II

Erasmus dreamed once—so he writes to Charles Utenhove—that St. Francis

came to thank him for chastising the Franciscans. The Founder had not

the scrupulous stage-costume of his degenerate followers: his brown

frock was of undyed wool; the hood was not peaked, but merely hung

behind to cover the head in bad weather; the cord was a piece of rope

from a farmyard; the feet were bare. Of the five wounds of the stigmata

there was as little trace in St. Francis as of the six virtues in the

Franciscans. Obedience, poverty, chastity, humility, simplicity,

charity—where had flown these “six wings of the seraph”?

_Eheu fugaces!_ ’Tis the story of all founders, of all orders. St.

Francis at his supreme moment of renunciation had not even the brown

frock of Erasmus’s dream. In the market-place of Assisi he stood in his

shirt. And he desired to die even more naked, as Thomas of Celano and

the “Legenda Trium Sociorum” testify. The first Franciscans were simple

souls kindled by his love and ecstasy, “the minstrels of the dear Lord.”

They bore revilement and scourging; dragged along by their hoods, they

never ceased to proclaim Peace. They lay a-cold in caves, with hearts

careless of the morrow; they served in lepers’ houses. And above all

they worked; begging was only to be a last resort, and never was money

to be asked for. “Beware of money,” says the “Regula.”

Brother Elias of Cortona, the immediate successor of St. Francis, is

said to have lived like a prince, with valets and horses, and he readily

got the Pope to sanction a device by which he obtained all the money he

wanted _per interpositas personas_. Nor did the Master’s teaching fare

better at the hands of the more faithful faction—the Observants whom

the Conventualists persecuted—for the rule of Absolute Poverty was

applied without the genial concessions and exceptions he knew how to

make; and under the guidance of the caustic and canonical Antony of

Padua the ancient _gaudentes in Domino_ hardened into slaves of the

letter, while the more mystic degenerated into anchorites who retired to

the mountains to save their own souls.

Nothing can point the tragedy of St. Francis’s success more vividly than

his own homely words in his “Testamentum.” “And they who came to take up

this life gave up whatever they might have to the poor and were content

with a single tunic, patched inside and out (if they wished), together

with a girdle and drawers: and we would have no more. We clerks said the

office like other clerks; the lay-brothers said the Lord’s Prayer. We

gladly abode in poor and forsaken churches, and were simple folk and

subject to all. And I used to work with my hands, and I desire to work,

and my earnest wish is that all the brethren should work at some decent

employment.”

Only a century later Dante’s eulogy of the Founder (“Paradiso,” Canto

XI) is qualified by the remark that so few of his followers cleave to

his teachings that “a little stuff may furnish out their cloaks.” And

three centuries later the spectacle which these _Fratri Minori_

represented to Erasmus was that of arrogant mendicants, often of loose

morals, begging with forged testimonials, haunting the palaces of the

rich, forcing themselves into families, selling the Franciscan habit to

wealthy dying sinners as a funeral cloak to cover many sins. His little

sisters, the swallows and the doves, fluttered over St. Francis’s tomb,

but from it issued the hawks and the vultures. An old, old moral, though

humanity will never learn it.

Saint Francis was Francis Saint. The Lady Poverty “who for eleven

hundred years had remained without a single suitor” found in him a

spouse faithful unto death. His soul went out in fraternity to all the

wonderful creation, in joyous surrender to pain and tribulation: even

Death was his sister. To found an Order of St. Francis is to count upon

a succession of St. Francises. As well found an Order of Shakespeare, a

phalanstery of Da Vincis.

In religion no less than in literature or art the Master is ever a new

individual—“_Natura lo fece e ruppe il tipo_”—but followers ever think

to fix the free-blowing spirit. Alas! saints may be summarised in a

system, but the system will not produce saints. Academies, churches,

orders can never replace men; they too often serve to asphyxiate or

assassinate such as appear. St. Dominic, the sterner founder of the

other mendicant order, was not more fortunate in creating an apostolic

succession of Poverty than his friend and contemporary; and as for his

precursor, St. Bruno, contrast his marble image in the Certosa, gazing

agonisedly at a crucifix, with the mosaics of agate, lapis-lazuli,

amethyst, and cornelian worked over the altars by eight generations of

the Sacchi family, or with the Lucullian feasts which the Carthusians

could furnish forth at the bidding of the Magnificent Lodovico. St.

