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<e). 
 What are the results of creating it? It is natural 
 
 30
 
 'THE IfORD AND 'THE MOB 
 
 for the self-interested to couple ignorance with 
 docility. If a dog crouch down before a man who 
 is powerful, who has achieved power by activities 
 such as are resisted by delicacy of feeling, who 
 is made conscious of his power by the submissive- 
 ness of the dog, the dog is giving the man an invita- 
 tion to strike him. "Chattery and smattery" short 
 cuts to a cheap knowledge, money-values, sham 
 gentility and primer scrappiness are an invitation 
 to power to make itself felt, because they submerge 
 the resisting power of knowledge and criticism. 
 When on the one side a people are a herd living in 
 ferment and distraction, while the members of it arc 
 at the same time all struggling to be exactly like 
 one another, and on the other are faced with the 
 immeasurable power of finance, then if that power 
 abstains from profiting by these conditions, 
 "miracles" as old Walton says, "are not ceased." 
 In such a world as ours, autocracy or, to call it more 
 comprehensively, plutocracy, is, indeed, co-ex- 
 tensive with monocracy. The two are indispensable 
 to one another. Power such as Alexander never 
 tasted falls ripe to them who employ the influence 
 of mobilised deceit and disguise; who make their 
 intellectual wares attractively shoddy, "bright" and 
 vulgar; who appeal to the lowest passions of the 
 greatest number, flatter their superstitions, and 
 give them a rattle to play with and make believe 
 it is a sceptre; who throw out a sprinkling of grand 
 and meaningless words ending in "ism" and trade 
 
 31 c 2
 
 PEOPLE AND THINGS 
 
 upon the infinite capacity of the modern demo- 
 cracy for illusion. 
 
 An instinctive conspiracy against the human 
 mind thus grows and develops, until the oppor- 
 tunity of war shakes it into a full consciousness. 
 War decomposes all virtue, all beauty, all sanity, 
 and makes short work of national intelligence. 
 "Deceit, cruelty and injustice are the appanage of 
 war," writes Tertullian. Finally, war encourages a 
 direct persecution of thought. That persecution 
 would have come without the intervention of war, 
 had the industrial system been permitted to unfold 
 itself unhindered. War itself was the next, is, 
 perhaps, the last step of an industrialised Europe, 
 but while it affords every scope for the suppression 
 of thought, it is not the predisposing cause of sup- 
 pression. It is the pretext at the fingers' ends, so to 
 speak, and the appalling reactions evoked by war 
 itself make the fingers whip the knife out of the 
 sheath more quickly and firmly. 
 
 Thus an effect itself becomes a cause and the 
 cause again generates its effect in endless iteration ; 
 until poor Ixion, bound to his revolving wheel, be- 
 comes an emblem of humanity. Thus Thomas 
 Hardy's noble phrase "the pale, pathetic 
 peoples" comes to life in all its poignancy. An 
 open campaign of mouth-gagging, a ponderous 
 head-clubbing, starts into being which duplicity 
 itself makes no attempt to hide. The winter of our 
 discontent comes upon us, and the free, brine-
 
 THE WORD AND 7HF MOB 
 
 tossing, running sea of human expression is at last 
 frozen still. "Milton, thou should'st be living at 
 this hour." But this conspiracy against the human 
 mind is not (to pass from extreme cold to extreme 
 heat) a Guy Fawkes plot hatched out of the war. 
 The fuse has been laying for a hundred years, and 
 the observer looks upon a completed stage of evolu- 
 tion. The rabies of war speeds the process up; the 
 wind of tendency has become a cyclone. 
 
 We may feel that authority, too, is a victim of the 
 system which we have been living under for a hun- 
 dred years and which has brought so awful a 
 Nemesis upon the world. Authority prowls for- 
 lornly in its deserts. In other days, and among other 
 records of the persecution of the mind under the 
 conditions that drew forth the Areopagitica, under 
 the censorship of the Spanish Inquisition and the 
 Council of Trent, or the book-slaughtering "Avec 
 Privilege du Roi " of Louis XIV, the spirit of in- 
 tellectual beauty has had its Pilates. In the full tide 
 of Elizabethan literature, the Sta'ioners' Company 
 had, according to an unimpeachable authority, Mr. 
 McKerrow, "supreme power over printing," "the 
 right of search," and "control over all stationers, 
 publishers, importers of books or bookbinders not 
 belonging to the Company, as well as over its own 
 members." Ben Jonson went to prison for a trifling 
 infraction of one of these regulations and Middle- 
 ton's "The Game of Chess" was suppressed for its 
 covert criticism of the Spaniards. The Star Cham- 
 
 33
 
 PEOPLE AND TH1NCS 
 
 her was forerunner of our Dora. The design of this 
 legislation was then, as it is now, theologico- 
 political; and the difference in kind is not in the 
 law, but the religion. The Puritans of yesterday 
 who were the principal sufferers by these laws are 
 the whole of the thinking and feeling public of to- 
 day. Yet the books (such as have escaped the "con- 
 spiracy of silence") live: a dusty obloquy covers 
 their censors. 
 
 Art and thought, therefore, retire from the State 
 and public life into their tubes and burrows. But 
 the gifts of God are immortal, and intelligence 
 cannot be killed.* One day they will emerge like 
 subterranean fires and no longer, perhaps, as the 
 utterance of English, French or German provin- 
 cialism, but of human life. 
 
 So then, life and thought have ebbed out of this 
 dispossessed State and the parasitic public opinion 
 it does possess; barbarity and stupidity usurp the 
 empty seats. The sacrilege which the barbarians 
 meditated against the British Museum was of a piece 
 with the sterility of heart and the stultification of 
 idea which, in the persons of a handful of rulers 
 
 * Yet how much genius and beauty have not been blown to fragments by the 
 blunderbuss of Power? How much, whisper the ghosts of the frustrated, thick 
 as the leaves of Vallombrosa ? A foolish saw runs : "genius will out," "murder 
 will out." How can our wiseacre know? Because I can see only half a dozen 
 stars on a moon-lit night, am I to run to my neighbour with news that there 
 are no more than half a dozen stars to the heavens? It is like the cocksure 
 mentality of a business age to cry " I can't see it ; therefore, it does not exist." 
 I do not know how much genius has been lost to the world, but certainly more 
 has been lost to it than gained. 
 
 34
 
 7 HE WORD AND THE I/O/,' 
 
 and business men, command and destroy the lives, 
 happiness, and freedom of millions of human beings. 
 Nationalism in a nation is really the same thing as 
 egoism in an individual. In Germany, a bottomless 
 vacuity, a wild infatuation of knavery and folly 
 ("Folly is the cloak of knavery," says one of the 
 "Proverbs of Hell") furnished an invaluable bur- 
 lesque and object-lesson upon the antics of irre- 
 sponsible Power, not uncommon in up-to-date 
 European civilisation . Your shades, crucified youth 
 of Europe, shall pass sentence. 
 
 But it is time to suggest a possible way out of the 
 pit. On measuring the pit's diameter, estimating its 
 depth and investigating its gases, let us, at the risk 
 of perfunctory treatment, spend no more time than 
 we can help. And I feel some confidence in at- 
 tempting to outline the steps for climbing out, in 
 that better minds than mine have done all the 
 pick-axe work before me. To clear these steps, not 
 to make them, is our job to-day. 
 
 It is, of course, easy to suggest certain remedies 
 for the decay in the "things of the mind," and the 
 mere consciousness of things as they mentally are is 
 something to start with. The problem centres 
 round men themselves, not their rulers. "Only 
 connect" runs a wise word, and certainly a chosen 
 people is one which can put two and two together. 
 Know the false and the door often opens of itself to 
 the true. If there is an L.C.M. of public common- 
 ness, there might be somewhere an H.C.F. of 
 
 35
 
 PEOPLE AND THINGS 
 
 public common sense. The question resolves itself 
 into separating the public of vested interests from 
 the true public, into separating the wheat of 
 democracy from the tares; or rather into culti- 
 vating the one and crowding out the other. 
 
 I make no mention of the proposal's put forward 
 by various political thinkers and writers. They, of 
 course, react beneficently upon thought. But there 
 is a danger of treating democracy as though it were 
 an end in itself and not a means to an end. One 
 school of thought, for a small example, advocates 
 open diplomacy. But it does not offer a solution of 
 the question which asks : what is to prevent pub- 
 licity in diplomacy being countered by falsification 
 in the Press? It would be arrogant to criticise any 
 thinker or school of thinkers who know a great 
 deal more about politics than I do. But something 
 that is not necessarily Radicalism, but is certainly 
 radical, must be sought and found growing in the 
 public consciousness itself and hostile in character 
 to present methods and conditions of living. 
 
 That in itself suggests education,* and posi- 
 tively nothing of lasting benefit is possible without 
 
 * Is it possible, for instance, to read Henry James's wonderful "A Small Boy 
 and Others" without conjecturing what an appalling loss it would have been for 
 the world had he been poured into the mould of an English Public School? His 
 unusually free and easy (even slipshod and neglefted) kind of education allowed 
 his natural bent to develop unchecked from the very beginning. Henry James 
 seems to have escaped all the struggle to discover his own individual line of 
 work, which vexes the adolescence of so many artists. Nobody planing him 
 down to the tidy mediocrity of the formal average, his mind sought and found 
 its own food. 
 
 36
 
 THE WORD AXD T//7? MOB 
 
 a revolutionised education, so transfigured as to 
 put a new face upon life. The young ought to be 
 taught to call things by their right names; to face 
 the hard facts of life, but to make those facts beauti- 
 ful and worthy by the exercise of their own human 
 possibilities. Destroy routine in work and in games, 
 help them to appreciate the beauty of life by making 
 them aware that it is for them to create beauty to 
 match it, and they are no longer taught at all, but 
 drawn out, as the phrase goes. To suggest and in- 
 spire and to keep their silly heads clear of shams and 
 a ridiculous aping of them is a duty we owe to 
 childhood. A consideration of the mob-mind can- 
 not exclude a consideration of education. 
 
 Consider the architecture of the mass-mind. It is 
 certainly not constructed from the foundation up- 
 wards as the collective result of an aggregate num- 
 ber of single minds. So far from faithfully repre- 
 senting the individual mind, it does not even sum- 
 marise a "class consciousness." Its trunk, perhaps, 
 is made up of the lower middle classes, which, 
 floating between the classes above and the classes 
 below, have no anchorage, fixed principles, and 
 corporate feeling, no permanence and solidity of 
 emotional life. They are "out of touch," and their 
 trivial ambitions and equally trivial recoil affect 
 their whole constitution. They surrender them- 
 selves the more flabbily, therefore, to the dead 
 hand of ignorance, prejudice and superstition. 
 
 Then, again, this mass-mind only acts upon sug- 
 37
 
 PEOPLE AND TH1NCS 
 
 gestion.* It is an instrument played upon by the 
 interests which manufacture and control it. The 
 mass-mind does not live and think and feel. It 
 responds like a sleep-walker to a distant hypnotic 
 pressure. Men do not mean as persons what they 
 say within the radius of the mass-mind. One sees 
 now and again some object a dead leaf or a little 
 piece of stick airily supported, it would seem, by 
 its own being, since it does not fall. But, on looking 
 closer, one perceives a tiny, almost invisible thread 
 fastened to some branch or bush overhead which, 
 by swinging the object at its end, gives it a make- 
 believe of independence. 
 
 This is a joyful discovery. There is no substan- 
 tial reality in the mass-mind ; it is dandled at the end 
 of a string ; guilelessness is its characteristic. At the 
 top end is the innocence of the serpent, at the bot- 
 tom the wisdom of the dove. The mass-mind has 
 not come into being from within outwards, from 
 the bottom upwards, but derives a fictitious exist- 
 ence from the top downwards. It may be described 
 as a film wrapping away the real and living mind 
 from our sight and its own self-knowledge. The 
 mass-mind is divorced from the human mind, just 
 as the word is divorced from the thing. I confess 
 
 * The conscience and sensibility of an independent being have been dis- 
 persed, or this mob-mind would not have been indifferent to the tortures of 
 men "slowly put to death" (as a well-known divine put it) in our savagely 
 barbarous prisons, not for a crime, but a belief. Whether that belief was a 
 mistaken one or not has nothing to do with it. The mass-mind cannot, indeed, 
 as an individual can, judge a case on its merits. 
 
 38
 
 THE WORD AND TflE I/O/,' 
 
 that this simple difference between from the top 
 downwards and from the bottom upwards seems 
 to me of such consequence that it will invade the 
 rest of this book. "All things live, yes even those we 
 call inanimate," writes Mr. Lowes Dickinson. "A 
 soul or a myriad souls inform the rocks and streams 
 
 and rivers All things together press upwards, 
 
 moved by love, to a goal that is good." Man alone, 
 who can out-do the beasts both in good and evil, 
 and appears to have no creature ahead of him in the 
 race, possesses the special faculty of shooting the 
 spires of his mind up towards a further reality. It is 
 true that he excels the masker-mole in burrowing. 
 Utopia is not the ignis fatuus of an intoxicated 
 fancy, but the logical consummation of building 
 from the bottom upwards. The human foundation 
 is as firm-set as the solar system. The job is to get 
 at it.* 
 
 Thus we come back to the individual, not as an 
 end in himself but as a means to an end, and the 
 effort of true reform should be towards breaking up 
 this mass-mind into the first, second and third per- 
 sons singular. "I know that personal relations 
 are the real life, for ever and ever," says Helen 
 Schlegel in "Howard's End." Plurality is always 
 the devil, from the plurality of livings to the plu- 
 rality of thick and soft heads. It is not how 
 much you are worth, or what you were or what you 
 
 * Or to put it in another way. The job is to slarve the beast, so carefully 
 nourished by its keeper. 
 
 39
 
 PEOPLE AND THINGS 
 
 are that matters, but what thou art. This is, of 
 course, only a beginning. But it is good economics, 
 as well as good morals and good art, surely, to 
 begin at the beginning. At any rate, we look, all 
 Europe looks so very much like finishing up at the 
 wrong end, that one may well feel justified in study- 
 ing the title-page of the book of humanity. But one 
 must study humanity not only as it is, but as it 
 might be, and the buttress of confidence rests upon 
 the authentic fact that humanity cannot be studied 
 potentially except upon the basis of what it is. It is 
 no good talking of humanity unless you take the 
 individual into consideration. But to point out this 
 platitude in an age whose major perplexity, thanks 
 to the twilight of lies in which it gropes, is to per- 
 ceive the obvious, is genuine if not brilliant, service. 
 I will fetch anchor upon the sequel to this. The 
 search for the individual implies a search for his 
 "subconscious" mind, the inarticulate mind lying 
 underneath the conscious and deliberate one. That 
 subconscious element is at once the most actual 
 and precious thing in life and the most susceptible 
 to expansion. Its joy and sweetness are so vivid that 
 when it breaks through its conventional envelope 
 the senses intuitively respond to it with a sharpness 
 and buoyancy which only the special electricity of 
 its nature can evoke. It is at the same time the 
 source of all mystery and fantasy, and of the un- 
 appeasable longing of man for the perfect and the 
 unknown. 
 
 40
 
 THE WORD AND THE MOB 
 
 This subconscious principle, to reveal which, to 
 put it into action in practical life, is the truest aim 
 of the reformer, cannot be comprehended by reason 
 alone. Reason, doubt, even scepticism, therefore, 
 are not the scissors which can cut the alimentary 
 canal between the vested interest and the mass- 
 mind and so wither them both. True, all that men 
 do now is the reverse of reasonable. Cap-and-bells 
 stalks gravely in council-chambers and cabinets. 
 But cold, rational science stalks with it. One may 
 put it in this way : A chosen people is one which can 
 put two and two together. With the Press, 2+2 = 0; 
 with the public 2+2 = 2; with the man of reason 
 2+2 = 4; with the man of perception 2 + 2 = any- 
 thing, but not necessarily 4 and certainly not 2 or o. 
 Ultimately, it will be i, though it may be 100 firs!:. 
 Perception rather than reason is the drill to probe 
 the subconscious human reality which is the only 
 foundation of a genuine society. Thus, in the 
 second half of this book it will be necessary to dis- 
 cuss the nature of art (for art is perception) and its 
 relation to men. As an anonymous writer puts it, 
 "Thousands of people can talk for one who can 
 think ; but thousands can think for one who can see. 
 To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all 
 in one." 
 
