aimless, ugly confusion; the immediate future seemed to me likely to intensify
all the present evils by sweeping away the last survivals of the days before the
dull squalor of civilization had settled down on the world. This was a bad look
out indeed, and, if I may mention myself as a personality and not as a mere
type, especially so to a man of my disposition, careless of metaphysics and
religion, as well as of scientific analysis, but with a deep love of the earth and
the life on it, and a passion for the history of the past of mankind. Think of
it! Was it all to end in a counting-house on the top of a cinder-heap, with
Podsnap's8 drawing-room in the offing, and a Whig committee dealing out
champagne to the rich and margarine to the poor in such convenient propor
tions as would make all men contented together, though the pleasure of the
eyes was gone from the world, and the place of Homer was to be taken by
Huxley?9 Yet, believe me, in my heart, when I really forced myself to look
towards the future, that is what I saw in it, and, as far as I could tell, scarce
anyone seemed to think it worth while to struggle against such a consumma
tion of civilization. So there I was in for a fine pessimistic end of life, if it had
not somehow dawned on me that amidst all this filth of civilization the seeds
of a great chance, what we others call Social-Revolution, were beginning to
germinate. The whole face of things was changed to me by that discovery, and
an aristocratic faction interested in reducing the promulgated by Thomas Babington Macaulay power of the Crown, the Whigs became progres-(1800-1859). His writings presented all Engfish sively associated with reform, and thus formed history as leading up to the parliamentary Reform important bonds with other groups and individu-Bill of 1832, and celebrated contemporary English als, such as moneyed industrialists, champions of life as the pinnacle of human achievement and civ- free trade, and religious dissenters. This Whig-ilization (see the first extract in 'Industrialism,' Radical coalition was known colloquially as the p. 11 56 below). Liberal Party from 1839 onward; it adopted the 8. Character in Charles Dickens's Our Mutual name officially when it assumed the form of a mod-Friend (1865), who represents the epitome of pre- ern political party in the 1860s. The term Whig tentious middle-class respectability. remained in informal use, often in connection with 9. T. H. Huxley (1825-1895), writer on science, a self-congratulatory state of mind most famously education, and philosophy. See p. 1427.
.
1 502 / ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
all I had to do then in order to become a Socialist was to hook myself on to
the practical movement, which, as before said, I have tried to do as well as I could.
To sum up, then, the study of history and the love and practice of art forced me into a hatred of the civilization which, if things were to stop as they are, would turn history into inconsequent nonsense, and make art a collection of the curiosities of the past which would have no serious relation to the life of the present.
But the consciousness of revolution stirring amidst our hateful modern soci
ety prevented me, luckier than many others of artistic perceptions, from crys
tallizing into a mere railer against 'progress' on the one hand, and on the
other from wasting time and energy in any of the numerous schemes by which
the quasi-artistic of the middle classes hope to make art grow when it has no
longer any root, and thus I became a practical Socialist.
A last word or two. Perhaps some of our friends will say, what have we to
do with these matters of history and art? We want by means of Social-
Democracy to win a decent livelihood, we want in some sort to live, and that
at once. Surely any one who professes to think that the question of art and
cultivation must go before that of the knife and fork (and there are some who
do propose that) does not understand what art means, or how that its roots
must have a soil of a thriving and unanxious life. Yet it must be remembered
that civilization has reduced the workman to such a skinny and pitiful exis
tence, that he scarcely knows how to frame a desire for any life much better
than that which he now endures perforce. It is the province of art to set the
true ideal of a full and reasonable life before him, a life to which the perception
and creation of beauty, the enjoyment of real pleasure that is, shall be felt to
be as necessary to man as his daily bread, and that no man, and no set of men,
