You fellows excite yourselves and try to change things overnight. Others
of us think them over quietly by our fires. That is the whole
difference. Scratch off the veneer, and we are all the same kind of
God-yearning animal underneath."
Few sayings ever have hit me harder.
I studied the years' offerings from this man--to his house, to his
acquaintances, to the world in general. An irony filled the room, and so
intense was it that it seemed to have a colour, a kind of green and
yellow vapour. It emanated from the centre of his face. I think the
point that animated me especially was that he was in the habit of
talking to young men. He had no children of his own. I changed the
subject and opened the door--not to hasten his departure but because the
air was close.
By every law which makes us hold fast to the memory of saviours and
great men, the finest fabric of any race is its pioneers. We are living
and putting into action now the dreams of brave spirits who have gone
before. Philosophically, even they may have found that the plan is good,
but that did not prevent them from giving their lives to lift the
soddenness and accelerate the Inertia of the crowds. They took their joy
in the great goodness of the plan--only after they had done their best
to bring the race more swiftly into its higher destiny. A man does not
sit back and allow his children to spend years in learning that which he
can explain in a moment from his own experience.... I did not answer the
philosopher, but many things that occurred from that little talk were
brought out in Chapel during the days which followed--matters that had
to do with America and literary workmanship in particular. Certain of
the matters we discussed have been written down for expression here:
* * * * *
If some one announced that there lived in the Quattuor Islands a man who
knew the exact way to bring into the world, not only the spirit, but the
action of _brotherhood_ and _fatherland_, there would be some call for
maps and steamship passages. If the Quattuor Islands were not already on
the maps, they would presently appear, but not before the first pilgrims
had set out. And if some one should add that all expression of the arts
so far in the world is addled and unsightly compared to that which is
about to be, if a certain formula is followed, and that this man in the
Quattuor group has the formula--many more would start on the quest, or
send their most trusted secretaries.
And yet the truth and the way is all here, and has been uttered again
and again by every voice that has lifted itself above the common din.
The wise men carried gifts. You would expect to give something for the
secret. You might expect to be called upon to sell all you have and give
to the poor. You would not be surprised even if the magnetic Islander
said:
"It is not your frankincense and myrrh that I want, though I thank you.
That which I have is for you. I am more anxious for you to know and
live it, than you can be to have and hold it. But the mystery is that it
will not come to abide with you, while you are passionate for
possession. The passion to give to others must be established within you
before you can adequately receive----"
You are beginning to see how ancient is the gospel. It _is_ old, older
than that. It belongs to the foundations. Personally and nationally, the
law works the same way. That which is true, is true in all its parts.
There is an adjustment by which that which is good for the whole is good
for the part; but each, whole and part, nation and man, must have for
the first thought, not self-good, but the general good. One nation, so
established in this conviction that its actions are automatically
founded upon the welfare of the world, could bring about the true
world-fatherland in a generation; and one human heart so established
begins to touch from the first moment the profound significances of
life.
Personally and nationally, this plain but tremendous concept is
beginning to manifest itself here in America. I do not write as a
patriot. It is not _my country_ that is of interest, but humankind.
America's political interests, her trade, all her localisations as a
separate and bounded people, are inimical to the new enthusiasm. The new
social order cannot concern itself as a country apart. American
predatory instincts, her self-worship, her attempt at neutrality while
supplying explosives for the European slaughter arenas, her deepening
confinement in matter during the past fifty years, have prepared her for
the outright demoralisation of war, just as surely as Europe is meeting
to-day the red harvest from such instincts and activities. For action
invariably follows the thought.
Yet the hearts of men in America are changing. I do not write as a
religionist, but as one very much of the world. For the hearts of men do
change, and it is only through such changes that the material stagnation
of a people can be relieved without deluges of blood.
