The New Society | Page 7

maintained by constant outlay, just as in arid districts a luxuriant
vegetation needs continuous irrigation. The flood of Oriental wealth
had to pour itself into Italy in order to bring forth the bloom of
Renaissance art. Thousands of patricians, hundreds of temporal and
spiritual princes, had to found and to adorn temples and palaces,
gardens, monuments, pageants, games and household goods in order
that art and science, schooling, mastership, discipleship and tradition
might grow up. The worship of foreign culture which characterized
Germany in the seventeenth and half of the eighteenth centuries only
meant that our soil was grown too poor to yield a crop of its own. The
culture of the Middle Ages remained international only so long as the
population of Europe was too sparse and the opportunities of work too
scanty to occupy local energies; even in the thinly populated, Homeric
middle-ages of Greece, the builder and the poet were not settled in one
place, they were wandering artists. If to-day the Republic of Guatemala
or Honduras should want a senate-house or a railway-station they will
probably send to London or Paris for an architect.
Even technique in handicraft and industry, that typical art of
civilization, cannot dispense with a great and continuous outlay on
training, commissioning and marketing in order to maintain itself.
Although it has not happened yet, there is no reason why a Serb or a
Slovak should not make some important discovery if he has been
trained at a European University and learnt the technical tradition. That
will not, however, give rise to an independent and enduring Serbian or
Slovakian technique, even though the costliest Universities and
laboratories should be established in the country and foreign teachers
called to teach in them. After all that, one must have a market in the
country itself; expert purchasers, manufacturers, middle-men, a trained
army of engineers, craftsmen, masters, workmen and a foreign market
as well--in short, the technical atmosphere--in order to keep up the
standard of manufacture and production.
A poor country cannot turn out products of high value for a rich one; it
has not had the education arising from demand. In products relating to
sport and to comfort, for instance, England was a model, but in France

these products were ridiculously misunderstood and imitated with silly
adornments, while on the other hand French products of luxury and
art-industry were sought for by all countries. German wares were
considered to be cheap and nasty, until the land grew rich, and brought
about the co-operation of its forces of science and technique,
production and marketing, auxiliary industries and remote profits,
finance and commerce, education and training, judgment and criticism,
habits of life and a sense of comparative values.
But human forces need the same nurture, the same outlay and the same
high training, as institutions and material products. Delicate work
demands sensitive hands and a sheltered way of life; discovery and
invention demand leisure and freedom; taste demands training and
tradition, scientific thinking and artistic conception demand an
environment with an unbroken continuity of cultivation, thought and
intelligence. A dying civilisation can live for a while on the existing
humus of culture, on the existing atmosphere of thought, but to create
anew these elements of life is beyond its powers.
Do not let us deceive ourselves, but look the facts in the face! All these
excellent Canadians, with or without an academic degree, who
innocently pride themselves on a proletarian absence of prejudice, are
adoptive children of a plutocratic and aristocratic cultivation. It is all
the same even if they lay aside their stiff collars and eye-glasses; their
every word and argument, their forms of thought, their range of
knowledge, their strongly emphasized intellectuality and taste for art
and science, their whole handiwork and industry, are an inheritance
from what they supposed they had cast off and a tribute to what they
pretend to despise. Genuine radicalism is only to be respected when it
understands the connexion of things and is not afraid of consequences.
It must understand--and I shall make it clear--that its rapid advance will
kill culture; and the proper conclusion is that it ought to despise culture,
not to sponge on it. The early Christians abolished all the heathen
rubbish and abominations, the early Radicals would have hurried, in the
first instance, to pick out the plums.
Culture and civilization, as we see, demand a continuous and enormous

outlay; an outlay in leisure, an outlay in working power, an outlay in
wealth. They need patronage and a market, they need the school, they
need models, tradition, comparison, judgment, intelligence, cultivation,
disposition, the right kind of nursery--an atmosphere. One who stands
outside it can serve it, often more powerfully with his virgin strength
than one who is accustomed to it--but he must be carried along and