'A Scribbler's Apology' (1883)

A Scribbler's Apology

Cornhill Magazine, 47 (May 1883), 538-550

Opposite the little study-window where I sit cobbling at my trade of scribbler every morning, a working shoemaker bends all day long at his bench over his monotonous task with awl and leather, fitting ready-made uppers on his wooden last to measured soles for country customers. It is a dreary trade enough in its way, no doubt, for it consists mainly of sewing the self-same triangular pieces into the self-same clogged boots, week after week and month after month the long year round. Yet it must have a certain ethical compensation of its own, I take it; it must imply a more or less vague consciousness of something duly performed for humanity in return for board and lodging and social protection. That shoemaker is not in all probability a very profound moral philosopher; one may venture to doubt even whether he has ever tried at all to justify to himself his own existence and his own function in an over-crowded and under-fed world; yet in some half-instinctive and embryonic fashion he must feel, I fancy, that he too is fulfilling his special office in the great economy of civilised humanity; that he too does his honest spell of good work in return for many and various benefits received. He is no idle guest at the banquet of nature, no mere dronish parasite at the table spread for us all by the joint exertions of the universal human race -- by the Egyptian fellah and the Indian coolie, by the Iowa granger and the West Indian sugar-planter, by the looms of Manchester and the whirring wheels of Birmingham factories. Like all the rest of us, to be sure, he labours chiefly for his daily wage; his first and greatest mainspring of action is afforded him by his pressing sense of his own necessities. Still, the labour he performs does not benefit himself alone: he must know and feel, however implicitly, that he is working for the common weal as well as for his own petty personal advantage. It is an undoubted benefit to civilised man that he should go dry-shod; and in those boots that my neighbour has made to-day, two human beings may go dry-shod in snow or rain or morass for at least a twelvemonth to come. There you see a solid, tangible, undeniably useful result of his day's labour; something that brings him in his daily bread, but that keeps a couple more poor brother mortals warm and comfortable for many a day as yet unborn. If a supreme censor should ask him now on behalf of humanity to give an account of his stewardship for this present twenty-four hours, he could produce his two stout pairs of hob-nail boots and say proudly, 'Behold my handicraft.'

But if such a censor were suddenly to present himself in this snug little study, and, seating himself in the visitors' chair, were to ask the bewildered scribbler at this desk what he on his part had done for mankind in these same twenty-four hours, or, for the matter of that, in all his journalistic life, what could the poor abashed scribbler honestly make answer? With what face could he say: 'I have contributed a column of political abuse to my daily paper, and I have written half an unfavourable review, for a weekly journal, of a foolish and vulgar sensational novel'? How blank and meagre a record a record that seems of a whole day's work by a man whose education and position ought surely to fit him for doing something better on behalf of humanity than the mere untrained and uncultivated shoemaker! Yet, if we look the thing in the face, we see at once that the shoemaker can point unhesitatingly to his pair of boots -- a definite, visible, positive benefit to mankind, to be comprehended even by the meanest intelligence; whereas the scribbler can point only to a few dubious lines of printed matter, good type arranged in questionably useful order, and probably of very little advantage to any human being, past, present, or to come, save only the author who got five guineas for the trouble of writing it. And considering what a doubtfully honest trade this trade of scribbler really is, I often ask myself the question which the shoemaker has so little need to ask: 'Have I, as a unit of humanity, any right at all to go existing? Am I, in fact, earning my own livelihood by any proper and justifiable means, or am I a useless head in the commonwealth of labour, offending against that prime law of economics, human and Divine, that 'whoso will not work, neither shall he eat?' Let us argue out this question quietly, pro and con, and let us see what can be fairly urged about it by a special pleader on either side.

II.

