needs of wholesale buying. So he would go either to wholesale
booksellers, or directly to the various publishers of the books and
editions he had chosen, and ask for reasonable special prices for the
two thousand or seven thousand or fifty thousand of each book he
required. And the publishers would, of course, give him very special
prices, more especially in the case of the out-of-copyright books. He
would probably find it best to buy whole editions in sheets and bind
them himself in strong bindings. And he would emerge from these
negotiations in possession of a number of complete libraries of—how many
books? Less than twenty thousand ought to do it, I think, though that is
a matter for separate discussion, and that should cost him, buying in
this wholesale way, under rather than over £2,000 a library.
And next he would bethink himself of the readers of these books. “These
people,” he would say, “do not know very much about books, which,
indeed, is why I am giving them this library.”
Accordingly, he would get a number of able and learned people to write
him guides to his twenty thousand books, and, in fact, to the whole
world of reading, a guide, for example, to the books on history in
general, a special guide to books on English history, or French or
German history, a guide to the books on geology, a guide to poetry and
poetical criticisms, and so forth.
Some such books our philosopher would find already done—the
_Bibliography of American History_, of the American Libraries’
Association, for example, and Mr. Nield’s _Guide to Historical
Fiction_—and what are not done he would commission good men to do for
him. Suppose he had to commission forty such guides altogether, and that
they cost him on the average £500 each, for he would take care not to
sweat their makers, then that would add another £20,000 to his
expenditure. But if he was going to found 400 libraries, let us say,
that would only be £50 a library—a very trivial addition to his
expenditure.
The rarer books mentioned in these various guides would remind him,
however, of the many even his ample limit of twenty thousand forced him
to exclude, and he would, perhaps, consider the need of having two or
three libraries each for the storage of a hundred thousand books or so
not kept at the local libraries, but which could be sent to them at a
day’s notice at the request of any reader. And then, and only then,
would he give his attention to the housing and staffing that this
reality of books would demand.
Being a philosopher and no fool, he would draw a very clear, hard
distinction between the reckless endowment of the building trade and the
dissemination of books. He would distinguish, too, between a library and
a news-room, and would find no great attraction in the prospect of
supplying the national youth with free but thumby copies of the sixpenny
magazines. He would consider that all that was needed for his library
was, first, easily accessible fireproof shelving for his collection,
with ample space for his additions, an efficient distributing office, a
cloak-room, and so forth, and eight or nine not too large, well-lit,
well-carpeted, well-warmed and well-ventilated rooms radiating from that
office, in which the guides and so forth could be consulted, and where
those who had no convenient, quiet room at home could read.
He would find that, by avoiding architectural vulgarities, a simple,
well-proportioned building satisfying all these requirements and
containing housing for the librarian, assistant, custodian and staff
could be built for between £4,000 and £5,000, excluding the cost of
site, and his sites, which he would not choose for their
conspicuousness, might average something under another £1,000.
He would try to make a bargain with the local people for their
co-operation in his enterprise, though he would, as a philosopher,
understand that where a public library is least wanted it is generally
most needed. But in most cases he would succeed in stipulating for a
certain standard of maintenance by the local authority. Since moderately
prosperous illiterate men undervalue education, and most town
councillors are moderately illiterate men, he would do his best to keep
the salary and appointment of the librarian out of such hands. He would
stipulate for a salary of at least £400, in addition to housing, light
and heat, and he would probably find it advisable to appoint a little
committee of visitors who would have the power to examine
qualifications, endorse the appointment, and recommend the dismissal of
all his four hundred librarians. He would probably try to make the
assistantship at £100 a year or thereabout a sort of local scholarship
to be won by competition, and only the cleaner and caretaker’s place
would be left to the local politician. And, of course, our philosopher
would stipulate that, apart from all other expenditure, a sum of at
least £200 a year should be set aside for buying new books.
