I. The idea of salvation by the child.- Each of us at birth has special potentialities which are slowly crushed and destroyed by a standardized society and mechanical methods of teaching, If a new educational system can be introduced, one by which children are encouraged to develop their own personalities, to blossom freely like flowers, then the world will be saved by this new, free generation
II. The idea of self expression.-Each man's, each woman's, purpose in life is to express himself, to realize his full individuality through creative work and beautiful living in beautiful surroundings
III. The idea of paganism.- The body is a temple in which there is nothing unclean, a shrine to be adorned for the ritual of love
IV The idea of living for the moment.- It is stupid to pule up treasures that we can enjoy only in old age, when we have lost the capacity for enjoyment. Better to seize the moment as it comes, to dwell in it intensely, even at the cost of future suffering, Better to live extravagantly, gather june rosebuds, 'burn my candle at both ends... it gives a lovely light'
V The idea of liberty.- Every law, convention, or rule of art that prevents self-expression or the full enjoyment of the moment should be shattered and abolished. Puritanism is the great enemy. The crusade against puritanism is the only crused with which free individuals are justified in allying themselves.
VI. The idea of female equality.- Women should be the economic and moral equals of men, They should have the same working conditions, same opportunity for drinking, smoking, taking or dismissing lovers.
VII. The idea of psychological adjustment.-
we are unhappy because we are maladjusted, and maladjusted because we are repressed. If our individual repressions can be removed- by confessing them to a Freudian psychologist- then we can adjust ourselves to any situation, and be happy in it,
VIII. The idea of changing place.- 'They do things better in Europe' England and Germany have the wisdom of old cultures; the latin peoples have admirably preserved their pagan heritage. By expatriating himselv, by living in Paris, Capri, or the South of France, the artist can break the puritan shackles, drink, live freely, and be wholly creative.
They carried us to a foreign country, the first that most of us had seen; they taught us to make love, stammer love, in a foreign language. They fed and lodged us at the expense of a government in which we had no share. They made us more irresponsible than before; livelihood was not a problem; we had a minimum of choices to make; we could let the future take care of itself, feeling certain that it would bear us into new adventures. They taught us courage, extravagance, fatalism, these being the virtues of men at war; they taught us to regard as vices the civilian virtues of thrift, caution, and sobriety; they made us fear boredom more than death. All these lessons might have been learned in any branch of the army, but ambulance service had a lesson of its own: it instilled into us what might be called a spectatorial attitude.
and this was perhaps the greatest of the lessons that the war taught to young writers. It revivified the subjects that had seemed forbidden because they were soiled by many hands and robbed of meaning: danger made it possible to write once more about love, adventure, death,
WAR IN BOHEMIA
Alexander Pope, two centuries before, had taken the side of property and propriety in a similar campaign against the slums of art. he reserved his best-considered insults for the garret dwells of Grub Street, the dramatists whose lives were spent dodging the bailiff, the epic poets 'lulled by a zephyr through the broken pane.' These he accused of slander, dullness, theft, bootlicking, ingratitude, every outrage to man and the Muses; almost the only charge he did not press home against them was that of affectation, They were not play-acting their poverty. The threadbare Miltons of his day were rarely the children of prosperous parents; they could not go home to Nottingham or Bristol and earn a comfortable living by selling hackney coaches; if they 'turned a Persian tale for half a crown,' it was usually because they had no other means of earning half a crown, and so keeping themselves out of debtors' prison. And the substance of Pope's attack against them is simply that they were poor, that they belonged to a class beneath his own, without inherited wealth, that they did not keep a gentleman's establishment, or possess a gentleman's easy manners, or the magnanimity of a gentleman zsure of tomorrow's dinner:
Yet then did Gildon draw his venal quill;
I wish'd the man a dinner, and sate still
Yet then did Dennis race in furious fret;
I never answer'd, I was not in debt
...Pope had inflicted a defeat on Grub street but- the distinction is important- he had left bohemia untouched, for the simple reason that Queen Anne's and King George's London had no bohemia to defeat.
...Grub street develops in the metropolis of any country or culture as soon as men are able to earn a precarious living with pen or pencil; bohemia is a revolt against certain features of industrial cappitalism and can exist only in a capitalist society, Grub St is a way of life unwillingly followed by the intellectual proletariat; bohemia attracts its citizens from all economic classes; there are not a few bohemian millionaires,
but they are expected to imitate the customs of penniless artists. Bohemia is Grub Street romanticized, doctrinalized, and rendered unconscious. It is Grub Street on parade.
-exile's return
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