There Is Absolutely Nothing Softer Upon The Earth Than An English Liberal
consider how much this critique applies to people in the struggle and how much it applies to yourself…
‘As to that I don’t care a fig, perbacco, put that away, I’m talking about you: let me proceed. With your training you are decked in the plumes of very fine birds indeed: but what does it amount to, your plumes are not meant to fly with but merely to slouch and skip along the surface of the earth. You wear the livery of a ridiculous set, you are a cunning and sleek domestic: no thought can come out of your head before it has slipped on its uniform: all your instincts are drugged with a malicious languor—an arm, a respectability, invented by a group of giggling invert-spinsters* who supply you with a fraudulent patent of superiority.’
Hobson opened his mouth, had a movement of the body to speak; but he relapsed.
‘You reply “What are the grounds of all this censure? I know I am not morally defensible, I am lazy and second-rate, that’s not my fault, I have done the best for myself. I was not suited for any heroic station, like yours: I live sensibly and quietly, cultivating my vegetable ideas,* and also my roses and Victorian lilies:* I do no harm to anybody.”
Hobson had a vague gesture of assent and puzzled enquiry.
‘That is not quite the case. That is a little inexact. Your proceedings possess a herdesque astuteness; in the scale against the individual weighing less than the Yellow Press* yet being a closer and meaner attack. Also you are essentially spies, in a lousy safe and well-paid service, as I told you before: you are disguised to look like the thing it is your function to betray—What is your position? You have bought have you not for eight hundred pounds at an aristocratic educational establishment a complete mental outfit, a programme of manners: for four years you trained with other recruits: you are now a perfectly disciplined social unit, with a profound esprit de corps. The Cambridge set that you represent is, as observed in an average specimen, a hybrid of the Quaker, the homosexual and the Chelsea artist.* Your Oxford brothers, dating from the Wilde* decade, are a more muscular body: the Chelsea artists have at least no pretensions to be anything but philistine: the Quakers are powerful ruffians. You represent, my good Hobson, the dregs of the anglo-saxon civilization: there is absolutely nothing softer upon the earth. Your flabby potion is a mixture of the lees of Liberalism,* the poor froth blown off the decadent Nineties, the wardrobe-leavings of a vulgar bohemianism with its headquarters in the suburb of Carlyle and Whistler.* You are concentrated, highly organized barley-water:* there is nothing in the universe to be said for you: any efficient state would confiscate your property, burn your wardrobe—that old hat and the rest—as infectious and prohibit you from propagating.’
Tarr’s white collar shone dazzlingly in the sun. His bowler hat bobbed, striking out clean lines in space as he spoke.
‘A breed of mild pervasive cabbages has set up a wide and creeping rot in the West: it is the lost generations described in Chekov* over again, that any resolute power will be able to wipe up over-night, with its eyes shut. Your kind meantime make it indirectly a peril and tribulation for live things to remain in your neighborhood. You are systematizing and vulgarizing the individual: you are the advance-copy of communism, a false millennial middle-class communism.* You are not an individual: you have, I repeat, no right to that hair and to that hat: you are trying to have the apple and eat it too. You should be in uniform and at work, not uniformly out of uniform and libeling the Artist by your idleness. Are you idle?’
-Wyndham Lewis, excepted from the novel “Tarr” (1918)