Oxford, and St. John’s, Cambridge. It is perhaps the most beautiful
element in the Walled Town, and here every intellectual, spiritual and
artistic quality is fostered to the fullest degree. The college is a
corporation under control of the alumni and the faculty, not in the
hands of trustees, as was the unfortunate fashion amongst American
universities in the nineteenth century. There are many fellowships
granted for notable achievements along many lines, and a Fellow may
claim free food and lodgings for life, if he choose, the return being
certain service of a limited nature in the line of instruction, either
as lecturer or preceptor. A few students are received from without
the walls, but the number may not exceed five per cent of the student
body, and high fees are charged for the privilege. There are no regular
courses divided into four years. An honour student must take his
Bachelor’s Degree within six years, his Master’s Degree in not less
than two years thereafter, and his Doctorate in another four years,
otherwise his privilege lapses and he must pay as other students,
in which case there are no limits whatever and a man may spend a
lifetime in study if he desires--and can pay the price. All the regular
members of the Faculty must be burgesses, but many lecture courses are
given by visiting professors from all parts of the world. Latin is a
prerequisite for the Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees, and Greek for a
Doctorate, whatever the line that may be followed.
As has been said above, the recreation quarter of the town is around a
square or garden a short distance from the central square. Here are
to be found the public baths and gymnasium, together with a number of
gay and attractive cafés and restaurants, the theatres, concert halls,
etc. To a very great extent all the music and drama are the product of
the people themselves. As has been said, music is almost the foundation
of the educational system, therefore trained as they are from earliest
childhood, good music, vocal, instrumental, orchestral, even operatic,
is a natural and even inevitable result. The same is true of the drama,
and nightly plays, operas, concerts are given by the townspeople
themselves which reach a standard comparable with that of professionals
elsewhere. Now and then, as a mark of special commendation, actors,
singers and musicians are invited by the Provost and Council to visit
the town, but as a general thing all is done by the people themselves.
The moving picture show is prohibited.
With all the rich pageantry of life in a Walled Town, the magnificent
church services, where all the arts assemble in the greatest æsthetic
synthesis man has ever devised, the religious and secular festivals
with their processions and merrymaking and dancing, the form and
ceremony of ecclesiastical and civic life, and the unbroken environment
of beauty, the craving for “shows” which holds without the walls and
must be satisfied by tawdry and sensational dramatic performances,
professional entertainers and the “movies,” is largely absent here
where all life is couched in terms of true drama and living beauty.
Here is no hard line of demarcation between a drab and sordid and
hustling daily life on the one hand, and “amusement” on the other.
All the arts are in constant use, and music and drama are merely
extensions of this common use into slightly different fields. The
same holds good of the other arts. An “art museum” is unknown, for it
is a contradiction in terms. The Walled Town is full of pictures and
sculpture and all the products of the art-crafts; but the latter are
in every household, while the pictures and sculptures are in all the
churches and public buildings, where they belong, and are constantly
and universally visible. If an old picture is obtained, or a Mediæval
statue or a tapestry, it is at once placed in a position similar to
that for which it was originally intended. It would be perfectly
impossible for the authorities to put a Bellini altar-piece in a
yawning museum, jostled by crowded others and visible on week-days on
payment of an admission fee, “Saturday afternoon and Sunday free.”
Instead it is placed over an altar in the parish church or in some
chapel. There are museums of sorts, but they are connected with the
guild halls and contain only models for instruction and emulation.
