They may be drawn, by irresistible forces, to take after some giddy and
disreputable old grandfather or grandmother instead of after him; for
in his veins run the parental weaknesses of thousands of generations;
and over the racial strain that passes through him to others he
possesses no control whatever. But the man who has given ornament to
life in any form of art--though he commits it to the risks and chances
of life, the destructive accidents of peace and war--is in danger
of no atavistic trick being played upon the product of his soul; he
is assured of his effect, and so long as it endures it reflects and
represents his personality more faithfully than the descendants of his
blood.

Now for the satisfaction of that instinct, the perpetuation of name
and identity is not necessary. The artist would not (if told that his
self-realisation was destined to become merged anonymously in the
existence of fresco, or canvas, or mosaic)--he would not therefore lay
down his mallet or his brush, and say that in that case the survival
of these things to a future age was no survival for him. The maker of
beautiful inlay would not lose all wish to do inlay if the knowledge
that he, individually, as the craftsman were destined to oblivion.
Let the future involve him in anonymity as impenetrable as it liked,
he would still go on expressing himself in ornament; self-realisation
would still be the law of his being.

That is the psychology of the artist mind--of that part of humanity
which produces things that come nearest, of all which earth has to
show, to conditions of immortality, and so presumably are the most
satisfying to man’s wish for continued individual existence. The makers
of beauty do not set any great store on the continuance of their
names--the continuance of their self-realisation is what they care
about.

But the possessors of these works of beauty do very often make a great
point of having their own names perpetuated, even though the vehicle is
another personality than their own. And so very frequently we have the
names passed down to us of these parasites of immortality--the tyrants
for whom palaces, or arches, or temples were built--but not the names
of the artists who designed them, whose immortality they really are.
And though the official guide may refresh our memory with snippets
of history, and say this, that, or the other about the name to which
the temple remains attached--the really important thing that lives,
survives, and influences us is not the externally applied name, but the
invested beauty which has no name, but is soul incarnate in stone to
the glory of God--the self-realisation of a being who (but for that)
has passed utterly from remembrance.

That, as I have said before, is the nearest thing to immortality that
we know. And it comes to us, in a shape which, (so to be informed with
immortality) cannot limit itself to the demands of use. When all the
claims of use are satisfied, then the life of personality begins to
show--the fullest and the most permanent form of self-realisation known
to man on earth lies in ornament.

Of course, when I say “ornament,” I use the word in a very wide sense.
What I have said of sculpture, painting or architecture, applies
equally to poetry, music or philosophy. I would even go further, and
apply it in other directions where no material matrix for it exists.
Every department of mental activity has its ornament--the culminating
expression of that particular direction of the human will. Faith is
the ornament of destiny, Hope the ornament of knowledge, Love the
ornament of sex. Without these ornaments destiny and knowledge and sex
would have no beauty that the soul of man should desire them. Those
additions or glosses were quite unnecessary to existence--up to a
point; for millions of years the world did without them, and Evolution
managed to scramble along without faith, without hope, without love.
But Evolution itself brought them into being; and then for millions of
years they existed in germ, without self-consciousness; but steadily,
as they germinated, they produced beauty and a sense of design in
their environment. Co-ordination, dovetailing (peaceful word!), the
harmonising and gentle effect of one life upon another, as opposed to
the savage and predatory, began to have effect. And in response came
ornament; faith, hope and love showed their rudimentary beginnings even
in the lower animals.

One of the most perfectly decorative objects that I have ever seen in
the animal world (you will find it in still-life form in our Natural
History Museum) is the device by which a certain small possum has
taught her young to accompany her from branch to branch. Along her back
she seats her litter, then over their heads like the conducting-wire
of a tram-line she extends her tail--and then (each like an electric
connecting rod) up go the little tails, make a loop, adjust themselves
to the maternal guide-rope, and hang on. And there, safe from upset, is
the family-omnibus ready to start!

Of course, you may say that is use; but it is use in which the
spiritualities, faith, hope and love, begin to appear; and in the
gentleness of its intention it forms a basis for the up-growth
of beauty. Now all the arts are, in the same way, first of all
structural--having for their starting-point a sound and economic use of
the material on which they are based. Music, architecture, poetry, and
the rest were all, to begin with, the result of an instinctive choice
or selection, directed to the elimination of superfluities, accidents,
excrescences--which to the craftsman’s purpose are nothing.

Nature, in her seed-sowing, has gone to work to propagate by profusion;
her method is to sow a million seeds so as to make sure that some may
live; thus she meets and out-matches the chances that are against her.
The seed of Art sprang up differently; maker-man took hold of the one
selected seed, not of a dozen, or of a thousand dozen promiscuously,
and bent his faculties on making that one seed (his chosen material)
fit to face life and its chances: if a house--walls and roof
calculated to keep out the rain and resist the force of storms: if a
textile--fabric of a staple sufficient to resist the wear and tear to
which it would be subjected: if a putting together of words meant to
outlast the brief occasion of their utterance--then in a form likely
to be impressive, and therefore memorable; so that in an age before
writing was known they might find a safe tabernacle, travelling from
place to place in the minds of men. And similarly with music--a system
of sounds so ruled by structural law as to be capable of transmission
either by instrument, or by voice disciplined and trained to a certain
code of limitations. And being thus made memorable and passed from
mouth to mouth, from one place to another, and from age to age, they
acquired a social significance and importance; till, seeing them thus
lifted above chance, man set himself to give them new forms of beauty
and adornment.

And the governing motive was, and always has been, first man’s wish to
leave memorable records--beyond the limits of his own generation--of
what life has meant for him; and secondly (and this is the more
intimate phase) the delight of the craftsman in his work, the
exuberance of vital energy (secure of its structural ground-work)
breaking out into play. “See,” it says, “how I dance, and gambol, and
triumph! This superfluity of strength proves me a victor in my struggle
to live.”

Nothing else does; for if (having survived the struggle) man only lives
miserably--scrapes through as it were--the question in the face of so
poverty-stricken a result, may still be--“Was the struggle worth it?”
And so by his arts and graces, by his adornment of his streets, temples
and theatres, by his huge delight in himself, so soon as the essentials
of mere material existence are secured to him, man has really shown
that life is good in itself, that he can do well enough without the
assurance of personal immortality held out to him by the theologians.
Whether that be or be not his reward hereafter, he will still strive to
express himself; but for that end mere use alone will not satisfy him.

We have seen, then, how man, in his social surroundings, begins to
secure something over and above the mere necessities of life; and so,
after providing himself with a certain competence of food, clothing
and shelter, has means and energy left for the supply of luxuries,
ornaments, delights--call them what you will. And according to
the direction in which he flings out for the acquisition of these
superfluities--so will his whole manhood develop, or his type of racial
culture be moulded.

Far back in the beginnings of civilization one of the first forms
taken by this surplus of power and energy over mere necessity was the
acquisition of slaves and wives. Civilization then began to ornament
itself with two modes of body-service--the menial attendance of the
slave upon his master, and the polygamous sexual attendance of the
woman upon her lord.

To-day we think that both those things were, from a moral point of
view, bad ornament. But you cannot look into the history of any
civilization conducted on those lines without seeing that they
decorated it--and that, out of their acceptance, came colour,
pomp, splendour, means for leisure, for enjoyment--for a very keen
self-realisation of a kind by the few at the expense of the many. And
the masterful few made that form of decorated civilization more sure
for themselves by extending a good deal of the decorative element
to the subservient lives around them. The slaves wore fine liveries
and lorded it over lower slaves, the favourite wives lived in luxury
and laziness, eating sweets and spending their days in the frivolous
mysteries of the toilet.

At a certain point in the social scale this form of ornamental
existence produced great misery, great hardships, great abasement. But
it was not instituted and maintained for that reason. Those underlying
conditions were a drawback, they were a misuse of human nature employed
as a basis for that ornamental superstructure to build on. And out of
that underlying misuse came the weakness and the eventual decay of that
once flourishing school of ornament.

But when that school of ornament was threatened by other schools, it
was ready to fight to the death for its ornamental superfluities--for
polygamy, for slavery, for power over others, which had come to mean
for it all that made life worth living! Life was quite capable of
being carried on without those things--was, and is, happily lived by
other races to the accompaniment of another set of ornaments which
those races think more enjoyable. But no race will consent to live
without some sort of ornament of its own choosing; and when its choice
of ornaments, or of social superfluities, over and above the needs
of existence, is seriously threatened from without it declares that
it is fighting not merely for liberty but for existence. Yet we know
quite well that the people of invaded and conquered States continue
in the main to exist--they continue even to wear ornaments; but these
are apt to be imposed ornaments galling to the national pride. And so
to-day, in the midst of a vast belligerency, we have committees and
consultations going on, to see to it lest, at the end of the war, under
German dominance, our women should have their future fashions imposed
on them from Berlin instead of from Paris, a fearful doom for any lady
of taste to contemplate.

The example may seem frivolous, but it is a parable of the truth;
we call our ornaments our liberties, and if we cannot ourselves die
fighting for them, we make others die for us.

Let us take up (for illustration of the same point) another stage
of civilization--that of ancient Greece. In Greece the city was the
centre of civilization, and its public buildings became the outward and
visible sign of the people’s pride of life and of their sense of power.
The fact that their private dwellings were very simple, and that they
expended nearly the whole of their artistry upon public works (things
to be shared and delighted in by all the citizens in common) had a
profound influence upon their civilization. That new social ideal of
civic pride found its way irresistibly into ornament. You could not
have had civic pride in anything like the same degree without it.

