In these articles I only take two or three examples of the first and
fundamental fact of our time. I mean the fact that the capitalists of
our community are becoming quite openly the kings of it. In my last (and
first) article, I took the case of Art and advertisement. I pointed out
that Art must be growing worse--merely because advertisement is growing
better. In those days Millais condescended to Pears’ soap. In these days
I really think it would be Pears who condescended to Millais. But here
I turn to an art I know more about, that of journalism. Only in my ease
the art verges on artlessness.
The great difficulty with the English lies in the absence of something
one may call democratic imagination. We find it easy to realise an
individual, but very hard to realise that the great masses consist of
individuals. Our system has been aristocratic: in the special sense of
there being only a few actors on the stage. And the back scene is kept
quite dark, though it is really a throng of faces. Home Rule tended to
be not so much the Irish as the Grand Old Man. The Boer War tended not
to be so much South Africa as simply “Joe.” And it is the amusing but
distressing fact that every class of political leadership, as it comes
to the front in its turn, catches the rays of this isolating lime-light;
and becomes a small aristocracy. Certainly no one has the aristocratic
complaint so badly as the Labour Party. At the recent Congress, the real
difference between Larkin and the English Labour leaders was not so much
in anything right or wrong in what he said, as in something elemental
and even mystical in the way he suggested a mob. But it must be plain,
even to those who agree with the more official policy, that for Mr.
Havelock Wilson the principal question was Mr. Havelock Wilson; and that
Mr. Sexton was mainly considering the dignity and fine feelings of Mr.
Sexton. You may say they were as sensitive as aristocrats, or as sulky
as babies; the point is that the feeling was personal. But Larkin, like
Danton, not only talks like ten thousand men talking, but he also has
some of the carelessness of the colossus of Arcis; “Que mon nom soit
fletri, que la France soit libre.”