Now, as a matter of fact, I knew already, with an almost despairing distinctness, nearly all these things I did not want and it has not helped me (with all due courtesy and admiration) having John Galsworthy out photographing them day after day, so that I merely did not want them harder.  And Mr. Wells’s measles and children’s diseases, too.  I knew already that I did not want them.  And Mr. Shaw’s entire, heroic, almost noble collection of things he does not want does not supply me—­nor could it supply any other man with furniture to make a world with—­even if it were not this real, big world, with rain and sunshine and wind and people in it, and were only that little, wonderful world a man lives within his own heart.  There have been times, and there will be more of them, when I could not otherwise than speak as the champion of Bernard Shaw; but, after all, what single piece of furniture is there that George Bernard Shaw, living with his great attic of not-things all around him, is able to offer to furnish me for me single, little, warm, lighted room to keep my thoughts in?  Nor has he furnished me with one thing with which I would care to sit down in my little room and think—­looking into the cold, perfect hygienic ashes he has left upon my hearth.  Even if I were a revolutionist, and not a mere, plain human being, loving life and wanting to live more abundantly, I am bound to say I do not see what there is in Mr. Galsworthy’s photographs, or in Mr. Wells’s rich, bottomless murk of humanity to make a revolution for.  And Mr. Bernard Shaw, with all his bottles of disinfectants and shelves of sterilized truths, his hard well-being and his glittering comforts, has presented the vision of a world in which at the very best—­even if it all comes out as he says it will—­a man would merely have things without wanting them, and without wanting anything.

* * * * *

And so it has seemed to me that even if he is quite unimportant, any man to-day who, in some public place, like a book, shall paint the picture of his heart’s desire, who shall throw up, as upon a screen, where all men may see them, his most immediate and most pressing ideals, would perform an important service.  If a man’s sole interest were to find out what all men in the world want, the best way to do it would be for him to say quite definitely, so that we could all compare notes, what he wanted himself.  Speaking for a planet has gone by, but possibly, if a few of us but speak for ourselves, the planet will talk back, and we shall find out at last what it really is that it wants.

The thing that many of us want most in the present grayness and din of the world is some one to play with, or if the word “play” is not quite the right word, some one with whom we can work with freedom and self-expressiveness and joy.  Nine men out of ten one meets to-day talk with one as it were with their watches in their hands.  The people who are rich one sees everywhere, being run away with by their motor-cars; and the people who are poor one sees struggling pitifully and for their very souls, under great wheels and beneath machines.