Page:James Ramsay MacDonald - The Socialist Movement.pdf/186

 182 indication of the future. When time went more leisurely than it does and the hustle and bustle of commercialism had not struck us like a cyclone, people lived a pretty full intellectual life in societies like the famous Edinburgh Select Society or in those mournful gatherings of cronies which fill so much of the canvas of the life of Burns. There seems little doubt but that if we could possess ourselves once more of our lost leisure (say, by subordinating machines to men instead of men to machines) these circles and coteries would revive, for man's intellectual life is as social in its requirements as his industrial life. If they did revive general culture would leap forward with a bound. One of the reasons why an unworthy literature is finding such a market to-day is that the destruction of intellectual coteries has withdrawn the great part of the intellectual stimulus which the best of men require. Individualism in reading and thinking gives, first, trashy journalism, and then trashy literature, a chance. Well, under the conditions which would come with Socialism, Science, Art, Literature would have their associations everywhere. This is the audience for our poet. He delights and charms his friends. He appears before the connoisseurs as Burns did in Edinburgh, or before the socially select as Tennyson did, or before the public as Dickens, or Carlyle, or Thackeray did. Thus the poet gets his reputation. But he has yet to find a printing-press and a publisher, and the Socialist state owns the one and is the other, we are told!