and the miner. But you are still getting ting no further. It is the
Life of the Bee over again, with no other object in it but mere
existence. If this were all, there would be nothing to write on our
tombstones but "Born 1800; Died 1880. _He lived till then._"


But it is not all, because--and here I strike my breast
proudly--because of us artists. Not only can we write on Shakespeare's
tomb, "He wrote _Hamlet_" or "He was not for an age, but for all
time," but we can write on a contemporary baker's tomb, "He provided
bread for the man who wrote _Hamlet_," and on a contemporary
butcher's tomb, "He was not only for himself, but for Shakespeare."
We perceive, in fact, that the only matter upon which any worker,
other than the artist, can congratulate himself, whether he be
manual-worker, brain-worker, surgeon, judge, or politician, is that he
is helping to make the world tolerable for the artist. It is only the
artist who will leave anything behind him. He is the fighting-man, the
man who counts; the others are merely the Army Service Corps of
civilization. A world without its artists, a world of bees, would be
as futile and as meaningless a thing as an army composed entirely of
the A.S.C.


Possibly you put in a plea here for the explorer and the scientist.
The explorer perhaps may stand alone. His discovery of a peak in
Darien is something in itself, quite apart from the happy possibility
that Keats may be tempted to bring it into a sonnet. Yes, if a
Beef-Essence-Merchant has only provided sustenance for an Explorer he
has not lived in vain, however much the poets and the painters recoil
from his wares. But of the scientist I am less certain. I fancy that