Utopia of Usurers and other Essays
G >>
G. K. Chesterton >> Utopia of Usurers and other Essays
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 This eBook was produced by Mike Pullen
Utopia of Usurers and other Essays
by Gilbert Keith Chesterton
CONTENTS
A Song of Swords
Utopia of Usurers
I. Art and Advertisement
II. Letters and the New Laureates
III. Unbusinesslike Business
IV. The War on Holidays
V. The Church of the Servile State
VI. Science and the Eugenists
VII. The Evolution of the Prison
VIII. The Lash for Labour
IX. The Mask of Socialism
The Escape
The New Raid
The New Name
A Workman's History of England
The French Revolution and the Irish
Liberalism: A Sample
The Fatigue of Fleet Street
The Amnesty for Aggression
Revive the Court Jester
The Art of Missing the Point
The Servile State Again
The Empire of the Ignorant
The Symbolism of Krupp
The Tower of Bebel
A Real Dancer
The Dregs of Puritanism
The Tyranny of Bad Journalism
The Poetry of the Revolution
A SONG OF SWORDS
"A drove of cattle came into a village called Swords;
and was stopped by the rioters."--Daily Paper.
In the place called Swords on the Irish road
It is told for a new renown
How we held the horns of the cattle, and how
We will hold the horns of the devils now
Ere the lord of hell with the horn on his brow
Is crowned in Dublin town.
Light in the East and light in the West,
And light on the cruel lords,
On the souls that suddenly all men knew,
And the green flag flew and the red flag flew,
And many a wheel of the world stopped, too,
When the cattle were stopped at Swords.
Be they sinners or less than saints
That smite in the street for rage,
We know where the shame shines bright; we know
You that they smite at, you their foe,
Lords of the lawless wage and low,
This is your lawful wage.
You pinched a child to a torture price
That you dared not name in words;
So black a jest was the silver bit
That your own speech shook for the shame of it,
And the coward was plain as a cow they hit
When the cattle have strayed at Swords.
The wheel of the torrent of wives went round
To break men's brotherhood;
You gave the good Irish blood to grease
The clubs of your country's enemies;
you saw the brave man beat to the knees:
And you saw that it was good.
The rope of the rich is long and long--
The longest of hangmen's cords;
But the kings and crowds are holding their breath,
In a giant shadow o'er all beneath
Where God stands holding the scales of Death
Between the cattle and Swords.
Haply the lords that hire and lend
The lowest of all men's lords,
Who sell their kind like kine at a fair,
Will find no head of their cattle there;
But faces of men where cattle were:
Faces of men--and Swords.
UTOPIA OF USURERS
I. Art and Advertisement
I propose, subject to the patience of the reader, to devote two or three
articles to prophecy. Like all healthy-minded prophets, sacred and
profane, I can only prophesy when I am in a rage and think things look
ugly for everybody. And like all healthy-minded prophets, I prophesy in
the hope that my prophecy may not come true. For the prediction made by
the true soothsayer is like the warning given by a good doctor. And the
doctor has really triumphed when the patient he condemned to death has
revived to life. The threat is justified at the very moment when it is
falsified. Now I have said again and again (and I shall continue to say
again and again on all the most inappropriate occasions) that we must hit
Capitalism, and hit it hard, for the plain and definite reason that it is
growing stronger. Most of the excuses which serve the capitalists as
masks are, of course, the excuses of hypocrites. They lie when they claim
philanthropy; they no more feel any particular love of men than Albu felt
an affection for Chinamen. They lie when they say they have reached their
position through their own organising ability. They generally have to pay
men to organise the mine, exactly as they pay men to go down it. They
often lie about the present wealth, as they generally lie about their past
poverty. But when they say that they are going in for a "constructive
social policy," they do not lie. They really are going in for a
constructive social policy. And we must go in for an equally destructive
social policy; and destroy, while it is still half-constructed, the
accursed thing which they construct.
The Example of the Arts
Now I propose to take, one after another, certain aspects and departments
of modern life, and describe what I think they will be like in this
paradise of plutocrats, this Utopia of gold and brass in which the great
story of England seems so likely to end. I propose to say what I think
our new masters, the mere millionaires, will do with certain human
interests and institutions, such as art, science, jurisprudence, or
religion--unless we strike soon enough to prevent them. And for the sake
of argument I will take in this article the example of the arts.
