|I met a lady the other day who had travelled much and seen much, and
who talked with great vivacity about her experiences. But I noticed one
peculiarity about her. If I happened to say that I too had been, let us
say, to Tangier, her interest in Tangier immediately faded away and
she switched the conversation on to, let us say, Cairo, where I had not
been, and where therefore she was quite happy. And her enthusiasm about
the Honble. Ulick de Tompkins vanished when she found that I had had
the honour of meeting that eminent personage. And so with books and
curiosities, places and things--she was only interested in them so long
as they were her exclusive property. She had the itch of possession, and
when she ceased to possess she ceased to enjoy. If she could not have
Tangier all to herself she did not want it at all.
And the chief trouble in this perplexing world is that there are so many
people afflicted like her with the mania of owning things that really do
not need to be owned in order to be enjoyed. Their experiences must be
exclusive or they have no pleasure in them. I have heard of a man who
countermanded an order for an etching when he found that someone else
in the same town had bought a copy. It was not the beauty of the etching
that appealed to him: it was the petty and childish notion that he
was getting something that no one else had got, and when he found that
someone else had got it its value ceased to exist.
The truth, of course, is that such a man could never possess anything
in the only sense that matters. For possession is a spiritual and not a
material thing. I do not own--to take an example--that wonderful picture
by Ghirlandajo of the bottle-nosed old man looking at his grandchild. I
have not even a good print of it. But if it hung in my own room I could
not have more pleasure out of it than I have experienced for years. It
is among the imponderable treasures stored away in the galleries of the
mind with memorable sunsets I have seen and noble books I have read, and
beautiful actions or faces that I remember. I can enjoy it whenever I
like and recall all the tenderness and humanity that the painter saw in
the face of that plain old Italian gentleman with the bottle nose as he
stood gazing down at the face of his grandson long centuries ago. The
pleasure is not diminished by the fact that all may share this spiritual
ownership, any more than my pleasure in the sunshine, or the shade of
a fine beech, or the smell of a hedge of sweetbrier, or the song of the
lark in the meadow is diminished by the thought that it is common to
all.
From my window I look on the slope of a fine hill crowned with beech
woods. On the other side of the hill there are sylvan hollows of
solitude which cannot have changed their appearance since the ancient
Britons hunted in these woods two thousand years ago. In the legal sense
a certain noble lord is the owner. He lives far off and I doubt whether
he has seen these woods once in ten years. But I and the children of the
little hamlet know every glade and hollow of these hills and have them
for a perpetual playground. We do not own a square foot of them, but
we could not have a richer enjoyment of them if we owned every leaf on
every tree. For the pleasure of things is not in their possession but in
their use.
It was the exclusive spirit of my lady friend that Juvenal satirised
long ago in those lines in which he poured ridicule on the people who
scurried through the Alps, not in order to enjoy them, but in order to
say that they had done something that other people had not done. Even
so great a man as Wordsworth was not free from this disease of exclusive
possession. De Quincey tells that, standing with him one day looking at
the mountains, he (De Quincey) expressed his admiration of the scene,
whereupon Wordsworth turned his back on him. He would not permit anyone
else to praise _his_ mountains. He was the high priest of nature,
and had something of the priestly arrogance. He was the medium of
revelation, and anyone who worshipped the mountains in his presence,
except through him, was guilty of an impertinence both to him and to
nature.
In the ideal world of Plato there was no such thing as exclusive
possession. Even wives and children were to be held in common, and
Bernard Shaw to-day regards the exclusiveness of the home as the enemy
of the free human spirit. I cannot attain to these giddy heights of
communism. On this point I am with Aristotle. He assailed Plato's
doctrine and pointed out that the State is not a mere individual, but
a body composed of dissimilar parts whose unity is to be drawn “ex
dissimilium hominum consensu.” I am as sensitive as anyone about my
title to my personal possessions. I dislike having my umbrella stolen
or my pocket picked, and if I found a burglar on my premises I am sure I
shouldn't be able to imitate the romantic example of the good bishop in
“Les Misérables.” When I found the other day that some young fruit trees
I had left in my orchard for planting had been removed in the night I
was sensible of a very commonplace anger. If I had known who my Jean
Valjean was I shouldn't have asked him to come and take some more trees.
I should have invited him to return what he had removed or submit to
consequences that follow in such circumstances.
I cannot conceive a society in which private property will not be a
necessary condition of life. I may be wrong. The war has poured human
society into the melting pot, and he would be a daring person who
ventured to forecast the shape in which it will emerge a generation or
two hence. Ideas are in the saddle, and tendencies beyond our control
and the range of our speculation are at work shaping our future. If
mankind finds that it can live more conveniently and more happily
without private property it will do so. In spite of the Decalogue
private property is only a human arrangement, and no reasonable observer
of the operation of the arrangement will pretend that it executes
justice unfailingly in the affairs of men. But because the idea of
private property has been permitted to override with its selfishness the
common good of humanity, it does not follow that there are not limits
within which that idea can function for the general convenience and
advantage. The remedy is not in abolishing it altogether, but in
subordinating it to the idea of equal justice and community of purpose.
It will, reasonably understood, deny me the right to call the coal
measures, which were laid with the foundations of the earth, my private
property or to lay waste a countryside for deer forests, but it will
still leave me a legitimate and sufficient sphere of ownership. And the
more true the equation of private and public rights is, the more secure
shall I be in those possessions which the common sense and common
interest of men ratify as reasonable and desirable. It is the grotesque
and iniquitous wrongs associated with a predatory conception of private
property which to some minds make the idea of private property itself
inconsistent with a just and tolerable social system. When the idea of
private property is restricted to limits which command the sanction of
the general thought and experience of society, it will be in no danger
of attack. I shall be able to leave my fruit trees out in the orchard
without any apprehensions as to their safety.
But while I neither desire nor expect to see the abolition of private
ownership, I see nothing but evil in the hunger to possess exclusively
things, the common use of which does not diminish the fund of enjoyment.
I do not care how many people see Tangier: my personal memory of the
experience will remain in its integrity. The itch to own things for the
mere pride of possession is the disease of petty, vulgar minds. “I do
not know how it is,” said a very rich man in my hearing, “but when I
am in London I want to be in the country and when I am in the country I
want to be in London.” He was not wanting to escape from London or the
country, but from himself. He had sold himself to his great possessions
and was bankrupt. In the words of a great preacher “his hands were full
but his soul was empty, and an empty soul makes an empty world.” There
was wisdom as well as wit in that saying of the Yoloffs that “he who was
born first has the greatest number of old clothes.” It is not a bad rule
for the pilgrimage of this world to travel light and leave the luggage
to those who take a pride in its abundance.
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