But the stroke of death has fallen upon such pandering, and the war put it there. The big names of the last generation are now magazine and movie men; all save the few whose sutures have not entirely closed, and they are making their last frenzied turn to meet the new social order, as they met the floating vogues and whims so long. But this is a difficult turn for panderers and caterers, because it does not have to do with the surface matter, nothing to do with dance and dress and appetite, but with the depths of the human spirit, quickened to animation afresh by the agony of the world.
Only the rarest few of the greatest names of England and Europe have escaped the fatal partisanship. They have become little national voices, and in the coming years this will be remembered against them bitterly. The truly liberated soul does not fall into lying attempts at national exoneration. The truly liberated soul is no longer a nationalist. A few of the young men have escaped this curse, but the older had their training, as has been told, in the blackest age of man. Men have been diminished in more spacious times than these by becoming laureates; they cannot but be degraded by becoming nationalists in these abandoned hours.
Genius, in the last generation, met a destructive force in the material world, almost as deadly and vindictive as that encountered by Copernicus. The voices of very few heralds were even heard, but there is a battle-line of genius in the new generation, timed for the great service years following the chaos of war. They will bring in the liberation of religion from mammon; they will bring in the religion of work, the equality of women, not on a mere suffrage matter alone, but in spirit and truth; they will bring in their children unaccursed.
... There's always a squeaking when a wagon climbs out of a rut, which is another way of saying that a time of transition is a time of pain.
This is a notable and constructive generation now beginning its work in America, and joining hands with the few remaining Undefiled of Europe. They are not advertisers, nor self-servers. They do not believe in intellect alone. Their genius is intuitionally driven, not intellectually. Just as steam has reached its final limitations as a force, and is being superseded by electricity (the limitations of which have not yet been sensed so far even by the most audacious), so the intellect, as a producing medium, has had its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, of parading, of surface-show and short-sightedness, without parallel in the world.
For the intellect is a product of sunlight, its energy supplied by human blood, a temporal heat. Intuition is driven from the fountain-head of spiritual energy. Its great conception is the unity of all nature. The intellect is as old as your body is; the giant that is awakening from sleep in the breasts of the rising generation is immortal.
In all times, second-class artists have dealt in the form and matter of the age, talked of its effects and paraded its styles. Only the very greatest above them have realised that the true story of the thing, as any given man sees it, is the one important thing in the world for him to produce; that the nearness of the expression to the thought is the measure of his success; in a word, that his thought must be put into words (or tones or paint or stone) without an intervening lie from the medium.
The race of men and women in their twenties, now at work in America, are doing these things. Especially in the new poetry is the fine consummation apparent. These are the leaders of the new social order. Before the war, such as had developed a voice had to shout through shut doors. The war has beaten down the doors. A comparable race of young workmen (more men than women there; more women than men here) has appeared in Russia and raised its voice. It is not altogether a dream that a unifying span will stretch across the pillars raised by these two groups of builders.
In America this rising generation shall return to us the prestige which Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau and Lanier so superbly attracted. Indeed, Whitman is the master of the new poetry; his free verse lives in every line of the modern production, a point that would not be significant if it were alone of manner; but his broad human spirit, the infusing brotherhood which was his passion, and the same universal toleration, are the inspiring energies of the new workmanship.