I am locked with impatience these days.
After that, comes fear.
I may go to the red fields to learn the nonsense about fear. Of course I can theorise it now perfectly, and practise it at periods. But I want it steadily, the non-wobbling wisdom. Already I have conquered some fatuousness in myself. Out of my jubilation I write to you.... Of course, the Many is not a model to follow. The "Many" is a picture in every man's mind, composed of the inferior things that all other men do.... Inclusion—intensity—love—creativeness—these Stonestudy precepts contain all the story. They are certainly the way out and up and over into Life.
Shuk has done a little sketch or two on the big Romance of the new social order:
Humour, universality, the highest good will, he writes, are the symbols that flame from the temple of the New Race.... Everywhere appear children of the renovating, re-vitalising, more cosmic tribe. They are easily recognised. The hope of a full and decent future is with them.
They will do little according to their immediate predecessors, and much by an inner light of their own. Being wise and simple and not destructive, they will gratefully accept all that has proven true for earlier peoples. But they will instinctively have nothing at all to do with the traditions based on three-score-and-ten, or any other of the unfortunately solid viewpoints that frost the world to-day.
They love the world, have come to claim it whole, to reclaim it from deluded ancestors who were solemnly, from birth, bent upon deeding and selling and stealing and fencing in bits of the planet's surface. Forerunners of this happier race have shown themselves to be masters of materials, true workmen in the solid stuffs; but by their sense of humour they are saved from any impulse to seize and sit upon fragments of earth.
These new ones are born with an urge towards unity. Their task, to set the world in order. Their means, not so much a rearrangement of objects as a very intense activity along the roads of Beauty and Truth, in a co-operation unstudied and normal with the rest of mankind and with the Igniting Principle.
It may be observed that Beauty and Truth are too vague to produce effective action in a solid world. This is invariably a saying of the material-minded, however virtuous they may be. It is they who loudly demand a dull utility over and above Beauty, and apart from it. It is they who have agglomerated the chaos that is in this hour threshing about in dust and blood. Their sober iniquities are the fertiliser to force the seed of the New Race.
It is not a cosmic blunder that the great minds of the world are found in art, including the supreme art of mystic religion—and seldom in the arena of statecraft. The world was never managed from a senate chamber; the cosmos is not guided by a king. When rulers of the past have become great figures, that greatness usually rested upon their gift of poetry, their love of art or wisdom, or some religious quality.
Poems of twenty words have outlived the might of forty wars. A great book is a higher achievement than a sweeping political move. The dullest changeling with an obsession may set his seal upon a war to the death of ten million men, but in the few lines of a true poem are stored the honey of millenniums of human life. A genuine work of art is more potent and practical than any blood-bought wall of tribal separation, more vital and immediate than the doings of armies. To judge of this properly, one need only know both kings and poets.
Of the early kings of Rome, it is Numa who is remembered—and he was in harmony with Celestial Order. Of countless other Roman figures, the average mind turns first to Cæsar, who was a literary man, and whose passion to write outlasted every march of his legions. Greece had kings and statesmen and great generals, yet it is her wise men who stand foremost. The conquering Alexander is famed chiefly because he was the unwitting distributor of Grecian beauty. In fact, Greek history began with Homer, the poet, and American history with Columbus, the dreamer who is still our creditor. The mystics of old China reached for the Torch of Light, and they might have attained a true dominion over the planet, had not their fear-inspired kings built a Wall and gelded the Empire once for all. Gautama Buddha gave up kingcraft in order to gain a higher mastery. Mohammed lived on the Road. Jesus the Christ set free an energy in the world that is only gaining its real momentum after two thousand years—and he firmly refused a material crown.
... A hopeful dream, the poem of an autumn afternoon, the building of a sphinx or a pyramid—these are not subject to time or conditions. They remain.
So the Children who are the hope of the world are not dismayed at the medley of illusions emanating from the so-called ruling class. Emperors and premiers do not get very much done either way; they themselves abandon their own works over night. They are deserving of profound sympathy. They only spread out more manful chaos to be set straight by the master craftsmen—the artists, humorists, vitalists, mystics.... Beauty is the sun-bright flash of the Infinite.
With duty raised to a joy, and pain forgot, the Singers come, the Builders, the Quickeners of man. The Unforgettables of the so-called past were of this stock. Their leisure is deep—of a sort that sustains the finitudes.
All the good goals of yesterday are to be counted as mile-posts. Direction is more important than any imaginable goal; unvarying tendency is more direct and splendid than any creed; the white path of the quester is more precious than a stationary heaven.
The modern children cannot stop on this side of the horizon because they are creators. Life is their religion. Their rites are broad and deep as man, as ancient and reverent as time, as new as dawn.