My young friend Alastor Jones, who is a meritorious and enthusiastic minor poet of some rising distinction, would have very little difficulty in settling the whole matter offhand for us in a single florid oration. He would say that the existence of a literary class in every community was a necessity far higher than the necessity for mere earthly boots and mundane gaiters. Man shall not live by bread alone: in virtue of his very humanity, he requires a spiritual food as much as, or even more than, a physical subsistence. What is it that raises us above the naked savages except the possession of literature, of science, of art, in one word, of culture? No one of us would wish to relapse into the condition of the beatified oyster; our consciousness of human superiority is too all-pervading to let us wish for any lower lot, however happy in its own way. Nor would we care for even the highest material civilisation, if it were nothing more than materialistic. A perfectly comfortable Mongolian paradise is no paradise for such as you and me. Better fifty years of Europe than cycle of Cathay. Fancy for a moment a glorified and intensified American ideal; a world all made up of infinite turkey and illimitable pumpkin pie; a world full of circular saw-mills, and Pullman palace cars, and mammoth hotels, and light blue satin, and white-and-gold drawing-rooms; a world wholly given over to raising corn, and sticking pigs, and distilling old Bourbon whisky, and making vulgar love through its nose to vulgar, overdressed, underbred young women. Its one literature would be the editorial screamer; its one excitement, an annual boom, and a quadrennial orgy of presidential elections. Picture to yourself such a society, without any painters, without any thinkers, without any musicians, without any of those rare souls, poets whose thoughts make rich the thought of the world! (My friend, Alastor, like most other young versifiers, has a pleasing sense of the important functions performed by his own class.) And then just remember that that is what this earth would come to were it not for you and me and our likes, my dear fellow. Could anything be more jejune, more monotonous, more utterly lacking in any worthy final cause than a whole community of unleavened Philistinism, deprived even of the reflected glimmer which is catches now or then in stray places from a Shakespeare, a Milton, a Wordsworth, or a Shelley? Would you or I care to live in such a world? Would any man worthy of being called a man care to live in it? Would even the Philistine himself care for it? Does not he himself vaguely feel, after his amorphous jelly-fish fashion, that these things which he cannot understand or appreciate are yet the very salt and savour of the earth? Does he not know in some indefinite way that without them all man, who is now a little lower than the angels, would become a little lower than the monkeys, a more perfect and consummate type of highly developed pighood? If you were to poll the entire mob of six-pound householders, or for the matter of that, take a plebiscite by universal suffrage either, asking the people, the blind and battling multitude itself -- Alastor is always cruelly hard on the proletariate -- whether it would abolish literature, science, and art by a wave of its hand, don't you think even the many-headed beast in person would thunder 'No!' from all its blatant beer-besmirched mouths? I warrant you it would; for they feel dimly that man is what he is, not in virtue of corn and pork and high-pressure steam-engines, but in virtue of his god-like brow and his beautiful, wonderful, human arts.

We are talking always about progress; but is the progress we want merely one of more wheels and more chimneys? What for? To find employment for more children who will grow into more men and women, to feed more wheels and more chimneys, to provide for more mouths again in the next generation. Are we to solve our Malthusian problem by a mere universal extension of grain cultivation over endless prairies, where we can raise still more corn, to feed still more pigs, to be ultimately converted into still more corn-growing humanity, which may reproduce its own bucolic kind ad infinitum? If the world feeds us poets and thinkers, we give back to the world more than it can ever give us. Any man (with a pair of arms) can drive a plough or cure bacon; but not every man can write things which make the world better and great throughout all time and all eternity. Let us have shoemakers and pig-stickers if you will; but, whether or no, let us at least have a Homer, a Virgil, a Plato, a Newton, a Mozart, a Phidias, and a Raffael.

III.

