§ 35

The wanderings of Osiris, told in ancient Egyptian mythology, are ethically as beautiful as their progress is enchanting. The most beautiful and instructive passages in Christ’s teaching are in parable, as all Oriental disquisitions are. The story of Buddha is a poetic allegory affecting the lives of millions to-day. The Divine Comedy of Dante is in allegory, and our own great writer, Bunyan, the Bedfordshire tinker, chose a dream in which to relate his Christian progress. Bacon’s New Atlantis is a species of allegory interwoven with the science of his period. The first three chapters of Genesis, whoever written by, are in allegory. I know that the form I have chosen is not one in fashion. I am old-fashioned, and prefer the example of the greatest minds to those which, on a lower level, in my opinion, are, just now, uppermost. Imagination is at a discount; materialism is paying interest on Industrialism; but I believe in the Triumph of Imagination and the defeat of Materialism. This late war has cemented that faith in me which William Blake taught me, when he saw trees at Dulwich filled with angels, and his beautiful mind was filled with enthusiasm by vision of a more perfect existence than a mundane one.

Imagination is the torch that lights the intelligence of man. It is of the Spirit which God breathed into the mythical Adam, as he rose physically out of the newly created soil. Without Imagination the world would soon drift into a desolate chaos. Imagination is somewhere in the British character, else how came about our literature, second only to the Greek? Materialism created by Industrialism has sought to push it out as a vague and idle gift of no service in the acquisition of wealth. Plutus has been on the throne of Zeus, but only temporarily. Olympus will be peopled again, for the gods never die. Another Parnassus, with Apollo and the Muses, will be here again, and great god Pan will come into his own when Agriculture is restored in the grand simplicity of its initial purpose, and Industrialism is organised so as not to be a nuisance and a curse, which it has been unquestionably, not because it is bad in the abstract (for nothing which includes labour is that), but because it has gone a ruthless way unchecked. Industrialism became a “Fetish” before which every one must bow. It has destroyed what and where it wished! Without discrimination it has acted the part of a Juggernaut by trampling down better things than it can show, which stood in the way of its tyrannical progress. It has darkened the face of fair England by smoke, poisoned its rivers, turned good land into ash heaps. Lowered the vitality of men, of animals, trees and plants wherever its autocratic will has prevailed.

Worse even than this it has done, it has created a false creed: “I believe in gold.” It helped to make the late war the most horrible in History. It has tended, wherever it has planted its foot, to urge that Might is Right. Without the abuses of Industrialism, the late war could not have been. Germany trusted to her Industrialism to win. She felt certain that she could turn out a hundred destroying machines to the Allies’ thirty. That the force created by her Industrialism was invincible. There was once a Soul in Germany—the worship of Industrialism killed it. Germany lost the war because she had first sold her soul. The Allies won it because, though sorely wounded, their souls were still alive, and their honour mostly unscathed.