Chapter II

All exploitation of the life of the wealthy, for the eye and the ear of the poor and half poor, in plays, in popular novels, in musical comedy, in fashion papers, at the cinema, in _Daily Mirror_ photographs, is a travesty of the life of the rich; and if it were not would all but justify some red terror: and it impoverishes and vulgarises the imagination, seeming to hold up for envy and to commend a life where all is display and hurry, passion without emotion, emotion without intellect, and where there is nothing stern and solitary. The plays and novels are the least mischievous, for they still have the old-fashioned romanticism--their threepenny bit, if worn, is silver yet--but they are without intensity and intellect and cannot convey the charm of either as it may exist in those they would represent. All this exploitation is a rankness that has grown up recently among us and has come out of an historical necessity that has made the furniture and the clothes and the brains, of all but the leisured and the lettered, copies and travesties.

Shakespeare set upon the stage Kings and Queens, great historical or legendary persons about whom all was reality, except the circumstance of their lives which remain vague and summary because--his mind and the mind of his audience being interested in emotion and intellect at their moment of union and at their greatest intensity--he could only write his best when he wrote of those who controlled the mechanism of life. Had they been controlled by it, intellect and emotion entangled by intricacy and detail could never have mounted to that union which, as Swedenborg said of the marriage of the angels, is a conflagration of the whole being. But since great crowds, changed by popular education with its eye always on some objective task, have begun to find reality in mechanism alone,[16] our popular commercial art has substituted for Lear and Cordelia the real millionaire and the real peeress, and seeks to make them charming by insisting perpetually that they have all that wealth can buy, or rather all that average men and women would buy if they had wealth. Shakespeare’s groundlings watched the stage in terrified sympathy, while the British working man looks perhaps at the photographs of these lords and ladies, whom he admires beyond measure, with the pleasant feeling that they will all be robbed and murdered before he dies.