No it is not. It is as near as I can come for the present to the word. What good to talk to me of Santayana and your later critics. I brush them aside. They do not apply. They do not reach me any more than a baby's hand reaches the moon. I am far under them. I am less, far less if you will. I am a beginner. I am an American. A United Stateser. Yes its ugly, there is no word to say it better. I do not believe in ugliness. I do not want to call myself a United Stateser but what in--but what else am I? Ugliness is a horror to me but it is less abhorrent than to be like you even in the most remote, the most minute particular. For the moment I hate you, I hate your orchestras, your libraries, your sciences, your yearly salons, your finely tuned intelligences of all sorts. My intelligence is as finely tuned as yours but it lives in hell, it is doomed to eternal--perhaps eternal--shiftings after what? Oh to hell with Masters and the rest of them. To hell with everything I have myself ever written. Here's a man wants me to revise, to put in order. My God what I am doing means just the opposite from that. There is no revision, there can be no revision-- Down came the rain with a crash. For five days it had been pending. With a loud splash it seemed to strike the earth as if it were body meeting body. The poplar leaves swirled and swirled. The gutters were wedged with water. Oh fool you are thicker than rain drops. Give me to Moussorgsky. I am tired. Take me to the opera tonight and let me see Nijinsky dance his _Til Eulenspiegel_ for I am tired to death with looking for sense among American poets. Igor will retrieve my courage. I could sit and listen in his lap for ever. Were not the American Indians Mongols? Oh they must have been. Why could they not have been Chinese? Why could not the early Emperors have discovered America? Tell me, wet streets, what we are coming to, we in this country? Are we doomed? Must we be another Europe or another Japan with our coats copied from China, another bastard country in a world of bastards? Is this our doom or will we ever amount to anything? Drown me in pictures like Marsden, make me a radical artist in the conventional sense. Give me the intelligence of a Wells. God, Hueffer is so far beyond him that what Wells says really sounds sensible. Must it be a civilization of fatigued spirits? Then give me Hueffer. My God it is too disgusting. Great men of America! O very great men of America please lend me a penny so I wont have to go to the opera. Why not capitalise Barnum--? _Bravo, bravo mon vieux_! A noble apostrophe to your country but don't you realize that it is not a matter of country but the time--The time. For God's sake Charlie bring a lemon pie. So they lay in the little brook and let the cold water run up their bare bellies. CHAPTER VI [Illustration]