The question remains, "Who is the tramp?" Who is the walking person
seen from the vantage ground of these pages? He is necessarily a
masked figure; he wears the disguise of one who has escaped, and also
of one who is a conspirator. He is not the dilettante literary person
gone tramping, nor the pauper vagabond who writes sonnets, though
either of these rôles may be part of his disguise. He is not merely
something negligible or accidental or ornamental, he is something real
and true, the product of his time, at once a phenomenon and a portent.
He is the walking hermit, the world-forsaker, but he is above all
things a rebel and a prophet, and he stands in very distinct relation
to the life of his time.
The great fact of the human world to-day is the tremendous commercial
machine which is grinding out at a marvellous acceleration the smaller
and meaner sort of man, the middle class, the average man, "the
damned, compact, liberal majority," to use the words of Ibsen, and
the world daily becomes "more _Chinese_". The rocks are fraying one
another down to desert sand, and mankind becomes a new Sahara.
But over and against the commercial machine stand the rebels, the
defiers of it, those who wish to limit its power, to redeem some of
the slaves, and to rebuild the temples which it has broken down.
Commercialism is at present the great enemy of the individual man. One
already reads in leading articles such phrases as "our commercial,
national, and imperial welfare"--commercial first, national second,
imperial third, and spiritual nowhere.
Commercialism has already subdued the Church of Christ in Western
Europe, it has disorganised the forces of art, and it tends to deny
the living sources of religion, art, and life.
It remains for the rebel to assert that even though the name and idea
of Christianity be sold--as was its Founder--for silver, though it
be rendered an impotent and useless word, yet there is in mankind a
religion which is independent of all names and all words, a spring of
living water that may be subterraneanised for a while, but can never
be altogether dammed and stopped; that there is an art which shall
blossom through all ages, either in the secret places of the world or
in the open, in the place of honour, as long as man lives upon the
world.
And he does more than assert, than merely wind upon his horn outside
the gates of the enchanted city, he is a builder, collector, saver.
He wishes to find the few who, in this fearful commercial submersion,
ought to be living the spiritual life, and showing forth in blossom
the highest significance of the Adam tree. He himself lives the life
which more must of necessity live, if only as a matter of salt to save
the body politic.
It has been urged, "You are unpracticable; you want a world of
tramps--how are you going to live?" But we no more want a world of
tramps than the promiser of new life wants a world of promisers: we
want a world that will take the life promised.
As I have said, we want first of all the few, the hermits, saints, the
altogether lovely men and women, the blossoming of the race. It is
necessary that these be found or that they find themselves, and that
they take their true orbits and live their true lives; for all the
rest of ordinary humanity is waiting to live its life in relation to
these. The few must live their lives out to the full in order that all
others may live their lives completely; for the temple of humanity has
not only the broad floor, but the Cross glittering above the pinnacle.
The night is dark, but there is plenty of hope for the future; the
very extremity of our calamity is something that bids us hope. Fifty
years ago nobody would listen to a gospel of rebellion, and such a
great man as Carlyle was actually preaching that to labour is to pray.
To-day men are ready to lay down their working tools and listen to any
insurrectionist, so aware has mankind become of an impending spiritual
bankruptcy. Never in any preceding generation has the young
man standing on the threshold of life felt more unsettled. His
unsettlement has frequently turned to frenzy and anarchy in individual
cases. Never has he cast his eyes about more desperately for a way of
redemption or a spiritual leader. For him, as for all of us, the one
requirement is to find out what is the _first_ thing to do; not the
nearest, but the _first_, the most essential; the one after which all
other things naturally take their places.
It is not to wreck the great machine, for that would be to rush to the
other extreme of ruin and disorder. It is not even, as I think, to
build a new machine, for that would be to enter into a wasteful
competition wherein we should spend without profit and with much loss
of brotherly love, all our patience and our new desires.
The one way and the first way is to use and subordinate the present
machine, to limit it to its true domain, and let it be our true and
vital servant.
But how?
By finding the few who can live the life of communion, the few who
can show forth the true significance of the race. By saving our most
precious thoughts and ideals, and adding them to the similar thoughts
and ideals of others, by putting the instruments of education in their
proper places, by separating and saving in the world of literature and
art the expressions of beauty which are valuable to the coming race,
as distinguished from those that are merely sold for a price. By the
making solitary, which is making sacred.
