All civilisations known to us have sprung from peoples which were
numerous, wealthy and divided into two social strata. They reached
their climax at the moment when the two strata began to melt into one.
It is not enough, therefore, that a people should be numerous and
wealthy; it must, with all its wealth and its power, contain a large
proportion of poor and even oppressed and enslaved subjects. If it has
not got these, it must master and make use of other foreign cultures
as a substitute. That is what Rome did; it is what America is doing.
It is terrible, but comprehensible. For up to this point the
unconscious processes of Nature, the law of mutual strife, has
prevailed. So far, collective organizations have been beasts of prey;
only now are they about to cross the boundaries of the human order.
Comprehensible and explicable. For all creations of culture hold
together; one cannot pursue the cheaper varieties while renouncing the
more costly. There is no cheap culture. In their totality they demand
outlay, the most tremendous outlay known to history, the only outlay
by which human toil is recompensed, over and above the supply of
absolute necessaries.
The creations of civilisation, like all things living and dead, follow
on each other--plants, men, beasts and utensils have their sequence
generation after generation. Men must paint and look at pictures for
ten thousand years before a new picture comes into existence. Our
poetry and our research are the fruit of thousands of years. This is
no disparagement to genius in work and thought, genius is at once new,
ancient and eternal, even as the blossom is a new thing on the old
stem, and belongs to an eternal type. When we hear that a native in
Central Africa or New Zealand has produced an oil-painting we know
that somehow or other he must have got to Paris. When a European
artist writes or paints in Tahiti, what he produces is not a work of
Tahitian culture. When civilisation has withered away on some
sterilized soil, it can only be revived by new soil and foreign seed.
The continuity of culture, even in civilized times, can only, however,
be maintained by constant outlay, just as in arid districts a
luxuriant vegetation needs continuous irrigation. The flood of
Oriental wealth had to pour itself into Italy in order to bring forth
the bloom of Renaissance art. Thousands of patricians, hundreds of
temporal and spiritual princes, had to found and to adorn temples and
palaces, gardens, monuments, pageants, games and household goods in
order that art and science, schooling, mastership, discipleship and
tradition might grow up. The worship of foreign culture which
characterized Germany in the seventeenth and half of the eighteenth
centuries only meant that our soil was grown too poor to yield a crop
of its own. The culture of the Middle Ages remained international only
so long as the population of Europe was too sparse and the
opportunities of work too scanty to occupy local energies; even in the
thinly populated, Homeric middle-ages of Greece, the builder and the
poet were not settled in one place, they were wandering artists. If
to-day the Republic of Guatemala or Honduras should want a
senate-house or a railway-station they will probably send to London or
Paris for an architect.
Even technique in handicraft and industry, that typical art of
civilization, cannot dispense with a great and continuous outlay on
training, commissioning and marketing in order to maintain itself.
Although it has not happened yet, there is no reason why a Serb or a
Slovak should not make some important discovery if he has been trained
at a European University and learnt the technical tradition. That will
not, however, give rise to an independent and enduring Serbian or
Slovakian technique, even though the costliest Universities and
laboratories should be established in the country and foreign teachers
called to teach in them. After all that, one must have a market in the
country itself; expert purchasers, manufacturers, middle-men, a
trained army of engineers, craftsmen, masters, workmen and a foreign
market as well--in short, the technical atmosphere--in order to keep
up the standard of manufacture and production.
A poor country cannot turn out products of high value for a rich one;
it has not had the education arising from demand. In products relating
to sport and to comfort, for instance, England was a model, but in
France these products were ridiculously misunderstood and imitated
with silly adornments, while on the other hand French products of
luxury and art-industry were sought for by all countries. German wares
were considered to be cheap and nasty, until the land grew rich, and
brought about the co-operation of its forces of science and technique,
production and marketing, auxiliary industries and remote profits,
finance and commerce, education and training, judgment and criticism,
habits of life and a sense of comparative values.
But human forces need the same nurture, the same outlay and the same
high training, as institutions and material products. Delicate work
demands sensitive hands and a sheltered way of life; discovery and
invention demand leisure and freedom; taste demands training and
tradition, scientific thinking and artistic conception demand an
environment with an unbroken continuity of cultivation, thought and
intelligence. A dying civilisation can live for a while on the
existing humus of culture, on the existing atmosphere of thought, but
to create anew these elements of life is beyond its powers.
