The Apostle and the Wild Ducks/The Hobby and the Head Waiter

In the matter of property we may find an obvious but useful parable in the difference between living in a house and living in an hotel. There are some practical conveniences in the hotel; but there is first of all a sort of megalomaniac glamour of great spaces and gilded ceilings that is not practical at all. At best there is the romance of personal adventure and accident; but there is no corporate and communal life.

It is when we pass to the practical difference between a house and an hotel that we come to the creative nature of property. I have taken this figure of speech for convenience and clarity, because I do not think everybody understands what we mean by this creative quality. Now a man in an hotel is entirely receptive. He may receive as many things as an average man in an average house. He may receive more things than most modern men in most modern houses. But these things must all be of a certain recognised and conventional character. He cannot add anything to the hotel. If he were to attempt to improve the hotel in any sweeping and striking fashion, his adventures would be somewhat sensational. Rich people in a rich hotel are in one sense protected and too much protected; but though they have protection they have not property. The point, however, is this; that nobody can provide beforehand for the creative needs, as people can provide for the protective need. It is in the nature of any creation that it is in some sense original; and it is in the nature of anything original that it cannot be foreseen. There is no prophecy of poetry; there is not even any prophecy of prophecy. A Futurist cannot predict a song even if he can produce a song; which is not always the case. He cannot foresee a poem or foresee a picture; he cannot even foresee a practical joke. If he did, indeed, it might possibly not occur.

In some hotels of the American sort there used to be an instrument erected in the bedroom; it had rather the general appearance of a clock, with a finger pivoted so as to point at various inscriptions on the dial, and these were supposed to be a complete list of the needs of man, in his highest capacity of an American hotel-frequenter. Whenever he wanted a Prairie Oyster or a Horse's Neck, a secretary or a sandwich, or anything (for all I know) from a daily paper to a dentist, he had only to move the hand on the clock and a bell rang and the person or object was somehow produced from the interior mechanism of the hotel. Now it is quite true that even the real list was long and detailed, and that it could be extended and applied to almost any length along certain lines. It would no doubt include not only a dentist but a detective.

But we may here turn from the fancies about what a man might desire to the facts about what he does desire. The simplest course is for each man to take himself as an example; as a typical and not necessarily an egotistic example. I am not a person especially prone by nature to be a nuisance in an hotel; I am not a vegetarian; I am not an epicure; I can eat and drink and smoke the ordinary things provided in ordinary places. But if it came to living my life in an hotel, especially that part of my life that is creative in the sense of being personal, I think I should find the list of things on the bedroom clock a little insufficient. For instance, if I have a hobby or a potential hobby, it is probably a toy theatre. Hobbies imply holidays; and while it is very arguable that journalists do no real work; it is also true that they have no real holidays. But if I had no need to earn my bread and cheese, and no country and no conscience and none of all those nonsensical things, I should settle down with a serious aim in life, which would be working a toy theatre. It is to me almost as much a box of miracles today, as it was when I first saw it as a baby; and I feel as if I knew that mimic world before I knew the real one. The gilded figures of a prince and princess glow in my memory against black oblivion, almost before the memory of my father who had made them for me; which things may be an allegory. Now this example is an understatement. I am in no sense alone in this taste; Stevenson and my father and many others evidently shared it. But it is an excellent example of something which, without being exactly eccentric, is just sufficiently out of the ordinary way to make it most improbable that any practical organizer would see it; or provide it, or put it into any definite class of things. I do not think I could say carelessly to a waiter, over my shoulder, `Just get me a black coffee and Benedictine and a toy theatre, will you?' I cannot imagine the headwaiter roaring down the speaking tube, `Three Manhattan cocktails and a toy theatre'. I cannot imagine it was mentioned among the minor luxuries printed on the piece of clockwork in the bedroom. But even if it was, it would not meet the case. Even if the waiter returned laden with toy theatres, as he sometimes comes laden with cigar-boxes, it would not solve the problem. For a hobby implies work as well as play; a process as well as a result. It would be a little nearer the mark if the head waiter brought me trays of tinsel and cardboard and that glorious metallic paper as intoxicating as all his wines, a crimson richer even than his burgundy and a green better than the greenest Chartreuse. Even then it would only work if the head waiter would sit down on the floor with me and help to cut the things out; and of this one could never be absolutely certain.

As these reflections pass through my mind, my abstracted eye is riveted on an ordinary wooden chair such as they make at Wycombe from the woods of South Bucks. And I see, as in a vision, that if one were to saw off the back of the chair, knock its bars out and screw it like a frame on to the four feet, the whole would make an almost exact model of a toy theatre, the bars between the legs forming the slips for the wings. I cannot pause for the experiment just now, having something worse to do; but the fancy happens to be an exact example of the sort of thing I mean; a fancy that could not possibly be foreseen, yet which might quite possibly be fulfilled. No great organizing mind would say, `See that seven thousand chairs are ordered from High Wycombe in case somebody wishes to turn them into toy theatres.' It is a hundred to one that nobody ever thought of this nonsensical notion before, and that nobody will ever think of it again. I do not say the world would have lost anything, but I do say I should have lost something, and that something is my own. It is private property.

Now, when I am in my sumptuous and select suite of apartments at the Hotel Beelzebub, reclining on rugs of leopard and tiger skin under tapestries of cloth of gold, it is quite certain that I shall not be encouraged to rush at one of the hotel chairs and begin cutting it up with a chopper or a saw. My explanation that I am turning it into a toy theatre will be coldly received. It may even lead to my being removed from that cushioned apartment to a still more cushioned apartment, commonly called a padded cell. But the point here is that the two forms of human comfort and convenience run distinct and parallel; and no increase of the one comes an inch nearer to the other. The hotel might multiply its chairs by the million, it might vary its pattern of chairs by the thousand, but it would never come into the same world as that perverse and personal day-dream of turning a chair, first into a stool and then into a stage. In that world are all the wonders of the creative side of property; and though I have taken for convenience the lighter and more portable types of property, the same psychology applies to the larger business of production. A man wishes to own his field, primarily because its productiveness is the protection of his honour and independence; but partly also because he wishes to do things with his field which he cannot explain to anybody, and is only vaguely shaping for himself. He is considering a balance between particular necessities and particular luxuries which escapes classification; he is ready, so to speak, to live on turnips on a chance of growing tobacco. I mean he is ready to act on a calculation exactly like the turning of a wooden chair into a wooden stage; something at once fantastic and thrifty. Where that power is democratically distributed men are more than citizens, they are all artists.

With this note on the purely creative or spiritual side of property I conclude the sketch I have here attempted against communism. I need not repeat for the hundredth time that the case against communism is not a case for capitalism; indeed the case against communism is that it is much too like capitalism. It matters little whether our allegorical hotel is called by capitalists an hotel or by communists a hostel. The case against it is that it is not a home, and that the spirit of man will never feel at home in it. It can only be a home when it has a sense of something at once restful and capricious, which is the mood of all creative action. It is only by narrowing itself to locality and privacy that the soul can broaden itself with real imagination and novelty. To listen to all the modern talk about organization and trade and transport is like watching a man wandering about carrying an uprooted tree. The tree is intended for transplantation; it is involved in problems of transport; it enjoys all the educational improvements of travel. It is carried by cosmopolitan trains through various countries with marvellous speed; it is unpacked or carted about in colossal railway stations with marvellous organization. But there are only two things worth saying about it. One is that the tree may be already dead. The other is that there is only one possible way of seeing it again alive. Only when it is planted finally in one fixed place on the face of the earth, will it ever bear fruit or blossom or become a greenhouse of birds.