The purple pomp of kings, blatant though it be in comparison with true grandeur, is at least the expression of a public dignity: it is an official costume like the judge’s wig and gown. But because greatness must accept office at the hands of its otherwise helpless inferiors, and office must be suitably apparelled, a certain confusion has been established between splendour and greatness, as though because greatness means splendour, splendour must mean greatness. Of this confusion those are promptest to take advantage to whom the high road to consideration is closed. Private pomp is a confession of personal pettiness. The little soul must needs inflate itself by a great house-shell, and protract itself by a long retinue of servants. ’Tis almost too pathetic a meekness, this humility of the Magnificent Ones.
Cannot I breathe into you—O Magnificent Ones—a little proper pride? Ye buy the Past, watching one another in jealous competition; will no one buy the Future? Why not buy with your millions an earth renewed and regenerated, a solvent social order? Why not build a true civilisation on this malarious marsh, that shall rise like the spires and domes of Venice from her swamps? Surely that were a dream worthy of Magnificence! Come, let us build together a State-Galley where the oars shall be red and gold from blade to handle, and every man shall take his turn at them, and the fantasies of Art shall adorn the hull of Righteousness, and Justice and Peace shall no longer be ironic images carved for the complacency of the top-deck. So shall there dawn an Ascension Day on which the Doge shall go out with banners and music, not to marry the sea with a ring, but to celebrate the nuptials of Earth with Heaven.
Private pomp is surely a questionable thing. Mediæval life centred round the Cathedral, the Castle, the Palace. And the masses touched the life at each and all. The Cathedral gave them their religion, their laws came from the Palace, their protection from the Castle. Dominating a feudal population, the towers of law and war uplifted and unified the people. The lowliest were of this greatness. To-day palaces flaunt themselves, divorced from moral meaning, magnificence without significance. The world, as I said, is full of private autocrats, without duties or dangers: an unhappy consequence of the fall of feudalism, ere a system as human was ready to replace it. And to-day the Cathedral is our one feudal relic, reconciling magnificence with morality: the light streaming through the rose-window haloes the grey head of the market-woman, and her prayer equals that of the Magnificent One himself. It is significant that no villa—whoever the architect—can attain the poetic quality of the simplest village church. The palace of Moses is nowhere mentioned, but we read many minute instructions concerning the Tabernacle and the Temple. In truth, art treasures are essentially public: the furniture of cathedrals, libraries, law-courts, market-places, and parks. The owners of collections do indeed often allow the public to visit them at inconvenient times, but that anybody should have exclusive rights is an absurdity. If Art were a form of property like any other, the owner could destroy it, and the righteous indignation of the world at the destruction of a Botticelli or a Velasquez would mark the boundaries of private property. Land comes under the same canon. Nothing, perhaps, should be owned which might not be destroyed at will.
In literature and music—which are more spirits than bodies, and which can be multiplied without loss—monopolies are unnecessary. If I write a book against Socialism, the world will applaud, and communistically possess itself thereof after a brief term. And this legal limitation of copyright which forcibly wrests epics, operas, and novels from the heirs might be extended to pictures and statues.
II
But if the galley of old Venice stimulates my Socialism, the cinematograph of modern Venice torpifies it again. For be it known that in Venice there are scores of halls and theatres devoted to delectable visions at prices to suit the poorest, and open to ragazzi for a couple of soldi. And in every city of Italy the fever rages; one performance follows on the heels of another, and the wretched manipulator of the magic lantern must subsist on sandwiches while the theatre is clearing and re-filling. Every unlet dancing-hall or decayed rink or bankrupt building has blossomed out into a hall of enchantment where even the words of the play are sometimes given by the cunning juxtaposition of gramophones. In this way I heard Amletto, or the Prince of Denmark, its too, too solid flesh melted into a meat extract. But the most wonderful spectacle of all was soundless, save for the flowing music. For twenty centesimi the Teatro S. Marco passed before my eyes an exquisite vision of Le Ore—the hours in ten “Quadri animati,” from the shiver of light that precedes the dawn to the last falling of night. In the Sala d’Aurora of the Castle of Ferrara, Dosso Dossi has depicted Tramonto, Notte, L’Aurora and Mezzogiorno, but not more poetically than the modern stage-manager who arranged these living pictures. As I watched these allegorical groupings of nymphs and fauns by their stream in the glade, I felt that the old pagan religion still lingered in the souls that could conceive and enjoy this nature-poetry.
And as I sat here, amid Venetian washerwomen and street boys, it was further borne in upon me that no State Bureau would ever have begotten this marvel for the joy and uplifting of the people, and that in the present imperfection of human nature individual initiative under the spur of gold or hunger could alone work these miracles of Socialism. “La propriété c’est la vol,” said Proudhon, but “vol” in his sense implies a bullish acceptance of the very conception he is combating. Let us translate it by “flight.” Property is the impulse of the aeroplane.
