Within a stone's throw of my house they are building another house. I am
glad they are building it, and I am glad it is within a stone's throw;
quite well within it, with a good catapult. Nevertheless, I have not
yet cast the first stone at the new house--not being, strictly speaking,
guiltless myself in the matter of new houses. And, indeed, in such
cases there is a strong protest to be made. The whole curse of the last
century has been what is called the Swing of the Pendulum; that is the
idea that Man must go alternately from one extreme to the other. It is a
shameful and even shocking fancy; it is the denial of the whole dignity
of mankind. When Man is alive he stands still. It is only when he is
dead that he swings. But whenever one meets modern thinkers (as one
often does) progressing towards a madhouse, one always finds, on
inquiry, that they have just had a splendid escape from another
madhouse. Thus, hundreds of people become Socialists, not because they
have tried Socialism and found it nice, but because they have tried
Individualism and found it particularly nasty. Thus, many embrace
Christian Science solely because they are quite sick of heathen science;
they are so tired of believing that everything is matter that they will
even take refuge in the revolting fable that everything is mind. Man
ought to march somewhere. But modern man (in his sick reaction) is ready
to march nowhere--so long as it is the Other End of Nowhere.
The case of building houses is a strong instance of this. Early in
the nineteenth century our civilization chose to abandon the Greek and
medieval idea of a town, with walls, limited and defined, with a temple
for faith and a market-place for politics; and it chose to let the city
grow like a jungle with blind cruelty and bestial unconsciousness; so
that London and Liverpool are the great cities we now see. Well, people
have reacted against that; they have grown tired of living in a city
which is as dark and barbaric as a forest only not as beautiful, and
there has been an exodus into the country of those who could afford it,
and some I could name who can't. Now, as soon as this quite rational
recoil occurred, it flew at once to the opposite extreme. People went
about with beaming faces, boasting that they were twenty-three miles
from a station. Rubbing their hands, they exclaimed in rollicking
asides that their butcher only called once a month, and that their baker
started out with fresh hot loaves which were quite stale before they
reached the table. A man would praise his little house in a quiet
valley, but gloomily admit (with a slight shake of the head) that a
human habitation on the distant horizon was faintly discernible on
a clear day. Rival ruralists would quarrel about which had the most
completely inconvenient postal service; and there were many jealous
heartburnings if one friend found out any uncomfortable situation which
the other friend had thoughtlessly overlooked.
In the feverish summer of this fanaticism there arose the phrase that
this or that part of England is being “built over.” Now, there is not
the slightest objection, in itself, to England being built over by men,
any more than there is to its being (as it is already) built over by
birds, or by squirrels, or by spiders. But if birds' nests were so thick
on a tree that one could see nothing but nests and no leaves at all,
I should say that bird civilization was becoming a bit decadent. If
whenever I tried to walk down the road I found the whole thoroughfare
one crawling carpet of spiders, closely interlocked, I should feel
a distress verging on distaste. If one were at every turn crowded,
elbowed, overlooked, overcharged, sweated, rack-rented, swindled,
and sold up by avaricious and arrogant squirrels, one might at last
remonstrate. But the great towns have grown intolerable solely because
of such suffocating vulgarities and tyrannies. It is not humanity that
disgusts us in the huge cities; it is inhumanity. It is not that there
are human beings; but that they are not treated as such. We do not, I
hope, dislike men and women; we only dislike their being made into a
sort of jam: crushed together so that they are not merely powerless but
shapeless. It is not the presence of people that makes London appalling.
It is merely the absence of The People.
Therefore, I dance with joy to think that my part of England is being
built over, so long as it is being built over in a human way at human
intervals and in a human proportion. So long, in short, as I am not
myself built over, like a pagan slave buried in the foundations of a
temple, or an American clerk in a star-striking pagoda of flats, I am
delighted to see the faces and the homes of a race of bipeds, to which
I am not only attracted by a strange affection, but to which also (by a
touching coincidence) I actually happen to belong. I am not one desiring
deserts. I am not Timon of Athens; if my town were Athens I would stay
in it. I am not Simeon Stylites; except in the mournful sense that every
Saturday I find myself on the top of a newspaper column. I am not in
the desert repenting of some monstrous sins; at least, I am repenting of
them all right, but not in the desert. I do not want the nearest human
house to be too distant to see; that is my objection to the wilderness.
But neither do I want the nearest human house to be too close to see;
that is my objection to the modern city. I love my fellow-man; I do not
want him so far off that I can only observe anything of him through a
telescope, nor do I want him so close that I can examine parts of him
with a microscope. I want him within a stone's throw of me; so that
whenever it is really necessary, I may throw the stone.
Perhaps, after all, it may not be a stone. Perhaps, after all, it may be
a bouquet, or a snowball, or a firework, or a Free Trade Loaf; perhaps
they will ask for a stone and I shall give them bread. But it is
essential that they should be within reach: how can I love my neighbour
as myself if he gets out of range for snowballs? There should be no
institution out of the reach of an indignant or admiring humanity. I
could hit the nearest house quite well with the catapult; but the
truth is that the catapult belongs to a little boy I know, and, with
characteristic youthful 'selfishness, he has taken it away.