nations, the Kaiser: "Recruits! you have given me the oath of allegiance before the altar and the servant of the Lord. You are still too young to comprehend the true meaning of what has been said here, but first of all take care ever to follow the orders and instructions that are given to you. You have taken the oath of allegiance to me; this means, children of my guards, that you are now my soldiers, that you have given yourselves up to me, body and soul. But one enemy exists for you my enemy. With the present Socialistic intrigues, it may happen that I shall command you to shoot your own relatives, your brothers, even your parents (from which may God preserve us !), and then you are in duty bound to obey my orders unhesitatingly." * The following extract comes out of a newspaper: "A road leading to a German internment camp in East Kent has been closed to foot traffic owing to the praHce of girls waving their hands to the prisoners." Imperishable human spirit, you shall not die! 95 G2 PEOPLE AND TRINGS Thus the Enfant Terrible of a State Authority who lets the cat out of the bag. It is lucky for us that here is the man who reveals the logical absurdity of the efficient and modern Sabbath, which, saddling the "labouring Titan" with Armies, Bureau- cracies,* Finance, War, and other loads of the kind, keeps his hands as full as the White Knight's. Our pack is so burdensome that words themselves "Struggle with the weight So feebly of the False, thick element between Our soul, the True and Truth!" Yet (as in Browning's simile of bathing) : "We must endure the false, no particle of which Do we acquaint us with but up we mount a pitch Above it, find our head reach truth, while hands explore The false below." If that is to say we can begin to sec clearly not this Importance or that Importance, but all the Im- portances, not confined to single nations, doctrines or manifestations! but all the effect of a system which sanctions men's preying upon their neigh- bours for gain, then one day, perhaps, men them- * They call it 92 committees: we think rather of the myriad green fly on a rose branch. But the more diieased the rose the greater the aphidian multitude. f In what way, for instance, is the "sacred egoism" of the robin-eating Julians morally superior in principle to Prussian Imperialism? 9 6 THE SABBATH WAS MADE FOR MAN selves, it may be generations ahead, will begin to turn their eyes inward and discover that they themselves and not a lot of stuffed dummies are the important thing. Nor is this mere optimism. If they see one another clearly and not through the smoked glass of Authority, they will see good men and bad for what they are, not for what Privilege and Banishment, Property and Destitution make them. In a comparatively recently discovered manu- script of the New Testament occurs a passage describing how Christ saw on the Sabbath a shoe- maker at work and said to him : "Man, if thou knowest what thou dost, blessed art thou, but if thou knowest not, thou art condemned." II faut cuhiver notre jar din. For what men unjustly take, they will keep by force. Competition not of excellence, but of cheap- ness, implies that spiritual goods may be sold for a farthing, and a vested interest in possessions pre- dicates another in the soul. The correlative of ugliness is seen to be brutality; or, rather, ugliness translated into terms of human action, reveals itself in brutality. Shoddy goods mean shoddy government; a Stock Exchange of money, a Stock Exchange of lives. Hell, like heaven, has many mansions some hovels, some jerry-built villas, some neo-Corinthian-Byzantine palaces of mart, some barracks, some factories, but they are all in the same metropolis. 97 PEOPLE AND THINGS We have, therefore, to aim at a synthesis of re- placement. The medicine of monotony of work and a dead level of average character is diversity and change in life and labour. That of exclusiveness and competition is fellowship; offeree, persuasion and of fraud faith. We sweep human beings into herds; it is time we distinguished them. The common-good is a substitute for the mob-mind, demagogy and newspaper-fodder, and so on. The seismic convulsions of Shakespeare's tragedies did not end in exhaustion, and in dark rites of atone- ment; they were replaced and covered by the ver- dure of young love, from whose warm, joined hands rose up like birds, the spirits of tolerance and re- conciliation. But there is yet another alternative to which modern Socialism, should it rely upon a mere transference of power from one set of officials to another, will pay no heed. For democracies and commodities let us try people and things and for the counting-house and the armament factory the workshop.* In order, therefore, to introduce the two to each other and because, in polite circles, the constitu- tional of the artist is presumed to lie between Bond * It will be noticed I am taking it pretty well for granted that good things are incompatible with bad and I think the experience of the lasl few years proves that the end of war has been loSi in the means of waging war. The Crusades were really a war for an idea. But war itself it so inherently demoralising that a genuine war for a genuine idea becomes impossible, as the means of waging war are perfected and extended. THE SABBATH WAS MADE FOR MAN Street and the British Museum, I had better write a short chapter, as a preface to the subject, upon Morris and Cobbett. Possibly, in their likeness, one may be able to trace an analogy between the two branches of my subject. 99 o NLY the a&ions of the jusl Smell sweet and blossom in their dusl. Shirley OD becomes as we are that we may be as he is, 'For everything that lives is Holy. Blake LOOK here, upon this picture, and on this; The counterfeit presentment of two brothers. See what a grace was seated on this brow; Hyperion's curls, the front of Jove himself, An eye like Mars, to threaten and command, A station like the herald Mercury New-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill, A combination and a form indeed, Where every god did seem to set his seal To give the world assurance of a man. Hamlet I SAY that our work lies quite outside Parliament, and it is to help to educate the people by every and any means that may be effective; and the knowledge we have to help them to is three-fold to know their own, to know how to take their own and to know how to use their own. William Morru I T is the natural effect of enlightening the mind to change the character. William Cobbett THEN war comes upon the scene and in six months all the results of twenty years of patient labour and of human genius are gone for ever, Maupassant 100 VI. TWO SABBATH-BREAKERS N nights so pitchy that the darkness can almosl be felt and handled, as though it were some kind of gelatinous substance, a walker in the country may see a few patches of light .from cottages and farms colouring and edging Cimmeria and at once relieving and intensifying its shades. Perhaps these farms and cottages, glancing so cheerfully, are old, and I remember that this month (March) sees the celebration of the William Morris week and the anniversary of William Cobbett's birthday. Beyond the identity of Christian names and souls, it is, on the face of it, fantastic to compare them. There is something so solitary, mountainous and prophetic about Morris* that it seems as idle to pair him with anyone as it would be Isaiah "Corruption," he wrote, with the leonine combativeness, and unquenchable (not to say brow-beating) honesty of purpose which make his personality so endearing, "is digging a terrible pit of perdition for society from which, in- * In this chapter I am not, of course, discussing Morris specifically as designer, craftsman, poet, story-teller, pastoral romancer, saga-writer, translator, scholar, archaeologist, typographer, Protector of Ancient Buildings (like Cnut, forbidding the encroachment of the waves) or "mediaevalist," as he is falsely called but only the public application of all this marvellous fertility to social life. Morrii* work is all of a piece and his actual literary production was an essential back- ground to his social convictions. He may not have created many masterpiece! (even his handicraft workX but they all contributed to the mafterpiece of his life. 101 PEOPLE AND THINGS deed, the new birth may come, but surely from amidol of terror, violence and misery. " What are you up to, Siegfried volleyed from his flaming hill of warning "on one side ruinous and wearisome waste leading through corruption to corruption on to complete cynicism at last, and the disintegration of all Society; and on the other side implacable oppression, destructive of all pleasure and hope in life, and leading whitherwards?" His constant preoccupation with this prophecy is full of interest, and it occurs a score of times in his letters, addresses and conversation. A letter written in 1885, some- time after the formation of the Socialist League and the split with the Social Democratic Federa- tion, says: "I have more faith than a grain of mustard seed in the future history of civilisation, which I know now is doomed to destruction, and probably before very long: what a joy it is to think of and how often it consoles me to think of. ... real feelings and passions, however rudimentary, taking the place of our wretched hypocrisies. With this thought in my mind all the history of the past is lighted up and lives again to me. I used really to despair once, because I thought what the idiots of our day call progress would go on perfecting itself; happily, I know now that all that will have a sudden check sudden in appearance I mean 'as it was in the days of NoeV " He likewise anticipated the coming of a more or less officially recognised State Socialism to precede a fuller enlightenment. But 102 TWO SABBATH-BREAKERS all his forecasts were uttered from the vantage of the poet's and prophet's creative imagination. Paradoxical as it may seem for a practical crafts- man, a writer who flouted "inspiration," and a man strongly coloured with Johnsonian good sense, Morris saw and dreamed in the way that Blake and Shelley did. His is a psychology by no means simple, so strangely blended in him were a keen in- telligence and imaginative wisdom. Yet further: because he was a seer, Morris, through all his vehemence (not in spite of it) was essentially a moderate man. Pathos sweetens and beams upon all his Socialist activities. A forbear- ance, sanity, humility (for such a man !) and good nature guided him in his dealings with the Federa- tion and the League, whose futilities, extravagance and empty violence so sorely tried him. He ap- proved neither of palliation nor of rioting; he broke with the Hyndmanites for their crudeness, bluster and intrigue, and his position some years before his death was that of A passive, mellow Socialism, which saw life as it saw art organically, as a growth, as a spiritual redemption, as "the spontaneous expres- sion of the pleasure of life innate in the whole people." War and violence, whether of commerce or its victims, were hateful to the aspiration of that rich and generous soul so free of cant, pretentious- ness and pomposity, that it could not be deceived by them. He knew that the anarchy of commerce had to be replaced by a spirit of love and art, insepar- 103 PEOPLE AND THINGS ables, and its only true and unconquerable foes. A shallow, journalistic reading picks out his more controversial words uttered in the heat of conflict, but anybody who studies Professor Mackail's wise appreciation of him must come to some such con- clusion. The retribution to fall upon society was, he knew, of society's own preparing; the logical consequence of its denial of God. So the prophet spake, thus the whirlwind has been reaped. But it was the peculiar nature and fate of Morris's gospel that made him like a star that dwelt apart a great deal further than most controversalists, further than many practical vision- aries. Society has failed to realise the saving dis- tinction he drew between false riches and true wealth (even old Butler who stuck up for money, and in his hatred for dogmas and passion for common-sense, sometimes made one of the other, felt what was wrong with money the love and the want of it). But so have the Socialists. Sterile, with- out the impulse of art, they have frittered away the end of his religion in the means.* Ruskin, it is true, * Is it necessary to define what that religion was? Surely not, and eyen if to, ray future chapter* will show plainly enough what a debt this book owe* to it. I will be content myself with an extract or two from his own less familiar correspondence. The following it from a letter to Mrs. Howard: "I think thit blindness to beauty will draw down a kind of revenge one day who knows ? Years ago men's minds were full of art and the dignified shows of life and they had but little time for juftice and peace; and the vengeance on them was not increase of the violence they did not heed, but the dr Aruftion of the art they heeded. So perhaps the gods are preparing troubles and terrors for the world; that it may once again (or our small corner of it) become beautiful; for I do not belicre they will haye it dull and ugly for ever." Secondly, an cxtraft out of hi IO4 TWO SABBATH-BREAKERS is usually coupled with Morris, but then Ruskin, except for his admirable insight into political economy, was a grandiose old woman who was always laying down the wrong law. A pound of Ruskin's "gorgeous eloquence" is not worth an ounce of Morris's Saxon mother wit. We feel, therefore towards Morris, in the spirit of Words- worth's sonnet to Milton. But what of Cobbett the Samson of "Re- form?" That stalwart looks a little earthy and ephe- meral beside Morris. Except in the natural fresh- ness, purity and even elegance of his style and its extraordinary ratiocinative power, he was no more of an artist (in the accepted sense) than a turnip. Nowadays, too, we see that Shelley and Blake were profounder politicians, because the boundaries of very rare criticisms of contemporary work (Swinburne's "Tristram of Lyonesse") " but in these days when all the arts, even poetry, are like to be over- whelmed under the mass of material riches which civilisation has made and u making more and more hastily every day; riches which the world has made, indeed, but cannot use to any good purpose: in these days the issue between art, that is the godlike part of man, and mere bestiality is so momentous and the surroundings of life are so stern and unplayful that nothing can take serious hold of people or should do so, but that which is rooted deepest in reality . . . there U no