 The divinations of man are better than his cer- 
 tainties, though,or rather because,he divines what is 
 impossible to achieve. That recognition of an un- 
 capturable beauty, the effort and failure to attain it,
 
 PEOPLE AND THINGS 
 
 and the wisdom that prompts him to pursue it, are, 
 as a writer in the Times put it, the privilege of the 
 great artist. But it is his privilege, only because his 
 inward eye is more sensitive to light than that of his 
 fellows. He graduates the light to our duller optics, 
 dull because we are so cocksure of what we can take 
 in with our normal sight. But mankind can see 
 through as well as with the eye, or great works of art 
 would never have survived, nor men like Shakes- 
 peare, Michael Angelo and Beethoven have dwelt 
 within the consciousness of men. 
 
 In the meantime, one may say that taste is as good 
 a guide as any. It is superior to reason ; it points the 
 way to art; it is impartial in its choice of human resi- 
 dence (it is to be doubted whether there is such a 
 thing as a natural bad taste. Nature herself never 
 if we except the mandrill shows bad taste); and 
 instantaneously destructive of the industrial and 
 demagogic mentality. Taste connects people and 
 things and is knowledge of good and evil. It gives 
 a synthetic idea of good and extends that good be- 
 yond the boundaries of normal morality. Taste is 
 the way of truth because it has the good on the one 
 side and the beautiful on the other. It is more 
 damning to say of a man that he acted in bad taste 
 than that he was immoral.* 
 
 * This is a simple illustration. There must be few people who, after reading 
 \V. H. Hudson's "Lost British Birds," have not felt a despair of humanity. The 
 extermination of the noblesl and most beautiful forms of British bird-life has 
 been due to two vices and two alone selfishness and bad taste. Under the first 
 heading comes the preservation of pheasants (the "curse of the pheasant") which 
 
 4 2
 
 THE WORD AND THE MOB 
 
 Now as the word replaces the thing, so the insli - 
 tution replaces the person. The two are correla- 
 tive, for a mob and a commercial State are but the 
 two halves of the same thing. 
 
 bids the gamekeeper destroy as "vermin" every species of wild bird and animal 
 preying upon, or supposed to prey upon, or even living in proximity with these 
 semi-domesticated coddlings. Where the gamekeeper begins, the collector ends. 
 There was a report some years ago that a new species of wren had been seen at St. 
 Kilda. A mob of collectors armed themselves, sallied forth and the entire St. 
 Kilda species was immortalised under glass cases. There could not surely be a 
 more blatant example of bad taste than the preference for the stuffed bird in a 
 glass case to the free and living one in its natural home. Cruelty and stupidity 
 (the cruelty and stupidity which persecute the lovely and exhilarating life of 
 wild Nature), may not be "immoral," but are certainly in bad taste. Bad taste 
 might be described as a cutting across the true nature of things, and it expands 
 very far beyond academic aesthetics. Until, in fact, people have the imaginative 
 good taste not to condemn wild birds to solitary confinement (a barbarism com- 
 mon to all classes of the community) and torture creatures in traps that don't 
 kill at once, a happy and ordered society is impossible. It is the attitude 
 that counts. Mind is not a function of the brain (as the scientists say) but 
 of the immortal spirit of life, and until our good taste recognises and 
 reverences that spirit in all its manifestations, social harmony is indeed but 
 a fiction and the quest of knowledge a pedantry. 
 
 43
 
 THE authorising great abuses is not the worst conse- 
 quence of a bad custom, for these may be at all times 
 opposed with success, but it is the giving credit to certain 
 abuses less palpable and concealing them under a mask of 
 wisdom and an appearance of public utility. Sully 
 
 T 
 
 HE aim of the reformer being always to make the 
 State more and more like man. Charles Marriott 
 
 CERTAINLY there is no knowledge more intrin- 
 sically true than that which is written in our con- 
 sciences. St. Augustine 
 
 THE Inca system of government was founded on that 
 most iniquitous and disastrous doctrine that the indi- 
 vidual bears the same relation to the State as a child to its 
 parent, that its life from the cradle to the grave must be 
 regulated for it by a Power it is taught to regard as omni- 
 scient a Power practically omnipresent and almighty. . . . 
 What wonder that a system so unspeakably repugnant to a 
 being who feels that his will is a divinity working within 
 him fell to pieces at the first touch of foreign invasion and 
 that it left no vestige of its pernicious existence on the con- 
 tinent it had ruled. For the whole State was, so to speak, 
 putrid even before dissolution, and when it fell it mingled 
 with the dust and was forgotten. W. H. Hudson 
 
 R 
 
 IGOLIR makes nothing but hypocrites. Shadwell
 
 III. 
 
 'DO not know to what extent Arnold's brief 
 for "sweetness and light," or in other words 
 beauty and intelligence uniting in the pursuit 
 of perfection is remembered nowadays; and 
 there is excuse for forgetting a sometimes sen- 
 tentious, complacent critic who belies the excel- 
 lence of his poetry. Still I am inclined (with all de- 
 precation) to find in portions of "Culture and 
 Anarchy" a measure of support to the suggestion 
 hereafter to be developed of a fraternity of artists, 
 forming without definite adhesions, policies or 
 constitution, a kind of third estate in the com- 
 munity and, as messengers of good tidings, offer- 
 ing to vexed humanity a gospel of rue living and 
 thinking. This notion is not original, since Arnold's 
 discussion of the rival principles of Hebraism and 
 Hellenism; his use of such terms as "right think- 
 ing," "a free play of mind," our "best selves"; his 
 detachment from parties and analysis of the bar- 
 barian aristocrats, the Philistine middle class and 
 the populace; his adherence to yet a fourth class 
 "Humanity," and his attack upon the Positivists as 
 system-mongers; his criticism of action for action's 
 sake all these things indicate that, blindly as I 
 
 45 p
 
 PEOPLE AND THINGS 
 
 may tread, it is not without guides. I would add 
 that the grain of Arnold's thinking may be har- 
 vested into a single sentence: 
 
 "To my countrymen, with their fatal weak- 
 ness for machinery, their bent for attaching 
 themselves to this, and losing all sense while 
 they so attach themselves, of the spirit and 
 truth of things, everything in the way of 
 machinery, all that gives them a chance of for- 
 getting the principal in the accessory, the end 
 in the means, is particularly dangerous." 
 
 Observe, further, the supreme irony by which 
 Arnold's elastic doctrine is manufactured into a 
 practical need. He requires a collective expression 
 of it, a comprehensive authority embodying the 
 "best selves" of all the individual citizens, as op- 
 posed to their ordinary, go-as-you-please egoistic 
 selves a powerful, synthetic realisation of right 
 thinking and sweetness and light in the name of the 
 higher reason of all. What is this unique Authority 
 which, while not precisely religious, is yet of so 
 sacred a character as to contain and symbolise the 
 loftier aspirations of our people? In the words of 
 the Positivists, repudiated on the preceding page 
 for their bondage to machinery, who is this High 
 Priestess of Humanity? Behold, it is the State ! 
 
 It is a misfortune of pioneers not to behold other 
 people reaping the fruits of their labours, and it is 
 a pity that Arnold cannot be present in the flesh to
 
 MAN WAS MADE FOR THE SABBATH 
 
 view his Priestess ascending the steps (three at a 
 time during the last three years) of the Temple. Not 
 only have our best selves now been formally in- 
 carnated in the State, but the State itself, by arro- 
 gating divine powers, has at the same time (quite 
 apart from routing the free thinkers) reassured 
 humanity by providing it with a visible example of 
 the identity between our best selves and the di- 
 vinity. Those of the weaker brethren, moreover, 
 who are unable to grasp the significance of an ideal 
 abstraction, even when secured from any high- 
 falutin notions of distance and other-worldliness, 
 are enabled to worship a human goddess under the 
 simple and homely denomination of Dora. Thus 
 has been consummated that desirable union be- 
 tween our internal and external selves; thus has the 
 fabric of our earthly being been woven with spiritual 
 strands; here, no doubt, is the origin of that sub- 
 lime conception of the "Holy War" which both lay 
 and clerical Ministers have preached with much 
 fervour ; thus has come to pass that in the words of 
 the poet: 
 
 "A brighter Hellas rears its mountains 
 
 From waves serener far, 
 A new Peneus rolls his fountains 
 
 Against the morning star, 
 Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep 
 Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep. 
 
 * * * * 
 
 47 D2
 
 PEOPLE AXD 
 
 "Saturn and Jove their long repose 
 
 Shall burst (read 'Have') more bright 
 
 and good 
 Than all who fell, than One Who rose, 
 
 Than many unsubdued : 
 Not gold, not blood their altar dowers 
 But votive tears and symbol flowers." 
 and thus, by the neat economy of compounding the 
 two halves of the sentence, has the problem which 
 intrigued the Pharisees been solved to the satis- 
 faction of both parties "Render unto the Caesar- 
 God the things that are the Caesar-God's and unto 
 the God-Caesar the things that are the God- 
 Caesar's." "We do not hate our enemies," mur- 
 mured a Christian pastor in Germany. "No, we 
 obey the Divine command to love them. When we 
 kill them, when we inflict untold sufferings on them, 
 when we burn their homes and overrun their terri- 
 tories, we are performing a labour of love." 
 Grotesque? Not at all. Deify the State and the 
 most atrocious crimes are only a rather more zeal- 
 ous bid for the Divine favour, a rather more ve- 
 hement indication of "good works" than is cus- 
 tomary in the comparatively tepid observances of 
 Christianity. 
 
 I do not propose here to propound any theory of 
 the State, its (His) relation to the individual, the 
 extent to which their interests and privileges con- 
 flict and co-exist, and the kind of equipoise that can 
 be struck between them. I have no theory. 
 
 48
 
 MAN WAS MADE FOR THE SABBATH 
 
 But the Leviathan State, as it exists today, is an 
 anachronism. The motive for its existence belongs 
 to the childhood of social community, when to 
 form an authority to prevent one violent ind vidual 
 from maltreating another was of advantage to the 
 community. But men as individuals no longer carry 
 arms; they have outgrown the primitive condition 
 of internal feud. Or, more accurately, the predatory 
 instinct has been organised into a system of ex- 
 change. The State, transferring its patria potetfas 
 from the individual to the system, has happened at 
 the same time to transfer its protection from the one 
 to the other. Men no longer oppress one another; 
 they are oppressed in the name of the higher reason 
 of them all. Our protector has become a greater 
 danger than the aforesaid primitive, even had he 
 the strength of ten thousand men, could ever be. 
 
 In practice the State, indeed, would seem to be 
 an embodiment rather of our worst than our best 
 selves. Something all-powerful and awe-inspiring 
 is surely a root-principle of religions, at any rate in 
 their beginnings. But modern States being singu- 
 larly indulgent to a financial oligarchy, cannot be 
 called omnipotent, nor, being at present directed in 
 England partly by twopenny Tamerlanes and 
 partly by newspaper proprietors who have climbed 
 to eminence upon the shoulders of Desperate Dick 
 and Weary Willie, can our State be said to inspire 
 in us the feelings of an Achilles whom the goddess 
 has caught by the hair. 
 
 49
 
 PEOPLE AND THINGS 
 
 Throughout long centuries, man has specialised 
 in idolatries, and to the forms of wood and stone 
 which have seduced his heart, stupefied his mind 
 and murdered his self-respect, he has now added the 
 worship of the State. The English are naturally a 
 kindly, decent, well-wishing, lovable people, and 
 vastly more agreeable than the ridiculous ideas they 
 have of themselves.* They naturally possess what 
 is, perhaps, the finest of qualities sensibility (it is 
 like the stupid English perversity to impersonate 
 themselves in the figure of a brutal and vulgar 
 farmer-buffoon, John Bull), and that is what makes 
 our literature and incidentally, at its ripest, out- 
 scholarship the greatest the world has ever known. 
 We have only to compare our treatment of birds 
 with that of our neighbours, allies and enemies on 
 the Continent. Ours is indifferent, but at least we do 
 not eat our finches, tits, and warblers. Let us not 
 despise this illustration. Perhaps the birds are 
 recording cherubs and pipe: "Inasmuch as ye 
 
 have done it to these little ones " Yet the 
 
 English are more easily put upon and bubbled by 
 
 * Indeed, as a forbearing and good-natured race, impartial history would 
 have more than a good word for us. Our revolts have been very rarely bloody, 
 and even the book of our Strong is not usually so atrocious as are most European 
 pages. To read the ghastly story of the twenties and thirties of the nineteenth 
 century, when landlord, magistrate and farmer oppressed the labouring men, 
 hanged then (or, worse, transported them on a "recommendation to mercy") 
 for stealing sheep or even handkerchiefs and half-crowns, is to be filled with a 
 sense of the poor man's patience in suffering, and of his mercifulness in retalia- 
 tion. Burned ricks and smashed machinery, after all, felt no pain. There is a 
 sort of equability in the English character which, alas, has not stood it in very 
 good stead. Fit dwellers upon our sweet and homely land such men have it in 
 them to be. 
 
 50
 
 MAN ffAS MADE FOR THE SABBATH 
 
 anything high-sounding and pretentious, than the 
 "mercurial" foreigners who, to our fond fancies, 
 are like the Athenians, always running after some 
 new thing. "Here in Patanau," says Mr. Ralph 
 Fitch in Hakluyt, "I saw a dissembling prophet 
 which sate upon an horse in the market-place and 
 made as though he slept, and many of the people 
 came and touched his feete with their hands, and 
 then kissed their hands. They took him for a great 
 man, but sure he was a lazie lubber." Mr. Fitch, at a 
 hazard, was a Celt. 
 
 But our inability to see through things and 
 thence to apprehend and associate ideas is not, of 
 course, responsible alone for this many-headed 
 dragon of a modern State. We have faithfully 
 modelled ourselves on Germany (dropping on the 
 journey her detestable "efficiency"), and, like her, 
 have allowed ourselves to be corrupted by the temp- 
 tation of power and money common to Western 
 Europe. Thus, if we pass judgement on Germany, 
 we do so in a lesser degree on ourselves, and one of 
 the reasons why we imitate Germany is because we 
 ignore the fact that German decadence is not ex- 
 clusively Teutonic. The cult of mechanism is 
 derived not from a particular nation in Europe, but 
 from a particular epoch in time. This canker, eating 
 away into our healthier tissues, has left us without 
 the spiritual power of counter-resistance. We have 
 allowed the institutionalism of material Power to 
 bedevil us. Having forgotten that people and 
 
 5 1
 
 PEOPLE AND THINGS 
 
 things owe their divine origin, not to the State, but 
 to humanity and art, we are delivered over into "the 
 bondage of machinery" pseudo-spiritual machin- 
 ery. For the cogs, cranks, levers and lubricant of 
 the machine are the tissues, membranes and blood 
 of men.* 
 
 Three years ago an enlightened Prince, Max of 
 Baden, gave an address : "In this age of grotesque 
 catchwords, it must be said with all emphasis that 
 institutions alone cannot guarantee the freedom of 
 a people. There is only one guarantee the char- 
 acter of the people itself." Turn from him to the in- 
 comparable account of the Dreyfus affair in "Pen- 
 guin Island": "The seven hundred Pyrotists 
 could not subvert the proofs of the accusation be- 
 cause they could not know what they were, and they 
 could not know what they were, because there were 
 none." And : "If he has not been convicted be- 
 cause he is guilty, he is guilty because he has been 
 convicted. I believe in his guilt as every good citizen 
 ought to believe in it; and I will believe in it as long 
 as the established jurisdiction shall order me to 
 believe in it, for it is not for a private person, but for 
 a judge, to proclaim the innocence of a convicted 
 person." Again : "Summoned before the judges 
 at a public sitting, Colomban immediately per- 
 ceived that his judges were not anxious to discover 
 the truth. As soon as he opened his mouth, the 
 
 * This machinery happens to correspond with an age of machines, but these 
 machines arc only an outward symbol of the mechanisation of living.
 
 MAN WAS MADE FOR THE SABBATH 
 
 President ordered him to be silent m the superior w- 
 terefls of the State. For the same reason, which is 
 the supreme reason, the witnesses for the defence 
 were not heard" We are gratuitously supplied with 
 one of the proofs of sanctity that the theocratic, 
 talismanic State can advance. It is religious be- 
 cause it is mysterious, and it is mysterious because 
 no one knows anything about it. A contempt and 
 ignorance, carefully nurtured by the Press, for the 
 actual idea behind the actual thing, keeps men in 
 that sly, clandestine, opaque, inscrutable darkness 
 so proper to worship. 
 