The high hope is upon us. In being apart from war, America has been
enabled to see. One must always remove himself from the ruck to see its
movement. Within these western shores, the voices of true inspiration
have recently been heard. From a literary standpoint alone, this is the
most significant fact since Emerson, Whitman and Thoreau and Lanier took
pen in hand, forgetting themselves a little while each day. There is a
peculiar strength upon American production of all kinds as a result of
the very act of getting out from under European influence.
England and France and Germany have fallen into mere national voices.
The voice of the partisan is but a weak treble, against the basic rumble
of war. War in this century is a confession, as suicide is a
confession, as every act of blood and rage is a confession, of the
triumph of the animal in the human mind.... If you received letters from
friends in England or Germany or France during the war--friends whom
formerly you admired for their culture and acumen--you were struck by
the dulness and misery of the communications, the uncentred points of
view, the incapacity of human vision in the midst of the heaviness and
blackness of life there; if, indeed, you read the newspapers and
periodicals of those countries, you required no further proof of the
fact--that a nation at war is an obscene nation, its consciousness all
driven down into the physical, its voice tonally imperfect from hate and
fear, its eyes open to red illusion and not to truth.
Even in America the voice of the nationalist is a part of the old and
the unclean. The new social order does not recognise the rights and
desires of any isolated people. Humankind is basically _one_ in meaning,
in aim and in destiny. The differences of nations in relation to the
sun's rays and in character of country, environment, race, colour and
structure of mind--these are primal values, the very values that will
sum up into the essential grandeur of the whole. Personally and
nationally there are no duplicates in the social scheme. The instruments
of this magnificent orchestra are of infinite diversity, but the harmony
is one.
The spiritual source of all human achievement is already a harmonic
whole. That globe is complete. It is our business as men to make a
pattern of it in matter--to make the dream come true in flesh, each man
and each nation bringing his labour.
If a certain plant, bird, insect, beast, man or nation, rises by
intrinsic force and predation to dangerous increase, a devouring
parasite, or formidable rival, is invariably fostered within its shadow.
In good time there is war to the death.
In a doctor's office in Canada, I saw the picture of a bull-dog standing
large against the background of the accepted flag, and beneath was this
line:
"What we have, we'll hold."
I found that the picture had a national popularity. Yet a child stopping
to think would have seen breakers ahead for a nation so lost in material
things, as thus to challenge the Fates.... There is a fairy-tale of a
man building a great boat for the air. It looked to win, and in the
effrontery of achievement, he set forth to conquer God. Just then a
hornet stung him.
* * * * *
It is a conviction held here that the darkest period of American
materialism came to its end with the beginning of the war. The
generation of literary producers in manifestation at that time was
responsible for the bleakest products which America will ever have the
shame of showing to future generations.
It was not so devoid of genius as would appear; the first cause was the
difficulty in getting the best work "through." This again was not
because the public was not ready for the good, but because the public
taste was brutalised by men who stood between the public and the
producers. These middlemen insisted, by the right of more direct
contact, that the public should have what they fancied the public desire
to be.
I sat in Union Square recently with a beggar who studied me, because it
appeared to be my whim to help him with a coin. Back of his temples was
a great story--sumptuous drama and throbbing with the first importance
of life. He did not tell me that story, and I could not draw it from
him. Rather he told me the story that he fancied I would want. There was
a whine in it. He chose to act, and he was not a good actor. His
offering hurt, not because he was filthy and a failure, but because he
lied to himself and to me, because he did not dare to be himself, though
the facts were upon him, eye and brow and mouth. So I did not get his
story, but I got a thrilling picture of the recent generation in
American letters--I, being the public; the truth of his story
representing the producer, and the miserable thing he fancied I was
ready for, being the middleman's part.
All workmen of the last generation--all who would listen--were taught to
bring forth their products with an intervening lie between the truth and
their expression--the age of advertising heavy in all production.
I recall from those days what was to me a significant talk with an
American novelist who wanted sales, who was willing to sacrifice all but
the core of his character to get sales, and who found himself at that
time in a challenging situation. As he expressed it:
"Along about page two hundred in the copy of the novel I am on, the
woman's soul wakes up."
