Democracy—who was it that recently stated with charming aplomb that “Individualism and democracy are synonymous terms?” Yes, I recall: it came from the pen of the author of _Incense and Splendor_ and _To the Innermost_. I confess this statement, especially when considering its authorship, came to me as a revelation. To me the word “democracy,” as many another beautiful word, has lost its original lofty meaning and has come to rhyme with mediocrity, with the strangling of the Few of the Mountain by the Many of the Valley. Could you name many great things that the most democratized countries, like America and Switzerland, have produced outside of Schweitzer-cheese and Victrolas? Has there ever been a great individualist who appeared as a child of his age, as an outgrowth and a reflection of a democracy? I do not know of such instances. Of course, I grant that the writer of that statement put into the word “Democracy” a higher, a more idealistic meaning. Words, like music, like practically every medium of art, express the author’s personality, and, provided he is an artist, he binds us to share his interpretation. Take, for example, that popular song, “_Oh, You Beautiful Doll_”; apparently there is nothing tragic in it, yet my emotions were stirred when I heard its French interpretation by Olga Petrova (it was before the kind American entrepreneurs had forced her to perform stunts in Panthea). She had managed to put so much sorrow and tenderness into “_O Ma Grande Belle Poupée!_” that one forgot the triteness of the words and felt gripping sadness. Or take a less vulgar illustration—Gertrude Stein’s _Tender Buttons_.[1] It is an exquisite little thing in cream covers, with a green moon in the center, implying the yolk of an egg with which “something is the matter,” and it gave me rare pleasure to witness the first attempt to revolutionize the most obsolete and inflexible medium of Art—words. The author has endeavored to use language in the same way as Kandinsky uses his colors: to discard conventional structure, to eliminate understandable figures and forms, and to create a “spiritual harmony,” leaving to the layman the task of discovering the “_innerer Klang_.” Both iconoclasts have admirably succeeded; both the “Improvisations” and the little “essays” on roast-beef and seltzer-bottles have given me the great joy of cocreating, allowing me to interpret them in my own autonomous way. Says the Painter:[2] The apt use of a word, repetition of this word, twice, three times or even more frequently, will not only tend to intensify the inner harmony but also to bring to light unsuspected spiritual properties of the word itself. Further than that, frequent repetition of a word deprives the word of its original external meaning.