NOTE VI
TO the imaginative man in the modern world something becomes, from the first, sharply defined. Life splits itself into two sections and, no matter how long one may live or where one may live, the two ends continue to dangle, fluttering about in the empty air.
To which of the two lives, lived within the one body, are you to give yourself? There is, after all, some little freedom of choice.
There is the life of fancy. In it one sometimes moves with an ordered purpose through ordered days, or at the least through ordered hours. In the life of the fancy there is no such thing as good or bad. There are no Puritans in that life. The dry sisters of Philistia do not come in at the door. They cannot breathe in the life of the fancy. The Puritan, the reformer who scolds at the Puritans, the dry intellectuals, all who desire to uplift, to remake life on some definite plan conceived within the human brain die of a disease of the lungs. They would do better to stay in the world of fact to spend their energy in catching bootleggers, inventing new machines, helping humanity—as best they can—in its no doubt laudable ambition to hurl bodies through the air at the rate of five hundred miles an hour.
In the world of the fancy, life separates itself with slow movements and with many graduations into the ugly and the beautiful. What isalive is opposed to what is dead. Is the air of the room in which we live sweet to the nostrils or is it poisoned with weariness? In the end it must become the one thing or the other.
All morality then becomes a purely æsthetic matter. What is beautiful must bring æsthetic joy; what is ugly must bring æsthetic sadness and suffering.
Or one may become, as so many younger Americans do, a mere smart-aleck, without humbleness before the possibilities of life, one sure of himself—and thus one may remain to the end, blind, deaf and dumb, feeling and seeing nothing. Many of our intellectuals find this is the more comfortable road to travel.
In the world of fancy, you must understand, no man is ugly. Man is ugly in fact only. Ah, there is the difficulty!
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In the world of fancy even the most base man’s actions sometimes take on the forms of beauty. Dim pathways do sometimes open before the eyes of the man who has not killed the possibilities of beauty in himself by being too sure.
Let us (in fancy) imagine for a moment an American lad walking alone at evening in the streets of an American town.
American towns, and in particular American towns of the Middle West of twenty years ago, were not built for beauty, they were not built to be lived in permanently. A dreadful desire of escape, of physical escape, must have got, like a disease, into our father’s brains. How they pitched the towns and cities together! What an insanity! The lad we have together invented, to walk at evening in the streets of such atown, must of necessity be more beautiful than all the hurriedly built towns and cities in which he may walk. True immaturity of the body and the spirit is more beautiful than mere tired-out physical maturity: the physical maturity of men and women that has no spiritual counterpart within itself falls quickly into physical and ugly decay—like the cheaply constructed frame houses of so many of our towns.
The lad of our fancy walks in the streets of a town hurriedly thrown together, striving to dream his dreams, and must continue for a long time to walk in the midst of such ugliness. The cheap, hurried, ugly construction of America’s physical life still goes on and on. The idea of permanent residence has not taken hold on us. Our imaginations are not yet fired by love of our native soil.
The American boy of our mutual imaginative creation is walking in the streets of an Ohio town, after the factories have begun coming and the day of the hustlers is at hand, the houses of the town pushed up quickly, people swarming into the town who have no notion of staying there—a surprising number of them will stay, but they have, at first, no intention of staying.
Before the boy’s day how slow the growth of the towns! There were the people of an older generation, coming out slowly to the Middle West, from New York state, from Pennsylvania, from New England—a great many to my own Ohio country from New England. They had come drifting in slowly, bringing traces of old customs, sayings, religions,prejudices. The young farmers came first, glad of the rich free soil and the friendlier climate—strong young males that were to come in such numbers as to leave New England, with its small fields and its thinner, stonier soil, a place of aging maiden ladies—that old-maid civilization that was, nevertheless, to be the seat of our American culture. An insane fear of the flesh, a touch of transcendentalism, a reaching always up into the sky. In the ground underfoot there is only fear, poverty, hardship. One must look upward, always upward.
What of the sensual love of life, of surfaces, words with a rich flavor on the tongue, colors, the soft texture of the skin of women, the play of muscles through the bodies of men?
The cry of fear—“that way lies sin.”
In the new land, in that older time, too much maleness. Deep mud in the streets of the little towns, built in the forest along rivers or on the stage roads. Bearded, rough-handed men gathered about the saloons. Abe Lincoln proving his manhood by lifting a barrel of whisky and drinking from the bunghole. The ruffian of the frontier, father of the modern gunman of our cities, proving his manhood by murder—Blinky Morgan of Ohio, Jesse James of Missouri, Slade of the Overland Route to the gold and silver camps of the Far West—these the heroes of that life.
A slow culture growing up, however—growing as culture must always grow—through the hands of workmen.
In the small towns artisans coming in—the harness-maker, the carriage-builder, the builder of wagons, the smith, the tailor, themaker of shoes, the builders of houses and barns too.
As Slade and James were to be the fathers of the modern gunmen, so these the fathers of the artists of the generations to come. In their fingers the beginning of that love of surfaces, of the sensual love of materials, without which no true civilization can ever be born.
And then, like a great flood over it all the coming of the factories, the coming of modern industrialism.
Speed, hurried workmanship, cheap automobiles for cheap men, cheap chairs in cheap houses, city apartment houses with shining bathroom floors, the Ford, the Twentieth Century Limited, the World War, jazz, the movies.
The modern American youth is going forth to walk at evening in the midst of these. New and more terrible nerve tension, speed. Something vibrant in the air about us all.
The problem is to survive. If our youth is to get into his consciousness that love of life—that with the male comes only through the love of surfaces, sensually felt through the fingers—his problem is to reach down through all the broken surface distractions of modern life to that old love of craft out of which culture springs.