He shook his head. “We must always have wealth demonstrate herself with freedom; we must always have class. Let each man be what he was best intended; we cannot have one class, one rule, one creed any more than one dimension. The Cause who made such eternal contrasts as the snowbound north and orchid-decorated tropics, the sagebrush desert and the French vineyards—has the example not been set us for all time? There must be wealth and its opposite poverty and the sunny, useful medium running between the two and understanding each alike. Remember, player and worker are like the wings of a bird, equal and necessary. Class must exist the same as vicarious atonement—the mother bearing the child, soldiers fighting for stay-at-homes. The ancient but sometimes forgotten or denied unity of the race is the belief in immortality.”
It was dark; the sea with the white rocks rising out of the water here and there gave the effect of the black and white cathedral front at Siena. Hobart lit their lanterns and urged a homeward journey.
“I don’t want to go,” Thurley begged. “Tell me more—”
“Yet you try to make me think you do not believe my vision,” he said, “that you will not be like the soldier in the old song, who did not halt but ‘he gave the bridle-reins another shake.’”
“Tell me why artists have different lives from the world in general,” she retorted.
“There are some isolated, superb but lonely souls whose work robs them of human ties and leaves them chaste yet wistful. True, again, on the firm yet terrible foundation of expiated sins is genius often laid—the splendid blossom of the tree of experience. The greatest leaders have often, to their enemies’ delight, pleaded guilty to a youth of folly, small faults, petty actions—and yet there has come an awakening and with the handicap of the past as a ballast, they forge on to the heights. I sometimes think handicaps are as necessary for an artist as ballast for a balloon. Without them we would sail upwards beyond ordinary comprehension and the whole purpose would be of no avail. Let us stay sufficiently earthbound to insure usefulness and proper responsibility.... Come, Thurley, even if the poets say the children of dark and the children of light tread the same pathway, our lanterns may fail us and we would have to scramble to find the house.” He helped her up.
“You mean, too,” she said, not content to stop the argument, “that artists should set the example—as well as prescribe one—”
“Those who are not sufficiently developed to perceive the higher cosmic laws must have man-made laws to teach the first great principle—which is to obey. Obedience either forced or voluntary is the first requisite in moulding character. Those of us who can glimpse the higher laws must also keep annoying man-made ones to help those less developed by our example.”
Thurley began picking her way along the beach, singing softly:
If all the seas were one sea—what a great sea it would be!