The little girl leaned toward the window. We heard the other bird answer from the distance, and then ours sang again—and again. We sipped the ecstacy in the hushes. Like a flicker the little bird was gone—a leaning forward on the branch, and then a blur ... and presently the words in the room:
“... sang four songs and flew away.”
It was a word-portrait, and told me much that I wanted. The number, of course, was not mental, clearly a part of the inner impression. However, no explanation will help if the art of the saying is not apparent. I told the thing as it is here, to a class later in the day, and a woman said:
“Why, those six words make a Japanese poem.”
I wonder if it is oriental? Rather I think it belongs especially to our new generation, the elect of which seems to know innately that an expression of truth in itself is a master-stroke. Somehow the prison-house has not closed altogether upon the elect of the new generation. There are lines in the new poetry that could come forth, and have their being, only from the inner giant that heretofore has been asleep except in the hearts of the rarest few whose mothers mated with Gods, merely using men for a symbol and the gift of matter....
As I believe that the literary generation which has the floor in America today is the weakest and the bleakest that ever made semi-darkness of good sunlight, so I believe that the elect of the new generation contains individuals who are true heaven-borns; that they bring their own light with them and do not stand about stretched for reflection; that they refuse to allow the world-lie to shut the passages of power within them, between the zone of dreams and the more temperate zones of matter. They have refused to accept us—that is the splendid truth.
The new generation does not argue with us. They are not a race of talkers. They do not accept what they find and begin to build upon that, as all but the masters have done heretofore. They are making even their own footings and abutments. And to such clean and sure beginnings magic strength has come. The fashions and the mannerisms which we knew and thought of as the heart of things; the artfulness of speech and written word, the age of advertising which twisted its lie into the very physical structure of our brains; the countless reserves and covers to hide our want of inspiration (for light cannot pass through a twisted passage)—all these, the new age has put away. It meets life face to face—and a more subtle and formidable devil is required for its workers than that which seduced us.
The few great workmen heretofore have come up in the lie, and in midlife, the sutures closing—they were warned because they had labored like men. For their work’s sake and for their religion, which is the same to great men, they perceived that they must tear the lie out of their hearts, even if they bled to death. We call it their illumination, but it was a very deep and dark passage for them. Except that ye become as little children—that was all they knew, perhaps, but quite enough.... And the old masters invariably put their story down for us to read: Rodin, Puvis de Chavannes, Whitman, Balzac, Tolstoi—only to mention a little group of the nearer names—all have told the story. In their later years they told no other story.
In the beginning they served men, as they fancied men wanted to be served, but after they confronted the lie of it, they dared to listen to reality from their own nature. They fought the fight for that cosmic simplicity which is the natural flowering of the child mind, and which modern education patronizingly dresses down at every appearance. The masters wrenched open with all their remaining strength the doors of the prison-house, and become more and more like children unto the end.