 It is the "superior interests of the State," that un- 
 questioned claim, which I have been careful to un- 
 derline. But before examining it, it will be as well to 
 make it quite clear that with us English the phrase 
 has not yet developed into a recognised doctrine. 
 The idea of the State, even the idea of commerce, is 
 not yet formulated, not yet "set" into an inflexible 
 shape. In England we live from hand to mouth no 
 less in our systems than in our ideas, no less in our 
 spiritual than our material interests. Our systems 
 are as makeshift as our houses. But lest we should 
 make ourselves comfortable by reflecting that it is 
 better to have no ideas and theories than bad ideas 
 and theories, let me remark that Nature abhors a 
 vacuum, and fools rush in where angels fear to tread. 
 In education, the Germans taught discipline, duty 
 and dogma. We were in two minds ; or rather in no 
 mind at all. It is the easiest thing in the world for 
 
 53
 
 PEOPLE AND THINGS 
 
 weeds to grow in virgin soil for bad ideas to 
 flourish in a mental climate unvisited by any ideas 
 at all. There are no counter ideas to resist them. 
 Thus with loving receptivity have we welcomed to 
 our open arms the German ideas of the State. Their 
 aunt is no less maternal to them than was their own 
 mother. In the second place, the principle of the 
 Commercial State is no less present in our midst, for 
 being inarticulate. Institutions appear to have only 
 an immediate and not a predisposing cause and are 
 morally justified in their actual workings. The 
 principle, the philosophy is there all right, but as it 
 were volatilised. It is not the business of the in- 
 telligent and well-disposed to indict a blind self- 
 seeking as a deliberate dogma, but to reveal the 
 fact that actions and institutions have their causes 
 and consequences jand make implicit a conscious- 
 ness which in Germany, for instance, was explicit. 
 It is inadmissible to talk of the philosophy of the 
 State, unless this distinction be kept in mind. 
 
 Possibly that little phrase "superior interests of 
 the State," the claw of the lion, the talon of the eagle, 
 the poison fang of the viper, the horn of the uni- 
 corn (for it is nothing but a myth) contains more 
 explanation of our deadly thraldom to machinery 
 than could be revealed in all the volumes of Han- 
 sard. What is (to cast away the fig leaf of decorous 
 diplomacy) "the good of the State?" The good of 
 the men, women and children who compose it, who 
 are it, who pay for it, to whom it belongs. One 
 
 54
 
 M.4X Jf'.IS M.1DF. FOR THE SABBJTH 
 
 hears tales of "Monsieur Un Tel" who "walked 
 about as if the whole street belonged to him." It 
 does. "Do what I tell you,'' says the parent State to 
 its citizenettes. "I will relieve you of all responsi- 
 bility and initiative; I will give you order, security, 
 prosperity, education, parks, well-lighted streets, 
 bread and circuses." "Thank you, we prefer to 
 have these things, or do without them, for our- 
 selves." A certain mumming punctilious medi- 
 ocrity called Louis XIV. has patented one little re- 
 mark as an offset against his futile and villainous 
 career : "L'Etat c'est moi." It is : mine and yours 
 and Dick's and William's and Clarastella's and 
 Peter's and Joan's. What further are the interests 
 and good (they are the same thing) of these folk? 
 To develop their lives creatively and amicably, as 
 individuals and members one of another (that is to 
 say, of the community), in beauty, joy and useful- 
 ness (in other words, "in spirit and in truth"). 
 It is monstrously unfair to push these elementary 
 conceptions away into the attic as Utopian. They 
 are the breath of common life. 
 
 Talk about majorities and minorities cannot 
 cloud the issue. The attempt of a State to coerce a 
 minority (often the salt, the leaven of a people) is to 
 create that condition of things of which coercion 
 was presumed to be the preventive. The fa6t that 
 the minority does not agree with the majority 
 makes it indispensable. If this State oppresses a 
 single individual, it is committing an acl: of self- 
 
 55
 
 PEOPLE AND THINGS 
 
 mutilation. Nor can the majority be all-powerful if 
 it does not include the minority. It is to be doubted, 
 too, at any rate nowadays, whether the word 
 "majority" is not so divorced from the thing as to 
 mean nothing the tyranny of a mere noun. In the 
 first place a State which usurps to itself an inde- 
 pendent, self-contained existence, masquerading as 
 an abstraction and bearing no relation to the needs 
 of the citizens, has nothing to do with either 
 majorities or minorities. It is a kind of aerolite, 
 wandering, an impotent firework, in space. In the 
 next place, when this majority knows no other 
 mind but its newspaper's, it dwindles down into a 
 unity, vested in a few daily sheets of paper. 
 
 Mrs. Harris, again, is no more insubstantial than 
 public opinion. To appeal to public opinion as for 
 an infallible sanction of fitness and right is surely a 
 craziness of optimism. Morris called public 
 opinion a bed of Procrustes ; but is it ever so positive 
 and solid? It takes the colour of its surroundings, 
 and its hostility is only aroused when it is discon- 
 certed by a colour-scheme at odds with them. But 
 it is curious to note how the less independent public 
 opinion is, the more tyrannical its hostility can be. 
 It is in times of a negative, prostrate public opinion 
 that we feel more keenly the truth of the sagacious 
 Mill's remark: "Mankind are greater gainers by 
 suffering each other to live as seems good to them- 
 selves, than by compelling each to live as seems 
 good to the rest." At any rate, if people it certainly 
 
 56
 
 .U.-/.V /r.-7-S M.-iDE FOR THE SABBATH 
 
 behoves us, who are one of the most personable 
 and honest of European peoples, to be less modest 
 will not take more account of themselves and one 
 another, and allow a necromantic Mumbo-jumbo 
 of a State-Idol to take their own lives and works off 
 their hands ("Individual men cannot shuffle off 
 the business of life on to the shoulders of an ab- 
 straction called the State," said Morris), then they 
 will get the State that they deserve. "The fault, 
 dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, But in ourselves 
 that we are underlings." 
 
 Neither countries nor individuals can be self- 
 governing so long as they permit theselves to be 
 the passive instruments of some impersonal Power, 
 which common folk half in derision, half in awe and 
 fear, generalise as "they," so long, that is to say, as 
 authority is externalised in a mechanism remote 
 from people's needs. Founded upon any other pos- 
 tulate, the foes of this Power are not so much 
 Socialism and Individualism as Reality and Ex- 
 perience. When "they" becomes "we," then, and 
 not till then, shall we dare to sing the hymn of the 
 poet, "The World's great age begins anew the 
 golden years return." 
 
 57
 
 I 
 
 T is clear that men enslave themselves; they suffer from 
 this slavery and yet they believe it inevitable. 
 
 To/Slot 
 
 AST came Anarchy: he rode 
 On a white horse splashed with blood; 
 He was pale even to the lips, 
 Like Death in the Apocalypse. 
 
 Li 
 
 T 
 
 Then all cried, with one accord, 
 
 "Thou art King and Law and Lord; 
 
 Anarchy, to thee we bow, 
 
 Be thy name made holy now!" Shelley 
 
 HOU shalt not," writ over the door. 
 
 Blake 
 
 THE disastrous miseries of man's life, where order, 
 Lawes, Doftrine and Authority are unable to protect 
 Innocence from the exorbitant wickednesse of Power. 
 
 Fulke Grevit/e, Lord Brooke 
 
 NEITHER one person nor any number of persons is 
 warranted in saying to another human creature of 
 ripe years thatheshall not do with hislife for his own benefit 
 what he chooses to do with it, John Stuart Mill
 
 IV. 
 
 THE SABBATH WAS MADE 
 
 FOR MAN I 
 
 O much for the general lie of the land. We 
 are at the mercy of a phrase whose meaning 
 is described in the words of Sir William 
 (Jones: "It owns us, we belong to it, we 
 derive the very substance of our soul from 
 the organised community in which we live and 
 which we call the State." Salus Reipublicae Su- 
 prema Lex or, in other words, we have adopted a 
 theory from the Romans and their devil's disciples, 
 the German economic-military, whereby we be- 
 come the private property of five letters of authority 
 which have no existence in reality, except as a con- 
 venient symbol of ourselves. Truly, where such 
 credulity is a virtue, falsehood will not be long a 
 vice. Nor is this supreme authority, as false in con- 
 ception and injurious in action as the divine right of 
 kings, the only claimant upon our unquestioning 
 obedience. For "the good of this" and "the good of 
 that" we pass our lives in a disinterested devotion 
 towards anything on earth but ourselves and our 
 fellows. All the self-destructive crimes of Germany 
 arose from the same cause. They were justified 
 because they were done "for the good of" Germany, 
 and because a sheepish people believed it. "Evil, be 
 thou my good." When I was at Oxford I remember 
 being solemnly reprimanded by the Dean, because 
 
 59
 
 PEOPLE AND THINGS 
 
 I did not go to chapel frequently enough "for the 
 good of the College." Schoolboys consent to being 
 trained in unrealities, to the perversion of their 
 natural faculties (the ossuaries of knowledge), of 
 their natural energies (set games) and finer appre- 
 hensions (esprit-de-corps) ; they are set to build 
 prisons of illusion for themselves and are dis- 
 charged from them with notions of rules for ethics 
 and routine for life "for the good of the school." 
 For "the good of the business" the employees of a 
 firm are urged to sacrifice pleasure, hope, honesty 
 and interest in their work, in order to make shoddy 
 and useless things at top speed and at a bare sub- 
 sistence wage. "For the goods of the business" 
 would be the proper phrase, since in terms of cash 
 everything goes to swell the pockets of one or more 
 individuals who live on the toil of others and pro- 
 duce nothing themselves. The following extract is 
 taken from a report of the proceedings of a Guild 
 Socialist meeting : "So-and-so criticised the report 
 on the ground that it paid too much attention to the 
 question of women which, in our judgment, is of 
 infinitely small importance compared with the 
 strength and development of the Trades Union 
 movement as a whole." What is "the strength and 
 development of the Trades Union movement as a 
 whole" but the strength and development of the 
 men and women who use the term "Trades 
 Union" as a convenient symbol of their association 
 for the benefit of each one of themselves? If one 
 
 60
 
 THE SABBATH WAS MADE FOR MAN 
 
 portion of a society develops itself at the expense of 
 another, the society ceases to exist. Let the society 
 or "movement," which thinks thus arbitrarily, be- 
 ware of becoming the enemy it professes to oppose : 
 "The hand of vengeance found the bed 
 To which the purple tyrant fled ; 
 The iron had crushed the tyrant's head 
 And became a tyrant in his stead." 
 So the thing goes on, until the good of a term, of a 
 figure of speech, is to be interpreted as the ill of the 
 human beings who invent it.* Thus we come round 
 again to the organisation of an absolute State as the 
 embodiment of our worst selves. William James 
 said that no sooner was an institution founded and 
 secured upon the idea that gave it birth than it went 
 to work to commit parricide. "Mention but the 
 word divinity," wrote Butler, "and our sense of the 
 divine is clouded." Or, to quote Blake again, the 
 St. George of this modern dragon: "Thus man 
 forgot that all deities reside in the human breast" 
 
 How is it, then, that we (a people who cut off 
 a king's head and he a lover of the arts, wanting, 
 indeed, in tact, but a mere dabbler in despotism as 
 modern States go) have become so involuntarily 
 devoted? What is the principal result of our self- 
 sacrifice and where, if any, is the remedy to seek? 
 
 * Tolsloi, I think, points out that one of the worft aspects of the State theory 
 is that it makes the whole body of the citizens it sways the accomplices of its 
 crimes. A crime is committed. Who is responsible for it? Nobody, because it is 
 committed in the name of us all; everybody, because no single individual or 
 group of individuals can be charged with it. 
 
 6l E
 
 PEOPLE AND THINGS 
 
 The answer nearly always given to the first question 
 is the war. Mention the word "War" and we are 
 saved from inconvenient speculation as the savage 
 is guarded from harm by his amulet. But Ares is 
 too much of a blockhead to set first causes in mo- 
 tion. He is, in fact, so gross a blockhead that even 
 the blindness of men is not sufficient to drive them 
 into his snare, unless they are being pushed into it 
 from behind. War arms the State, but it neither 
 makes the weapons nor the limbs that wield them. 
 Rather it is our old bugbear, Commerce, Finance, 
 Industrialism, the most inhuman system invented 
 in history, that makes the assumptions of the State 
 possible and ourselves resigned to accepting them. 
 
 Commerce, for instance, makes the mob-mind, 
 and the mob thinks in phrases. So that, to begin 
 with, we are confronted by the fallacy of looking at 
 classes (the correlative of phrases) and not persons, 
 at woman and not women and so on. Cultivate 
 irreverence, dear countrymen, learn respect and 
 inscribe on your mental phylacteries the tag, 
 "dolus latet in generalibus" : 
 
 "PattorManders: 'You call it "cowardice" to do 
 your plain duty? Have you forgotten that a son 
 ought to love and honour his father and mother?' 
 
 "Mrs. Afowg: 'Do not let us talk in such general 
 terms. Let us ask: Ought Oswald to love and 
 honour Chamberlain Alving?' ' 
 We are seduced by generalities (a very different 
 thing from the abstract) and fix our minds upon the 
 
 62
 
 THE SABBATH WAS MADE FOR MAN 
 
 "criminal class," not upon John Smith the errand 
 boy who took the marked half-crown out of the 
 shop-till. We refuse to^look at the particular 
 human case. 
 
 The effect of these generalities is to give the 
 State a free hand. There is no control over it, be- 
 cause there is no examination into it. It is at liberty 
 to separate itself from us and at the same time to 
 assume by general terms that its actions are identi- 
 fied with us and our well-being. We obey our idol 
 because we believe in it, and we believe in it be- 
 cause it is working "for our good." If we do not 
 obey it, something frightful will happen to us and 
 we shall all go to pieces. Indeed, the matter need 
 not go so far as this. Sheer lethargy of mind and 
 spirit without thought of consequences, alone, will 
 deliver us, has delivered us, into the hands of the 
 State. We cannot be surprised that the State of 
 an industrial age is ready to grasp the occasion. 
 
 Therefore the product of the "man-was-made- 
 for-the-Sabbath," the from top-to-bottom theory of 
 life, is compulsion. The State has doubts of our 
 capacity for benevolence. We are, therefore, com- 
 pelled to benevolence. I gave you all the privilege 
 of living and working under my business men, in 
 my towns, for my wages and my ends, my power 
 and glory, saith the State ; you will, therefore, hand 
 over your life and work to me when I want it, saith 
 the State. If you demur, I will put you slowly to 
 death in my prisons, saith the State. 
 
 63 E2
 
 PEOPLE AND THINGS 
 
 But compulsion is root and branch of the in- 
 dustrial system. " 'Do you not see, my son, that 
 madman who, with his teeth, is biting the nose of 
 the adversary he has overthrown and that other 
 who is pounding a woman's head with a huge 
 stone?' 'I see them. They are creating law; they are 
 founding property ; they are establishing the prin- 
 ciples of civilisation, the basis of Society and the 
 foundation of the State.' ' The modern quarrel, 
 said Morris in his wisdom, is not between Absolu- 
 tism and Democracy, but Mastership and Fellow- 
 ship. The unequal distribution of labour on the one 
 hand and of its results upon the other left the lack- 
 alls withonly one counterin bargaining with thehave- 
 alls the power of labour. That they not only sold 
 to their masters they were compelled to sell it. 
 The alternative was starvation or the workhouse. 
 Although reason refuses to be convinced that they 
 who consume practically all should produce nothing 
 and they who produce all should consume practically 
 nothing, yet this arrangement is a commonplace of 
 economic fact. The system of "plunder and waste" 
 which thus adjusts the balance between those who 
 own and those who use the means of production is 
 foundation, structure, roof and all of modern 
 society. Its defenders have a more elaborate 
 method than denial. They claim (i) that it is 
 beneficial, or (2) that it is inevitable : 
 "I heard a devil curse 
 Over the heath and the furze ; 
 64
 
 THE SABBATH WAS MADE FOR MAN 
 
 'Mercy could be no more 
 
 If there were nobody poor, 
 
 And pity no more could be 
 
 If all were happy as ye; 
 
 And mutual fear brings peace, 
 
 Misery's increase 
 
 Are mercy, pity, peace.' ' 
 This cruelly absurd method of work was really 
 enforced by indirect compulsion ; it was your labour 
 or your life. Nor were the compulsion to bad work 
 and dishonesty, the compulsion to poverty and 
 spiritual atrophy the only resource of business. 
 Before domestic flamed into foreign war we were 
 forced to buy and sell things (to make a profit) 
 which nobody v/anted and which degraded their 
 possessors. We were forced to live in hideous, 
 ramshackle houses, constructed with an eye 
 neither to use nor beauty, with a maximum of in- 
 convenience and a minimum of common sense. We 
 were forced to walk streets where these houses 
 were rammed formlessly together in endless lines, 
 like a set of "Meditations Among the Tombs" 
 endlessly reprinted in sham vellum. Our men were 
 forced to walk the streets in clothes as drab and 
 neutral as the bindings of school algebras and 
 manufactured not to reveal but encase the lines of 
 the body; we were forced in our sham houses to eat 
 adulterated food and to sit upon shoddy furniture. 
 We put up with dirt, squalor, ugliness, and pre- 
 tentiousness as the indispensables of our condition. 
 
