of the unconquerable, the
imperishable proletaire. This is the hope which sends its thrill through
us when nothing else can. At the bottom of my heart I know I am living
but for one thing, and my life has been nothing but a preparation for
this. Of and for myself I have accomplished nothing: for to be ever
ready and alert is not accomplishment.... I see a profound hope in the
proletaire, for to him is granted that intense, wistful awareness of his
common lot and life with his fellows. His very crowding in factories
and tenements, salons, unions, and brothels, brings it home to him. Yes,
this very lack of space must remorselessly rub it in, even by dumb,
physical close contact. The friction resulting from ten living in one
room must make one of them phosphorescent--and capable of giving light
to humanity. The tenement houses are harmless boxes of lucifers as long
as none is ignited. The inhabitants are wofully benighted, but they
possess wonderfully the quality of brotherhood, of oneness, hence arises
their wonderful psychology and their aesthetics, so full and overflowing
with pathos, so piercing, it carries one to that borderland where comic
and tragic make marriage.

"This strange crowding in our consciousness of things that do not seem
to come from us and yet are of us--this clamouring consciousness is what
drives me to despair and makes me feel I have not the form or shadow of
things, though I may have the substance. Yet I am determined to strain
my self-consciousness even to the breaking point; for though I know
madness lies that way, there stands my Ideal, beckoning. I must grasp
this great common thing which comes from all of us, from us crowded
proletarians, and yet is not in any one of us. Together we enjoy and
suffer more than any one of us alone. There is, I believe, something
deeper than the deepest woe: our racial consciousness is there and we
must find it. At moments of great insight we are suddenly made aware of
this, the mysterious unity of the Race, but it is flashed and gone and
we must await another crisis. It is only in moments of sublime sorrow
that the depths of the racial consciousness is heaved up to us. Joy
cannot do this, for joy is narrow and wants us to do away with sorrow;
but sorrow never wants us to do away with joy. Keats always beheld joy
in an external attitude of farewell and this is profoundly and perfectly
mystical and real: joy is swallowed up in something deeper, away down in
the