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TO THE LIGHTHOUSEhad over and over again rounded some pause,signified some conclusion, seeing his wife andchild, seeing again the urns with the trailing redgeraniums which had so often decorated processesof thought, and bore, written up among theirleaves, as if they were scraps of paper on whichone scribbles notes in the rush of reading—heslipped—[%]VW: The dashes are deleted with vertical lines. —saraheilefson,/seeing all this—[%]VW: The dashes are deleted with vertical lines. —saraheilefson,/smoothly into specula-tion suggested by an article in The Times about thenumber of Americans who visit Shakespeare'shouse every year. If Shakespeare had neverexisted, he asked, would the world have differedmuch from what it is to-day? Does the progressof civilisation depend upon great men? Is the lotof the average human being better now than in thetime of the Pharaohs? Is the lot of the averagehuman being, however, he asked himself, thecriterion by which we judge the measure ofcivilisation? Possibly not. Possibly the greatestgood requires the existence of a slave class. Theliftman in the Tube is an eternally necessary...VW: Double dot indicates restoration of the cancelled double “s”.ityThe thought was distasteful to him. He tossedhis head. To avoid it, he would find some wayof snubbing the predominance of the arts. Hewould argue that the world exists for the averagehuman being; that the arts are merely a decora-tion imposed on the top of human life; they donot express it. Nor is Shakespeare necessary to it.70
