I have already had occasion to mention, indeed I have quoted, a
certain high-browed gentleman living at Highbury, wearing a _golden_
_pince_-_nez_ and writing for the most part in that beautiful room,
the library of the Reform Club. There he wrestles with what he calls
"social problems" in a bloodless but at times, I think one must admit,
an extremely illuminating manner. He has a fixed idea that something
called a "collective intelligence" is wanted in the world, which means
in practice that you and I and everyone have to think about things
frightfully hard and pool the results, and oblige ourselves to be
shamelessly and persistently clear and truthful and support and
respect (I suppose) a perfect horde of professors and writers and
artists and ill-groomed difficult people, instead of using our brains
in a moderate, sensible manner to play golf and bridge (pretending a
sense of humour prevents our doing anything else with them) and
generally taking life in a nice, easy, gentlemanly way, confound him!
Well, this dome-headed monster of intellect alleges that Mr. Polly was
unhappy entirely through that.
"A rapidly complicating society," he writes, "which as a whole
declines to contemplate its future or face the intricate problems of
its organisation, is in exactly the position of a man who takes no
thought of dietary or regimen, who abstains from baths and exercise
and gives his appetites free play. It accumulates useless and aimless
lives as a man accumulates fat and morbid products in his blood, it
declines in its collective efficiency and vigour and secretes
discomfort and misery. Every phase of its evolution is accompanied by
a maximum of avoidable distress and inconvenience and human waste....
"Nothing can better demonstrate the collective dulness of our
community, the crying need for a strenuous intellectual renewal than
the consideration of that vast mass of useless, uncomfortable,
under-educated, under-trained and altogether pitiable people we
contemplate when we use that inaccurate and misleading term, the Lower
Middle Class. A great proportion of the lower middle class should
properly be assigned to the unemployed and the unemployable. They are
only not that, because the possession of some small hoard of money,
savings during a period of wage earning, an insurance policy or
suchlike capital, prevents a direct appeal to the rates. But they are
doing little or nothing for the community in return for what they
consume; they have no understanding of any relation of service to the
community, they have never been trained nor their imaginations touched
to any social purpose. A great proportion of small shopkeepers, for
example, are people who have, through the inefficiency that comes from
inadequate training and sheer aimlessness, or improvements in
machinery or the drift of trade, been thrown out of employment, and
who set up in needless shops as a method of eking out the savings upon
which they count. They contrive to make sixty or seventy per cent, of
their expenditure, the rest is drawn from the shrinking capital.
Essentially their lives are failures, not the sharp and tragic failure
of the labourer who gets out of work and starves, but a slow, chronic
process of consecutive small losses which may end if the individual is
exceptionally fortunate in an impoverished death bed before actual
bankruptcy or destitution supervenes. Their chances of ascendant means
are less in their shops than in any lottery that was ever planned. The
secular development of transit and communications has made the
organisation of distributing businesses upon large and economical
lines, inevitable; except in the chaotic confusions of newly opened
countries, the day when a man might earn an independent living by
unskilled or practically unskilled retailing has gone for ever. Yet
every year sees the melancholy procession towards petty bankruptcy and
imprisonment for debt go on, and there is no statesmanship in us to
avert it. Every issue of every trade journal has its four or five
columns of abridged bankruptcy proceedings, nearly every item in which
means the final collapse of another struggling family upon the
resources of the community, and continually a fresh supply of
superfluous artisans and shop assistants, coming out of employment
with savings or 'help' from relations, of widows with a husband's
insurance money, of the ill-trained sons of parsimonious fathers,
replaces the fallen in the ill-equipped, jerry-built shops that
everywhere abound...."
I quote these fragments from a gifted, if unpleasant, contemporary for
what they are worth. I feel this has come in here as the broad aspect
of this History. I come back to Mr. Polly sitting upon his gate and
swearing in the east wind, and I so returning have a sense of floating
across unbridged abysses between the General and the Particular.
There, on the one hand, is the man of understanding, seeing clearly--I
suppose he sees clearly--the big process that dooms millions of lives
to thwarting and discomfort and unhappy circumstances, and giving us
no help, no hint, by which we may get that better "collective will and
intelligence" which would dam the stream of human failure, and, on the
other hand, Mr. Polly sitting on his gate, untrained, unwarned,
confused, distressed, angry, seeing nothing except that he is, as it
were, nettled in greyness and discomfort--with life dancing all about
him; Mr. Polly with a capacity for joy and beauty at least as keen and
subtle as yours or mine.