room for anything which is not forced out of a man of deep feeling, because of its innate strength and vision." Lastly, a small piece out of his noble letter to the Daily Chronicle on the Miners' question: "I do not believe in the possibility of keeping art vigorously alive by the action, however energetic, of a few groups of specially gifted men and their small circle of admirers amidst a general public incapable of understanding and enjoying their work. I hold firmly to the opinion that all worthy schools of art must be in the future, as they have been in the patt, the outcome of the aspiration of the people towards the beauty and true pleasure of life. And further these aspirations of the people towards beauty can only be born from a condition of practical equality of economic condition amongst the whole population This, I say, is the art which I look forward to, not as a yague dream, but ai a practical certainty, founded on the general well-being of thepsople." PEOPLE AND THINGS Cobbett's crusades lay pretty well within a single generation : "But vain the sword and vain the bow, They never can win war's overthrow; The hermit's prayer and the widow's tear Alone can free the world from fear. "For the tear is an intellectual thing, And the sigh is the sword of an angel king; And the bitter groan of a martyr's woe Is an arrow from the Almighty's bow." The statecraft of "The Masque of Anarchy" and "Auguries of Innocence" was far beyond Cobbett's apprehension. He was in fact half a Tory Constitutionalist, with all the obvious and quite likeable prejudices, the honest hatred of vulgar innovation, of "the place-and-pension-hunting- crew,"of peculators and stock-jobbers, of pluralism, "of grasping tyrannical faction" attaching to that extinct creed. "The Whigs," he said, "are the Rehoboam of England; the Tories rule us with rods, but the Whigs scourge us with scorpions." And again: "They (the Whigs) always tried to make tyranny double tyranny; they were always the most severe, the most grasping, the most greedy, the most tyrannical faction whose pro- ceedings are recorded in history." The other half of him was rooted like an old rock, in the soil, making him not only so passionate a champion of the pauperised agricultural labourer, but as he 1 06 tWO SABBATH-BREAKERS himself claimed with pardonable vanity, "the great enlightener of the people of England." But beneath the faces and in the expressions of our heroes, likenesses rise up like trout after flies. There is a primary likeness in their very tone a tone of disgusted repudiation, combined v/ith threats that are rather entreaties and entreaties that are rather threats. It is a tone both of withdrawing and of plunging in, of deserting the vis inerti* which is the real enemy and at the same time giving its hide, encrusted with barnacles, a good sound drubbing. Morris has the advantage over Cobbett here. His artistry gave him the whole social land- scape, which the seriousness and simplicity of his character saw, felt and knew as piercingly as they knew the arts; Cobbett only encompassed the little property by the homestead. The real difference between them is not merely that the one saw revo- lution (a revolution, through art, of spirit, and of peace) and revolution alone as the prelude to the "great change" and the other less articulately; not only that Cobbett saw life socially, but Morris crea- tively. Morris had a philosophy of life and Cobbett, but one of (to put the matter in a deceptively harsh light, for want of a better word) expediency. Cobbett, so to speak, twisted the bull's tail, but Morris had it by the horns. Granted this distinction, radical enough, but not destructive, they can run in harness together. Both were headstrong and impetuous in disposi- 107 PEOPLE AND THINGS tion; both were extremely good haters, abomina- ting the one political, the other commercial cor- ruption with the same hearty, militant zeal. Both of them were born fighters, and the same kinds of characteristic excellencies appear, curiously enough, in their respective styles. They match each other in their forthrightness, in their vast productiveness and capacity for work, in the doggedness of their convictions and, indeed, in a way of beating people over the head with them, as they no doubt deserved. Cobbett's career, it is true, is strewn with incon- sistencies; on page 10 of his mental biography, he is in full cry with his contemporaries, hounding Tom Paine as a monster, an apostate, an infidel, a rogue and an outcast, and on page 100 piously hawking his bones. He was first a "patriot," then a pacifist. What Cobbett was really doing was shedding exuberances. The dog was hunting his rat. Besides, a quite consistent that is to say a perfectly logical man is one who must reduce life to the absurd and himself to a madhouse. If Cobbett was inconsistent, he was coherent enough. Morris, too, like Cobbett, had that mystical attach- ment to the land which lends both of them some- thing of their enchantment. "Less lucky than Midas," says Morris, "our green fields and clear waters, nay, the very air we breathe are turned not to gold, but to dirt" He follows in his fine tem- pestuous way "Let us eat and drink, for to- morrow we die, choked lyfilth?' 1 Cobbett's devotion 108 TWO SABBATH-BREAKERS to the land of his fathers, quite apart from his refer- ences to the "great wen," his papers on plantations, etc., and his little estate at Botley, is sufficiently attested by the way he was attacked as an incen- diary of barns and hayricks by a Press half as poisonous as ours to-day. But besides their fearlessness, their magnificent public spirit (Cobbett's loathing of jobbery was Morris's of charlatanism and shoddiness) and their very reprehensible attitude to the House of Com- mons (in "News from Nowhere" is it not a barn for the storage of manure.^-^-while Cobbett, on his first appearance as member for Oldham, planted himself on the front bench and remarked: "It appears to me that since I have been sitting here, I have heard a great deal of vain and unprofitable conversation" they both had a veneration for the worth and value of labour which makes them brethren Dioscuri of a dawn that has not yet come. Both addressed their audiences as working men. "I have pleaded the cause of the working people, and I shall see that cause triumph," and Morris professedly repudiated the middle classes. Both of them were .n this respect traditionalists, for Cobbett looked back to the more independent labourer of his childhood ("I want nothing new," he always said), and Morris far back 10 the owns- folk of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, who built the cathedrals of England and North France. 109 H PEOPLE AND THINGS But they met here upon even closer ground. Morris, as well as Cobbett, was a bit of a feudalist or at least agreed with Cobbett in the health and sanity of a more personal and intimate relationship between employer and employed. It is interesting to find him advocating the common hall "in the rational ancient way which was used from the time of Homer to past the time of Chaucer, a big hall to wit, with a few chambers tacked on to it for sleeping or sulking in," in almost the same language as Cobbett. Modern finance is impersonal and remote from the human consequences of its designs. Cobbett, too, stood apart "I am the watchman, the man on the tower, who can neither be coaxed, nor wheedled, nor bullied." A special point remains to be made of the attitude of men like Cobbett and Morris to tradition. Morris's teaching could not exist without it, and quite refutes the accepted verdict that tradition and revolution are in hostile camps. Cut the former out of him and Shylock is once more discomfited. The traditions of a thousand years, he says, fall before competitive commerce in a month. Pro- fiteering he called by the mediaeval terms of usury, "regrating" and "forestalling" (viz., buying for 2d. what you sell for 2-|d.). He describes the struggle between commerce (with which popular liberties were first associated) and sham feudality, and shows how the conqueror turned on his allies. The history of the Dutch Republic (as he might no WO SABBATH-BREAKERS have pointed out) which once free of the Spanish despotism, diverted and etiolated its energies into a series of commercial wars for the trade of the Indies, is a comment in little upon the progress of civilisation. He declares that work is no good to a man, unless memory and imagination accompany it, and he can create, not only as an individual, but a particle of the human race, that obscure congeries of the "common people" to whom kings, prelates and patrons owe the glory of their dwellings and their household appointments. How comes it, he asks, that these works that have survived are full of joy and vitality, when open violence and oppres- sion were the lot of their makers? They were absorbed, in spite of all, in the excellence of what they made. If we do not study ancient art, he warns his audiences, we shall be influenced by the feeble work around us and shall only copy the better through the copyists. For the memory of that ancient art will determine us to bear no longer the reckless brutality and squalor of to-day. A labori- ous study of the workmanship and design of the old peasant-craftsmen is in itself a prelude to the awakening. Follow Nature, study antiquity, make your own art this was Morris's triad. Cobbett's grim suspicion of the beginnings of plutocratic Whiggery comes to almost, though not quite, the same thing. Their true piety for the past was indeed founded on a perception that the commercial system thrust a III H 2 PEOPLE AND THINGS crude wedge into the continuity of man's develop- ment into ever higher and higher forms of inter- preting life. War, in which the spoils of time and the labour of generations are overthrown in ten minutes' firing, is the endorsement, signed in blood of this challenge. Modern rulers have a kind of in- evitable grudge against the historic building. It was natural for the German military to destroy Rheims and Louvain and Amiens, as it was for the London School Board to propose the demolition of old and beautiful houses to make Board Schools as it is for our age to treat art as a luxurious divan to be leaped from when Sergeant Action blows his whistle. The health and sanity of the works of the past impeach and warn the present (because they are an alternative) that Moloch's temple, built of the bones of human love and happiness, shall one day be overthrown. I have one more parallel to make. Morris and Cobbett were what the fashion of a few years back would have called "vitalists." Vitalism can cover a multitude of sins, but the term may, perhaps, be applied, if it means that our heroes devoted them- selves to parting the decoration from the expres- sion of life. Morris especially loved art, because he saw in it the expression of simple and valid human needs. Everything beyond and outside those needs was a decorative superfluity. Cobbett, too, sought all his life how to translate humanity into the quick and active element of life. Humanity is the am- 112 TWO SABBATH-BREAKERS bassador of God, just as shadows, responding in their depth and movement to the relationship of sun and cloud to the author of their being are the expression of Nature's countenance. It was the business of Morris and Cobbett to expose the decorative in life and to show that, though a vague and insubstantial thing because it is remote from human needs, at the same time it can and does work fearful, tangible havoc. In fad, they would have disliked the aesthete. It seems antiquarian to mention them in these days of direct action ; who crawl but in the Black and Yellow Books, of which the first is unobtainable by the most covetous of collectors and the latter lan- guishes, like the inland pebbles left dry and pur- poseless by some remote geological offensive, upon the shelves of the Charing Cross Road. j^Estheticism is, indeed, aged, but, like eld, has borrowed the image of youth. The military gentle- men, for instance, whose conception of warfare is that of technical contrivance and design, and who do not see flesh and blood in flanks and salients; the business man who plays with his stocks and shares, serenely detached from any real work that is done in the world; the politician who feeds on the liver of humanity, not out of a sense of duty to some Jovian decree, but for a dietary, as a gourmet, one might say who regards politics much as an elegant woman regards an expensive hat, as an exercise of power and display of personality; the PEOPLE AND THINGS first-class passengers, troubled by no idle super- stition, who used to, and may still, catch the alba- tross (if there are any left) with hook and line on shipboard all, all of them, are aesthetes. The characteristic of the aesthete, that is to say, is frivolity; he is cut off from the concrete reality of life on the one hand and the idea, the spirit of life on the other. Morris and Cobbett might, therefore, be called "vitalists," because they realised that just as spiritual love manifests itself through physical desire, so the spirit of life finds expression through the concrete forms of life. Nor is it necessary to point out that these men who fought so valiantly "for the good of men's souls" were hostile in grain to that theory of ex- ternal authority, which, like a cat chasing its own tail, can express nothing but its own delusive egoism. They are gone and it is well for them, for Morris would have burst had he seen his prophecy come to pass and his workmen making the instruments of death instead of life and beauty, and Cobbett would have burst had he seen the multitudes of placemen and jobbers, the deluge of paper-money, the starva- tion of the land and the Alps of National Debt. Our cottage lights are really stars, and we who sit in the valley of lamentation may at least look up and see their good works and their lights so shining before men that it may give us courage to glorify something very different from what we do. 114 TWO SABBATH-BREAKERS The comparison is, after all, relevant to our times, and this book. Cobbett may, in his way, stand as a respecter of persons (not quite in the Scriptural sense), Morris as a respecter of things, and the approximations and parallels of their lives and works will do for an example of the interaction and interpenetration of things with people and people with things. Through them we see, too, that political in the end accompanies commercial cor- ruption a lesson to be learned, since we English used to be jealous of our political rights, while ig- noring the complement of commercial ones. Cobbett