Ballata i voi che tu ritrovi Amore
Ballata i voi che tu ritrovi Amore
Ballata i voi che tu ritrovi Amore
Consider the jeweled setting of vowels, their wise interlining, the grace, consider, the beginning, that does not disturb the poise of silence, nor invade harshly its suave secrecy.
Or
Tutti li miei penser parlare d’AmoreDonne ch’avete intellette d’Amore,i vo’con voi de la mia donna dire.
Tutti li miei penser parlare d’AmoreDonne ch’avete intellette d’Amore,i vo’con voi de la mia donna dire.
Tutti li miei penser parlare d’Amore
Donne ch’avete intellette d’Amore,i vo’con voi de la mia donna dire.
Donne ch’avete intellette d’Amore,
i vo’con voi de la mia donna dire.
Italy is almost as rich in dignified, nobly chiseled sonnets as in chiseled marbles. Today we are trying to belittle the sonnet. Frequently we make it tawdry. The sonnet is akin to the eye which is one of the windows of the soul. It is not an up-heaped bargain-counter, for a noisy bargain sale.
Heredia, despite his varied story-telling in sonnet form, did not overcrowd the line. He was too reliable an artist. He knew what a frame is silence. Nor did d’Annunzio! Both were too sensitive for this indelicate wrong.
Very likely the chief difficulty lies in the fact that the sonnet does not suit the life of the present. New art-form must be invented for our restless, changing existence. The old bottles are not strong enough for the heavy, strange effervescences, from grapes, of this crowded, disconcerting, wild Garden of Time.
Goethe expatriated the soul of him astonishingly in that war-vexed Germany that knew the wild ways of Napoleon, when he wroteThe Roman Elegies. (Die Römische Elegien.) They are calm. They are chiseled like marbles of Attica. They are sincere, noble, firm, truly visioned; the kind of art we shall not see soon again. They have given me unvarying pleasure throughout the years because of the perfection they keep. Their wholeness is source of strength. I read them over and over.
And yet it is the same as reading Tibullus, Propertius, or theAmores. It is the same art, happening merely to be written in a northern tongue.
Goethe was a unique, powerful figure in history of letters for one whose manhood saw the French Revolution. One of the strangest things in literature is that it did not move him. When it was sweeping grandly on, for freeing man from trammels of the past, Goethe wrote a scholarly friend in Paris about the good news. The friend supposed of course he meant the Revolution. Goethe, however, had no such thought. He was merely referring to praise the French Academy had given his scientific discoveries.
I have read Brandes’ book about Goethe, and with interest, because practically every idea projected was given long ago by the late Professor Calvin Thomas, who very likely is the most trustworthy authority on theMan of Weimar. A comparison of the two books about the German writer is interesting. There has seldom been, perhaps, so much rehashing ofprojected thought of the past as now, so many evidences that limitation has come, and that reconstructed mental clothes are considered good enough.
The etched line of Whistler, especially in the first Italian series, is peculiarly like the sentence-line of Loti in his earlier books on the East. There is the same rare distinguished attack, of which not two in a generation are capable. The same wistful, intensified, highly personal beauty, flashed upon the dazzled senses by a moment of tremendous seeing. The same tremulous sensitiveness, that only the exquisitely dowered possess. Mingled with all,witchcraft, the vanishing essential of art, which none may seize easily with words.
I can recall passages in etchings of those dim, night-palaces of Venice, up which the sad-lighted sea sends faint, equivocating shivers, that give me the exact sensation of lines of Loti. They rise to mind from depths of consciousness. And without volition. Now that Loti is traveling and writing of what he sees no more, and Whistler’s etching needle is stilled, there are two joys fewer in the world for me.
I have heard Kubelik! He is young, boyish. When he came upon the platform he was a timid little boy, parading his grandfather’s long black coat. A melancholy boy, buttoned to the chin in black. Beside me sat an old man, who at sight of him exclaimed: To think he is father of twins! Every once in a while, as the concert progressed, he gave expression to the exclamation.
While his body is graceful, aristocratic, in his head, expression of face, there is good deal of the peasant. The face is sombre, gloomy, with touch of the pure Slav, in the modelling. That Slav land is unique because genius has been pleased to illumine it. No race have so understood tragedy of the soul, tyranny of material things. What other literature can show such revealing wisdom as stories of Potapenko, the short sketches of the two Tolstoy’s? Such tales as Nemirovitch Dankschenko wrote, inUnder the Earth! The criminal pictures of Dostoievsky, the stories Chekov made with the surgeon’s scalpel, the work of Kuprin, or Garshin!
