' 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.
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