again was really an artist, since consciously or not he felt self-government to be equal, contri- butory and harmonious in all its parts, both as a comely form and as proceeding from the common need; and we have consequently to extend the meaning of art into an Empire. Lastly, the im- possible conception of Cobbett and Morris, as men, as workers, and as representatives of ideas living and working in our present pass, breathing in this foul air, may give the measure of our age bet.er, perhaps, than any number of Jobads and Jere- miads. T IT is admitted that the presence of people who refuse to enter in the great handicap race for sixpenny pieces, is at once an insult and a disenchantment for those who do. . . . Alexander is touched in a very delicate place by the dis- regard of Diogenes. R. L. Stevenson HERE is one thing in the world more wicked than the desire to command, and that is the will to obey. W. K. Clifford COMMAND is a blight to the affections; love and co- ercion cannot possibly exist together. Herbert Spenser FOR what is my life or any man's life but a conflict with foes : The old, the incessant war? Walt Whitman IT is hard to think that man could ever have become man at all, but for the gradual evolution of a perception that though the world looms so large when we are in it, it may seem a little thing when we have got away from it. Samuel Butler THERE rises an unspeakable desire After the knowledge of our buried life; A thirst to spend our fire and restless force In tracking out our true, original course; A longing to enquire Into the mystery of this heart which beats So wild, so deep in us to know Whence our lives come and whence they go. Matthew Arnold N all Love, there is some Producer, some Means and some End; all these being internal in the thing itself. Thomas Traherne I SHAKE off your heavy trance! And leap into a dance Such as no mortals use to tread; Fit only for Apollo To play to, for the moon to lead, And all the slars to follow. Francis Beaumont G OD has made out of his abundance a separate wisdom for everything that lives. Old Celtic Saying VII. A TYPE OF THE CHOSEN DEOPLE and things, then true, if dis- guised human nature and the nature of things are united in cause and principle against any arbitrary system which im- -J v poses, and is imposed, upon them from without. The remedy, therefore, has to come through the exercise and association of these two sovereign elements of life. There are historians who debate the separation of Church and State, of kingdom from kingdom, of England from Ger- many, what have they to say to the separation of art from humanity? The Horatian ideal, that of the vulgar aesthete and the ideal of Cleon the artistic vulgarian are, in their "democratic" and anti- democratic aspects the principal themes for the orthodox historian. Are there to be found, then, any broad general principles which can be applied to art, and by their comprehension give us a notion of what human progress means? I believe that there are, and that they can be set down without undue recourse to the vested interests of sesthetic idiom. In a word, we have to look at art, as we have been looking at the human being from the foundation upwards. For the task of art is to find "the line of least resistance"* * By the "line of leaft reliance," I do not, of course, mean a laiiser faire policy. I am using it in the sense of the liue that does leasl violence to the material*. 119 PEOPLE AND THINGS between the substance in which it works and the Form in which it seeks to emerge. The same can be said of the individual. His motive for living is to express himself in terms of life. To make his life a work of art, he, too, has ("oh, what labour, oh, what pain!") to find the line of least resistance and to mould himself upon the nature of the human material, as art does upon the nature of its material. He has to find the most adaptable means of com- munication between his less conscious self (the substance, the material) and the self that is to come into its own. "It is our less conscious thoughts. . . . which mainly mould our lives," writes William James. The identification of those two selves is the veritable law of God. The artist himself performs a kind of double func- tion. In attempting to identify the substance with the Form of his material, to entice out its essence, he has also to identify the substance of his own nature with its own Form. He sees, that is to say, in the materials of the universe, of man and of his craft, the spirit that fragmentarily is in himself. If he be true to the one consciousness, he will be true to the other. Precisely the same applies to society, of which the individual is the substance, just as stone is the substance of a statue and pigment of a picture, of which the Formisthe unified, developed life, indivisible from the substance and yet not of it. Translated into social terms, the substance is the individual and only by giving structure and I2O A TTPE OF THE CHOSEN harmony to the growth of every individual can a society gather up its heterogeneous material into a compact reality into Form into an image of God. A society that ignores or exploits the individual is like a painter who either tries to get on without paint at all, or forces it into a foreign relation something alien to the nature of itself. On these grounds one of the cardinal sins in art, as in humanity, is to disobey those materials to compel those materials to conform to the special qualities of other materials; to mix the expression of paint, say, with the proper materials of stone, to pervert the human material in the terms of ma- chinery, wealth and compulsion. To impose arbi- trary designs upon materials is to deprive them of their essential reality. The process of art forms an exa6t parallel with 7 that of human relations and per- sonality. Both are the well-beloved children of God, and both seek to express themselves in the due Form of their material. So that to be "true to Nature" is to be true to Nature's materials. "How admirable thy justice, O thou first Mover! Thou hast not willed that any power should lack the pro- cesses and qualities necessary for its results." In- genious forms in art interpose themselves between its materials and their expression corresponding forms interpose themselves between the human material and its expression. Pedantry in art is the same thing as tyranny in life. For ultimately Form is the " I AM" of the universe, and God, the com- 121 PEOPLE AND THINGS plete expression, the perfect creation, while the surest proof of the existence of God is the proof both visible and felt of his materials. The law of materials, the promise of the law of God, governs all men and all things. The homeliest illustration will serve. Morris points out that in a fireplace the wood should be part of the wall and the tiles of the chimney. The craftsman's business lies in expressing those re- spective relationships. The art of the novelist will serve as another example. What we have to watch in a good novel is not the plot, which is not an abso- lute value in itself, not, again the personality of the novelist, which will only emerge full-bodied if the other values are in due relation, but the balance of the relationship between the material working itself out and the attitude of the writer. We have to feel that there is idea and conviction in the novelist's mind, and that at the same time they do not upset and interfere with the natural development of the material out of its own innate resources and signi- ficance. The material would not duly evolve itself unless the grasp and perception of the novelist re- alise its capabilities, and he or she again would not convey the true sense of that perception to us if he (or she) were to take liberties with the material. Or, to take an example right away from art performing animals. Elephants sitting on benches, blowing|trumpets, seals tossing and catching balls, tigers leaping through hoops, bears at afternoon 122 A TTPE OF THE CHOSEN tea all those mongrel and outlandish antics that turn an animal away from the norm of his own kingdom into the fool of another mutiny against the materials. Far better for a tiger to spring in his superb beauty upon his prey than upon an inverted tub. No wonder that that sensitive writer Desmond MacCarthy speaks of the "heart-damping gambols of performing animals." It may be objected that dogs ought not to sit up and beg. Nonsense dogs are domesticated and enjoy their own little variety shows. But a dog which apes man and rides a bicycle is a monstrosity. The natural dignity of art is outraged and debased by clowning him into a Little Boy Blue. He is being forced "to imitate in one substance the Form of another." He is true neither to himself nor to Little Boy Blue.* In the same way, whoever takes pleasure in the song of a lark or a blinded chaffinch in a cage, is, willy nilly, an apostle of art for art's sake. But the lover of beauty, who is true to the law of materials, can take no pleasure in a bird's song, unless it be an accom- paniment to the natural surroundings in which the bird exists the fields of blue and green, the woods and waters, hills and valleys. The bird's song cannot, that is to say, be dissociated from the idea of gladness and freedom. Or, again, take a country house. If it stick to the natureof its wood or stone, if it have the appearance of having grown out of the * I do not, of course, mean that animals should not be tamed or domefli- cated. A horse drawing a plough does not offend our sense of harmony or fitness, but dancing on two legs to a silly tune, he does and should offend it. T23 PEOPLE AND THINGS earth and the particular character and atmosphere of the district in which it is built (as even the ugliest houses look, if they have a matured and amber-coloured thatch head on them or have grown old enough to take Nature's brush) and at the same time be fitly accommodated to the wants of man, that house has done its duty by the law of materials. When we consider the threefold relation of a house to the earth, to man and to the materials of its own structure, we recognise how right was Morris in insisting upon the primary importance of archi- tecture. Or again. To plant cactuses in English gardens is to mix up different forms and materials. Garden flowers should be natural products of a garden, they should be true to the idea of a garden, not of the tropics or a florist's shop. Or to take a penultimate example: an egret's plume should be in an egret's tail, not in a female barbarian's hat. I will take one last example also from the birds. It may appear that I am always dragging in birds by the beak. But it seems to me that birds play an exceedingly important part in the spiritual economy both of man and of Nature. They are the most beautiful objects in Nature; our attitude to- wards them is a test of our relations with Nature, and though science has a vested interest in them, it is to psychology and philosophy that they more truly and naturally belong. Jules Michelet, in "L'Oiseau," saw birds not in species and orders, but as souls and persons. They are, too, a kind of 124 A TYPE OF THE CHOSEN chorus to the argument of this book. Well, then, museums all over the world (I am leaving out of account the private collector a base creature out- side the pale of discussion) are full of stuffed birds in glass cases, principally for purposes of identifica- tion. To me, there is hardly a spectacle more de- pressing than row upon row of these specimens, with their faded plumage, their glass eyes and rigid, lifeless, meaningless poses. They are a dull parody upon the quick and living being. But are they indispensable for the purposes of study? Nothing of the kind. Instead of these travesties and violations of life, why are there not painted models of all the species, wrought in materials suitable to the representation desired porcelain or wax for instance? Consider the advantages of this method. In the first place, the cost of life would be practi- cally nil an immeasurable gain. Secondly, the poise and shape of the figures would be more just and comely. Thirdly, the colours would retain their gloss and brilliance. Fourthly, these figures would be beautiful in themselves, since they would be executed, not by scientists, but by competent artists. Nobody in their senses could call a stuffed bird beautiful. Fifthly, this beauty would be their own^ and not a borrowing from, an imitation of the beauty of the bird. A bird is beautiful in itself, a figure of a bird should be beautiful in itself; both are works of art. But a stuffed bird is neither art nor Nature ; it violates the nature of things. Sixthly, 125 i PEOPLE AND THINGS the model would also serve a scientific purpose more accurately than the bastard art of taxidermy which can only retain the shape, and that clumsily, can ever do. Lastly, there is the gain for humanity, through our refusal to abuse our power over the creatures (since if we abuse them, we shall abuse one another) and in the more sympathetic under- standing of bird-life (that is to say, of the nature of things) which such modelling would entail. There, simply by obeying the law of materials in one par- ticular branch of knowledge, we should achieve a definite gain in life, beauty and humanity con- siderations against which all others are pedantry. Shakespeare put the whole thing into one line "Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds." So we can travel from the smaller to the greater substances and the final object of art as of human nature is to scale the invisible ladders of heaven, with passion, humility and delight, by steps that lead up from dust and clay to perfect Form. Humanity and art are what Shelley calls "nurslings of immortality." Perhaps here is a possible inter- pretation of the mysterious Sin against the Holy Ghost. It is a violation of the very nature of things. Now this view of art (which, of course, is not my invention) is opposed in grain to the mimetic art of "accurate representation," which, through its literary medium, is called "realism," or, to use a narrower term, "naturalism." The latter is contrary to the view set forth (scrappily, but I shall try A 7rPE OF THE CHOSEN to follow it in a continuous thread through the rest of the book) in four different ways. In the first place, it sacrifices end to means by concentrating upon technique and draughtsmanship as ends in themselves. Secondly, the emphasis upon "like- ness" diverts the attention of the artist from the material to the subject. He is imitating the ex- ternal appearance of Nature, not being true to: he spirit of Nature in his material. Photography