TO the imaginative man in the modern world something becomes, from
the first, sharply defined. Life splits itself into two sections and,
no matter how long one may live or where one may live, the two ends
continue to dangle, fluttering about in the empty air.
To which of the two lives, lived within the one body, are you to give
yourself? There is, after all, some little freedom of choice.
There is the life of fancy. In it one sometimes moves with an ordered
purpose through ordered days, or at the least through ordered hours. In
the life of the fancy there is no such thing as good or bad. There are
no Puritans in that life. The dry sisters of Philistia do not come in
at the door. They cannot breathe in the life of the fancy. The Puritan,
the reformer who scolds at the Puritans, the dry intellectuals, all
who desire to uplift, to remake life on some definite plan conceived
within the human brain die of a disease of the lungs. They would do
better to stay in the world of fact to spend their energy in catching
bootleggers, inventing new machines, helping humanity--as best they
can--in its no doubt laudable ambition to hurl bodies through the air
at the rate of five hundred miles an hour.
In the world of the fancy, life separates itself with slow movements
and with many graduations into the ugly and the beautiful. What is
alive is opposed to what is dead. Is the air of the room in which we
live sweet to the nostrils or is it poisoned with weariness? In the end
it must become the one thing or the other.
All morality then becomes a purely æsthetic matter. What is beautiful
must bring æsthetic joy; what is ugly must bring æsthetic sadness and
suffering.
Or one may become, as so many younger Americans do, a mere smart-aleck,
without humbleness before the possibilities of life, one sure of
himself--and thus one may remain to the end, blind, deaf and dumb,
feeling and seeing nothing. Many of our intellectuals find this is the
more comfortable road to travel.
In the world of fancy, you must understand, no man is ugly. Man is ugly
in fact only. Ah, there is the difficulty!
* * * * *
In the world of fancy even the most base man’s actions sometimes take
on the forms of beauty. Dim pathways do sometimes open before the eyes
of the man who has not killed the possibilities of beauty in himself by
being too sure.
Let us (in fancy) imagine for a moment an American lad walking alone at
evening in the streets of an American town.
American towns, and in particular American towns of the Middle West
of twenty years ago, were not built for beauty, they were not built
to be lived in permanently. A dreadful desire of escape, of physical
escape, must have got, like a disease, into our father’s brains. How
they pitched the towns and cities together! What an insanity! The lad
we have together invented, to walk at evening in the streets of such a
town, must of necessity be more beautiful than all the hurriedly built
towns and cities in which he may walk. True immaturity of the body and
the spirit is more beautiful than mere tired-out physical maturity: the
physical maturity of men and women that has no spiritual counterpart
within itself falls quickly into physical and ugly decay--like the
cheaply constructed frame houses of so many of our towns.
The lad of our fancy walks in the streets of a town hurriedly thrown
together, striving to dream his dreams, and must continue for a long
time to walk in the midst of such ugliness. The cheap, hurried, ugly
construction of America’s physical life still goes on and on. The idea
of permanent residence has not taken hold on us. Our imaginations are
not yet fired by love of our native soil.
The American boy of our mutual imaginative creation is walking in the
streets of an Ohio town, after the factories have begun coming and
the day of the hustlers is at hand, the houses of the town pushed up
quickly, people swarming into the town who have no notion of staying
there--a surprising number of them will stay, but they have, at first,
no intention of staying.
Before the boy’s day how slow the growth of the towns! There were the
people of an older generation, coming out slowly to the Middle West,
from New York state, from Pennsylvania, from New England--a great
many to my own Ohio country from New England. They had come drifting
in slowly, bringing traces of old customs, sayings, religions,
prejudices. The young farmers came first, glad of the rich free soil
and the friendlier climate--strong young males that were to come in
such numbers as to leave New England, with its small fields and its
thinner, stonier soil, a place of aging maiden ladies--that old-maid
civilization that was, nevertheless, to be the seat of our American
culture. An insane fear of the flesh, a touch of transcendentalism, a
reaching always up into the sky. In the ground underfoot there is only
fear, poverty, hardship. One must look upward, always upward.
What of the sensual love of life, of surfaces, words with a rich flavor
on the tongue, colors, the soft texture of the skin of women, the play
of muscles through the bodies of men?
The cry of fear--“that way lies sin.”
In the new land, in that older time, too much maleness. Deep mud in the
streets of the little towns, built in the forest along rivers or on the
stage roads. Bearded, rough-handed men gathered about the saloons. Abe
Lincoln proving his manhood by lifting a barrel of whisky and drinking
from the bunghole. The ruffian of the frontier, father of the modern
gunman of our cities, proving his manhood by murder--Blinky Morgan of
Ohio, Jesse James of Missouri, Slade of the Overland Route to the gold
and silver camps of the Far West--these the heroes of that life.
A slow culture growing up, however--growing as culture must always
grow--through the hands of workmen.
In the small towns artisans coming in--the harness-maker, the
carriage-builder, the builder of wagons, the smith, the tailor, the
maker of shoes, the builders of houses and barns too.
As Slade and James were to be the fathers of the modern gunmen, so
these the fathers of the artists of the generations to come. In their
fingers the beginning of that love of surfaces, of the sensual love of
materials, without which no true civilization can ever be born.
And then, like a great flood over it all the coming of the factories,
the coming of modern industrialism.
Speed, hurried workmanship, cheap automobiles for cheap men, cheap
chairs in cheap houses, city apartment houses with shining bathroom
floors, the Ford, the Twentieth Century Limited, the World War, jazz,
the movies.
The modern American youth is going forth to walk at evening in the
midst of these. New and more terrible nerve tension, speed. Something
vibrant in the air about us all.
The problem is to survive. If our youth is to get into his
consciousness that love of life--that with the male comes only through
the love of surfaces, sensually felt through the fingers--his problem
is to reach down through all the broken surface distractions of modern
life to that old love of craft out of which culture springs.