at the 'wake'
of Life. With their platitudes, their prudery, and their chastity, they
make for death. These languid ones desire to have life served up to them
in many courses. Greed lies at the bottom of their being, and so they
preach content to the masses, though for the workers they have nothing
in their shallow souls but contempt. This cultured leisure class has had
the time and cunning to perpetrate one great and tragic trick. They have
made social falsehoods so complicated that they themselves neither
understand nor wish to understand.... Why is it that in all the great
authors I detect an air of condescension, marking their contempt for
those who make and keep them what they are? With what fine contempt the
'rube' is surveyed by the faker who has plucked him! Must I put these
classic souls of art in the same category? The art for art's sake
people--these make me sick. It is at best an argumentative confusion
springing from the fact that in the perfect work of art there is such a
fusion of form and substance as to resist dissociation and defy
analysis. Perhaps this fact accounts for Tolstoi's contempt for some of
the classic art. It seems to me that most classic art is one of two
things: either it smacks of smug content and over-fed geniality or it is
permeated with a profound pessimism. The philosophers are worse than the
artists; they are the ringleaders of the betrayers of humanity. Art at
least makes the atonement of beauty for its mistakes, but this cannot be
said of philosophy.

"Herbert Spencer, for instance, who represents the high-water mark of a
philosophy that will not hold water, pours out the vials of his
bottled-up wrath on the poor unfortunates of London who are compelled
'to make a living' by tips in opening the carriage doors or holding the
horses of the wealthy. He had nothing but loathing for the pregnant girl
who tries to break her 'fall' by taking advantage of the 'poor laws.'
For the workingman, who sincerely tries, at least, to settle the
'affairs of State' in the pot-house over a mug of ale, Spencer had
nothing but contempt; but to the parliamentary people who settle the
same 'affairs' over champagne and prostitutes, he played the
lick-spittle.... The recantation of his 'Social Statics' is the worst
case of intellectual cowardice on record.... He went down with final
contempt for the workers who served him, gave him his daily bread, made
his ink, pen, and paper and bound the twenty volumes