can do that a great deal more accurately than he can and far more satisfactorily, since, by taking photo- graphs, photography is being true to the nature of its being. Thirdly, accurate representation con- fuses forms with Form. Form is true to the idea, which can only be expressed appropriately by in- sight into the nature of the materials that are to reveal that idea. In the art of transferring to canvas or paper the Form of something totally different, forms replace Form and the letter the spirit. Nature may have been successfully imitated, but the nature of things has been violated. Fourthly, it destroys the value of art altogether, just because art is not Nature. Turn Nature over to art and art slips into the wings and you are clasping only a pallid imitation of Nature. Ixion embraces the cloud-shape and accepts it complacently as Hera. Art can no more be called either superior or inferior to Nature than crocuses can be called superior or inferior to sweet-williams. They are different and each is beautiful and fit in itself. It is of no small 127 u PEOPLE AND THINGS significance that the artists of a commercialised and imperialised Japan should preach that "without the depiction of objects there can be no pictorial art" Hence Japanese art has deteriorated into empty decoration. Some of the old Chinese poets and artificers made no such artistic mistake or conces- sion. If, therefore, we get the bearings of this law and steer by it into other waters, displacement rather than force, becomes the proper revolutionary term. A material victory is often the complement of a spiritual defeat. If man thirsts for a better order than the present one, he must seek it in himself, draw what he finds there into the light of day, and embody it in the art of living, of which the work of art, both in process and achievement, is the microcosm. The way to solve the problem is by getting rid of that which interposes itself between what may be called the good nature of men (it must be good, because it is the raw material of the in- finite and perfectible) and the direction, energy and satisfaction of that nature. How, then, is it possible to get men's true wants clear of the perversions and frustations owed to our civilisation? Is it possible, for instance, to build a kind of spiritual clearing-house for those wants, so that people may be able, if they choose, to perceive what is uncongenial to their growth and happiness, by the example, by the alternative of what is congenial to them ; that they may be able to distinguish more 128 A TYPE OF THE CHOSEN clearly between what they do want and what they don't ? It may be hedonism, or too obstinate a faith in the spiritual good sense of man, but it is not mere wild speculation to believe that if he could develop this sense of choice and then differentiate the result from mere appetite, morality might be pretty much left to take care of itself. Under the pressure of illusion or under the delusions of force, men and women will consent to be miserable and ignorant and prejudiced and because ignorant and pre- judiced cruel. But they will not consent to be moral either by force or deceit. Therein is their hope. Mankind will not be happy unless moral, nor moral unless happy, and the quality of man's happi- ness and morality depends upon the strength and desire with which he apprehends reality the Form of his individual substance. Reality, in spite of the materialists, is twofold. In this world, it means perceiving people andjthings literally as what they are, and metaphysically as what they imply. In the invisible world, the mil- lenial world, the world of dreams, by whose con- tact with our own we divine that perfect love, order and beauty are not a dream, it consists in knowing that people and things are in an ancestral, a con- tinuous and symbolic relation with infinite truth. We cannot, as Francis Thompson puts it, "touch a flower without troubling of a star." Instinct, in fact, is the criterion of faith in the unseen. These realities, those of the concrete and the abstract, the 129 PEOPLE AND THINGS individual and the universal, are so to be judged, the one by the touchstone of the other, that if we lose our sense of the one, we sacrifice our percep- tion of the other. Mr. Francis Meynell, in his beautiful little anthology of Vaughan and Marvell, puts upon his title page: "The Best of Both Worlds Poems of Spirit and of Sense." Keats's famous line: "She stood in tears amid the alien corn," contains no fewer than four clear particulars, four concrete and definite statements, as differ- entiated from one another as it is possible for a sentence of eight words to effect. Yet, by some alchemy of language, these four plain observations have combined to pass out of sense into spirit, out of the particular into the eternal. I think it would be true to say that all the great mystics teach this truth that people and things are both a truth in them- selves and a portion of Truth. It is the mystifiers who drown the concrete in the abstract, the idola- ters who ignore the abstract in the concrete, and the aesthetes who ignore both both the "Word" of life and the "Flesh" that it is made. Can the artist then (as champion of a new society) be used both as a convenient example to people of the faith they might have in themselves, and as an explorer of reality? Caution steps in here, for it is no easy matter to keep even the best of men's heads clear of the prevailing notion of the artist as the Man in the Deck Chair, while men are working and women weeping. But if it is hard to materialise 130 A Tl'PE OF THE CHOSE* him as a type, it will do for the moment to take him on trust as a symbol. Forget for that moment all the gibberish about art for art's sake, and art for war's sake and war for art's sake. Forget the pale hands beside the Shalimar. Recoiled "the fretful- ness, impatience and extreme tension of modern literary life, the many anxieties that paralyse and the feverish craving for applause that perverts so many noble intellects" but it is not fair to con- fuse the reactions of a forced environment with original sin. Rather "conceive him if you can a matter-of-fact young man." The lily-worshipper of the 'nineties is gone, and the exquisite casual with tapering ringers who fashions jewelled phrases about the conventions of bourgeois marriage ; gone the half- angel and half-child, the spoiled darling of elderly spinsters and (except in America) the gourmet who devours mispresses like oysters. Novelists begin to treat the artist not as a scapegoat, an enigma or a sensitive plant, but as a real person. Legends still persist of the terrific debaucheries of the early Elizabethan dramatists, Nashe, Greene, Lodge, Peele and their associates. The notable thing about these worthies is not their depravity, but their in- dustry. So with the modern artist. The "genuine article" is usually a serious, hard-working, tem- perate, unhappy creature, struggling to realise his artistic conscience against the overwhelming odds imposed upon him by the outside world. PEOPLE AND THINGS He is, in short, a person more likely than his less conscious fellows to be out of tune, by the nature and character of his work, with the processes and the results of modern shams. Without encroaching too freely upon a future chapter about art, one may say that he has to bring truth of imagination to bear upon the facts of actual life. Art, as Browning says, in "Fifine at the Fair" : u . Which I may style the love of loving, rage Of knowing, seeing, feeling the absolute truth of things For truth's sake, whole and sole. . . ." Grotius, who spoke of the "law of Christian piety," really meant that where these facts collide with an apprehension more acute and clairvoyant, the former must go. The artist, because he distin- guishes between the appearances and the truth, is the advocate of reality. There is a charming passage in Motley's "Dutch Republic" which will, per- haps, give a notion of what I am after : "Women, children, old men were killed in countless numbers and still through all this havoc, directly over the heads of the struggling throng, suspended in mid- air above the din and smoke of the conflict, there sounded every half-quarter of an hour, as if in gentle mockery, the tender and melodious chimes." The artist is at the other end of the bell-rope. He can then, to some extent, prevent truth from being as confounded as it now is with illusion, and 132 A TYPE OF THE CHOSEN to that obje<5t his life is dedicated. Yet it is idle to speak him deliverer, before he can deliver himself. As it did the old knights, a purifying ceremony awaits him an initiation into a new freedom. Within that being exist the longing to be free and the passion to make; outside it and in the disorders of our time, the will, however half-hearted and clumsy, to enslave and the instinct to destroy. Faith in Truth, in himself and his art and in the need of that art to restore happiness and the will to beauty and lastly, faith in the traditional con- tinuity of that will trampled, but not uprooted by the hoof of material Power, is a working formula. There is, said Butler, "no incontrovertible first premiss," and we have to accept faith or to use the modern term, conviction, as the basis of logic and reason. The artist possessed with this faith looks upon the pride, force and show of modern government, and, a more modest Crusader, finds it infidel. Assuming that he is so preoccupied, is there any- thing he can do? Physical force, deliberate con- version, organised opposition, tract mongering, humanitarianism, are all out of his beat. They are making of the line of least resistance a straight, an unbending line, a line with an arrow-head fixed to one end. "The line that is straightest," says Leonardo in his Notebooks, "offers the most re- sistance." Charles Marriott, most original, delicate, and accomplished of modern art-critics, some- 133 PEOPLE AND THINGS where describes the artistic process as a "patient waiting upon Form," just as God "brooded over chaos" : in fact, "wise passivity" over again. Theseus, then following the line of least re- sistance out of the labyrinth, is led by it out into the world; the gardener shifts his attention from the single flower to the garden, and the artist his from the part of his work of art to the whole of mankind? Humanity's interest is his, not only because the idea of humanity is part of his material, but he part of humanity's. The artist also is a man and a brother. But both as artist and brother he will very soon find himself confronted by a state of things favourable to neither. Brotherhood is the polite fiction of the poets; and that process which he has come to recognise as the law of artistic growth has upon the human canvas been violated in the very nature of things. Humanity he perceives as an instrument, not as a substance patiently persuaded into maturity or rather persuaded to make the effort for itself. Forms (the State, militarism, finance, legalism and all the hankey-pankey) press upon and do violence to the helpless human material. The first law of art, the first law of humanity that "progress" is from within out- wards are disobeyed under his eyes. I conclude that on behalf of himself as part of humanity and of humanity as his greater self, his business is to keep clear, desert, retire, with- draw from the concern, as an imposture (using 134 A TYPE OF THE CHOSEN the word in the double sense of its ordinary and derived meaning) upon the true significance of life and art. By so doing, he will still be "true to himself and the organic law of art. "Wise pas- sivity" turns to its enemy and scares him out of countenance. It is not quite true to say that this is an extension in terms of art of Tolstoi's gospel of "non-resistance." The artist affirms life, but Tolstoi, too dogmatically, even theologically, intent upon the dualism of body and soul, denied and re- nounced life. Art and Tolstoi may share some conclusions in common, but they approach them from the opposite poles of thought. When Tolstoi said and applied "the kingdom of God is within you," once more the great truth was loosened. But as he was prodigious in everything, the very huge- ness of his intolerance squeezed the kingdom into a province. He was in the right and the wrong, but too ruthless in both. We are flesh and spirit, and mankind will not be freed by keeping them apart. He treated social life, not as an idea, but a pitiless dogma and chained the one by the other. An example nearer home is presented by Marriott's novel "Now," where a few malcontents drop out, like tired soldiers, from the forced march of civilisation. The idea also emerges, if less trans- parently, in Henry James's "The Ivory Tower." The striking thing to note is that this attitude is compatible with the whole nature and process of art (a conjunction which is not at all Tolstoian); 135 PEOPLE AND'THINGS next, that it is a means to getting the feel and taste of what I may call undiluted humanity, and lastly, that it is a menace to Power which is finally irresistible. It introduces into the lists the unorthodox com- batant who rights not with the weapons selected for him by custom and authority, but with his own. Just as the prestige of duelling would be debased if one of two duellists were to extricate himself, throw down his rapier and walk away, leaving his an- tagonist dumbfounded, so the prestige of con- formity is somehow mystified, embarrassed, un- hinged, Falttaffed off the stage. The matter cannot rest here. "Withdrawal" re- mains a paradox and of no apparent use to hu- manity or art. It may, of course, mean anything or nothing, and invites a train of misconceptions. The early Christians withdrew; our young poets, some of them have withdrawn ; the Pilgrim Fathers did and the Pantisocrats desired to. Cliques, stall- holders in Vanity Fair, the long-haired in the Cafe Royal, Garden Suburbans, dons place themselves apart. Every artist, more concerned with doing his work well than with what people will think of him for -it with the work itself rather than the effects produced to a certain extent already withdraws from society. Satirists and prophets, those thinkers (or rather seers) who can teach humanity a thing or two that takes some learning, detach themselves more consciously. One of the De Guerins withdrew to an island to write works for 136 A TYPE OF THE CHOSEN his own exclusive delectation. He and the ceno- bites were the extreme literalisms of a reaction com- mon enough in all its forms. The poets retire into their own blossoming solitudes, the spectators of life into their own little observation mounts, Dives into his counting-house and Lazarus his grave, from which it can hardly have been his personal wish to have been raised. The Essenes again, and numberless heretical sects, withdrew from the or- thodox Christians, while the Puritans withdrew from the Anglican Church and the Diggers from the Puritans. Individual examples are still more numerous. Montaigne, freeing himself from the epileptic France of Henry III, voyaged the "anatomy" of himself; Leonardo's timeless soul roamed the timeless universe in strange quests and in severe detachment from the human antheap. There are others.