power of forecast and invention—­their power of riding upon the unseen, upon the thoughts of men and the spirit of the time.  Even the painters have caught this spirit.  The plein air painters are painting the light, and the sculptors are carving shadows and haloes, and we have not an art left which does not lean out into the Invisible.  And religion is full of this spirit and theosophy and Christian Science.  The playwrights are touched by it; and the action, instead of being all on the stage, is thrown out into the spirit of the audience.  The play in a modern theatre is not on the stage but in the stalls.  Maeterlinck, Ibsen, Shaw, merely use the stage as a kind of magic-lantern or suggestion-centre for the real things that, out behind us in the dark, are happening in the audience.

CHAPTER VIII

THE CROWD’S IMAGINATION ABOUT THE FUTURE

I remember looking over with H.G.  Wells one night some time ago a set of pictures or photographs of the future in America, which he had brought home with him.  They were largely skyscrapers, big bridges, Niagaras, and things; and I could not help thinking, as I came home that night, how much more Mr. Wells had of the future of America in his own mind than he could possibly buy in his photographs.  What funny little films they were after all, how faint and pathetic, how almost tragically dull, those pictures of the future of my country were!  H.G.  Wells himself, standing in his own doorway, was more like America, and more like the future of America, than the pictures were.

The future in America cannot be pictured.  The only place it can be seen is in people’s faces.  Go out into the street, in New York, in Chicago, in San Francisco, in Seattle; look eagerly as you go into the faces of the men who pass, and you feel hundreds of years—­the next hundred years—­like a breath, swept past.  America, with all its forty-story buildings, its little Play Niagaras, its great dumb Rockies, is the unseen country.  It can only as yet be seen in people’s eyes.  Some days, flowing sublime and silent through our noisy streets, and through the vast panorama of our towers, I have heard the footfalls of the unborn, like sunshine around me.

This feeling America gives one in the streets is the real America.  The solidity, the finality, the substantial fact in America, is the daily sense in the streets of the future.  And it has seemed to me that this fact—­whether one observes it in Americans in America, in Americans in England and in other nations—­is what one might call, for lack of a better name, the American temperament in all peoples is the most outstanding typical and important fact with which our modern world and our philosophy about the world have now to reckon.  Nothing can be seen as it really is if this amazing pervasive hourly sense of the future is left out of it.