Michael Villiers, Idealist :: :: University of Virginia Library

And so while Michael bare upon his soul
The trouble of those who work with darkened hearts,
And have no time for anything but toil,
And drop unheeded into the silent gulf,
Having existed only, never lived
With the full life of those to whom their work
Is pleasure and delight; whose selves go out
Along the glory of the cunning hand
That bears the glory of the cunning brain;
He studied much upon the ways of men,
And watched what men and women thought and did;
Knowing that inward ripeness was not his,
And knowing too that none can work alone;
And no one who is impious to the past
Can help the present or the future time;
And none who liveth only in the past
Can be the servant of the present time,
And sow the seeds to bear the future's growth.

‘All things are free to all in this free land,’
Said one he spoke with, Arthur Grey, a man
Whom he believed in, who believed in him,
Albeit the twain were aye at loggerheads
In argument; and often Arthur Grey
Would speak on what he called the better side,
The side of common sense. Why should his friend
Vex himself thinking upon things that are
A part of natural order? Some go up,
And some go down; and so the world evolves,
If not the best, the meetest for her need.
And anyway, the chances do not fall
So heavily wrong,—at least on English soil,—
As folk with bees in their bonnets seem to think.

And Michael answered something on this wise.

‘“All things are free to all in this free land!”
Why, so they are! The veriest lowborn girl,
Who toils all day and shouts in the streets at night,
If her respectability be proved,—
And some can prove themselves respectable,
Without a better right than she, poor child,—
May, if she will, send the Lord Chamberlain
Her name for the next Drawing-room: of course
There is no sumptuary law forbids
The workgirl to be clad in costly silk

That trails its shining length upon the ground;
Her neck may glitter with the orient gems;
The ostrich-plumes may nod upon her head;
If she can pay the price, and that is all,
Save find the lady who presents her; well,
And that's not so impossible a thing.
You smile, as thinking me a very fool;
You would not waste an argument on me.

‘Well, let us take a lower level, then.
What law forbids the girl, who, let us say,
Assists the State by making match-boxes,
A dozen dozen for twopence-farthing, Grey;
She has a shilling a day to—keep herself?
She finds her fire and glue and string, her time
To fetch the stuff, take back the article:
That shilling is something under twelvepence worth!
What law, I ask you, Grey, forbids this girl
To throw her work aside, and let the sun
Kiss her white cheek to red, and the wind play
With her soft hair, soft as your sister's is;
The meadows cool her feet, and all the bliss
Of tree and flower and bird and butterfly
Run revel in her heart? What law forbids?
None? only this;—the penalty is death!
Not any sudden, violent, ugly death:

O nly that if she do not work, she starves.
No Ugolino horror! such as that
Belongs to Hell, and this is—England, sir.’

‘It's a mad world, my masters, save for one
Or two; that's I,—and you, by courtesy!
Or is the big world sane, and we two mad?’
So Arthur Grey laughed over his cigar
To Michael, as the two sat by the fire,
Another day, when many weeks had gone.
Then, laughter passing from him, thus he spoke.

‘Michael, you say that none should reap the corn
He hath not sown, and none should gather where
He hath not strawed! The thing's impossible!
Surely there is not any man of us
But reaps the grain he hath not sown; and none
But gathers daily where he has not strawed.
The seed that one man dowers the ground withal
Another man shall reap; the vine he plants
Shall quench another's drought and warm his veins.
Why grudge to take what one would gladly give;
What one must give, as one must surely take?’

‘Nay, nay,’ said Michael; ‘I never meant it so;
All that you say is true, and yet, a truth
Wrongly applied is very like a lie.

This were a lie to me, though not to you.
We all must reap where we have never sown;
We all must gather where we have not strawed;
Else were the solidarity of man
A dreamer's dream, and no reality.
Some needs come out of emptiness, and some
Come out of fullness; so the baby-lips
Seek for the overflowing mother-breasts:
And so the mother-breasts crave to be sucked.
God sets the taker by the giver's side;
And all mankind is with mankind entwined.
And cannot loose itself; only, who reaps
Must sow again for others' harvesting.

But what give we, we who have cost so much
In blood and sweat and agony of men?
Shed on for century after century?
If our hearts beat high-pulsed, the blood that leaps
Within them came from some whose veins were drained
For our veins' fullness. If our hearts send up
Their life's broad litanies that breast the heaven,
Quick with the passion of humanity,
Cries for all beauty, all good, all happiness,
Cries for the supreme blessing that we dare
Not cloud by definition; what of them,
Our brothers, who have only power to cry

For elemental needs of food and clothes,
Or have no voice to cry for anything?
What right have we to live on others' lives?
What do we give the men who work for us?
The privilege of having gentlemen
To look at! It's a lofty privilege,
Almost as great as gentlehood itself!’