Now, this is all very well on Alastor's part, who, I believe, really thinks himself a great poet in posse. If you are quite convinced that your thought will positively add something valuable to the thought of the world, that you can say or do aught which will live after you to make future ages wiser or nobler, then I fully agree that you may eat your bread boldly at the table of humanity without any humiliating sense of unworthy or pauper-like dependence. After your kind you are labouring for your meat, and a high and enviable kind it most undoubtedly is. A Shakespeare whose imaginings gladden and ennoble the stray hours of millions in a hundred generations, a Beethoven whose notes ring forever through our listening ears, a Darwin whose patient toil turns all the thought of the world into a fresh and fruitful channel -- these men surely deserve better of humanity that the mere ignoble clod, too often purely coarse and selfish, who turns a virgin sod on some western prairie into desolate stretches of unfenced and unlovely cornfield. Even the lesser workers in the same arts or science, the men who turn out dainty little nothings in verse perfect of its kind, the men who paint us little sketches that beautify our meagre middle-class rooms, the men who slowly frame the raw bricks of natural knowledge from which a Newton, a Cuvier, or a Spencer, builds up at last a stately and harmonious fane -- even these, too, deserve to eat their bread in the proud consciousness of independence, as labourers richly worthy of their hire. Unless we are content to abdicate all our prerogatives as civilised men, to sink down into mere animal machines, fruges consumere nati, we must grant that such work as this has its uses, and those of the very highest. If there be anything on this earth worth living for ( a moot point which I am far from wishing dogmatically to settle), that thing is surely culture in its fullest and broadest sense. It is that that differentiates man as man from the helpless struggling herd of lower creatures.

Yes, all this is very well for Alastor Jones; but it does not touch the ethical status of the mere hired scribbler and common journalist in any way. And even within that narrower circle, I wish still further to define and circumscribe. For I don't doubt that the newspaper in the abstract is a beneficial and a useful institution. It is true that, in the concrete, it has many defect, inseparable, I suppose from all the best works of poor fallen human nature; especially does it tend to diffuse a wide and general familiarity with the very worst and most slipshod literary style, and to reduce the Queen's English to a common dead level of vulgar inaccuracy. Still, it is clearly necessary for people in a civilised country to be fully informed of what is actually going on about them; to be acquainted with the latest news from Egypt, with the last change of political balance in the minor chieftainships of Zululand, with the minutest details of the recent shocking murder in the Borough Road. Hence I will freely allow that the printers, the reporters, the editors and possibly even the leader-writers (though here I am certainly stretching a point lest I condemn any man too hastily) have a fair right to existence in a civilised commonwealth, side by side with the butchers, the bakers, and the candlestick makers. Perhaps (who knows?) in the wise dispensations of Providence there may be a final cause for the special correspondent in person. In the beautiful interaction of the social economy he too may fulfil some useful though unsuspected function. But the sort of scribblers I have specially in my eye at the present moment are those whom I am wont to call, in my own private dialect, the tootlers; that is to say, the good folk who write a tootle about nothing in particular for the mere gratification of idle people. Sometimes the tootle takes the form of a third leader -- that wonderful social leader in all the daily papers, which begins with a fresh squabble in the St Pancras Vestry, goes on to consider the history of vestries in general from the days of the Stone Age onward, alludes playfully to our Aryan ancestors, digresses into the constitution of the Athenian demes, discourses casually of Roman municipia, is learned on the subject of early French communes, and ends abruptly with an amusing anecdote of Gustave Courbet. Sometimes the tootle becomes a middle in a weekly paper, sometimes it assumes the guise of an amusing review, sometimes it presents itself to the candid reader as the present article. But whatever it may be, it always tootles merely; it contains nothing on earth really calculated to do any kind of solid good or impart any kind of serious information to any human being whatsoever. Now, the vast mass of our current literature consists entirely of such tootles; and the question naturally arises, Has the tootler any sufficient excuse to give for his persistent daily appearance in answer to the clanging dinner-bell of collective humanity?