And what of the social organism as it has developed under these
definite modes of action? In the first place there are certain explicit
inhibitions, as has already been indicated, the elimination of many
details of luxury and artificial desires which tend to turn much human
energy to futile ends, to raise the cost of living to abnormal heights,
to establish false levels between those that have and those that have
not, and that defeat every sane effort towards a simplification of life
and its maintenance in accordance with right standards of comparative
value. Desires have not been reduced in force, but they have been
vastly cut down in number and turned towards real values. Owing to
the ban on usury and the unearned increment, and the restoration of
production for use in place of production for profit, wide variations
in wealth no longer exist, although there are still differences due
to thrift, more intelligent or prolonged work, and above all to
superiority in the thing produced. Variations in social status still
exist; indeed they are fostered, as a matter of fact, but they are
no longer based either on money or on power. A Walled Town is at the
same time individualist, coöperative and aristocratic, so far more
closely resembling Mediæval society than any other that has existed,
and therefore sharply differentiated both from society as it had become
in the nineteenth century, and as it was aimed at by the socialists,
the anarchists and the democrats of the same period. As all society
is organized in guilds, and as in each there are the three classes of
apprentices, journeymen and masters, so while each class has its own
recognized status, there is an equally recognized difference between
them. An apprentice may not hold land, therefore he cannot be a burgess
of the free city, while a journeyman or master may not become a burgess
unless he does hold land, and only burgesses participate in the civic
duties and privileges of the town. There are certain offices which only
a master may hold, and there are others which are open only to those
masters who have become members of one of the Academies, or who belong
to the Order of Knighthood. The Provost, for example, may be chosen
only from amongst the knights. These highest ranks of dignity are
constituted as follows:
In each Walled Town there are several Academies, each made up of
those masters in the several guilds who have achieved the highest
eminence. There is one Academy of Science and Craft, an Academy of
Arts and Letters, an Academy of Philosophy, etc. Entrance into this
circle of supreme achievement is effected either by direct choice of
the members of the Academy, in which case the guild from which the
candidate is chosen must ratify the choice, or by nomination on the
part of the guild, when the recommendation so made must be sanctioned
by the members of the Academy. Only high proficiency in some specified
direction is ground for election to these Academies, and membership
is an honour of the greatest distinction. The Order of Knighthood,
however, is conferred rather for high qualities of character and for
public service; any man, apprentice, minor official, servant, may
be made a Knight if he demonstrates some high quality of honour or
service. Here the power to nominate lies in the hands both of the
Provost and of the knights themselves, but the latter have the right
to confirm or reject the nominee of the Provost, while he has the same
power if the nomination comes from the knights. Both the Academies and
the knights have the right to degrade and expel a member of their own
order; but when this is done it must be as the result of an open trial,
if the accused so demands. Conviction of certain crimes and offences
works degradation automatically.
The object of these higher circles of specially chosen individuals
is the official recognition of character and achievement and the
constituting of certain groups of distinguished men whose duty it is to
guard the highest ideals, not only of their own crafts, but of society
itself through the free city which embodies their communal life. The
Walled Towns know well that, while all men are equal in the sight of
God and before the Law, there is otherwise no such thing as equality,
that it would be fatal were it ever achieved, and that the efforts at
its accomplishment have undermined such society as we once had until it
has crumbled and crashed into the unhandsome _débris_ of its own ruin.
The determination of inequalities by false standards of comparative
value is almost as ill-favoured a thing as a doctrinaire equality;
between the cash values of the bourgeois nineteenth century and the
crazy overturnings and levellings and topsy-turvydom of twentieth
century “democracy,” or Bolshevism, there is little to choose. High
values, few, cherished, recognized and honoured, are one great end
of society, of life itself, and it is in these crowning marks of
distinction and achievement that humanity finds its best expression
as well as its safe guides and sure leaders. In the Walled Towns is
always the ardent quest for something to honour, whether it is some
concrete product of art, science, letters, craftsmanship, or whether it
is a citizen, an ideal, a memory of the past, a figure in history, a
saint--or God Himself. Honour, service, loyalty, worship,--these things
have wholly taken the place of an insolent assurance of equality, a
bawling about rights, a denial of superiority, a proclaiming of the
omnipotence of men “by virtue of their manhood alone.”
V
It will be evident at once that the Walled Towns are founded in
deliberate opposition to nineteenth century democracy as well as to its
bastard issue, its Mordred and its Nemesis, anarchy and Bolshevism,
and to its inevitable but blood-kin enemy, socialism. Through state
socialism, communism or internationalism a fool-hardy and illiterate
democracy, surrendering at discretion to the materialism of industrial
civilization, has striven to maintain the thing itself in all its
integrity and its wealth-producing potency while turning its products
into the hands of the many rather than the few. Even now, with the
myrrh of war still bitter on the lips, the dim visions of greater
things are fading away, and only one cry goes up for ever greater
production, for more intensive effort, in order that the material
losses may be retrieved.
