“No; but the factory is only a part of the machinery of the system.  Its basis is the tyranny of brain force, which, among civilized men, is allowed to do what muscular force does among schoolboys and savages.  The schoolboy proposition is:  ’I am stronger than you, therefore you shall fag for me.’  Its grown up form is:  ’I am cleverer than you, therefore you shall fag for me.’  The state of things we produce by submitting to this, bad enough even at first, becomes intolerable when the mediocre or foolish descendants of the clever fellows claim to have inherited their privileges.  Now, no men are greater sticklers for the arbitrary dominion of genius and talent than your artists.  The great painter is not satisfied with being sought after and admired because his hands can do more than ordinary hands, which they truly can, but he wants to be fed as if his stomach needed more food than ordinary stomachs, which it does not.  A day’s work is a day’s work, neither more nor less, and the man who does it needs a day’s sustenance, a night’s repose, and due leisure, whether he be painter or ploughman.  But the rascal of a painter, poet, novelist, or other voluptuary in labor, is not content with his advantage in popular esteem over the ploughman; he also wants an advantage in money, as if there were more hours in a day spent in the studio or library than in the field; or as if he needed more food to enable him to do his work than the ploughman to enable him to do his.  He talks of the higher quality of his work, as if the higher quality of it were of his own making—­as if it gave him a right to work less for his neighbor than his neighbor works for him—­as if the ploughman could not do better without him than he without the ploughman—­as if the value of the most celebrated pictures has not been questioned more than that of any straight furrow in the arable world—­as if it did not take an apprenticeship of as many years to train the hand and eye of a mason or blacksmith as of an artist—­as if, in short, the fellow were a god, as canting brain worshippers have for years past been assuring him he is.  Artists are the high priests of the modern Moloch.  Nine out of ten of them are diseased creatures, just sane enough to trade on their own neuroses.  The only quality of theirs which extorts my respect is a certain sublime selfishness which makes them willing to starve and to let their families starve sooner than do any work they don’t like.”

“Indeed you are quite wrong, Sidney.  There was a girl at the Slade school who supported her mother and two sisters by her drawing.  Besides, what can you do?  People were made so.”

“Yes; I was made a landlord and capitalist by the folly of the people; but they can unmake me if they will.  Meanwhile I have absolutely no means of escape from my position except by giving away my slaves to fellows who will use them no better than I, and becoming a slave myself; which, if you please, you shall not catch me doing in a hurry.  No, my beloved, I must keep my foot on their necks for your sake as well as for my own.  But you do not care about all this prosy stuff.  I am consumed with remorse for having bored my darling.  You want to know why I am living here like a hermit in a vulgar two-roomed hovel instead of tasting the delights of London society with my beautiful and devoted young wife.”