The enemies who resist us help us more than the friends who flatter us. They perform the service of unpaid gardeners. The art madness of Germany was astonishing about the time of Heine. The young wife of Stieglitz, the poet, killed herself so that grief might make her husband great. This gives us key to that gloomy, melancholy north from which a new, a more complex art, was to come, first to oppose and then to surprise the clean-lined Mediterranean classicism, with its plasticity, its reasoned assurance. People of genius are people of intuition. Plodders are the intellectual. Now scientists rule. They are trying first to isolate _self_, then exploit it. This is a period of egotism, when man keeps the importance of the microbe, while he feels like the mountain. Money has no meaning as a measure of excellence. In a city of huge size like New York, pressure upon the individual is great. It equals ocean pressure, upon deep-sea life. It deforms. It makes shapeless. Gigantic pieces of engineering shock the senses. People suffer from surfeit of everything. They can not indulge the luxury of longing. They are overfed. They have mental indigestion. Satiety comes. Individuals, in so large a city, become sea sand; uniform, uninteresting, individually inconsequential. Such center of prodigious living becomes the wilderness, in spite of law, a place where savages may roam, the most terrible, civilization’s savages; men who prey upon men. They have become beasts. They people solitudes. Heights, depths, touch then blend. Ambition, inspiration, self-respect, die. No poet can live here, then write poetry. (Only the painter, the etcher, seem to survive.) Look at Percy McKaye for example! When he came from his wooded New England hills, he had gifts of a poet. What does he write now? I would not like to name it. To be humble I do not think I could. It is bare of poetry. His _Washington_ is not a creditable high school performance. It is almost as bad as Drinkwater’s _Lincoln_! Success kills too often today. George Sterling was wise enough to get out of New York, to Carmel, the blue sea, the mountains. I recall a sonnet-sequence of his, which is the best of American make. Consider, too, Tarkington after he wrote _Beaucaire_, and turned to New York, quick dollars. _Beaucaire_ was writing. Compare it with his later prose! When conflict for life is keen, not only is love between man and man impossible, but kindliness, justice, friendship. Man becomes prey of man. His emotions are those of the beast that destroys. For the body to live, the soul dies.