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CHAPTER THE FOURTH. THE NEW PHASE
Section 10
It is doubtful if we shall ever see again a phase of human existence in which 'politics,' that is to say a partisaninterference with the ruling sanities of the world, will be the dominant interest among serious men. We seem tohave entered upon an entirely new phase in history in which contention as distinguished from rivalry, has almostabruptly 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 apeace between individuals. We live in a world that comes of age. Man the warrior, man the lawyer, and all thebickering aspects of life, pass into obscurity; the grave dreamers, man the curious learner, and man the creativeartist, 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 ofcompetition and the narrow, private life of trade and saving and suspicious isolation as though such things were insome exceptional way proper to the human constitution, and as though openness of mind and a preference forachievement over possession were abnormal and rather unsubstantial qualities. How wrong that was the history ofthe decades immediately following the establishment of the world republic witnesses. Once the world wasreleased from the hardening insecurities of a needless struggle for life that was collectively planless andindividually absorbing, it became apparent that there was in the vast mass of people a long, smothered passion tomake 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 ourpopulation consists of artists, and the bulk of activity in the world lies no longer with necessities but with theirelaboration, decoration, and refinement. There has been an evident change in the quality of this making duringrecent years. It becomes more purposeful than it was, losing something of its first elegance and prettiness andgaining in intensity; but that is a change rather of hue than of nature. That comes with a deepening philosophy anda sounder education. For the first joyous exercises of fancy we perceive now the deliberation of a moreconstructive imagination. There is a natural order in these things, and art comes before science as the satisfactionof more elemental needs must come before art, and as play and pleasure come in a human life before thedevelopment of a settled purpose.... For thousands of years this gathering impulse to creative work must have struggled in man against the limitationsimposed upon him by his social ineptitude. It was a long smouldering fire that flamed out at last in all thesethings. The evidence of a pathetic, perpetually thwarted urgency to make something, is one of the most touchingaspects of the relics and records of our immediate ancestors. There exists still in the death area about the Londonbombs, 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 insome respects quite filthy, only people in complete despair of anything better could have lived in them, but toeach is attached a ridiculous little rectangle of land called 'the garden,' containing usually a prop for drying clothes
The World Set Free
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and a loathsome box of offal, the dustbin, full of egg−shells, cinders, and such−like refuse. Now that one may goabout this region in comparitive security−−for the London radiations have dwindled to inconsiderableproportions−−it is possible to trace in nearly every one of these gardens some effort to make. Here it is a poorlittle 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 effortsare almost incredibly inept, like the drawings of blindfolded men, they are only one shade less harrowing to asympathetic 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 poorfathers 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 houseuncontrolled by others, an 'independence' as the English used to put it. And what made this desire for freedom andprosperity so strong, was very evidently the dream of self−expression, of doing something with it, of playing withit, of making a personal delightfulness, a distinctiveness. Property was never more than a means to an end, noravarice more than a perversion. Men owned in order to do freely. Now that every one has his own apartments andhis own privacy secure, this disposition to own has found its release in a new direction. Men study and save andstrive that they may leave behind them a series of panels in some public arcade, a row of carven figures along aterrace, a grove, a pavilion. Or they give themselves to the penetration of some still opaque riddle in phenomenaas once men gave themselves to the accumulation of riches. The work that was once the whole substance of socialexistence−−for most men spent all their lives in earning a living−−is now no more than was the burden upon oneof those old climbers who carried knapsacks of provisions on their backs in order that they might ascendmountains. It matters little to the easy charities of our emancipated time that most people who have made theirlabour contribution produce neither new beauty nor new wisdom, but are simply busy about those pleasantactivities and enjoyments that reassure them that they are alive. They help, it may be, by reception andreverberation, and they hinder nothing. ...