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 pa.s.sion 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 appet.i.te, 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 s.p.a.cious 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s of the rising generation is immortal.
In all times, second-cla.s.s 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, Th.o.r.eau 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 pa.s.sion, 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 G.o.d, 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 (G.o.d knows that intrinsically he is to be pitied more, because his sh.e.l.l 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 sh.o.r.e according to the mood. One afternoon we walked up the sh.o.r.e 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 pa.s.sing 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.
For instance, there was something behind our pleasure in the gleam of red from the pervading greys of the beach.... I pointed to the Other Sh.o.r.e--a pearly cloud overhanging the white of breakers at its point--and the little bay asleep in the hollow. The view was a fulfilment. That little headland breaks the force of the eastern gales for all this nearer stretch of sh.o.r.e, but its beauty is completed by the peace of the cove. The same idea is in the stone-work of the Chapel, and the completing vine.
Beauty is a globe of meaning. It is a union of two objects which complete each other and suggest a third--the union of two to make one.
Our minds are satisfied with the sustaining, the masculine in the stone-work and the gaunt headland, because they are completed by the trailing vine and the sleeping cove. The suggestion in each is peace, the very quest of life.
There is always this trinity, to form a globe of beauty. From the union of matter and spirit, all life is quickened; and this initial formula of completing a circle, a trinity, pervades all life.