Most people have seen a picture called "Bubbles," which is used for the
advertisement of a celebrated soap, a small cake of which is introduced
into the pictorial design. And anybody with an instinct for design (the
caricaturist of the Daily Herald, for instance), will guess that it was
not originally a part of the design. He will see that the cake of soap
destroys the picture as a picture; as much as if the cake of soap had been
used to Scrub off the paint. Small as it is, it breaks and confuses the
whole balance of objects in the composition. I offer no judgment here
upon Millais's action in the matter; in fact, I do not know what it was.
The important point for me at the moment is that the picture was not
painted for the soap, but the soap added to the picture. And the spirit
of the corrupting change which has separated us from that Victorian epoch
can be best seen in this: that the Victorian atmosphere, with all its
faults, did not permit such a style of patronage to pass as a matter of
course. Michael Angelo may have been proud to have helped an emperor or a
pope; though, indeed, I think he was prouder than they were on his own
account. I do not believe Sir John Millais was proud of having helped a
soap-boiler. I do not say he thought it wrong; but he was not proud of it.
And that marks precisely the change from his time to our own. Our
merchants have really adopted the style of merchant princes. They have
begun openly to dominate the civilisation of the State, as the emperors
and popes openly dominated in Italy. In Millais's time, broadly speaking,
art was supposed to mean good art; advertisement was supposed to mean
inferior art. The head of a black man, painted to advertise somebody's
blacking, could be a rough symbol, like an inn sign. The black man had
only to be black enough. An artist exhibiting the picture of a negro was
expected to know that a black man is not so black as he is painted. He
was expected to render a thousand tints of grey and brown and violet: for
there is no such thing as a black man just as there is no such thing as a
white man. A fairly clear line separated advertisement from art.
The First Effect
I should say the first effect of the triumph of the capitalist (if we
allow him to triumph) will be that that line of demarcation will entirely
disappear. There will be no art that might not just as well be
advertisement. I do not necessarily mean that there will be no good art;
much of it might be, much of it already is, very good art. You may put it,
if you please, in the form that there has been a vast improvement in
advertisements. Certainly there would be nothing surprising if the head
of a negro advertising Somebody's Blacking now adays were finished with as
careful and subtle colours as one of the old and superstitious painters
would have wasted on the negro king who brought gifts to Christ. But the
improvement of advertisements is the degradation of artists. It is their
degradation for this clear and vital reason: that the artist will work,
not only to please the rich, but only to increase their riches; which is a
considerable step lower. After all, it was as a human being that a pope
took pleasure in a cartoon of Raphael or a prince took pleasure in a
statuette of Cellini. The prince paid for the statuette; but he did not
expect the statuette to pay him. It is my impression that no cake of soap
can be found anywhere in the cartoons which the Pope ordered of Raphael.
And no one who knows the small-minded cynicism of our plutocracy, its
secrecy, its gambling spirit, its contempt of conscience, can doubt that
the artist-advertiser will often be assisting enterprises over which he
will have no moral control, and of which he could feel no moral approval.
He will be working to spread quack medicines, queer investments; and will
work for Marconi instead of Medici. And to this base ingenuity he will
have to bend the proudest and purest of the virtues of the intellect, the
power to attract his brethren, and the noble duty of praise. For that
picture by Millais is a very allegorical picture. It is almost a prophecy
of what uses are awaiting the beauty of the child unborn. The praise will
be of a kind that may correctly be called soap; and the enterprises of a
kind that may truly be described as Bubbles.
II. Letters and the New Laureates
In these articles I only take two or three examples of the first and
fundamental fact of our time. I mean the fact that the capitalists of our
community are becoming quite openly the kings of it. In my last (and
first) article, I took the case of Art and advertisement. I pointed out
that Art must be growing worse--merely because advertisement is growing
better. In those days Millais condescended to Pears' soap. In these days
I really think it would be Pears who condescended to Millais. But here I
turn to an art I know more about, that of journalism. Only in my ease the
art verges on artlessness.
The great difficulty with the English lies in the absence of something one
may call democratic imagination. We find it easy to realise an individual,
but very hard to realise that the great masses consist of individuals.
