Prose Fancies | Page 8

is a subdivision, not of a form of work even, but merely of a form
of taste; the man who collects foreign stamps, say, or book-plates, or
arrow-heads, the connoisseur of a tiny section of one of the lesser
schools of Italian painting, the coral-insect who has devoted his life to a
participle, first-edition men, and all those various bookworms who,
without impropriety be it spoken, are the maggots that breed in the
dung of the great. A certain friend of mine always appears to me in the
similitude of a first edition of one of Mr. Hardy's novels. I have the
greatest difficulty at times to prevent myself forcibly setting him upon
my shelf to complete my set; for, oddly enough, he is the one bit of
Hardyana I lack. In which confession I let the reader into the secret of
my own petty limitations. To have one's horizon bounded by a
book-plate, to have no hope, no wish in life, beyond a first edition! The
workers, however sectional, have some place in the text of the great

book of life, but such mere testers and tasters of existence have hardly a
place even in the gloss, though it be printed in the most microscopic
diamond.
And every moment, as we said, we are being turned out smaller and
smaller from the mill of Time. You ask your little boy what he would
like to be when he grows up. To your consternation he answers, 'A
man!' You hide your face: you cannot tell him how impossible it is now
to be that. Poor little chap! He is born centuries too late. You cannot
promise even that he shall be a tailor, for by the time he is old enough
to be apprenticed, how do you know how that ancient profession may
be divided up? May you not have sadly to tell him: 'My poor boy, it is
impossible to make you that--for there are no longer any whole-tailors.
You may, if you like, be a thread-waxer or a needle-threader; you may
be one of the thirty men it takes to make a buttonhole, but a complete
tailor--alas! it is impossible.'
Who will save us from this remorseless law of eternal subdivision? To
make one complete man out of all this vast collection of snips and
snippets of humanity. To piece all the trades, professions, and fads
together, like a puzzle, till one saw the honest face of a genuine man
round and whole once more. To take these dry bones of the Valley of
Commerce, and powerfully breathe into them the unifying breath of life,
that once more they stand up, not as fractional bones of the wrist or the
ankle of manhood, but mighty, full-blooded men as of old. Ah! we
must wait for a new creation for that.
The mystics have a suggestive fancy that all our vast complex life once
existed as a peaceful unit in the mind of God. But as God, brooding in
the abyss, meditated upon Himself, various thoughts separated
themselves and revolved within the atmosphere of His mind, at first
unconscious of themselves or each other. Presently, desire of separate
existence awoke in these shadowy things, a lust of corporeality grew
upon them, and hence at last the fall into physical life, the realisation in
concrete form of their diaphanous individualities. And that original
cause of man's separation from deity, this desire of subdivision, how it
has gone on operating, more and more! We call it differentiation, but

the mystic would describe it as dividing ourselves more and more from
God, the primeval unity in which alone is blessedness. Blake in one of
his prophetic books sings man's 'fall into Division and his resurrection
into Unity.' And when we look about us and consider but the common
use of words, how do we find the mystic's apparently wild fancy
illustrated in every section of our commonplace lives. What do we
mean when we speak of 'division' of interests, 'division' of families,
when we say that 'union' is strength, or how good it is to dwell together
in 'unity,' or speak of lives 'made one'? Are we not unwittingly
expressing the unconscious yearning of the fractions to merge once
more in the sweet kinship of the unit, of the ninths and the
nine-hundred-and-ninety-ninths of humanity to merge their differences
in the mighty generalisation Man, of man to merge his finite existence
in the mysterious infinite, the undivided, indivisible One, to 'be made
one,' as theology phrases it, 'with God'? How the complex life of our
time longs to return to its first happy state of simplicity, we feel on
every hand. What is Socialism but a vast throb of man's desire after
unity? We are overbred. The simple old type of manhood is lost