"A woman's novel?" I asked.
"Meant to be," said he. "Study of a woman all through. Begins as a
little girl--different, you know--sensitive, does a whole lot of
thinking that her family doesn't follow. Tries to tell 'em at first, but
finds herself in bad. Then keeps quiet for years--putting on power and
beauty in the good old way of bumps and misunderstanding. She's pure
white fire presently--body and brain and something else asleep. She
wants to be a mother, but the ghastly sordidness of the love stories of
her sisters to this enactment, frightens her from men and marriage as
the world conducts it----"
"I follow you," said I.
"Well, I'm not going to do the novel here for you," he added. "You
wouldn't think there was a ray of light in it from this kind of
telling. A man who spends five months of his best hours of life in
telling a story, can't do it over in ten minutes and drive a machine at
the same time----"
"We're getting out of the crowd. What did the girl do?" I asked.
"Well, she wanted a little baby--was ready to die for it, but had her
own ideas of what the Father should be. A million women--mostly having
been married and failed, have thought the same thing here in
America--pricked the unclean sham of the whole business. Moreover,
they're the best women we've got. There are----"
He purposely shook the hat from his head--back into the seat--at this
point.
"There are some young women coming up into maturity here in America--God
bless 'em--who are almost brave enough to set out on the quest for the
Father of the baby that haunts them to be born.... That's what she did.
He was a young man doing his own kind of work--doctoring among the poor,
let us say, mainly for nothing--killing himself among men and women and
babies; living on next to nothing, but having a half-divine kind of
madness to lift the world.... She saw him. You can picture that. They
were two to make one--and a third. She knew. There was a gold light
about his head which she saw--and some of the poverty-folk saw--but
which he didn't know the meaning of, and the world missed altogether.
"She went to him. It's cruel to put it in this way.... I'm not saying
anything about the writing or about what happened, but the scene as it
came to me was the finest thing I ever tried to put down. We always fall
down in the handling, you know.... I did it the best I could.... No, I'm
not going to tell you what happened. Only this: a little
afterward--along about page two hundred of the copy--the woman's soul
woke up."
"Why not, in God's name?" I asked.
He glanced quickly at me as a man does from ahead when his car is
pressing the limit.
"Ever have a book fail?" he asked.
"Seven," said I.
He cleared his throat and the kindest smile came into his eyes:
"They tell me at my publishers' that I slowed up my last book badly--by
taking a woman's soul out for an airing--just a little invalid kind of a
soul, too. Souls don't wake up in American novels any more. You can't do
much more in print nowadays than you can do on canvas--I mean _movie_
canvas. You can paint _soul_ but you can't photograph it--that's the
point. The movies have put imagination to death. We have to compete. You
can't see a soul without imagination--or some sort of madness--and the
good people who want imagination in their novels don't buy 'em. They
rent or borrow. It's the crowds that go to the movies that have
bright-coloured strings of American novels as the product runs--on their
shelves--little shiny varnished shelves--red carpets--painted birds on
the lamp-shades and callers in the evenings."
There was a good silence.
"Do you know," he added presently, "I've about come to the conclusion
that a novel must play altogether on sensuous tissue to catch the crowd.
Look at the big movie pictures--the actors make love like painted
animals.... I'm not humorous or ironical. It's a big problem to me----"
"Why, you can't touch the hem of the garment of a real love story until
you are off the sensuous," I offered. "The quest only begins there. I'm
not averse to that. It belongs in part. We are sensuous beings--in part.
But I am averse to letting it contain all. Why, the real glow comes to a
romance when a woman's soul wakes up. There's a hotter fire than that
which burns blood-red----"
"I know," he said quickly. "I know. That blood-red stuff is the cheapest
thing in the world.... I'm sure of this story until her soul wakes up.
