Suppose I go on to a ship, and the ship sinks almost immediately; but
I (like the people in the Bab Ballads), by reason of my clinging to a
mast, upon a desert island am eventually cast. Or rather, suppose I am
not cast on it, but am kept bobbing about in the water, because the only
man on the island is what some call an Individualist, and will not throw
me a rope; though coils of rope of the most annoying elaboration and
neatness are conspicuous beside him as he stands upon the shore. Now,
it seems to me, that if, in my efforts to shout at this fellow-creature
across the crashing breakers, I call his position the “insularistic
position,” and my position “the semi-amphibian position,” much valuable
time may be lost. I am not an amphibian. I am a drowning man. He is
not an insularist, or an individualist. He is a beast. Or rather, he
is worse than any beast can be. And if, instead of letting me drown, he
makes me promise, while I am drowning, that if I come on shore it shall
be as his bodily slave, having no human claims henceforward forever,
then, by the whole theory and practice of capitalism, he becomes a
capitalist, he also becomes a cad.
Now, the language of poetry is simpler than that of prose; as anyone
can see who has read what the old-fashioned protestant used to call
confidently “his” Bible. And, being simpler, it is also truer; and,
being truer, it is also fiercer. And, for most of the infamies of our
time, there is really nothing plain enough, except the plain language of
poetry. Take, let us say, the ease of the recent railway disaster,
and the acquittal of the capitalists’ interest. It is not a scientific
problem for us to investigate. It is a crime committed before our eyes;
committed, perhaps, by blind men or maniacs, or men hypnotised, or men
in some other ways unconscious; but committed in broad daylight, so that
the corpse is bleeding on our door-step. Good lives were lost, because
good lives do not pay; and bad coals do pay. It seems simply impossible
to get any other meaning out of the matter except that. And, if in human
history there be anything simple and anything horrible, it seems to have
been present in this matter. If, even after some study and understanding
of the old religious passions which were the resurrection of Europe,
we cannot endure the extreme infamy of witches and heretics literally
burned alive--well, the people in this affair were quite as literally
burned alive. If, when we have really tried to extend our charity beyond
the borders of personal sympathy, to all the complexities of class
and creed, we still feel something insolent about the triumphant and
acquitted man who is in the wrong, here the men who are in the wrong are
triumphant and acquitted. It is no subject for science. It is a subject
for poetry. But for poetry of a terrible sort.