Bruno retreated to the desert to fast and pray, and the result was

Chartreuse. If he now follows the copious litigation he may well

apprehend that his order has modified its motto and that for “_Stat crux

dum volvitur orbis_” you should read “_Stat spiritus_.”

Benedictine, too, is a curious by-product of the first of all the

Western orders, and the one by which England was converted to

Christianity. How pleased the founder of Monte Cassino must be to see a

British bishop sipping Benedictine!

Religion has not, indeed, lacked saints aware of the tendency of

followers to substitute the forms for the realities and the leader for

the spirit. There was Antoinette Bourignon, with her love for the free

flowing of the Holy Ghost and her hatred of the Atonement theory, but in

the absence of forms her sect had not sufficient material framework to

maintain itself by. If the Quakers still survive, it is because they

have erected something into a system, if only colour-blindness. But the

twaddle which is talked at Quaker meetings when an old bore is played

upon by the spirit, turns one’s thoughts longingly to a stately liturgy,

independent on the passing generation. Humanity is indeed between the

devil and the deep sea. Institutions strangle the spirit, and their

absence dissipates it.

“Nec tecum possum vivere, nec sine te.”

Even if by miracle a Church remains true to the spirit of its founder,

this is a fresh source of unspirituality, for his spirit may be

outgrown. An excellent definition of what a Church should be was given

some years ago by a writer in the _Church Quarterly_: “A National

Church, elastic enough to provide channels for fresh manifestations of

spiritual life, yet anchored to the past.” But where is such a Church to

be found? “Anchored to the past”—yes, that condition is more than

fulfilled. But spiritual elasticity? The _Church Quarterly_ reviewer has

the face to pass off his definition as that of the Church of England,

and to say that such a National Church “might have saved the United

States from many of those grotesque, and worse than grotesque, features

which have at various times disfigured their spiritual life.” But the

Church of England has notoriously failed in elasticity—even the

Archbishop of Canterbury is unable to make it express his view of the

Athanasian Creed. And, far from its anchoring the spiritual life of the

English people, they have violently torn themselves away from it in

secessions of Baptists, Methodists, Quakers, &c. &c. As to its

preserving them from grotesque religious features, the aberrations of

English sectarianism fully equal those of America, when the difference

of geographic area is considered and the absence of supervision over

great spaces. Sandemanians, Walworth Jumpers, Joanna Southcottians,

Seventh Day Baptists, Plymouth Brethren, Christadelphians, Peculiar

People—such are a few of the British aberrations, some of which have

counted distinguished followers. The bequests to foster even the

Southcott mania were treated as sacred by the Court of Chancery.

Jump-to-Glory-Jane is an English type put into poetry by an English

poet. The sect to which Silas Marner belonged, with its naïve belief in

drawing lots—the practical equivalent of the sortilege of the Pagan

soothsayer—was not made in America. It was England which Voltaire

ridiculed for its one sauce and its endless sects. The great scale of

America magnifies the aberrations. But even Mormonism, Dowieism, and

Christian Science have solid achievements to their credit. Salt Lake

City is a paradise built over a desert reclaimed by Mormon labourers,

Zion City is a handsome town without drinking-palaces, and Christian

Science has made more advances in the last generation than Christianity

made in its first two centuries, numbering as it does its temples and

its teachers by the thousand. There is at least life behind these

grotesqueries, while in the Established Churches there is asphyxiation

by endowments.

Endowments—there is the secret of stagnation. It is an unhappy truth

that man tends to become a parasite on his own institutions. Humanity is

a Frankenstein that is ridden by its own creations. Its Churches, with

their cast-iron creeds and their golden treasure-heaps, are the prisons

of the soul of the future. The legal decision in the great Free Church

fight serves as what Bacon calls an “ostensive instance” of this

elemental truth, bringing out as it does that the legal interpretation

of a Church involves, not the elasticity so glibly vaunted by the

_Church Quarterly_ reviewer, but absolute inelasticity. A tiny minority

of ministers is able, for a time at least, to hold millions of money and

hundreds of buildings, because the vast majority has elected, in a

spirit of brotherly love, to join another body from which it is

separated by a microscopic point. There can, at this rate, never be

development in a Church. The faintest divergence from old tradition may

justify the hard-shell orthodox in claiming all the funds and regarding

the innovators as deserters of their posts and properties. All Church

funds are indissolubly connected with the doctrines to which they were

first tacked on, and changes in doctrine involve forfeiture of the

belongings in favour of those who have had the fidelity or the

shrewdness to cling to the original dogma. How much change is necessary

to alter a creed is a delicate problem, known in logic as of the Soros

order. For every day brings it subtle increments or decrements, and a

dogma of imperishable adamant has not yet appeared in human history.