To this question I fear I must return a far more lowly and commercial answer than Alastor Jones's. The tootler can only reply that he fulfils a want. A demand exists, and he himself the correlative supply. People are ready to buy his wares, and he sells his wares to them accordingly. Perhaps he may turn out better wares -- sometimes yes, sometimes no -- but in any case he must turn out simply and solely what suits his market. After all, the phalansteries are not yet organised; the millennium has not yet begun; and the world in its present condition is mainly governed by the base, cold, hard, vulgar laws of supply and demand. The daily papers and the weekly papers want a certain definite article, and the tootler produces it for them at a fixed rate. He takes his guineas for work performed, and he seems therefore about as honest a man as the mason or the carpenter who builds for hire. His work may be shoddy -- most likely it is shoddy nowadays; but it is the thing he is paid to do, and do it he must. The man who pays him wants just such stuff; not merely the simple middleman or intermediary whom we call the publisher or proprietor, but the real ultimate hirer, the consumer who takes a delight in the perusal of tootling. In this present workaday world of political economy and competing markets, the career open to talent is just the best career we can each carve out for our individual selves. We of the proletariate cannot be pickers and choosers: it is all very well for the rich man in his gilded saloons (he doesn't gild them now, since the aesthetic revolution -- but no matter), it is all very well for the rich man to say, I will write a great epic poem; or, I will produce an epoch-making philosophical work; or, I will devote ten years of my life to historical researches into the reign of King Burgred of Mercia: he has got his way made clear before him, and he can do as he likes in this as in other matters. But the poor man (and the mass of litterateurs have always been poor, from the days of Grub Street onward) must take the first work that turns up to his hand: and if Heaven ordains that he should become a special correspondent, he must e'en pocket his pride and endeavour to do his duty in that station of life to which it has pleased political economy to call him.

IV.

Yet this, to say the truth, is a very shallow kind of moral philosophy indeed. Would such an excuse as that serve my purpose, I should like to know, if some sea-green, incorruptible readuster were suddenly to begin lopping off the useless branches from the social organism here in England? For ours, after all, is a serious world of struggling, hungry mortals, governed by natural selection and the survival of the fittest -- in other words, by ever-pressing famine which picks out on the whole the weakest and least successful members with the unerring sagacity of blind mechanical law. If such a community, composed mainly of real workers and producers, of men and women who raise the bread and weave the garments that feed and clothe me, were seriously and solemnly to ask me what I had ever done for them and theirs that I should not be hewn down and cast into the fire like the barren fig-tree, could I really give them any solid and satisfactory excuse for my continued existence? I fear not. The classes for whom I purvey entertaining leaders, or leaders meant to be entertaining, are not theirs: they are the classes with whom theirs have little or nothing at all in common. Tootling is of small use to the cobblers of Northampton, or to the saw-grinders of Sheffield; it is the idle people of the world who pay me my penny for my day's labour. Probably there are few minor journalists who do not sometimes pause to think with shame or grief that they are ministering only to the pettiest amusement of a useless crowd; that they are pandering to the more or less unwholesome tastes of a set with whom they can have personally but very little literary sympathy. This, I take it, is the worst and darkest count in the whole indictment against professional scribblers -- that they are scribbling not for the advancement of the world as a whole, not for the enlightenment of the struggling masses, not even for the more innocent amusement of the people who feed and clothe them, but simply and solely for the gratification of a class who have probably no reason whatsoever to exist, and whom the sea-green incorruptible, if ever he comes, will educate out of existence with all convenient expedition.

