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Title: The Lean Kind
Author: Dora Marsden
Language: en
Topics: egoism, property
Source: Retrived 10/22/2021 from https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:517940/
Notes: Originally published in The New Freewoman (No. 1, Vol. 1, June 15, 1913)

Dora Marsden

The Lean Kind

This is the epoch of the gadding mind. The mind ‘not at home’ but given

to something else, occupied with alien ‘causes’ is of the normal order,

and as such must be held accountable for that contemning of the lonely

occupant of the home—the Self—which is the characteristic of the common

mind. With the lean kind—the antithesis of those ‘Fat’ with whom

latterly we have become so familiarised—the most embarrassing notion is

that of the possession of a self having wants. To be selfless is to have

attained unto that condition of which leanness is the fitting outcome.

Hence, the popularity of the ‘Cause’ which provides the Idol to ‘which

the desired self-sacrifice can be offered. The greater the sacrifice the

Idol can accept the greater is it as a ‘Cause,’ whether it be liberty,

equality, fraternity, honesty or what not. If ten thousand starving men,

with their tens of thousands of dependants, starve in the Cause of

Honesty, how great is Honesty! If a woman throws away her life for

freedom, how great is freedom! And no mistake.

‘Great is the Cause and small are men,’ is the creed of the lean kind.

Consider the Cause of Honesty—the righteous frenzy for the maintenance

of the status quo in regard to property. True it is that all worshippers

of honesty have no property, but what of that: the greater the

sacrifice: good is it to be a vessel of dishonour if thereby is achieved

the greater glory of the Cause.

It is true one may choose one’s ‘Cause,’ but choice appears to fall

fairly uniformly into classes, and as for the lean kind, they choose

honesty. ‘Poor but honest,’ is the lean one’s epitaph. He makes it his

honour to see to it that property shall remain ‘just so.’ He will right

and die and play policeman with zeal, that property should remain just

so! There have been those, however, who have maintained that ‘Property

was theft.’ Monsieur Proudhon said so, and Monsieur Shaw supports him.

‘The only true thing which has been said about property,’ says Mr. Shaw.

We—and the lean—beg leave to dissent, what though in dissenting, we

differ. The lean scout the base notion, for where would the Cause,

Honesty be if horribly it should prove true? It is therefore not true

for the lean. And for us? If the pick and the shovel are the discovered

gold, then property is theft. But if the shovel and pick be as a means

to an end—the acquiring of gold—then theft is to property in the same

relation. Theft is the time-honoured, success-crowned means to property.

All the wholesale acquirements of property have come, do come, will

come, in this way. Whether Saxon robs Celt, and Dane robs Saxon, and

Norman robs all three: whether William Shortlegs robs the English to

give property to his fellow-bandits, or bandits, grown bolder, rob the

Church for themselves, or the Trust-maker robs whom he will, the process

is one and the same. A constant state of flux (Oh, Cause of Honesty!)

flux of property, from hands which yield into hands which seize! Small

wonder the lean kind love not this truth, and cover their eyes with

their Cause. Hands which seize are not their kind of hands; the spirit

of their Cause makes the muscles relax and the grip grow feeble.

Property once seized, the seizers set about to make flux static. They

declare a truce. They send forth a proclamation: ‘Henceforth the

possessed—we and our children—must remain possessors: and the

dispossessed remain the dispossessed—for ever: these shall not raise

disturbing hands against the state of things: should they, the STATE

will visit upon them the penalities due.’ For notice: In the process of

proclamation, the victors have taken the proclamation for the deed; they

have not merely said ‘this state, now established, shall remain.’ they

have said, without pause for breath, ‘this shall be’ and ‘this is,’ ‘The

State now is and we are the State.’ And so it turns out. The

dispossessed—the lean—make answer: ‘Yea—great conquerors, as you say, so

it is.’ The STATE IS. Though we perish, let the State live for ever!

Thus the State takes birth; the mobile takes on immobility; the Iron

Mask upon which its makers write the law for the lean to keep, descends;

henceforth, the lean, the law-abiding, the honest, are the pillars of

the STATE, while the possessors of it are left well-established, free to

pursue chance and adventure in the flux which has never ceased to flow

in the secret order above the State. Hence comes high finance—a game of

sport best played like cricket, with limited numbers.

The law of honesty is the first precept written out on the Iron Mask.

Honesty is a rule of convenience whose purpose is to keep back the crowd

from the excellent game of the select few. But, ‘Among yourselves, seize

what you can,’ which reminds us of Mr. Cecil Chesterton. Mr. Chesterton

charged the financial sportsmen with corruption, and tried to prove his

charge by Law. Extraordinary forgetfulness. The law is not for those who

make it. It is for the dispossessed only. Mr. Chesterton tried to

establish a charge of dishonesty in a sphere where honesty—quite

rightly—is a term of reproach. The holders of ‘un-earned increment’ are

not concerned with honesty—that Cause of the Canaille—the

retail-property-holder’s virtue. He might with as much relevance have

charged Mr. Isaacs with doing no work! Working is a lean-man’s virtue

and so is honesty, but neither are the virtues of the makers of the

State. The reason Mr. Chesterton is mulcted of £10,000 is, that he used

a word—corruption—which is not held in favour among the herd, who cannot

be expected to understand that what is crime to them is the sport of a

higher order; to whom theft, for instance, is not theft. It carries no

stigma as it does with the lean. The State itself has no blush when it

reveals its sole right to our money to be its might: makes us pay up for

fear of wishing that we had, later; no blush that it steals because it

can. All of which goes to prove it is a poor job calling names and

explains why we are giving our first article to the lean kind. It is to

protest against the irrelevance for the Lean of the doings of the Fat.

