My father, from whom I had
learned the term, preferred a comparison to a musical instrument
so strong that if we touch a string all the strings murmur
faintly. There is not more desire, he had said, in lust than in
true love; but in true love desire awakens pity, hope, affection,
admiration, and, given appropriate circumstance, every emotion
possible to man. When I began, however, to apply this thought to
the State and to argue for a law-made balance among trades and
occupations, my father displayed at once the violent free-trader
and propagandist of liberty. I thought that the enemy of this
unity was abstraction, meaning by abstraction not the distinction
but the isolation of occupation, or class or faculty--
'Call down the hawk from the air
Let him be hooded, or caged,
Till the yellow eye has grown mild,
For larder and spit are bare,
The old cook enraged,
The scullion gone wild.'
I knew no mediaeval cathedral, and Westminster, being a part of
abhorred London, did not interest me; but I thought constantly of
Homer and Dante and the tombs of Mausolus and Artemisa, the great
figures of King and Queen and the lesser figures of Greek and
Amazon, Centaur and Greek.
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