For instance, I would have the famous and wonderful pictures now
foiling and dwarfing one another in our vulgar galleries, distributed
over the Western world. I wish their enfranchisement. Each great
picture should be given a room to itself, like the Sistine Madonna,
not only a room but a temple like that of the Iverskaya at Moscow, not
only a temple but a fair populous province. The great pictures should
be objects of pilgrimages, and their temples places of prayer. In the
galleries, as is obvious, the pictures are at their smallest, their
glory pressed back into themselves or overlapped or smudged by the
confusing glory of others. Out in the wide world, enshrined in
temples, these pictures would become living hearts, they would have
arms dealing out blessings, they would outgrow again till their
influence was as wide as the little kingdoms in which they were
enshrined. Pictures would again work miracles. What is more, great
pictures would again be painted.
This illustration is valuable allegorically. Great pictures are very
like great souls, very like great and beautiful ideas. What is true
for pictures is true for men.
The men who feel in themselves the instinct for the new life must take
steps to make space for themselves and to make temples. Where they
find the beautiful, the real, they must take it to themselves and
protect it from enemies, they must at once begin to build walls of
defence. So great is their responsibility and so delicate their charge
that they must challenge no one, and invite no discussion and no
hostility. They must have and hold their own beautiful life as they
would a fair young bride.
Where they have visions they must build temples, as the Russian
mouzhiks build churches and put up crosses. Of course I do not mean
material temples, but temples not made by hands, temples of spirit,
temples of remembrance. Where they read in books sacred pages they
must make these pages sacred, sacred for them. Where they find men
noble they must have reference to the noble part of them and deny the
other. They have to win back the beautiful churches and cathedrals.
Often it is said nowadays, "Such and such a church is wonderful and
its service lifts one to heaven, but the clergyman and his sermon are
impossible." But though a clergyman can condition his congregation it
is much more true that the congregation can condition the clergyman.
It is written, "Where two or three are gathered together in My Name,
there am I in the midst of them." When they in the pews are those in
white robes, then He in the pulpit is the Christ Himself.
In literature we have to differentiate what is purely a commercial
product like the yellowback novel, what is educational like the
classic, and what is of the new. With the commercial we have of course
no traffic; the classic is a place for those still learning what has
already been said, a place for orientisation, for finding out where
one stands. In this category are the Shakespearean performances at the
theatre. In any case the classic is necessarily subordinate to the new
literature, the literature of pioneering and discovery, the literature
of ourselves. It is the school which prepares for the stepping forth
on the untrodden ways.
This fencing off, differentiation and allocation, these defences of
the beautiful and new, and of the temples enshrining them, shall
be like the walls round a new sanctuary. We shall thereby protect
ourselves from the encroaching commercial machine, its dwarfing
ethics, mean postulates, and accurst conventions, and we shall rear
within the walls all the beautiful that the outside world says does
not exist. We shall find a whole new world of those who despise the
honours and prizes of the commercial machine, and who care not for
the shows, diversions, pleasures, and gambles provided for commercial
slaves. But it will not cause those of that world to falter if the
great multitude of their fellow-men scoff at them or think that they
miss life.
Our work is then to separate off and consecrate the beautiful, to
bring the beautiful together and organise it, not renouncing the
machine, but only taking from it the service necessary for our
physical needs, in no case being ruled or guided by it or its
exigencies. When we have accomplished that, a miracle is promised. The
outside world will take shape against our walls and receive its life
through our gates--it will come into relation to us even to the ends
of the earth. The new heart means the salvation of all.
With that we necessarily return to ourselves, the out-flung units of
modern life, tramps so called, rebels, hermits, the portents of the
new era, the first signs of spring after dark winter; some of us, the
purely lyrical, spring flowers; others the prophetic and dynamic,
spring winds--who blowing, shall blow upon winter, as Nietzsche says,
"with a thawing wind."
We are many: I speak for thousands who are voiceless. But we are
feeble, for we know not one another: we shall know.
A new summer is coming and a new adventure; and summer, as all know,
is the year itself, the other seasons being purely subordinate. We are
as yet but February heralds. Nevertheless we ask, standing without the
gates of the sleeping city of winter, "Who of ye within the city are
stepping forth unto the new adventure?" Strange powers are to them;
the mysterious spells of the earth, the renewal of inspiration at the
life source, the essence of new summer colours, the idea of new summer
shapes. To the young men and women of to-day there is a chance to be
as beautiful as it is possible to be upon this little earth, a chance
to find all the significance of life and beauty that is possible for
man to know, a chance to be of the same substance as the fire of
stars, a chance of perfection. It is the voice of the hermit crying
from the wilderness: "I have come back from God with a message and a
blessing--come out ye young men and maidens, for a new season is at
hand."