I enjoyed greatly the noble, chiseled art of Greeks and Romans. I enjoy in a different way the emotional whirlwind of the rough undistinguished moderns, with blinding dust, noisy upheavals, less accomplished expression, childish uncertainties, and the knowledge that no one knows where it may sweep us. But it may be merely a prolongation of habit of reading! I have faith that developments are to be prodigious. I know complexities will be considerable. In light of what has been accomplished, the prose of Landor is as remote, as delicately carved Alexandrian gems from the commodities of Woolworth. The new art is for the masses; the old art was for the intellectual aristocrats, the people of trained taste. The youth of mankind rings in the trumpets of Wagner. Youth means achievement. And hope! The music of Wagner is a conquest of Rome. It is another down-pouring of the barbarian from the troubled, sad, mist-covered north. That which is finest of the old civilization that is passing, of the culture, wisdom, faith, love, of two thousand years, is stored in the prose, the verse of France. There slips into the best prose of French writers of great periods, phrases, sentences, from deeps of the subconscious, the world-soul, dwelling, in the powerful, seldom seen, creative places, that other races have neither been able to see, seize, nor make visible; a superb letting go of the ego. This is something we do not find. Our land is too new, young, too devoted to the fleeting thing _self_, which has progressed no further than today, than that reasoning mind with which as children we used to learn the multiplication table. The creating of art has no little in common with teaching of Eastern philosophies, _the death of self_. It, too, is an effect of time. It is proof of rich ripening, under multiple suns. Old World nations possess this in some degree. The sorrows of much living and contending faiths have taught them. In addition, _Good_ wears many faces. Deeper spiritual revelation is theirs, enveloping, then penetrating the subject under discussion, with something sweeter, more eloquent, than the sumptuous sunsets of Lorraine, something to be sought among masters, as wild honey is sought in the forest. To the mind, indeed, that is what it resembles, _The Taste of Honey_. It is something that all but shatters with delight, blinds with unshakable truth. It is a lightning flash from the racial soul. Among Greek writers I have thought of this. It has occurred to me most often perhaps when reading Aristophanes, a joy whose memory remains. Again it is in the superb, cumulative, spendthrift, piling of adjectives of Homer. It is in that on-rushing, resistless, cataract of verbal music of Æschylus.