H. Wells - The World Set Free

petty making and entangling of laws in an atmosphere of

contention that is perhaps the most perplexing aspect of

constitutional history in the nineteenth century. In that age

they seem to have been perpetually making laws when we should

alter regulations. The work of change which we delegate to these

scientific committees of specific general direction which have

the special knowledgeneeded, and which are themselvesdominated

by the broad intellectual process of the community, was in those

days inextricably mixed up with legislation. They fought over the

details; we should as soon thinkof fighting over the arrangement

of the parts of a machine. We knownowadays that such things go

on best within laws, as life goes on between earth and sky. And

so it is that government gathers now for a day or so in each year

under the sunshine of Brissago when Saint Bruno's lilies are in

flower, and does little more than bless the work of its

committees. And even these committees are less originative and

more expressive of the general thoughtthan they were at first.

It becomes difficult to mark out the particular directive

personalities of the world. Continuallywe are less personal.

Every good thoughtcontributes now, and every able brain falls

within that informal and dispersed kingship which gathers

together into one purpose the energies of the race.

Section 10

It is doubtfulif we shall ever seeagain a phase of human

existencein 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 ceasedto be the

usual occupation, and has become at most a subdued and hidden and

discredited thing. Contentious professions ceaseto 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 existenceby 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 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 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 perceivenow the deliberation of a more

constructive 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 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 touchingaspects of the relics and records of our

immediate ancestors. There existsstill in the death area about

the London bombs, a region of deserted small homes that furnish

the most illuminating comment on the old stateof affairs. These

homes are entirely horrible, uniform, square, squat, hideously

proportioned, uncomfortable, dingy, and in some respects quite

filthy, only people in complete despairof 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 joyousexpression our poor fathers ignorantly sought, our

freedom has declared to us…

In the old days the common ambition of every simple soulwas 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 desirefor freedom and prosperity so strong, was

very evidently the dreamof 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 dispositionto 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 themselvesto the penetration of some still opaque riddle in

phenomena as once men gave themselvesto 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