But Greek civilization did not fall into decay because of the beauty
and perfection with which it crowned itself in the public eye, but
because of certain underlying evils and misuses in the body politic--in
which again slavery and the subjection of women had their share. Greek
civilization fell because it failed to recognise the dignity of all
human nature; it reserved its sense of dignity for a selected race
and class; it failed to recognise the dignity of all true kinds of
service, and prided itself in military service alone--in that and in
the philosophies and the arts. It built a wonderful temple to its gods,
but failed in a very large degree to take into God the whole body of
humanity over which it had control. And so, Greek civilization broke up
into portions of an unimportant size and perished.

At a later day--and again with the city as centre to its life of
self-realisation--we get the great period of the Italian Renaissance,
a period in which civic and feudal and ecclesiastical influences
alternately jostled and combined.

And out of these three prides arose a wonderfully complex
art--tremendously expressive of what life meant for that people. And
you got then (for the first time, I think), grouped under the civic
arm, a new life-consciousness--the consciousness of the guilds, the
workers, and the craftsmen. The dignity of labour began to assert
itself; and when it did, inevitably it broke into ornament on its own
account--not at the bidding of an employer, but for the honour and
glory of the worker himself. And so, from that date on, the homes and
halls and churches of the guilds became some of the noblest monuments
to what life meant for men who had found joy in their labour.

Now that did not come till the craftsman had won free from slavery
and from forced labour; but when he was a freeman, with room to turn
round, he built up temples to his craft, to make more evident that the
true goal of labour is not use but delight. And only when it fell back
into modern slavery at the hands of commercial capitalism, only then
did labour’s power of spontaneous expression depart from it and become
imitative and debased.

I could take you further, and show you (among the survivals from our
England of the Middle Ages) the “joy of the harvest” expressed in the
great granaries and tithe-barns which still crown like abbey-churches
the corn-lands of Home. Concerning one of these William Morris said
that it stood second in his estimation among all the Gothic buildings
of Europe! Think of it!--of what that means in the realisation of
life-values by the age which had a mind so to celebrate man’s rest
after the labour of the harvest! In those days England was called
“merry” and foreigners who came to her shores reported as a national
characteristic the happy looks of her people: even their faces showed
adornment! And thus it is that beautiful use always clothes itself in
beauty.

I have said that all art is useful. To many that may have seemed a
very contentious statement. But how can one separate beauty from use
if one holds that everything which delights us is useful? On that
statement there is only one condition I would impose. The use in
which we delight must not mean the misuse or the infliction of pain
on others. In those periods of civilization to which I have referred
(so magnificent in their powers of self-discovery and self-adornment),
there were always dark and cruel habitations where the “art of living”
was not applied. They were content that the beauty on which they prided
themselves should be built up on the suffering, the oppression, or the
corruption of others. In the lust of their eyes there was a blind spot,
so that they cared little about the conditions imposed by their own
too arrogant claim for happiness on the lives that were spent to serve
them. And out of their blindness came at last the downfall of their
power.

So it has always been, so it always must be. I believe that beauty,
delight, ornament, are as near to the object of life as anything that
one can name, and that through right uses we attain to these as our
goal. But it is no good claiming to possess delightful things if we do
not see to it that those who make them for us have also the means to
live delightfully.

If man cannot make all the uses and services of life decent and
wholesome as a starting-point, neither can he make life enjoyable--not,
I mean, with a good conscience. If he would see God through beauty, he
must see Him not here and there only, but in the “land of the living”;
else (as the psalmist said) his spirit must faint utterly.

Our life is built up--we know not to what ultimate end--on an infinite
number of uses, functions, mechanisms. These uses enable us to live;
they do not necessarily enable us to enjoy. You can quite well imagine
the use of all your senses and organs so conditioned that you could
not enjoy a single one of them, and yet they might still fulfil their
utilitarian purpose of keeping you alive.

I need not rehearse to you in troublesome detail conditions of life
where everything you see is an eyesore, every touch a cause of
shrinking, every sound a discord, where taste and smell become a revolt
and a loathing.

Our modern civilization derives many of its present comforts from
conditions such as these under which thousands, nay millions, of
subservient human lives become brutalised. So long as we base our
ideal of wealth on individual aggrandisement, and on monetary and
commercial prosperity, and not (as we should do) upon human nature
itself--making it our chief aim that every life should be set free for
self-realisation in ornament and delight--so long will these things be
inevitable.

But when we, as men and women, and as nations, realise that human
nature is the most beautiful thing on earth (in its possibilities, I
mean) then surely our chief desire will be to make that our wealth here
and now, and out of it rear up our memorial to the ages that come after.

ART AND CITIZENSHIP

(1910)

The most hardened advocate of “Art for Art’s sake,” will hardly deny
that Art, for all its “sacred egoism,” is a social force. The main
question is where does your Art-training begin?

The conditions of the home, the workshop, and of social industries
do more than the schools and the universities to educate a nation;
and more especially, perhaps, to educate it toward a right or a wrong
feeling about Art.

And if, in these departments, your national education takes a wrong
line, then (however much you build schools over the heads of your
pupils and intercept their feet with scholarships, and block their
natural outlook on life with beautiful objects produced in past ages
and in other countries) your Art-training will partake of the same
condemnation.

True education, as opposed to merely commercial education, is a
training of mind and body to an appreciation of right values; values,
not prices. The man who has an all-round appreciation of right values
is a well-educated man; and he could not have a better basis either for
the love or the practice of Art than this appreciation of what things
are really worth.

But, in the present age, which prides itself on its inhuman system
of specialisation as a means to economy, such a man is rather a
rare phenomenon; for it is about as difficult to get out of present
conditions a true appreciation of life values--a true Art-training--as
it is to get a true artist. Where your national conditions shut down
the critical faculties, and make their exercise difficult, there too,
your creative artistic faculties are being shut down and made difficult
also. They are far more interdependent than your average Art-teacher
or Art-student is generally willing to admit. The idea that he has to
concern himself with conditions outside his own particular department
threatens him with extra trouble, and the burden of a conscience
that the doctrine of “Art for Art’s sake,” will not wholly satisfy;
and so he is inclined to shut his eyes, and direct his energies to
the securing of favourable departmental instead of right national
conditions.

But the man, or woman, who embarks whole-heartedly on Art-training
must in the end find himself involved in a struggle for the recovery
of those true social values which have been lost (or the acquisition
of those which are as yet unrealised) and for the substitution, among
other things, of true for false economics. He cannot afford to live
a life of aloof specialisation, when the conditions out of which he
derives and into which he is throwing his work are of a complementarily
disturbing kind. If, that is to say, the give-and-take conditions
between artistic supply and social demand have become vitiated, if
the conditions of the market, or of society, are unfavourable to the
reception of products of true worth, then the artist must to some
extent be an active party in the struggle for getting things set right.

That does not mean that, if he has a gift for the designing of
stage-scenery, he should necessarily be involved in a struggle to
secure a good drainage system (though even that should have an interest
for him) but it does mean very much that he should be tremendously
interested in the education of his own and the public mind to the point
of receiving good drama rather than bad, in order that his art may have
worthy material to work upon; and as good drama largely arises from a
lively conscience and the quickening in the community of new ideas, he
will wish his public a keen and open mind on all social questions.

Similarly a man who designs for textile fabrics should be very much
concerned indeed in getting cleanly conditions and pure air in the
towns and dwelling-houses where his designs have to live and look
beautiful, or grow ugly and rot. And there you get set before you in
small, the opposition between the interests of Art and the supposed
interests of trade. It is--or it is supposed to be--in the interest of
trade that things should wear out or get broken, and be replaced by
other things. It is in the interest of Art that they should not wear
out, that they should last; that everything worthy which is given to
man’s hand to do should have secured to it the greatest possible length
of life. And the reason is that the artist, if he be a true artist,
realises the value of things, the life value; that he is on the side of
creation and not of destruction, of preservation and not of waste. He
has within his nature an instinct that the greatest possible longevity
is the right condition for all manual labour; that when a man sets his
hand to a thing he should have it as his main aim to give good value,
to make it so that it will endure. And in this connection I would like
to substitute for the words “art training” the word “education.” It
is in the interests of education that things should be made to last,
and that only things should be made of any lasting material that
deserve lasting. Nothing should be produced the value of which will
become negligible before it is honestly worn out. And so it is in the
interest of education, as of Art, that we should eliminate as much as
possible the passing and the ephemeral, the demand of mood and fashion,
the thing cheaply chosen, cheaply acquired, and cheaply let go; and
substitute the thing that we shall have a long use for, and should like
to keep permanently--the thing acquired with thought and care, and
thoughtfully and carefully preserved because it has in itself a value.

But you won’t get any broad exercise of that kind of choice between
evil and good until you get a sense of right values--going far away
from what apparently touches art--in the mind, and the public and
private life of the community. And so, as I started by saying, true Art
is bound up with true education and social conditions. Good citizenship
is one of the conditions for setting national Art upon a proper basis.
A lively sense of your duty to your neighbour cannot fail to have an
effect upon your taste in art.