So our rich philosopher would secure at the minimum cost a number of
efficiently equipped libraries throughout the country. Eight thousand
pounds down and £900 a year is about as cheap as a public library can
be. Below that level, it would be cheaper to have no public library.
Above that level, a public library that is not efficient is either
dishonestly or incapably organised or managed, or it is serving too
large a district and needs duplication, or it is trying to do too much.
ABOUT CHESTERTON AND BELLOC
It has been one of the less possible dreams of my life to be a painted
Pagan God and live upon a ceiling. I crown myself becomingly in stars or
tendrils or with electric coruscations (as the mood takes me), and wear
an easy costume free from complications and appropriate to the climate
of those agreeable spaces. The company about me on the clouds varies
greatly with the mood of the vision, but always it is in some way, if
not always a very obvious way, beautiful. One frequent presence is G. K.
Chesterton, a joyous whirl of brushwork, appropriately garmented and
crowned. When he is there, I remark, the whole ceiling is by a sort of
radiation convivial. We drink limitless old October from handsome
flagons, and we argue mightily about Pride (his weak point) and the
nature of Deity. A hygienic, attentive, and essentially anæsthetic Eagle
checks, in the absence of exercise, any undue enlargement of our
Promethean livers.... Chesterton often—but never by any chance Belloc.
Belloc I admire beyond measure, but there is a sort of partisan
viciousness about Belloc that bars him from my celestial dreams. He
never figures, no, not even in the remotest corner, on my ceiling. And
yet the divine artist, by some strange skill that my ignorance of his
technique saves me from the presumption of explaining, does indicate
exactly where Belloc is. A little quiver of the paint, a faint aura,
about the spectacular masses of Chesterton? I am not certain. But no
intelligent beholder can look up and miss the remarkable fact that
Belloc exists—and that he is away, safely away, away in his heaven,
which is, of course, the Park Lane Imperialist’s hell. There he
presides....
But in this life I do not meet Chesterton exalted upon clouds, and there
is but the mockery of that endless leisure for abstract discussion
afforded by my painted entertainments. I live in an urgent and incessant
world, which is at its best a wildly beautiful confusion of impressions
and at its worst a dingy uproar. It crowds upon us and jostles us, we
get our little interludes for thinking and talking between much rough
scuffling and laying about us with our fists. And I cannot afford to be
continually bickering with Chesterton and Belloc about forms of
expression. There are others for whom I want to save my knuckles. One
may be wasteful in peace and leisure, but economies are the soul of
conflict.
In many ways we three are closely akin; we diverge not by necessity but
accident, because we speak in different dialects and have divergent
metaphysics. All that I can I shall persuade to my way of thinking about
thought and to the use of words in my loose, expressive manner, but
Belloc and Chesterton and I are too grown and set to change our
languages now and learn new ones; we are on different roads, and so we
must needs shout to one another across intervening abysses. These two
say Socialism is a thing they do not want for men, and I say Socialism
is above all what I want for men. We shall go on saying that now to the
end of our days. But what we do all three want is something very alike.
Our different roads are parallel. I aim at a growing collective life, a
perpetually enhanced inheritance for our race, through the fullest,
freest development of the individual life. What they aim at ultimately I
do not understand, but it is manifest that its immediate form is the
fullest and freest development of the individual life. We all three hate
equally and sympathetically the spectacle of human beings blown up with
windy wealth and irresponsible power as cruelly and absurdly as boys
blow up frogs; we all three detest the complex causes that dwarf and
cripple lives from the moment of birth and starve and debase great
masses of mankind. We want as universally as possible the jolly life,
men and women warmblooded and well aired, acting freely and joyously,
gathering life as children gather corn-cockles in corn. We all three
want people to have property of a real and personal sort, to have the
son, as Chesterton put it, bringing up the port his father laid down,
and pride in the pears one has grown in one’s own garden. And I agree
with Chesterton that giving—giving oneself out of love and fellowship—is
the salt of life.
But there I diverge from him, less in spirit I think than in the manner
of his expression. There is a base because impersonal way of giving.