She stirs in her sleep, and I see a giantess ahead--the kind of a woman
who could whistle to me or to you--and we'd follow her out--dazed by the
draw of her. They are in the world. I reckon souls do wake up--but I can
feel the public dropping off every page after two hundred--like chilled
bees--dropping off page by page--and the old familiar battle ahead for
me. I can feel that tight look of poverty about the eyes again----"
* * * * *
"Are you going to put her soul back to sleep?" I asked, as we turned
again into the crowd.
I wasn't the least lordly in this question. I knew his struggle, and
something of the market, too. I was thinking of tradesmen--how easy it
is to be a tradesman; in fact, how difficult it is to be otherwise--when
the very passion of the racial soul moves in the midst of trade.
"She's beautiful--even asleep," he said. "I'm afraid I'll have to give
her something. I'm building a house. She's in the comprehension of the
little varnished shelves--asleep."
"Doesn't a tight look come about the eyes--from much use of that sort of
anaesthetic?" I asked.
"Let's get a drink," he answered.
19
THE NEW SOCIAL ORDER
But the stroke of death has fallen upon such pandering, and the war put
it there. The big names of the last generation are now magazine and
movie men; all save the few whose sutures have not entirely closed, and
they are making their last frenzied turn to meet the new social order,
as they met the floating vogues and whims so long. But this is a
difficult turn for panderers and caterers, because it does not have to
do with the surface matter, nothing to do with dance and dress and
appetite, but with the depths of the human spirit, quickened to
animation afresh by the agony of the world.
Only the rarest few of the greatest names of England and Europe have
escaped the fatal partisanship. They have become little national voices,
and in the coming years this will be remembered against them bitterly.
The truly liberated soul does not fall into lying attempts at national
exoneration. The truly liberated soul is no longer a nationalist. A few
of the young men have escaped this curse, but the older had their
training, as has been told, in the blackest age of man. Men have been
diminished in more spacious times than these by becoming laureates; they
cannot but be degraded by becoming nationalists in these abandoned
hours.
Genius, in the last generation, met a destructive force in the material
world, almost as deadly and vindictive as that encountered by
Copernicus. The voices of very few heralds were even heard, but there is
a battle-line of genius in the new generation, timed for the great
service years following the chaos of war. They will bring in the
liberation of religion from mammon; they will bring in the religion of
work, the equality of women, not on a mere suffrage matter alone, but in
spirit and truth; they will bring in their children unaccursed.
* * * * *
... There's always a squeaking when a wagon climbs out of a rut, which
is another way of saying that a time of transition is a time of pain.
This is a notable and constructive generation now beginning its work in
America, and joining hands with the few remaining Undefiled of Europe.
They are not advertisers, nor self-servers. They do not believe in
intellect alone. Their genius is _intuitionally_ driven, not
intellectually. Just as steam has reached its final limitations as a
force, and is being superseded by electricity (the limitations of which
have not yet been sensed so far even by the most audacious), so the
intellect, as a producing medium, has had its period--a period of
style-worship, vanities of speech and action, of self-service, of
parading, of surface-show and short-sightedness, without parallel in the
world.
For the intellect is a product of sunlight, its energy supplied by human
blood, a temporal heat. Intuition is driven from the fountain-head of
spiritual energy. Its great conception is the unity of all nature. The
intellect is as old as your body is; the giant that is awakening from
sleep in the breasts of the rising generation is immortal.
In all times, second-class artists have dealt in the form and matter of
the age, talked of its effects and paraded its styles. Only the very
greatest above them have realised that the true story of the thing, as
any given man sees it, is the one important thing in the world for him
to produce; that the nearness of the expression to the thought is the
measure of his success; in a word, that his thought must be put into
words (or tones or paint or stone) without an intervening lie from the
medium.
The race of men and women in their twenties, now at work in America, are
doing these things. Especially in the new poetry is the fine
consummation apparent. These are the leaders of the new social order.
