As Slade and James were to be the fathers of the modern gunmen, so these the fathers of the artists of the generations to come. In their fingers the beginning of that love of surfaces, of the sensual love of materials, without which no true civilization can ever be born.
And then, like a great flood over it all the coming of the factories, the coming of modern industrialism.
Speed, hurried workmanship, cheap automobiles for cheap men, cheap chairs in cheap houses, city apartment houses with shining bathroom floors, the Ford, the Twentieth Century Limited, the World War, jazz, the movies.
The modern American youth is going forth to walk at evening in the midst of these. New and more terrible nerve tension, speed. Something vibrant in the air about us all.
The problem is to survive. If our youth is to get into his consciousness that love of life—that with the male comes only through the love of surfaces, sensually felt through the fingers—his problem is to reach down through all the broken surface distractions of modern life to that old love of craft out of which culture springs.
NOTE VII
THE end of the second year after mother’s death was at hand and our family was at the point of falling to pieces. No more sitting by the fire in the kitchen through the long fall and winter evenings with mother at the ironing board. The kitchen of our house was cold and cheerless. The spirit of the household had fled. It had gone down into the ground with the body of the woman out of whose living body had come five strong sons.
Mother had died swiftly, mysteriously, without warning. It was as though she had got out of bed on a fall morning and had taken a long look at her sons. “It’s about the time when they will have to push out into the world. Any influence I may have on their lives has already been exerted. There is no time to think of any other purpose in life for myself, and anyway, I am too tired. Having lived out my life, now I shall die.”
It was as though she had said something of the sort to herself, and had then laid down her life as one might lay down a finished book. On a rainy dismal day in the fall there she was, coming in at the kitchen door from hanging a wash out on the line, temporarily strung up in our woodshed, smiling quietly, making one of her quick soft ironic observations, sweetening always the air of the room into which she came with her presence.
On such a rainy morning in the fall she was like that, as she will live always in the memory of her sons, and then, on another equally wet dismal fall day two or three weeks later, she was dead.