50 TO THE LIGHTHOUSEmeasure of civilization? Possibly not. Possiblythe greatest good requires the existence of a slaveclass. The liftman in the tube is an eternal necessity.The thought was distasteful to him. He tossed hishead. To avoid it, he would find some way ofsnubbing the predominance of the arts. He wouldargue that the world exists for the average humanbeing; that the arts are merely a decoration imposedon the top of human life; they do not express it.Nor is Shakespeare necessary to it. Not knowingprecisely why it was that he wanted to disparageShakespeare and come to the rescue of the man whostands eternally in the door of the lift, he picked aleaf sharply from the hedge. All this would have tobe dished up for the young men at Cardiff nextmonth, he thought; here, on his terrace, he wasmerely foraging and picnicking (he threw away theleaf that he had picked so peevishly) like a man whoreaches from his horse to pick a bunch of roses, orstuffs his pockets with nuts as he ambles at his easethrough the lanes and fields of a country known tohim from boyhood. It was all familiar; this turning,that stile, that cut across the fields. Hours he wouldspend thus, with his pipe, of an evening, thinking upand down and in and out of the old familiar lanes andcommons, which were all stuck about with the his-tory of that campaign there, the life of this statesmanhere, with poems and with anecdotes, with figurestoo, this thinker, that soldier; all very brisk andclear; but at length the lane, the field, the common,the fruitful nut tree and the flowering hedge led himon to that further turn of the road where he dis-mounted always, tied his horse to a tree, and pro-
