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 comparative 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. ...