Now I want to bring this view of things home to you. So I will ask
everyone here to think for a moment of their own homes, their own
living-rooms, and especially of their parlours or drawing-rooms, which
are by their nature intended to express not so much our domestic
necessities as our domestic sense of the value of beauty, recreation,
and rest. And to begin with, how do you show your sense of duty to
the architect, who has (if you are fortunate) designed for you rooms
of pleasant and restful proportions? How many of the objects in those
rooms help at all to give a unifying and a harmonious effect, or are
in themselves in any way beautiful--things, that is to say, which (if
not of actual use) we love to set our eyes on, and feel what fineness
of skill in handling, what clean human thought in design went to their
production? Have those things been put there quite irrespective of
their price and the display they make of their owner’s “comfortable
circumstances”? Are they subordinated to a really intelligent sense
of what a living-room should be? Or are they merely a crowd, a
litter, things flung into the room pell-mell by a house-mistress
bent on securing for her parlour-maid a silly hour’s dusting every
day of objects--not of virtue--and for herself the recognition by
her neighbours that she has money enough to throw away in making her
living-room a silly imitation of a shop for bric-a-brac. Can you, even
those of you who do not live in streets where you have to safeguard
your privacy--can you look out of the window without being tickled in
the face by lace curtains, blind-tassels, or potted palm-leaves? Can
you sit down to the writing-table without entangling the legs of your
chair in a woolly mat and your feet in the waste-paper basket, or get
at the drawer of the cabinet without moving two or three arm-chairs,
or play the piano without causing the crocks which stand upon it to
jangle? Is the rest and recreation you get in that room anything else
but a sense of self-complacency based upon pride of possession? I ask
you to think what your furnishing of your rooms means, and remember
that to every person who comes into those rooms--and more especially
perhaps to the maids whom you set to dust them--you are helping to give
either an Art-training or an anti-Art-training, a training in true uses
and values, or in misuses and mere waste and wantonness.

Of course I know that to some extent you are victims. You have dear
friends who will give you presents, and you can’t hurt their feelings
by not putting up another shelf, or erecting another glass-shade,
where neither are wanted, or driving another peg into the wall to hang
a picture where no picture can be properly seen. And probably the
reason you cannot is because you have shown yourself so thoughtless
and haphazard in all your ideas about decoration and house-furnishing
that even in that house, which you falsely assert to be your castle,
you stand defenceless before this invasion of ornamental microbes!
Obviously the house is not yours if others can break in and spoil its
borders with their own false taste. But I can assure you that those
inroads do not happen to people whose rooms show a scrupulous sense of
selection. You inspire then (even in the thoughtless) a certain dread
and respect. Though they regard you as uncanny and call you a crank,
you are beginning their Art-training for them.

I remember, in this connection, a Quaker acquaintance whose friends
descended upon him at the time of his marriage with certain household
monstrosities which he was expected thereafter to live down to. It was
a cataclysm which he could not avert; but he found a remedy. He became
a passive resister to the Education rate, and year by year he placed
at the disposal of the distraining authorities a selection of his
wedding-presents till his house was purged of them. I have said that
you cannot separate Art-training from general education; and here, at
all events, you find the two happily combined--a war on bad art and on
a bad educational system joined economically in one.

So much, then, for thoughtless superfluity as an impediment to a
recognition of true values. I want now to come to the importance of
permanence as a condition underlying the aim of all production if
it is to be wholesome in its social results. I have said that an
instinct for permanence is what differentiates artistic from supposed
trade interests. Take architecture. Do you imagine that architects or
builders are likely to design or build in the same style for a system
of short leaseholds as they might for freeholds? And is the building
which is calculated just to “save its face” until the lease expires
likely to be so good either in design or workmanship?

Read, in that connection, what Coventry Patmore says in his essay on
“Greatness in Architecture”:

“The house and cottage builder of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries was,” he says, “fully aware that the strength of a rafter
lay rather in its depth than its breadth, and that, for a time at
least, a few boards two inches thick and ten inches deep, set edgeways,
would suffice to carry the roof, which nevertheless it pleased him
better to lay upon a succession of beams ten inches square. It is the
reality, and the modest ostentation of the reality, of such superfluous
substantiality that constitutes the whole secret of effect in many an
old house that strikes us as “architectural,” though it may not contain
a single item of architectural ornament; and, in the very few instances
in which modern buildings have been raised in the same fashion, the
beholder at once feels that their generous regard for the far future
is of almost as poetical a character as the aged retrospect of a
similar house of the time of Henry VII. or Elizabeth. A man,” he goes
on, “now hires a bit of ground for eighty or ninety years; and, if he
has something to spare to spend on beauty, he says to himself: ‘I will
build me a house that will last my time, and what money I have to spare
I will spend in decorating it. Why should I waste my means in raising
wall and roof which will last five times as long as I or mine shall
want them?’ The answer is: Because that very ‘waste’ is the truest and
most striking ornament; and though your and your family’s enjoyment of
a house thus magnanimously built may last but a tenth of its natural
age, there lies in that very fact an ‘ornament’ of the most noble and
touching kind, which will be obvious at all seasons to yourself and
every beholder, though the consciousness of its cause may be dormant;
whereas the meanness of the other plan will be only the more apparent
with every penny you spend in making it meretricious.”

Again, are you likely to get so good an architectural design where you
cannot be fairly sure that the use for which the building is raised
is likely to be permanent? And do our modern trade conditions and
present enormous demand for thoughtless superfluities tend to make that
prospect more probable? If not, then instability of trade, or trade
directed to the satisfaction of frivolous and ephemeral demands is bad
for architecture, and hinders any worthy development in it of national
characteristics.

But there, mind you, in trade, lies to-day the very life of the nation;
for the life of our teeming millions depends on it. By our industrial
specialisation in the pursuit of wealth vast numbers of us have ceased
to be self-supporting in the necessaries of life. And the question for
artists is, are we basing our national life on conditions that cannot
secure permanence and stability in the things which we produce? Is it
a necessary condition of our industrial development that things should
have a shorter life and we a shorter use for them than in the old days?
To the artist the drawback of machine-made things is not necessarily
in the mechanism of their production (for in some cases your machine
relieves the human hand of a hard and wearing monotony), but there is
a very obvious drawback if it imposes upon the worker merely another
form of hard and wearing monotony, and at the same time shortens the
life of the thing produced. If handicraft does not offer to the worker
worthier conditions for hand and brain, and insure longer life in the
thing produced, it is no good pinning our faith to it. Eliminate it,
and let machinery take its place. You have not, then, in the transfer,
destroyed any right values, and you are not going counter to the
conditions which tend to produce national Art.

But, as an example of the particular value which does sometimes attach
to hand labour (irrespective of its artistic value), I have here a
small unused sample of chair-cover material of English make, produced
about eighty years ago, at a probable cost--so I am told by experts--of
under £2 the square yard. The chairs it was made to cover are now
in my possession. During the twenty-five years of my own personal
acquaintance with them they have had plenty of hard wear; but even at
the corners that material has not yet begun to wear out; and the colour
has only become softer and more mellow in quality.

Within the last ten years I endeavoured to get that covering matched in
a modern material, and I paid for the nearest match I could get about
one-fifth of the price I have quoted. That material has already gone
shabby; and where it is most worn and faded the colour, instead of
mellowing, has gone dead and dirty in quality. The older material will
probably outlast my time.

There, then, are the comparative values of the old and the new
material. You pay the higher price for the old, but in the end it is
more economical. And it has this double advantage (or what would be a
double advantage in a State where industrial conditions were sound),
that it inclines its possessor to adopt a more permanent style of
furnishing, by making age beautiful and change unnecessary; and so it
sets free a great amount of human labour for other purposes; not merely
the labour of the textile workers who have not to provide new covers,
but the labour of the upholsterers, who are not called upon to rip off
a series of old covers and fit on new ones, dragging old nails out and
driving fresh nails in, with the result that the framework of the chair
itself is presently worn out and a new one required in its place. All
that labour is saved.

That small example is important because it exemplifies those
possibilities of permanence attaching to certain forms of hand-labour
out of which can be developed a school of textile manufacture
indigenous in character--indigenous in that you give it time to become
embedded in its domestic setting, and to make for itself domestic
history. It enables you to develop an appreciation for subtleties
of colour, and to secure tones and harmonies which you cannot get
ready-made in a shop: it gives to a piece of furniture life-value.

But it is bad for trade!

Now why is it bad for trade? It is bad for trade because our modern
industrial conditions have brought us to this pass, that it is no
longer our national aim to direct labour and set it free for other
work that really needs to be done. Our national problem is rather to
find work for people, at times even to invent needs, and to create a
fictitious turnover in trade so that we may not have upon our hands an
enormous increase of the unemployed problem. And as hands go begging,
as we have more hands in the country than we can employ on useful and
fit labour (fit, I mean, for such fine implements as these and for the
brains behind them), therefore hands are inevitably put to degrading
uses, and the joy goes out of work; and for the delight (or at least
the intelligent patience) of true craftsmanship is substituted the
soul-destroying bondage of mechanical labour at something which is not
really worth producing.

You may take that, I think, as a test whether a State is in industrial
health or disease--whether, namely, it tends more in the direction
of setting labour free for other and higher purposes (through the
permanent quality of its products), and so evolving an aristocracy of
labour; or whether (owing to their ephemeral quality) it constantly
tends to invent work of a lower and more trivial kind, and to provide
jobs of an ephemeral character which are not really wanted.

