Hence the Great Unrest. People scurry to and fro all over the earth,
like ants disturbed on their hill by a burning match thrown in among
them. They do not know what is the matter, but they feel that they must
keep moving. The sensation of inexplicable haste is upon them. There
is no time for anything. Pleasure easily palls, and the most agreeable
society develops into boredom. The days of reposeful leisure, in which
the greatest works of art were created, are ended. Everything must be
got through quickly nowadays--“scamped” as a matter of fact. Sweetness
and harmony in music are no longer admired--it must be discordant and
odd to suit the spirit of the age. Fine painting is a drug in the
market unless it be the work of an “old master”--a picture must be
“sensational” in colour and in execution to suit the perverted taste
of the day. Literature and the drama must present “problems” of a
questionable nature before their productions can be pronounced “great”
by the very few critics who are more than ordinary paragraphists--while
Poetry, the highest of all the arts, is practically dead. The abnormal
condition of the human mind displays itself in costume, manners, and
social observances and over all things hangs the deepening mist of a
universal dissatisfaction for which there seems to be no cause, and
for which we can find no name.
Do we mean to go on blindly, pretending we do not see? “Ye hypocrites!
Ye can discern the face of the sky and of the earth, but how is it that
ye do not discern this time?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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