Part 28

The whole mistake is natural enough—the conscious mind always lagging behind our unconscious growth; but to-day the social consciousness is finally forcing itself on the perception of the individual; and that which we have called selfishness, and which is really socialness misused, will be lifted from vice to virtue as we re-name it. Once properly recognised, we have quite ability enough to measure the man who uses a public power for a private end; to measure and condemn. But while this misconception still exists we have a minor confusion as to “self-expression” and “social service.”

The artist feels this more perhaps than other workers. He feels it because his feelings are more prominent, and more often handled, than those of the workman in the more mechanical trades. A man may make tremendous engines or run them; and never “feel himself work” so much as the maker of very inconsiderable poems. This is because the poet is so highly socialised a product. His power to be a poet is a social power. What he feels is the heart of his people, and he, poor man! thinks it is his own. He thinks his heart is far more exquisitely sensitive than theirs, whereas it is their hearts he is feeling! His capacity for pain and for pleasure is their capacity; it is greater because he is more people, or at least is the specialised point of sensation and expression for more people.

“Let me write the songs of a people and let who will make their laws.”

The songs of a people—not his songs forced down upon them, but their songs forced up through him. “The proof of a poet shall be sternly deferred until his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.”

Artists, of all men, are most exquisitely specialised to the social service. Their work, of all men’s, is least valuable to themselves, most valuable to others. They are absolutely for other people to so extreme a degree as nearly always to warp and injure their personal relations, even under the fairest conditions. They must do the work for which they are built, cost what it may, and this compelling power, this insistent force from within which will out through whatever medium is at hand, this they call “self-expression”! An artist, they say, must not consider social service in the least; he must express himself.

It is a true recognition of the kind of work he must do; he must indeed express that which is good in him quite regardless of whether the people around him want it or not; will pay him for it or not; will kill him for it or not. But that unfaltering expression is his social service, his true function, what he was built for. And it is not “himself” that he is expressing, it is “themself.” He is, of that people and that time, a voice, an eye, an ear, a hand to do. Holland made the Dutch painters, not they Holland. They in return in their accomplished work made Holland Hollander, so to speak, but the lives of many generations of Dutchmen and Dutchwomen went to form those painters first.

There is no necessary conflict between the two conceptions of the artist’s duty—to express himself, or to serve society—as far as the special performance goes: but the misconception carries wide error and evil with it none the less. It makes the artist morbid in what he fancies a vast self-consciousness, whereas he might remain as free and unassuming personally as any child, once he recognised that it was not he who was doing all this, but they. It would save him too from the common mistake of applying his splendid range of social sensitiveness to his own personal affairs as he too commonly does. Had Carlyle, for instance, seen truly what was the nature of his place and power, he would have been less haughty and less irritable—also less lonely.

The individual must needs suffer under the isolation of his strange overdevelopment, unless he is able to detach himself from it, and be a person among other persons freely. The power to separate the man from the office, to come down from the throne and play ball, is a healthy one. On the other hand, much true artistic service is lost to the world through this misconception about “self-expression” when the power is not overwhelmingly great, and the individuals are strong in their sense of duty as they see it. This is especially true among women. To such, the inner impulse demanding expression is considered “selfish,” and a thing to resist; and their energies are forced into other lines because thereby they imagine they are best serving. If they recognised this inward propulsion as the call for social expression—not self’s—it would stand differently in their scale of duty.

A question rises here of large importance, and not easy of answer. Suppose the social expression actuating the individual be a bad one—visibly a bad one—resultant from wrong conditions and tending to promote others as wrong—should such a tendency be followed? Is that the social service? How far may the individual judgment give check to such social tendency?

As, for instance, certain wrong economic conditions, say in France, before the Revolution, tended to produce many social phenomena, including a tendency to debased literature and art. Should the artist, in such case, say to himself, “Why, dear me! This is a vicious and reactionary social impulse. I am out-Heroding Herod—this stuff shows how bad we have been, and doesn’t help us to be any better. Now I will not indulge my inclination to paint these torture-chamber scenes, or these subtle indecencies. I like to—but what of that? It is a social tendency, but society is not always right, she goes backward and sideways by spells; it will not do her any good to let out this stuff. No, I’ll choke it off, and, if I can’t paint better things, I’ll take to pottery or weaving.”

Whether this is best, or whether it is the artist’s duty humbly to voice that which is in him—saying, “Well, this is the way you feel, is it? Better let it out then. Perhaps you’ll change quicker if you see your badness,” this is a very large question.

Perhaps the truly morbid and vicious tendencies, thus recognised by the artist, would cause him as much shame as if he had unfortunately inherited some scrofulous disease, and he would be unable to proceed. This, at least, should be held steadily in mind, that human work is not mere expression, of self or of society, but is transmission, and therefore to be watched.

If speech were merely a relief to one’s own feelings, poured forth into empty air and earless waste places, then foulness and profanity would be merely indications of how the speaker felt, and hurt no one. But where speech goes to other ears, it must be measured, not merely by the speaker’s emotions, but by theirs. So the artist is not merely an unconscious spring bubbling over with fair water, or foul, according to its hidden sources, but is a conduit, taking the water to something as well as from something. And as a conscious intelligence bound to act “up to his lights,” if he judges the water to be bad in its effects, he has no right to convey it to others. This would leave an easy alternative to the artist. Let him, if he must, write his decadent literature, paint his decadent pictures; and then, having so relieved himself of these foul secretions, let him decently destroy the product, lest it prove contagious. Some friend, having seen, would say compassionately—“Poor Jones! He has to write about so much of it in a year—he cannot help it, it is better to come out, I suppose. But don’t look as if you knew—he is very sensitive about it.”