Do not let us deceive ourselves, but look the facts in the face! All
these excellent Canadians, with or without an academic degree, who
innocently pride themselves on a proletarian absence of prejudice, are
adoptive children of a plutocratic and aristocratic cultivation. It is
all the same even if they lay aside their stiff collars and
eye-glasses; their every word and argument, their forms of thought,
their range of knowledge, their strongly emphasized intellectuality
and taste for art and science, their whole handiwork and industry, are
an inheritance from what they supposed they had cast off and a tribute
to what they pretend to despise. Genuine radicalism is only to be
respected when it understands the connexion of things and is not
afraid of consequences. It must understand--and I shall make it
clear--that its rapid advance will kill culture; and the proper
conclusion is that it ought to despise culture, not to sponge on it.
The early Christians abolished all the heathen rubbish and
abominations, the early Radicals would have hurried, in the first
instance, to pick out the plums.
Culture and civilization, as we see, demand a continuous and enormous
outlay; an outlay in leisure, an outlay in working power, an outlay in
wealth. They need patronage and a market, they need the school, they
need models, tradition, comparison, judgment, intelligence,
cultivation, disposition, the right kind of nursery--an atmosphere.
One who stands outside it can serve it, often more powerfully with
his virgin strength than one who is accustomed to it--but he must be
carried along and animated by the breath of the same atmosphere.
Culture and civilization require a rich soil.
But the richness of the soil is not sufficient; culture must be based
upon, and increased by, contrast. Wealth must have at its disposal
great numbers of men who are poor and dependent. How otherwise shall
the outlay of culture be met? One man must have many at his disposal;
but how can he, if they are all his equals? The outlay will be large,
but it must be feasible; how can it, if the labour of thousands is not
cheap? The few, the exalted, must develop power and splendour, they
must offer types for imitation: how can they do that without a
retinue, without spectators, without the herd? A land of well-being,
that is to say, of equally distributed well-being, remains petty and
provincial. When a State and its authorities, councils of solid and
thrifty members of societies for this or that, take over the office of
a Mæcenas or a Medici, with their proposals, their calculations, their
objections, their control, then we get things that look like
war-memorials, waiting-rooms, newspaper-kiosks and drinking-saloons.
It was not always so? No; but even in the most penurious times it was
kings who were the patrons.
But if culture is such a poison-flower, if it flourishes only in the
swamp of poverty and under the sun of riches, it must and ought to be
destroyed. Our sentiment will no longer endure the happiness and
brilliance of the few growing out of the misery of the many; the days
of the senses are over, and the day of conscience is beginning to
dawn.
And now a timid and troubled puritanism makes itself heard: Is there
no middle way? Will not half-measures suffice? No, it will not do; let
this be said once for all as plainly as possible, you champions of the
supply of "bare necessities" who talk about "daily bread" and want to
butter it with the "noblest pleasures of art." It will not do!
No, half-measures will not do, nor quarter-measures. They might, if
the whole world, the sick, the healthy and the bloated all together
were of the same mind as ourselves. In Moscow it is said that people
are expecting the world-revolution every hour, but the world declines
to oblige. Therefore, if culture and civilization are to remain what
they were, is there nothing for it but with one wrench to tear the
poisoned garment from our body? Or--is there then an "or"? Let us see.
We have a long way before us. First of all we must know how rich or
how poor we and the world are going to be, on the day when there will
be no income without working for it and no rich people any more.
If our economic system made us self-supporting we might arrange
matters on the model of the Boer Republic which had all it needed, and
now and then traded a load of ostrich feathers for coffee and hymn
books. But we, alas! in order to find nourishment for twenty
millions[5] have to export blood and brains. And if, in order to buy
phosphates, we offer cotton stockings and night-caps as the highest
products of our artistic energies, and declare that they are all the
soundest hand-work--for in our "daily bread" economy we shall have
long forgotten how to work such devil's tools as the modern
knitting-machine--then people will reply to us: in the first place we
don't want night-caps, and if we did we can supply them for one-tenth
of the cost; and our cotton goods will be sent back to us as
unsaleable.
A world-trade, even of modest dimensions, can only be carried on upon
the basis of high technical accomplishment, but this height of
accomplishment cannot be attained on the basis of any penny-wise
economy. Whoever wills the part must also will the whole, but to this
whole belongs not merely the conception of a technique, but of a
civilization, and indeed of a culture. One might as well demand of a
music-hall orchestra which plays ragtime all the year round that once
in the year, and once only, on Good Friday, it should pull itself
together to give an adequate performance of the Passion Music of Bach.