This, perhaps, may be said to be an extreme example, as was Hergesheimer’s, but is it? Do not all our surroundings and things affect us? The social effects of such things as automobiles, radios and so on have now become commonplaces, but what of the effects on the individual? In many ways a man or woman with a motor car is a different creature from one without one. Think how many lives have been altered by the reading of a single book. The laboring man who lives in a Sixth Avenue room in New York facing on the elevated railroad is a different man from one who lives in a cottage and garden in Devon or amid quiet and roses in the Vaucluse. All this would seem to be so self-evident as to call for no elaboration, and yet do we pay any attention to it? When we try to live as everyone else does, when we buy something because “everybody has one,” are we not using our tools with an utter lack of discrimination? There is a similar decadence in some directions in the arts other than that of life, a tendency to put “any old thing” on canvas, to clutter up a novel with irrelevant details on the plea of realism. We might as well try to eat everything as have everything, regardless of our[Pg 298] own taste or the idiosyncrasies of our own digestions. A painter does not use his scarlet or blue or orange brushes regardless of the effect, merely because they are “there.” He selects his colors as he does his objects, for their final influence on his work, or he merely produces a daub. If we are to have an art of life, must we not exercise equal care in trying to discriminate between the influences and values of all the tools that we use in making the infinitely more complex work, an individual human life of significance and happiness and worth? We have got to think what all these tools—things, situations, surroundings, relationships—may mean for our own individual selves, for our own private lives, regardless of the standards of the majority, before we can begin to live as human beings and develop an art of life. Otherwise we are mere telephone switchboards, like animals, receiving stimuli and sending out reactions. Until we have given thought to this, we can use all our tools and material only at random and with no idea of the result we are producing. If we can decide what we want to make of ourselves and what tools will best assist the result, then we can vastly simplify our lives by a wholesale rejection of all those things which may be well enough for our neighbors but do not conduce to the one desired end for ourselves. We would then no longer wear ourselves out in the mere living of standardized lives and keeping up with the Joneses. We would not only simplify our lives but we would introduce variety into the deadly monotony of the national life. No two artists would have exactly the same conception of a subject or treat it in exactly the same way.