But there are more dangerous influences than ragtimes waiting for people
brought up in ignorance of fine art. Nothing is more pitiably ridiculous
than the wild worship of artists by those who have never been seasoned
in youth to the enchantments of art. Tenors and prima donnas, pianists
and violinists, actors and actresses enjoy powers of seduction which in
the middle ages would have exposed them to the risk of being burnt
for sorcery. But as they exercise this power by singing, playing, and
acting, no great harm is done except perhaps to themselves. Far graver
are the powers enjoyed by brilliant persons who are also connoisseurs
in art. The influence they can exercise on young people who have been
brought up in the darkness and wretchedness of a home without art, and
in whom a natural bent towards art has always been baffled and snubbed,
is incredible to those who have not witnessed and understood it. He (or
she) who reveals the world of art to them opens heaven to them. They
become satellites, disciples, worshippers of the apostle. Now the
apostle may be a voluptuary without much conscience. Nature may have
given him enough virtue to suffice in a reasonable environment. But this
allowance may not be enough to defend him against the temptation and
demoralization of finding himself a little god on the strength of
what ought to be a quite ordinary culture. He may find adorers in
all directions in our uncultivated society among people of stronger
character than himself, not one of whom, if they had been artistically
educated, would have had anything to learn from him or regarded him
as in any way extraordinary apart from his actual achievements as an
artist. Tartuffe is not always a priest. Indeed he is not always a
rascal: he is often a weak man absurdly credited with omniscience and
perfection, and taking unfair advantages only because they are offered
to him and he is too weak to refuse. Give everyone his culture, and no
one will offer him more than his due.
In thus delivering our children from the idolatry of the artist, we
shall not destroy for them the enchantment of art: on the contrary, we
shall teach them to demand art everywhere as a condition attainable
by cultivating the body, mind, and heart. Art, said Morris, is the
expression of pleasure in work. And certainly, when work is made
detestable by slavery, there is no art. It is only when learning is
made a slavery by tyrannical teachers that art becomes loathsome to the
pupil.
"The Machine"
When we set to work at a Constitution to secure freedom for children, we
had better bear in mind that the children may not be at all obliged to
us for our pains. Rousseau said that men are born free; and this saying,
in its proper bearings, was and is a great and true saying; yet let it
not lead us into the error of supposing that all men long for freedom
and embrace it when it is offered to them. On the contrary, it has to
be forced on them; and even then they will give it the slip if it is not
religiously inculcated and strongly safeguarded.
Besides, men are born docile, and must in the nature of things remain so
with regard to everything they do not understand. Now political science
and the art of government are among the things they do not understand,
and indeed are not at present allowed to understand. They can be
enslaved by a system, as we are at present, because it happens to be
there, and nobody understands it. An intelligently worked Capitalist
system, as Comte saw, would give us all that most of us are intelligent
enough to want. What makes it produce such unspeakably vile results is
that it is an automatic system which is as little understood by those
who profit by it in money as by those who are starved and degraded by
it: our millionaires and statesmen are manifestly no more "captains
of industry" or scientific politicians than our bookmakers are
mathematicians. For some time past a significant word has been coming
into use as a substitute for Destiny, Fate, and Providence. It is "The
Machine": the machine that has no god in it. Why do governments do
nothing in spite of reports of Royal Commissions that establish the most
frightful urgency? Why do our philanthropic millionaires do nothing,
though they are ready to throw bucketfuls of gold into the streets? The
Machine will not let them. Always the Machine. In short, they dont know
how.
They try to reform Society as an old lady might try to restore a broken
down locomotive by prodding it with a knitting needle. And this is not
at all because they are born fools, but because they have been educated,
not into manhood and freedom, but into blindness and slavery by
their parents and schoolmasters, themselves the victims of a similar
misdirection, and consequently of The Machine. They do not want
liberty. They have not been educated to want it. They choose slavery and
inequality; and all the other evils are automatically added to them.
And yet we must have The Machine. It is only in unskilled hands under
ignorant direction that machinery is dangerous. We can no more govern
modern communities without political machinery than we can feed and
clothe them without industrial machinery. Shatter The Machine, and you
get Anarchy. And yet The Machine works so detestably at present that we
have people who advocate Anarchy and call themselves Anarchists.