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force, and is being superseded by electricity (the limitations of which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
intellec