“Standing drink,” which he praises as noble, is just the thing I cannot
stand, the ultimate mockery and vulgarisation of that fine act of
bringing out the cherished thing saved for the heaven-sent guest. It is
a mere commercial transaction, essentially of the evil of our time.
Think of it! Two temporarily homeless beings agree to drink together,
and they turn in and face the public supply of drink (a little vitiated
by private commercial necessities) in the public-house. (It is horrible
that life should be so wholesale and heartless.) And Jones, with a
sudden effusion of manner, thrusts twopence or ninepence (got God know
how) into the economic mysteries and personal delicacy of Brown. I’d as
soon a man slipped sixpence down my neck. If Jones has used love and
sympathy to detect a certain real thirst and need in Brown and knowledge
and power in its assuaging by some specially appropriate fluid, then we
have an altogether different matter; but the common business of
“standing treat” and giving presents and entertainments is as proud and
unspiritual as cock-crowing, as foolish and inhuman as that sorry
compendium of mercantile vices, the game of poker, and I am amazed to
find Chesterton commend it.
But that is a criticism by the way. Chesterton and Belloc agree with the
Socialist that the present world does not give at all what they want.
They agree that it fails to do so through a wild derangement of our
property relations. They are in agreement with the common contemporary
man (whose creed is stated, I think, not unfairly, but with the omission
of certain important articles by Chesterton) that the derangements of
our property relations are to be remedied by concerted action and in
part by altered laws. The land and all sorts of great common interests
must be, if not owned, then at least controlled, managed, checked,
redistributed by the State. Our real difference is only about a little
more or a little less owning. I do not see how Belloc and Chesterton can
stand for anything but a strong State as against those wild monsters of
property, the strong, big private owners. The State must be complex and
powerful enough to prevent them. State or plutocrat, there is really no
other practical alternative before the world at the present time. Either
we have to let the big financial adventurers, the aggregating capitalist
and his Press, in a loose, informal combination, rule the earth, either
we have got to stand aside from preventive legislation and leave things
to work out on their present lines, or we have to construct a collective
organisation sufficiently strong for the protection of the liberties of
the some-day-to-be-jolly common man. So far we go in common. If Belloc
and Chesterton are not Socialists, they are at any rate not
anti-Socialists. If they say they want an organised Christian State
(which involves practically seven-tenths of the Socialist desire), then,
in the face of our big common enemies, of adventurous capital, of alien
Imperialism, base ambition, base intelligence, and common prejudice and
ignorance, I do not mean to quarrel with them politically, so long as
they force no quarrel on me. Their organised Christian State is nearer
the organised State I want than our present plutocracy. Our ideals will
fight some day, and it will be, I know, a first-rate fight, but to fight
now is to let the enemy in. When we have got all we want in common, then
and only then can we afford to differ. I have never believed that a
Socialist Party could hope to form a Government in this country in my
lifetime; I believe it less now than ever I did. I don’t know if any of
my Fabian colleagues entertain so remarkable a hope. But if they do not,
then unless their political aim is pure cantankerousness, they must
contemplate a working political combination between the Socialist
members in Parliament and just that non-capitalist section of the
Liberal Party for which Chesterton and Belloc speak. Perpetual
opposition is a dishonourable aim in politics; and a man who mingles in
political development with no intention of taking on responsible tasks
unless he gets all his particular formulæ accepted is a pervert, a
victim of Irish bad example, and unfit for decent democratic
institutions....
