in Dorchester will have to suffer directly in
his diet and his dress; even the secretary, who drafts the official
correspondence, will sit down to his task embittered, as a man who has
dined ill and may expect to dine worse; and thus a business difference
between communes will take on much the same colour as a dispute between
diggers in the lawless West, and will lead as directly to the
arbitrament of blows. So that the establishment of the communal system
will not only reintroduce all the injustices and heart-burnings of
economic inequality, but will, in all human likelihood, inaugurate a
world of hedgerow warfare. Dorchester will march on Poole, Sherborne on
Dorchester, Wimborne on both; the waggons will be fired on as they
follow the highway, the trains wrecked on the lines, the ploughman will
go armed into the field of tillage; and if we have not a return of
ballad literature, the local press at least will celebrate in a high
vein the victory of Cerne Abbas or the reverse of Toller Porcorum. At
least this will not be dull; when I was younger, I could have welcomed
such a world with relief; but it is the New-Old with a vengeance, and
irresistibly suggests the growth of military powers and the foundation
of new empires.

VII

LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN WHO PROPOSES TO EMBRACE THE CAREER OF ART

With the agreeable frankness of youth, you address me on a point of some
practical importance to yourself and (it is even conceivable) of some
gravity to the world: Should you or should you not become an artist? It
is one which you must decide entirely for yourself; all that I can do is
to bring under your notice some of the materials of that decision; and I
will begin, as I shall probably conclude also, by assuring you that all
depends on the vocation.

To know what you like is the beginning of wisdom and of old age. Youth
is wholly experimental. The essence and charm of that unquiet and
delightful epoch is ignorance of self as well as ignorance of life.
These two unknowns the young man brings together again and again, now in
the airiest touch, now with a bitter hug; now with exquisite pleasure,
now with cutting pain; but never with indifference, to which he is a
total stranger, and never with that near kinsman of indifference,
contentment. If he be a youth of dainty senses or a brain easily heated,
the interest of this series of experiments grows upon him out of all
proportion to the pleasure he receives. It is