In a more advanced civilisation we may have Public Health ordinances as to these expressions, like the signs in our street cars. The assumption of the artist that his form of production is beyond all social responsibility or control, that “there is no ethics in art,” is a very interesting instance of the ego concept at its most insane height.

If ever there was a “social function,” it is art. As a civilisation advances, there is more and more development of art; as we look back along the path of social progress, there is less and less of it. In its inception it was more or less common to all workers, a little of it; as it grew, it demanded more wholly the work of a whole life. No ultra-specialised social servant is more removed from self-support than the artist, whose work is of no faintest possible use to him as an individual. He must absolutely depend on the advanced society which made him, which feeds, clothes, shelters, and defends him, and whose highest needs it is his duty to serve.

Higher than kings or captains, higher even than the giant producers and distributers of wealth, comes this delicate, sensitive, exquisitely specialised organ of society. For true service he deserves all the love and honour society can give, as well as the support due all of us—nothing can overestimate his value. For true service,—but what service does he give?

The more highly developed the organ, the more open to disease. No feature in human production is marked with worse depravity than is found in art. Because of the extreme pleasure found in the transmission of his peculiar power, because of the special sensitiveness involved in his form of service, we too often find the artist sunken in a sublimated selfishness and arrogant to a degree beyond comparison. It is as though an eye should plume itself loftily on its power of sight. “You poor, blind body! You cannot see, but I can! I only can see, and I like to see. It gives me pleasure. I will see only what gives me pleasure. It is my pleasure to see things pink—all things pink. And round—all things are round.” The poor blind body cannot deny that things are pink—if the eyes say so; but it has hands at least, to tell it that some things are flat and others sharp; so it works on, sadly misled by its servant.

And if we reason with the servant, saying: “Are you so sure that things are pink? It does not seem reasonable—it does not seem right,”—the servant loftily and unapproachably replies: “The Eye does not reason! There is no right or wrong to the Eye! I am an Eye, and I see as I like. If you differ with me, go blind!”

When we recognise production as a social process, for the social good, all work will change its standard of measurement. The worker, artist or scientist, inventor or teacher, must often differ with the purchasing public; must modify his work by his own reason and conscience, not by that of the other people; but the purpose to which he modifies it is social service. It may cost him his life at the time; he may have to set himself and his views against those of the past and present; but he should do so with unfaltering devotion to what he believes the social good; not in this lunatic position that he and his work are unique in the universe—that he owes no responsibility to anything—that “art is for art’s sake.”

When we are alive to the nature of our social processes, when we see that production is both duty and pleasure, personal good and social advantage, we shall bend our tremendous powers to develop and educate the productive energy in all our children, and provide the best conditions for its free exercise.

XIII: DISTRIBUTION Summary

Distribution the field of most social disorders. Advantages of Distribution. Physical Avenues of Distribution. Mechanical means of Distribution. Social nourishment flowing around the world. Evils of local production and consumption. Social instincts developed by common interests. Love rests on service. International dependence means international peace. Long circuit, wide base, gives room for larger development. Present system of Distribution does not properly supply the world. Mysterious coagulations. False concepts again. Ego concept. Want theory. Working and eating, which comes first? Parent not competent to provide for child in society. Social parentage. Public education. Making and taking. How to supply social energy. Pay concept. Patent failure in application. Selling kerosene as a social service. No true relation between work and pay. Pay idea wrong. Nourishment first, work after. Heirlooms in our heads. The Bear. Competition and survival not useful among our vital organs. Our improvement mutual, collective, organic. How to raise the productive value of society. No ratio between want and work. Reductio ad absurdum of Want theory. Not “pay,” but investment. A man’s work is his payment to society for value received. Slave labour could not conceive of wage labour; wage labour fails to conceive of free labour. The normal “incentive” is pressure of social energy. See effect of false concepts on distribution of wheat. How it should be. Real “business sense” for society.

XIII DISTRIBUTION

When we come to the subject of Distribution, we are facing what may be called the main field of our social disorders. Under this head, and that of the next chapter, Consumption, come all questions of property rights, with the vast structures of the civil law ensuing; the whole money question—laboriously complex; the demands of the labour movement; the protests of the “leisure class”—we are on the great battlefield of modern thought.

Let us approach it simply and naturally along the lines laid down in preceding chapters.

Distribution is a natural corollary of production. Society produces through its individual members in ever-growing surplus, and must distribute that surplus among its members to the best social advantage. What that advantage is needs no abstruse exposition; it is simply to have all the members of society supplied with what they need in order that they may so continue to serve society.

As social functions develop, the rate of production increases, as well as the relative distance of the consumers; and with them increases the necessity for an ever wider, swifter, and easier distribution of product. The circulation of our social supplies is as essential to social growth as the circulation of blood is to the growth of the body. This is seen plainly in the course of history. In the earliest times the young civilisations depend on great waterways for their life and prosperity as the easiest means of transportation; and water transportation remains one of our most important avenues of distribution. But seacoast and river bank were not enough for us, land transportation must develop too, and it has done so, wonderfully.

At first the mother-of-all-industries, the savage woman, was the only beast of burden. Then stronger animals were pressed into the service, and reached their height of usefulness in the age of caravan traffic. The drag, the sled, and final triumph—the wheel, were invented, and the world rolled on more and more swiftly. With the wheel grew the road, and civilisation leaped forward. The road became a railroad, tireless mechanical forces superseded the quadruped, and the distribution of social products to-day is truly marvellous.