 65
 
 PEOPLE AND THINGS 
 
 An eccentric taste and an ample bank balance alone 
 could satisfy men's natural instincts for pleasant 
 and individual surroundings. "Stark utility" or 
 "idiotic sham" we took it or we left it. The tale is 
 not told, nor can it ever be told. Oblivion, the re- 
 pository of secrets and the defeat of the chronicler 
 writes its own epic of dust upon twentieth-century 
 Europe in the prison of commercialism. 
 
 The doctrine again that man was made for the 
 Sabbath means man the auxiliary of machinery. 
 The use of machinery is defended on the plea that 
 it saves labour; the introduction of it into modern 
 Europe degraded that use by turning skilled 
 workers into unskilled, workers with control over 
 their work into workers controlled by the machines 
 which make the work and by the masters who con- 
 trol both men and machines. Machinery in work 
 has meant no less than mechanism in life. It has cut 
 across what is desirable in life and paid no heed to 
 what is undesirable in work. For to adapt human 
 effort to the strict demands of production and con- 
 sumption, to treat commodities (including men 
 and women) on the lines of repetition and special- 
 ization is, to use the old phrase, "against human 
 nature." Those faculties which cannot expand 
 without ample security, leisure and free play of 
 mind, follow as a matter of course. Machinery 
 caused automatism and subdivision,* and they 
 
 * The consequence of course in aftion of subdivision (or as Professor Mackail 
 in his life of Morris calls it more correctly disintegration of labour) isftandard- 
 
 66
 
 THE SABBATH WAS MADE FOR MAN 
 
 themselves (I believe watch-making has ninety 
 different processes) made machinery the tyrant 
 rather than the servant and liberator of human 
 energy. When Butler saw men devitalised by ma- 
 chinery into machines, he abolished machines 
 themselves for fear of their becoming anthropo- 
 morphic. Not that the abolition of machinery is 
 either a desirable or logical end of this perversion of 
 it. Machinery, that is to say, is good in its proper 
 place. If you design a thing for machinery, said a 
 friend to me once, well and good. If you imitate a 
 hand-made thing by machinery it is all to the bad. 
 That implies not the abolition, but the develop- 
 ment of machinery. J. A. Hobson, dealing in 
 "Work and Wealth" with the problem of man and 
 the machine, says suggestively that machinery 
 should do for the moderns what slave labour did 
 for Athens. The business of machinery, that is to 
 say, is to do the dirty work. 
 
 If, then, compulsion was indirect before the war, 
 it was omnipresent and implacable. We should 
 beware, therefore, of taking for granted that the 
 present compulsion will be only a transitory ex- 
 pedient. Economic force has evolved into military 
 force, and the war of classes and competing pro- 
 fiteers into the war of nations. The compulsion to 
 
 ization of work. Work is bound to be mechanical so long as the workman's in- 
 telligence cannot circulate into the general body of the work or even affedl the 
 value and quality of the isolated portion upon which he is engaged; so long, 
 again, as his knowledge cannot grasp the relation of the parts to the whole. 
 
 6 7
 
 PEOPLE AND THINGS 
 
 work slips into the compulsion to fight,* and if our 
 rights and liberties come tumbling after it is a 
 sign that the disease has "come out" "Tyranny," 
 wrote Motley, "ever young and ever old, con- 
 stantly reproducing itself with the same stony 
 features, with the same imposing mask which 
 she has worn through all ages, can never be 
 too minutely examined, especially when she paints 
 her. own portrait and when the secret history of 
 her guilt is furnished by the confessions of her 
 lovers." 
 
 In this general surrender "the superior interests 
 of the State" acquire a more precise meaning. Since 
 the State is independent of the body of the citizens, 
 "for the good of" it means exactly what it says. We 
 had our compulsion for utility (conscription, etc. 
 It is on evil days that we have fallen when "Man- 
 Power" is our name for the human form and the 
 human face divine). Our compulsion for expedi- 
 ence (the abolition of political liberties) was fol- 
 lowed up in due time by the compulsion of the 
 sick "for the good of" compulsion. There was no 
 room here for motive or pretext. The sick were of 
 no use to the State; they possessed no privileges, 
 they asserted no strength, they made no resistance, 
 nor by the holding of any subversive theories, could 
 
 * This point does not touch the ethical question of whether, having 
 fallen into the war, we should have to fight in it. Though so much is 
 made of it, it is not a relevant issue. But the predisposing causes of the 
 war are of an importance that cannot be exaggerated. 
 
 68
 
 THE SABBATH WAS MADE FOR MAN 
 
 they have excited its cruel hand to close upon them. 
 They were the most pliable because the most help- 
 less material for the exercise of Power, for the good 
 of, or in other words, for the sake and gratification of 
 Power. Two years ago I saw with my own eyes a 
 man with elephantiasis in the legs, stripped bare 
 after waiting in a crowded room for eight hours 
 without food or drink and being heartily slapped 
 for their diversion by a couple of elderly military 
 doctors. I might have been excused had I reflected 
 at the time that that portion of the newspaper-fed 
 public, which tolerated such brutalities, "had at 
 last succeeded in persuading themselves that their 
 Divinity would be extremely offended if they hesi- 
 tated to ascribe to him the attributes of a fiend." 
 I should have been wrong, since hundreds of such 
 details which hardly the most insensitive of free 
 judgements would condone were but the automatic 
 proof of the pudding in the eating, as automatic as 
 the round of the seasons and the effect of a system 
 ultimately founded upon defrauding people and 
 debasing things by force. Let us, the people of 
 England, that is to say the soldiers, the workmen, 
 the poets and the thinkers, not forget the crimes of 
 these wretches. Let us punish them by our mercy 
 and degrade them by the peaceful strength of our 
 hearts ! 
 
 For State coercion shows itself yoke-fellow to 
 commercialism when seen from the human point of 
 view. The principle of conscription, for instance, 
 
 69
 
 PEOPLE AND THINGS 
 
 apart from the suffering and ill-conduct it causes, 
 and its shameful political and ethical reactions, 
 denies the human law that one man's meat is 
 another man's poison. It mechanically simplifies 
 human variety. That uniformity is the great seal of 
 industrialism. In Henry James's critique on Balzac 
 occurs the following : "The fatal fusions and uni- 
 formities inflicted on our newer generations, the 
 running together of all the differences of form and 
 tone, the ruinous liquefying wash of the great in- 
 dustrial brush over the old conditions of contrast 
 and colour, doubtless still have left the painter of 
 manners much to do, but have ground him down to 
 the sad fact that his ideals of differentiation, those 
 inherent oppositions from type to type, in which 
 drama most naturally resides, have well nigh 
 perished." Commerce, which sees all men as one 
 man and simplifies that one man as a mechanical 
 quantity, is not only remote from the facts of life 
 and a stranger in the vari-coloured workshop of 
 Nature; it is the anaesthetic that prepares the 
 patient for the operations of a sovereign State. 
 
 Warring, too, upon the individual, the com- 
 mercial State inevitably wars upon itself. "Getting 
 and spending we lay waste our powers" is a kind of 
 summary of commercial economics. This waste in- 
 volves society in a condition of fierce and inter- 
 minable warfare. A society that spends itself in tear- 
 ing the means of livelihood from its members is not 
 a commonwealth, but a pack, to which the rooks 
 
 70
 
 THE SABBATH WAS MADE FOR MAN 
 
 could teach better manners and citizenship no 
 society at all, but an anarchy. I am speaking not of 
 foreign, but civil war. Groups of competing capi- 
 talists who fire or wish to fire silver bullets at each 
 other for the privilege of exploiting the undeveloped 
 resources of backward countries, must first collect 
 the financial ammunition for the foreign gamble 
 from their own countrymen, by the thinly dis- 
 guised methods of war. 
 
 For the ethical source of commerce or its de- 
 velopment in finance, its primum mobile is self- 
 interest. It plays the game of "Beggar-my- 
 Neighbour," it puts a premium upon fraud and its 
 axiom is that one man's gain is another man's loss. 
 It is founded on the denial of the law of the Deca- 
 logue: "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's 
 goods." Except in clothes and in weapons and the 
 extension of his field of operations there is no 
 capital difference between the financier (except that 
 he keeps personally out of the way) and the mediae- 
 val robber baron. Evolution plays us some strange 
 tricks. It is "a long, long way" from Lorenzo the 
 Magnificent to the coal-baron and the oil-king, 
 from the robbery at Gadshill to the fraud of the 
 modern company promoter.* Modern Europe, in 
 adopting the Industrial System, gave a blank 
 cheque and a moral certificate to the predatory 
 appetite. As that charming innocent, Ingersoll, 
 
 * "Is the Jew of the usury-gold becoming the despot-king of Commerce?" 
 wrote Meredith. 
 
 71
 
 PEOPLE AND THINGS 
 
 puts it, "the teaching of Christ is no longer 
 practical, as it does not suit our industrial times." 
 
 Now if people produce things for what they may 
 get out of them, competition will automatically 
 arise for the fruits of what they produce. Where 
 men compete, they will covet, where they covet 
 they will acquire, and where they acquire tjiey will 
 fight to retain and to seize more. Where they com- 
 pete again, some will gain and some will lose. The 
 losers retaliate on the gainers, the gainers on the 
 losers, and all things are confused to ill . The world 
 to-day is convulsed by 
 
 "That vain low strife [power, 
 
 Which makes men mad, the tug for v/ealth and 
 The passions and the cares that wither life 
 And waste its little hour." 
 
 We cannot wonder that the moral chaos of this age 
 fathers its domestic and international anarchy. 
 Plutus is a more powerful monarch than Pluto.* 
 It is better to fight for a drab (as they anciently 
 fought at Troy) than for a trade monopoly. Force 
 is the natural consequence of this strife, and an 
 autocratic State founded upon force of a commer- 
 cial system founded upon strife. 
 
 * We surrender the honours of life, the best positions in society, every prestige, 
 illimitable power and ethical advantage to whom ? To the man of tried merit, 
 of intelleftual calibre, of insight and sympathy? We abandon them to the man 
 who has enough money to keep thousands of his fellow-creatures in the pleasures 
 and necessaries of life, and to the man who is responsible for denying them. To 
 the man who increases men's wants and at the same time decreases the value of 
 what they get; who buys below value and sells above it, and who sacrifices 
 human lives by forced and unnatural labour to his own interest! ! 
 
 7 2
 
 THE SABBATH WAS MADE FOR MAN 
 
 But the real trouble of material Power is the 
 philosophy of automatism, the compulsion of ne- 
 cessity which it half consciously encourages. \Men 
 who cease to believe in themselves and in the work 
 of their hands and brains are not so destitute of 
 faith as to be fobbed off with a tin god. The best 
 and the worst of it is that they must have spiritual 
 compensation. Therefore, driven by the pressure 
 of industrial determinism, prevented from choosing 
 their daily work, from exercising their native talent 
 upon it and from making it pleasurable, interesting 
 and important, swung out of their individual orbits 
 into the vast and complex one of an authority whose 
 ends they do not understand and whose workings 
 they do not share, they come to resign themselves 
 to the conception of an impersonal force as in- 
 evitable as it is malignant and inhuman. The 
 name of this Ate of eternal night is what a first- 
 rate article in the Times Literary Supplement 
 described as Human-Nature-Being-What-It-Is. 
 Naturally, it is sacrilege to cut off Medusa's head 
 by denying her existence. The way to appease her 
 is by thankfully accepting and even reinforcing the 
 evil for which she is responsible. Thus savages per- 
 form propitiatory rites of blood and terror to their 
 demons. Men will not abolish the bogeys created 
 out of their own helplessness and fear until they 
 see that "the things which we have been used to 
 look upon as necessary and eternal evils are merely 
 the accidental and temporary growths of past 
 
 73
 
 PEOPLE AND THINGS 
 
 stupidity and can be escaped from by due effort 
 and the exercise of courage, goodwill and fore- 
 thought" 
 
 On the contrary, they are turned into a good. 
 
 Mungo Park, in his African travels, relates 
 how, in Teesee no woman was allowed to eat an 
 egg. "This prohibition, whether arising from 
 ancient superstition or from the craftiness of some 
 old bushman who loved eggs himself, is strictly 
 adhered to and nothing will more affront a 'woman of 
 Teesee than to offer her an egg" Take away some- 
 body's right and he will be mortally offended if 
 you offer him it back. In "Erewhon" the young 
 man who surreptitiously devoured beef-steaks 
 when it was against the law, suffered such grievous 
 pangs of conscience that he killed himself. Take 
 away somebody's necessity and (be he an honest 
 man) he will die of shame if he take it back again. 
 Duty,separated from nature and common sense, so 
 readily becomes fatalism. 
 
 Indeed no progress is possible unless we can use 
 our minds to sever what is inevitable from what is 
 accidental and can make them up to get rid of the 
 latter, so far as it impedes our free development as 
 men. For man's salvation is prevented by no bogeys, 
 devils or idols but by himself; it is secured by no 
 bribes or hostages to gods or fortunes but again 
 by himself. But fatalism is the right hand of ma- 
 terial Power. Power compels men not to resist it ; 
 fatalism makes a voluntary pact with men not to 
 
 74
 
 THE SABBATH WAS MADE FOR MAN 
 
 resist it. What has happened can be undone or 
 rectified by those to whom it has happened; what 
 must happen can be safely left to take its appointed 
 course, since it is beyond men's collective energy. 
 For men themselves allow the evil from which they 
 suffer. Power, political expediency, State heathen- 
 ism do not cause men's public actions to contradict 
 their private convictions. Christian men are 
 metamorphosed into idolaters; kindly men into 
 ministers of persecution ; honest men into accom- 
 plices of venality and corruption ; men who love 
 beauty, as it is the nature of men to do, acquiesce in 
 the brutal tyranny of ugliness. It is the hypnotism 
 of necessity works all these miracles. Lovers of men, 
 and of the things they can make and use, must learn 
 to overcome that compulsion of the soul, the pander 
 to the compulsion of the body, before the world can 
 be set free, as it could so easily be set free, were we 
 not so fearfully and helplessly bound by the dark 
 misgiving that it cannot.* "And ye shall know the 
 truth and the truth shall make you free." 
 
 * The war for peace, for liberty, for democracy, has been won. Peace 
 hurriedly prepares for another war, liberty imposes forcible slavery upon 
 friends and foes impartially, democracy is engaged in the manly charge of 
 starving German babies to death. Do we regard these things as inevitable? 
 Then the human race is shortly predestined to extinction. 
 
 75
 
 
 T 
 
 UE si quelque affaire t'importe 
 
 Ne la fais point par procureur. La Fontaine 
 
 HEIR small money is almonds, which oftentimes they 
 use to eat. Hakluyt^ "Ralph Fitch's Voyage" 
 
 WE are nothing more than the creatures of that anti- 
 nomic abstraction the State, which makes of each in- 
 dividual a slave in the name of all, each individual of which 
 all, taken separately, will desire the exadl contrary of what 
 he will be made to do. Edouard Rod, "Le Sens de la Vie" 
 
 HUMAN beings in their present condition may be 
 likened to bees in the act of swarming, as we see them 
 clinging in a mass to a single bough. Their position is a 
 temporary one, and must inevitably be changed. They 
 must rise and find themselves a new abode. Every bee 
 knows this, and is eager to shift his own position as well as 
 that of the others, but not one of them will do so until 
 the whole swarm rises. The swarm cannot rise, because one 
 bee clings to the other and prevents it from separating itself 
 from the swarm, and so they all continue to hang. It might 
 seem as if there were no deliverance from this position, pre- 
 cisely as it seems to men of this world who have become en- 
 tangled in the social net. Indeed, there would be no outlet 
 for the bees if each one were not a living creature possessed 
 of a pair of wings. Tolsloi 
 
 EACH (of the stone statues) was terrible after a different 
 kind. One was raging furiously as in pain and great 
 despair; another was lean and cadaverous with famine; 
 another cruel and idiotic, but with the silliest simper that 
 can be conceived this one had fallen and looked exquisitely 
 ludicrous in his fall the mouths of all were more or less 
 open, and as I looked at them from behind I saw that their 
 heads had been hollowed. Samuel Butler
 
 AS I sit at my work at home, which is at Hammersmith, 
 close to the river, I often hear some of that ruffianism 
 go past the window of which a good deal has been said of 
 late. As I hear the yells and shrieks and all the degradation 
 cast on the glorious tongue of Shakespeare and Milton, as I. 
 see the brutal reckless faces and figures go past me it rouses 
 the recklessness and brutality in me also, and fierce wrath 
 takes possession of me, till I remember, as I hope I mostly 
 do, that it was my good luck only of being born respectable 
 and rich that has put me on this side of the window among 
 delightful books and lovely works of art, and not on the 
 other side, in the empty street, the drink-steeped liquor 
 shops, the foul and degraded lodgings. I know by my own 
 feelings and desires what these men want, what would have 
 saved them from these lowest depths of savagery: employ- 
 ment which would foster their self-respect and win the 
 praise and sympathy of their fellows, and dwellings which 
 they could come to with pleasure, surroundings which 
 would soothe and elevate them; reasonable labour, reason- 
 able rest. There is only one thing which can give them this 
 art. William Morris
 
 V. 
 
