To practise an art of living it is essential, as I have said, to arrive at some standard of values for ourselves. If we may judge from this contest, and from other evidences, the standard of value arrived at by the American people in the broad sphere of ethics or morality is merely the standard of what the overwhelming mass of Americans of all sorts consider applicable to themselves. There can be no individuality[Pg 296] in conforming to such a standard so arrived at. Moreover, such a standard is bound to be beastly low. The mass of men has never risen without individuals to make it rise any more than a mass of dough will rise without the tiny bit of yeast in it. Our concern here, however, is with the individual who would manage his life with art, not with the mass, and for him no art of life is possible if he is merely going to make his life conform to the opinions of the majority. It is as absurd as it would be to think of Keats, preparing to write an “Ode to a Nightingale,” taking a vote of all his fellow apothecary apprentices as to what they thought he ought to say about a nightingale. But we have also got to consider carefully what tools to use in our art. Limiting ourselves for the moment to what are usually called “things,” it is obvious, though generally overlooked, that the effect upon ourselves of “things” is both varied and profound. This is a theme which is rarely treated, but the reader will recall the effect upon Lee Randon of the French doll on his mantelpiece in Hergesheimer’s “Cytherea.” It is, perhaps, the best illustration I can offer of the idea worked out to its conclusion in all completeness. The other day I happened to be visiting the exhibition of the Arts Decoratifs at the Grand Palais in Paris. The new art in France, and elsewhere over here in Europe, is producing a wholly new form of interior decoration and furnishing, sometimes of great beauty and nearly always of much interest. As I stood in one bedroom in which the bed of ivory and ebony of indescribable design had its covering of leopard skins, I could not help musing on what subtle differences in one’s spiritual and intellectual character would come from living one’s life amid such furnishings, as contrasted, we will[Pg 297] say, with bedrooms of complete and perfect Queen Anne or Louis Quatorze. In the room I mention, the atmosphere, due to the furnishing, was an almost maleficent blending of the perfection of twentieth century civilization with the savagery of the jungle. As one stood there, in a room designed as the last word in French art and craftsmanship for a millionaire of 1929, one was aware in part of one’s soul of the faint booming of tom-toms and of the odor of black and sweaty jungle flesh. A man could not live in that room without strange things happening in the depths of his being.