But this, you say, is rank socialism and nihilism of the most cut-throat sort. This is the talk of sheer Parisian communards and pétroleuses over their drop of absinthe in a Belleville cabaret. Oh, no; I hope not. My own ethics are far too dubitative and fluctuating to make me willingly cut any other man's throat for any supposed shortcoming in his performance of his social duties. I don't mean by these apparently harsh words to taboo utterly all the ladies and gentlemen upon earth; I only want to make my own calling and election quite sure. I can readily understand that there many a wealthy man in England who lives in a great house and keeps a great retinue, and whom mere unthinking nihilism would at once condemn as a double-dyed aristocrat, but who nevertheless has really done nearly as much for the cause of humanity as Messrs. Delescluze, Rochefort, and O'Donovan Rossa. I don't for a moment deny that many a member of the richer classes in all countries, if asked to render an account of his stewardship, could point to great works of benevolence, of social organisation, of industrial improvement, of agricultural progress, of education, of literature, of science, of art. Such people could pass their examination before the delegates of humanity in the first class with honours. I have no doubt, too, that there are many other humbler persons of the same rank who could show good work done in other ways, political, social, or domestic, which would at least enable them to scrape through decently for a pass degree. But I don't suppose, on the other hand, that anybody will deny the existence of many thousands of utterly idle and useless people in our midst, who have never done anything, and never will do anything, save eat, drink, and enjoy themselves in wholly selfish ways their whole life long. Now, I don't say that such people ought to be lopped off forcibly from the body politic: far be it from me, who am an individualist of the utterest school, and firmly believe in the divine right of everybody to be left alone in his own devices, so to coerce the acts and consciences of other people. Let the wheat and the tares grow together to the harvest. But the important point for each one of us is to make sure under which category he himself properly falls. It is one thing to say you do not interfere with a certain set of exoteric persons; another thing to say you will be one of them yourself. We are all for tolerating Muggletonians and Fifth Monarchy Men, but we don't all wish immediately to join these eccentric sects, or to march up and down the streets with banners flying as full privates in the Salvation Army.

I take it for granted, therefore, without being at all of a sanguinary or revolutionary disposition, that there are at this moment in England a vast number of people who cannot satisfactorily defend their own presence on earth in any way; and who, if only they had attained to an ethical standpoint at all, would either go their way and do otherwise, or else would cut their own throats for incorrigible vagabonds upon the spot. I take it for granted also that it is the obvious duty of every right-minded man to avoid being one of these, and as far as practicably possible, to avoid making his living by pandering to their useless tastes and selfish amusements. The only remaining question is this -- Can the scribbler be considered as sinning against light if he deliberately goes on scribbling for the classes in point, after he has once clearly arrived at this fundamental ethical judgement?

V.

When one begins to apply the rule, it becomes obvious, I think, that it cuts quite too widely for practical guidance. For after all, in the world as now constituted, with the majority of the wealth concentrated in the hands of useless, idle, and selfish people (which, in fact, we all admit in our soberer moments), it is difficult to see what else the proletariate can do but just silently perform the tasks which wealth demands of it. Consider, for example, that it is not merely the scribblers who are included in this condemnation, but whole thousands and millions of labouring men who spend their lives in making expensive articles of useless luxury for the very wealthy. Indeed it is but a relatively small portion of the world's population that is employed in providing or distributing really useful things -- bread, meat, clothing, science, poetry. The remainder are chiefly occupied in turning out mother-of-pearl card-cases, malachite boxes, ivory-handled brushes, crests and monograms, or papier-mache monstrosities; in preserving game, breeding bull-dogs, manufacturing lawn tennis bats, or dressing young ladies' hair; in growing champagne, hunting sealskins, diving for pearls, grubbing for diamonds, shooting humming-birds, or pulling out ostrich-feathers all the world over. If we go into a big house, inhabited by one of Mr Matthew Arnold's greater barbarians, we see nothing around us on every side but infinite products of wasted and misdirected human labour, for the most part not even beautiful, but owing their whole value and whatever paltry interest they may happen to possess to the amount of time and pains that has been unhappily expended on procuring them. The objects are mostly of what we call precious materials; that is to say, materials for the obtaining of which many individual men have backed their luck against the paucity of the supply, and have wasted their days in an ineffectual search, only one out a hundred ever getting a fair return for his time and labour -- as in diamond mining. The whole place reeks of gold, silver, ivory, jade, agate, onyx, porphyry, and tortoise-shell, it slides and glistens with polished granite, marble, and lacquer; it dazzles us with mosaic, buhl , velvet, Russia leather, porcelain, bronze, and ormolu. If we take a turn round one of our great manufacturing towns, we find it wholly given over to the making of little electro-plate shrines for the goddess of fashion, to the manufacture of jewellery, bloom of Ninon, opera glasses, artificial flowers, photographic albums, or blue satin coverings for chairs with gilt legs and plaster mouldings. If we drop down casually on any distant colony or dependency, we find black men and brown men shooting birds of paradise, hunting for rubies, extracting elephant tusks, growing dyes, cutting down mahogany, or fishing coral, all for the supply of the greedy, lazy, grasping, tribute-exacting European market. I don't say all these trades are necessarily bad in themselves, but I do say they are not a whit better than the trade of a scribbler who writes social leaders for the daily press.

