avert it. Every issue of every trade journal has its four or five

columns of abridged bankruptcy proceedings, nearly every item in which

means the final collapse of another struggling family upon the

resources of the community, and continually a fresh supply of

superfluous artisans and shop assistants, coming out of employment

with savings or 'help' from relations, of widows with a husband's

insurance money, of the ill-trained sons of parsimonious fathers,

replaces the fallen in the ill-equipped, jerry-built shops that

everywhere abound...."

I quote these fragments from a gifted, if unpleasant, contemporary for

what they are worth. I feel this has come in here as the broad aspect

of this History. I come back to Mr. Polly sitting upon his gate and

swearing in the east wind, and I so returning have a sense of floating

across unbridged abysses between the General and the Particular.

There, on the one hand, is the man of understanding, seeing clearly--I

suppose he sees clearly--the big process that dooms millions of lives

to thwarting and discomfort and unhappy circumstances, and giving us

no help, no hint, by which we may get that better "collective will and

intelligence" which would dam the stream of human failure, and, on the

other hand, Mr. Polly sitting on his gate, untrained, unwarned,

confused, distressed, angry, seeing nothing except that he is, as it

were, nettled in greyness and discomfort--with life dancing all about

him; Mr. Polly with a capacity for joy and beauty at least as keen and

subtle as yours or mine.

195

The History of Mr Polly