* A practical difficulty follows. What is likely to be the lot of a party of zealots who set sail for the banks of the Susquehanna? They would probably cause international complications, and perhaps set the whole world by the ears, and it would not be very different on the banks of the Thames or the Seine or the Tiber. Modern European States, shambling in the track of the coarse materialism of the Roman and the out-Romanising German, hardly share the * Some months since writing these lines has come a vindication of the argument upon a very large scale. I refer to the "withdrawal" or "retire- ment" of the entire Labour Party from all contact with the coalesced forces of "vefted imteresls" and political power. 137 PEOPLE AND THINGS former's quasi-tolerance for personal and intel- lectual liberty. Economic pressure, newspaper hostility, publicity, and advertisement would soon crumble their lines and ridicule break them up or (worse) bring them too much together. Their very "withdrawal" exposes them to the charge, whether true or false, of slackness, indifference, and egoism. The dangers of isolation amid an uncongenial world are as patent as those of total retreat. Art must not become the monopoly of an exclusive and cultivated minority (a group-personality) turned in upon itself like the serpent to be seen in the old printers' marks devouring its own tail. But people and things go hand in hand, and people must not be developed at the expense of things or things at the cost of people. Humanity is a work of art in the making, and art itself the thanksgiving of humanity for the gift of life. Art does not despair of humanity, since its object is to separate humanity's perishable from its permanent elements; to contain and ex- press Nature and humanity in an imperishable Form, which the gates of Hell shall not prevail against. The art of an exclusive minority will fail out of sheer dearth of material. It will be reduced to inventing ingenious and insubstantial forms, the frivolity of an hour. Getting too far away from con- temporary life has the same demoralising results as getting too close to it. Besides, exclusion is con- trary to the purpose of the artistic spirit, which is to impart to others what it has discovered about man 138 A TTPE OP THE CHOSEX and the universe. The artist who ceases to teRify to the glory of God shrinks into the aesthete. Another objection would be the over-cultivation of personality, to be discussed in a future chapter. It is good to have an artistic temperament, but it is abominable to use it as a temperament. Lastly, and I will end the chapter with this ob- jection, there is the attitude which says: "I care no more for all this talk about humanity than I do for politicians' speeches. All I really care about are Nature, books, and a few human beings. The rest is silence." This is the hardest of all to combat, because I have more than a sneaking regard for it.* But Swift said something of the same thing. There is more affinity between the idea of "that animal, man" and that of "love of mankind" than appears to the casual eye. For there is aspiration for mankind in both. Alas, this regard it only intemified when one considers the appalling reactions which the mad appetite for slaughter is causing in the animal kingdom. For Nature has made no provision to check the destructivenes* of man. Her creatures perish at his hands ; neither wariness, nor speed, nor cunning, nor protective colouring are of the least avail against the intelligent means man adapts to a destructive end. Man succeeds : he beats Nature ; he wounds her to the death in the seat of her first sovereign and quintessential principle a principle she has spent millions of years in elaborating and perfecting the conservation and continuity of life. Man cannot, indeed, violate this law with impunity ; his destructiveness is, must be and will be visited on his own head. But that is no consolation to Nature for the frustration of her great purpose of "life, more life." There seems to me to be a truly hair-rawing blasphemy here, particularly when we consider in how few a number of years (side by side with Nature's aeons in the unwinding of her clue) the great tidal wave of life has been dammed. Even if we allow the salvation of man at long last, was Nature prepared to sacrifice the mobile, non-human element of her creation to gain this end ? A dark problem. 139 OOK on, make no sound. Conrad NOTHING is so dangerous to the mind of man as a false absolute and the false absolute of the Germans is Germany. But you cannot guard against a false absolute, whether it be your country,or money, or any kind of worldly success or any pleasures of the flesh except by knowing what are the true absolutes, what are those things which a man ought to desire for their own sake, which, indeed your spirit does actually desire. And, if you know this, you must wish that everyone should have freedom of the spirit. Clutton Brock BUT what is the use of all this minute research (the habits of the beetle Minotaurus Typhceus)? I well know that it will not produce a fall in the price of pepper, a rise in that of crates of rotten cabbages, or other serious events of this kind, which cause fleets to be manned and set people face to face intent upon one another's extermination. The insect does not aim at so much glory. It confines itself to showing us life in the inexhaustible variety of its mani- festations; it helps us to decipher in some small measure the obscurest book of all the book of ourselves. J. H. Fabre H E lives detached days; He serveth not for praise; For gold He is not sold. Francis Thompson VIII. AND HIS MENTAL EXODUS best way to answer these objections is by slating the alternatives to them. The artist (I throw the net as widely as possible) is one at least of the types in modern life who has a regard both for his own welfare and the community's. He has to secure the first in order to forward the second. He can never do either himself or the world any lasting good until, so far as is practicable, he can find out how to extricate himself from the body of society as organised to-day. There is a tale of some ingenious potentate who used to punish an enemy by tying him alive to a corpse until the union ceased to be an artificial one. The artist cannot altogether cut the cords, because he, like each of us, is a "unit" of society. But he can withhold himself from the "de- mocracy" in order to join the people. For art is the expression of the whole landscape of created life; not a decoration of the window-pane which looks upon it. We can think of the artist, rather, as a kind of mendicant preacher, without the preaching or the mendicancy a doctor of souls. He rejects not only the systematised coercion and deceit of plutocracy, but public opinion. I am reminded of the excellent old phrase about being in the world, but not of the world. He has only withdrawn 141 K PEOPLE AND THINGS from the Man in the Street, the Populace, and the idea of it formulated in catchwords, sum- marised in the Average and embodied in the Press, so that he may penetrate to the dormant bud of being, where it protects itself in its sheath of darkness from the frost that paralyses and the heat that consumes. When Shakespeare combined pot-boiling with a passing attack of Jingo measles and wrote a school- boy pantomime, with plenty of masterly and rous- ing rhetoric in it, called "Henry V," he represents his brigand as wooing the unhappy Princess Catherine "in a soldierly manner": "No, it is not possible you should love the enemy of France, Kate. But in loving me, you should love the friend of France ; for I love France so well, that I will not part with a village of it; I will have it all mine; and Kate, when France is mine and I am yours, then yours is France and you are mine." The artist should love mankind so well that he will work his way to occupying the whole of it. He has to consider that a country is composed of individuals and that the human being, as dis- tinguished from the herd, the class, the institution is his affair if we like, his "copy." The importance of the human being is the paramount interest of his art, regardless of the knots of generalities into which that being has tied himself. He thinks of society in the same way. His interest lies in the re- lation that certain human beings have with other 142 AXD HIS MENTAL EXODUS human beings, and his object (as the object of art) is to encourage the interdependence of those rela- tions in harmony, a poise and balance, in which the particles (the individuals) will all contribute to the whole, without being lost in it and so exploited by the parts masquerading as the whole. His view both of society and the individual, that is to say, is creative. He sees that a society cannot be created unless all the members of it are creating it that society cannot be a work of art until the individuals that compose it are all working artists. In fact, he comes round it appears to me inevitably to Morris and the idea of art as a daily and co-opera- tive function performed by the whole body of citi- zens both as individuals and social quantities. The greatest poems, he will say, if he is a poet, are those which have never been written. This, in itself, implies the second point the artist's dissociation from the existing order. "Passive resistance" is, perhaps, a better term than "withdrawal," and standing aside than either of them, since "passive resistance" has acquired a special and narrow meaning. The artist cannot fight his plutocratic State; the dice and the pistol are always loaded against him. But he can know it for the thing it is, and that is the beginning of all things. In whatever order the pieces are set upon the board whether we call it a duel as to the pre- cedence of prices or values, between making shift or making use of life, between taking what you can 143 K2 PEOPLE AND THINGS get or getting what you want, between the shoddy or the "genuine article," distinction or the average, free will or determinism, man or the machine* the artist stands on one side, the business man and his State on the other. The quarrel is truly bitter- endian and the prize of victory is the soul of man. "There must be no making friends with the chil- dren of Mammon," as Charles Marriott says in one of his novels, and that will do very well for the artist's emblazoned device. Parliament, the State, the Chamber of Commerce, the institutions of the "we're all right" people as the same writer calls them appear to him a "barren technique" because they fail to translate into intelligible and active terms the human and creative needs of the people. They fail to speak its language they spoil a naturally promising voice by vociferation, so to speak. If the people whisper, they shout. Con- sequently he must have nothing to do with them. I cannot define what standing aside means The artist must find things out for himself, and to bind him to a set of negative regulations is to harden the whole concept. The very name of regulation in these days maketh the heart sick. But one may say roughly that he should revive the obsolete term "scruples"; that he should not think too much about his career or (most difficult of all) the lean- ness of his purse; that he should not invest his money in any of those concerns (armaments is only one of hundreds) which support the interests of 144 AND HIS MENTAL EXODUS death rather than of life; that he should say to him- self, as the name of any prominent statesman, financier, bishop, general or official, policeman, judge, Pressman, lawyer or ruler occurs to him "There, but for the grace of God, go I."* That he should never allow his children to read the newspapers and never -himself believe what he reads in them; that he should perceive officialism behind mob-rule, disorder behind prosperity, vul- gar appetites behind long-winded disclaimers of them; that he should connect on the one side and discriminate on the other in all his observation of the official and business world a catalogue is out of place, a rough draft of one a little arbitrary. Take, for instance, his attitude to women's suffrage. If, by our cumbrous methods of getting into hot water in order to get out of it, it were neces- sary for women to receive the vote, as a symbol of their equality with men, then he would accept the fact. But that women should in consequence share with men their exploitations, deceits, and oppres- sions, he certainly would not. Lastly, the artist will distinguish between sham art, between art which is exploited as a vested in- terest and so hands (under the counter) a moral certificate to the existing order and genuine art. Shepherded by an autocratic State, men lose the * I suppose one it bound to be harried by the literalisms. Let me say here, then, that I think President Wilson to be a practical visionary and I know of no greater title. He truly has expressed the popular substance. PEOPLE AND THLVGS royal power of rejection. The artist who rejects and again rejects is conferring a benefit in the first place upon his art (the artist whose real aim is to make money fails in his art) and, in the second upon society, the greatness of which benefit society, in its present blindness, cannot measure. Forcible opposition either strengthens the existing order by consolidating it or destroys it only to substitute another order founded likewise upon organised force. But simple rejection does more, it under- mines the Slatus quo. Here, at any rate, is no Cloud- Cuckoo-land scheme of romantic rejection; no plan for a settlement in the South Sea Islands. Become different from your enemy; do not, under another name, manifest him in yourselves. A renunciation of this kind would seem to con- found disagreeable duty with personal choice. Putting the matter at its lowest, the pangs of de- livery might be more than compensated by the relief. For the pursuit of materialism is rapidly coming to an end from a break-down of the material advantages. The raw materials of force, for in- stance, are giving out in their expenditure upon material force. Self-interest so must run this absurd recusancy demands that self-interest be abandoned. The triumph of the business spirit coincides with the failure of the business policy. Here is where virtue or, as we should call it nowa- days, creation gets the measure of vice or destruc- tion. Destruction, by the law of its being, mutinies 146 AND HIS MENTAL EXODUS in its own camp and sends its loyalists packing into the meagre cohorts of the faithful. Is it not Donne who says "Death, thou shalt die!"