[20] Even the characteristic conditions of writing books, that least
mechanical of pursuits, have been profoundly affected by the typewriter.
[21] To these two primary classes the more complicated societies have
added others. There is the priest, almost always in the social order of
the pre-railway period, an integral part, a functional organ of the
social body, and there are the lawyer and the physician. And in the
towns--constituting, indeed, the towns--there appear, as an outgrowth of
the toiling class, a little emancipated from the gentleman's direct
control, the craftsman, the merchant, and the trading sailor,
essentially accessory classes, producers of, and dealers in, the
accessories of life, and mitigating and clouding only very slightly that
broad duality.
[22] Slight, that is, in comparison with nineteenth-century changes.
[23] It included, one remembers, Schopenhauer, but, as he remarked upon
occasion, not Hegel.
[24] A very important factor in this mitigation, a factor over which the
humanely minded cannot too greatly rejoice, will be the philanthropic
amusements of the irresponsible wealthy. There is a growing class of
energetic people--organizers, secretaries, preachers--who cater to the
philanthropic instinct, and who are, for all practical purposes,
employing a large and increasing section of suitable helpless people, in
supplying to their customers, by means of religious acquiescence and
light moral reforms, that sense of well-doing which is one of the least
objectionable of the functionless pleasures of life. The attempts to
reinstate these failures by means of subsidized industries will, in the
end, of course, merely serve to throw out of employment other just
subsisting strugglers; it will probably make little or no difference in
the nett result of the process.
[25] I reserve any consideration of the special case of the "priest."
[26] I find it incredible that there will not be a sweeping revolution
in the methods of building during the next century. The erection of a
house-wall, come to think of it, is an astonishingly tedious and complex
business; the final result exceedingly unsatisfactory. It has been my
lot recently to follow in detail the process of building a private
dwelling-house, and the solemn succession of deliberate, respectable,
perfectly satisfied men, who have contributed each so many days of his
life to this accumulation of weak compromises, has enormously
intensified my constitutional amazement at my fellow-creatures. The
chief ingredient in this particular house-wall is the common brick,
burnt earth, and but one step from the handfuls of clay of the ancestral
mud hut, small in size and permeable to damp. Slowly, day by day, the
walls grew tediously up, to a melody of tinkling trowels. These bricks
are joined by mortar, which is mixed in small quantities, and must vary
very greatly in its quality and properties throughout the house. In
order to prevent the obvious evils of a wall of porous and irregular
baked clay and lime mud, a damp course of tarred felt, which cannot
possibly last more than a few years, was inserted about a foot from the
ground. Then the wall, being quite insufficient to stand the heavy drift
of weather to which it is exposed, was dabbled over with two coatings of
plaster on the outside, the outermost being given a primitive
picturesqueness by means of a sham surface of rough-cast pebbles and
white-wash, while within, to conceal the rough discomfort of the
surface, successive coatings of plaster, and finally, paper, were added,
with a wood-skirting at the foot thrice painted. Everything in this was
hand work, the laying of the bricks, the dabbing of the plaster, the
smoothing of the paper; it is a house built of hands--and some I saw
were bleeding hands--just as in the days of the pyramids, when the only
engines were living men. The whole confection is now undergoing
incalculable chemical reactions between its several parts. Lime, mortar,
and microscopical organisms are producing undesigned chromatic effects
in the paper and plaster; the plaster, having methods of expansion and
contraction of its own, crinkles and cracks; the skirting, having
absorbed moisture and now drying again, opens its joints; the rough-cast
coquettes with the frost and opens chinks and crannies for the humbler
creation. I fail to see the necessity of (and, accordingly, I resent
bitterly) all these coral-reef methods. Better walls than this, and
better and less life-wasting ways of making them, are surely possible.
In the wall in question, concrete would have been cheaper and better
than bricks if only "the men" had understood it. But I can dream at last
of much more revolutionary affairs, of a thing running to and fro along
a temporary rail, that will squeeze out wall as one squeezes paint from
a tube, and form its surface with a pat or two as it sets. Moreover, I
do not see at all why the walls of small dwelling-houses should be so
solid as they are. There still hangs about us the monumental traditions
of the pyramids. It ought to be possible to build sound, portable, and
habitable houses of felted wire-netting and weather-proofed paper upon a
light framework. This sort of thing is, no doubt, abominably ugly at
present, but that is because architects and designers, being for the
most part inordinately cultured and quite uneducated, are unable to cope
with its fundamentally novel problems. A few energetic men might at any
time set out to alter all this. And with the inevitable revolutions that
must come about in domestic fittings, and which I hope to discuss more
fully in the next paper, it is open to question whether many ground
landlords may not find they have work for the house-breakers rather than
wealth unlimited falling into their hands when the building leases their
solicitors so ingeniously draw up do at last expire.
[27] The new aspects of building, for example, that have been brought
about by the entrance of water and gas into the house, and the
application of water to sanitation.
[28] The future of the servant class and the future of the artist are
two interesting questions that will be most conveniently mentioned at a
later stage, when we come to discuss the domestic life in greater detail
than is possible before we have formed any clear notion of the sort of
people who will lead that life.
[29] Even the physical conditions under which the House of Commons meets
and plays at government, are ridiculously obsolete. Every disputable
point is settled by a division, a bell rings, there is shouting and
running, the members come blundering into the chamber and sort
themselves with much loutish shuffling and shoving into the division
lobbies. They are counted, as illiterate farmers count sheep; amidst
much fuss and confusion they return to their places, and the tellers
vociferate the result. The waste of time over these antics is enormous,
and they are often repeated many times in an evening. For the lack of
time, the House of Commons is unable to perform the most urgent and
necessary legislative duties--it has this year hung up a cryingly
necessary Education Bill, a delay that will in the end cost Great
Britain millions--but not a soul in it has had the necessary common
sense to point out that an electrician and an expert locksmith could in
a few weeks, and for a few hundred pounds, devise and construct a
member's desk and key, committee-room tapes and voting-desks, and a
general recording apparatus, that would enable every member within the
precincts to vote, and that would count, record, and report the votes
within the space of a couple of minutes.