When Kubelik made his appearance he received tremendous welcome. No trace of pleasure, sympathetic response, showed upon his face. Bohemian Paganini is a good name for him, only he is an intellectual player, not an emotional one. He is great, exact.
I should like to know the history of his violin. It set me dreaming of rare Cremona’s, for wood of which master-makers roamed forests of Tuscany, tapping trees, testing resonance, on the south side, listening subtly to song of sap. A marvelous instrument for depth, richness!
Music is an independent world, whose diameter no scientist can measure. A vast world of delight, placed conveniently near.
I do not imagine it was insupportable to Beethoven to be deaf. He merely lived more fully in that other world. It was superior. He could not hear other men’s music to be sure. But there were none so great as he.
As the physical organ which reproduced sound became frailer, more perfect, because undisturbed, was the inner sound-vision. It was purified. The world of music is filled with astonishing buildings, towers of tone, buildings such as Painter Turner, dreamed when centuries after they vanished, he tried to realize with his brush, for us of slighter vision, thePalaces of Caesar.
The architecture of Handel was religious, of Hebraic sternness; while Mozart built fairy palaces of delight, gleaming, white-sugar fantasies of form, palaces ofZucker und Zauber. We can not see these buildings on our own initiative, we of little faith. We are forced to wait for masters to fling open gates. They alone possess the key.
Those little sound-arabesques in Beethoven, of superb decorative beauty, I like to fancy, are the condensed sweetness, in memory, of days of youth, spent in the merry Rhineland. The happy heart of harvesters is there, the subdued joy of laughter. The desire for money, fame, the world’s applause, can never be mainspring of such rare arabesques.
I know a little old Jewish gentleman. Little indeed! Not larger than a Brownie, which he resembles. He has pale, grey, colorless eyes, so crossed they spend their time looking into each other. He has a huge, bristling, up-standing mustache, which looks as if it were futilely engaged in pulling his poor, hump-backed figure up to height, straightness.
After lunch he starts for a walk, wearing a tall hat, coquettishly tip-tilted over his nose. On one of his home-comings I met him. He told me he had been to the grave of his wife, that during the twenty years since her death he had seldom missed a day. He told me this in such dignified tone, and one withal sad, earnest, that his shriveled figure took on the importance, the size of a hero.
Who but member of the race, with indelible blood of centuries of persecution in its veins, would be capable of such devotion! To the Jew, family, home, mean more than to the Gentile. (But free, easy, get-rich-quick America is not good for him. It is breeding out, rapidly, the fine qualities of the race.) The Jew has been helpful, in various ways, to America. He has helped destroy provincialism. He makes for enlightened cosmopolitanism, because the cultivation of the world has touched the race-mind.
This old man regaled me with stories of youth spent in Austria, Bavaria. He was a beau, he declared, in old Bavarian days. But of all the women he saw, Viennese are the prettiest, most spirited. They have figures of sylphs. They are never twice alike.
In childhood, he explained, I lived in sight of Munich. A beautiful city! I remember when Mad Louis was King. He tried to make it another Athens, center of art. The dream was delusive. As delusive as the name he chose for his fairy palace,Wahnfried.
But he taught Germans music. He was patron of Wagner.
When summer comes to the plains, air is hot, dry, and I can not breathe comfortably, nor sleep, I dream of the air I used to smell in Bavaria, as it blew across snowy Alps, sweet with spruce, with fir. I like America! It has been good to my people. My old friend is like March weather; upon the surface snow, chill, while underneath, unseen, the warmth of spring.
Members of the old man’s race have stood at head of art, letters and every science. In the Middle Age, at dawn of the Renaissance, it was Jewish wanderers, traveling from country to country on multifarious business errands, whose linguistic nimbleness formed links between Greece and Rome, between Spaniard and Moor, between Occident and Orient. They had no little to do in dissemination of Greek culture, a culture which in its essence is antagonistic to them.
They were translators for the ancient world. They were numbered among scholars of mediæval days. It was they who helped unlock treasures of Moorish culture for the ungrateful Spaniard.