? A very curious chapter in the study of reactions, might, indeed, be written on the theme : Man shall not live by bread alone, for if he does, he shall not have even bread. It would open up the question as to whether the phrase "enlightened self-interest" was justified at all as the criterion of an actual law. I mean as to whether enlightenment and self- interest are not mutually exclusive. No man, for instance, flatly owns to self-interest or very few. Therefore, nearly all self-interest is enlightened. Perhaps the problem would be narrowed down to a consideration of ultimate and immediate re- actions, and it is safe to say that a policy of self- interest, whether it be called "enlightened" or no, is bound in the end to bear both a moral and a material retribution. One of the visible proofs of the interdependence of men, and so one of the strongest arguments for a stable, self-supporting fellowship, is the dreadful fact that a man's self- interest does actually produce a material nemesis upon the persons of his innocent neighbours or descendants. We all share a portion of each other's "sins" and "virtues," now and hereafter. Honesty w the best policy, therefore, though that is no argu- ment for pursuing honesty as a policy, since, thus endorsed, it ceases to be honesty. But the immediate reactions of self-interest are sometimes as frequent PEOPLE AND THINGS as the ultimate ones. The spiritual loss, for in- stance, has an immediate and powerful effect, since it makes men unhappy. By making them unhappy it causes them, knowingly or not, to despise the material profit of their self-interest. Take the case of the destruction of birds for the preservation of food crops. Anybody who knows anything about the life-habits of birds is aware that their levies upon fruit and corn, etc., are a minute wage for more than sweated labour in the interest of the farmer and the producer; that, without their services, there would be neither a blade in the corn- fields nor a leaf upon the trees. Therefore, those active workers on behalf of birds for the birds' own sake and for the sake of the joy and tenderness they bring to everybody who is not a clod, very natur- ally appeal to owners and tenants of land to spare the birds, because it pays to spare them. Spare the bird and spoil the insect, they say. With people of a little nous, that, of course, has an effect. But it will not have much. At best, it will cause a respite, an interval here and there, in the process of destruc- tion. For it is the very nature of self-interest to be short-sighted. Spare the bird and spoil the insect will never achieve a crushing victory over spare the bird and spoil the crops. Self-interest thinks in a narrow groove; it cannot take long and complete views because it is walled in, absorbed in trivial pre-occupancies. "There is a bird in my corn ; that is good enough for me" that sentiment is bound 148 AND HIS MENTAL EXODUS to be pre-eminent, because it illustrates the phil- osophy of self-interest. Until, that is to say, we voice our enjoyment of birds; until we acknow- ledge that we have far less right to take their lives than they have to take our cherries; that our cherries are but a mean minimum wage for their songs; and until we realise that they are delicate and aerial intelligences and so worthwhile preserv- ing for their intrinsic beauty and the glad reactions of that beauty upon our perceptions, birds will go on being destroyed and insects multiplying, whether it be to the advantage of our food supply or not. I am not (to return) suggesting this easy road of desertion to be a good thing. On the contrary, it is a bad thing: not merely because the artistic conscience implies, as it certainly does, a moral conscience. The saint and the true artist differ not in their spiritual nature of their respective energies, but in their choice of theme. Religion is, as it were, a specialization of art. Religion appeals directly to God ; art may or may not employ various symbols, formulas and euphemisms for the conception of God. All the arts are but different ways of saying God. All the good roads point to Mecca, but they are not the same roads. I mean that the artist has to withdraw not only from the externals of society, but from the philosophy of those externals. In retiring from the commercial and official "Te Deum," he must shake from his feet all that he can of their philosophic duft. PEOPLE AND THINGS It was suggested in a previous chapter that this philosophy does not consciously accompany the exploits of power and money, although England has been making great strides in propagating it as a definite creed. Defined or not, it is implicit. The artist, therefore, has again to go one better. "A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees," and the artist will not carry through his withdrawal to its full implications unless he can build his house of faith in truth and beauty upon a ground-plan of first principles. He has to examine the meaning of art, the sources of the human emotions and long- ings, the relation of humanity to God and the strategy by which the image of God is disclosed in stone, in paint, in bronze, in wood, in letters, upon the fair surface of the earth and in the fertile human soil. He will regard his art, not as a profession, but a vocation. The professional artist is superior to the amateur, but he is as inferior to the initiated, the vocational artist. Rupert Brooke, for instance, was a genuine poet, but his was not poetic truth as dis- covered and revealed by Rupert Brooke, so much as the poetic truth of Rupert Brooke. The artist by vocation is careful not to sacrifice the end to the means. The advantage of the professional artist is that he knows his business ; of the artist by vocation that he knows what his business is for. Vocational art is at once natural, human and religious. For this reason I made, in the last chapter, some fumbling attempts to discuss the nature of art. Revolution in 150 AND HIS MENTAL EXODUS the accepted sense is not the artist's business. His is substitution, an attempt to combat human machinery by the weapon of the human spirit. I call to mind the beautiful passage at the end of that witty and revealing book "The Revolt of the Angels." Satan has had his dream in which he has conquered the Heavens, and flung laldabaoth (God, the God of Power) into the pit and seen him develop those feelings of pity for suffering hu- manity that he (Satan) had lost in Heaven, but gained in Hell. He awakes and addresses the re- volting Archangels: "'God conquered will be- come Satan; Satan conquering will become God. May the Fates spare me this terrible lot; I love the Hell which formed my genius. I love the Earth where I have done some good, if it be possible to do any good in this fearful world where beings live but by rapine. Now, thanks to us, the god of old is -dispossessed of his terrestial empire and every thinking being on this globe disdains him or knows him not. But what matter that men be no longer submissive to laldabaoth if the spirit of laldabaoth is still in them ; if they like him, are jealous, violent, quarrelsome and greedy, and the foes of the arts and of beauty? What matter that they have re- jected the ferocious Demiurge, if they do not hearken to the friendly demons who teach all truths? As to ourselves, celestial spirits, sublime demons, we have destroyed laldabaoth, our Tyrant, if in ourselves we have destroyed Ignorance and PEOPLE AND THINGS Fear.' And Satan, turning to the gardener said: 'Nedtaire, you fought with me before the birth of the world. We were conquered because we failed to understand that Victory is a Spirit and it is in ourselves and ourselves alone that we must attack and destroy laldabaoth.' r Therefore, the artist should aim at substituting human values for automatic recoil. Caedmon rose up from the banquet, from the thunder of the cap- tains and the shouting, and in a quiet place laid his ear to the Song of Creation, a song that makes no sound, because it is compounded of all sounds: "There is in God, some say, A deep but dazzling darkness . . . ." The question remains of organising this with- drawal into a definite society; of founding the church in the centre of the congregation. Perhaps one is unreasonably afraid of this. The maker of things and the artist is the maker is not a com- petent organiser or administrator. He is rather a centre of suggestion his practical policy consists in throwing off vibrations like an electron. Theories of art are too liable to shibboleths and (worse than that) such a society might take itself too solemnly and even priggishly. Let organisation arise, if it will, of itself and that is another matter. If again, its growth were generous, it would admit other workers not technically ranked as artists. "Liberty," as Don John of Austria wrote to his master 152 AND HIS MENTAL EXODUS Philip II, "is a contagious disease which goes on in- fecting one neighbour after another, if the cure be not promptly applied" In such a society none of our modern divisions and artificial hierarchies would find any place ; all men would be its province, for in mankind as in Nature, an instinct exists for free and spontaneous living. But mere theoretic discussion of a potential society is sterile, because it must happen of an idea and impulse moving among men. If that is lacking, it will not be formed. "I search, but cannot see What purpose serves the soul that strives, or world it tries Conclusions with, unless the fruit of victories Stay, one and all, stored up and guaranteed its own For ever, by some mode whereby shall be made known The gain of every life. Death reads the title clear What each soul for itself conquered from out things here, Since, in the seeing soul, all worth lies, I assert And nought i' the world, which, save for soul that sees, Was, is, and would be ever stuff for transmuting null And void until man's breath evoke the beautiful But, touched aright, prompt yields each particle, its tongue Of elemental flame no matter whence flame sprung 153 PEOPLE AND THINGS From gums or spice, or else from straw and rotten- ness, So long as soul has power to make them burn, express What lights and warms henceforth, leaves only ash behind." says Browning in "Fifine." To return once more to the conditions of the artist's "withdrawal" as they concern his own wel- fare; he will not be able to give up the world for Christ's sake, unless he give it up for his own.* While he is in the machine he will be exploited by it. He must avoid, therefore, not only the mechan- ism of modern society, but that society's view of his art. Quite apart from the obvious pressure of advertisement, and the "what the public (that is to say the tradesman) wants," fallacy, there is a kind of hypnosis of closeness which saps the artist's in- dependence. It is as if he drew into his very lungs the floating particles of a foggy atmosphere. What- ever apparent freedom he may have to cultivate his art, is but that of the horse given a loose rein on the road and a wide tether in the fields. He is still the passive instrument of a spurious law of supply and demand, and no less a commodity for purchase than any labourer. Nor has his price to the buyer any ratio to his merit as an artist. His work has no abso- lute value. Anything circulation, expense of pro- He cannot give it up for hit own unless he learn to laugh as well as to frown both at himself and the rich absurdity of what he it leaving. '54 AND HIS MENTAL EXODUS duction, subject-matter, the pressure of certain styles and mannerisms, amenability to the vested interest of art, fashionable claims, the "right thing" for the "right people," the whole system of endowment, all take precedence of the simple test of quality. The man who pays the piper will always call the tune. This fact is partly responsible for the petty but internecine feuds between artists, their childish rivalries and jealousies, the contempt of the suc- cessful for the unsuccessful artist and vice versa. Art seems nothing but an auction-room in which the artists fiercely compete to sell and to be sold to the highest bidder. Is not all this the effect of com- mercialism? Artists are the pastime of powerful men ; they must fight one another to catch the in- terest of these men, as sheep driven by the dog struggle who shall first pass the gate. Thus they trample and jostle one another and the dog has his way. Lastly, I will say nothing about "art, made tongue-tied by authority" a crude fact, sufficient to be recorded and calling for no elaboration. How cruelly difficult it is for the artist to escape from being a mere sequin upon the social dress! How overwhelming the practical difficulties of de- tachment 1 Still, perception is half the battle, and the preservation of the "artistic conscience" as jealously as may be a calling up of the reserves. My intention in this chapter has been to show in broad outline that the nature of art, widely inter- 155 PEOPLE AND THINGS preted, responds so delicately to the human need that the release of it from the barracks of business and State policy might one day end by drawing after it all the victims of those powers and discharge follow demobilisation. Patently the artist is not the only type who has men's interest at heart. At any rate, an art purged of contact with modern com- merce, concerned with the idea of the human being and the things he makes and uses, and discrimin- ating between the true and the false, would be a corner-stone of the Civifat Dei. LET us depart from hence and fly to our father's de- lightful land. But by what leading stars shall we direct our flight and by what means avoid the magic power of Circe and the detaining charms of Calypso? But it is in vain that we prepare horses to draw our ships to transport us to our native land. On the contrary, neglecting all these, as unequal to the task, and excluding them entirely from our view, having now closed the corporeal eye, we must stir up and assume a purer eye within, which all men possess, but which is alone used by a few But if your eye is yet infected with any sordid concern, and not thoroughly re- fined, while it is on the stretch to behold this most shining spectacle, it