Neither by state-socialism nor by soviets nor by any other ingenious
device can wholesome social conditions be brought out of a thing
unwholesome in itself; neither can a new control, a new basis of
production and distribution, or new laws, compacts and covenants,
take the place of a new spiritual energy, a new vision of ultimate
values and their relationships. That communism, collectivism and
social democracy have all gone bankrupt during and following the war
is one truth at least we have learned. The methods were foolish enough
but the object aimed at, the preservation and redemption of modern
industrialism, was worse.
The impulse and incentive towards Walled Towns, whenever it comes, will
be primarily social, the revolt of man against the imperial scale,
against a life of false values impregnably intrenched behind custom,
superstition and self-interest, against the quantitative standard,
the tyranny of bulk, the gross oppression of majorities. It will
echo a demand for beauty in life and of life, for the reasonable and
wholesome unit of human scale, for high values in ideal and in action,
for simplicity and distinction and a realization of true aristocracy.
Engendered of a new spiritual outlook, it may be fostered by the
compulsion of circumstance, for in spite of the brave front assumed
by those who even now are looking towards a future, it becomes daily
more apparent that the war has destroyed modern society and that in
spite of all the best intentions in the world it can never be restored.
The whole fabric of industrial civilization, already rotten at heart,
has collapsed; it could not save the world from universal war and it
possesses no power to enforce its own recuperation. In five years the
potential in men has been cut down by millions, an enormous amount
of machinery for production and transportation has been destroyed,
together with much arable land and many mines. The birth-rate steadily
decreases all over the world and with no evident prospect of a reversal
of the process. The debts of all the warring nations have reached
a point where in some cases the interest charges alone will almost
amount to the whole pre-war budget. The entire system of credit and
of international finance has become hopelessly disorganized and no
one has yet suggested any way in which it may adequately be restored.
Neither armistice nor peace has brought about even the beginnings of
industrial recovery; the demand is fabulous and acute, but the problems
of raw materials, transportation, credits, and of markets that will not
only take but also pay, are apparently unsolvable; meanwhile national
debts are still increasing through the payment of enormous amounts to
the unemployed.
To meet the crisis there is an unanimous cry for a resumption of
production, and for a vastly augmented output through increased
efficiency and more intensive methods, but the crying is in vain, for
meanwhile the working element has entered on a course of restriction
that will inevitably nullify every effort at increasing the output.
Partly through its pre-war victories in the contest with capital,
partly through the abnormal wage returns brought into being through
the desperation of the managers of the war, labour is now successfully
engaged in the work of cutting down production far below what it was
even ten years ago, both by reducing the hours of work and by vastly
augmenting the wage. The actual productivity of a “labour unit” today
is less than at any time since industrialism became the controlling
element in life, and in many categories it is less and less productive
of satisfactory results. Under these conditions it is hard to see just
how the reconstructionists expect to obtain that greatly increased
output they admit is the only visible hope of saving the world from
bankruptcy, chaos and barbarism.
The contest is an unfair one, for the entrance of Bolshevism has added
a new factor hitherto unknown. Enraged by the failure of strikes and
other war measures to improve their condition, labour is increasingly
turning to the small minority of avowed revolutionists who proclaim
the rather obvious fact that so long as industry is engineered by the
two antagonistic forces of capitalism and proletarianism, no permanent
improvement in the state of the latter is possible. Every increase in
wages is followed automatically by a greater increase in the cost of
living, and the ratio today between a wage of eighty cents an hour
and the cost of food, clothing and shelter, is less advantageous than
was the case when this sum represented not a wage per hour, but per
day. The reason for this state of things is not thought out with any
particular degree of exactness, and the leap is made in the dark to
revolution, confiscation and, of late, to Bolshevism. The ease with
which an insignificant, alien and unscrupulous minority has succeeded
in destroying society in Russia and Hungary, and the apparent ease with
which the same theory has almost been carried out in Germany, and may
be carried out in France and Italy--not to speak of North Dakota--has
aroused all the latent savagery and the impulse to revolt in large
sections of the working classes, but it has also completely terrorized
the politicians if not the capitalists themselves, and the menace of
anarchy is met cringingly and half-heartedly. It has even acquired a
strong if somewhat veiled defence among contemporary directors of human
destiny.
