Everyone but a consistent and contented capitalist, who must be
something pretty near to a Satanist, must rejoice at the spirit and
success of the Battle of the Buses. But one thing about it which happens
to please me particularly was that it was fought, in one aspect at
least, on a point such as the plutocratic fool calls unpractical. It
was fought about a symbol, a badge, a thing attended with no kind of
practical results, like the flags for which men allow themselves to fall
down dead, or the shrines for which men will walk some hundreds of miles
from their homes. When a man has an eye for business, all that goes on
on this earth in that style is simply invisible to him. But let us be
charitable to the eye for business; the eye has been pretty well blacked
this time.
But I wish to insist here that it is exactly what is called the
unpractical part of the thing that is really the practical. The chief
difference between men and the animals is that all men are artists;
though the overwhelming majority of us are bad artists. As the old fable
truly says, lions do not make statues; even the cunning of the fox can
go no further than the accomplishment of leaving an exact model of
the vulpine paw: and even that is an accomplishment which he wishes
he hadn’t got. There are Chryselephantine statues, but no purely
elephantine ones. And, though we speak in a general way of an elephant
trumpeting, it is only by human blandishments that he can be induced to
play the drum. But man, savage or civilised, simple or complex
always desires to see his own soul outside himself; in some material
embodiment. He always wishes to point to a table in a temple, or a cloth
on a stick, or a word on a scroll, or a badge on a coat, and say: “This
is the best part of me. If need be, it shall be the rest of me that
shall perish.” This is the method which seems so unbusinesslike to the
men with an eye to business. This is also the method by which battles
are won.