Now bad and wasteful taste is directly productive, not so much of trade
as of fluctuations in trade, because that sort of taste soon tires
and asks for change; and the consequence is that thousands of workers
(especially women, whose industries used to be home industries before
machinery drew them out of the homes) are in this country constantly
being thrown out of one useless employment into another, and very often
have to pass through a fresh apprenticeship at a starvation wage.
And so, when we create frivolous demands for things that we shall not
want the day after to-morrow, we are not (as we too often think) doing
anything that is really good for trade, but only something much more
horrible, which you will understand without my naming it.

You see, then, how very closely the artist’s inclination toward
permanence of taste may be connected with morality. And if that
instinct for permanence (with an accompanying adaptation of material
and design to making things last their full time without waste) is not
present in the craftsmanship of our day, then we have not got the true
basis, either in spirit or material, for Art to build upon.

Now I am going to put before you some quite homely instances, because
I think they will stick best in your memories, in order to show
you that the real struggle of the artist to-day is not so much to
secure appreciation of beauty in line and texture, as honesty of
construction, and real adaptation of form to utility and of production
to lastingness. I have been noticing, with quite simple objects of
domestic use, that the trade-purpose toward them seems almost the
opposite. The trade purpose is to present us with an article which,
apparently sound in construction, will break down at some crucial point
before the rest of it is worn out. A watering can, a carving fork,
a kettle, a dustbin, a coal scuttle, the fixings of a door-handle,
are generally made, I find, on an ignobly artful plan which insures
that they shall break down just at that point where the wear and tear
come hardest, so that an article otherwise complete shall be scrapped
wastefully or go back to the trade to be tinkered.

But leave things the actual design of which you cannot control, and
come to dress, our own daily wearing apparel. I do not know if the men
of my audience are aware that undergarments wear out much quicker if
they are tight-fitting and worn at a stretch than if they are loose,
but that is so. And, in consequence, a smart shopman has the greatest
reluctance to sell you anything that is, as he conceives it, one size
too large for you. The reason being that the looser fit lasts longer
and is bad for trade--that it makes for endurance instead of for
galloping consumption.

In the majority of houses whose cold water systems I have inspected
the pipes are nearly always run at the most exposed angle of the
containing walls, so that if there is a frost, the frost may have a
chance of getting at the pipes and bursting them, and so give the trade
a fresh job. Again, every housewife knows that in the ordinary daily
conflicts between tea-sets and domestic service more cups get broken
than saucers. And I suppose every household in London has got some
corner shelf piled with superfluous saucers (useless widowers mourning
the departure of their better halves); but it is very exceptional--only
in one shop that I know--that one is able to replace the cup (in
certain stock patterns) without encumbering oneself with the saucer
which one does not want. The saucers continue to be made in wasteful
superabundance, because waste of that sort is “good for trade.”

I have been assured by an observant housewife that certain articles do
now and again appear upon the market specially designed to safeguard by
little constructive devices, the main point of wear-and-tear through
which they become useless, and that presently these things disappear
and are unobtainable, presumably because they prove too lasting, and so
are “bad for trade.” And they are allowed to disappear because we, as a
community, have not sufficiently set our hearts and minds against waste
and uselessness. We buy cheaply because we think cheaply, and because
we have lost our sense of honour towards the products of men’s hands,
and toward that wonderful instrument itself which we are content to
put to such base uses, letting the workers themselves see how much we
despise the things they have made.

I have seen in London a comic music-hall “turn” in which the comedy
largely consisted in a continuous breakage of piles of plates by a
burlesque waiter, who, in the course of his duties, either drops them,
falls against them, sits on them, or kicks them. During the turn I
should say some thirty or forty plates get broken. They were cheap
plates, no doubt; but it seems to me that if there is any fun in this
monotonous repetition of destruction, then the greater the cost and
waste of human labour the more irresistibly comic should the situation
appear; and the management which provided Worcester or Dresden china
for its low-comedy wits to play upon would have logical grounds for
considering that it was thereby supplying its audience with livelier
entertainment more satisfying to its taste.[2]

Now what I want you to see is that such a production would not be
entertaining to an audience which had not come to regard the labour of
man’s hands with a licentious indifference--which had not developed the
gambler’s contempt for the true relations between labour and value.
And here I want to put before you a proposition which may at first
shock you, but which I hope to prove true. And that is that labour in
itself, apart from its justification in some useful result, is bad and
degrading; the man who is put to work which he knows is to have no
result comes from that work more degraded and crushed in spirit than
the man who merely “loafs” and lives “naturally.”

Perhaps the readiest example of that is the old treadmill system which
was once employed in our prisons, where the prisoner was set to grind
at a crank artificially adjusted to his physical strength, but having
no useful result; and I believe that the main reason why prisoners
on those machines were not allowed to grind their own bread or put
their strength to any self-supporting industry was because it was “bad
for trade” and brought them into competition with the contractors who
supplied food to his Majesty’s prisons. It was not the monotony half
so much as the consciousness that it was without result which made
that form of labour so degrading and so utterly exhausting to mind and
body. You might think it was the compulsion; but I am not sure that
compulsion to work may not sometimes be very moral and salutary. At any
rate, here is an instance of the same thing presented under voluntary
conditions. A man out of work applied to a farmer for a job; the
farmer had no job for him, and told him so; but as the man persisted
he started him at half a crown a day to move a heap of stones from one
side of the road to the other. And when the man had done that and asked
what next he was to do, he told him to move them back again! But though
that man was out of work, and was on his way to earn the half-crown,
rather than submit his body to the conscious degradation of such
useless labour, he did as the farmer had calculated on his doing, and
threw up the job.

That same quality of outrage and degradation attends on all labour that
is subject, within the worker’s knowledge, to wanton destruction, or is
obviously of no real use or of “faked” value. And the finer the skill
employed the greater the anguish of mind, or else the hard callousness
of indifference which must result. Call upon men to make useless
things, or things which you mean wantonly to destroy the day after
to-morrow, or to which by the conditions you tolerate you make a fair
length of life impossible--call upon labour to do those things, and you
are either filling its spirit with misery and depression, or you are
making it, in self-defence, callous and hard.

Industrial conditions which encourage the building of houses that are
only intended to last a lease; which permit the destruction of our
canal system because that means of transit has proved a dangerous
rival to the railway system; which impose a quick change in fashions
on which depend various kinds of ephemeral and parasitic industries;
which encourage a vast production of ephemeral journalism and
magazine illustration which after a single reading is thrown aside
and wasted--all these things, which have become nationalised in our
midst, are a national anti-Art training. We English have, as the
result of these things, no national school of architecture; we have
no national costume (though I myself can remember the time when in
our Midland counties not only the farm labourer, but the small yeoman
farmer himself went to church as well as to labour in the beautiful
smock-frock worn by their forefathers) and we have killed out from our
midst one of the most beautiful national schools of popular art that
ever existed, the school of the illustrators of the ’sixties; and we
have done these things mainly from our increasing haste to get hold of
something new, and our almost equal haste, when we have it, to throw it
away again.

We have cast our bread upon the waters. The sort of wealth to the
pursuit of which nations have committed themselves needs (it now
appears) an enormous amount of protection. And it cannot have been
without some demoralising effect upon the mind of the community that
we have been driven by our outstanding necessities to build every
year six or seven of those enormous engines of destruction called
“Dreadnoughts,” whose effective lease of life is about 20 years,
something considerably shorter than the lease of life which we allow
for our most jerry-built lodging-houses! And on these short-lived
products of industry (which are to-day the sign and symbol and
safeguard of our world-power), our aristocracy of labour has been
spending its strength, and the nation has now to depend on them for
its safety. The cost of building a “Dreadnought” is about the same
as the cost of building St. Paul’s Cathedral. Imagine to yourself a
nation building every year six or seven St. Paul’s Cathedrals, with the
consciousness that in twenty-five or thirty years they will all again
be levelled to the dust, and you will get from that picture something
of the horror which an artist is bound to feel at the necessity
which thus drives us forward, even in peace-time, to the continuous
destruction, on such a colossal scale, of the labour of men’s hands.
And the more it is revealed to us to-day (by the present catastrophe)
as an absolute political necessity, the more is the disorder of
civilization we have arrived at condemned.

Well, I must leave now, in that example I have set before you, the
wasteful aspect of modern industry, in order to touch briefly on
another, and an almost equally hateful aspect, which I will call “the
vivisection of modern industry.” I mean its subdivision into so many
separate departments, or rather fragments, that it loses for the mind
of the worker all relation to the thing made--that time-saving device
at the expense of the human hand and brain, which we glorify under the
term “specialisation.” Now, however much you may defend that system on
ground of trade competition, the artist is bound by his principles to
regard it as a national evil; for anything which tends to take away
the worker’s joy and pride in the distinctiveness of his trade and
to undo its human elements is anti-Art training. And so that inhuman
specialisation which (for the sake of trade cheapness) sets down a man
to the performance of one particular mechanical action all his life,
in the making of some one particular part of some article which in its
further stages he is never to handle, or a woman to stamp out the tin
skeleton of a button, with her eyes glued to one spot for ten hours
of the day--all these dehumanising things are anti-Art because they
are destructive of life-values. We have erected them into a system,
and while cutting prices by such means at one end, we are mounting up
costs at the other. We are promoting, maybe, a quicker circulation of
the currency of the realm, but we are impoverishing the currency of
the race. For that hard mechanical efficiency we are paying a price
which is eating up all our real profits; quite apart from its effect
in the increase of lunacy and of the unfit birth-rate and death-rate
among children, it is helping to implant in the whole world of labour
a bitter and a revengeful spirit which we have no right to wonder at
or to blame. And the results affect us not only in our workshops but
in our pastimes, by driving those whose labour is so conditioned into
a more consumptive form of pleasure-seeking and relaxation. You cannot
put people into inhuman conditions for long hours of each day, and
expect them to be normal and humane when you turn them out to their
short hours of leisure. I am pointing to conditions which you know
probably as well as, or better than, I do; but I am pointing to them
for the express purpose of saying that you cannot dissociate them from
your national appreciation of Art. The more you can connect the worker
with the raw material on the one hand and the finished product on the
other, the more surely you are establishing conditions out of which
national Art can grow; and the more you dissociate him from these two
ends of his material the more you make national Art impossible.

