There ain't no sun beatin' in my doorway, and there ain't none of your sacred seas and canyons around; but there is a socialist's riot in the street below--kerosene torches a-going--one shaggy haired enthusiast is standing on a soap box and is wagging his jaw in an athletic way.... How's the fire burning under your type-mill? What's the brand of smoke it gives up--poetry, action, lumps of granite or ladles of ocean? I'm all lit up in this place here--because things are moving--real issues are gathering--and the pulse of living is so close that I can almost feel it occasionally. Last Saturday, went to a place called Rockaway--and oh man--rocks--rugged grey and eroded--surf bitten--gnarled, twisted--and they tossed the sea's white jaws about like bits of cotton. Real sea coast it was--with a little smack in the purple way, her sails bellied, her mouth lapping the brine--an old fisherman browsing around the shores for clams while his wife hauled up the nets, basketed the cod and upturned their boat. Put an extra stick under the machine and line a few of your aphorisms. * * * * * 14 THE ARTIST UNLEASHED The young workmen here do essays well, earlier than short stories. Longer training is required for fiction. The reason is obvious. Fiction work takes brain. The Stonestudy idea is to set free the greater Artist within. Essays and ethical works are the natural fruits of the inner life of the ages; story-production requires facility and development of the every-day working consciousness. Straight brain is needed to arrange settings, keen development of actual tissue to note and arrange and remember. Also a big working surface of self-criticism must be prepared. There is a quality of fiction that seems to set free a larger consciousness and to bring with it settings and atmospheres of another age. This sort of phenomenon encourages the idea of the continuity of consciousness--before and after the three-score-and-ten. It may be that the greater the Artist, the more of these veins of syntheticated experience are open to his every-day working mind. That may really be what sumptuous artistic equipment is--the capacity to open up the old loves and scenes and adventures of the long road. Intuition is explained as the use of the result of massed experiences, intellect the coping with one at a time; intuition, a light that flashes from peak to peak, intellect as a running fire up and down from height and vale.