第63章 THE SECOND(6)

I thought for a time the essential difference lay in our relation to beauty.With me beauty is quite primary in life; I like truth, order and goodness, wholly because they are beautiful or lead straight to beautiful consequences.The Baileys either hadn't got that or they didn't see it.They seemed at times to prefer things harsh and ugly.That puzzled me extremely.The esthetic quality of many of their proposals, the "manners" of their work, so to speak, were at times as dreadful as--well, War Office barrack architecture.

A caricature by its exaggerated statements will sometimes serve to point a truth by antagonising falsity and falsity.I remember talking to a prominent museum official in need of more public funds for the work he had in hand.I mentioned the possibility of enlisting Bailey's influence.

"Oh, we don't want Philistines like that infernal Bottle-Imp running us," he said hastily, and would hear of no concerted action for the end he had in view."I'd rather not have the extension.

"You see," he went on to explain, "Bailey's wanting in the essentials.""What essentials?" said I.

"Oh! he'd be like a nasty oily efficient little machine for some merely subordinate necessity among all my delicate stuff.He'd do all we wanted no doubt in the way of money and powers--and he'd do it wrong and mess the place for ever.Hands all black, you know.

He's just a means.Just a very aggressive and unmanageable means.

This isn't a plumber's job...."

I stuck to my argument.

"I don't LIKE him," said the official conclusively, and it seemed to me at the time he was just blind prejudice speaking....

I came nearer the truth of the matter as I came to realise that our philosophies differed profoundly.That isn't a very curable difference,--once people have grown up.Theirs was a philosophy devoid of FINESSE.Temperamentally the Baileys were specialised, concentrated, accurate, while I am urged either by some Inner force or some entirely assimilated influence in my training, always to round off and shadow my outlines.I hate them hard.I would sacrifice detail to modelling always, and the Baileys, it seemed to me, loved a world as flat and metallic as Sidney Cooper's cows.If they had the universe in hand I know they would take down all the trees and put up stamped tin green shades and sunlight accumulators.

Altiora thought trees hopelessly irregular and sea cliffs a great mistake.... I got things clearer as time went on.Though it was an Hegelian mess of which I had partaken at Codger's table by way of a philosophical training, my sympathies have always been Pragmatist.I belong almost by nature to that school of Pragmatism that, following the medieval Nominalists, bases itself upon a denial of the reality of classes, and of the validity of general laws.The Baileys classified everything.They were, in the scholastic sense--which so oddly contradicts the modern use of the word—"Realists."They believed classes were REAL and independent of their individuals.This is the common habit of all so-called educated people who have no metaphysical aptitude and no metaphysical training.It leads them to a progressive misunderstanding of the world.It was a favourite trick of Altiora's to speak of everybody as a "type"; she saw men as samples moving; her dining-room became a chamber of representatives.It gave a tremendously scientific air to many of their generalisations, using "scientific" in its nineteenth-century uncritical Herbert Spencer sense, an air that only began to disappear when you thought them over again in terms of actuality and the people one knew....

At the Baileys' one always seemed to be getting one's hands on the very strings that guided the world.You heard legislation projected to affect this "type" and that; statistics marched by you with sin and shame and injustice and misery reduced to quite manageable percentages, you found men who were to frame or amend bills in grave and intimate exchange with Bailey's omniscience, you heard Altiora canvassing approaching resignations and possible appointments that might make or mar a revolution in administrative methods, and doing it with a vigorous directness that manifestly swayed the decision;and you felt you were in a sort of signal box with levers all about you, and the world outside there, albeit a little dark and mysterious beyond the window, running on its lines in ready obedience to these unhesitating lights, true and steady to trim termini.

And then with all this administrative fizzle, this pseudo-scientific administrative chatter, dying away in your head, out you went into the limitless grimy chaos of London streets and squares, roads and avenues lined with teeming houses, each larger than the Chambers Street house and at least equally alive, you saw the chaotic clamour of hoardings, the jumble of traffic, the coming and going of mysterious myriads, you heard the rumble of traffic like the noise of a torrent; a vague incessant murmur of cries and voices, wanton crimes and accidents bawled at you from the placards; imperative unaccountable fashions swaggered triumphant in dazzling windows of the shops; and you found yourself swaying back to the opposite conviction that the huge formless spirit of the world it was that held the strings and danced the puppets on the Bailey stage....