I like my art unadorned; thought and skill and the other strange quality that is added thereto to make things beautiful--and nothing more. A farthing's worth of paint and paper, and behold! a thing of beauty!--as they do in Japan. And if it should fall into the fire--well, it has gone like yesterday's sunset, and to-morrow there will be another.
He contrasts this with the ordinary English view of art and property, mahogany furniture and "handsome" possessions:
The pretence that they were the accessories to human life was too transparent. _We_ were the accessories; we minded them for a little while, and then we passed away. They wore us out and cast us aside. We were the changing scenery; they were the actors who played on through the piece.
_There is no Being but Becoming_ is the special dictum of Wells, a dictum which does not consort with mahogany sideboards, but is tangibly expressed in Japanese architecture. And if Wells naturally likes Japanese art, its economy, delicacy, ephemerality, its catlike nicety, its paucity of color, its emphasis of design, its "starkness," it is plain also that many qualities of the Japanese character must also appeal irresistibly to him: the light hold they have on all those things into which one settles down, from stolid leather arm-chairs to comfortable private fortunes; their lack of self-consequence, their alertness, their athletic freedom from everything that encumbers, their remoteness from port-wine and _embonpoint._ These things exist in Wells's notion of right human nature.
Thus the Samurai. They are delegates of the species, experimenting and searching for new directions; they instinctively view themselves as explorers for the race, as disinterested agents. And their own self-development on this disinterested basis is not only the purpose of their own lives, but also the method by which the Life Impulse discovers and records itself and pushes on to ever wider and richer manifestations.
The socialism of Wells is merely a building out from this conception. He is persuaded that this kind of experimental exercise is not simply a happy indulgence for the few fortunately placed, but that it is actually virtue and the only virtue. And this notion of personal virtue--personal in quality, social in effect--once conceded, it follows that the moulding of life must proceed with reference to this.