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 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 lit