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action because it shows will; for to say that is merely to say that it is an action. By this
praise of will you cannot really choose one course as better than another. And yet
choosing one course as better than another is the very definition of the will you are
praising.
The worship of will is the negation of will. To admire mere choice is to refuse to
choose. If Mr. Bernard Shaw comes up to me and says, Will something, that is
tantamount to saying, I do not mind what you will, and that is tantamount to saying, I
have no will in the matter. You cannot admire will in general, because the essence of
will is that it is particular. A brilliant anarchist like Mr. John Davidson feels an irritation
against ordinary morality, and therefore he invokes will -- will to anything. He only wants
humanity to want something. But humanity does want something. It wants ordinary
morality. He rebels against the law and tells us to will something or anything. But we
have willed something. We have willed the law against which he rebels.
All the will-worshippers, from Nietzsche to Mr. Davidson, are really quite empty of
volition. They cannot will, they can hardly wish. And if any one wants a proof of this, it
can be found quite easily. It can be found in this fact: that they always talk of will as
something that expands and breaks out. But it is quite the opposite. Every act of will is
an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense every act is
an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else. That
objection, which men of this school used to make to the act of marriage, is really an
objection to every act. Every act is an irrevocable selection exclusion. Just as when you
marry one woman you give up all the others, so when you take one course of action you
give up all the other courses. If you become King of England, you give up the post of
Beadle in Brompton. If you go to Rome, you sacrifice a rich suggestive life in
Wimbledon. It is the existence of this negative or limiting side of will that makes most of
the talk of the anarchic will-worshippers little better than nonsense. For instance, Mr.
John Davidson tells us to have nothing to do with Thou shalt not ; but it is surely
obvious that Thou shalt not is only one of the necessary corollaries of I will. I will go
to the Lord Mayor s Show, and thou shalt not stop me. Anarchism adjures us to be bold
creative artists, and care for no laws or limits. But it is impossible to be an artist and not
care for laws and limits. Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you
draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If, in your bold creative way, you
hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not
free to draw a giraffe. The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world
of limits. You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their
own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his
stripes. Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from
being a camel. Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of
the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to
a lamentable end. Somebody wrote a work called The Loves of the Triangles ; I never
read it, but I am sure that if triangles ever were loved, they were loved for being
triangular. This is certainly the case with all artistic creation, which is in some ways the
most decisive example of pure will. The artist loves his limitations: they constitute the
thing he is doing. The painter is glad that the canvas is flat. The sculptor is glad that the
clay is colourless.
In case the point is not clear, an historic example may illustrate it. The French
Revolution was really an heroic and decisive thing, because the Jacobins willed
something definite and limited. They desired the freedoms of democracy, but also all the
vetoes of democracy. They wished to have votes and not to have titles. Republicanism
had an ascetic side in Franklin or Robespierre as well as an expansive side in Danton
or Wilkes. Therefore they have created something with a solid substance and shape,
the square social equality and peasant wealth of France. But since then the
revolutionary or speculative mind of Europe has been weakened by shrinking from any
proposal because of the limits of that proposal. Liberalism has been degraded into
liberality. Men have tried to turn revolutionise from a transitive to an intransitive verb.
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