When one lifts the mask from any crowd, commonness is disclosed in every change and movement of personality. At the same time, the crowds of common people are the soil of the future, a splendid mass potentially, the womb of every heroism and masterpiece to be.
All great things must come from the people, because great leaders of the people turn their passionate impregnation of idealism upon them. First the dreamer dreams—and then the people make it action....
What we see that hurts us so as workmen is but the unfinished picture, the back of the tapestry.
To be worth his spiritual salt, the artist, any artist, must turn every force of his conceiving into that great restless Abstraction, the many; he must plunge whole-heartedly in the doing, but cut himself loose from the thing done; at least, he must realise that what he is willing to give could not be bought.... When he is quite ready, there shall arise for him, out of the Abstraction, something finished; something as absolutely his own as the other half of his circle.
The one relentless and continual realisation which drives home to a man who has any vision of the betterment of the whole, is the low-grade intelligence of the average human being. Every man who has ever worked for a day out of himself has met this fierce and flogging truth. The personal answer to this, which the workman finally makes, may be of three kinds: He may desert his vision entirely and return to operate among the infinite small doors of the many—which is cowardice and the grimmest failure. He may abandon the many and devote himself to the few who understand; and this opens the way to the subtler and more powerful devils which beset and betray human understanding, for we are not heroically moulded by those who love us but by the grinding of those who revile. If a key does not fit, it must be ground; and to be ground, its wards made true and sharp, it must be held somehow in a vise. The grinding from above will not bite otherwise. So it is with the workman. He must fix himself first in the knowledge of the world....
The workman of the true way abandons neither his vision nor the world. Somehow to impregnate the world with his particular vision—all good comes from that. In a word, the workman either plays to world entirely, which is failure; to his elect entirely, which is apt to be a greater failure; or, intrenched in the world and thrilling with aspiration, he may exert a levitating influence upon the whole, just as surely as wings beat upward. There are days of blindness, and the years are long, but in this latest struggle a man forgets himself, which is the primary victory.
The real workman then—vibrating between compassion and contempt—his body vised in the world, his spirit struggling upward, performs his task. When suddenly freed, he finds that he has done well. If one is to have wings, and by that I don't mean feathers but the intrinsic levitating force of the spiritual life, be very sure they must be grown here, and gain their power of pinion in the struggle to lift matter.