• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction
• Famous-Fiction
• Historical-Fiction

By Root 11497 0

’t; and the only result of saying and believing that it is, will be to lower your humanity to the level of the dirty work. If you believe in business as Service and the sanctity of labour, you’ll merely turn yourself into a mechanical idiot for twentyfour hours out of the twentyfour. Admit it’s dirty, hold your nose and do it for eight hours and then concentrate on being a real human being in your leisure. A real complete human being. Not a newspaper reader, not a jazzer, not a radio fan. The industrialists who 1purvey standardized ready-made amusements to the masses are doing their best to make you as much of a mechanical imbecile in your leisure as in your hours of work. But don’t let them. Make the effort of being human.” That’s what you’ve got to say to people; that’s the lesson you’ve got to teach the young. You’ve got to persuade everybody that all this grand industrial civilization is just a bad smell and that the real, significant life can only be lived apart from it. It’ll be a very long time before decent living and industrial smell can be reconciled. Perhaps, indeed, they’re irreconcilable. It remains to be seen. In the meantime, at any rate, we must shovel the garbage and bear the smell stoically, and in the intervals try to lead the real human life.’

‘It’s a good programme,’ said Philip. ‘But I don’t see you winning many votes on it at the next election.’

‘That’s the trouble.’ Rampion frowned. ‘One would have them all against one. For the only thing they’re all agreed on—Tories, Liberals, Socialists, Bolsheviks—is the intrinsic excellence of the industrial stink and the necessity of standardizing and specializing every trace of genuine manhood or womanhood out of the human race. And we’re expected to take an interest in politics. Well, well.’ He shook his head. ‘Let’s think about something pleasanter. Look, I want to show you this picture.’ He crossed the studio and pulled out one from a stack of canvases leaning against the wall. ‘There,’ he said when he had set it up on an easel. Seated on the crest of a grassy bank, where she formed the apex of the pyramidal composition, a naked woman was suckling a child. Below and in front of her to the left crouched a man, his bare back turned to the spectator, and in the corresponding position on the right stood a little boy. The crouching man was playing with a couple of tiny leopard cubs that occupied the centre of the picture, a little below the seated mother’s feet; the little boy looked on. Close behind the woman and filling almost the whole of the upper part of the picture, stood a cow, its head slightly averted, ruminating. The woman’s head and shoulders stood out pale against its dun flank.

‘It’s a picture I like particularly,’ said Rampion after a little silence. ‘The flesh is good. Don’t you think. Has a bloom to it, a living quality. By God, how marvellously your father-in-law could paint flesh in the open air! Amazing! Nobody’s done it better. Not even Renoir. I wish I had his gifts. But this is all right, you know,’ he went on, turning back to the picture. ‘Quite good, really. And there are other qualities. I feel I’ve managed to get the living relationship of the figures to each other and the rest of the world. The cow, for example. It’s turned away, it’s unaware of the human scene. But somehow you feel it’s happily in touch with the humans in some milky, cud-chewing, bovine way. And the humans are in touch with it. And also in touch with the leopards, but in a quite different way-a way corresponding to the quick leopardy way the cubs are in touch with them. Yes, I like it.’

‘So do I,’ said Philip. ‘It’s something to put over against the industrial stink.’ He laughed. ‘You ought to paint a companion picture of life in the civilized world. The woman in a mackintosh, leaning against a giant Bovril bottle and feeding her baby with Glaxo. The bank covered with asphalt. The man dressed in a five-guinea suit for fifty shillings, squatting down to play with a wireless set. And the little boy, pimpled and with rickets, looking interestedly on.’

‘And the whole thing painted in the cubist manner,