thought, all the art, all the increments of knowledge that matter,
are supplied so far as the English-speaking community is concerned
by-how many?-by three or four thousand individuals. ('Less,' said
Thorns.) To be more precise, by the mental hinterlands of three or
four thousand individuals. We who know some of the band entertain
no illusions as to their innate rarity. We know that they are just
the few out of many, the few who got in our world of chance and
confusion, the timely stimulus, the apt suggestion at the fortunate
moment, the needed training, the leisure. The rest are lost in the
crowd, fail through the defects of their qualities, become
commonplace workmen and second-rate professional men, marry
commonplace wives, are as much waste as the driftage of superfluous
pollen in a pine forest is waste."
"Decent honest lives!" said Dayton to his bread-crumbs, with his
chin in his necktie. "WASTE!"
"And the people who do get what we call opportunity get it usually
in extremely limited and cramping forms. No man lives a life of
intellectual productivity alone; he needs not only material and
opportunity, but helpers, resonators. Round and about what I might
call the REAL men, you want the sympathetic cooperators, who help by
understanding. It isn't that our-SALT of three or four thousand is
needlessly rare; it is sustained by far too small and
undifferentiated a public. Most of the good men we know are not
really doing the very best work of their gifts; nearly all are a
little adapted, most are shockingly adapted to some second-best use.
Now, I take it, this is the very centre and origin of the muddle,
futility, and unhappiness that distresses us; it's the cardinal
problem of the state-to discover, develop, and use the exceptional
gifts of men. And I see that best done-I drift more and more away
from the common stuff of legislative and administrative activity-by
a quite revolutionary development of the educational machinery, but
by a still more unprecedented attempt to keep science going, to keep
literature going, and to keep what is the necessary spur of all
science and literature, an intelligent and appreciative criticism
going. You know none of these things have ever been kept going
hitherto; they've come unexpectedly and inexplicably."
"Hear, hear!" from Dayton, cough, nodding of the head, and an
expression of mystical profundity.
"They've lit up a civilisation and vanished, to give place to
darkness again. Now the modern state doesn't mean to go back to
darkness again-and so it's got to keep its light burning." I went
on to attack the present organisation of our schools and
universities, which seemed elaborately designed to turn the well-
behaved, uncritical, and uncreative men of each generation into the
authoritative leaders of the next, and I suggested remedies upon
lines that I have already indicated in the earlier chapters of this
story…
So far I had the substance of the club with me, but I opened new
ground and set Crupp agog by confessing my doubt from which party or
combination of groups these developments of science and literature
and educational organisation could most reasonably be expected. I
looked up to find Crupp's dark little eye intent upon me.
There I left it to them.
We had an astonishingly good discussion; Neal burst once, but we
emerged from his flood after a time, and Dayton had his interlude.
The rest was all close, keen examination of my problem.
I see Crupp now with his arm bent before him on the table in a way
we had, as though it was jointed throughout its length like a
lobster's antenna, his plump, short-fingered hand crushing up a
walnut shell into smaller and smaller fragments. "Remington," he
said, "has given us the data for a movement, a really possible
movement. It's not only possible, but necessary-urgently
necessary, I think, if the Empire is to go on."
"We're working altogether too much at the social basement in
education and training," said Gane. "Remington is right about our
neglect of the higher levels."
Britten made a good contribution with an analysis of what he called
the spirit of a country and what made it. "The modern community
needs its serious men to be artistic and its artists to be taken
seriously," I remember his saying. "The day has gone by for either
dull responsibility or merely witty art."
I remember very vividly how Shoesmith harped on an idea I had thrown
out of using some sort of review or weekly to express and elaborate
these conceptions of a new, severer, aristocratic culture.
"It would have to be done amazingly well," said Britten, and my mind
went back to my school days and that ancient enterprise of ours, and
how Cossington had rushed it. Well, Cossington had too many papers
nowadays to interfere with us, and we perhaps had learnt some
defensive devices.
"But this thing has to be linked to some political party," said