will be immediately darkened and incapable of intuition. Plotinm IX. CHRIST AND HIS CHRISTIANS THE STATE AND ITS POETS EFORE leaving "withdrawal" behind, I should give a couple of examples of it in operation and leave the reader to draw the moral. They are a religious and ancient and a modern and literary one primitive Christianity as copiously and on the whole fairly observed by Lecky and recent verse. It is easy to be prejudiced and intolerant about Christianity, still easier to score dialectic points, in the Shaw manner, off it. Christianity, interpreted secularly, undogmatically, and without the ascetic twist which Tolstoi, the Manichaeans and Puritans gave it, is as a rule of life, finally inexpugnable. I mean not only that it beats any ethical system you can invent, but that all positive philosophies, aesthetics, and, indeed, politics, really come back to a commentary upon it. What it comes to is that Christianity has ceased to be a monopoly of the theologians. Blake, Shelley, Browning are, in this sense, definitely Christian poets, more so than Tolstoi was a Christian propagandist. We have to deal, however, with Christianity in practice. Nothing, indeed, is more remarkable in history 159 L2 PEOPLE AND THINGS than the contract between Christianity before and after the third century. That change embraces the whole conflict between a spiritual idea and material power, with Christianity itself taking the succes- sive parts of hero and villain. But the briefest refer- ences to the latter role need be made, since it is familiar to all. It populated earth with demons in the name of him whose only demonology and theocracy was that the kingdom of God is within you. It damned those populations of the world who, through ig- norance, conviction or indifference, did not agree with its opinions, and in the name of him whose social theories embraced the peace and brother- hood of men : "A burning, scorching fire," writes the saintly St. Cyprian, "will for ever torment those who are condemned; there will be no respite or end to their torments. We shall, through eternity, con- template in their agonies those who for a short time contemplated us in tortures, and for the brief pleasure which the barbarity of our persecutors took in feasting their eyes upon an inhuman spectacle, they will themselves be exposed in an eternal spectacle of agony." For the tolerance of its founder, it substituted a hierarchy of ecclesiastical dominion destined to expel freedom of thought from society for many centuries. TVproselytise mankind to the cause of the greatest of men who cared not for what men did, but what they were and what they might become in 1 60 CHRIST AND HIS CHRISTIANS ever increasing warmth and intensity of life (the teaching of Christ like that of Blake is one of posi- tives, acceptance and affirmatives. "Thou shalt not" had no place in it), it prescribed a regimen of taboos and prohibitions which put a halter on the soul at birth, led it to death and then turned it loose in a paddock of eternal bliss. In its turn it has given place to yet another religion, worse, than anything the most opinionated rationalist could declare of Christianity. Yet Christianity swallowed the world, taking Neo-Platonism, which could put up a fair spiritual case against its contemporary, in the same mouthful. Was the conqueror armed in the shining armour of material power or the light tunic of a spiritual idea? He "won by weakness," to quote the title of a play I once saw placarded on the walls of a suburban theatre. Material power was simply the spoils of victory. The golden seduction of that figure whose beauty the world, for all its relays of false gods, can never forget, hardly crept through the disfigure- ments of its Cyprians and Ambroses, but was a sharp sword to the earlier Christians. For the way the successful offensive was con- ducted was by holding back, in an isolation from the Roman Empire, complete at any rate up to the days of Marcus Aurelius. Christ himself stood aside; the Christians followed. They took no part in the business of the State ("Nee ulla res aliena magis quam publica," says Tertullian) in social 161 intercourse with pagans, in Imperial interests or ambitions. They were a self-governing nation within an Empire in spite of every racial diversity a needle in a haystack. Their intensely significant position did not, of course, commit them to revolu- tionary theories on the one hand, or to the exclusive nationalism of the Jews on the other. In public spirit and political animus they were pigmies beside the Stoics. Their finest practical achieve- ment the abolition of the disgusting circuses and their more intermittent one the refusal to serve in the Roman armies were only accident- ally political in effect and totally the reverse in intention. I hope I am not so completely bee-bonnetted as to credit the victory of the Christians over the Roman Empire to their withdrawal from it. Many causes contributed to that prodigious conquest and the most potent was the original ethical attitude of the new religion. The moral fervour of Christi- anity, and its ideals of universal love held a trump hand against the sterility, however noble, of the Stoics, in a way that the certificates for Paradise and warrants for hell of a later day could never have done. The elevated and rather tedious creed of Marcus Aurelius cut the spirit of man in half; Christianity, without horses or men, but by that inner prompting which makes every man and woman the unofficial oracles of God, put the pieces together again. 162 CHRIST AND HIS CHRISTIANS But that the Christians' splendid gesture of with- drawal was an agent of incalculable force, who will deny? The withdrawal was in itself ethical without being dogmatically so. It preserved them un- spotted from the corruption of the Roman world and kneaded them together so irresistibly that in their early days they were not so much a uniform association as a single individual, terrible in their helplessness, forlornness and remoteness as an army with banners. They bounded out of the tyranny of the present, the local and the habitual which has so imperious an influence upon'the taking of long views. Climbing away at a distance upon their hill of vision they looked down upon the swarming valleys beneath, and the resistance to that intense gaze was that of the mist to the down- plunging and disencumbered rays of the sun. What happened when they had finished their meal of a world? History relates the sequel and its con- sequences. The Christians took office. My second example is modern verse. What is taking place to-day and very healthily is not so much a revival of poetry as a transference of poetic allegiance from individuals into sets, classes and groups. Names there have been during the- last few years, but they have been titles without solid estate behind them. Budded at the morn, they have been cut down at dewy eve. But these groups and classes, in spite of patronage, by no means adhere to a par- ticular school or cult. Their virtue, apart from 163 PEOPLE AND THINGS those accidents which, though they get most of the credit, do not really influence poetic progress, is to foregather broadly and variously into a federa- tion defined, but neither narrow nor dogmatic. The young soldiers' verse is an example. It is not realistic nor vers-librist nor eighteen-ninetyish nor cosmological nor magazinish nor obedient to what the public or the age or the poetic mode thinks that it wants, and is not so limited in subject-matter as the methods and conditions of its birth might warrant. Yet somehow it is of a piece; one general impulse informs its complexity; it possesses a corporate sense, even if that impulse and sense be derived only|from a nearly unan'mous detestation of the War. This poetic decentralisation into groups and societies suggests a further reflection. A poetic re- vival is both child and father of the age. The poet and his age, that is to say, are interdependent, but the one cannot create the other without being created by it. But is our age favourable to poetic wealth, virility and freedom? Is society brilliantly conscious of itself; do ideas flow into all its parts like the streams in the fertile Hampshire plain ; is the expression of its spiritual life alert, luminous or even coherent? Or is it all dumbness, anxiety, un- happiness, stress, chaos dominated by a crude and sterile discipline? It must itself answer these questions, but, in the meantime, one takes leave to doubt whether it can play the Jove to a poetic 164 CHRIST AND HIS CHRISTIANS Minerva, whether out of the lion of materialism can come forth sweetness. These poetic groups and unconfessed alliances then, so far from being formed, like Eve, out of the thigh of society, un- consciously form themselves in tacit criticism of it. The instincts of passive resistance and self-pre- servation draw the outlines. Yet there are dangers in a lack of sympathy be- tween the poet and the age in which he lives. There will be literary starvations and perversions, literary dogmas, corporate literary egoisms and probably few Titans of genius. The total effect of the poetry so produced might be more critical than creative. But poetry, if not altogether the criticism of life that Arnold called it, can very well exhibit the actual ironies and contrasts of life without com- mitting itself to topics and controversies better adapted to prose. After all, the poetry of the lyrical ballads and the "Metaphysical School" of Crashaw, Herbert and Vaughan, originated in much the same way. Happily for themselves these groups do not meet the taste of the age. If the fool says in his Press that the whole land is juicy with the vineyards of poetic feeling, that eager hands are gathering the vintage, fermenting and bottling it, he may be left in his Paradise. Sanity knowing better, is glad to carry off from the little wayside inns such honest potables as it has sought and found. 165 OH thou, that dear and happy isle, The garden of the world erewhile, Thou Paradise of the four seas, Which Heaven planted us to please, But, to exclude the world, did guard With watery, if not flaming sword j What luckless apple did we taste, To make us mortal and thee waste? Unhappy ! shall we never more That sweet militia restore, When gardens only had their towers And all the garrisons were flowers; When roses only arms might bear, And men did rosy garlands wear? Andrew Marvell ART was not born in the palace; rather she fell sick there, and it will take more bracing air than that of rich men's houses to heal her again. If she is ever to be strong enough to help mankind once more, she must gather strength in simple places; the refuge from wind and weather to which the good man comes home from field or hillside; the well-tidied space into which the craftsman draws from the litter of loom, and smithy, and bench; the scholar's island in the sea of books; the artist's clearing in the canvas- grove it is from these places that Art must come. William Morris THE world interests us only because of the ideas which we form of it. Remove the idea and everything be- comes sterile chaos, empty nothing. J. H. Fabre IT is not possible to disassociate art from morality, politics and religion. William Morris \ RT made by the people and for the people, a joy to the worker and the user. Ibid TO have the sense of creative activity is the great happi- ness and the great proof of being alive. Matthew Arnold X. COMMUNAL ART I. EXPRESSION AND DECORATION /'. i.n, ^ g*zz$O return to the artist. He sees the individual, if the figure be not too fantastic, from both ends of the tele- scope; both as a leaf in the folio of brotherhood and the binding of one of the duodecimos of immortal love. That seems to imply a chapter or two or three on popular art. The drawback is that I am not qualified to write it. Having had a useless and merely formal school education (like most other boys of my "class"), the time of early manhood was spent not in developing the sensibilities which a school training had taught me to value and direct, not in cultivating the general powers of hand, mind and eye with which educa- tion had made me acquainted but in laboriously finding out that I had learned nothing. *Perfunctory * It is almost incredible that public schools should teach boys a mechanical Greek and Latin but not how to draw, how to match and distinguish colours, how to differentiate one bird from another, one wild flower from another, beauty from ugliness, refinement from vulgarity, and so on. A sixth-form boy can turn out a set of stilted hexameters, but is he encouraged (I except the Perse School) to write English verse or to distinguish one cadence of our English poets from another? He is brought up to glorify the British Empire, not the beautiful land of England; to lose his precious imagination, as the Germans loft theirs in the tranced and vulgar contemplation of sheer bulk, to know the names of the Germanic tribes conquered by Cesar, not the names and characteristics of the Gothic cathedrals. Do many boys know the difference between a moulding and a carving, between inlaid and relief work, between a cornice and a flying buttress? I did not. Boys are not only taught the wrong things, but taught them in the wrong way. The campaign in favour of scrapping 169 PEOPLE AND THINGS reading in the English classics and interminable in the ancient took the place of art and makeshift morals, the place of the art of manners in the sound and true sense of "manners makyth man." I can only, therefore, discuss letters and them only from the pickings bolted in the intervals of the reviewer's doleful calling. Still, like indus- trialism, militarism and the rest, the arts all hang together, and, perhaps, the only distinction of literature is that it is the easiest to acquire and the most difficult to master. Likewise, the disease of one art ultimately means the disease of all art. Is the future of literature, then, to be a swamp ex- haling pestilential gases or a place of pastures and daylight? "So guide us through this darkness, that we may Be more and more in love with day." To play the Cassandra may be as idle as wagging Nestor's beard over the past. But living as we are to-day in a state of paroxysm, it is reasonable to guess that either the fit will leave us in a coma which Latin and Greek for a business or scientific training is no doubt partly the result of this. It is good for boys to learn enough Latin to appreciate Virgil and Greek to appreciate Homer, Aristophanes, Euripides, etc. if they want to; but it it intolerable they should be stuffed with dead languages like tame geese. Somehow the fact* are always