I will give you an instance, quite away from sweated labour conditions,
where you will see at once how wasteful and opposed to Art is this
system of breaking up craftsmanship into departments. It was an
architect who told me that the following system is quite frequently
followed in dealing with the stone out of which we build the outside
walls of our modern churches. It is hewn at the quarries into a rough
surface, thoroughly expressive of the stonemason’s craft, and not in
any way too rough for its purpose. It is then taken and submitted by
machinery to a grinding process which makes it mechanically smooth, and
it is then handed over to other workmen who give back to it a chiselled
surface of an absolutely uniform and mechanical character which
expresses nothing. And with that wanton and wasteful lie we are content
to set up temples to the God of Truth!

Now if the Church has become so blind to the values of life, and so
lacking in any standard of honour toward the labour of men’s hands, as
to allow itself to be so clothed in falsehood, yet I do still plead
that those who call themselves artists shall protest by all means in
their power against the systematisation of such indignities toward
handicraft. That is the sort of thing against which any national Art
training we have ought to fight.

How can we fight? Best of all, I believe, by establishing a standard
of honour toward manual labour; and, quite definitely, wherever we
have Art schools, by training all students to hate and despise shams
and to loathe all waste of labour. But, perhaps, the most direct way
would be for the State to set up, in every town, in connection with
its Art schools and its technical schools, a standard of honesty by
practical demonstration, in the staple industry of the locality. I
would not trouble, so long as that industry had a useful purpose,
how much or how little it was connected with Art; but I would give
the youth of that place the chance of an honest apprenticeship under
true human conditions to the trade in which they might be called upon
to spend their lives. I would not have those schools of labour adopt
any amateurishness of method or standard; they should not obstinately
reject the aid of machinery where machinery can relieve monotony, but
they should very carefully consider at what stage the dehumanising
element came in, either by substituting mechanism for skill, or by
separating the worker too much from his work in its completed form.
And from those schools of labour I would allow people to purchase all
the work of these State-apprentices which their master-craftsmen could
pass as being of a standard quality. They would not compete in point
of cheapness with the trade article, for their price would almost
certainly be higher, but they would, I trust, compete in point of
quality and design; and by exhibiting a standard, and making the thing
procurable, they might create a demand which the very trade itself
would at last be forced to recognise.

This is but a very bald and brief statement of the kind of extension I
mean; but what I want to put to you is this, that wherever a nation has
turned from agriculture to trade, there, if you want national Art you
must invade those trade conditions and set up your standard of honour,
not outside, but in the trades themselves; you must get hold of those
who are going to be your workers and craftsmen and put into them (by
exhibiting to them manual labour under right human conditions) the old
craftsman’s pride which existed in the days of the Guilds, when the
trade unions were not merely organisations to secure good wages, but
to secure good work, and to maintain a standard of honour in labour.
But you must not stop there. To make your training in any true sense
national you must make it characteristic, or rather it must make
itself. It must aim at bringing out racial and local character; and
before it can do so we must recover that love of locality which we have
so largely lost. A mere multiplication of schools and classes where a
departmental system evolved at some city centre is put in force, is not
national: it is only metropolitan, perhaps only departmental. You can
put such a system, in a certain superficial way, into the heads and
hands of your local students, but you cannot put it into the blood.
Unless your Art training enters into and links up the lives of those
you would teach with a larger sense of citizenship, it isn’t national.
They won’t carry it away with them into their daily pursuits, they
won’t make a spontaneous and instinctive application of it; they will
only come to it at class-hours, and, when class-hours are over, quit
again. I have spoken of the necessity of a standard of honour toward
labour, but we need also a standard of honour toward life. It is still,
you see, values--life-values--that I am trying to get at as a basis for
Art.

Now to some of you I must have seemed, in all conscience, gloomy
and pessimistic in my outlook on present conditions; and therefore,
before I end, I will try to emit a ray of hope. There are certain
social developments going on around us which make me hope that we
may yet emerge from this valley of the shadows through which we are
still stumbling. One is that there has been in the last generation a
very general breakdown of the old artificial class notion of the kind
of work which was compatible with “gentility.” And one meets to-day
people, whose culture has given them every chance to develop that
standard of honour toward life (without which their claim to be gentry
means nothing); you meet with many such people nowadays who have come
back to manual labour in various forms, in farming, in horticulture,
and in craftsmanship--some also, I am glad to say, who have become
shopkeepers--and who are bringing, presumably, their standard of honour
to bear on those trades on which they no longer foolishly look down.
Among these a definite revival of handicraft is taking place, and
where they are doing their work honestly and well they are undoubtedly
inculcating a better taste. It is especially among this class which
has come back to handicraft that one meets with domestic interiors of
a fine and scrupulous simplicity which we may eventually see imitated
(meretriciously, perhaps, but on the whole beneficially) even in
lodging-houses which are at present the dust-hung mausoleums of the
aesthetic movement of thirty years ago.

Another matter for congratulation--not a movement, but a survival--is
the unspoiled tradition of beauty which still exists in the cottage
gardens of England. There, in our villages, you find a note of beauty
that has scarcely been touched by the evil of our modern conditions.
And I take it as a proof that where, by some happy chance, we have
managed to “let well alone,” there the instinct for beauty and for
fitness is still a natural ingredient of industrial life. That survival
of taste in our cottage gardens is culture in the best sense of the
word; and it is still popular. We do not yet dig our gardens by
machinery; when we do they will die the death.

And two other bright points of movement, which I look to as having in
them the basis of a true Art training, are the widespread revival,
in so many of our towns and villages, through the efforts of Miss
Mary Neal, Mr. Cecil Sharp and others, of our old folk-songs and
Morris dances, and lastly--perhaps I shall surprise you--the Boy Scout
movement.

Coming into contact with these two movements, I have found that they
have in them certain elements in common. Instituted with a rare
combination of tact and enthusiasm, they have taken hold of the blood;
they have got home at a certain point in boy and girl nature which has
already made them become native. I find that these two organisations
tend to develop among their members grace and vigour of movement, good
manners, a cheerful spirit, a more alert interest in the things about
them, a feeling of comradeship, and best of all, a certain sense of
honour toward life. And therefore, even in a place technically devoted
to the training of students, I say boldly that I see nowhere better
hope of a sound basis for national Art than in this revival of village
dancing and folk-song and in the Boy Scout movement.

The assertion may perhaps seem strange and ironic to some of you
that it is not from a study of beautiful objects that the sense of
beauty can be made national, but only in the recovery of an ordered
plan for our social and industrial life, and in the finding of a true
and worthy purpose for all that our hands are put to do. But in that
connection you may remember how Ruskin maintained that great Art has
only flourished in countries which produced in abundance either wine or
corn; in countries, that is to say, where the greatest industries were
those with which we most readily associate that note of joy which has
become proverbial, the joy of the harvest. It is perhaps too much to
dream that we shall ever again see England living upon its own corn;
and the greatest forms of Art may, therefore, remain for ever beyond
our reach. But until a nation does honour to the human hand as the
most perfect and beautiful of all instruments under the sun, by giving
it only honourable and useful tasks--until then I must rather wish
you to be good valuers, keen--indignantly keen--to destroy the false
values which you see about you, than that you should be either good
draughtsmen or good artists.

You can do honest and good work as designers and illustrators and
architects, as workers in wood and metal and stone; but you are
hampered and bound by the conditions of your day, and you cannot by
your best efforts make Art national till you have established joy in
labour. No great school of Art can ever arise in our midst in such a
form as to carry with it through all the world its national character,
until the nation itself has found that voice (which to-day seems so
conspicuously absent, even when we close our shops to make holiday); I
mean the voice of joy.

FOOTNOTE:

[2] _By that reckoning we in Europe are to-day the best comedians the
world has ever seen. Out of peace-conditions nations produce their
wars._

CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS IMMORTALITY.

(1915.)

We are frequently told (more especially by those whose profession it is
to preach belief in a revealed religion), that if man be not endowed
with an immortal soul, then the game of life is not worth the candle.
Incidentally we are warned that if the bottom were knocked out of that
belief, morals would go to pieces and humanity would become reprobate.

Now I can imagine a similar sort of claim put forward in other
departments of life for other pursuits which seem to their advocate to
make life more appetising.

I can imagine sportsmen saying that without sport men would cease to
be manly, morals and physique would deteriorate and life be no longer
worth living. I can imagine the butcher saying that without meat, and
the licensed victualler that without beer, men were of all things the
most miserable. I have recently seen advertisements which say that
only by supporting the cinema (made beautiful by the feet of Charlie
Chaplin), can we hope to be victorious in the present war.

