8
OLD PICTURES IN RED
There was a period between the second and third year of the war, when it seemed that the guiding, shielding spirits of the planet were slowly being withdrawn—leaving only the mockery of goods, the chaos of multiplied things. But at the blackest, in the very hush of desolation, the new breath stole in upon us, a breath of lilacs on the chill, dank, wintry air. Many now stand arisen, waiting the flash that changes the world.... Five men were gathered in Stonestudy one evening; we talked of our parts, the best we could do in the clean-up. It was hard to look over the barriers at first; hard for an American to accept the fact that he dare not say what he thought, nor write what he thought. It was hard to realise that we were prevented from expressing what we thought, by the very forces that had drawn us into this deep trouble. We who are the distant generation of a party of pilgrims and voyagers who came to America to find a free country, were strange and intolerant at first, when we felt the yoke of Europe settle upon ancient scar-tissue.
We discussed.
A country is superb when one is unconscious of it, we said. One's country should be like one's health, part of the song of life. Suddenly to find the freedom of the past unremembered, the freedom of the future unglimpsed, to hear the loathly low beat of talk from groups of frock-coated Appetites, with heavy half-dead legs and heads like pitching-quoits, settling our sacred future on the basis of steel and coal and margin and murder market; to feel ourselves clutched and borne forward with stub-nailed fingers in the stench of big business; black-garbed shopmen pointing the way to the ports, urging and shouldering other people's children to the ports of the gunboats, advising the efficacy of "Nearer My God to Thee," as a song for sinking ships,—we forgot at first in our own pain that this was merely the body of the Old strained to a cracking point by the resistless growth of the New.
Presently we grew kinder.... In a way, the Old was the grim stepmother in whose house we learned how not to do most things; in whose kitchen we learned cleanliness, because of the vile example of her organic sloth; in whose walled garden we learned the peril and the passion of Quest, because we loathed her long snoring of afternoons; from the death of whose sects and schism-shops we set forth to find the unity of life; from the obscenity of whose loves we came into the first great cleansing hatred of ourselves....
No hatred now. Hatred is part of the Old. It has no part to unsteady the hands of the reconstructionists. This New Race has come up in strong soil. The Old nourished and fertilised all its vitalities. The new green beneath the litter of dead leaves cries out under the decay, "You are stifling me!" but the plan of it all is wiser, for there is warmth still in the humus of the old to protect the new and the frosts may not be finished.
More and more as the sense of big cleansing and chastening came home to us, the everlasting principles of reason and order and beauty also appeared out of the chaos and the pain.... They were saying in Europe that this war was a war without morale. We believed it would be a war with morale before the destruction was finished. One of the cleanest dreams we had was that America would bring, with its guns and knives and instruments of flagellation, something of the almighty spirit of the human heart to light the blackness where the Pale Horse has passed. That's all morale is, and war without morale hasn't any cause or effect on the constructive side, and will continue to destroy itself against itself as all such forces do in their madness.