One item that should perhaps chasten the native son, is that these motion picture people, so truly the hope of California, are not native sons or daughters.
When I was in Los Angeles, visiting my cousin Ruby Vachel Lindsay, we discussed many of these items at great length, as we walked about the Los Angeles region together. I owe much of my conception of the more idealistic moods of the state to those conversations. Others who have shown me what might be called the Franciscan soul, of the Franciscan minority, are Professor and Mrs. E. Olan James, my host and hostess at Mills College. Another discriminating interpreter of the coast is that follower of Alexander Campbell, Peter Clark Macfarlane, to whom I owe much of my hope for a state that will some day gleam with spiritual and Franciscan, and not earthly gold.
When I think of California, I think so emphatically of these people and the things they have to say to the native sons, and the rest, that if the discussion in this volume is not considered conclusive, I refer the reader to these, and to the California poets, and to motion picture people like Anita Loos and John Emerson, people who still dream of things that are not gilded, and know the difference for instance, between St. Francis and Mammon. For a general view of those poets of California who make clear its spiritual gold, turn to “Golden Songs of the Golden State,” an anthology collected by Marguerite Wilkinson.
FIRST SECTION
THE LONGER PIECES, WITH INTERLUDES
THE GOLDEN WHALES OF CALIFORNIA
Part I. A Short Walk Along the Coast
Yes, I have walked in California,
And the rivers there are blue and white.
Thunderclouds of grapes hang on the mountains.
Bears in the meadows pitch and fight.