In the realm of medicine their sway was undisputed. In this profession they held positions of honor in Italian, in Spanish Courts.
They carried songs of Italy to France, to Provençe, inspiring the Troubadours. They had powerful poets, originators of their own, too. Most talented perhaps of whom, in mediæval days, was Jehuda ben Halevy, whose mistress and lady of sorrows, (to whom he dedicated his heart in song), was Jerusalem the Fallen, just as in a later day, Italy, the discrowned, dismantled Queen, was the mistress of inspiration of Poggio.
During Moorish rule, in Spain, before the Inquisition, there was no position of honor, influence, where intellectual worth counted, where the Jew was not found. He was held in like esteem at Court of Robert of Naples, at time gay Boccacio was there paying poeticaldevoir, at the same time, both to Queen Joanna and Fiammetta.
The world’s great wit and lyric poet, Heine, was a Jew. So were the philosophers, Moses Mendelssohn, Spinoza. Of the same race were the composers, Meyerbeer, Felix Mendelssohn. And there may have been Jewish blood in Wagner. No one can prove there was not. Of this race were Auerbach, Heyse, Marcel Schwob, Daudet, Halevy, Mendes, Beaconsfield, Nordau, Brandes, Bernhardt, Rachel, and Jorge Isaacs, who wroteMaria, a South American classic, mentioning a few at random. And once, so the story goes, a Jew was king of Poland for a night. Perhaps the most remarkable feat, however, recorded of this race, is that when the Christian religion, like a tidal-wave, swept over Europe, destroying civilizations, the pagan world, where joy was king, they were the one race that did not succumb. Every other race has borne the imprint of its ideals. Who could dream an humble shepherd band from Judea could set at naught the tides of the world!
The Renaissance does not equal the pagan world in beauty. Its madonnas, its units of architectural design, its saints of noble bodies, are but borrowings from the past. They are not original creation. The old beauty which was poignant because it was unselfconscious, because it kept the heart of man, its canary-throated joy, its hours of song, went out of the world then like a candle that is snuffed by a wind that is chill.
Ideal beauty can not enter the House of Grief.
Ideal beauty can not enter the House of Grief.
Ideal beauty can not enter the House of Grief.
Perhaps wisdom of perception is in this line. We who work today, work crippled, sad, limping, in comparison with them of long ago. Worst of all, confused! Dust covered, perhaps, but still taking space in the roomof the mind, are too many irrelevant, accumulating objects. Too many foolish and cheap amusements. The free, yellow, sunlighted clean space of the whispering winds is not there.
How ancient are words! When we play with them carelessly, we do not realize how freighted they are with history. They are queer unsteady little sail boats carrying all kinds of baggage of the soul. They fly merrily, briskly, down interminable rivers of Time.
They have come from remotest periods. They have come from the night of history. There is nothing else in the world man has contact with that is so old, except the red earth beneath his feet, or so much part of his life. How they originated we know little more than of the beginning to be of the same red earth. Theories have been put forward. None have been agreed upon.
We know primitive tongues were monolithic. They were built in gigantic squares, like the stone buildings of primitive peoples, the temples upon the Andes, in Peru, in Honduras for example, Yucatan, the pre-historic buildings of Guatamala, India, Egypt. Primitive men hurled at each other blocks of unhewn thought. The change that was in progress from that day to this was one ofmaking little, disintegration. The rocks were wearing slowly away to sand. Now speech is broken. It is filled with tiny paste-like particles, inconsequential connectives, the worn, floating, detritus of years.
In everyday speech we make use of sounds which our Aryan ancestors used at foot of the Himalayan Mountains in the childhood of man. Sanskritvritta(turn); Latinvertire; Englishverse. SanskritDeva(God); Latindeus; Englishdivine.
These are very near the forms we use. As I explained before, I, of course, have no right to the word linguist. I read too few tongues. It has been used merely to explain interest in foreign literature, and because we have no intermediate word for exchange.
Sir John Bowring boasted he could speak one hundred tongues and read fluently still another hundred. With it all he was a poor translator. To translate well there must be generous admixture of artist and native writer in the scholar.
