personalities of the world. Continually we are less personal.
Every goodthought contributes now, and every able brain falls
within that informal and dispersed kingship which gathers
together into one purpose the energies of the race.
Section 10
It is doubtful if we shall ever see again a phase of human
existence in which 'politics,' that is to say a partisan
interference with the ruling sanities of the world, will be the
dominant interest among serious men. We seem to have entered
upon an entirely new phase in history in which contention as
distinguished from rivalry, has almost abruptly ceased to be the
usual occupation, and has become at most a subdued and hidden and
discredited thing. Contentious professions cease to be an
honourable employment for men. The peace between nations is also
a peace between individuals. We live in a world that comes of
age. Man the warrior, man the lawyer, and all the bickering
aspects of life, pass into obscurity; the grave dreamers, man the
curious learner, and man the creative artist, come forward to
replace these barbaric aspects of existence by a less ignoble
adventure.
There is no natural life of man. He is, and always has been, a
sheath of varied and even incompatible possibilities, a
palimpsest of inherited dispositions. It was the habit of many
writers in the early twentieth century to speak of competition
and the narrow, private life of trade and saving and suspicious
isolation as though such things were in some exceptional way
proper to the human constitution, and as though openness of mind
and a preference for achievement over possession were abnormal
and rather unsubstantial qualities. How wrong that was the
history of the decades immediately following the establishment of
the world republic witnesses. Once the world was released from
the hardening insecurities of a needless struggle for life that
was collectively planless and individually absorbing, it became
apparent that there was in the vast mass of people a long,
smothered passion to make things. The world broke out into
making, and at first mainly into aesthetic making. This phase of
history, which has been not inaptly termed the 'Efflorescence,'
is still, to a large extent, with us. The majority of our
population consists of artists, and the bulk of activity in the
world lies no longer with necessities but with their elaboration,
decoration, and refinement. There has been an evident change in
the quality of this making during recent years. It becomes more
purposeful than it was, losing something of its first elegance
and prettiness and gaining in intensity; but that is a change
rather of hue than of nature. That comes with a deepening
philosophy and a sounder education. For the first joyous
exercises of fancy we perceive now the deliberation of a more
constructive imagination. There is a natural order in these
things, and art comes before science as the satisfaction of more
elemental needs must come before art, and as play and pleasure
come in a human life before the development of a settled
purpose…
For thousands of years this gathering impulse to creative work
must have struggled in man against the limitations imposed upon
him by his social ineptitude. It was a long smouldering fire
that flamed out at last in all these things. The evidence of a
pathetic, perpetually thwarted urgency to make something, is one
of the most touching aspects of the relics and records of our
immediate ancestors. There exists still in the death area about
the London bombs, a region of deserted small homes that furnish
the most illuminating comment on the old state of affairs. These
homes are entirely horrible, uniform, square, squat, hideously
proportioned, uncomfortable, dingy, and in some respects quite
filthy, only people in complete despair of anything better could
have lived in them, but to each is attached a ridiculous little
rectangle of land called 'the garden,' containing usually a prop
for drying clothes and a loathsome box of offal, the dustbin,
full of egg-shells, cinders, and such-like refuse. Now that one
may go about this region in comparitive security-for the London
radiations have dwindled to inconsiderable proportions-it is
possible to trace in nearly every one of these gardens some
effort to make. Here it is a poor little plank summer-house,
here it is a 'fountain' of bricks and oyster-shells, here a
'rockery,' here a 'workshop.' And in the houses everywhere there
are pitiful little decorations, clumsy models, feeble drawings.
These efforts are almost incredibly inept, like the drawings of
blindfolded men, they are only one shade less harrowing to a
sympathetic observer than the scratchings one finds upon the
walls of the old prisons, but there they are, witnessing to the
poor buried instincts that struggled up towards the light. That
god of joyous expression our poor fathers ignorantly sought, our
freedom has declared to us…
In the old days the common ambition of every simple soul was to
possess a little property, a patch of land, a house uncontrolled
by others, an 'independence' as the English used to put it. And
what made this desire for freedom and prosperity so strong, was
very evidently the dream of self-expression, of doing something
with it, of playing with it, of making a personal delightfulness,
a distinctiveness. Property was never more than a means to an
end, nor avarice more than a perversion. Men owned in order to
do freely. Now that every one has his own apartments and his own
privacy secure, this disposition to own has found its release in
a new direction. Men study and save and strive that they may