Yet the hearts of men in America are changing. I do not write as a religionist, but as one very much of the world. For the hearts of men do change, and it is only through such changes that the material stagnation of a people can be relieved without deluges of blood.
The high hope is upon us. In being apart from war, America has been enabled to see. One must always remove himself from the ruck to see its movement. In the past six months, within these western shores, the voices of true inspiration have been heard. From a literary standpoint alone, this is the most significant fact since Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau, took pen in hand forgetting themselves a little while each day. There is a peculiar strength upon American production of all kinds, as a result of this very act of getting out from under European influence.
England and France and Germany are merely national voices now. The voice of the partisan is but a weak treble against the basic rumble of war. War is a confession, as suicide is a confession, as every act of blood and rage is a confession, of the triumph of the animal in the human mind.... If you have received letters from friends in England or Germany or France since the war; friends whom formerly you admired for their culture and acumen, you have been struck by the dullness and misery of the communications, the uncentered points of view, the incapacity of human vision in the midst of the heaviness and blackness of life there; if, indeed, you have read the recent newspapers and periodicals of these countries, you will require no further proof of the fact—that a nation at war is an obscene nation, its consciousness all driven down into the physical, its voice tonally imperfect from hate and fear, its eyes open to red illusion and not to truth.
Even in America the voice of the nationalist is a part of the old and the unclean. The new social order does not recognize the rights and desires of any isolated people. Humankind is basically one in meaning, in aim and in destiny. The difference of one nation from another in relation to the sun’s rays, in character, country, environment, race, color and structure of mind—these are primal values, the very values that will sum up into the essential grandeur of the whole. Personally and nationally there are no duplicates in the social scheme. The instruments of this magnificent orchestra are of infinite diversity, but the harmony is one.
The spiritual source of all human achievement is already a harmonic whole. That globe is complete. It is our business as men to make a pattern of it in matter—to make the dream come true in flesh, each man and each nation bringing his labor, which can only be bent into a fitting arc, by the loss of the love of self.
It requires but a little vision to observe Nature at work upon this concept in a thousand ways. She always seeks to preserve her balances. If a certain plant, or bird, insect, beast, man or nation, rises by intrinsic force and predation to dangerous increase, a destroying parasite is invariably fostered within its shadow. In good time these two growths turn to rend each other, a mutual cleansing. The Prussian war-office is a counter-growth to British imperialism. That which survives will be humbler and wiser.
I saw in a doctor’s office in Canada the picture of an English bull-dog standing large against the background of a British flag, and beneath was this line:
“What we have, we’ll hold.”
I found that the picture had a national acceptance in the British colonies and at Home. Yet a child stopping to think would have seen breakers ahead for a nation so lost in material things, as thus to challenge the Fates.... There is a fairy-tale of a man building a great boat for the air. It looked to win, and in the effrontery of achievement, he set forth to conquer God. Just then a hornet stung him....
All this to suggest that the new dimension of life must come from America, if it comes at all; and from this vantage-point, the reality is mightily appearing—in the new poetry, in the new novels, in music, painting, and the crafts. The generation just coming into its own, contains the builders whose work is to follow the destroyers of war. They are not self-servers. They do not believe in intellect. Their genius is intuitionally driven, not intellectually. Just as steam has reached its final limitation as a force, and is being superseded by electricity, the limitations of which have not been sensed so far even by the most audacious, so the intellect as a producing medium, has had its period—a period of style-worship, vanities of speech and action, of self-service, or parading, of surface show and short-sightedness, without parallel in the world.