And what shall we say, now, as to the social ethics of these various occupations? Are they all to be condemned in a single sweeping and unswerving condemnation? Not quite, I think. There is an obvious distinction to be drawn between them. It is quite unlawful, as it seems to me to belong to a trade which inflicts deliberate and wanton cruelty for the gratification of coarse and vulgar tastes. It is quite unlawful to bake tortoises alive, in order to make their shells the proper colour; to dig tuska out of the jaws of a still living elephant; to slaughter mother seals by the thousand, leaving their babies to starve to death, crying piteously, with their almost human cry, upon the ice; to scale red mullet alive, for the sake of reddening them; to cram unhappy geese for pâté de foie gras; to massacre humming-birds and sun-birds for fashionable hats; to perform the thousand and one hideous vivisections which no society has yet been instated to suppress, and which law itself expressly permits at the present moment, provided only they are not done for a scientific purpose. It is also obviously wrong, as it seems to me, to make use of any product so obtained, when once we know the way in which it has been produced: to eat Strasburg pies, to wear ostrich-feathers in a bonnet, to buy sealskin jackets, or bronze beetle necklets. I may be mistaken, but I fancy there must be a fibre wrong somewhere in the lovely women who still knowingly countenance all these unspeakable atrocities for fashion's sake. I always wish they could be made to realise the wrongfulness of their conduct by once being compelled to assist at the processes which have gone to make up their muffs and their bonnets. And, in the same way, I also hold that it is a low and a dirty trade for any man to purvey distinctly bad and degrading literature -- literature calculated to make the world something wickeder and worse than it actually is, literature like some of the repulsive novels which we have seen more than once befouling the shelves of our libraries during the last few years.

But apart from such actively wrongful trades as these, about which it seems to me there can be no ethical hesitation at all, I don't know that even the most rigid moralist can well object, at the present time, to the mere pursuance of a useless profession by needy members of the working classes. The condemnation would be a condemnation of circumstances, not of dispositions. It is a mere toss-up, at the present day, that makes Eliza Ann into the maid-of-all-work in an honest farming family, and Euphemia Amelia into the lady's maid of a baronet's daughter; it is a mere toss-up that makes Bill take to the plough, and turns Tom into the squire's gamekeeper; it is a mere toss-up that sends Bob into a cotton factory, and puts Jim into the cigar-case making. The proletariate itself feels no distinction in this matter: its moral sense is still many thousand miles away from the casuistry that would distinguish between such nice shades of rightfulness and wrongfulness as these. Our labourers all do what work they are paid for; and they think no harm, in their honest, uninquiring way, of their trade being, in ultimate analysis, a purely otiose one.

Nor, indeed, is it easy even for the casuist (and I confess to a turn that way myself) to draw delicate lines in such a very complex society as our modern English world. For example, it is obvious that a powdered footman is a purely useless and not even ornamental object of virtu; but it is not so clear whether a doctor's coachman is not subserving a useful function; and it would be difficult indeed to decide as to the exact value of London cabmen, from those who wait with growlers at the railway stations to those who drive night hansoms about the Strand and the theatres. Again, what shall we say concerning the vast army of retail distributors? What is the precise point at which a stationer's merges into a fancy shop, or at which crockery passes from the useful into the useless stage? All these things are hopeless problems for ultimate practical ethics, and they drive the despairing moralist to conclude that while things remain as they now are each member of the proletariate must be content to make and sell, without question, such goods as are demanded of him by the superior classes. Like the early Christians, we must eat all meat that is set before us, asking no questions for conscience' sake, lest the answer should convince us that it is really meat offered to idols. Any attempt to do otherwise, to stick out for purist creed of strict utilitarianism, to refuse all work unless we feel sure it honestly adds to the sum of really-earned human happiness, would be simply quixotic, and would necessarily lead to prompt self-effacement by the easy machinery of sheer starvation.