 THE SABBATH WAS MADE 
 FOR MAN II 
 
 A f M // Jf E come, then, to the lasl of the 
 \\ \ V/ IJ questions proposed in the lasl: chap- 
 
 Wter. Where is the remedy to seek? 
 Some men think that as the whole 
 V V apparatus of force and power lives 
 by automatism, so will it automatically collapse 
 that the contradiction of moral consciousness ex- 
 plicit in the modern kingdoms of this world has 
 gone as far as it will go. For beyond them, as 
 Butler says, "there is another within which the writs 
 of this world's kingdoms do not run," and we can 
 finally escape the writ that kingdom serves on us 
 only at the cosl of a moral insolvency that spells dis- 
 solution. Mankind, in other words, cannot ignore 
 the principle of fellowship without ceasing to be 
 mankind. 
 
 Such is not only the law of Man, but of Nature, of 
 the universe. Nature (and art as well) plays infinite 
 variations upon very few themes, upon one 
 theme which may be called the glory of God, or 
 anything you like. But the theme is not losl in the 
 variations or the variations in the theme, and de- 
 mocracy, therefore, is a very real thing indeed, since 
 it is expressive of, and in harmony with, the divine 
 law of the universe. The best of modern science 
 again is becoming so Wordsworthian as to dis- 
 
 79 F 2
 
 PEOPLE AND THINGS 
 
 cover the idea of pleasure in all the manifestations of 
 the non-human world. Observation has tardily 
 come to endorse the intuition that every flower en- 
 joys the air it breathes. The new-old doctrine of 
 Nature red in tooth and claw goes the way of ration- 
 al ism. "What man that loves Nature has not read 
 into her a secret innocence, the purity of which 
 her outward seeming cruelties do not really mar? 
 Possibly, we call Nature "red in tooth and claw" 
 because man, in the shame of his own worse (be- 
 cause organised, deliberate and superfluous) sav- 
 ageries, was constrained to make Nature his 
 accomplice. For Nature is not actually either waste- 
 ful or cruel. What makes her seem so is our gloom 
 and monopoly in unhappiness which we cast over 
 her as a pall of glib philosophy. Each species, in 
 exquisite proportion and balance, enjoys its own 
 life and supplies life to others. It is we, in our greed 
 and insensibility, who overweigh that balance and 
 point, in the vindication of our theories about her, 
 to the consequences. 
 
 Part of this sense of new values is due to the re- 
 cognition of death as a natural law. It has been left 
 for man to invent useless fear and suffering in living 
 and in dying who, as soon as you suggest to him 
 that the joyful law of our being is creative and not 
 destructive, and that he should do pleasant and 
 sensible things, invokes all his thunders upon you. 
 For birds, animals, and insects in the natural state 
 approach death as unconsciously and appropri- 
 
 80
 
 THE SABBATH WAS MADE FOR MAN 
 
 ately as a falling upon sleep, nor do they suffer in 
 the preliminaries to it. A merciful paralysis of 
 sensation (also experienced by human beings in the 
 grasp of beasts of prey) seizes upon them and kills 
 the gnawing worm of fear and pain within them. 
 Neither, in the fullness of their strength, do animals 
 of the same species kill one another in their rivalries 
 of courtship. The discomfited one retires to nurse 
 his powers and return the victor in the following 
 year. Sport is theirs, mating, parenthood, the pleas- 
 ure of the daily task and the unconscious satisfac- 
 tion of passing their lives in perfect accord with 
 natural laws. However far we separate, as Herbert 
 says, Nature from the God of Nature, there is 
 surely a divine essence in the solemn expression of 
 thanksgiving which all the works of the Lord 
 render unto him the Lord of life, joy and growth. 
 
 "No mercy-seat of gold, 
 No dead and dusty cherub, nor carv'd stone, 
 But his own living works did my Lord hold, 
 
 And lodge alone 
 
 Where trees and herbs did watch and peep 
 And wonder, while the Jews did sleep." 
 
 When, therefore, Nature denies to us now the fruits 
 of her womb and the comfort of her spirit, I am con- 
 tent to leavethe moral verdict upon ourways to her. 
 We should, however, be discussing remedies, 
 not consequences. Competitive Commerce has 
 grown up into High Finance, private into State 
 
 81
 
 PEOPLE AND11HINGS 
 
 capitalism, covert force into open violence. We 
 need not point to any particular Junkers of the 
 European nations and post them up as designing 
 tyrants. They are inevitable, automatic symptoms 
 of war, as the war is the symptom of mechanical 
 industrialism and mechanical industrialism of the 
 Sabbath theory of life, of the loss of the human being 
 in his institutions, of the text in the commentary, of 
 God in graven images. We are beginning to see, in 
 fact, that every effect has a cause and that the odd 
 division of the world between autocratic mobs and 
 democratic States has produced certain results 
 Pangloss alone can explain. Mastership of life and 
 work is the enemy and Fellowship of life and work 
 our aim. 
 
 Is current Socialism, then, the remedy? Some 
 of its doctrinaires are ready to tinker up a system 
 that is past mending; some to get rid of a system for 
 which they have an alternative no less external. 
 One school has had its theories parodied to ab- 
 surdity by the existing government. Another, 
 narrow and didactic, is not so much a class move- 
 ment as a section-of-a-class movement and its plans, 
 not being founded upon any large knowledge of 
 existing details lack a constructive philosophy for 
 bridging the transition from things as they are to 
 things as they should be. Even if these plans would 
 work when established, they cannot be attained />^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<l, but at 
 the lily. Mr. Hewlett musl explain himself away because, being a poet, he 
 looks at the lily and in simple forcible language, tells us what it is and meant. 
 
 179
 
 PEOPLE AND THINGS 
 
 in that enough at least to make him see the beauty 
 of holiness. So, too, there is always enough of the 
 aesthetic conscience in the saint to see the holiness 
 of beauty." What is St. Francis, more saint than 
 artist or artist than saint? Po-chu-i, the ninth cen- 
 tury poet, does not seem to me to have outraged the 
 poetic proprieties when he wrote : 
 
 "I wish I had a rug ten thousand feet long 
 Which at one time could cover up every inch of 
 the City." 
 
 Accepting then the association of art with con- 
 victions, we shall see that they happen at the same 
 time to correspond with the "enlightened self- 
 interest" of all the arts themselves. Bitter experi- 
 ence is teaching us that the prosperity of art de- 
 pends on no individual, however great, but on the 
 freedom and happiness of the community. Art, as 
 a livelihood for all, becomes the aim of art. "Let us 
 say," cried the old champion of deliverance, "let us 
 say that we (the artists) have a property which your 
 tyranny of squalor cheats us of: we also have a 
 morality, which its baseness crushes : we also have 
 a religion which its injustice makes a mock of." 
 The aim of art is to turn machines into men and 
 happy workers, to give back to men individuality in 
 co-operative jcreation. Freedom, leisure, non- 
 routine education, health, active minds working in 
 common to the stimulus and response of a kindred 
 environment these are seen to be the rivers, 
 
 1 80
 
 COMMUNAL ART I 
 
 valleys and mountains diversifying and composing 
 the landscape of beauty. 
 
 The literary "modernist" then will perceive, in 
 the first place, that there is something wrong in the 
 notion that the arts and the enjoyment of life are an 
 exclusive monopoly of the few, the privilege of 
 wealth, the ornament of luxury and, in the second, 
 that aesthetic perception, being a prerogative of the 
 human soul, is not killed in the people, but only 
 atrophied and vulgarised by the hideous environ- 
 ment in which they are compelled to live, and the 
 equally hideous idols they are compelled to worship. 
 He will take into consideration the fact that, as Ben 
 Jonson puts it: "It is a false quarrel against 
 Nature, that she helps understanding but in a few, 
 when the most part of mankind are inclined by her 
 thither, if they would take the pains; no less than 
 birds to fly, horses to run, etc., which, if they lose it, 
 is through their own sluggishness, and by that 
 means they become her prodigies, not her chil- 
 dren." How he shapes this conception how, that 
 is to say, he fits it into the proper notation of his 
 art is his concern, not mine. Obviously, so earth- 
 shaking an idea will be Protean in the number of 
 formulas adaptable to the literary substance. The 
 subject-matter is only secondary, and one formula 
 for one artist may be false for another. It is of im- 
 portance to underline the fact that art is quite inde- 
 pendent of its subject-matter. It is a positive energy 
 and laughs at locksmiths. But it does not laugh at 
 
 181
 
 PEOPLE AND THINGS 
 
 the law of the spirit. To that it is obedient or 
 perishes. 
 
 Take, for instance, the work of W. H. Hudson, 
 one of our very few contemporary great artists. 
 He has nothing to say about liberty and equality. 
 It would be easier to find in him and with 
 reason a touch of misanthropy. Yet because of 
 the imaginative intensity by which he feels the 
 contact of the forms of material nature with their 
 spiritual origin, and because he possesses a power of 
 identifying himself with the secret processes of 
 nature, which some might call fay and others pagan, 
 but which I should prefer to call religious ; because 
 his art is conceived and expressed rather as vision, 
 prophecy and religion than anything smaller we 
 feel that he does intrinsically belong to that kind of 
 "modernism" I have tried to represent. His man- 
 hood feels the truth of Nature, and by them both 
 the truth of man. Nature keeps her truth, man 
 violates his and Nature's. Keep his own and he will 
 know and keep hers. 
 
 This brings me to one last suggestion before 
 closing the chapter. Art that is expressive and con- 
 vincing (i.e., art that is a vocation see Chapter 
 VIII) will on that account embrace a larger con- 
 ception than faith in man. Faith in man, that is to 
 say, is a natural consequence of faith in the uni- 
 verse. The nearer, that is to say, we bring "morality" 
 into line with the faith, the design, the idea which 
 our finer apprehensions realise to be the truth of 
 
 182
 
 
 
 COMMUNAL ART I 
 
 the universe, the greater will be our art. For art, 
 priest of the universe, is the John Baptisl not of 
 reason, but, so to speak, of the thinking, brooding 
 soul of God and Nature. Art and letters express a 
 belief in the universe. Being a confession of faith 
 they cannot exist without meaning and purpose. 
 Or if they can so exisl:, they are what the publisher 
 (speaking of literature) calls "belles lettres." As 
 Blake said : "Everything possible to be believed is 
 an image of truth." Art "calls heaven to witness," 
 its "answer is in the affirmative," it vouches for the 
 spiritual truth of life and ratifies it. 
 
 183
 
 A 
 T 
 
 GOOD painter has two chief objects to paint, man 
 and the intention of his soul. Leonardo da Vinci 
 
 HAT figure is mosT: worthy of praise which, by its 
 action best expresses the passion which animates it. 
 
 Ibid 
 
 ONE begins by plaguing oneself to no purpose in order 
 to be true to nature and one concludes by working 
 quietly from one's own palette alone and then Nature is 
 the result. Vincent Van Gogh 
 
 DI D we realise the fact that society is a growth and not a 
 manufacture a thing that makes itself, not a thing 
 that can be artificially made. Herbert Spencer 
 
 THOU findesl arts of all kinds; choose then for thyself 
 that which is like to be of greatest service to thee; learn 
 it; let not the difficulty thereof vex thee till thou hast accom- 
 plished somewhat wherewith thou mayest be satisfied. 
 
 Diirer 
 
 BUT to me religion is more than the mumbling of a 
 creed. It is the meaning of all that is unexplained and 
 inexplicable in the world. It is the adoration of the unknown 
 force which maintains the universal laws and preserves the 
 types of all beings; it is the surmise of all that in Nature does 
 not fall within the domain of sense, of all that immense 
 realm of things which neither the eyes of our body nor even 
 those of our spirit can see; it is the impulse of our conscience 
 towards the infinite, towards eternity, towards unlimited 
 
 knowledge and love In this sense I am religious. 
 
 Rodin
 
 XI. 
 
 COMMUNAL ART II. 
 A LINQUA FRANCA AND 
 WORK FOR ITS OWN SAKE 
 
 VIDENTLY some kind of adjustment 
 has to be sought between the super- 
 intelleftual and the vulgarian. The art of 
 the former, left derelict outside the tide 
 and impulse of a common understanding, 
 will lose character and motive. He will gradually 
 improve upon Nature, painting the lily, arrang- 
 ing the flowers of beauty in the vases of his own 
 invention, and imposing his own arid ingenuities 
 in arbitrary patterns that gradually approach the 
 special vice of the vulgarian meaningless decora- 
 tion. Chaos, the black charger of death, with its 
 riders the super-intelle6tual and the vulgarian, 
 brands the mark of its hoof upon the forehead of 
 life. Rodin points out that art without character, 
 without the inner prompting, is essentially ugly, 
 however fanciful and plausible the forms it may 
 take. But in the transformation of the inward truth 
 to the outward expression, there is literally nothing 
 ugly, nothing in the whole circumference of art and 
 Nature. When the novelist makes a "happy 
 ending" in defiance of the logic of Nature, he is de- 
 forming truth and so making ugliness. When the 
 painter reproduces Nature upon his canvas, his 
 
 185
 
 PEOPLE AND THINGS 
 
 elaborate draughtsmanship is only ugly and stupid. 
 Until that which is hidden is revealed, beauty 
 cannot "wave in its plumes the various light." The 
 light of beautiful truth cannot be obscured from 
 Baudelaire's terrible anguish: 
 
 "Et pourtant vous serez semblable a cctte ordure 
 
 A cette horrible infection, 
 Etoile de mes yeux, Soleil de ma nature, 
 
 O mon ange et ma passion ! 
 Oui, telle vous serez, O la reine des Graces 
 
 Apres les derniers Sacraments, 
 Quand vous irez sous 1'herbe et les floraisons 
 
 grasses 
 Pourrir parmi les ossements." 
 
 That surely has plumbed something of the un- 
 fathomably precious depth and murmured the 
 farthest-heaven-transfixing prayer of men to the 
 infinite. 
 
 Somehow and somewhere then people and 
 things, the arts and humanity must become man 
 and wife. Art must not only possess this conviction 
 of humanity, but must herself become more com- 
 munal in spirit. But it is futile to discuss communal 
 art at all, unless pleasure and art are inseparably 
 associated. Although art cannot be created for the 
 sake of the pleasure to be got out of it, still less can it 
 be created without the pleasure that must accom- 
 pany its creation. Pleasure and art are equally 
 sworn foes of drudgery. 
 
 186
 
 COMMUNAL ART II 
 
 How can this canon be applied to a popular art? 
 Firmly, as I indicated in previous chapters, by ex- 
 panding its range to include the work of the entire 
 community. Painting, music, literature, sculpture 
 are not the monopoly of art; cutting out a frock, 
 hoeing a potato-patch or almost anything a man or 
 woman can do, have a right to be considered 
 "artistic" and an obligation to become so. Secondly, 
 the condition of art is that all these activities, so far 
 as is compatible with our mortal shortcomings, 
 should be pleasurable and interesting in themselves. 
 Thirdly, character, idea and a sense of the mysteri- 
 ous and eternal being the inspiration of true art, 
 its aim, as a popular art, is to infuse them into 
 everything a society makes and does. Fourthly, 
 this kind of art can only be born of the practical 
 uses. and spiritual needs of the community. The 
 arts fulfilling these demands will naturally gather 
 about the house and its thousandfold stirs and needs 
 as the expression of man's normal existence. They 
 will gather about a house more, a building, more, 
 a church. Just, in fact, as the exhibition picture, the 
 "subject-picture" in the gilt frame would be super- 
 seded by the picture either painted straight upon 
 the wall-space or adapted to the architectural and 
 decorative whole of the "domestic interior," or, in 
 other words, to the daily need and pleasure of the 
 people who live in it; so all the arts are likely in the 
 end to become the passionate expression of men's 
 and women's wonder, satisfaction in and apprehen- 
 
 187
 
 PEOPLE AND THINGS 
 
 sion of the miracle of daily life, life shared and life 
 experienced. 
 