Our system has been aristocratic: in the special sense of there being only
a few actors on the stage. And the back scene is kept quite dark, though
it is really a throng of faces. Home Rule tended to be not so much the
Irish as the Grand Old Man. The Boer War tended not to be so much South
Africa as simply "Joe." And it is the amusing but distressing fact that
every class of political leadership, as it comes to the front in its turn,
catches the rays of this isolating lime-light; and becomes a small
aristocracy. Certainly no one has the aristocratic complaint so badly as
the Labour Party. At the recent Congress, the real difference between
Larkin and the English Labour leaders was not so much in anything right or
wrong in what he said, as in something elemental and even mystical in the
way he suggested a mob. But it must be plain, even to those who agree
with the more official policy, that for Mr. Havelock Wilson the principal
question was Mr. Havelock Wilson; and that Mr. Sexton was mainly
considering the dignity and fine feelings of Mr. Sexton. You may say they
were as sensitive as aristocrats, or as sulky as babies; the point is that
the feeling was personal. But Larkin, like Danton, not only talks like
ten thousand men talking, but he also has some of the carelessness of the
colossus of Arcis; "Que mon nom soit fletri, que la France soit libre."
A Dance of Degradation
It is needless to say that this respecting of persons has led all the
other parties a dance of degradation. We ruin South Africa because it
would be a slight on Lord Gladstone to save South Africa. We have a bad
army, because it would be a snub to Lord Haldane to have a good army.
And no Tory is allowed to say "Marconi" for fear Mr. George should say
"Kynoch." But this curious personal element, with its appalling lack of
patriotism, has appeared in a new and curious form in another department
of life; the department of literature, especially periodical literature.
And the form it takes is the next example I shall give of the way in which
the capitalists are now appearing, more and more openly, as the masters
and princes of the community.
I will take a Victorian instance to mark the change; as I did in the case
of the advertisement of "Bubbles." It was said in my childhood, by the
more apoplectic and elderly sort of Tory, that W. E. Gladstone was only a
Free Trader because he had a partnership in Gilbey's foreign wines. This
was, no doubt, nonsense; but it had a dim symbolic, or mainly prophetic,
truth in it. It was true, to some extent even then, and it has been
increasingly true since, that the statesman was often an ally of the
salesman; and represented not only a nation of shopkeepers, but one
particular shop. But in Gladstone's time, even if this was true, it was
never the whole truth; and no one would have endured it being the admitted
truth. The politician was not solely an eloquent and persuasive bagman
travelling for certain business men; he was bound to mix even his
corruption with some intelligible ideals and rules of policy. And the
proof of it is this: that at least it was the statesman who bulked large
in the public eye; and his financial backer was entirely in the background.
Old gentlemen might choke over their port, with the moral certainty that
the Prime Minister had shares in a wine merchant's. But the old gentleman
would have died on the spot if the wine merchant had really been made as
important as the Prime Minister. If it had been Sir Walter Gilbey whom
Disraeli denounced, or Punch caricatured; if Sir Walter Gilbey's favourite
collars (with the design of which I am unacquainted) had grown as large as
the wings of an archangel; if Sir Walter Gilbey had been credited with
successfully eliminating the British Oak with his little hatchet; if, near
the Temple and the Courts of Justice, our sight was struck by a majestic
statue of a wine merchant; or if the earnest Conservative lady who threw a
gingerbread-nut at the Premier had directed it towards the wine merchant
instead, the shock to Victorian England would have been very great indeed.
Haloes for Employers
Now something very like that is happening; the mere wealthy employer is
beginning to have not only the power but some of the glory. I have seen
in several magazines lately, and magazines of a high class, the appearance
of a new kind of article. Literary men are being employed to praise a big
business man personally, as men used to praise a king. They not only find
political reasons for the commercial schemes--that they have done for some
time past--they also find moral defences for the commercial schemers.
They describe the capitalist's brain of steel and heart of gold in a way
that Englishmen hitherto have been at least in the habit of reserving for
romantic figures like Garibaldi or Gordon. In one excellent magazine Mr.