The assertion that man cannot do without certain things which, as a
matter of fact, vast numbers of his fellows are constantly doing
without--(and with no very marked set-back as regards health,
efficiency, or general morals)--is a questionable way of forcing home
conviction that these things or beliefs are indispensable. It is quite
possible that beer, meat, the pursuit of game, the personality of
Charlie Chaplin, and a belief in immortality are all alike capable of
giving stimulus to the human soul (especially to those souls which
have come by habit to depend upon them). But it is quite certain that
other human souls have found without them sufficient stimulus to make
life worth living. And though, against that fact, it may be argued
that these unconsciously receive their driving force, their social
and ethical standards, from those whose motive power they reject as
superfluous, and that we, who do not go to see Charlie Chaplin on the
films, are winning this war somewhat circuitously through the powers of
those who do--the argument is hardly a convincing one, since it remains
for ever in the nature of an unproved hypothesis.

But when the majority of those who believe in personal immortality are
asked for the ground of their belief, it generally resolves itself into
this: they have an intense individual conviction that it is so--so
intense that to hold the contrary becomes “unthinkable.” But that
intense, individual conviction, over things we greatly care about, is
a constant phenomenon of the working of the human mind, and is not
limited to belief in a future state. To a convinced Liberal it is
“unthinkable” that he should ever pass into such a state of mental
annihilation as to become a Conservative. To a convinced Conservative
it is unthinkable that he should fall from the grace which guides
him into the slough of Liberalism. It is the same with Protestant or
Catholic, with Socialist, Universalist, or Sectarian: conviction always
presents an adamantine front to opposing forces and arguments--so long
as it lasts.

The same phenomenon constantly occurs in the domain of the amative
passion. The lover (if he be really in love), believes that his love
will last for ever--that nothing can possibly change it; and all the
evidence in the world that lovers of a like faith have too often lived
to see the immortal dream put on mortality, will fail to convince him
(while he is in the toils) that his own love is liable to any such
change as theirs.

The reason is that strongly vitalised forces always carry with them a
sense of permanence.

The vital spark (focused within us by strong conviction or emotion),
is but an individually apprehended part of a great whole: for this
thread of life passing through us has already stretched itself out
over millions of years, and countless atavisms have touched it to
individual ends which were not ours; the will to live has clung to it
by myriads of adhesions, feelers, tentacles, and not by human hands
alone (though our palms still moisten, and our arms fly upward to
the imaginary branch overhead when danger of falling threatens us,
because the instinct of our arboreal ancestry still prevails in us over
reason). And through those atavisms, the struggle to secure survival
for the family, the clan, the race, has left an impress which may
very naturally convey from the general to the individual a sense of
immortality.

For of all these constituent forces the majority knew and thought
very little about death, except in their instinctive and spasmodic
efforts to escape from it; and when at last man began to envisage death
consciously and philosophically, straightway, with all these atavisms
behind him, he belittled it with dreams of a future life.

It was as perfectly natural a thing to do as for the lover to declare
that his love for his mistress was eternal and not merely for a
season, since any lesser statement would fail to convey adequately
the intensity of the force by which he was moved. Moreover, though
in millions of individual cases the statement and the sincere belief
that the love experienced will remain changeless and eternal, are
contradicted by later fact, it is at least true that the passion itself
is an ever-recurring phenomenon of life, and does, by its infinite
recurrence and resurrection in form beyond form through evolving
generations, present to finite minds an aspect of immortality. Just as
the water we drink is an imperishable thing, though after drinking it
we shall thirst again, so is that love, which satisfies the lover’s
soul, a principle of life extending illimitably beyond his own use for
it. And if that be true about love, why should it not be true about
life?

For surely (put it thus), when across limited vision a thread passes,
of which the eye can see neither the beginning nor the end, and
when upon that thread, for the time being, the limited life hangs
all its hopes, is it not quite natural for that clinging life to
identify itself, through the closeness of its momentary contact,
with the spiritually apprehended whole, and to identify with that
concept of a general continuity its own present degree of individual
consciousness. Moreover, in a world governed by cause and effect, it
can hardly be predicated that the results either of love or hatred,
individually indulged, are not, or may not be illimitable, even though
the individual spirit be not there to preside consciously over their
extended operations.

When, therefore, so much is true, when so many elements which pass
through our lives have (by association), links and connections which
to finite minds seem infinite, they may well impress us (by reason of
the close identification established between us and them for the time
being) with a sense that our own individual share and apprehension of
them are addressed also to a universal goal.

“Universal,” for surely mere continuity--a stretching out of length
without corresponding breadth--ought not to be the limit of our
claim. Yet it is significant that, in their demand for personal
immortality, so many thinkers have found sufficient satisfaction in
the idea of an extended survival through time into eternity, without
making a corresponding demand for extension into unity through space.
They are willing, that is to say, to put up for all eternity with
those limitations of personality which they enjoy--the relations of
_meum_ and _tuum_ upon which the possessive life of the senses is
based, but not with those limitations (the prospect of which they do
not enjoy), the termination of those same relationships imposed by
death. It seems rather a one-sided way of doing things--this narrowing
of the claim in a two-dimensional direction (one might almost say
in a one-dimensional), yet it has been very generally done--I shall
presently hope to show why--and most of our Western theology has built
up our future hopes for us entirely on those lines. Personality,
the sort of personality we have learned to enjoy, is based upon
limitations. Abolish limitations in your conception of future life, and
for the majority of those pious minds which now clamour for it as their
due you abolish personality also; it is swallowed up not in death but
in a life from which the individual power to focus and to enjoy has
disappeared.

It is true that there has now begun, in modern socialistic
Christianity, a yeasting of desire for an all round, or expansive,
as well as a forward, or extensive personality after death; that an
all-embracing and not merely an all-surviving consciousness is more
and more predicated for the full satisfaction of man’s spiritual need.
But that was by no means the form of moral hunger which permeated
primitive or mediæval Christianity, and sufficed, we are to suppose,
to keep poor human nature from that depravity into which it will fall
if belief in personal immortality is surrendered. Oregon, as we know,
looked forward to finding in the nether groans of the damned a full
completion of the orchestral harmonies of Heaven; and in the whole
conception of immortality as it has illumined the path of the Church
from its beginning down to quite modern times, individualism has been
rampant. On that basis, so long as it satisfied his moral conscience,
man did great things with it, making it shine as a great light by the
unflinching witness which he bore to its efficacy through suffering and
through martyrdom.

It is probably true that an individualistic form to the doctrine was
then, and always will be, necessary to attract those whose lives have
been run from a highly individualised standpoint; and that, for them,
death-bed consolation would hardly be achieved in the presentation of
a doctrine so defined as to threaten annihilation to all the fetish
worship and social values of the past.

“God would think twice,” said a courtly French Abbé of the seventeenth
century to a King’s mistress who, upon her death-bed, was seized by
spiritual qualms--“God would think twice before damning a lady of your
quality.” And no one who holds by class-distinctions really wishes to
find in the New Jerusalem any abolition of that respect for persons
or prejudices which has, in this world, been the main ground on which
their self-esteem and their estimate of personality have been based.

To them the most “unthinkable” proposition would be not the contraction
of the future world to narrower and more select limits than those of
the one they know, but a future world conducted on any code of morals
which had not their own entire approval and sanction.

We are told that the late Queen Victoria looked forward with very
great interest to a future meeting with the Hebrew patriarchs, with
Abraham, Moses, and Elijah, but hoped to be excused from any personal
acquaintance with King David on account of his affair with Bathsheba.
And when we realise how very often the hope of Heaven is really a
species of self-love and self-applause, conditional on Heaven being
what we ourselves want it to be, one is led to wonder whether the real
condition for entry into that state of bliss may not prove to be the
precise opposite, and whether the disciplinary motto upon its portal
may not be those mystic words, hitherto attributed to another place,
“All hope abandon ye who enter here.” That, after all, is only a more
emphatic way of stating what Christ Himself laid down as the path by
which man should attain; that only those namely who were ready to
lose life should find it. And I rather question whether our Christian
individualists have, up till now, been honestly prepared to “lose life”
in the full sense, without condition or reserve, and whether, (if they
have not), they have yet attained the spiritual standpoint necessary to
bring them within the terms of the promise.

So far I have dealt with the doctrine of immortality as presented to us
from the individualistic basis alone. But, in some form or another, the
doctrine of immortality belongs to many religions and schools (indeed,
one might almost say to all) and has, therefore, most varied and even
contradictory meanings attached to it. In some schools, as we have
seen, it sets great store on the survival of the individual; in others
individuality is held to be of small account--a diminishing rather than
a persistent factor in the ultimate ends of life viewed as a whole.

I remember in that connection discussing with the late Father George
Tyrrell, in the days before Rome’s excommunication fell on him, the
divergent views as to immortality of Christianity and Buddhism; and
at that time he held that the superiority of the Christian faith
lay in its insistence on the personal immortality, conscious and
self-contained, of every human being. Some years later, a month before
his death, we discussed the matter again; and I asked him then, in what
degree, if at all, his view as to personal immortality had changed.
His answer gave me a curious instance of those scientific analogies by
which Modernism has been seeking to deliver the Roman Church from its
mediæval entanglements.

“In the main,” he said, “I have only changed in my apprehension of what
‘personality’ really is. Just as one may find in an hysterical subject
five or six pseudo-personalities which reveal themselves in turn, each
one of which is a character quite separately and consistently defined,
but not one of them (however completely in possession for the time) a
real person, so it seems to me must we regard all those limitations
of ‘personality’ which find expression in individual form. There is
only one true personality, and that is Christ; anything less than the
one all-embracing whole is but a simulacrum, concealing rather than
revealing the true substance and form.”