 It may be objected that this is to bring the im- 
 aginative arts down to the level of the applied arts. 
 But I am making no such comparisons of excel- 
 lence. Literature may surely be "applied" and 
 masonry imaginative. The Spirit of Beauty pos- 
 sesses hands and feet, as well as heart, eyes and 
 head. Sense is not different in kind from Spirit. If 
 we cannot see the beauty of this world we may be 
 sure we shall not see that of the other. If we neglect 
 the applied arts, we shall, in the end, lose the im- 
 aginative ones. All the arts are of one family. 
 
 A single consciousness is the goal to be achieved 
 in the end. A flock of fifty starlings, making a 
 single curve in beautiful unison, possesses that 
 consciousness in a way that a company of soldiers 
 wheeling mechanically to left or right can never 
 do. That consciousness realised, and letters, paint- 
 ing, architecture, etc., resting upon the synthetic 
 feelings of mankind, literature steps into the con- 
 fidence of Nature, and acknowledges no bounds in 
 its adventures towards the unknown. 
 
 Take Millet, the frontispiece to the yet unwritten 
 book of a future popular art. Millet painted the 
 elemental feelings and doings of the peasants, of 
 the people who navigate the mystery of life between 
 field and cottage, cottage and field. With him art 
 comes into touch with the very simplest elements 
 of human life uncomplicated work, suffering and 
 
 188
 
 COMMUNAL ART II 
 
 poverty. It would, of course, be wrong and dog- 
 matic to suggest that a peasant art is desirable in 
 itself (which was where Tolstoi went wrong) or that 
 Millet was a greater artist than Velasquez, because 
 the one painted peasants and the other kings. Art 
 is not to be thus dictated to by its subjects, nor will 
 an art, for instance, which is sick of expressing a 
 few type-ideas of the middle classes, become any 
 more communal by expressing a few type-ideas, 
 say of a trade union. What we should ask is 
 whether the art of Millet is dull because he hap- 
 pened to paint peasants? Does it not rather express 
 the workings of the living and transfigured human 
 spirit upon these simple elements and of them upon 
 the living human spirit? Into what august mys- 
 teries of being do his figures tempt the inquisitive 
 mind? What are they gleaning, sowing, reaping? 
 the experience of all knowledge and all sorrow, 
 the histories of peoples, the record of the tribula- 
 tion of the human soul. The human spirit makes 
 its majestic gesture questions in lowliness and 
 sublimity the mystery of suffering, and accepts with 
 bowed resignation the destiny of martyrdom. To 
 what chorus of thanksgiving, mingled with me- 
 morial tears, will not the literature of a redeemed 
 people, whose happiness will be the gift of this 
 martyred spirit so solemnly incarnated by Millet, 
 give voice? 
 
 A communal art, then, will lean more and more 
 to "wholesomeness," by which I mean usefulness 
 
 189 N
 
 PEOPLE AND THINGS 
 
 for and delight in the purposes of life and a sense 
 on the one hand of the concrete as the clothing of 
 the abslracl, and on the other of the universal in the 
 individual and the personal in the community. 
 These conditions are interdependent, for while 
 great art always sees the universal in the particular, 
 it does not lose sight of the particular in the uni- 
 versal. The road through to the unknown and the 
 intangible may be hard and rough, but it is quite 
 definite. Brotherhood is the release of the sub- 
 conscious, which is the universal self, essentially 
 the same in all men and each individual is a little 
 theatre of all mankind. The law of humanity is the 
 same as the law of art. Strange as it may seem, the 
 independence and individuality of each separate 
 human being are the guarantee of their communion . 
 When people are squeezed together under an arti- 
 ficial system they will fly or try to fly off at tangents. 
 But human beings, if given their best chance and 
 freed from formal and forced contracts of union 
 will fall into each other's arms. They know they 
 can fall out again if they choose.* 
 
 To apply the argument, take the relation be- 
 tween literature and common speech. There is no 
 common speech nowadays. The amenities of 
 language decline with the amenities of a free 
 
 * In marriage, for instance, the formal and irrefragable bond is an invitation 
 to break it. The more heavily penalised is adultery, the more frequent are its 
 occurrences. Jeremy Bentham said: "Render marriage soluble and you 
 increase the number of apparent separations, but diminish the number of 
 real ones." 
 
 I9O
 
 COMMUNAL ART 11 
 
 people. As the bureaucrat spreads his legions (a 
 swarm bred, so to speak, out of a decaying body) 
 and his coupons over the land, so the love of beauty 
 and right speaking, censored by Government, 
 despised by business, debauched by newspapers, 
 and beyond the grasp of labour, retires into scat- 
 tered citadels. As the public yields to the aggran- 
 disement and self-vindication of small cerebralities, 
 language the normal language that we all speak 
 has a way of becoming grandiose and preten- 
 tious; so that even children and farm-labourers 
 patter their verbal Imperialisms. The process^ of 
 separation between literature and common speech, 
 accelerated by the Industrial Revolution, has since 
 the war been granted a decree nisi. 
 
 Even in provincial dialects, the combination be- 
 tween the two survives so scantly and faintly as to be 
 moribund, and the old county glossaries and topo- 
 graphies make the saddest reading. Yet from them 
 comes the impression of the wealth, abundance 
 and vivid precision of the rustic words in use only 
 forty years ago. These words signified not a dual, 
 but a triple alliance between poetry, common 
 speech and literary tradition. The tongue that 
 Shakespeare spake was embalmed in the utterance 
 of the peasant. Nor were these words the private 
 property of the antiquary; they werealivingspeech, 
 strong in themselves, in their survival, in their 
 beauty and their fidelity to truth. Now that they 
 have nearly all retired before their towny young re- 
 
 191 NZ
 
 PEOPLE AND THINGS 
 
 lations in business, we feel as though we had 
 buried a living body. There was Beaumont and 
 there Fletcher working in the fields.* 
 
 The perfume of flowers was matched by that of 
 the rustic words which named them. A few still 
 linger in the national garden, still form part of our 
 racial anthology. But the iron claw of industri- 
 alism is down upon them; swift and bright, lithe 
 and supple though they are. "Nap-at-noon," "Old 
 Man's Beard," "Traveller's Joy" noware nothing 
 but wild clematis. "Wake-Robin," "Angle-berry," 
 "Robinhoods," "Shepherd's Dial," "Le gant de 
 Notre Dame" (fox-gloves), "Love lies a-bleeding," 
 "Three faces underahood,""Sops-in-wine" which 
 reminds me of old Bishop Andrewes's early morning 
 song : 
 
 "Come, be my valentine 
 
 I'll gather eglantine, 
 Cowslips and sops-in-wine 
 
 With fragrant roses." 
 
 So with the birds and the seasons. Isaac and Philip 
 (who comes down from old melodious Skelton) 
 are gone; Jenny and Robin will no doubt follow 
 them. The "rain-tabberer," the "yaffingale," the 
 
 * In the North Country, the moon was said to "tine," i.e., close her light. 
 Vaughan's "Cock-crowing" has: 
 
 "Their eyes watch for the morning-hue, 
 Their little grain, expelling night, 
 So shines and sings, as if it knew 
 The path unto the house of light; 
 It seems their candle, howe'er done 
 Was lined and lighted at the sun." 
 
 192
 
 COMMUNAL ART II 
 
 "oven-bird," the "flittermouse" (Ben Jonson's 
 "giddy flittermouse with leathern wings") all, all 
 are gone, the old familiar names. Lost words and 
 the birds themselves are following them! In meta- 
 phor, too, poetic and natural truths prospered up to 
 their golden wedding, and now natural truth is a 
 widow. In the cold weather of April, when the 
 blackthorn bears its own and alien snows the 
 Northern dalesman no longer speaks of "the winter 
 of the blackthorn." So, in old days, he saw not a 
 clump, but a "plume of trees," echoing all uncon- 
 sciously the delicate perceptions of Marvell : 
 
 "Upon its crest, this mountain grave 
 A plume of aged trees does wave." 
 
 How long ago, to end this sentimental elegy, was it 
 since haws were known as "pixy-pears," which, 
 according to the poet Barnes, in his Dorset glossary, 
 is scientifically accurate. Not that that matters. 
 
 The carol, too, is pretty well laid with its fathers. 
 A few perfunctory and husky youths gather outside 
 the front-door nowadays and nasalise that poor 
 thingof the Rev. Dr.Neale's "Good KingWences- 
 laus" and the spavined puppets are put back in their 
 sawdust. The "festivities "are over. "Remember, O 
 Thou Man," "I Saw Three Ships Come Sailing In," 
 "The Seven Virgins" (one of the loveliest things in 
 the language), the "Holy Well," or "I sing of a 
 maiden, That is makeless," are not sung to-day in 
 the streets, as they have been sung in England for 
 
 193
 
 PEOPLE AND THINGS 
 
 five hundred years. Carols and Nativity songs are, 
 too, a form of popular literature expressed in the 
 poets. But the carol, like the ballad, is an anony- 
 mous literature and in its clear, wistful, earthly- 
 heavenly notes one can discern what a communal 
 art, founded upon equality, may produce. The 
 wonderful thing about the more mystical carols is 
 the way they can spin "things that you may touch 
 and see" into a white samite which is the robe of 
 beauty itself. These are a few lines from "The 
 Cherry-Tree Ballad," which the withering prudish- 
 ness natural to the joyless age of Commerce has 
 banished: 
 
 "O then bespoke Mary, 
 
 So meek and so mild, 
 Pluck me one cherry, Joseph, 
 For I am with child. 
 
 "O then bespoke Joseph, 
 
 With words most unkind, 
 Let him pluck thee a cherry, 
 That brought thee with child. 
 
 "O then bespoke the babe, 
 
 Within his mother's womb, 
 Bow down then the tallest tree, 
 For my mother to have some. 
 
 "O, eat your cherries, Mary, 
 O, eat your cherries now, 
 O, eat your cherries, Mary, 
 That grow upon the bough." 
 194
 
 COMMUNAL ART II 
 
 The miracles of tact these old carols performed 
 might be called gentility, were it not something so 
 much greater and more serious. Their quality, in- 
 deed, goes beyond the uniformity of the naive. 
 Literature often reconciles characteristics which, in 
 actual life, diverge and the carols, that are so friendly 
 and so remote, so wise and so childish, so matter- 
 of-fact and often so mysterious, have drunk the 
 milk of Paradise. 
 
 If our common nature and our common hu- 
 manity are not good enough material for art, let 
 us abandon it for ever and devote ourselves to per- 
 fecting explosives that will one day rid this planet of 
 us altogether. But of course, they are good enough.* 
 All Nature is arrayed in the garment of the spirit 
 and in the light of its own spirit humanity beholds 
 it and marvels at the divine meaning of all those 
 hieroglyphs wrought into the fabric, all that sym- 
 bolic biography of God. "Those gentle craftsmen 
 of the Middle Ages," wrote Rodin, "saw infinite 
 goodness everywhere. And, with their charming 
 simplicity, they have thrown reflections of this 
 lovingkindness even on the faces of their demons, 
 to whom they have lent a kindly malice and an air 
 almost of relationship with the angels." Omnia 
 opera their praise is not in our tongue, but man 
 
 * Some judgements might objeft that it was not the business of writers, 
 painters, builders to write, paint and build down to the meanest understanding. 
 Of course not. What the artisl appeals to is the dumb inAinft towards art in 
 which all men share. His business is to give a lead to this instinft and a voice to 
 this dumbness.
 
 PEOPLE AND THINGS 
 
 sets down the broken chords of the hymn that 
 baffles and enchants him. 
 
 But a common speech is irrecoverable so long 
 as material power and Industrialism menace the 
 human spirit, and their supremacy creates such in- 
 equalities that they result in two classes which 
 literally talk different languages. Until all men are 
 free to develop their natural lives, until they are 
 educated to appreciate art in youth, and accus- 
 tomed to work in manhood according to the spirit 
 of art, literature may go seek for its instrument 
 a common speech. It is not, therefore, a foolish 
 dream to stress the artist's duty to the community 
 on the one hand and its need of him on the other. 
 He must look communally both at his art and his 
 fellow-men. He must help the people to recover 
 the eyesight that Commerce has darkened. 
 
 That adorable poet, William Barnes, whom I 
 mentioned above, is a good instance of this re- 
 conciliation between what we say and what we 
 write. He happens to be one of the most curious, 
 and, at the same time, felicitous examples of the 
 connection between poetry and common speech in 
 literature. He adapts a very rough-shod dialect, 
 not only to normal rhyme, but to a premeditated, 
 finished and elaborate technique of rhythmical 
 composition, which is invariably fastidious and 
 sometimes academic. This is not the place to go 
 into his devices and dexterities of sound and rhyme, 
 but here is a little sample : 
 
 196
 
 COMMUNAL ARt11 
 
 "And there vor me the apple tree 
 
 Do lean down low on Linden Lea." 
 The artful lingering softness of this last line is 
 achieved by employing and arranging together only 
 four consonants and four vowels. Thus did a 
 country parson marry "greasy Joan" to the courtier 
 from London.* 
 
 A common language is, indeed, a fine thing to 
 aim at. In time, and as the common consciousness 
 of our inner selves becomes more unified and more 
 articulate, so language will become more closely 
 identified with other modes of expression. It will 
 become an integral part of gesture, movement, 
 music and the dance. Perhaps some new and at 
 present unimaginable symmetry of expression, 
 fully expressing this unification of all our senses 
 may arise. When wings are tongues and tongues 
 are wings, we shall in verity be but a little lower than 
 the angels instead of the brutes! For feelings and 
 ideas, belonging to our common nature and our 
 
 * I am not, of course, suggesting that dialed is a desirable end in itself. It is 
 only that, if it is a living and expressive not (as it is) a dying speech. When peace 
 came, for instance, the common consciousness of men suddenly rose up and was 
 revealed even if only negatively, in the aspect of relief from anxiety and 
 suffering and he who could have expressed that consciousness in noble and 
 fitting language would have been a democratic poet, as Shelley was, as Blake 
 was, who did not write in dialect and may not be read by the working classes; so 
 when Shakespeare wrote: "We are such stuff as dreams are made of and our little 
 life is rounded by a sleep,' 1 he was writing democratic popular poetry. If, that is 
 to say, a common denominator of common ideas and emotions be found, the 
 highest common factor of language will find itself. For it is not our great poets 
 who are to blame because the working classes do not read them; it is not the 
 latter's fault because they do not read the poets. But for the system and the men 
 who are responsible, it were better for them they should be cast into the depths 
 of the sea. 
 
 197
 
 PEOPLE AND THLMGS 
 
 common humanity are, so belonging, universal 
 and, if universal, mystic in beauty and infinite in 
 their power of expansion. 
 
 But I must leave communal art in action to dis- 
 cuss it as a principle. Let us return, therefore, to 
 the "law of materials" argued in a previous chapter, 
 tor it bears very closely both upon communal art 
 and the artist's personality. 
 
 To begin with the poet. The schoolmaster, lead- 
 ing his young charges into the sacred grove, gener- 
 ally begins, like all well-conducted guides, by de- 
 riving the word "poet" from the Greek iroidv= 
 to make. The poet, he explains, is a maker, and 
 then leaves all the gaping young penguins to make 
 the best of it they can. It is doubtful whether any 
 derivation can be more erroneous or do more harm 
 to the precise study of poetic meaning and purpose. 
 Sometimes making is wildly identified with in- 
 spiration. Now the word inspiration (Morris 
 denied it, but then that was one of his fads) does 
 both by origin and use really convey some distinc- 
 tion of values as well as elucidating the difficult 
 poetic function. It does more it carries weight as 
 well as atmosphere, a picture as well as an idea, and 
 those who think in terms of pictures will not go 
 far wrong if they conceive their poet accompanied 
 by a kind of Socratic daemon. Inspiration brings 
 into play the proper oracular notion and keeps 
 poetry close to the chariot-wheels of Truth. 
 Poetry is true, so long as it is subsidiary ; effective so 
 
 198
 
 COMMUNAL ART 11 
 
 long as it does not act "off its own bat," real so long 
 as it is obedient to a directing impulse which the 
 romanticism of a material world treats as of no 
 practical importance in the affairs of daily life. 
 
