TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

had over and over again rounded some pause,
signified some conclusion, seeing his wife and
child, seeing again the urns with the trailing red
geraniums which had so often decorated processes
of thought, and bore, written up among their
leaves, as if they were scraps of paper on which
one scribbles notes in the rush of reading—he
slipped, seeing all this,. smoothly into specula-
tion suggested by an article in The Times about the
number of Americans who visit Shakespeare's
house every year. If Shakespeare had never
existed, he asked, would the world have differed
much from what it is to-day? Does the progress
of civilisation depend upon great men? Is the lot
of the average human being better now than in the
time of the Pharaohs? Is the lot of the average "
human being, however, he asked himself, the
criterion by which we judge the measure of
civilisation? Possibly not. Possibly the greatest
good requires the existence of a slave class. The
liftman in the Tube is an eternal necessity.
The thought was distasteful to him. He tossed
his head. To avoid it, he would find some way
of snubbing the predominance of the arts. He
would argue that the world exists for the average
human being; that the arts are merely a decora-
tion imposed on the top of human life; they do
not express it. Nor is Shakespeare necessary to it.
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