And yet--and yet--somehow I cannot think that these balls and pageants and breakfasts are truly typical of the real Village--I mean the newest and the best Village--the Village which, like the Fairy Host, sings to the sojourners of the grey world to come and join them in their dance, with "the wind sounding over the hill." My Village is something fresher and gayer and more child-like than that. There is in it nothing of decadence. But, as John Reed says-- _"... There's anaemia Ev'n in Bohemia, That there's not more of it--_ there _is the miracle!"_ For still the Village is, or has been, inarticulate. Individually it has found speech--it has expressed itself in diverse and successful forms. But there remains a void of voices! A community must strongly utter something, and must find mouths and mouthpieces for the purpose. It was hard to find, hard to locate, hard to vocalise, this message of the Village; eventually it came up from the depths and pitched its tone bravely and sweetly, so that men might hear and understand. The need was for something concrete and yet varied, which could cry out alone,--a delicious voice in the wilderness, if you like! There have been play-acting companies, "The Washington Square Players," "The Provincetown Players," and others. But something was still wanting. Sometimes it strikes us that wonderful things happen haphazard like meteors and miracles. But I believe if we could take the time to investigate, we would find that most of these miraculous and glorious oaks grow out of a quiet commonplace acorn. Richard Wagner once held an idea--perhaps it would better be termed an ideal--concerning art expression. He declared (you may read it in "_Oper und Drama_" unless you are too war-sided) that all the art forms belonged together: that no one branch of the perfect art form could live apart from its fellows, that is, in its integral parts. He contended (and enforced in Bayreuth) that all the arts were akin: that the brains which created music, drama, colour effects, plastic sculptural effects--anything and everything that belonged to artistic expression--were, or should be, welded into one supreme artistic expression. He believed this implicitly, and like other persons who believe well enough, he "got away with it." In Bayreuth, he established for all time a form of synthetic art which has never been rivalled. Now Wagner has very little apparently to do with Greenwich Village. And yet this big world-notion is gaining way there. They are finding--as anyone must have known they would find--a new mood expression, a new voice. And, wise, not in their generation, but in all the generations, the Village has seized on this new vehicle with characteristic energy.