That, I take it,, is the one poor, weak, temporising justification of the professional scribbler. I am an abuse, no doubt, and I know it; a mere useless excrescence on the face of society; but then there are so many abuses and so many excrescences that a single one more or less makes practically very little difference either way. The scribbler, too, is a member of the proletariate -- a true working man -- and for the most part a journeyman labourer. Like his fellows, he cannot pick and choose; he must take the work that the world imposes upon him. As a rule, he does not adopt his useless trade of malice prepense; he drifts into it unawares by mere stress of wind and weather much as other labourers drift into other disreputable or laborious occupations. He has no time, when he first takes it up, to debate about its moral status; he hears the cry of a child in the background, 'whose crying is a cry for gold,' and he writes for his life, just as he would dig canals or build a rich man's house, if he had the cunning. It is only later on, when increasing work paradoxically gives him leisure for indulging in the luxury of a conscience, that he finds time for ethical considerations. Then he sees the moral condemnation staring him in the face, and can only take refuge in the lame excuse -- the last resort of vulgar dishonesty -- that he is, after all, no worse than his neighbours.

VI.

And can the scribbler really urge no more than that on his own behalf? Is his best justification for his own existence merely the fact that he forms one of a large useless class, so large and so intricately intermixed with others that there is no hope of successfully weeding them out? Must he, add those (to him) far more important persons who are dependent upon him, go down quick into the pit as useless members? -- must they be hewn down and thrown into Tophet alive, lest they cumber the ground that might else be supporting a fruitful crop of shoemakers and ploughmen? There are just two little excuses wherewith he may try to justify his being -- two considerations which may possibly save him from the final limbo of empty windbags and do-nothing eatalls. They are these.

First of all, I will admit that I have all through been pretending to too much austerity -- to far greater austerity than is really in me. I am not, in fact, so great an ascetic as I have made myself out to be. A world so terribly in earnest that it could never smile would be a world unendurable by human beings. On the other hand, it seems a horribly cruel thought that we should devote one acre of ground to any purpose of mere diversion while there are thousands starving for want of bread in our very midst. Why was not this playfield planted with corn, and given to the poor? asks the ever-present politico-socialistic Judas within us. But on the other hand, just fancy a world which was all so strictly and materialistically utilitarian that it gave itself wholly over to growing bread and pork, making necessary clothing, quarrying coal, and catching codfish. What to us would be the worth of such a world at all at all? If we are human we must have arts and pleasures. The merest savage makes a stone axe for himself, and then a tiny dolly axe for his baby-boy. He has his dances and his corrobborees: he paints his bright-hued pictures, and carves his rude bas-reliefs in leisure moments. Even in the pre-glacial age, we find him scratching figures of mammoths on bits of their own ivory, or drilling bears' teeth to make a savage necklet for his dusky squaw. All these feelings have become so ingrained in the very fibre of our natures that we should not be human now if we were born without them. An ants' nest is a perfect model of a purely utilitarian phalanstery: in it, all the exertions of every member are devoted solely to the construction and maintenance of the rest, to the collection of food, the care of pupae, the warding off of enemies, the keeping of aphides and other useful flocks and herds. There is no formican literature, no formican fine art, no formican science. But man is not an ant: he cannot live by bread alone, and his life must be filled up with many small amusements and distractions, petty enough in themselves, yet absolutely necessary for his well-being. Suppose we were to occupy every field on earth with our corn and our turnips; suppose we were to sacrifice all the beautiful wild beasts, all the graceful wild flowers, all the tangled thickets and copses; suppose we were to make all our waterfalls drive grist-mills, and to blast away all our rapids for the sake of improved navigation; suppose we were to people every acre as thick as it could stand with human beings, each just sufficiently clad and fed and housed and lighted -- what sort of world should we have made it into in the end? What a joyless, purposeless, truly bestial existence it would be after all! -- as bestial as that of the cow in the meadow, chewing the cud leisurely, and thinking placidly of nothing at all in heaven above or earth below or the waters that are under the earth.