I digress again, I see, but my drift I hope is clear. Differ as we may,
Belloc and Chesterton are with all Socialists in being on the same side
of the great political and social cleavage that opens at the present
time. We and they are with the interests of the mass of common men as
against that growing organisation of great owners who have common
interests directly antagonistic to those of the community and State. We
Socialists are only secondarily politicians. Our primary business is not
to impose upon, but to ram right into the substance of that object of
Chesterton’s solicitude, the circle of ideas of the common man, the idea
of the State as his own, as a thing he serves and is served by. We want
to add to his sense of property rather than offend it. If I had my way I
would do that at the street corners and on the trams, I would take down
that alien-looking and detestable inscription “L. C. C.,” and put up,
“This Tram, this Street, belongs to the People of London.” Would
Chesterton or Belloc quarrel with that? Suppose that Chesterton is
right, and that there are incurable things in the mind of the common man
flatly hostile to our ideals; so much of our ideals will fail. But we
are doing our best by our lights, and all we can. What are Chesterton
and Belloc doing? If our ideal is partly right and partly wrong, are
they trying to build up a better ideal? Will they state a Utopia and how
they propose it shall be managed? If they lend their weight only to such
fine old propositions as that a man wants freedom, that he has a right
to do as he likes with his own, and so on, they won’t help the common
man much. All that fine talk, without some further exposition, goes to
sustain Mr. Rockefeller’s simple human love of property, and the woman
and child sweating manufacturer in his fight for the inspector-free home
industry. I bought on a bookstall the other day a pamphlet full of
misrepresentation and bad argument against Socialism by an Australian
Jew, published by the Single-Tax people apparently in a disinterested
attempt to free the land from the landowner by the simple expedient of
abusing anyone else who wanted to do as much but did not hold Henry
George to be God and Lord; and I know Socialists who will protest with
tears in their eyes against association with any human being who sings
any song but the “Red Flag” and doubts whether Marx had much experience
of affairs. Well, there is no reason why Chesterton and Belloc should at
their level do the same sort of thing. When we talk on a ceiling or at a
dinner-party with any touch of the celestial in its composition,
Chesterton and I, Belloc and I, are antagonists with an undying feud,
but in the fight against human selfishness and narrowness and for a
finer, juster law, we are brothers—at the remotest, half-brothers.
Chesterton isn’t a Socialist—agreed! But now, as between us and the
Master of Elibank or Sir Hugh Bell or any other Free Trade Liberal
capitalist or landlord, which side is he on? You cannot have more than
one fight going on in the political arena at the same time, because only
one party or group of parties can win.
And going back for a moment to that point about a Utopia, I want one
from Chesterton. Purely unhelpful criticism isn’t enough from a man of
his size. It isn’t justifiable for him to go about sitting on other
people’s Utopias. I appeal to his sense of fair play. I have done my
best to reconcile the conception of a free and generous style of
personal living with a social organisation that will save the world from
the harsh predominance of dull, persistent, energetic, unscrupulous
grabbers tempered only by the vulgar extravagance of their wives and
sons. It isn’t an adequate reply to say that nobody stood treat there,
and that the simple, generous people like to beat their own wives and
children on occasion in a loving and intimate manner, and that they
won’t endure the spirit of Mr. Sidney Webb.
ABOUT SIR THOMAS MORE
There are some writers who are chiefly interesting in themselves, and
some whom chance and the agreement of men have picked out as symbols and
convenient indications of some particular group or temperament of
opinions. To the latter it is that Sir Thomas More belongs. An age and a
type of mind have found in him and his Utopia a figurehead and a token;
and pleasant and honourable as his personality and household present
themselves to the modern reader, it is doubtful if they would by this
time have retained any peculiar distinction among the many other
contemporaries of whom we have chance glimpses in letters and suchlike
documents, were it not that he happened to be the first man of affairs
in England to imitate the _Republic_ of Plato. By that chance it fell to
him to give the world a noun and an adjective of abuse, “Utopian,” and
to record how under the stimulus of Plato’s releasing influence the
opening problems of our modern world presented themselves to the English
mind of his time. For the most part the problems that exercised him are
the problems that exercise us to-day, some of them, it may be, have
grown up and intermarried, new ones have joined their company, but few,
if any, have disappeared, and it is alike in his resemblances to and
differences from the modern speculative mind that his essential interest
lies.
