§ 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 æsthetic
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 leave behind them
a series of panels in some public arcade, a row of carven figures along
a terrace, a grove, a pavilion. Or they give themselves to the
penetration of some still opaque riddle in phenomena as once men gave
themselves to the accumulation of riches. The work that was once the
whole substance of social existence—for most men spent all their lives
in earning a living—is now no more than was the burden upon one of
those old climbers who carried knapsacks of provisions on their backs in
order that they might ascend mountains. It matters little to the easy
charities of our emancipated time that most people who have made their
labour contribution produce neither new beauty nor new wisdom, but are
simply busy about those pleasant activities and enjoyments that reassure
them that they are alive. They help, it may be, by reception and
reverberation, and they hinder nothing. . . .