that the whole Collectivist error consists in saying that because
two men can share an umbrella, therefore two men can share
a walking-stick
If I might pursue the figure of speech, I might briefly say
that the whole Collectivist error consists in saying that because
two men can share an umbrella, therefore two men can share
a walking-stick. Umbrellas might possibly be replaced by some kind
of common awnings covering certain streets from particular showers.
But there is nothing but nonsense in the notion of swinging a
communal stick; it is as if one spoke of twirling a communal mustache.
It will be said that this is a frank fantasia and that no sociologists
suggest such follies. Pardon me if they do. I will give a precise
parallel to the case of confusion of sticks and umbrellas,
a parallel from a perpetually reiterated suggestion of reform.
At least sixty Socialists out of a hundred, when they have spoken
of common laundries, will go on at once to speak of common kitchens.
This is just as mechanical and unintelligent as the fanciful
case I have quoted. Sticks and umbrellas are both stiff rods
that go into holes in a stand in the hall. Kitchens and
washhouses are both large rooms full of heat and damp and steam.
But the soul and function of the two things are utterly opposite.
There is only one way of washing a shirt; that is, there is only
one right way. There is no taste and fancy in tattered shirts.
Nobody says, 'Tompkins likes five holes in his shirt, but I
must say, give me the good old four holes.' Nobody says,
'This washerwoman rips up the left leg of my pyjamas; now if
there is one thing I insist on it is the right leg ripped up.'
The ideal washing is simply to send a thing back washed.
But it is by no means true that the ideal cooking is simply
to send a thing back cooked. Cooking is an art; it has
in it personality, and even perversity, for the definition
of an art is that which must be personal and may be perverse.
I know a man, not otherwise dainty, who cannot touch
common sausages unless they are almost burned to a coal.
He wants his sausages fried to rags, yet he does not insist
on his shirts being boiled to rags. I do not say that
such points of culinary delicacy are of high importance.
I do not say that the communal ideal must give way to them.
What I say is that the communal ideal is not conscious of
their existence, and therefore goes wrong from the very start,
mixing a wholly public thing with a highly individual one.
Perhaps we ought to accept communal kitchens in the social crisis,
just as we should accept communal cat"s-meat in a siege.
But the cultured Socialist, quite at his ease, by no means
in a siege, talks about communal kitchens as if they
were the same kind of thing as communal laundries.
This shows at the start that he misunderstands human nature.
It is as different as three men singing the same chorus from
three men playing three tunes on the same piano.
