THE POETRY OF THE REVOLUTION

Everyone but a consistent and contented capitalist, who must be something pretty near to a Satanist, must rejoice at the spirit and success of the Battle of the Buses.  But one thing about it which happens to please me particularly was that it was fought, in one aspect at least, on a point such as the plutocratic fool calls unpractical.  It was fought about a symbol, a badge, a thing attended with no kind of practical results, like the flags for which men allow themselves to fall down dead, or the shrines for which men will walk some hundreds of miles from their homes.  When a man has an eye for business, all that goes on on this earth in that style is simply invisible to him.  But let us be charitable to the eye for business; the eye has been pretty well blacked this time.

But I wish to insist here that it is exactly what is called the unpractical part of the thing that is really the practical.  The chief difference between men and the animals is that all men are artists; though the overwhelming majority of us are bad artists.  As the old fable truly says, lions do not make statues; even the cunning of the fox can go no further than the accomplishment of leaving an exact model of the vulpine paw:  and even that is an accomplishment which he wishes he hadn’t got.  There are Chryselephantine statues, but no purely elephantine ones.  And, though we speak in a general way of an elephant trumpeting, it is only by human blandishments that he can be induced to play the drum.  But man, savage or civilised, simple or complex always desires to see his own soul outside himself; in some material embodiment.  He always wishes to point to a table in a temple, or a cloth on a stick, or a word on a scroll, or a badge on a coat, and say:  “This is the best part of me.  If need be, it shall be the rest of me that shall perish.”  This is the method which seems so unbusinesslike to the men with an eye to business.  This is also the method by which battles are won.

The Symbolism of the Badge

The badge on a Trade Unionist’s coat is a piece of poetry in the genuine, lucid, and logical sense in which Milton defined poetry (and he ought to know) when he said that it was simple, sensuous, and passionate.  It is simple, because many understand the word “badge,” who might not even understand the word “recognition.”  It is sensuous, because it is visible and tangible; it is incarnate, as all the good Gods have been; and it is passionate in this perfectly practical sense, which the man with an eye to business may some day learn more thoroughly than he likes, that there are men who will allow you to cross a word out in a theoretical document, but who will not allow you to pull a big button off their bodily clothing, merely because you have more money than they have.  Now I think it is this sensuousness, this passion, and, above all,