T. P. O'Connor, who, when he likes, can write on letters like a man of
letters, has some purple pages of praise of Sir Joseph Lyons--the man who
runs those teashop places. He incidentally brought in a delightful
passage about the beautiful souls possessed by some people called Salmon
and Gluckstein. I think I like best the passage where he said that
Lyons's charming social acaccomplishments included a talent for "imitating
a Jew." The article is accompanied with a large and somewhat leering
portrait of that shopkeeper, which makes the parlour-trick in question
particularly astonishing. Another literary man, who certainly ought to
know better, wrote in another paper a piece of hero-worship about Mr.
Selfridge. No doubt the fashion will spread, and the art of words, as
polished and pointed by Ruskin or Meredith, will be perfected yet further
to explore the labyrinthine heart of Harrod; or compare the simple
stoicism of Marshall with the saintly charm of Snelgrove.
Any man can be praised--and rightly praised. If he only stands on two
legs he does something a cow cannot do. If a rich man can manage to stand
on two legs for a reasonable time, it is called self-control. If he has
only one leg, it is called (with some truth) self-sacrifice. I could say
something nice (and true) about every man I have ever met. Therefore, I
do not doubt I could find something nice about Lyons or Selfridge if I
searched for it. But I shall not. The nearest postman or cab-man will
provide me with just the same brain of steel and heart of gold as these
unlucky lucky men. But I do resent the whole age of patronage being
revived under such absurd patrons; and all poets becoming court poets,
under kings that have taken no oath, nor led us into any battle.
III. Unbusinesslike Business
The fairy tales we were all taught did not, like the history we were all
taught, consist entirely of lies. Parts of the tale of "Puss in Boots" or
"Jack and the Beanstalk" may strike the realistic eye as a little unlikely
and out of the common way, so to speak; but they contain some very solid
and very practical truths. For instance, it may be noted that both in
"Puss in Boots" and "Jack and the Beanstalk" if I remember aright, the
ogre was not only an ogre but also a magician. And it will generally be
found that in all such popular narratives, the king, if he is a wicked
king, is generally also a wizard. Now there is a very vital human truth
enshrined in this. Bad government, like good government, is a spiritual
thing. Even the tyrant never rules by force alone; but mostly by fairy
tales. And so it is with the modern tyrant, the great employer. The
sight of a millionaire is seldom, in the ordinary sense, an enchanting
sight: nevertheless, he is in his way an enchanter. As they say in the
gushing articles about him in the magazines, he is a fascinating
personality. So is a snake. At least he is fascinating to rabbits; and
so is the millionaire to the rabbit-witted sort of people that ladies and
gentlemen have allowed themselves to become. He does, in a manner, cast a
spell, such as that which imprisoned princes and princesses under the
shapes of falcons or stags. He has truly turned men into sheep, as Circe
turned them into swine.
Now, the chief of the fairy tales, by which he gains this glory and
glamour, is a certain hazy association he has managed to create between
the idea of bigness and the idea of practicality. Numbers of the
rabbit-witted ladies and gentlemen do really think, in spite of themselves
and their experience, that so long as a shop has hundreds of different
doors and a great many hot and unhealthy underground departments (they
must be hot; this is very important), and more people than would be needed
for a man-of-war, or crowded cathedral, to say: "This way, madam," and
"The next article, sir," it follows that the goods are good. In short,
they hold that the big businesses are businesslike. They are not. Any
housekeeper in a truthful mood, that is to say, any housekeeper in a bad
temper, will tell you that they are not. But housekeepers, too, are human,
and therefore inconsistent and complex; and they do not always stick to
truth and bad temper. They are also affected by this queer idolatry of
the enormous and elaborate; and cannot help feeling that anything so
complicated must go like clockwork. But complexity is no guarantee of
accuracy--in clockwork or in anything else. A clock can be as wrong as
the human head; and a clock can stop, as suddenly as the human heart.
But this strange poetry of plutocracy prevails over people against their
very senses. You write to one of the great London stores or emporia,
asking, let us say, for an umbrella. A month or two afterwards you
receive a very elaborately constructed parcel, containing a broken parasol.
You are very pleased. You are gratified to reflect on what a vast
number of assistants and employees had combined to break that parasol.