Every dogma has its day. The life of a normally constituted truth is,

according to Ibsen, twenty years at the outside, and aged truths are apt

to be shockingly thin. Thus the danger which threatens all Churches—the

danger of having to buy their ministers—is raised to infinity if the

money is thus to be tied up by the dead hand of the past. A premium is

placed upon infidelity and mustiness. There is no Church or religious

body in the world which is not weighted with pecuniary substance, from

Rome to the Order we have been considering, founded for the preachment

of Absolute Poverty. The continuity of policy which the _Church

Quarterly_ applauds becomes a mere continuity of property, if progress

is to be thus penalised. Nor are the Dissenting bodies immune from this

pecuniary peril. A Calvinist chapel in Doncaster that was gravitating to

the New Theology has found itself closed _pro tem._ under its trust deed

of 1802.

The remedy for this clogging of spiritual life is clear. It was always

obvious, but when Property is in danger one begins to consider things

seriously.

Every Church and sect must be wound up after three generations. The

time-limit needs elucidation.

The first generation of a Church or a heresy—the terms are synonymous,

for every Church starts as a heresy—is full to the brim of vitality,

fire, revolt, sincerity, spirituality, self-sacrifice. It is a

generation in love, a generation exalted and enkindled by the new truth,

a generation that will count life and lucre equally base beside the

spreading of the new fire. The second generation has witnessed this

fervour of its fathers, it has been nourished in the warmth of the

doctrine, its education is imprinted with the true fiery stamp. It is

still near the Holy Ghost. In the third generation the waves radiated

from the primal fire have cooled in their passage through time; the

original momentum tends to be exhausted. Now is the period of the smug

Pharisees profiting by the martyrdoms of their ancestors, babbling

rhetorically—between two pleasures—of their fidelity to the faith of

their fathers. If the third generation of a Church can get through with

fair spiritual success, it is often only because of a revival of

persecution. But the third generation is absolutely the limit of the

spiritual stirring. In the fourth generation you shall ever find the

young people sly sceptics or sullen rebels, and the Vicar of Bray coming

in for high preferment. Here, then, is the limitation dictated by human

nature. The life of a Church should be wound up by the State. The birth

of a heresy must be free to all, and should be registered like the birth

of a child. It would expose its adherents to no disadvantages, either

religious or political. But after three generations it must be wound up.

Of course, it should be perfectly open for the Church to reconstitute

itself immediately, but it should do this under a new name. If it

started again afresh, the compulsory winding-up would have acted as a

species of persecution and thoroughly revitalised the content of the

particular _credo_. The third generation would have strained every sinew

to realise their faith and bring it home to the young and fourth

generation. The latter, ere re-establishing the Church, would have

rediscovered its truth, and thereby given it fresh momentum to carry it

through another three generations. This simple system would allow

children to continue the faith of their fathers from conviction instead

of compulsion, and, by terminating the right to property, would save

posterity from the asphyxiation of benefactions.

The life of a generation is computed by biological statisticians at

thirty-three years. Three generations would thus make ninety-nine years.

A century brings such changes in thought and things that the excerpts

from the _Times_ of a hundred years ago read like the journalism of

another planet.

The bequests by which eleven old gentlewomen of a certain parish, that

has been swept away, receive groats of an abolished currency, on a day

that has disappeared from the calendar, to perpetuate the memory of a

benevolent megalomaniac, would, on a similar principle, be limited to

the natural run of a century. It is enough to be allowed a dead finger

in the pie of proximate posterity; “a century not out” must never be

written over any human will or institution.

If this time-limit seems a trifle harsh, apply it, dear reader, not to

your own creed, but to something esoteric, like the doctrine of the

Dalai Lamas of Tibet, which has for so many centuries paralysed a

priest-ridden Asiatic population. Do you think this theory of

reincarnation deserved a longer run than three generations?

THE GAY DOGES: OR THE FAILURE OF SOCIETY AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF

SOCIALISM

“Dieses Prunkschiff ist ein rechtes Inventariënstück, woran man

sehen kann, was die Venetianer waren, und sich zu sein dünkten.”

GOETHE: _Italiänische Reise_.