John Gregory in the English Seventeenth Century, read easily almost all the languages of the Orient in which a literature has been written; andEthiopean, too, for good measure. There was a period in England of something resembling encyclopedic mind—like the Russian Eighteenth Century, to which there seemed to be no limit of acquirement. After that (to me) there came another and a seemingly different England, both in mind and nature. Its rare moment of creative power passed. Very likely I have no right to the following opinion. My guess, however, would be that languages had a common origin. Then came migration of peoples, life in widely separated localities, under different areas of pressure of changing climates, bringing new demands upon the body. This modified speech. This caused the word to be spoken differently. In this way, in long periods of time, regularly appearing, cumulative differences arose.
In the first place, word was uttered to give imitation in sound of emotion. It was gesture made through another bodily medium. It was mind gesture through the throat.
In almost all languages the word for mother expresses the same gesture. Arabic,oom. Russianmatushka. Latinmater. Englishmother, and so forth.
This is true likewise of the word for water, and others I might mention, and certain emotions such as joy, fear. I have traced words with interest and pleasure through many languages, I usually come back with increased belief in basic oneness, far away, but findable. Words that express suffering, fear, grow grim and gaunt in any tongue. Their surfaces are shriveled with emotion. Those on the contrary that express love, call with singing softness of vowel liquids.
Words are the patient camels of the grey, lonely deserts of the mind, bearing carefully for increased knowledge, increased welfare, the treasured burdens of intellect.
You can feel the atmosphere in which a word was born, brought up, so to speak, no matter in what tongue it happens to be incorporated. Words have personality. They keep securely the aroma of the past.
Many years ago when I was learning Spanish a word in that tongue puzzled me. My Spanish teacher was not a scholar; he knew nothing about it. I felt sensitively fluttering over its surface the atmosphere of another race, the thinking of a different people. Later I found it came from the East, from Persia. It meantmaster. Then I understood. It had been brought to Spain by the Moors. It had pride, dignity, patriarchal sternness, a peculiar harsh browed aloofness to my ear that Spanishwords did not have. It was a memory incorporated in daily speech of Spain of the four hundred years of Moorish rule.
It belongs in the Court of the Lions of the Alhambra. It is draped, turban-crowned. It has nothing in common with the pale, long-faced, ascetic, Spaniard who created the Inquisition.
I think it was an Arab poet who declared words are the thin, embroidered veil in which we wrap thoughts. Races have loved them. In their structure, after the crumbling of ages, may still be felt the stress of composite emotions, ancient, semi-cosmic loves. Words are as near reality as anything life possesses. There are words that for me keep peculiar qualities. The wordDelhi, for instance, is a carved pendant made of amethyst. It is richly hued, lovely. It could not be any kind of jewel save pendant. Nor made of anything save amethyst. The wordAgra, on the contrary, is a stone-white cameo, hard, sharp, cold of line.
It is not impossible that words, in effort to catch plastic beauty, may possess extentions not readily catalogueable; that they may build (for sensation) with vowels, with consonants interwoven like a fugue, with guarded emphasis of recurrent letters, similarsound-picturesthat echo the sensation of objects of art, rebuild them, in short, in the mind, in a different medium.
We have not explored all the properties of words any more than of matter. There are shores waiting for Columbus. We can not determine exactly theirpsycho-plasm, so to speak. We do not know all the phosphoric, ancient visions that enveloped them, and still cling to them. Their boundaries are always changing. They can not be definitely measured. They possessdegreesof being potently visible. For incalculable time the souls of races have wrapped them with love. They have borne intact, to today, the dreams of the world.
In England, in days of Shakespeare, words were fat, red-blooded, unctuous. In America they have been growing leaner and leaner. We lack greatly the rich variety of the older country. Our speech has lost a kind of vigor, sweetness, substantiality. As late as Stevenson, this quality remained in English prose. It has never been transplanted, successfully, to America.
We are losing, too, some of our fine, former pride in Saxon strength, which is our heritage. We are less faithful to ideals. We are falling away from its precepts. We are losing sight of belief in the desirability of itsfuture power over our race. We are turning rather briskly toward foreign gods, toward false standards.
We are losing, too, the homely faith and friendliness of English social life, which is something whose strength we can not estimate; its merriment, uncomplaining courage, in the heart. We have nothing to substitute, or worse, things not our own.