isolated from their principles and applications and their relation to other facts. To this day, an idiotic jingle runs in my head "bal, regal, chacal." How do we know that the plural of "bal" is not "baux"? because it would look wrong. For the patter itself, how much more charming and ten- sible and real, if we had been taught that the reedy pipe of the yellowhammer signifies in our tongue "a little bit of bread and no chee-eese." 170 COMMUNAL ARTI is the reception room of death, or we shall get better. If we settle down to a quiet life of bureaus and barracks, its monotony compensated by the fillip of wolfishness in human relations, the sooner literature gives up the ghost the better. But if as in the old song, "My own sweet heart come home again," the three F's freedom, faith and fellow- ship return to us; if God (the one with a capital G) "Settle and fix our hearts, that we may move In order, peace and love, And taught obedience by Thy whole Creation Become an humble, holy nation," what part will literature play? It is hardly enough to say that it will live and there leave it. It is the incompetent midwife neglects the transi- tional pangs. While discussing a popular literature, that is to say, we have to formulate more or less what we think it ought to be. I propose, then, to carry through into a particular province the general argument on behalf of art set out in previous chapters. It is best to begin by drawing a distinction be- tween expression and decoration in literature and by assuming that what holds good for literature holds for the rest of the arts. The first essential of all true art is conviction. But, to avoid ambiguity, it is necessary to develop the meaning of conviction as applied to literature and to diagnose what rela- 171 PEOPLE AND THINGS ation it bears to expressive art as the forerunner of popular art. Now, it is true to say that literature and all the arts "are the expression of the society to which they belong." But one has to be careful not to misinterpret this axiom as a gospel of pure "modernism." For a literature entirely of its own day perishes with that day, neither surviving nor deserving to survive. Somebody said that the Re- naissance was not a New Birth at all, but the fruit of those last centuries of the Middle Ages, when the arts, more dispersed through the community than at other periods, nearly became voxpopu/t, vox Dei. Rodin calls Michaelangelo the culmina- tion of all Gothic thought. The Renaissance was not so much a birth as a manhood, and in many re- spects amanhood in the sense covered by Vaughan's poem on "Childehood": "An age of mysteries which he Must live twice, that would God's face see Which Angels guard, and with it play, Angels which foul men drive away. "How do I study then and scan Thee, more than ere I studied man, And onely see through a long night, Thy edges and thy bordering light! O, for thy center and mid-day! For sure that is the narrow way. So with the Romantic Revival. Had it merely taken a photographic impression of its age, it 172 COMMUNAL ARTJ would have ended in nothing more than a glorifica- tion of the Industrial Revolution, jthat guillotine which cut off man's continuous development from the past into the future. But we know that what the Romantic Revival really did was to divine, dis- encumber and materialise an inchoate spiritual idea, which the passage of a century has by no means brought to maturity. The present does not matter to a true literature, because, being a relative bridge between the past and the future, as an abso- lute conception it does not exist. Literature, like time and the planetary system, is always travelling. Its life is growth, while a creed of "modernism" qua modernism (as they say in donnish circles) can never express the society to which it belongs; literature becomes the decoration of the society upon which it it dependent. A glutinous adhesion to "modernism" implies a loss of the principal in the accessory, the end in the means, and "the spirit and truth of things" in machinery. * Take our society. In the mass, literature and the arts mean about as much to it as Sanskrit or an official document. If all the arts were abolished to- day by an Order in Council, what difference would it make to the people as a whole? None. The divorce between art and life is as complete as that between religion and life, as that between religion and art and men's normal way of thinking and feeling. The idea that thoughts and feelings are so inti- mately connected with religion and art as to be 173 M! PEOPLE AND THINGS their natural expression and proper goal, is re- garded as an unintelligible flourish. No wonder that art is considered a superfluous luxury and re- ligion a formal and necessary bore. How, indeed, is literature possible to a pro- fanum vulgw striving not to express its life but to burrow away from it in the dim warrens of escape, in the Aladdin's Cave of the Ideal? That cave is not at all dim, but garish and spectacular and full of penny-in-the-slot machines, for the great mechani- cal Polypheme of industry, to the service of whose appetite our lives are dedicate, provides the circuses not so much as a reward for the bread we provide for him as to prevent his little human machines from providing it in a fit of hard thinking for them- selves. "The shallow murmur, but the deep are dumb," says Raleigh's beautiful line. They mur- mur because the deep are dumb, When the com- mon life is dead, the Nine Muses are a beauty chorus in short and spangled frocks, and "The Little Grey Home in the West" is the song the syrens sang. When the arts are poor, they will take to their cups, and finally to their beds. Terrible is the contrast between the cast-iron conventions of our social life, the confusion raging underneath, and the feverish distractions on the surface. Let us, then, say the sufferers, be glad to leave our own flesh-and-blood of illusion for the illusion of flesh- coloured tights and the blood of horse-thieving cow- boys. Where life is a kill-joy, art will be a kill-time. 174 COMMUNAL ART I But the art of escape is only the obverse of that which hugs its chains. There is back-scratching literature the pressure upon the artist to produce work which will titillate the senses, flatter the in- terests and prejudices, melt the palpitating heart of his paymaster, and "exalt the virtues on which society is based, attachment to wealth, pious senti- ments and especially resignation on the part of the poor." "Popular" fiction discovers spiritual flowers in a commercial wilderness, a pitiful and throbbing heart in the lords of civilisation and Romance in everything. One has heard of poets, painters and men of letters, who, so far from leaving the banquet, like the effeminate Caedmon, have learned to stiffen the muscles, summon up the blood, and imitate the action of the tiger. It may be there is worse to come. Should the pall of absolutism in business and politics be laid upon our dear land in the days of peace, to what wake of propitiation and flattery will literature gather? What songs will it pipe to the glory of the Pax Romana? The deriva- tion of cant is "canto," a chant or hymn of praise to creation, so that the old canticle (with, of course, a gloss upon the two proper nouns) may come in handy: "Sing praises to God, sing praises; sing praises unto our king, sing praises." True litera- ture will be like the child, as recorded in Pliny's Natural History, "which, as soone as it was come forth of the mother's wombe, presently returned into it againe." 175 M2 PEOPLE AND THINGS Therefore, just as virtuosity is the correlative of ignorance, so a literature which merely reproduces its age will swing from one to the other and yet be one and the same thing. A false refinement is born of crudity, luxury of indigence, finery of rubbish, formality of formlessness, and the literature which escapes its age is as decorative as that which em- braces it. But expression (or representation) means some- thing deeper. The really original contribution of "modernism" is not the conquest of Nature; we have "conquered" Nature only to make her our harlot. It is surely the idea of the equality and free- dom of men, irrespective of classes and of nations. That is brand new. Plato, Epictetus, Plutarch, even Euripides never knew it, because it was not yet born into the world and the blossoming democracy of Athens was rooted in slave-labour.* It follows, then, that a literature which is the true expression of modern society must be occupied not with parasitic forms and fashions of idle novelty, but with this original spiritual passion. It will identify itself with the rebellion of the human soul against externalisation and of human life against mechani- sation. If "modernism" does not mean this, it means nothing, or is, at the best, as much a distraction from reality as the variety-show is from life. It will * How much political ineptitude is derived from the Audy of Greek and Roman society by the class which nurtures our legislators? 176 COMMUNAL ARTI be a distraction because it will be leading an arti- ficial career in direct contradiction to our inmost convictions. Convictions are not opinions, any more than Form is the same as forms or accuracy of observation the same as truth of perception. In- asmuch, then, as this idea of freedom and equality is the guardian angel of our age, so its habitat will be our inmost convictions. I have to tread delicately here, for up comes the old vice, or the patchwork herald who gives the signal for the joust between Art and Morality. I referred to this old but very real controversy two or three chapters ago. But it demands more careful treatment. In his happy and valuable little book "TheUltimateBelief,"Mr.CluttonBrockdescribes the philosophy of the spirit as exercising three activities, the moral, the intellectual and the aesthetic or goodness, truth and beauty. But the ad- vantage of pitching upon the "aesthetic activity" is because it comprehends its brethern more justly than they do it or each other. Art is more elastic than morality and truth; morality and truth are more sufficient to themselves than art. True, art is maimed, morality halt and truth blind, unless they draw upon one another. But art has more of the synthetic faculty than truth and goodness. With- out violating the substance of its being, art does find its fullest development and beauty by absorb- ing truth and goodness. At any rate, art can be used as a convenient symbol of the interdependence of 177 PEOPLE AND THINGS truth, goodness and beauty. Or, to put it in another way, truth, goodness and beauty are implicit in the best and truest art, for while truth and goodness are a precise reading of the moral and intellectual activities, beauty is a limited one of the aesthetic. Keats, for example, was an aesthetic poet, Browning an intellectual, Wordsworth a moral poet, but Shelley and Blake combined in truth of intuition the qualities of all the three.* R. H. Hutton again, in one of his essays, says : "So far from the truth is it that the poet must have no moral predilections at heart, that if he has none such, his picture becomes feeble, watery, uncon- vincing. Impartiality in delineation, not imparti- ality in conception, is what is needed. "f That * There is a passage in that delightful book of W. H. Hudson's "The Purple Land," which is not so irrelevant to this revaluation as it seems: "Here the lord of many leagues of land and of herds unnumbered sits down to talk with the hired shepherd, a poor bare-footed fellow in his smoky rancho, and no class or caste difference divides them, no consciousness of their widely different posi- tions chills the warm current of sympathy between two human hearts. How re- freshing it is to meet with this perfect freedom of intercourse tempered only by that innate courtesy and native grace of manner peculiar to Spanish Americans. What a change to persons coming from lands with higher and lower classes and with their innumerable hateful sub-divisions to one who aspires not to mingle with the class above him, yet who shudders at the slouching carriage and abject demeanour of the class beneath him." Anybody who has lived in the country (especially among small farmers and peasant proprietors where the property idea loses its Sunday manners) must have been bewildered by the extraordinary niceties of caste prevailing among people who, to innocent appearance, have not only common interests, houses exactly alike, a common occupation and language, but are descended from precisely the same class. All these ludicrous distinctions are exactly proportioned to the success in money-making of the people con- cerned. t Mr. Hewlett's really grand poem, "The Village Wife's Tragedy," affords an interesting example. Fearing lest he should be captured by the Pacifists, Mr. 178 COMMUNAL ART I has nothing to do with philanthropy. The philan- thropist wants to "improve" people; the artist to reveal them to their true selves. Nor do these "moral predilections" commit art to pamphleteering nor traipsing the streets with "Be good" on its sandwich boards. Moliere pil- loried vice and folly, but he hated Puritanism. Aristophanes was a Pacifist who hated sophistry, demagogy and war-mongers. But he did not write like Brieux. As soon as art draws the moral, it is drawn by it. Art, like the firmament, con- tains the earth, but it does not expressly write letters of fire across it. Those people who are always clamouring for the moral in a work of art are own children to those who, in the Scrip- tures, asked for a sign. Yet literature and art should be conscious of sharing a common aspira- tion and sentiment, at present inaccessible to the common run of men. "A man cannot be an artist," writes Glutton Brock, "if he has no conscience and there is always something of the moral conscience Hewlett denies the implicit verdidr. of his poem in an appendix. Still, Mr. Hewlett explicatory can no more annotate away Mr. Hewlett in his poetics than the worthies of the Church can the Song of Solomon. "The Village Wife's Tragedy" is a Pacifist poem, in the sense that Vaughan's "Constellations" is a Pacifist poem, in the sense that the "Ancient Mariner" is a plea for kindness to animals. In other words, and like all good and true poems, it is an imagina- tive presentment of the truth of life. I remember a German print in which a circle of gentlemen are seated round a lily in a pot. One of the company, gazing and pointing up at the sky and with a small greenish-yellow hoop round his head, is remarking: "Consider the lilies of the field." The others are gazing musingly either on the ground or into the distance, anywhere, in fa