Therefore pray do not count my aspiration for a solvent social order as an adhesion to any cut and dried theory of the State owning and administering all social resources. For that sort of Socialism is—like science—bankrupt, even before it begins. It fails, not merely because it would substitute an external arrangement for a change of heart—and Socialism will either be a religion or will not be—but because no external arrangement is possible. The collective ownership of land and capital is feasible in Juan Fernandez so long as Robinson Crusoe and Friday continue exiled from civilisation, but impossible in our world of international finance, where private ownership extends to countries which the property holder will never even visit. Unless, therefore, every country in the world simultaneously adopted Socialism, there would be an inextricable tangle of Socialism and Individualism. Not to mention that capital—as every shareholder knows—means men as much as money. But even in Juan Fernandez, as soon as it became thickly populated, Socialism would be unmanageable, because the stock of concentrable human consciousness is insufficient to arrange a social order from a central bureau. Omniscience alone would be equal to the task, not to mention All Goodness and All Wisdom. Despite the vast loss by friction and absence of organisation, despite the vast suffering, the struggle for existence is the only agency capable of fitting the pegs into the holes. Shall the State, for example, select which man shall write poetry? And still more vital, which poetry the State Press shall print? We have already had experience of the State as a selector of Laureates and a censor of drama, and Milton knew it as a censor of literature. Our most brilliant Socialists, an they had their way, would be reduced to pasting pasquinades on the pedestals of our street statues.
But in a looser connotation, “we are all Socialists now,” if indeed we ever were anything else. From the day of the first human grouping for co-operation and common defence, Socialism has been the rule of life, and the question of how the common work and the common products are to be apportioned is a mere question of organised distribution. That we have hitherto left this cumbrous and infinitely complex problem of distribution to solve itself by natural selection does not make society less socialistic. Nor would the discovery of a more excellent way of dividing up the labour and its results make society more socialistic. For compared with the assets of civilisation in which we share equally—the museums, picture galleries, libraries, parks, roads, schools, life-boat and fire-engine services, armies, navies, light-houses, weather-bureaus, asylums, hospitals, observatories—the assets in which we share unequally are relatively unimportant, and without sacrificing to a machine the zest and stimulus of liberty, and the fine flavour of individuality, it is a comparatively simple matter to minimise the waste and suffering produced by the struggle for existence, and to arrange that talent shall rise to the top, not for its sake but our own. It is no evil that one man should live in a palace and another in a cottage; these differences even add to the colour and joy of life. The evil is solely that any man willing to work should lack a cottage, or that the cottage should be a malarious hovel. Levelling up is the only reform necessary, as it is the only reform possible. For if the gradual consolidation of railways, land, mines, and a few leading industries in the hands of the State is not beyond practical politics, this would still be very far from “Socialism,” and it is vastly amusing to witness the agony of apprehension with which respectable society looks forward to the advent of a social order which cannot possibly materialise, and which menaces us less than the flaming tail of a comet. Only less amusing is the awe with which society regards Property as something sacrosanct in quality and immutable in quantity. Why, even the King’s shilling is as nimble and elusive as mercury, will buy you mutton to-day and only tripe to-morrow, and scarcely run to dog-sausage in a siege. Property is a Proteus, a shadow, a transient and generally embarrassed phantom. Property merely means a potential call upon human service—past or future—and if human service is unwilling or absent, Property shrinks or collapses, like the bag of pearls found by the thirsting Arab in the desert. Finance—like all other branches of science—has been treated as though its subject-matter had absolute existence. But the assets of the world’s bankers incalculably outrun the world’s power of service, and Property is merely a promissory note which can only be redeemed if there is not too great a run upon the labour bank at which it is presented. Still more elastic is the service that produces this right to call upon the service of others. A hundred thousand readers buy this book—instead of borrowing it—and I am a Crœsus; a hundred, and I am free of income tax. Motor cars are invented, and my house in Ascot falls to half its former value because the smart set need no longer stay overnight during the Ascot week. My unknown aunt remembers me in her will and I am a thousand pounds the richer. The Seine rises and my Paris flat is a ruin. I die and my land dwindles to six feet. Where in this foolish flux is room for holiness? And why may not society—the only source of values—mould Property as it will for society’s ends? Why—among the many vicissitudes with which Property must reckon—should not social reform count equally with bad harvests, wars of conquest and Stock Exchange manœuvres?
To say that Property is sacred is to confuse the means with the end, like the miser who hoards his gold and forgets its uses. Society is sacred, not Property, and whatever sanctitude or stability has been attached to Property has been attached entirely for socialistic purposes; not that the individual may be enriched, but that he may not lose the spur that drives him to enrich society. Individual property is merely a by-product of labour for society. He who demands overmuch for his labour is under-moralised. The true citizen is anxious to be taxed for the general good, provided his taxes are used for social service. He is anxious that some form of distribution of the common products shall be organised to supplement natural selection and correct its over-harshness. Experience might prove that interference with natural selection saps the stamina and initiative of society more than it benefits the “submerged tenth,” in which case we should reluctantly return to the present form of Socialism.