The portrait presented by contemporary mention and his own intentional
and unintentional admissions, is of an active-minded and
agreeable-mannered man, a hard worker, very markedly prone to quips and
whimsical sayings and plays upon words, and aware of a double reputation
as a man of erudition and a wit. This latter quality it was that won him
advancement at court, and it may have been his too clearly confessed
reluctance to play the part of an informal table jester to his king that
laid the grounds of that deepening royal resentment that ended only with
his execution. But he was also valued by the king for more solid merits,
he was needed by the king, and it was more than a table scorned or a
clash of opinion upon the validity of divorce; it was a more general
estrangement and avoidance of service that caused that fit of regal
petulance by which he died.
It would seem that he began and ended his career in the orthodox
religion and a general acquiescence in the ideas and customs of his
time, and he played an honourable and acceptable part in that time; but
his permanent interest lies not in his general conformity but in his
incidental scepticism, in the fact that underlying the observances and
recognised rules and limitations that give the texture of his life were
the profoundest doubts, and that, stirred and disturbed by Plato, he saw
fit to write them down. One may question if such scepticism is in itself
unusual, whether any large proportion of great statesmen, great
ecclesiastics and administrators have escaped phases of destructive
self-criticism, of destructive criticism of the principles upon which
their general careers were framed. But few have made so public an
admission as Sir Thomas More. A good Catholic undoubtedly he was, and
yet we find him capable of conceiving a non-Christian community
excelling all Christendom in wisdom and virtue; in practice his sense of
conformity and orthodoxy was manifest enough, but in his _Utopia_ he
ventures to contemplate, and that not merely wistfully, but with some
confidence, the possibility of an absolute religious toleration.
The _Utopia_ is none the less interesting because it is one of the most
inconsistent of books. Never were the forms of Socialism and Communism
animated by so entirely an Individualist soul. The hands are the hands
of Plato, the wide-thinking Greek, but the voice is the voice of a
humane, public-spirited, but limited and very practical English
gentleman who takes the inferiority of his inferiors for granted,
dislikes friars and tramps and loafers and all undisciplined and
unproductive people, and is ruler in his own household. He abounds in
sound practical ideas, for the migration of harvesters, for the
universality of gardens and the artificial incubation of eggs, and he
sweeps aside all Plato’s suggestion of the citizen woman as though it
had never entered his mind. He had indeed the Whig temperament, and it
manifested itself down even to the practice of reading aloud in company,
which still prevails among the more representative survivors of the Whig
tradition. He argues ably against private property, but no thought of
any such radicalism as the admission of those poor peons of his with
head half-shaved and glaring uniform against escape, to participation in
ownership, appears in his proposals. His communism is all for the
convenience of his Syphogrants and Tranibores, those gentlemen of
gravity and experience, lest one should swell up above the others. So
too is the essential Whiggery of the limitation of the Prince’s
revenues. It is the very spirit of eighteenth-century Constitutionalism.
And his Whiggery bears Utilitarianism instead of the vanity of a flower.
Among his cities, all of a size, so that “he that knoweth one knoweth
all,” the Benthamite would have revised his sceptical theology and
admitted the possibility of heaven.
Like any Whig, More exalted reason above the imagination at every point,
and so he fails to understand the magic prestige of gold, making that
beautiful metal into vessels of dishonour to urge his case against it,
nor had he any perception of the charm of extravagance, for example, or
the desirability of various clothing. The Utopians went all in coarse
linen and undyed wool—why should the world be coloured?—and all the
economy of labour and shortening of the working day was to no other end
than to prolong the years of study and the joys of reading aloud, the
simple satisfactions of the good boy at his lessons, to the very end of
life. “In the institution of that weal publique this end is only and
chiefly pretended and minded, that what time may possibly be spared from
the necessary occupations and affairs of the commonwealth, all that the
citizens should withdraw from the bodily service to the free liberty of
the mind and garnishing of the same. For herein they suppose the
felicity of this life to consist.”