I

But if Absolute Poverty is less worshipful than St. Francis imagined,

Magnificence as an ideal will, I fear, always be found to connote

defective moral sympathies, as of the Pharaohs building their

treasure-cities on the labour of lashed slaves. For how in our world of

sorrow and mystery can magnanimity and magnificence meet? What great

soul could find expression in gilt, or even in gold? ’Tis a reflection

on the character of the Doges of Venice that everywhere in their palace

is a sense of over-gilded ceilings. Even when the Masters have made a

firmament of frescoes, the massive flamboyant framing weighs like a

torrid haze on a weary land. Art is overlaid and obliterated by gold.

What wonder Religion too is soon asphyxiated in these flaming halls of

Council—the Doge ceases to kneel to the Madonna, he stands before

_Venice Enthroned between Mars and Neptune_. It is Juno who from a

ceiling-fresco pours gold on Venice, and in the heavy gilded picture of

Zelotti, the Magnificent Ten could behold _Venice Seated on the World_.

What sly satirist was it who—over the choir of St. Mark’s—crucified

Christ on a cross of gold?

In “The Merchant of Venice,” ’tis the Duke of Morocco who chooses the

golden casket; I feel sure ’twas Bassanio, the Venetian. Not that I do

not hate the leaden casket more. Portia should have gone with a field of

buttercups in June.

Of all expressions of human greatness, metallic sheen is the most banal.

I have never recovered from the shock of learning that the Greeks gilded

their temples, and though I can now with even a spice of zest imagine

them shining afar from their headlands in a golden glory, I would have

preferred to keep my vision of austere columns and noble pediments; and

I am grateful to Time, that truer artist, for having refined away that

assertive aureola.

On the water, indeed—which is beneath one’s feet, and not sagging on

one’s head—metallic sheen may exhilarate, subtilising and softening

itself, as it does, in its own wavering reflections, and I find the

Doge’s gilded galley more endurable than his _lacunar aureum_. It may be

because Shakespeare (or rather Plutarch) has reconciled me to

Cleopatra’s barge by those magnificent burnished lines. The Lord Mayor

of London, too, had anciently his gilded barge, and if you will look at

an eighteenth-century picture in the Guildhall by a pair of forgotten

painters, representing the Lord of Cockaigne sailing in state on the

Thames on the ninth of November, on the way to be sworn at Westminster,

you will see how easily London, with her old boatmen and barges, and

water-gates and water-parties, singing as in Pepys, might have

paralleled the water-pomp of Venice, and how completely we have now

thrown away the gorgeous possibilities of our proud water-way, lining it

with warehouses in lieu of stately mansions, and cutting out of our

lives all that shimmering vitality of ever-moving water. Man does not

live by bread alone, and “Give us this day our daily water” were no

unfitting prayer in our arid city. The Henley Week is our one approach

to the colour of a Venetian _festa_. Yet what a Grand Canal the Thames

might have been! I vow that at a distance I should take that old

Guildhall picture, with its gay old costumes, its pageant of gilded

galleys, each flying a brave array of rich-dyed flags and manned with

rowers in white, its spires and turrets, and the noble dome of St.

Paul’s swelling into sunny spaces of air and cloud, all suffused in a

golden mellowness, to represent the Doge of Venice going to a “solemn

rite” at the _Salute_. Alas! the Lord Mayor has now only a gilded coach,

and the Doge of Venice has vanished away, and only fragments of galleys

in the Arsenal and a model of the last of the Bucentaurs remain to tell

the tale of his marine glories, and his marriage to the Adriatic on

Ascension Day.

One mast of the _Bucentoro_—the very mast that upbore the flag of the

winged lion and the proud inscription, _In hoc signo vinces_—survives

in tragic recumbency, while a morsel of frieze shows in gold, on a basis

of dark wood, delicious angels playing trumpet and harp at the prow. The

relics of other galleys, pranked with figures about half life-size,

enable us to gather what exuberance of fancy and grotesquerie went to

grace the _Bucentoro_ which Napoleon burnt, while the fact that he

extracted the gold of 80,000 Napoleons from its ashes shows with what

prodigality the Republic blazoned its sense of itself.