To you, no doubt, this all seems to perfectly self-evident that you wonder any man should seriously take the trouble to write it down in black and white. But it has not always seemed self-evident to many of us, and does not even now seem self-evident to the average social democrat among the working men. It is only with some effort that the awakened scribbler, endeavouring to justify himself to himself, to strike a treaty of peace with his own conscience, arrives at the conclusion that even he, as a wheel among wheels in a great social mechanism, fulfils a remotely useful purpose. What he writes affords amusement for a passing moment to a few people, most of whom indeed may themselves be useless, but some of whom may belong to the useful classes. I confess it was with a glow of pleasure that once in a third-class carriage I saw a workman in his muddy clothes reading one of the papers to which I contribute; and when I asked him why he bought it, received the answer, 'Because I always read the articles about so-and-so,' those being, in fact, the very series that I am engaged upon. And whether the actual distribution of the product is at present good or bad, at least the product itself is well-meant: just as it is well that there should be paintings and statues and architectural works, even if many of them are still too much monopolised by special classes. The things themselves are there, and they are working up slowly (let us hope) toward a better future.

And that brings me at last to my second and final point. Though I am not a poet, like Alastor Jones, there is a stanza of Shelley's which often suggests to me a certain grain of moral comfort when this sort of ethical dyspepsia oppresses my professional conscience in spare moments.

Everybody knows the lines by heart

Like a poet hidden

In the light of thought,

Singing hymns unbidden

Till the world is wrought

To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.

Now, a journalist is not a poet, and Heaven knows he is far enough from being lost in a haze of thought; yet I sometimes think that even he, in his humble capacity of populariser and suggester, may help to do something like what that last line so exquisitely shadows forth as the poet's function. There is one species of literature which everybody reads -- the daily paper; and it is better that they should there get honest thought, however inartistically expressed, than dishonest buncombe; better that they should get a little sprinkling of some useful knowledge than mere appeals to their worst feelings; better that they should be pointed onward and pointed backward; better that they should read such stuff as a decent third leader than that they should be wholly delivered over to endless and aimless political acrimonies. If a man is driven by fate into the position of scribbler, he may at least elect which kind of scribbler he will be. There are scribblers of whom one may fairly say that they take no heed at all of right or wrong; they produce just such articles as will please their audience, irrespective of ulterior tendency. But a scribbler may say to himself, in the rare intervals of thinking afforded him by his trade: 'I will at least in this my dubiously useful calling endeavour to abstain from doing any active and positive harm. Since the public will have journalism, and I am chosen by destiny as one of the instruments for supplying them with that doubtful article, I will make my work as little hurtful and as much helpful as I possibly can. I will give the people of my best, such as it is; I will never print anything which will aid in keeping back humanity on its old, half-brutal track. Where possible and when possible, so far as the medium permits, I will teach whatever little I know, and I will preach whatever I best feel. It cannot do much good, but it will not do any harm; and it may perhaps fall n with other influences to help on slowly toward the upward path. After all, what one individual can effect is always but little, and less in proportion to his personal obscurity. If he works decently well as a cog-wheel fitting in with surrounding cogs, he has done the most that can be reasonably expected of him.' And perhaps, to end the whole question, a scribbler who acts as far as possible up to these principles is on the whole, in existing circumstances, as a member of a confessedly imperfect and ill-organised society, earning his livelihood, not indeed, like the shoemaker, with a clear consciousness of social worth, but in a relatively harmless and unblameworthy fashion. With that negative sort of self-approval, it seems to me, he must be content to plod his way in the humble hope that at the end he may escape utter condemnation at the hands of collective labouring humanity.