Every week or every day the writer must chew the cud of events and
deliver his punctual copy. Every day, wet or fine, the newspaper
sheet must be filled: filled, but not congested. But it is only now
and then that the phase is good for really happy writing. Sometimes
everything is germinating, but nothing seems to happen; at others a
dozen issues compete for attention. Now one does not want to write
because there is nothing to stimulate one to utterance; now because one
wants time to consider some dominating event. But the columns stand
waiting. Henceforth for my poor irregular brain there shall be no more
periodicity.
I look over these articles and suddenly there joins on to my sense of
them the fact that on my table are lying the proofs of a collected
edition of my writings; eight and twenty fat volumes they will make. I
perceive I have already lived a long, industrious life. I celebrate my
death as a periodic journalist--and these proofs extend the obituary
sense beyond the scope of that event. If I am not actually tucked up in
my literary death-bed I am at least sitting on it. Possibly I may yet
take a few more airings before I send for the clergyman and the heirs
and turn in for good and start blessing and forgiving people from my
pillow, but the longer part is finished. What does it all amount to,
that mass of written matter?
The gist of it is an extraordinarily sustained and elaborated adverse
criticism of the world as it is, a persistent refusal to believe that
this is the best or even the most interesting of all possible worlds.
There is a developing attempt culminating in the _Outline of History_
to show that the world of men is only temporarily what it is, and might
be altered to an enormous extent. There is a search through every sort
of revolutionary project and effort for the material for conclusive
alteration. The total effect of these articles and these books of mine
on my mind, is of a creature trying to find its way out of a prison
into which it has fallen.
I recall how that in my boyhood I made a little prison of paper and
cardboard for a beetle, and how I heard the poor perplexed beast
incessantly crawling and scratching and fluttering inside. I forget
what became of it. Perhaps I gave it its freedom; perhaps it pressed
and worried at the corners where the light came through, and made an
enlarged hole and worried its own way out. But I remember the dirty
scratches and traces of its explorations on the unfolded paper cage.
To a larger mind these books and articles of mine will seem very like
those markings.
Implicit behind and beyond all these writings there is faith in a great
“outside.” I do believe there is a better life for such creatures as
we are, and betterment for our race and an escape from the meanness,
the dullness, the petty doomed life of this time. So far as I can go
beyond my untrained feelings and my unsolved limitations I give myself
to the attack upon our common prison walls of ignorance and effortless
submission. In all these articles and books there is the thrust of the
natural and conscious and convinced revolutionary. I am against the
clothes we wear and the food we eat, the houses we live in, the schools
we have, our amusements, our money, our ways of trading, our ways of
making, our compromises and agreements and laws, our articles of
political association, the British Empire, the American Constitution.
I think most of the clothes ugly and dirty, most of the food bad, the
houses wretched, the schools starved and feeble, the amusements dull,
the monetary methods silly, our ways of trading base and wasteful,
our methods of production piecemeal and wasteful, our political
arrangements solemnly idiotic. Most of my activities have been to get
my soul and something of my body out of the customs, outlook, boredoms,
and contaminations of the current phase of life.
I am not so very exceptional in this. Endless people find the present
world--in spite of storms of natural beauty, in spite of the irregular
delightful revelations of human possibility--almost intolerable.
Indeed I do not know how far the occasional intense loveliness of
nature and the rare gleams of human dearness and greatness, do not
exacerbate their general discontent. They struggle to get away from
it. Drink--“the shortest way out of Manchester,” as someone called
it--a vicious pursuit of excitement, opiates and religious devotion,
a widespread indulgence of reverie, are all forms of escape from the
cruel flatness of uninspired days. But none of them, unless it be
the religious excitement, give more than a temporary respite. When
the orgy is over comes the awakening still in the cage. But in the
idea of revolution which does not forget the cage, but realises its
impermanence, there is an enduring support for the spirit.
My imagination takes refuge from the slums of to-day in a world like
a great garden, various, orderly, lovingly cared-for, dangerous still
but no longer dismal, secure from dull and base necessities. I have
come to believe in the complete possibility of such a world, and to
realise the broad lines upon which we can work for its attainment
through a great extension of the scientific spirit to the mental field,
and through a deliberate reconstruction of social and economic life
upon the framework of a new, far-reaching educational organisation. By
projecting my mind forward to that greater civilisation I do succeed
in throwing a veil of unreality over the solemn ineptitude of to-day
and the complete identification of myself and my insufficiencies and
disappointments with the quality of common things. By insisting that I
can be a creative revolutionary I escape from acquiescence in what I am
and what things are. To live under the rule of King George or President
Coolidge and under the sway of current customs, habits and usages, can
be made tolerable by the recognition of their essential transitoriness
and their ultimate insignificance. And in no other way can it be made
tolerable to anyone with a sense of beauty and a passion for real
living.
This is what I have been saying in these eight and twenty volumes of
collected works and in this yearful of newspaper articles, and after a
rest it is quite possible I shall go on saying it some more. But after
these reflections upon my literary death-bed I think I shall take a
holiday--at least from journalism--for a time. If there is anything
worse in this way than periodic journalism it must be preaching and
having to go into a pulpit with half an hour’s supply of uplift fresh
and punctual every Sunday.
Transcriber’s Notes
Minor errors in punctuation were fixed.
Page 19: “than she has even been” changed to “than she has ever been”
Page 95: “the policy of a great nations” changed to “the policy of a
great nation”
Page 153: “the citizens of the United States as a sort of transplanted
Britisher” changed to “the citizen of the United States as a sort of
transplanted Britisher”
Page 230: “war aviator and machines” changed to “war aviators and
machines”
Page 286: “not esentially different” changed to “not essentially
different”
Page 308: “on one have a right” changed to “no one have a right”