They who loved words best, and perhaps understood best their varying values, were decadent Greek and Roman writers, who looked upon them as gems, who knew all their tints, their shades, and certain French writers, a little later (roughly estimating) than 1830. Callimichus loved them in the ancient world. He spoke of them as the Arab loved and spoke ofSaïf, the sword. Something clean, cruel, powerful, decisive, uncompromising. Mallarmé, of the moderns, I think has loved them best. Hokusai, the Japanese print-maker, cried with sincerity:Write me down as the old man who is mad about line.With equal sincerity I exclaim: Write me down as the woman who is mad about words.
Cubism, so-called, does not necessarily belong to plastic art, nor verse. A new mind which may be termedcubism of the spirithas come; a spirit of destruction largely, brought about by the increasing passion of the individual forself, expression of self, assertion of self. The three points of time, that led to this, widely separated, different as they are, were (first) Christ and his teachings; (second) the Eighteenth Century in revolt against government forms and established standards; and the present, its equally great revolt against reverence of all kinds, its deification ofthe ego, its passion for destruction and the dawning scientific mind. This has brought a condition which might be termedthe golden age of the commonplace, when people who can neither write nor think, paint nor carve, dance nor make music, insist upon the sacredness, the necessity of expression. Theegoof the individual is enlarged. This is one cause of the increase in crime. It is inflamed. Everyone is convinced he has rights that bear no relation to his ability. Moral fiber is breaking. Ambition and talent are not the same.
This may be herald of a cycle of time, a new, a different world civilization. When such change has come, history tells us, art begins to die first, before morals or manners. The spirit of destruction is directed toward ideals.
In the plastic arts the careless, blithe, fine laughter is gone. The moment’s creative joy. There is less real beauty, but morenerve, daring. When the sculptor boasts either ofmodernism, or primitive vision, he harks back to things Assyrian, not Greek. The last touch in the world of that serenity we found in Greek marbles, is in the figures of Clodion. Afterward, it comes no more. When art and letters feel breath of decay, nations have gone a long way toward that decay. As proof, review the history of antiquity. Is that what is setting in? Is that what is going to result in remaking the world, in creating a new order of mind? Transition is startling. Everything is changing. Art and letters are changing rapidly; music too, the political outlook, morals, religions. Nothing is left untouched. A period of rebellion is here. Love, sincerity, friendliness, are disappearing. Another civilization is heaving to sight with the wild, brawling winds, the harsh atmospheric disturbance of birth of a star.
Some quality, usually in solution in life of our planet, and to us indispensable, disappeared. Since this has been evident.
It was after the Peloponnesian war, we must remember, that disintegration began in Greece. Consider, too, the slow dissolving of the Roman Empire, beginning in the West, then progressing, like political paralysis, toward the East. Consider the ruin, annihilation, of the powerful, the richly cultivated Han Dynasty, the change, decay, brought by war. Wars are to established civilizations what cancers are to the healthy body. They destroy tissue that can not be rebuilt. Sometime a law can be stated between war and decay.
InCubism of the Spirit, as I have named it, revolts are many. This tragic, asserting of self is revolting now against death. When you divide the forces of the enemy you lessen his strength. Carrel divided the forces of Death, into general and elemental. That is a beginning. Who knows what the end will be?
It is a period of shattering of ideals, when all things, even of the spirit, are being bent to forms of material gain, of foolish, self-flattering assertion, shorthand, incompetent stating. Christian Science is product of the age because it is an age of self-delusion. The power is lost to distinguish between things that are and things as we wish they were. Man is breaking trammels, and in the triumphant emergence, he sees himself greater than he is. The prophets have been many who heralded reaction against restraints of the past. There was the Christ. Before the coming of Christianitythere was Greek philosophy. In the early Nineteenth Century there was German philosophy. There were Kant, Wagner. Wagner was an eloquent preacher of revolt. Like the warring angels of Milton who were cast out of Heaven, Wagner in rebellion, scaled again the battlements. This found its way to the brain of man in preachment more dangerous than words. It heralded gloriously the era whose disconcerting, unsuspected changes are upon us, making us shiver with presage of unmeasured things. No longer shall the golden, fluent splendor,life, be expressed in stale formulas. For new day a new robe. Who can guess what the result will be? While we live, while change progresses, what will be our attitude toward things we loved? Books, art, music, the world of the spirit?
Cubismwas brought about in some degree, too, by focussing for purpose of quick, personal vision, of the art, the science, of the world. Some of them who were great in the past were great because of limitations. Dante was one whose nature possessed depth not breadth. Will art resolve itself into expression of untrammeled personality? In throwing away form are leaders nearer essence? Are we peeling to the skin, like wrestlers, for the Games, leaving nothing proud, superfluous? Surely there must be luxurious languor, foolish recreation, the fine, idle space for the unexpected, in addition to defiant assertion.
