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.
…
Section 11
Now all this phase of gigantic change in the contours and
appearances of human life which is going on about us, a change as
rapid and as wonderful as the swift ripening of adolescence to
manhood after the barbaric boyish years, is correlated with moral
and mental changes at least as unprecedented. It is not as if old
things were going out of life and new things coming in, it is
rather that the altered circumstances of men are making an appeal
to elements in his nature that have hitherto been suppressed, and
checking tendencies that have hitherto been over-stimulated and
over-developed. He has not so much grown and altered his
essential being as turned new aspects to the light. Such turnings
round into a new attitude the world has seen on a less extensive
scale before. The Highlanders of the seventeenth century, for
example, were cruel and bloodthirsty robbers, in the nineteenth
their descendants were conspicuously trusty and honourable men.
There was not a people in Western Europe in the early twentieth
century that seemed capable of hideous massacres, and none that
had not been guilty of them within the previous two centuries.
The free, frank, kindly, gentle life of the prosperous classes in
any European country before the years of the last wars was in a
different world of thought and feeling from that of the dingy,
suspicious, secretive, and uncharitable existence of the
respectable poor, or the constant personal violence, the squalor
and naive passions of the lowest stratum. Yet there were no real
differences of blood and inherent quality between these worlds;
their differences were all in circumstances, suggestion, and
habits of mind. And turning to more individual instances the
constantly observed difference between one portion of a life and
another consequent upon a religious conversion, were a standing
example of the versatile possibilities of human nature.
The catastrophe of the atomic bombs which shook men out of cities
and businesses and economic relations shook them also out of
their old established habits of thought, and out of the lightly
held beliefs and prejudices that came down to them from the past.
To borrow a word from the old-fashioned chemists, men were made
nascent; they were released from old ties; for good or evil they
were ready for new associations. The council carried them
forward for good; perhaps if his bombs had reached their
destination King Ferdinand Charles might have carried them back
to an endless chain of evils. But his task would have been a
harder one than the council's. The moral shock of the atomic
bombs had been a profound one, and for a while the cunning side
of the human animal was overpowered by its sincere realisation of
the vital necessity for reconstruction. The litigious and trading
spirits cowered together, scared at their own consequences; men
thought twice before they sought mean advantages in the face of
the unusual eagerness to realise new aspirations, and when at
last the weeds revived again and 'claims' began to sprout, they
sprouted upon the stony soil of law-courts reformed, of laws that
pointed to the future instead of the past, and under the blazing