‘No country but is gainer,’ answered Grey,
‘By having its leisured class. How would you get
Your poets, your artists, your philanthropists,
Were all men doomed to starve who did not toil?’

‘We want no leisured class, but leisured men
Who win their leisure from the heart of work—
Of work, I say, and not of drudgery—
Not merely see that all the work be done.
And, saying this, I mean not to assert
That all should work in like degree or kind;
“To every man his work:” the common gain
Springs not from individuality
Crushed down, or maimed, but from its perfect use.
Yet if the individual's life be fed
Not from the wholesomeness of Mother Earth,
Nor from the heirdom of humanity,
Nor from the grandeur of the awful spheres,

But from the very blood of other lives,
Deprived whereof it needs must faint and fall,
Down with such individuality!
You have not man and man, but slave and slaves,
The enslaver being doubly the enslaved.
A better Art will rise from better life;
Beauty is more than any beauties are,
And beauty lives on life and not on death.

‘I hate the very name philanthropist,’
Michael went on, ‘perhaps because it seems
To mean not one who loves his fellow-men,
But one who gives his time, and strength, and gold,
Feeling his own superiority;
Daring to offer what he would not take.
Were the State sounder at the core, no need
To have philanthropy, but only love.’

‘What can it matter what a man is called,’
Said Grey, ‘if so he do his duty well?
Philanthropist, or love-man, it's all one!
Philanthropy will never harm the world;
And sinners must be cleaned before they are loved.
I only talk a little common sense;
I know it sounds but flat compared with words
Of fire and pathos—which I do not feel,

And should be merely insincere to use.
It seems to me the duty of a man
Is just to do whatever comes to hand,
And do it rightly; there's no Golden Age
To come; we jog along and do our best
In our own station; nothing can be gained
By giving up of any vantage-ground
Whereon our feet are set; and if we have
A larger vision thence, why, those who see
Dimmer than we do, vex not so their souls
With troublings for the future; if their joys
Are narrower,—lower, do you like to say?—
Is not their pain less keen? and would you dower
The lives you say are inarticulate
With voices only to go up in wails
For what they may not have? Depend upon it,
Things are more justly shared than often seems.
At any rate we can afford to wait
Till the Time-Spirit shape the way for us.’

‘“Till the Time-Spirit shape the way for us!”
What is the Spirit of the Time, except
The essence of the noblest thoughts and deeds
Of all the strongest spirits of the time?
A nation's life is wrong where every man
Lives for himself, or for himself and those

He has begotten; and her life is wrong
If some of those her sons have set themselves,
However it may be in ignorance,
To live upon the work of other men,
Whose lives are none the richer because of theirs.
We have not come into our heritage
Of body and soul as yet; and shall not come
Until we go another way than now.
That other way is Justice; we may talk
Of Love; let us at least do Justice first!

‘Culture and civilization! Yes, I know
The meaning of the word, and of the thing!
The man climbs up his slow and toilsome way
To higher civilization by degrees,
Ay, “base degrees,” if you will have it so,
Of lives he treads upon, and scorns away;
Attains to culture thus, and sits enthroned
On a king-seat, that is not carved of wood,
And is not decked with gold, but wrought of all
Unkindled passion, unhumanized desire,
And decked with crushed-out hopes and murdered faiths.
But what the race did, blindly striking out
Its limbs, scarce more than feelers at the first,
Toward some dim goal to which its instinct led,

Until that instinct into purpose grew,
The man developed cannot do, nor dare!
“Forgive them, for they know not what they do!”
Said One. For us, we know it very well,
And dare not shut our eyes, nor close our ears,
Lest on our life of lives there brood for aye
That deep damnation of the slain ideal,
Whose ghost for ever haunts the bed and board.’

‘And do you, Michael, you, a sane man, hold
That monstrous creed, equality of all?
Look Nature in the face, and see her laugh
At such a faith: she showers her goods and gifts
On one; on one her wrongs and ills outpours;
And goes her way, and cares not any whit
Whom she may slay or maim in body or mind,
She seeking out whom she would raise and crown.
Dame Nature makes an aristocracy;
There's no democracy with her, my friend.’

And Michael answered, ‘Are we Nature then,
Or men?’
And Grey was silent for the nonce.