The lower class, peculiarly enough, under pressure of new ways of living, is disappearing, just as in the Eighteenth Century there was no effective middle-class. A social chasm results with disappearing at top of the aristocrat. Fromentin wrote some time ago: “Vers 1828 on vit du nouveau” and “le dixhuitième siècle brisa beaucoup de formules.” It was the sensitive artists, not thinkers, who felt it first. In serious consideration of facts of living, the artist is not to be despised. The decay of the great age of Louis XIV was heralded by great artists beginning to lessen in number or lose their luster.
In this general destruction, excesses must be expected. In the on-rushing tidal-wave of mediocrity against the Lords, wrong will be done. SometimesCubism of the Spiritwill insist pearls are the best food for hogs. It will not be easy to find that absolute, that prepared outspread level of mind, suitable for pearls to roll on. Some of the pearls may melt, become invisible forever, such as pity, sympathy, old-fashioned kindliness. I suppose it is significant that Marquis de Sade was writing, in prison, hisbookLe Roman Philosophique, which shows a cruel mind, just one year before the outbreak of the French Revolution.
Changes that come so stealthily they could not be chronicled, preceded this. The human skull, the physical eye, have been gradually formed differently.
The old, carefully drawn, punctiliously painted figure, with details insisted upon, hurts the modern eye trained to stenographic seeing. It does not wish to be pelted with fact that way. Seeing is not to be done alone by the painter but partly by the looker on! Increasingly insistentselfdemands share. The picture is to be astarting point, instead of an end. It is to be something for the seer to help make.
Before the Great War line and color began to disintegrate, to feel their way back to primal selves; this was a step toward new creation, beginning over. The end of a cycle had come. New standards followed. There was are-valuation. The middle age of the modern man had begun. The old tenements of the mind were being torn down and swept away. When one reaches the top of the hill, there is nothing to do except to find the path that leads down. This is not genius. It does not deserve praise for perception or novelty. It has too great resemblance to necessity. If change means destruction, it likewise means growth, or the level upon which change is permitted to begin, on the other,the south side, of the hill. But Dostoievsky exclaimed when he was living in Germany: “In der neuen Menschheit ist also die æsthetische Idee volkommen betrübt.” Dostoievsky was not only an artist, but a sensitive one. He felt quickly the chill breath of the new order.
New art comes closer to man than the old. We are better mental tailors. In aclose-upwe must remember figures loom large. We see details we do not wish to see. We are getting aclose-upof life. In addition, the old, carefully drapedtogais large.
Art being sensitive, heralded approach of the new cycle, and close of the cycle passing. Disintegration of color, line, was not the only change. The bonds that unite people in social intercourse, friendship, family ties, weakened. This was followed by exploitation of self, an increasingly shifting standard. Theegobecame diseased. In the critical faculty there was discernible a lessening sense of values. The general reading public no longer knew good from bad. There was, too, breaking down, decay, of sociological tissues, just as bodily tissue breaks, with stress of years,or warning of insidious disease. People who had reached forty when the change began, awoke to find themselves in a world they did not know. Everyone became Rip Van Winkle.
Like the trapeze performer, they had forsaken the safe ring, without being sure of the next. New World art picks up and saves crumbs from the wasteful banquet-table. It finds neglected things, minor things, apparently insignificant things beautiful, and with demands, with rights. It says so, if it does not believe it.
A new era is here. Educational ideals are overturned. Some things man created he finds not good. As counterweight there is inclination not to observe rules of the game, unless perchance some game be greater than the rules. In thiscounterweightthere is inclination to translate theorizing into action, and do it quickly. The new world disregards the charm of idle thought. Sometimes it has bad taste to do things not meant to be done, but merely to be talked about. Occasionally it is dull, lacks perception. It has misunderstood the poetry and politeness of the Arab host, who declares:All I own is yours. With present dramatic seriousness and belief in the divine right ofself, lack of humor, we would move in, and show the Arab the door.
The impulse back of living is changed. There is indication of a dying in the human race of what was called divine. A red apple rotting at the core!
New religions, moral ideals, are dawning which surprise in form, in substance.