During the last few months there has appeared amongst us an artist of

foremost rank, an artist who is a satirist, who has revealed the very

lineaments of the soul of his ‘Fat Men.’ Mr. Will Dyson’s cartoons, now

appearing daily in the ‘Herald,’ are the event of recent journalism. The

power and truth, the pull and thrust of arm, the clutch upon their

material, the face-to-face revelation—that these things should appear

now in England is almost incredible. Yet we have not so far forgotten

the satiric rage of Swift to be wholly without criterion for judgment of

the measure of strength with which he wields this lightning flail, and,

notwithstanding their truth and stretch of arm, union of brain and soul,

the quality of Swift which leaves us seared and but barely alive, is

absent from Mr. Dyson’s work. For all his contempt for his thick-necked

breed of ‘fat-men,’ contempt which we believe Mr. Dyson means to be the

last word with his work, this does not create the ache, the burning

wound which is at the kernel of contempt, and is that which the outer

rage of contempt is meant to hide. He draws ‘fat men’ as though he hated

them, yet his artists’ revelation is truer than his interpretation of

it. He has seen the breed of Fat men, and having seen he cannot for the

life of him hate them as Swift hated his Yahoos. They are all redeemed

by a quality which Mr. Dyson sees revealed, but which he does not know.

The last glance at the cartoons always carries a smile. With the arm to

wield the superhuman rage of Swift, he does not do so. Did he. his

subjects would be shattered. He appears himself to feel he may not let

himself go. There exists something he would shrink from destroying.

Mr. Dyson’s choice of subjects (unless due, and one hopes to an

accidental connection with a spirited journal which itself is engaged a

futile ‘War against Fat,’) illustrates his difference in relation to

Swift, as a difference in what each fears. We hate what we fear and if

what is feared is not in itself hateful, the hate recoils back upon us,

only in part assuaged. Dyson fears brutal, stupid strength. Swift

feared, loathed, writhed at the bare suggestion of weakness, meekness,

and what these imply. Swift was girding at the thing which is the woe of

men and the tragedy of the Godhead which Arnold assures us would do all

things well but sometimes fails in strength.’ Swift touches men in the

quick; he reveals the shameful sore which we all walk enshrouded to

hide. His Yahoo is each of us. His lay figures which bear the virtues,

his Houyhnhnms have no soul to save in a bath of fire. He has not

misdirected his rage. He lives with the Immortals because of his

stupendous courage which dared to turn an unwinking eye upon that which

other men dare approach only by stealth and with averted gaze. He saw,

knew and uttered forth, what none but a giant may look upon. Dyson on

the other hand, looks and sees, but his head is turned in the wrong

direction. What he sees is merit smothered over with accidental

demerits. The filthy vestures that meet his gaze, and which a finer

breed than these thick-necked Fat would throw off in repulsion and

disgust, are the outcome, not of the quality which Dyson reveals in his

‘Fat,’ but of the lack of this quality in the figures which crouch

behind him—the lean. The vitriolic passion of repudiation which is

satire, is with him never called into being. His primary occupation is

with what should be his lay figures. He has directed his withering flame

against his Houyhnhnms—the Fat, instead of against his Yahoos—the Lean.

At present his work, while it makes the ‘Daily Herald’ notable, is not

out of place there, but we trow a man would have a heart of flint who

insisted on Yahoos with, shall we say, Mr. George Lansbury,—insisted

that is on truth. The lean are spoon-fed with lies—a diet with no

fattening qualities. Even Mr. Dyson’s drawings of ‘the worker’ are

sentimental. None dare tell the ‘worker’ the blunt truth, that his

leanness blights the landscape and that he is responsible. The tales of

leanness’ woes are told to the discredit of fat, but they recoil in

truth to the discredit of lean. It is the last resort of the downtrodden

to seek comfort in the relating thereof. There is only one thing the

down-trodden with retained dignity can do, and that is to Get Up. And

there is only one thing for the lean and that is, to get fat, get

property: and it is the one thing they will not do. The efforts to dodge

the responsibility of self-defence, self-appropriation, to assume the

mastership in their own person, is the unmistakeable mark of the lean.

The first conscious effort of mind in any prospective change of

circumstance is to look for the chain and the collar and the next great

Someone to whom they may belong, serve, work for. If not the

slave-owner, then the employer; (employer—someone who keeps him busy!)

if not the individual (employer, then the State; if not these then the

Commune or the Trade Union or the Trade Guild: an ‘employed person,’

worker, for ever. Let reproaches be directed where cause lies—home—and

then they may bear fruit. As Mr. Tillett might have remembered when he

called upon the Deity to perform a task which he could have done for

himself had he cared, what a man wants doing, he will do himself. And

what is true in relation to the deity is true in relation to fat men.

The fat man is just as ‘likely to endow the lean scolders as is the

Almighty—none at all. He is satisfied in the knowledge that they can

achieve their own endowment as he and his achieved theirs, by taking

from yielding hands.