industrious hands.

When the last aqueduct shall have crumbled to pieces, the last airship
fallen to the ground, the last blade of grass have died upon a dying
earth, man, indomitable by his training in resistance to misery and pain,
shall set this undiminished light of his eyes against the feeble glow of
the sun. The artistic faculty, of which each of us has a minute grain,
may find its voice in some individual of that last group, gifted with a
power of expression and courageous enough to interpret the ultimate
experience of mankind in terms of his temperament, in terms of art. I do
not mean to say that he would attempt to beguile the last moments of
humanity by an ingenious tale. It would be too much to expect--from
humanity. I doubt the heroism of the hearers. As to the heroism of the
artist, no doubt is necessary. There would be on his part no heroism.
The artist in his calling of interpreter creates (the clearest form of
demonstration) because he must. He is so much of a voice that, for him,
silence is like death; and the postulate was, that there is a group
alive, clustered on his threshold to watch the last flicker of light on a
black sky, to hear the last word uttered in the stilled workshop of the
earth. It is safe to affirm that, if anybody, it will be the imaginative
man who would be moved to speak on the eve of that day without
to-morrow--whether in austere exhortation or in a phrase of sardonic
comment, who can guess?

For my own part, from a short and cursory acquaintance with my kind, I am
inclined to think that the last utterance will formulate, strange as it
may appear, some hope now to us utterly inconceivable. For mankind is
delightful in its pride, its assurance, and its indomitable tenacity. It
will sleep on the battlefield among its own dead, in the manner of an
army having won a barren victory. It will not know when it is beaten.