The thing called the New Race--the passion of poets, the phantom
running ahead and forever calling the dreamer and revolutionist
and occultist, is far from a reality as yet among the commonplaces
of the world. It is the spirit of everything worth while, but that
means nothing to one who has not a breath of it in his own body.... A
story went forth from this shop recently in which certain ideals and
presences of the new social order were carried through to a cheerful
ending. The publisher wrote, "Yes, but what is the New Race?"
It's a fair question, but remember one cannot adequately describe a
spiritual thing in terms of matter. It is only possible of portrayal
where it has broken through into terms of three-space. First you are
apt to get the nearest and most striking picture of the New Race at
your own supper-table--the presence of one of your own children,
especially if the young one is hard to understand.
Parents and children of all times have found confusion and alarm in
each other's ways. But there are rare periods of human history when
the difference between two generations has been not a normal and
superficial crack, but an abyss. It is so now. The Old has reached
its climacteric point of destructivity. All self-passions destroy
themselves in time. Fear, greed, sensuality--all are self-destructive.
Great human numbers and decadent principles have been recently
broken down in the world with a swiftness and abandonment heretofore
unrecorded, except in the traditions of planetary flood and flame....
You may watch closely the child under seven who plays in the Unseen,
whose companions are not in the room for older eyes; watch the one of
fancies and fairies and fragrances which others cannot quite discern.
Many a child has been driven with a soul-wound into corroding silence
by parents who thought they were punishing falsehood, when they were in
reality repressing the imagination--the faculty which master-artists
denote as the first and loveliest possession of the creative mind. Too
coarse and unlit to see what the child saw, the parents again and again
have looked gravely at each other, saying:
"This is a crisis. Our child has begun to lie. We must forget her own
feelings and punish her----"
So often it is _her_--but not always. The boys who are to do the
great tasks of song and prophecy and architecture--they, too, dream
dreams and see visions and have the rapt eyes of Joan in the forests
of Domremy; they, too, are severely questioned by the pharisees; none
escape this scourging; they, too, in many cases shall be put to death.
The new ideals of the parenthood, education, romance, are now being
introduced and promulgated by pioneers long since emerged from the old
litter and humus. Education will mean first of all a turning for power
to the Unseen. The quest of the Swan and the Star and the Beloved, are
never carried along on the levels and inequalities of the earth--always
the uplifted face for the saint and the sage and the seer. Great
parents kneel beside their children and beg to be delivered from the
heaviness which holds them to the dim shadows, where the child sees
face to face. Education will mean finding his intrinsic task for the
child--the intensive cultivation of the human spirit from the Soul
outward, not alone from the brain inward.
The quest of the passing age was for Gold. The real meaning and
symbol and glory of gold, as the highest, smoothest and most finished
of minerals, has been lost in the bulkier products and possessions
it meant to measure and signify. More and more has gold itself hid
away from vulgar hands and been represented by objects intrinsically
inferior. We now behold a civilisation destroying itself for
commodities and destroying the commodities for which the destruction
began.
Gold itself will serve Beauty in the coming age; commerce will serve
æsthetics. The lovers of Beauty begin with the sand, with the clay.
They love nature from the ground up; they are fervent for light and
air, for sun and sky and water, for fruits and grains and bees, for
stars and rains and romances. They say such things are holy. Words are
inadequate for their loves and appreciations. They find the ways to
love God infinite. They see Him in stone and stream; they see Him in
the eyes of the deep down men; they see Him risen and inevitable in the
eyes of their lovers....
Straight goodness will not do for the New Race, nor straight
intellectuality. Artists, singers, painters and idealists will be the
heroes of the generations to come, for they will add the quest of
Beauty to the unwashed goodness of the saints and pilgrims.
These are but flaring points; one is embarrassed in short space because
of a myriad things to say. Free verse is a sign of the New, also the
dream of a free world and the planetary patriotism. The immanence of
the _spirit_ of all things, is a sign; the sense of the underlying
oneness of humanity; not alone the Fatherland, but the Kinterland,
where new Fountains are established and sages and masters come for
inspiration--all these, like a passing train of wonder, a glimpse of
many cars....
I think I can bring the picture in closer by using a few pages of work
from one of the young men with me. His name is Steve. I called him The
Dakotan,[1] in the book, _Child and Country_. We've romped and ridden
together for three years, and I've known Steve better every day--still
far from the end. The rest of the chapter is Steve's writing:
[1] H.A. Sturtzel.