After that, comes fear.
I may go to the red fields to learn the nonsense about fear. Of course
I can theorise it now perfectly, and practise it at periods. But I
want it steadily, the non-wobbling wisdom. Already I have conquered
some fatuousness in myself. Out of my jubilation I write to you....
Of course, the Many is not a model to follow. The "Many" is a picture
in every man's mind, composed of the inferior things that all other
men do.... Inclusion--intensity--love--creativeness--these Stonestudy
precepts contain all the story. They are certainly the way out and up
and over into Life.
* * * * *
Shuk has done a little sketch or two on the big Romance of the new
social order:
Humour, universality, the highest good will, he writes, are the
symbols that flame from the temple of the New Race.... Everywhere
appear children of the renovating, re-vitalising, more cosmic
tribe. They are easily recognised. The hope of a full and decent
future is with them.
They will do little according to their immediate predecessors, and
much by an inner light of their own. Being wise and simple and not
destructive, they will gratefully accept all that has proven true
for earlier peoples. But they will instinctively have nothing at
all to do with the traditions based on three-score-and-ten, or any
other of the unfortunately solid viewpoints that frost the world
to-day.
They love the world, have come to claim it whole, to reclaim
it from deluded ancestors who were solemnly, from birth, bent
upon deeding and selling and stealing and fencing in bits of the
planet's surface. Forerunners of this happier race have shown
themselves to be masters of materials, true workmen in the solid
stuffs; but by their sense of humour they are saved from any
impulse to seize and sit upon fragments of earth.
These new ones are born with an urge towards unity. Their task, to
set the world in order. Their means, not so much a rearrangement
of objects as a very intense activity along the roads of Beauty
and Truth, in a co-operation unstudied and normal with the rest of
mankind and with the Igniting Principle.
It may be observed that Beauty and Truth are too vague to produce
effective action in a solid world. This is invariably a saying of
the material-minded, however virtuous they may be. It is they who
loudly demand a dull utility over and above Beauty, and apart from
it. It is they who have agglomerated the chaos that is in this hour
threshing about in dust and blood. Their sober iniquities are the
fertiliser to force the seed of the New Race.
It is not a cosmic blunder that the great minds of the world are
found in art, including the supreme art of mystic religion--and
seldom in the arena of statecraft. The world was never managed from
a senate chamber; the cosmos is not guided by a king. When rulers
of the past have become great figures, that greatness usually
rested upon their gift of poetry, their love of art or wisdom, or
some religious quality.
Poems of twenty words have outlived the might of forty wars. A
great book is a higher achievement than a sweeping political move.
The dullest changeling with an obsession may set his seal upon a
war to the death of ten million men, but in the few lines of a true
poem are stored the honey of millenniums of human life. A genuine
work of art is more potent and practical than any blood-bought wall
of tribal separation, more vital and immediate than the doings of
armies. To judge of this properly, one need only know both kings
and poets.
Of the early kings of Rome, it is Numa who is remembered--and he
was in harmony with Celestial Order. Of countless other Roman
figures, the average mind turns first to Cæsar, who was a literary
man, and whose passion to write outlasted every march of his
legions. Greece had kings and statesmen and great generals, yet
it is her wise men who stand foremost. The conquering Alexander
is famed chiefly because he was the unwitting distributor of
Grecian beauty. In fact, Greek history began with Homer, the poet,
and American history with Columbus, the dreamer who is still our
creditor. The mystics of old China reached for the Torch of Light,
and they might have attained a true dominion over the planet, had
not their fear-inspired kings built a Wall and gelded the Empire
once for all. Gautama Buddha gave up kingcraft in order to gain a
higher mastery. Mohammed lived on the Road. Jesus the Christ set
free an energy in the world that is only gaining its real momentum
after two thousand years--and he firmly refused a material crown.
... A hopeful dream, the poem of an autumn afternoon, the building of a
sphinx or a pyramid--these are not subject to time or conditions. They
remain.
So the Children who are the hope of the world are not dismayed at the
medley of illusions emanating from the so-called ruling class. Emperors
and premiers do not get very much done either way; they themselves
abandon their own works over night. They are deserving of profound
sympathy. They only spread out more manful chaos to be set straight by
the master craftsmen--the artists, humorists, vitalists, mystics....
Beauty is the sun-bright flash of the Infinite.
With duty raised to a joy, and pain forgot, the Singers come, the
Builders, the Quickeners of man. The Unforgettables of the so-called
past were of this stock. Their leisure is deep--of a sort that sustains
the finitudes.
All the good goals of yesterday are to be counted as mile-posts.
Direction is more important than any imaginable goal; unvarying
tendency is more direct and splendid than any creed; the white path of
the quester is more precious than a stationary heaven.
The modern children cannot stop on this side of the horizon because
they are creators. Life is their religion. Their rites are broad and
deep as man, as ancient and reverent as time, as new as dawn.
They do not reject the Vedas. They re-fashion the Upanishads in their
own hearts. They study the travels and hopes of Jesus, listen for
the divine songs of Orpheus, penetrate the glitter of numbers with
Pythagoras, find satisfaction in the Mohammedan thinkers who connected
Aristotle with Moses. These names do not belong to the past. The
many Buddhas are perpetually modern. Kabir lives to-day in Tagore.
Heracleitus and Plato are still living springs.
In just the same sense, the children of the New Race are old as
the Pelasgian Zeus, though in point of time they are here for work
and play in 1920. But their vitality, reality, beauty, power and
achievement--these are affairs of all time.
* * * * *
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