You luxuriate in the memory of all those long rooms and departments and
wonder in which of them the parasol that you never ordered was broken. Or
you want a toy elephant for your child on Christmas Day; as children, like
all nice and healthy people, are very ritualistic. Some week or so after
Twelfth Night, let us say, you have the pleasure of removing three layers
of pasteboards, five layers of brown paper, and fifteen layers of tissue
paper and discovering the fragments of an artificial crocodile. You smile
in an expansive spirit. You feel that your soul has been broadened by the
vision of incompetence conducted on so large a scale. You admire all the
more the colossal and Omnipresent Brain of the Organiser of Industry, who
amid all his multitudinous cares did not disdain to remember his duty of
smashing even the smallest toy of the smallest child. Or, supposing you
have asked him to send you some two rolls of cocoa-nut matting: and
supposing (after a due interval for reflection) he duly delivers to you
the five rolls of wire netting. You take pleasure in the consideration
of a mystery: which coarse minds might have called a mistake. It consoles
you to know how big the business is: and what an enormous number of people
were needed to make such a mistake.
That is the romance that has been told about the big shops; in the
literature and art which they have bought, and which (as I said in my
recent articles) will soon be quite indistinguishable from their ordinary
advertisements. The literature is commercial; and it is only fair to say
that the commerce is often really literary. It is no romance, but only
rubbish.
The big commercial concerns of to-day are quite exceptionally incompetent.
They will be even more incompetent when they are omnipotent. Indeed,
that is, and always has been, the whole point of a monopoly; the old and
sound argument against a monopoly. It is only because it is incompetent
that it has to be omnipotent. When one large shop occupies the whole of
one side of a street (or sometimes both sides), it does so in order that
men may be unable to get what they want; and may be forced to buy what
they don't want. That the rapidly approaching kingdom of the Capitalists
will ruin art and letters, I have already said. I say here that in the
only sense that can be called human, it will ruin trade, too.
I will not let Christmas go by, even when writing for a revolutionary
paper necessarily appealing to many with none of my religious sympathies,
without appealing to those sympathies. I knew a man who sent to a great
rich shop for a figure for a group of Bethlehem. It arrived broken. I
think that is exactly all that business men have now the sense to do.
IV. The War on Holidays
The general proposition, not always easy to define exhaustively, that the
reign of the capitalist will be the reign of the cad--that is, of the
unlicked type that is neither the citizen nor the gentleman--can be
excellently studied in its attitude towards holidays. The special
emblematic Employer of to-day, especially the Model Employer (who is the
worst sort) has in his starved and evil heart a sincere hatred of holidays.
I do not mean that he necessarily wants all his workmen to work until
they drop; that only occurs when he happens to be stupid as well as wicked.
I do not mean to say that he is necessarily unwilling to grant what he
would call "decent hours of labour." He may treat men like dirt; but if
you want to make money, even out of dirt, you must let it lie fallow by
some rotation of rest. He may treat men as dogs, but unless he is a
lunatic he will for certain periods let sleeping dogs lie.
But humane and reasonable hours for labour have nothing whatever to do
with the idea of holidays. It is not even a question of tenhours day and
eight-hours day; it is not a question of cutting down leisure to the space
necessary for food, sleep and exercise. If the modern employer came to
the conclusion, for some reason or other, that he could get most out of
his men by working them hard for only two hours a day, his whole mental
attitude would still be foreign and hostile to holidays. For his whole
mental attitude is that the passive time and the active time are alike
useful for him and his business. All is, indeed, grist that comes to his
mill, including the millers. His slaves still serve him in
unconsciousness, as dogs still hunt in slumber. His grist is ground not
only by the sounding wheels of iron, but by the soundless wheel of blood
and brain. His sacks are still filling silently when the doors are shut
on the streets and the sound of the grinding is low.
The Great Holiday
Now a holiday has no connection with using a man either by beating or
feeding him. When you give a man a holiday you give him back his body and
soul. It is quite possible you may be doing him an injury (though he
seldom thinks so), but that does not affect the question for those to whom
a holiday is holy. Immortality is the great holiday; and a holiday, like
the immortality in the old theologies, is a double-edged privilege. But
wherever it is genuine it is simply the restoration and completion of the
man. If people ever looked at the printed word under their eye, the word
"recreation" would be like the word "resurrection," the blast of a trumpet.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8