You may at first feel inclined to pooh-pooh the notion that mere love
of beauty can help to bring about a better distribution of the world's
riches; and reasonably object that we cannot feed people on images and
impressions which multiply by sharing; they live on bread, and not on
the _idea_ of bread.
But has it ever struck you that, after all, the amount of material
bread--even if we extend the word to everything which is consumed for
bodily necessity and comfort--which any individual can consume is
really very small; and that the bad distribution, the shocking waste
of this material bread arises from being, so to speak, used
symbolically, used as spiritual bread, as representing those _ideas_
for which men hunger: superiority over other folk, power of having
dependants, social position, ownership, and privilege of all kinds?
For what are the bulk of worldly possessions to their owners: houses,
parks, plate, jewels, superfluous expenditure of all kinds [and armies
and navies when we come to national wastefulness]--what are all these
ill-distributed riches save _ideas_, ideas futile and ungenerous, food
for the soul, but food upon which the soul grows sick and corrupteth?
Would it not be worth while to reorganise this diet of ideas? To
reorganise that part of us which is independent of bodily sustenance
and health, which lives on spiritual commodities--the part of us
including ambition, ideal, sympathy, and all that I have called
_ideas_? Would it not be worth while to find such ideas as all people
can live upon without diminishing each other's share, instead of the
_ideas_, the imaginative satisfactions which each must refuse to his
neighbour, and about which, therefore, all of us are bound to fight
like hungry animals? Thus to reform our notions of what is valuable
and distinguished would bring about an economic reformation; or, if
other forces were needed, would make the benefits of such economic
reformation completer, its hardships easier to bear; and, altering our
views of loss and gain, lessen the destructive struggle of snatching
and holding.
Now, as I have been trying to show, beauty, harmony, fitness, are of
the nature of the miraculous loaves and fishes: they can feed
multitudes and leave basketfuls for the morrow.
But the desire for such spiritual food is, you will again object,
itself a rarity, a product of leisure and comfort, almost a luxury.
Quite true. And you will remember, perhaps, that I have already
remarked that they are not to be expected either from the poor in
material comfort, nor from the poor in soul, since both of these are
condemned, the first by physical wretchedness, the second by spiritual
inactivity, to fight only for larger shares of material bread; with
the difference that this material bread is eaten by the poor, and made
into very ugly symbols of glory by the rich.
But, among those of us who are neither hungry nor vacuous, there is
not, generally speaking, much attempt to make the best of our
spiritual privileges. We teach our children, as we were taught
ourselves, to give importance only to the fact of exclusiveness,
expense, rareness, already necessarily obtruded far too much by our
struggling, imperfect civilisation. We are indeed angry with little
boys and girls if they enquire too audibly whether certain people are
rich or certain things cost much money, as little boys and girls are
apt to do in their very far from innocence; but we teach them by our
example to think about such things every time we stretch a point in
order to appear richer or smarter than we are. While, on the contrary,
we rarely insist upon the intrinsic qualities for which things are
really valuable, without which no trouble or money would be spent on
them, without which their difficulty of obtaining would, as in the
case of Dr. Johnson's musical performance, become identical with
impossibility. I wonder how many people ever point out to a child that
the water in a tank may be more wonderful and beautiful in its beryls
and sapphires and agates than all the contents of all the jewellers'
shops in Bond Street? Moreover, we rarely struggle against the
standards of fashion in our habits and arrangements; which standards,
in many cases, are those of our ladies' maids, butlers, tradesfolk,
and in all cases the standards of our less intelligent neighbours.
Nay, more, we sometimes actually cultivate in ourselves, we superfine
and æsthetic creatures, a preference for such kinds of enjoyment as
are exclusive and costly; we allow ourselves to be talked into the
notion that solitary egoism, laborious self-assertion of ownership (as
in the poor mad Ludwig of Bavaria) is a badge of intellectual
distinction. We cherish a desire for the new-fangled and far-fetched,
the something no other has had before; little suspecting, or
forgetting, that to extract more pleasure not less, to enjoy the same
things longer, and to be able to extract more enjoyment out of more
things, is the sign of æsthetic vigour.