Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [115]
‘What you need is a capitalist,’ he said. ‘If I had a few hundreds or thousands to spare, I’d put them into the World. But alas, I haven’t. Not sixpence,’ he concluded, almost triumphantly, and the sympathetic expression turned suddenly into a grin.
That evening Burlap addressed himself to the question of Franciscan poverty. ‘Barefooted through the Umbrian hills she goes, the Lady Poverty.’ It was thus that he began his chapter. His prose, in moments of exaltation, was apt to turn into blank verse…. ‘Her feet are set on the white dusty roads that seem, to one who gazes from the walls of the little cities, taut stretched white ribbons in the plain below…’
There followed references to the gnarled olive trees, the vineyards, the terraced fields,’ the great white oxen with their curving horns,’ the little asses patiently carrying their burdens up the stony paths, the blue mountains, the hill towns in the distance, each like a little New Jerusalem in a picture book, the classical waters of Clitumnus and the yet more classical waters of Trasimene. ‘That was a land,’ continued Burlap, ‘and that a time when poverty was a practical, workable ideal. The land supplied all the needs of those who lived on it; there was little functional specialization; every peasant was, to a great extent, his own manufacturer as well as his own butcher, baker, green-grocer and vintner. It was a society in which money was still comparatively unimportant. The majority lived in an almost moneyless condition. They dealt directly in things—household stuff of their own making and the kindly fruits of the earth—and so had no need of the precious metals which buy things. St. Francis’s ideal of poverty was practicable then, because it held up for admiration a way of life not so enormously unlike the actual way of his humbler contemporaries. He was inviting the leisured and the functionally specialized members of society—those who were living mainly in terms of money—to live as their inferiors were living, in terms of things. How different is the state of things to-day!’ Burlap relapsed once more into blank verse, moved this time by indignation, not by lyrical tenderness. ‘We are all specialists, living in terms only of money, not of real things, inhabiting remote abstractions, not the actual world of growth and making.’ He rumbled on a little about ‘the great machines that having been man’s slaves are now his masters,’ about standardization, about industrial and commercial life and its withering effect on the human soul (for which last he borrowed a few of Rampion’s favourite phrases). Money, he concluded, was the root of the whole evil: the fatal necessity under which man now labours of living in terms of money, not of real things. ‘To modern eyes St. Francis’s ideal appears fantastic, utterly insane. The Lady Poverty has been degraded by modern circumstances into the semblance of a sackaproned, leaky-booted charwoman…No one in his senses would dream of following her. To idealize so repulsive a Dulcinea one would have to be madder than Don Quixote himself. Within our modern society the Franciscanideal is unworkable. We have made poverty detestable. But this does not mean that we can just neglect St. Francis as a dreamer of mad dreams. No, on the contrary, the insanity is ours, not his. He is the doctor in the asylum. To the lunatics the doctor seems the only madman. When we recover our senses, we shall see that the doctor has been all the time the only healthy man. As things are at present the Franciscan ideal is unworkable. The moral of that is that things must be altered, radically. Our aim must be to create a new society in which Lady Poverty shall be, not a draggled charwoman, but a lovely form of light and graciousness and beauty. Oh Poverty, Poverty, beautiful Lady Poverty!…’
Beatrice came in to say that supper was on the table.
‘Two eggs,’ she commanded, rapping out her solicitude. ‘Two, I insist. They were made especially for you.’
‘You treat me like the prodigal son,’ said Burlap. ‘Or the fatted calf while it was being fattened.’ He wagged his head, he smiled a Sodoma smile and helped himself to the second egg.