Before the war, such as had developed a voice had to shout through shut
doors. The war has beaten down the doors. A comparable race of young
workmen (more men than women there; more women than men here) has
appeared in Russia and raised its voice. It is not altogether a dream
that a unifying span will stretch across the pillars raised by these two
groups of builders.
In America this rising generation shall return to us the prestige which
Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau and Lanier so superbly attracted. Indeed,
Whitman is the master of the new poetry; his free verse lives in every
line of the modern production, a point that would not be significant if
it were alone of manner; but his broad human spirit, the infusing
brotherhood which was his passion, and the same universal toleration,
are the inspiring energies of the new workmanship.
What is the vision of this new social order?
These workmen recognise that no saint's blood, nor the power of any God,
is going to interfere before a heavenly throne to save sinners who have
wasted their lives in predatory accomplishment, instead of saving
themselves;
That the re-distribution of the world's wealth will not bring about the
new order and beauty of life; that the rich man is to be pitied as much
as the poor (God knows that intrinsically he is to be pitied more,
because his shell is thicker) that the time is at hand when the
vulgarity of being rich in material wealth will be a sense of the common
mind; That women are not golden fleeces, nor clinging vines, but human
adults with separate principles from men, which make them equally
valuable in the social scheme; that women should be their own law in all
matters of mating and reproduction, because the male has not the mental
organism to cope authoritatively with these affairs;
That heretofore as educators, as fathers, mothers and bringers-forth of
children, humankind, in the large, has shown itself less than the
animals, inasmuch as it does not fulfil its possibilities as animals do;
That the time is past for cults and creeds, for separate interests and
national boundaries, for patriotism and all the other _isms_; that we
are all one in the basic meaning of existence; that there is an
adjustment founded upon the principles of liberty and brotherhood, in
which that which is good for the one is good for all; that this
adjustment can only be attained by a reversal of the old form,
personally and nationally--of thinking not of the self first in all
things, but of the general good;
Finally, the new social order of workmen, having come up through the
blear and sickness of lies, has arrived at the high vantage which
reveals that there is nothing so potent as a straight statement of fact,
nothing so strategically the masterstroke.
20
COMMON CLAY BRICK
Certain Chapel days we require music instead of talk; other times only a
walk will do, to the woods or shore according to the mood. One afternoon
we walked up the shore where the beach is narrow and the bluffs high. A
gleam of red in the sand became the theme of the day. It was just a
half-brick partly submerged in sand, and momentarily in the wash of the
waves.... It had a fine gleam--a vivid wet red against the gravel greys.
Its edges were rounded by the grind of sand and water, and one thought
of an ancient tile that might be seen in a Chinese rose garden.
... Just a common clay brick, not very old, not very hard, but a thing
of beauty in the greys of the beach. It suggested a girl's dress I had
once seen on a winter's day--a rough cloth of mixed grey wool with a
narrow edging of red velvet around the sleeves and collar.... Yet,
alone, and now that it was dry--this was just a brick-red. It needed
the grey grain.... I reflected that there must be a deep human reason
for its appeal to our sense of beauty.
There was something in the hollowing and rounded edges, such as no
machine or hand-grinding could duplicate, but that had to do with the
age of the impression it gave. There is beauty in age, a fine mystery in
itself. Often the objects which our immediate forebears found decorative
strike our finer eyes as hideous, and with truth; but the more ancient
things which simpler races found useful and lovely, often appeal to us
as consummate in charm and grace, though we may never have seen them
before in this life. The essence of their beauty now is a certain
thrilling familiarity--the same mystery that awakens us in an occasional
passing face, which we are positive has not met these eyes before.
We are all more or less sensitive to mystic relationships with old vases
and coppers, with gourds and bamboo, urns and sandal-wood, with the
scents and flavours of far countries and sudden stretches of coast, so
that we repeat in wonder--"And this is the first time----" Something
deep within knows better, perhaps. It is enough, however, to grant the
profound meanings underlying our satisfaction in ancient objects, and
that our sense of their beauty is not accidental.