Page:The Commonweal (IA 0544678.0001.001.umich.edu).pdf/20

18 dealers, who have sufficient independence left in them to desire freedom, to emancipate themselves from the British yoke. Firstly, the establishment of “the orderly government at Khartoum,” otherwise called British supremacy in Eastern Africa, must of necessity be indefinitely postponed. The policy of “butcher and bolt” would have to be pursued—less the “butcher.” For there would be no time to give the Mahdi the chance of inflicting that chastisement on the invader he so richly deserves. But the Soudanese would be at least relieved from the immediate danger of having the blessings of civilisation conferred upon them. It would be well to remember, in this connexion also, that the native movement in Egypt proper is not dead but sleeping.

Next, those wicked Irish might possibly not be inclined to cease from troubling and to leave the weary “Castle” at rest just at this precise juncture. Even the presence of “their prince” might not supply that of a military force in keeping down such discontent—such is human perversity. If the “handful of agitators” of which we are sometimes told “disloyal Ireland” consists, chose to take advantage of the political “situation,” stirring times might be expected across St. George's Channel.

In the rear of the British armies themselves would be the vast Indian populations, which some who know them say are ready for revolt, other that their “loyalty” to their empress has never been firmer. War in Afghanistan would afford an excellent opportunity of deciding this interesting question. It is unnecessary to do more than allude to the possible action of Irish-Americans in Canada, or the probable prospect of “movements” in South Africa. All things considered, we think we are not far wrong in venturing the prognostication that in the event of a Russian war the “British Empire,” speaking generally, is likely to have a warm quarter of an hour.

After all, it is not nice going to war with one's equal or possible superior in strength—so different from those delightful “military operations” which consist in “potting” savages with an amount of danger just sufficient to give a zest to the sport, and no more—and then “nobbling” their territory. Hand the Sultan of Soccatoo or the King of Abyssinia insisted on holding positions when ordered to evacuate them, he would have been thrashed, of course. But then the special line the skill of our ablest and most valiant generals takes is that of “thrashing a cannibal” (pace Messrs. Gilbert and Sullivan). Thrashing a Cossack is a different sort of thing.

The strong point of England is her cheap goods. Cheap “glory” is the latest industrial development of the British capitalistic system. The Englishman has discovered an improved method of manufacturing it very cheap, by the application of the latest inventions in war machinery on the raw material of naked savages who can't handle a rifle. Since it is only on these terms that “glory” pays, it is hardly likely that any British Government would care to embark in the perilous speculation of producing it on the old method of personal prowess and equal fighting. This would be retrograde. Much as we hate war, we must confess to a species of eager, expectant curiosity, akin to that one feels at the revival of some defunct art, at the prospect of contemplating the figure cut by the “bold Briton” before the foeman when the odds are something less than a thousand to one in his favour. Would we doubt the valour of Britain's sons? Never! But as yet we live by faith, and not by sight. That is all. E. BELFORT BAX.

imagine some of our comrades smiling bitterly at the above title, and wondering what a Socialist journal can have to do with art; so I begin by saying that I understand only too thoroughly how “unpractical” the subject is while the present system of capital and wages lasts. Indeed that is my text.

What, however, is art? whence does it spring? Art is man's embodied expression of interest in the life of man; it springs from man's pleasure in his life; please we must call it, taking all human life together, however much it may be broken by the grief and trouble of individuals; and as it is the expression of pleasure in life generally, in the memory of the deeds of the past, and the hope of those of the future, so it is especially the expression of man's pleasure in the deeds of the present; in his work.

Yes, that may well seem strange to us at present! Men to-day may see the pleasure of unproductive energy—energy put forth in games and sports; but in productive energy—in the task which must be finished before we can eat, the task which will begin again to-morrow, and many a to-morrow without charge or end till we are ended—pleasure in that?

Yet I repeat that the chief source of art is man's pleasure in his daily necessary work, which expresses itself and is embodied in that work itself; nothing else can make the common surroundings of life beautiful, and whenever they are beautiful it is a sign that men's work has pleasure in it, however they may suffer or otherwise. It is the lack of this pleasure in daily work which has made our towns and habitations sordid and hideous, insults to the beauty of the earth which they disfigure, and all the accessories of life mean, trivial, ugly—in a word, vulgar. Terrible as this is to endure in the present, there is hope in it for the future; for surely it is but just that outward ugliness and disgrace should be the result of the slavery and misery of the people; and that slavery and misery once changed, it is but responsible to expect that external ugliness will give place to beauty, the sign of free and happy work.

Meantime, be sure that nothing else will produce even a reasonable semblance of art; for, think of it! the workers, by means of whose hands the mass of art must be made, are forced by the commercial system to live, even at the best, in places so squalid and hideous that no one could live in them and keep his sanity without losing all sense of beauty and enjoyment in life. The advance of the industrial army under its “captains of industry” (save the mark!) is traced, like the advance of other armies, in the ruin of the peace and loveliness of earth's surface, and nature, who will have us live at any cost, compels us to get used to our degradation at the expense of losing our manhood, and producing children doomed to live less like men than ourselves. Men living amidst such ugliness cannot conceive of beauty, and, therefore, cannot express it.

Nor is it only the workers who feel this misery (and I rejoice over that, at any rate). The higher or more intellectual arts suffer with the industrial ones. The artists, the aim of whose lives it is to produce beauty and interest, are deprived of the materials for their works in real life, since all around them is ugly and vulgar. They are driven into seeking their materials in the imaginations of past ages, or into giving the lie to their own sense of beauty and knowledge of it by sentimentalising and falsifying the life which goes on around them; and so, in spite of all their talent, intellect and enthusiasm, produce little which is not contemptible when matched against the workers of the non-commercial ages. Nor must we forget that whatever is produced that is worth anything is the work of men who are in rebellion against the corrupt society of to-day—rebellion sometimes open, sometimes veiled under cynicism, but by which in any case lives are wasted in a struggle, too often vain, against their fellow-men, which ought to be used for the exercise of special gifts for the benefit of the world.

High and low, therefore, slaveholders and slaves, we lack beauty in our lives, or, in other words, man-like pleasure. This absence of pleasure is the second gift to the world which the development of commercialism has added to its first gift of a propertiless proletariat. Nothing else but the grinding of this iron system could have reduced the civilised world to vulgarity. The theory that art is sick because people have turned their attention to science is without foundation. It is true that science is allowed to live because profit can be made of her, and men, who must find some outlet for their energies, turn to her, since she exists, though only as the slave (but now the rebellious slave) of capital; whereas when art is fairly in the clutch of profit-grinding she dies, and leaves behind her but her phantom of sham art as the futile slave of the capitalist.

Strange as it may seem, therefore, to some people, it is as true as strange, that Socialism, which has been commonly supposed to tend to mere Utilitarianism, is the only hope of the arts. It may be, indeed, that till the social revolution is fully accomplished, and perhaps for a little while afterwards, men's surroundings may go on getting plainer, grimmer, and barer. I say for a little while afterwards, because it may take men some time to shake off the habits of penury on the one hand and inane luxury on the other, which have been forced on them by commercialism. But even in that there is hope; for it is at least possible that all the old superstitions and conventionalities of art have got to be swept away before art can be born again; that before that new birth we shall have to be left bare of everything that has been called art; that we shall have nothing left