Living is less fine. It is a rush for self exploitation. It is giving over rest, sunny leisure. The idea of work, of dispensing energy for display, decoration of front elevation of Sunday papers, is penetrating the upper classes. In being useful, they plan social achievements. They have found a game in which to star.
The opening of the Twin Americas, Africa, meant, demanded, a tremendous amount of practical work, exploiting; expanding technical skill. Under progressive conquest of things material, increasing manual dexterity, increasing technical achievement, the idealizing spirit of a smaller world, content with fewer things for the few, was in abeyance. Whatever happens or threatens to happen is not final. A glimpse, if imperfect, beyond the age helps steady us. Time has no model of perfection meant to be copied forever.
The more modern the unit of art, the more unrest, that nameless something that disturbs. In activities of the rapid present, there is not sufficient place for gentle things. Not all flowers bloom best when the storms rage. But in a future, far perhaps, after the material conquest has been carried through, there will come, I have faith to believe, a nobler conquest, loftier. Now artists are merely trying to explore, then map a new world. We can not travel always upon mountains. Meadow lands have to be crossed. We can not sweep all the new with vision at any one moment.
Wrapped in Christianity, which taught sacredness of the individual, lay undeveloped seed of socialism, the French Revolution, world-upheavals. At inception of new faith, no one can measure expansion. Vast processes of change are in progress all about us everywhere.
The restlessness in the United States has varied causes, one, the possibility (soon to become desire) of individuals leaving the class in which they were born. Restlessness welcomes change. Anything different is good. It is not necessary it be better. Life is a game. Concept is cheapened. Every small boy is given one ideal; namely, to get out of the class in which he was born and become President. It is like considering life as being poised upon the crest of excitement. The object of life should be to widen the horizon of intelligence, preserve kindness in the heart, and keep a margin of security for comfortable living. He lives most who thinks best, not he who has the largest accumulation of dollars, and moves about upon wheels in the air.
The Great War was the demolishing blow to the vast, antique structure, the marble columns of whose first falling echoed thunderously in May, 1787, in France.
In the West there exists dramatic, political idealism; inexperience, youth, together with lack of international outlook. In the West there is still youth, its desire, its progress, a dream suitable for a rich, young, unexploited country permitted for a century to develop undisturbed. Wealth has too often become end, instead of aid to larger living. It has habit of shrinking the horizon of the one who possesses it. It might provide broad spaces of leisure, instead of a mad, noisy movie program, which resembles destructive fury of the mastodons, the monsters, when they dashed ahead to escape the approaching ice cap. The ideal, however unrealizable, is not wasted because it forms compensating pendant to the practical.
When, in America, the poor become rich too speedily, the perspective of living is changed over night, there is boiling, seething. The new rich can not enjoy what money buys. In fact, they are still poor. True-judging, poised living, is not easy.
It is too bad a race should get so it can not support a moment without amusement. We have much to learn from the European emigrant. Civilization, what we agree to call by that name, becomes disease. The hardy, patient fibre disappears. The newspaper helps. It sets ideal of greed, haste. It preaches ambition, conquest. This destroys stable social basis. Each individual longs to grow to size of a monstrous cabbage in overstimulated soil. There was always inclination in the Saxon to stubborn independence. Too quick material advancement is balanced by moral letting down. It is a pity modernity should be afraid of plain spaces. It is too bad every State has not a Vachel Lindsay to preach the religion of beauty. May his tribe increase!
We have appliedKulturto money-getting. In doing it we were copying Germany. It was Germany that discovered the modern world and no one was at fault for the War. Its cause was cosmic; biological, an impulse of world-growth not to be turned aside. Cosmic impulses lift nations like waves, hurl them against other nations, lightly as helpless fish, and tangled sea-weeds, shells, in season of tides and storms. It was merely a mighty migration of peoples. It was dumb forces turning over races, with results we can not know.
The world felt the cataclysm coming. This is proven by the many writing nervously aboutspirit of the times. The increase, too, in knowledge, wealth, material power, knowledge poured into the human mind too swiftly and in quantities too great for assimilation. Lack of balance resulted. There was top-heavy overturning. Re-adjustments had to be made too soon. A different basis of morals became effective without being recognizedin mind. Things merely fine began to be looked down upon as superfluities. The changingmoral selfbegan to wear a new garment, which was ill-fitting.