But the marvellous model reconstructed by Ferdinand of Austria in 1837

at a cost of 152,000 francs, reveals, if it be exact, that seamy side

which is always the obverse of Magnificence. At first the eye is taken

up with its opulence of decoration, as it seems to take the water with

its proud keel, and its great all-topping flag of the lion and the

cross. For its upper deck is of mosaic, over-hinged by a huge lid, red

velvet without and gold relief within, and from the water-line rise

winged figures, and over the arch through which pass the many-flashing

oars of red and gold is a frieze of flying horses, the rape of Europa,

Centaurs, and what not; and above this are winged figures flying towards

a gold sky, and gold figures on a balcony, which is supported at the

prow by winged lions and a pair of mermen, and at the bowsprit couches

the winged lion with two little angels playing behind him; and on the

hull is a naiad pouring out her urn, and a merman blowing his trumpet,

and the protrusive heads of alligators; and lest you should think Venice

meant nothing but gold and fantasy and the pride of life, behold

dominant over these Justice with her sword and her scales, and Peace

with her dove and her olive-branch.

But below, hidden away behind and beneath the gilding, at the unseen end

of the red and gold oars

“Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke,”

sat one hundred and seventy-eight galley-slaves, chained four to an oar;

and here in this fuscous interior the benches are no longer of plush,

but of rough deal; here is no play of Fancy—here in the hard seats we

touch Reality. But not herein lies the supreme sordidness of the

_Bucentoro_—the crowning touch is given by the oars, which, at the very

point where they disappear over the rowlocks under the gay arches, turn

from their red and gold into a plain dirty white, like shirt-cuffs that

give on soiled sleeves. ’Tis the very magnificence of meanness! The

horny-handed wretches, to the rhythm of whose tired muscles this golden

vessel moved along in its music and sunshine, to whose caged gloom no

glimpse came of the flags and the purple, the angels and the naiads,

could not even be conceded the coloured end of an oar. But could there

be an apter symbol of civilisation, ancient, mediæval, or modern, than

this gilded oar, whose gaudiness fades as it passes from the bravery of

the outer spectacle to the grimness of the inner labour? Upon such

sweating slaves rested all the glitter and pageantry of the ancient

world—not only Babylon and Carthage, but even the spiritual and

artistic greatness of Greece. _In hoc signo vinces_—in the sign of

slavery; in the sign of the lion and the cross—the lion for yourself

and the cross for the people. And in every land of to-day the same

State-Galley glides along in bannered pomp, parading its decorative

images of Peace and Justice, and the radiant creations of its Art, while

below are the hard bare benches and the labouring, groaning serfs. The

serfs are below, even in another sense, for it is their unsightly hands

that have built up every square inch of this splendour. Beatrice d’Este

went to see a galley a-building, her velvet cap and her embroidered vest

stuck full of jewels; complacently recording the ejaculations of

admiration for her diamonds and rubies, while the Venetian women, and

even children, were toiling at making the sails and the ropes. Yes, the

social order too must be gazetted bankrupt. It has, indeed, never been

solvent. It has never paid its real creditors, the slaves of the

uncoloured oar.

Nor does our civilisation hold much hope of a change for the fairer.

Despite prophets and poets, despite Socialists, dry-as-dust or

dithyrambic, despite philanthropists and preachers, the revel on the

top-deck amid the velvet and the mosaics grows ever wilder, the flutes

ever more Dionysiac, the fantasies on prow and poop ever more

grotesquely golden. America, shorn of monarchy and feudalism and rank,

and all that the friends of man screamed against, divides with Russia

the hegemony of hotels and outdoes the worst extravagances and

debaucheries of the Renaissance. Where in the Cinquecento a few despots

and “humanists” wallowed in lust and luxury, we have now ten thousand

private tyrants and loose-livers, restrained hardly by the penal law.

The deeds of the Cenci or the Baglioni must be done in a glass-house in

the fierce light that beats upon local greatness. The ruffians of the

Renaissance had no such free field for vagaries and vices as the vagrom

son of a millionaire enjoys in this modern world, where property in

growing fluid has become dissolved from duty; where in every

pleasure-city palaces invite and women allure and slaves grovel; where

every port swarms with white-winged yachts to bear his indolent

irresponsibility to glamorous shores; where in a million halls of light

his world-strewn flunkeys proffer unseasonable food cooked by

unsurpassable artists, and rare champagnes, oscillated for months in a

strange daily ritual by troops of underground elves.

