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