I cannot pretend to give his actual words, but I believe that I have
accurately stated the sense of them; and you will see, I think, that
they go a long way toward the adaptation of the Christian to the
Buddhistic standpoint. That tendency, I believe, we shall find more
and more at work in the Christian Church as time goes on--not merely
because by such a definition the doctrine will be better able to hold
its own against the inroads of science--but because it gives also a
better response to that socialising genius of the human race which
is coming more and more to demand a perfect unity as the ultimate
expression of good.

That, then, we shall probably find to be the future tendency of
idealism. There remains, of course, the Rationalistic school of
thought, by which the possibility of individual or personal survival
after death is from first to last either absolutely denied or very
severely discountenanced as an idea based upon wholly insufficient
evidence.

Nevertheless, in some form or another, immortality, conscious or
unconscious, personal or impersonal, is accepted by all schools alike;
the scientific law of the conservation of energy being one form of it
which human reason would now find it very difficult to deny.

Let us for one moment apply that law to our own individual lives and
consciousness.

Has life convinced us that we are all self-contained persons? Through
social contact we have undergone many changes, many damages, and
many repairs. Parts of us have gone to other people, parts of other
people have come, to us. We have shed and have absorbed quite as much
spiritually as materially; and though through our material changes we
retain a certain likeness, so that friends meeting us after a seven
years’ absence recognise us again in bodies no particle of which have
they ever seen before; and though similarly we can recognise our
inner selves across wider intervals of time, have we any reason to
suppose that our identity is more fixed in the spiritual substance
than in the material? For myself, I hope not. May one not prefer the
idea of interchange between life and life, to the notion that one is
to remain for ever fixed and self-possessed--a thing apart? The more
we are compounded of other lives, the more we have contributed to
the lives of others--the more can we recognise our entrance into the
only eternal life that we can demonstrably be sure about, or that can
(so it must seem to many of us), be sensibly desired or deserved. Is
Eternal Bliss, in the individual sense, a more tolerable doctrine than
eternal Hell-fire? Though, indeed, this latter may be but a scientific
statement of fact perverted and made foolish by the theologians.
For life, after all, is but a form of combustion for ever going on,
and outside of it we know nothing. No doubt the atoms of our being,
whether physical or spiritual, will forever form part of it; but I see
no reason why our spirits should not be as diffused, through proper
elemental changes, as our bodies are now being diffused from day to
day; or why I should repine that I personally shall not always be there
to preside over the operation and find it good. Even if, at the far end
of this earth’s history, everything is again to be reabsorbed in the
heat and light out of which it came, I can trust the suns and planets
to fulfil their mission of progress--or the will of God--quite as well
as, or better than, in my own small sphere I can trust Constitutional
Governments or Established Churches. And since these lesser lights,
in their foolish and providential dealings, do not confound my faith,
neither do the stars in their courses fight against it. Rather do they
confirm me in my sense that even the most acute perceptions with which
human life is endowed fail of themselves to justify me in any claim to
a larger lease of life than can naturally belong to them; for I see in
the universe things far greater than any individual man, doing service
and sustaining the life of countless millions, (which without them
could not live at all), without any prospect of so great a reward.

The eye of the sun itself is blind; and for ever, while it dazzles
us with its light, blind it must remain. Nay, what need has it for
sight at all, if in blindness it be able to fulfil its mission? And
yet implicit within its vast energies, there lies the gift of sight.
For that blind Eye of Heaven taught us to see; our substance came from
it, our eyes were made by it, and without it was not anything made on
earth that was made. And if, by this gift of sight, it has opened to us
so vast a space for our understanding to dwell in--bestowing so huge
a conception of life on this frail vessel of clay--if by so giving
of itself through long aeons of time it has opened to us so much more
than it knows itself, cannot we render back without grudging these
shorter, frailer lives of ours, whose brevity, perhaps, is the very
price required of us for their enjoyment, since without such limits our
far-reaching comprehension of space and its possessions could never
have been gained. Should there be any despair, or any depression in
the thought that from the blind eye of day and from the powers of its
heat was developed the human brain? For if from that apparent Blindness
of our Universe came really the eyes of life by which we perceive all
things, can we not commit our spirits back to its keeping with an
equal trust that what lies ahead will be at least as good as what lies
behind, though we be not there to see it?

But the law of the conservation of energy does not in the least satisfy
the aspirations of those who are out for personal immortality in the
individual sense. To these it seems a grievance that they should have
been called into being for any end not wholly satisfying to that
Ego which is now laying upon their consciousness the weight of its
possessive limitations. This separative quality of the Ego is to them
the whole principle of existence; without it they cannot see life.
To them, life in any less focused or more diffused form would be no
better than annihilation, an obvious setting-back of the evolutionary
process by which creation has led step by step to that degree of
self-consciousness realised in the human race.

Do not these objectors forget not merely how considerable a part of
human nature already moves and has its being on the lines of a diffused
and rather decentralised subconsciousness, but also how largely the
genius of the human race has committed to such conditions of separation
from all possible enjoyment by the Ego, some of the rarest gifts and
highest efforts at self-realisation that the world has ever seen? It
is a condition attaching to all the more permanent forms of expression
in the arts, to everything that man designs and makes for the delight
of the generations that come after. It is a condition willingly
accepted by all who rejoice in their power to throw the influence of
their personalities beyond the material uses of their own present
existence. And in that willingness to lose out of themselves for
future generations--to turn aside from mere physical enjoyment--the
life-forces within them, in that willingness artist, poet, and thinker,
have come far nearer to the finding of life than those who live
indulgently for ends finished by their own absorption thereof.

Now it is the supporters of the individualistic school of thought who
have generally urged that grave moral dangers would befall the human
race were a belief in personal immortality to perish; and it is at
least arguable (by minds that can only see values individually), that
if man is not to be permanently rewarded or punished for his present
and future conduct, he has no reason for conducting himself as a decent
part of the social whole, and that it would be better for him to break
out on entirely individual lines, live a short and merry life, and
throwing all altruistic and ethical considerations to the winds, enjoy
himself as much as he can while the material is to him.

On paper that consideration may seem to hold strong ground; but when it
is put into practice the facts of life are found to be overwhelmingly
against it. For one thing excess and self-indulgence fail to produce
enjoyment, for another the socialising of life by mutual aid tends
quite obviously to the increase of comfort, safety, and happiness. And
where apparently it does not is mainly at that point where rampant
individualism grasps and warps it to its own ends, making the social
organism subserve not the goodwill of the many but the ill-will of the
few.

But the ethical argument about the bad effects of non-belief in
personal immortality has been considerably discounted by the growing
sensitiveness of the modern conscience--more especially among those who
are in a serious sense “free-thinkers”--toward the social ills lying
around us. Generally speaking, our sense of duty toward our neighbour
is much more lively than it was in the mid-Victorian era; but our
conviction of personal immortality is probably far less. The two things
do not go together: the diminution of church attendance in the last
fifty years has not worsened the conditions of labour.

It may, however, be argued that an instinct for immortality is still
subconsciously at work within us, colouring our actions and directing
us on right ethical lines. But if it be a subconscious direction
which thus works in us for righteousness, it may equally be to a
subconscious end. The subconscious impulse may merely be guiding us to
a subconscious realisation which would not at all satisfy the advocates
of conscious immortality after death. What works subconsciously can in
all probability find satisfaction in a subconscious reward. The chemic
processes of the stomach and of the blood, for instance, are largely
subconscious in their operation; and their needs may be subconsciously
appeased without the brain being told anything about it through the
usual intermediaries of taste and mastication. We have a preference for
a conscious performance of the functions of life which we have always
been accustomed to perform consciously; but a very large proportion of
our life-functions work themselves out subconsciously and independently
of our will. Our hearts beat, our blood circulates, our nails grow,
our stomachs digest, our wounds heal, whether we tell them to or no,
and yet we are quite happy about them. We do not consider (because
they operate by a volition of which we are unaware), that therefore we
carry about with us a body of death from which our conscious ego must
needs shrink in disgust--a dead heart, dead stomach, dead blood--that
the unconsciousness which accompanies health is a state nearer to
annihilation, and so less to be desired, than the pains accompanying
functional disturbances.

When those things happen--functional disturbances--we are conscious
of something more immediately relating to death than to life: it is
because of local mortification that we become so much aware of things
which our immortal part helps us to use unconsciously and without
thought. Virtue itself, when engrained, tends to become instinctive and
subconscious instead of an effort.

There is quite as much evidence, therefore, in our own bodies that
unconsciousness is the real gate to immortal life, and the condition
toward which all that is best and highest in us is seeking, as of the
contrary teaching that increased self-consciousness is man’s final
goal. In the functional working of our own bodies an enormous amount of
self-consciousness has been eliminated, and we do not for our happiness
or self-realisation wish it restored to us; whole tracts and areas are
immune from it, or only make a spasmodic grab at our consciousness when
things go ill with them. “If you go on doing that,” they say, when
you misuse them, “we will make you know that we are here.” And so you
become conscious of them: but that doesn’t make you happier. Yet in a
sort of way, I suppose, a man would realise himself more completely if
he had sciatica all over him, and could count up his nerves, and tell
all his bones by the aches and pains attaching to them.