 It is questionable whether the poet, or any other 
 kind of artist, "makes" anything at all; the thing he 
 is working upon is there ready-made. His busi- 
 ness is simply to reveal it in full consciousness to 
 other eyes and minds and hearts that cannot see or 
 apprehend or feel it ; or if they can, only do so "sub- 
 consciously." He is always hunting about for the 
 best way to get this material to speak its own idiom. 
 He does not "make" it at all. He simply strips 
 away from it all those inconvenient wrappings that 
 conceal it from the apprehension of others. Surely 
 that is the principal reason why we hail Rodin as a 
 great genius. He saw inside the block a magical 
 figure, and set to work with a chisel to clear away all 
 that imprisoning surface which kept other people 
 from seeing the figure. Do not those marvellous 
 figures blossom out of the stone and marble in 
 exactly the same way as a tree blossoms out of the 
 earth, in exactly the way as art itself blossoms out of 
 life? Rodin did not invent those radiant figures, 
 varying from the most immaterial delicacy to the 
 most strenuous physical agony of longing Rodin, 
 who asserted his faith in the universal soul as few- 
 other moderns have done and uncurtained it upon 
 the theatre of humanity, shaking its prison bars to 
 gain the land of Luthany, the region Elenore. 
 
 199
 
 PEOPLE AND THINGS 
 
 He did not invent them, he saw them and dedi- 
 cated the unresting labour of two generations to 
 releasing those figures to the world's contemplation. 
 Yet the legend persists that the artist is an egoist 
 presumably because he is the only worker who 
 really enjoys his work. 
 
 Of course, it is possible to aim "at understanding 
 the world and making it understood," at conjuring 
 this vision into life, and yet to be an egoisl in art. 
 The world itself can be pressed into the employ- 
 ment of the ego. But when the worker is intent 
 upon doing something that is worth while (the 
 capture of this vision) rather than worth Jm while, 
 the personality of the artist will take good care of 
 itself. That, I imagine, is what Leonardo means 
 when he says "good literature proceeds from men of 
 natural probity." Whatever he may incidentally 
 hope from the proceeds, the true artist is all fire 
 and concentration upon the process. He is doing 
 the work for the work's sake and not for the sake of 
 the personality involved in it. That personality, if 
 anxious to exploit itself before the gaze of society, 
 will, perhaps, find itself reflecting the official per- 
 sonality of society. It will act up to what is expected 
 of it, and will be cut to pattern, like Dora Forbes in 
 Henry James's "Death of the Lion." 
 
 To assume, for instance, that an author possessed 
 by the desire to give body, limbs, a voice to the in- 
 choate material wherein is hidden a spiritual truth 
 in other words, by the literary passion is at 
 200
 
 COMMUNAL ART 11 
 
 pains only to cut a figure before the world, is to 
 confuse cause with effect. If he reverses the posi- 
 tion and make his art the tool of his personality, he 
 is creating ugliness. 
 
 For the first principle of art is disinterestedness. 
 Fame, pride, pleasure, a market and an audience 
 are all healthy stimulants to the genuine artist, but 
 to make them the parents rather than the brethren 
 of his task is a very narrow reading of the artistic im- 
 petus. The artist does not "out-top knowledge" 
 and stand "self-school'd, self-scann'd, self-hon- 
 oured, self-secure"; so far is he from the megalo- 
 mania of the infinite-in-capacity school that he is 
 nothing more than a patient or uneasy instrument 
 of that secret purpose our forefathers used to call 
 God. He is the JEolian harp played upon by the 
 "queer, unpleasant, disturbing touch of the king- 
 dom of heaven." So far from being the Sybil, he is 
 only the Sybil's secretary, and in so far as he serves 
 that purpose to the best of his faith and wits, he is a 
 disinterested agent. It may be said that Montaigne, 
 who so delightedly explored the New Found Land 
 of himself, was thereby an artist of deformity. Not 
 at all, because he himself was the material, the idea. 
 He did not exploit his personality, but expressed it. 
 His real was to his detached self what Rodin's 
 figures were to Rodin. He unselfishly devoted him- 
 self to colonising and civilising this enchanting 
 country of curious feelings and temperament for 
 the habitation of the whole world. His ego to him 
 
 201
 
 PEOPLE AND THINGS 
 
 was part of that mysterious idea which dwells 
 within the bosom of Nature. 
 
 If, indeed, some example is wanted of what this 
 literary passion means take the supreme one, 
 Henry James. Those noble and profound master- 
 pieces ("The Death of the Lion," "The Next Time," 
 and the others) deal with it as no one else has ever 
 dealt. These stories are literally unique, for their 
 intuition into that passion is something not un- 
 canny but divine. He invests the idea of the 
 artist with a splendour that only his incomparable 
 art could give it. James expressed psychological re- 
 lations more intimate, more imponderable to the 
 average scale, than have ever been expressed 
 before; he was a genius, whose ample and at the 
 same time delicate style was the fit, the only fit in- 
 strument of a thought stretching to capture the 
 workings of human emotions hovering out of the 
 reach of all but the supreme inspiration, the finest 
 of shades, the most rarefied of impressions. He is to 
 be called the greatest of latter-day artists, because 
 he made entirely fresh pilgrimages into and en- 
 tirely fresh discoveries of the intricate human 
 mechanism; James, whose tremendous respect for 
 the human being made him godlike, but not 
 Olympian. For assuredly he dwelt among men. 
 He (who is to man what W. H. Hudson is to 
 Nature) first made clear to me the generous devo- 
 tion of the artist to the cause of art, his fellow- 
 men and the holiness of life. 
 
 202
 
 COMMUNAL ART II 
 
 For the business of the artist is to translate the 
 mystery of the visible universe and through that 
 of the invisible to the hearts of men. His technique 
 is only of service to him so long as it is the instru- 
 ment which enables him to make the infinite com- 
 plexity of that vision as relevant, as expressive, as 
 clear as may be.* Leonardo writes: "The soul 
 can never be infected by the corruption of the body, 
 but acts in the body like the wind which causes the 
 sound of the organ, wherein if one of the pipes is 
 spoiled, the wind cannot produce a good result in 
 that pipe." Is this to depreciate the virtues of pains, 
 composition, and style? On the contrary, it is to 
 accentuate them, since the vision will emerge im- 
 perfect without them and the eye that sees it, squint. 
 "Prepare ye the way of the Lord ! Make His paths 
 straight!" is a little volume on what the Americans 
 call "technics." 
 
 Donne is a good example. Arthur Symons, in his 
 essay on him, declares that he preferred truth to 
 beauty and wrote many of his poems before the 
 personal had had time to fuse with the poetic in- 
 spiration. Donne, he says, was intent on the passion 
 itself, without waiting for the crystallisation of 
 form and tranquillity. Donne, he means, in fact, 
 does not embody and translate his passion; he feels 
 it emotionally and observes it intellectually. One 
 has only to think what fatal influence Donne's 
 
 * To make the vision perfectly apparent is, indeed, impossible, since it is of 
 heaven, and heaven looks in through the dim skylight of our mortality. It will 
 not for that the less provoke our wonder and desire. 
 
 203
 
 PEOPLE .4ND THINGS 
 
 methods had in prompting certain extravagances 
 in English poetry to recognise a good deal of subtle 
 truth in this. But it is not the whole truth. Donne's 
 finest: poetry but rarely possessed felicity in form, 
 but it had a wonderful Form that united the other- 
 wise distracted parts of his complex psychology. 
 "The Apparition" is, for instance, rough, crabbed, 
 and abrupt, in externals; but at the end of it tran- 
 quillity filters through its ferocity as though, even 
 in so wide and fierce a circuit of the emotions, the 
 wheel had come full circle and there was nothing 
 more to be said. Donne's form does, at its best, 
 contain and rivet the tremendous adventures of his 
 soul and mind. There is no misfire about it 
 nothing random or wasted. Let the emotion come 
 through undamaged and there is nothing wrong 
 with the technique. The substance has found its 
 manhood. It is when the spirit and truth of things 
 are lost in machinery, the principal in the accessory, 
 the end in the means, that technique will bear the 
 arbitrary relations to the material of conception 
 that the modern State does to mankind. 
 
 We come back, then, to the materials, to the law 
 of the identity of form and substance which governs 
 art. The artist, who recognises a calling so lofty as 
 this, cannot neglect the great human substance. 
 It is of no consequence what his subject-matter 
 may be. He is there to release the creative spirit, and 
 that spirit finds its highest ambition in the release 
 of the capacity of men to its free, appropriate and 
 
 204
 
 COMMUNAL ART it 
 
 enjoyable exercise. Thus does conviction become 
 identified with the artistic function. 
 
 But this attention to the materials bears in yet 
 another direction upon communal art. The crea- 
 tive spirit of man is at present perverted into false 
 romantics. All the dreary sexuality (sex is the only 
 thing left to romanticise in our intolerably prosaic 
 world), the sentimentalism and raucous vulgarity 
 in so many places are man's safety-valve for articu- 
 lating his starved feelings. The true value and ro- 
 mance of life a new way of looking at life will 
 come to us, not only through the release of the crea- 
 tive spirit, but actually by the process of releasing it 
 and the attention concentrated upon it. Let us, 
 then, follow up the meaning of this word "process," 
 for it carries with it the exaltation of common 
 life from the bottom upwards. 
 
 The central principle of the Commercial State 
 (as I suggested in Chapter IV) is that we should do 
 things for the sake of getting something out of 
 them. An average business man does a thing, that is 
 to say, for the sake of something else, and judges it 
 by the profitable or unprofitable realisation of that 
 something else. The condition of the world to-day 
 shows what terrible consequences this practice has 
 had upon politics, education, trade and ethics. 
 The artist retaliates, as it were, by doing his work 
 for its own sake and thus, by fulfilling a simple 
 canon both of morals and aesthetics, undermines 
 the business principle, not stirring an inch mean- 
 
 205 1 o
 
 PEOPLE AND THINGS 
 
 while from the nature and character of his own 
 function. At the same time, work for its own sake is 
 work for his sake, and for the sake of his fellows. It 
 is necessary to stress and even repeat unto the third 
 and the fourth paraphrase the moral value of doing 
 the work of the universe without counting the cost. 
 The more, that is to say, the heart and mind are 
 bent upon the object, the greater spiritual growth 
 and artistic grasp will become; and in this double 
 expansion lies the vindication as well as the reward 
 of devotion. To quote Glutton Brock (whose clair- 
 voyance into the nature of the spirit is so beauti- 
 fully reflected in his work) once more: "Our 
 joy ... is in discovering that which can be valued 
 for its own sake, and in recognising that it is to be 
 valued for its own sake, that it is good in itself." 
 When Coleridge asked Clarkson, the Abolitionist, 
 whether he ever thought of his probable fate in the 
 next world, he gave this noble reply : "How can I? 
 I think only of the slaves in Barbadoes." 
 
 From this point of view the Bible is a gold- 
 field of aesthetic precept. "Take no thought for the 
 morrow"; "Cast your bread upon the waters." 
 Then there is Whitman's "The gift is to the giver 
 and comes back most to him," and Francis Thomp- 
 son's: 
 
 "Plough thou the rock until it bear; 
 
 Know, for thou else could'st not believe; 
 
 Lose, that the lost thou may'st receive; 
 
 Die, for none other way can'st live." 
 206
 
 COMMUNAL ART II 
 
 In St. Francis de Sales's "A Treatise of the Love 
 of God" occurs this deleclable little passage: "So 
 Nightingales, according to Plinie, take such com- 
 placence in their songes, that by reason of this com- 
 placence, for five dayes and five nightes long they 
 never leave warbling, forcing themselves to sing 
 better, in despight one of the other; so that when 
 they chirpe the best, they take a greater compla- 
 cence, and it is increase of complacence carrieth 
 them to force themselves to a better quavering, 
 augmenting in such sort their complacence by 
 their songe and their songe by their complacence, 
 that often they are scene to fall downe dead split- 
 ting their weesells with the violence of singing. 
 Birdes worthy the fair name of Philomele, sith 
 they die in this sorte, of and for the love of melodic." 
 Where the godship is Mammon's, nothing is done 
 for its own sake. 
 
 But we can carry and develop this philosophy of 
 opposites much further than this. Professor L. P. 
 Jacks has an essay which sums the whole thing up 
 extraordinarily well. The economic, he says, has 
 outstripped the moral development of man and the 
 nations were morally unprepared for their material 
 prosperity. They cannot prevent all this money 
 from being a curse and can do nothing better than 
 quarrel over it at home and abroad. In the present 
 condition of international morality, this wealth 
 provokes wars. War is the necessary sequel to an 
 atmosphere of hatred, suspicion and ambition. For 
 
 207 02
 
 PEOPLE AND THINGS 
 
 wealth (here comes the significance of the whole 
 argument) when produced is the cause of War. 
 Militarism will always feed on the fruits of industry. 
 The quantitative standard of accumulation, the 
 distinction between the process and the fruits of 
 wealth have plunged us all into this unspeakable 
 misery. This distinction seems to me of para- 
 mount importance. It not only indicates the cause 
 of the decline of European civilisation, but points 
 to a spiritual revolution. The abolition not of the 
 House of Commons (desirable as it may or may 
 not be), but of the ulterior motive should be the re- 
 former's programme of "reconstruction." The 
 meaning of life is in the process, not the proceeds, 
 in concentration upon identifying substance with 
 Form. In this light, how profoundly revealing are 
 Blake's words : 
 
 "He who bends to himself a joy 
 Doth the winged life destroy; 
 But he who kisses the joy as it flies, 
 Lives in eternity's sunrise." 
 
 Let the men who seek a better order inscribe that 
 on their banners ! For its contrary is, indeed, the 
 cause of the war. The ulterior motive seems to 
 gather about it a sinister alliance of the forces of 
 darkness. In Germany, as one might say, the 
 patriot, the fighter and the trader were of rapacity 
 all compact.* 
 
 * In Edmond Holmes's "Nemesis of Docility," one reads that "the industries 
 of the country are dominated by some three hundred men, about a score of 
 
 208
 
 COMMUNAL ART II 
 
 But the difference between Germany and the 
 other great nations is a difference only in the greater 
 power of resistance of the human soul. Nor shall we 
 ever develop the art of the spirit by beating Ger- 
 many in the field and losing to her in the soul. 
 That soul is both corrupt and impotent so long as 
 property is the origin, property the means and pro- 
 perty the end of modern European States. The 
 desire of gaining this property and the fear of losing 
 it become the simple appetites upon which much of 
 the complex structure of civilisation is built. It is in- 
 evitable that the richest nations in the history of the 
 world should have plunged into its most destructive 
 war; it is an ironic fatality that a gigantic evil of 
 consumption should devour an equally gigantic 
 evil of production, and that the principle of waste in 
 peace should be matched by the principle of waste 
 in war. Never will these tortured countries find 
 peace either at home or abroad, until it is no longer 
 respectable to cultivate the acquisitive instinct, 
 until men turn their minds away from the art 
 of making the riches of money, to use Morris's 
 phrase, to that of making the wealth of life, from 
 what is unworthily made to that which is worthy 
 in the making. 
 
 Such making is in itself a promise and guarantee 
 
 whom form an inner oligarchy which, linked with the German money trust, 
 connected with the Government and, in many cases, in close personal touch 
 with the Kaiser, control all the industrial resources of the Empire." And which, 
 in fact, direct all the political destinies and support all the militarism, to protect 
 whose wealth is its prime cause of activity. 
 
 2O9
 
 PEOPLE AND THINGS 
 
 of fraternity. Men who are doing work for the sake 
 of the work and not for the irrelevant prize of 
 making more money out of it than their partners, 
 who are doing work they know to be useful to 
 others and feel to be a pleasure to themselves, who 
 are working towards the same social results through 
 an infinite variety of materials and by the exercise 
 of an infinitely varied individual skill and choice, 
 who are, in short, doing artislic work these men 
 have a bond in common compared with which all 
 other kinds of association are brittle. Commerce, 
 in facl, makes men enemies and all alike; art makes 
 men different but friends. 
 
 210
 
 IN this work he claimed for mankind that right to the 
 absolute moral and intellectual liberty of which he no 
 longer believed it worthy. Joseph Conrad 
 
 HE accord of one thing with another is beautiful. 
 
 Dfirer 
 
 T 
 
 AND the men of labour spent their strength in daily 
 struggling for breath to maintain the vital strength 
 they laboured with ; so living in a dailycirculation of sorrow, 
 living but to work, and working but to live, as if daily bread 
 were the only end of a wearisome life, and a wearisome life 
 the only occasion of daily bread. Daniel Defoe 
 
 SIR, I believe that art has such sympathy with cheerful 
 freedom, open-heartedness and reality, so much she 
 sickens under selfishness and luxury, that she will not live 
 thus isolated and exclusive. I will go further than this and 
 say that I do not wish her to live. William Morris 
 
 ART is the most sublime mission, since it is the expres- 
 sion of thought seeking to understand the world and 
 to make it understood. Rodm 
 
 BENEATH the economic chaos which exists on the 
 surface, there may be a network of human affinities 
 which provides the ground of a stable, peaceable and endur- 
 ing social order. L, P. Jacks 
 
 HERE is nothing in this world so silly as quarrelling. 
 