They tell us that this New Year’s Eve in New York alone some three

million pounds were spent in suppers in the flaring restaurants, where

between eleven and twelve o’clock only champagne could be served. Such

is the New Era ushered in by the New World—the Era of Champagne. For

this the Red Indian was uprooted and the wilderness tamed. For this

Washington lived and Lincoln died. By the flood of champagne all

standards of life and letters are swept away, save the one standard of

financial success, save the ability to dine in that wonderful culinary

cathedral where in a dim irreligious light as of a submarine world of

faery, to a melting liturgical music, a fashionable congregation follows

with absorbing zeal the lengthy order of service. What an Agapemone!

And this epidemic of vulgarity, spreading to our own country, has made

the England of 1802, which Wordsworth denounced for “glittering like a

brook,” the England where “plain living and high thinking” were no more,

appear like an island of pristine simplicity. Even the old families

surrender to the new standard and—in the plaint of Dante—“_non heroico

more, sed plebeo sequuntur superbiam_.”

What is to be done? What is to be done about it all? We writing men, to

whom the highest British manhood is still Wordsworth in that country

cottage where visitors must pay for anything beyond bread and cheese, we

to whom the greatest American personality is still Walt Whitman in his

Camden shanty, must at least preserve our divine gift of laughter, our

one poor power of laughing at these vulgarians, whom even the occasional

smuggling of an Old Master out of Italy cannot redeem from barbarism.

The purple pomp of kings, blatant though it be in comparison with true

grandeur, is at least the expression of a public dignity: it is an

official costume like the judge’s wig and gown. But because greatness

must accept office at the hands of its otherwise helpless inferiors, and

office must be suitably apparelled, a certain confusion has been

established between splendour and greatness, as though because greatness

means splendour, splendour must mean greatness. Of this confusion those

are promptest to take advantage to whom the high road to consideration

is closed. Private pomp is a confession of personal pettiness. The

little soul must needs inflate itself by a great house-shell, and

protract itself by a long retinue of servants. ’Tis almost too pathetic

a meekness, this humility of the Magnificent Ones.

Cannot I breathe into you—O Magnificent Ones—a little proper pride? Ye

buy the Past, watching one another in jealous competition; will no one

buy the Future? Why not buy with your millions an earth renewed and

regenerated, a solvent social order? Why not build a true civilisation

on this malarious marsh, that shall rise like the spires and domes of

Venice from her swamps? Surely that were a dream worthy of Magnificence!

Come, let us build together a State-Galley where the oars shall be red

and gold from blade to handle, and every man shall take his turn at

them, and the fantasies of Art shall adorn the hull of Righteousness,

and Justice and Peace shall no longer be ironic images carved for the

complacency of the top-deck. So shall there dawn an Ascension Day on

which the Doge shall go out with banners and music, not to marry the sea

with a ring, but to celebrate the nuptials of Earth with Heaven.

Private pomp is surely a questionable thing. Mediæval life centred round

the Cathedral, the Castle, the Palace. And the masses touched the life

at each and all. The Cathedral gave them their religion, their laws came

from the Palace, their protection from the Castle. Dominating a feudal

population, the towers of law and war uplifted and unified the people.

The lowliest were of this greatness. To-day palaces flaunt themselves,

divorced from moral meaning, magnificence without significance. The

world, as I said, is full of private autocrats, without duties or

dangers: an unhappy consequence of the fall of feudalism, ere a system

as human was ready to replace it. And to-day the Cathedral is our one

feudal relic, reconciling magnificence with morality: the light

streaming through the rose-window haloes the grey head of the

market-woman, and her prayer equals that of the Magnificent One himself.

It is significant that no villa—whoever the architect—can attain the

poetic quality of the simplest village church. The palace of Moses is

nowhere mentioned, but we read many minute instructions concerning the

Tabernacle and the Temple. In truth, art treasures are essentially

public: the furniture of cathedrals, libraries, law-courts,

market-places, and parks. The owners of collections do indeed often

allow the public to visit them at inconvenient times, but that anybody

should have exclusive rights is an absurdity. If Art were a form of

property like any other, the owner could destroy it, and the righteous

indignation of the world at the destruction of a Botticelli or a

Velasquez would mark the boundaries of private property. Land comes

under the same canon. Nothing, perhaps, should be owned which might not

be destroyed at will.

In literature and music—which are more spirits than bodies, and which

can be multiplied without loss—monopolies are unnecessary. If I write a

book against Socialism, the world will applaud, and communistically

possess itself thereof after a brief term. And this legal limitation of

copyright which forcibly wrests epics, operas, and novels from the heirs

might be extended to pictures and statues.