And it seems to me the answer is banal enough: class!I cannot go into the middle-class world. I have, as far as circumstances go left the working-class world. So I have no world at all, and am content.
What is it, then, that prevents so many capable men from moving on in the apparently natural order of progress from the lower class into the upper class· Why can I not follow in the footsteps of Barrie, who is a son of the working-class· —or of Wells· —and become well-to-do middle-class·
What is the peculiar repugnance one feels, towards entering the middle-class world· It is not that there is anything very difficult about it, it seems to me. On the contrary, nothing is so easy as to be a middle-class man among middle-class men: or call it upper-class, if you like. For one who can bring himself to it.
What is the obstacle· I have looked for it in myself, as a clue to this dangerous cleavage between the classes. And I find it is a very deep obstacle. It is in the manner of contact. The contact, among the lower classes—as perhaps, in the past, among the aristocracy—is much more immediate, more physical, between man and man, than it ever is among the middle classes. The middle class can be far more intimate, yet never so near to one another. It is the difference between the animal, physical affinity that can govern the lives of men, and the other, the affinity of culture and purpose, which actually does govern the mass today.
But the affinity of culture and purpose that holds the vast middle-class world together seems to me to be an intensification today, of the acquisitive and possessive instinct. The dominant instinct of the middle-class world, that is, of the whole world today, is the possessive instinct, which in its active form is the acquisitive instinct.
