We cannot afford to cramp or antagonise or even bore our intellectuals and our artists, our wits and our craftsmen, our dreamers and our thinking men and women. It may be that to achieve a breakthrough to material success in a nation it is necessary to be single-minded in the economic sphere. I am not enough of an economist or a political thinker to judge that. But in the sphere of art and the intellect to be single-minded is a sort of living death for a nation. When such men in any nation feel their minds are no longer being excited their nation’s future is endangered.
Of course personal disenchantment does not flow only or even mainly out of national difficulties. Long ago, in 1591, Giovanni Florio counted the ten pains of death for any man: they do not contain any obvious political distress: