The opening of the Twin Americas, Africa, meant, demanded, a tremendous amount of practical work, exploiting; expanding technical skill. Under progressive conquest of things material, increasing manual dexterity, increasing technical achievement, the idealizing spirit of a smaller world, content with fewer things for the few, was in abeyance. Whatever happens or threatens to happen is not final. A glimpse, if imperfect, beyond the age helps steady us. Time has no model of perfection meant to be copied forever.
The more modern the unit of art, the more unrest, that nameless something that disturbs. In activities of the rapid present, there is not sufficient place for gentle things. Not all flowers bloom best when the storms rage. But in a future, far perhaps, after the material conquest has been carried through, there will come, I have faith to believe, a nobler conquest, loftier. Now artists are merely trying to explore, then map a new world. We can not travel always upon mountains. Meadow lands have to be crossed. We can not sweep all the new with vision at any one moment.
Wrapped in Christianity, which taught sacredness of the individual, lay undeveloped seed of socialism, the French Revolution, world-upheavals. At inception of new faith, no one can measure expansion. Vast processes of change are in progress all about us everywhere.
The restlessness in the United States has varied causes, one, the possibility (soon to become desire) of individuals leaving the class in which they were born. Restlessness welcomes change. Anything different is good. It is not necessary it be better. Life is a game. Concept is cheapened. Every small boy is given one ideal; namely, to get out of the class in which he was born and become President. It is like considering life as being poised upon the crest of excitement. The object of life should be to widen the horizon of intelligence, preserve kindness in the heart, and keep a margin of security for comfortable living. He lives most who thinks best, not he who has the largest accumulation of dollars, and moves about upon wheels in the air.
The Great War was the demolishing blow to the vast, antique structure, the marble columns of whose first falling echoed thunderously in May, 1787, in France.
In the West there exists dramatic, political idealism; inexperience, youth, together with lack of international outlook. In the West there is still youth, its desire, its progress, a dream suitable for a rich, young, unexploited country permitted for a century to develop undisturbed. Wealth has too often become end, instead of aid to larger living. It has habit of shrinking the horizon of the one who possesses it. It might provide broad spaces of leisure, instead of a mad, noisy movie program, which resembles destructive fury of the mastodons, the monsters, when they dashed ahead to escape the approaching ice cap. The ideal, however unrealizable, is not wasted because it forms compensating pendant to the practical.
When, in America, the poor become rich too speedily, the perspective of living is changed over night, there is boiling, seething. The new rich can not enjoy what money buys. In fact, they are still poor. True-judging, poised living, is not easy.
It is too bad a race should get so it can not support a moment without amusement. We have much to learn from the European emigrant. Civilization, what we agree to call by that name, becomes disease. The hardy, patient fibre disappears. The newspaper helps. It sets ideal of greed, haste. It preaches ambition, conquest. This destroys stable social basis. Each individual longs to grow to size of a monstrous cabbage in overstimulated soil. There was always inclination in the Saxon to stubborn independence. Too quick material advancement is balanced by moral letting down. It is a pity modernity should be afraid of plain spaces. It is too bad every State has not a Vachel Lindsay to preach the religion of beauty. May his tribe increase!