Now it is easy enough for a man to say (I think it was H. M. Stanley,
the explorer, who did say so) that he would rather endure torment for
all eternity than accept a state of annihilation. In thus protesting
he is talking through his hat of something too far beyond human
experience for the mind to realise. Toothache he has probably always
found bearable, because he knew that in course of time it would end. On
the other hand, sound dreamless sleep is probably not less bearable to
him because during that sleep he has not a ghost of a notion that he
will ever wake up again. He is carried, that is to say, every day of
his life while in health, into a state closely resembling annihilation
of consciousness, in which such annihilation has no terrors for him
at all; he accepts it as a comfortable part of existence, and goes to
it with delight when his faculties are tired. Its attractions for him
would naturally be less while all his senses were alert and fresh.

But the waking man is not the whole man; the subconscious life,
acquiescent to imposed conditions, occupies by far the larger part
of him. He can, therefore, only predicate the inclinations of his
waking hours; in sleep he may revert to a very strong affinity for that
annihilation of self-conscious life against which, in his waking hours,
he protests his dread.

And now a further word of comfort for those moral teachers who assure
us that if once we let go the idea of personal immortality, with its
accompanying implications of eternal reward or punishment, the conduct
of the human race is bound to degenerate, and that man’s only logical
motto will then be, “Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we
die.”

To refute that deduction we have but to remember that sociology is a
thing of ancestry and evolution, and has committed us to a weight of
facts against which precept and theory are powerless. We have only
to look back into Nature to see how persistently (without, one must
suppose, any promise of future reward after death) a contrary instinct
emerges from the establishment of the social bond in nest and herd and
hive. And why--if that emerging instinct leads on, in man’s reasoned
estimation, to foolishness--why do we so specially admire the communal
life of ant and bee, and incline sometimes to wonder whether (behind so
marvellous an order of altruistic energy) there be not concealed more
and not less of spiritual apprehension than in the more individualistic
forms of insect and animal life? And why, on the contrary, has the
wise cuckoo become a sort of byword for the singular economy with which
it has disentangled its life from care or responsibility?

It is surely very unfair thus to erect the cuckoo into a moral emblem
for reprobation, if it is only doing by instinct, what man would do by
reason and logic were the darkness of his own destiny made clear to him.

And similarly, it is surely disingenuous on our part to exalt as a
moral emblem the instinct of ant and bee to subordinate the life of the
individual to the general--if we deny to ant and bee the immortality
by which alone such altruism can be recompensed; or if we are to
believe that a clearer knowledge of their future lot would cause them
in logic and reason to declare that life on those terms was not worth
living, and that “to eat, drink, and die to-morrow” were better than to
live longer and labour for a vain repetition of lives like their own
indefinitely multiplied. It is ridiculous to impose the moral emblem
unless you grant also the justifying conditions.

Because the bee and the ant live unconscious of their impending doom,
are we, therefore, to regard them as a hoodwinked race, set to labour
at the dictates of the Creative capitalist on terms which contain in
them no adequate reward? Suppose, for a moment, that revelation could
descend upon ants’ nest and hive, and tell these workers that beyond
death the future held for them no store--that their immortality
was the immortality not of individual but of race; and suppose that
thereupon they all struck and went forth to die each singly in their
own way--would that moral emblem impress us, do you think, as a thing
worthy of imitation or of praise?

But why (let us think) is the predication of such an event so
impossible and so grotesque? Is it not because the life, the individual
life of ant or bee is so impregnated with that instinct of communalism
which gives the species its distinctive character, that it is
impossible to sunder them, or to imagine the individual capable (while
in the social _milieu_) of pursuing individual ends alone, after a
following, over millions of years, of life in the communal form. Life,
the thread of life which runs through them, is too much engrained with
communism for separatist principles ever again to prevail.

And surely it is the same with man. Individualism, separatism,
self-obsessionism, though still present in the phenomena of existence,
are more and more subject to qualifications from which they cannot
escape. And even the most evil form of individualism has to be
parasitic or predatory; it cannot exist alone; even against its
will it becomes conditioned by other lives. And the communal sense
of man, implicit within the innumerable forms of life through which
he has evolved, will continue to lay its hold on the parasitic and
the predatory, and will do so quite effectively on the basis of an
evolutionary past, the tendencies of which were established before ever
theological definitions came to give them impulse and strength.

Is it not almost ludicrous to suggest that that communal instinct
will cease to play, if the hope of individual reward after death is
withdrawn from the human race? Will man--because he is nobler than
the beast, because at his best he does things more altruistic, more
self-sacrificing, more self-forgetting, more self-transcending than any
of these--do less nobly because he envisages destiny, which (if he see
it as destiny) he will see as the logical outcome of evolutionary law?

It is possible, it is even probable, that all phases of theological
thought have had their use in giving direction and stimulus to the
human brain; if they have done nothing but stimulate rebellion against
obscurantist authority they have had value of a positive kind. But
we may go even further than this, for “everything possible to be
believed,” says Blake, “is an image of truth.” And under many a
concept, distorted by ignorance or guile, has lain a germ of the true
life which draws man on to communal ends. In time that germ puts off
the husk that seemed once (perhaps in some cases actually was) the
protective armoury through which alone it could survive for the use
of a later day. But though old reasons have been shed, the essential
value has not changed; and often it is less by logic and reason than
by the strong and subtle links of association that we preserve what is
good of past credulities.

The doctrine of conscious immortality, however much belittled by its
appeal to selfish individualism, has done a work for the human race.
It has held the germ of an ideal for unity which is receiving a more
universal interpretation to-day than the earlier theologians would ever
have allowed, or than man, in his then stage of development, could have
thought it worth while to hand on to his intellectual heirs. Perhaps
only because he conceived it in just such a form have its values been
preserved.

I am reminded in this connection of the method by which the wild swine
of the New Forest were taught to obey the voice of the horn by means
of which the swine-herd, called them back each night from their free
roaming in the forest. The way he did it was this. Having first formed
his herd, some four or five hundred strong, he penned them in a narrow
space where water and warm shelter were to be found; and there, in the
allotted enclosure, according them no liberty, he fed them daily to the
sound of the horn. Food and music became a sort of celestial harmony to
pig’s brain--when they heard the one, good reason was given them for
expecting the other.

Presently, in a well-fed condition, they were set free to roam; and
being full and satisfied they did not roam far; and at night the horn
sounded them back to an ample meal, and continued to sound while again
they ate and were satisfied.

So at last, by association, the horn came to have such a beneficent
meaning that the mere sound of it sufficed to bring them back at
nightfall to their appointed place of rest. They might roam for miles
and miles during the day, but night and the sound of the horn brought
them all back safe to fold. And when that habit had become established,
they did not cease to return even though the swineherd no longer
supplied the food which had first given music its charm to those savage
breasts.

And, similarly, I doubt not, that, though all hope of material profit
or reward be withdrawn from man’s mind, that call of the horn which
he has heard of old will still bring his spirit to the resting-place
at the appointed time; nor will he wish either to shorten his days or
debase his pleasures because the horn has ceased to provide the meal
which it once taught him to expect.

Do not let anything I have said be taken as suggesting that the
spiritual forces of man’s nature may not be conserved, transmuted,
re-assimilated, or re-distributed, as surely and with as little waste
as are the material elements of life which pass through disintegration
and decay into new forms. The processes by which such changes are
wrought may be, and may ever remain, a mystery to human sense. There
may be yet in the making a new order or plane of evolution by which
the process will be quickened and perfected. Soul of man may be in
the making, though it may be very far removed from that aspect of
individualism with which the anthropomorphic tendencies of theology
have burdened it. But--whether life thus rises by unknown law to
further ends, or whether it passes out, like the life of leaves, into
the general decay with which autumn each year fertilises the bed of
mother earth--of one thing I would ask you to be confident--that the
bandying of words and theories, and the discussion, tending this way
or that, of man’s destiny after death, are not in any way likely to
alter or to undo those forward-driving forces and communal desires with
which, from an inheritance of so many millions of years, the life of
humanity has become endowed. The will to live will still lift up the
race and carry it forward to new ends, whether man thinks he sees in
death the end of his personal existence, or only a new and a better
beginning. And whether he claims or resigns that prospect of reward he
will never be able to rid himself of the sense which revives after all
failures and crimes, that man is his brother-man--or be able to refrain
at his best from laying down his life, without calculation of personal
benefit to himself, so that others may live.

The highest manifestations of human genius, the most perfected forms
of self-realisation in art, in literature, and science, have been
given to us--and will continue to be given to us--independent of any
bargain that name and identity shall for ever remain attached thereto
while posterity enjoys the benefit. The artist might foresee that his
name would, in a brief time, become dissociated from his work, and his
memory blotted out from the book of the living; he would produce it all
the same. The reformer might know that his motives would be aspersed,
that his name would become after death a spitting and a reproach; but,
for the sake of the cause he believed in, he would still be willing to
die a dishonoured death and leave a reprobated name, to a world that
had failed to understand.

That is human nature at its best; and you will not change it or
endanger it through any increased doubt thrown by modern thought or
science on the prospect of conscious immortality after death. For
whether we recognise it or not, a subconscious spirit, not perhaps of
immortality but of unity, permeates us all; and for furtherance and
worship of that which his soul desires, the spirit of man will ever be
ready to work and strive, and to pass unconditionally into dust--if
that indeed be the condition on which he holds his birthright in a life
worth living.

W. H. Smith & Son, The Arden Press, Stamford Street, London, S.E.1

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|Transcriber’s note:                              |
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|Obvious typographic errors have been corrected.  |
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