 T 
 
 OTHOU Who art infinitely delightful to the sons of 
 men, make me and the sons of men infinitely delightful 
 unto Thee. Replenish our actions with amiableness and 
 beauty; that as Thou in all Thy works art pleasing to us, we 
 in all our works may be so to Thee. Thomas Traherne 
 
 211
 
 WHAT thunders shall those men arraign 
 Who cannot count those they have slain, 
 Who bath not in a shallow flood, 
 But in a deep wide sea of blood? 
 A sea, whose loud waves cannot sleep, 
 But deep still calleth upon deep: 
 Whose urgent sound like unto that 
 Of many waters, beateth at 
 The everlasting doors above, 
 Where souls behind the altar move, 
 And with one strong, incessant cry 
 Inquire How long? of the most High. 
 
 Henry Vaughan 
 
 O ROSE, thou art sick! 
 The invisible worm 
 That flies in the night, 
 
 In the howling storm, 
 Has found out thy bed 
 
 Of crimson joy, 
 And his dark, secret love 
 
 Doth thy life destroy. Blake 
 
 WHEN gold and gems adorn the plough, 
 To peaceful arts shall envy bow. Ibid 
 
 212
 
 XII. 
 
 COMMUNAL ART III, 
 
 GOOD WORK AND A COMMON 
 UNDERSTANDING 
 
 ONVICTION, then, intelligent work 
 ifor all, a communal art, a common 
 speech and the law of the process are 
 f all means to expressing the true life of 
 _ men. There is only one purpose in art, 
 writes Charles Marriott, "to discover the Creator 
 in the creature by revealing its true Form." The 
 art of man is the expression of the human material, 
 the perception and revelation of the god in him. 
 With profound insight did Christ call himself the 
 Son of Man. 
 
 There remains the problem of relating these 
 single elements to one another by a formula that 
 will cover them all; of seeing whether that formula 
 includes both art and humanity; whether the re- 
 covery of a common understanding between the 
 arts and men is not the best means of finding the 
 formula for a new society, and lastly, whether by 
 good work and a common understanding art does 
 not fulfil humanity and humanity art. 
 
 The remarks made about Rodin's statues soaring 
 out of the block touch this problem. The stone or 
 marble, touched by the wand of the imaginative 
 
 213
 
 PEOPLE AND THINGS 
 
 spirit which understands its substance, magically 
 gives forth its characteristic Form. As a mountain 
 rises from the earth, as a true community from the 
 human spirit, so expression out of material. When 
 F. W. Robertson says in one of his Sermons: 
 "What we want is more life and fuller. To escape 
 from the monotony of mere routine and habits, to 
 feel that we are alive, with more of surprise and 
 wakefulness in our existence. To have less of the 
 gelid, torpid, tortoise-like existence. To feel the 
 years before us" he is calling for the divine and 
 human expression out of the divine and human 
 material. 
 
 Indeed, in that fine gesture, one gets perhaps 
 nearer to understanding not only the identity of 
 substance and Form, but of God with Form. For 
 this "surprise and wakefulness" mean the intensi- 
 fication of life to such an extent that life's destruc- 
 tion by death both seems and is a violation of the 
 eternal law of life. When our life upon earth is en- 
 gaged in the loving process of identifying sub- 
 slance with Form, death itself is but a passport of 
 adventure into the undiscovered land. Death dis- 
 integrates life; the idea of death unites it. A score of 
 birds in the hand are not, after all, worth one in the 
 bush. 
 
 We should be trying, then, to find the right 
 kind of 'formula of evocation, to decipher the magic 
 words. It is very difficult, or life would not beworth 
 living. But Nature has found it. "Although human 
 
 214
 
 COMMUNAL ART III 
 
 subtlety makes a variety of inventions answering by 
 different means to the same end, it will never devise 
 an invention more beautiful, more simple or more 
 direct than does Nature, because in her inventions 
 nothing is lacking and nothing superfluous." The 
 smallest blade of grass in the meadows has uttered 
 the formula and achieved the identity. In the uni- 
 versal language of praise and love, its little syllable 
 is uttered. It has expressed the material, found the 
 line of least resistance, and been true to the nature 
 of things.* Itis not pretending to be a buttercup or a 
 beetle. It is asserting the triumph of individuality 
 and is a lesson on the surrender of man's soul to the 
 cult of mechanism, not to be forgotten. 
 
 Now, a reconciliation of people and things will 
 give us back our self-knowledge and set us again 
 to the glad work of translating them both into the 
 appropriate truth of their being. Here is where the 
 combination of the two comes in. In the business 
 of translation, the one is a kind of dictionary to the 
 other. On the face of it, parallel lines do not meet, 
 and the process of art cannot, therefore, blend with 
 the process of humanity. But the substance of 
 humanity cannot be translated into its expression, 
 except by the process of art. I mean that a person who 
 has, perhaps, never so much as heard of the word 
 "art" will yet, if he develop a full consciousness, be 
 acting artistically. The formula of union between 
 substance and Form has been uttered. But when 
 
 * Had it failed, it would, as Darwin has shown, have perished. 
 215
 
 PEOPLE AND THINGS 
 
 the process of humanity corresponds so perfectly to 
 the process of art, it is self-evident that they cannot 
 keep apart, except at the risk of disturbing the 
 process. A healthy people will naturally turn to 
 things, because, through them, they will the more 
 perfectly know that they are men. It is, indeed, un- 
 thinkable that a genuine community could do 
 without art. It would be essentially a work of art 
 without knowing it without making the works of 
 art. The very fact that the community took pleasure 
 in what it was doing is practically a guarantee of 
 art. If it did not take that pleasure, it would in all 
 probability be doing things that were weary, stale, 
 flat, and unprofitable. "I call useful all that gives us 
 happiness" it sounds like Morns, but it happens 
 to be Rodin. We cannot escape the conclusion 
 that without this incomparable blessing mankind is 
 a cipher. Do not the people, then, need the artist, 
 whose presence and aid will discover to them the 
 means of creating their lives as works of art? While 
 for him to work sincerely and conscientiously at 
 art itself is a means to making an art of life. 
 
 Therefore, the most perfect art is ultimately co- 
 operative, rising out of the common understanding, 
 no longer like a single tree or flower, but like a land- 
 scape. In the transitional period, however, the 
 artist has to feel his way down to that common un- 
 derstanding which is the material of a common 
 language, which again is the substance of brother- 
 hood. There is no question about its existing, be- 
 
 216
 
 COMMUNAL ART: in 
 
 cause the consciousness of life is a common one. 
 Emotions are the same in all nations. The formulas 
 vary, that is all. The materials are there, waiting to 
 be called to expression and the imprisoning sur- 
 faces to be cleared away. Somehow the artist has to 
 get his meaning through, to find the formula, to 
 utter the incantation, to release the figure from the 
 block, the heart of man from its mechanical en- 
 casement. That is what Charles Marriott means 
 when he says : "Art is mainly a matter of finding 
 the right formula."* 
 
 Most people feel but cannot see, wonder but 
 cannot understand, and the man who sees and un- 
 derstands through feeling is the need of our genera- 
 tion. Not the "I believe, therefore I feel" of the 
 creeds, but "I feel, therefore I believe" should be 
 his "Pilgrim's Scrip." As the interpreter into terms 
 of the divine of such human and natural elements as 
 still linger in our distraught being, he has, through 
 human feeling and desire, to find a common basis 
 of understanding, and to bring home his message 
 to all his kind. 
 
 Nor is it really a paradox that the very indivi- 
 duality of art is a means to this social end. We are 
 obviously not social beings to-day ; on the contrary, 
 we are uncommonly like herrings in a barrel, both 
 less social and less individual in that situation than 
 if we were swimming free, under Nature's guid- 
 
 * All this by no means implies, a grey fluid cosmopolitan culture: but 
 rather an intensely individual, though not exclusive, native art. 
 
 217
 
 PEOPLE AND THINGS 
 
 ance only. Hardly ever, in all hi&ory, has the sup- 
 pression of the individual coincided so signifi- 
 cantly with the self-assertion of an anarchic society. 
 Human choice languishes and human compliance 
 is organised under all the different forms of lifeless 
 mechanism. It was well said that eternal vigilance 
 is the price of liberty. All this mechanism of power 
 and wealth is' only a<5live at the expense of and 
 through the negation of the individual human 
 spirit, by means of a kind of treason to the human 
 materials. If, therefore, art can appeal to the heart 
 of the individual, it is really on its way to the com- 
 mon language of the heart. By seeking a true ex- 
 pression of the individual heart theartisliinevitably, 
 in serving his art, serves all humanity. 
 
 It follows that that art should be traditional. 
 Sainte-Beuve (to return to literature) wrote of 
 Moliere : "Moliere, le plus createur et le plus in- 
 ventif des genies esl celui peutetre qui a le plus 
 imite et de partout." We should translate "imite" 
 absorbed. True literature, that is to say, is never 
 parthenogenic, and even Bunyan had the Bible as 
 a model. Especially will models be indispensable to 
 an art and letters "turning over a new leaf." That 
 the leaf is part of the book is a commonplace of 
 literary history. "The bees do heere and there 
 suck this and cull that flower," wrote Montaigne, 
 "but afterwards they produce the honey, which is 
 peculiarly their own, then is it no more Thyme or 
 Marjoram." 
 
 218
 
 COMMUNAL ART 111 
 
 I need not labour this essential point, because it is 
 implied in nearly every argument already used. 
 Tradition is not (as the literary arrivifte declares) an 
 iron chain tethering the free spirit of art to the past. 
 The artist who obeys a traditional impulse may be 
 the reverse of academic. The proof of artistic tra- 
 dition's vitality lies in its survival. The kings, the 
 statesmen, the soldiers of the ages disappear, but 
 the art of the ages remains. 
 
 But I refer to tradition here because it is one of 
 the artist's allies in the attempt to work his way 
 through to the common understanding, to recover 
 a common language and so to become the voice of 
 his kind. The idea of man is clearly apprehended 
 by all nations and all periods, however different 
 their manners and languages. Tradition, speaking 
 for the latter, affirms that idea; internationalism 
 speaking for the former, acknowledges it. Modern 
 art expresses that idea; the man who scratched a 
 reindeer on a mammoth-bone with a flint expressed 
 it; the object of art, politics and religion is to ex- 
 press it. Man, God and Nature, three in one and 
 one in three their idea is the riddle and answer of 
 the universe, so far at any rate as the furthest 
 imagination can apprehend it. Deprived of the 
 idea of them, the world is inconceivable chaos, a 
 black formless hole with neither sides nor bottom. 
 The religious artist, therefore, intent upon ex- 
 pressing the idea of man, at once floats out into the 
 current of tradition. His language, if true to the 
 
 219
 
 PEOPLE AND THINGS 
 
 material, formulates itself traditionally. He is ex- 
 pressing an idea, although, perhaps, unconsciously, 
 that the languages of the world have shaped them- 
 selves in expressing. The vast ocean of eternal 
 thought flows through him, exhilarating him with 
 its brine, governing him by its solemn rhythm, and 
 his originality consists in adapting it to the measure 
 of his own artistic need and choice. If feeling him- 
 self in danger of being swept away by it he take 
 refuge in the sluggish, discoloured river of the 
 present, the blame is his, not tradition's. Art is 
 "instinct working upon an unbroken chain of 
 tradition,"* and the major difficulty of our period is 
 to re-awaken the perception of beauty in people 
 who have no longer the natural eye of tradition 
 to perceive it with. Folk-art is dead now, killed, 
 with the tradition of it, by Commerce. It was once 
 alive. 
 
 I conclude, then, that to restore pleasure and in- 
 telligence to the common round, the daily task, and 
 to leave the human being alone to express his life 
 through the pipes of his normal work would be the 
 opening of a transformation-scene upon the human 
 theatre, the like of which has never been recorded in 
 history. 
 
 Work and leisure are the natural day and night of 
 man's existence. But it is usual to throw the weight 
 
 * It is a wonderful fa& that young birds, quite unacquainted with the route, 
 are often the first to migrate. In spite of the vast distances they traverse, they all 
 fly (except for stragglers) in the line of the older birds. Their guide, therefore, 
 is inherited memory or unconscious tradition. 
 
 22O
 
 COMMUNAL ART 111 
 
 of argument upon the leisure rather than the work 
 of the workers leisure for the cultivation of 
 neglected faculties, and as a check upon the special- 
 isation of industry, leisure for health, for art, etc. 
 But leisure and work are too closely related to 
 present two separate problems. Mean work means 
 thriftless leisure, profitable idleness means fruitful 
 work. "What other blessings are there in life," 
 wrote Morris, "save these two, fearless rest and 
 hopeful work? ... To have space and freedom to 
 gain such resl; and such work'is the end of politics; 
 to learn how best to gain it is the end of education; 
 to learn its inmost meaning is the end of religion." 
 A system under which men and women toil for long 
 hours at high speed under arbitrary conditions, 
 without initiative or interest, makes leisure as dull 
 as work and work as impotent as leisure. 
 
 Their recreations will be as savage as their work 
 is brutalising. Thus a shorter work-day is a mere 
 preliminary blank leaf to the book of spiritual 
 economy. Settle how to make work useful and 
 creative and the use of leisure will settle itself. That 
 is the object of a co-operative art. Until people see 
 that art is "the serious business of life," we shall get 
 nowhere. How are we to get leisure? What are we 
 to do with our work? It is not the joy of work 
 (as the parsons say) that we want, but the work 
 of joy. 
 
 To make a thing for use inevitably implies inter- 
 est and pleasure, and they again indispensably are 
 
 221 p
 
 PEOPLE AND THINGS 
 
 a prelude to art.* For instance, the real incentive 
 to getting in the hay is that the hay has to be got in. 
 It is not actually good sport, but uncommonly 
 fatiguing work; yet work worth doing and so of 
 interest. But to make hay because Master Giles, 
 the farmer, will, at the end of the day, pay you an 
 inadequate wage for it, is neither interesting nor 
 pleasurable. Nor would it be, were the wage ade- 
 quate, or even munificent; to work for profit in- 
 stead of for use is to lose the spiritual value of in- 
 dividual choice, skill, pride and stimulus, as well 
 as the support of the communal effort. Even if the 
 communal effort spent itself merely in satisfying 
 the bare human necessities and was untouched by 
 the creative spirit, nine-tenths of modern civilisa- 
 tion would fall away. The difficult thing to decide 
 would be not what would disappear, but what 
 would remain. The proud labours of a century of 
 commerce result in supplying a few people with a 
 vast number of things which no rational human 
 being can need and denying to most people those 
 few essentials by which life is rendered not, indeed, 
 joyful and experimental, but barely tolerable. Side 
 by side with a commonwealth that produces for its 
 members "to each according to his need," that loves 
 the process for its own sake and glorifies the pro- 
 duct as a fulfilment of the will of God in the creation 
 
 * In Arts and Crafts Exhibitions, it is interesting to note that things made for 
 ornament are very frequently vile; for use generally good. 
 
 222
 
 COMMUNAL ART 111 
 
 of beauty how paltry, transient and gloomy 
 appears European civilisation.* 
 
 Mankind (it may be to-night, to-morrow, or the 
 day after, when our children's grandchildren 
 possess the earth) will at last withdraw his spell- 
 bound eyes from his graven images, will at last 
 recoil in horror and ridicule from the sudden con- 
 sciousness of what he has done and look from within 
 upon the fairness of the world and with Art and 
 Nature for h's builders, lay the first stones of 
 Thelema. The men of State, War and Money, say 
 the one; the artist, the thinker, the lover, all the 
 ambassadors of humanity, whoever they be, say the 
 other. Which shall it be? 
 
 "O cease! must hate and death return? 
 
 Cease ! must men kill and die? 
 Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn 
 
 Of bitter prophecy; 
 The world is weary of the past 
 O might it die or rest at last!" 
 
 * It may be objected that I ignore the fact that there will always be tedious 
 and distasteful jobs in the world. I would remind such objectors that our com- 
 mercial system holds and enforces the theory that work is trifling unless it be 
 tedious and distasteful. If a madhouse community and a prostituted science can 
 arrange to make its members and victims bear the intolerable existence which 
 their follies have brought upon them, surely a sensible community is not going 
 to run on the rocks by making necessarily tedious work dishonourable. The 
 common necessities of men ought to be able to settle the residue of the problem 
 left unsolved by machinery. Remember the gorgeous dustman in "News from 
 Nowhere." 
 
 THE END 
 
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