Were it not for the results of Bolshevism wherever it is being tried,
the situation might appear hopeless, for it begins to look very much
as though the attitude of labour, now apparently fixed, would make
impossible the industrial restoration on which statesmen, captains of
industry and high financiers count for the saving of the situation. If
this fails then there appears no escape from international bankruptcy
and a complete breakdown of the modern social system, with all this
implies of poverty, unemployment and even starvation. This is the
breeding-ground of Bolshevism, but the hope lies in the fact which is
becoming more apparent every day, that the thing is even worse for
the proletarian than for the capitalist or the man of culture and
education, the criminal being the only one that derives any profit
from the adventure. A few months more of Lenine, Trotsky and Bela Kun,
and the danger of Bolshevism will have passed, so far certainly as the
United States, Great Britain, France and Italy are concerned.
Yet with the removal of this peril the possibility of a social and
industrial breakdown still remains, and whether in anticipation
thereof, or as a forced expedient under sudden catastrophe, the Walled
Town offers itself as a means of solution, since it does not depend for
its existence on the maintenance or recovery of the pre-war industrial
system--rather on its rejection and reversal--while equally it is the
prophylactic against Bolshevism and its entire reversal.
And so the Walled Towns go back to an earlier age before modernism
began; back to the dim cities, the proud cities, the free cities of
centuries ago. They wall themselves against the world without, and
build up within their grey ramparts, and guard with their tall towers,
a life that is simpler and more beautiful and more joyful and more just
than that they had known and rejected because of its folly and its sin.
As, long ago, when the world became too gross or the terror of its
downfall too ominous, cell and hermitage, convent and monastery grew up
now here, now there, in secluded valleys, on inaccessible mountains,
in the barren and forgotten wilderness; as the solitary drew around
him first a handful, then a horde; as the damp cave or the wattled
hut gave way to multitudinous buildings and spacious cloisters and
the tall towers of enormous churches, so now, when time has come full
circle again, is all to be done over once more though after a different
fashion.
Men have despaired of redeeming a crumbling or recalcitrant world and
have gone out into the desert for the saving of their own souls, and
lo, the world followed and by them was saved. From each centre of
righteousness and beauty and salvation radiated circle after circle
of ever widening influence; the desert and the waste became orchard
and garden, the ribald and the lawless and the insolent came knocking
at the gates; soldier and bravo and king humbled their heads before
tonsured monk and mitred abbot. Ever wider waxed the increasing circles
until they touched, merged,--and the wonder was accomplished; ill had
come to an end and good had come into being.
So the Walled Towns, now when the need is clamorous again. Evil
imperial in scale cannot be blotted out by reform imperial in method.
The old way was the good way, the way of withdrawal and of temporary
isolation. “To your tents, O Israel!” Gather together the faithful and
them of like heart, building in the wilderness sanctuaries and Cities
of Refuge. The old ideals are indestructible; they survive through the
scorching of suns and the beating of tempests and as ever they are
omnipotent when they are rightly used. Not for long would the Walled
Towns stand aloof, and rampired against an alien and unkindly world,
for more and more would men be drawn within their magical circuits,
greater and ever greater would become their number, and at last the new
wonder would be accomplished and society once more redeemed.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
Obvious typos corrected, where they are supported by the same word in
the rest of the book. Note that there are several archaic terms used
that are not actually typos e.g. alarum, froward.
Apparent inconsistencies in hyphenation have been left unchanged.
“in other” corrected to “in another” on page 35.
Missing comma added on page 35: “the individual, the family, the State”.
Missing quotation mark added on page 74: “are bound to be present.”
“belongs” corrected to "belong" on page 92.
Excerpts of _The Decadent: Being the Gospel of Inaction_ are quoted in
the Prologue, after the thought break. The presentation of the excerpt
has been left unchanged from the original scan.