time at that. I pressed my astral button, and flew homeward, wearily, slowly; I was full of soup and tone, and my ears and nostrils quivered from exhaustion. When I landed at the Battery it was exactly five o'clock. It had stopped snowing, and an angry sun was preparing to bathe for the night in the wet of the western sky. New Jersey was etched against a cold hard background, and as an old hand-organ struck up It's a Long, Long Way to Retrograd, I threw my cap in the air and joined in (astrally, but joyfully) the group of ragged children who danced around the venerable organist with jeers and shouting. After all, life is greater than the Seven Arts. CHAPTER XXI THE CLASSIC CHOPIN That Chopin is a classic need not be unduly insisted upon; he is classic in the sense of representing the best in musical literature; but that he is of a classical complexion as a composer from the beginning of his career may seem in the nature of a paradox. Nevertheless, it is a thesis that can be successfully maintained now, since old party lines have been effaced. To battle seriously for such words as Classic or Romantic or Realism is no longer possible. Cultured Europe did so for a century, as it once wrangled over doctrinal points; as if the salvation of mankind depended upon the respective verbal merits of transubstantiation or consubstantiation. Only yesterday that ugly word "degeneracy," thanks to quack critics and charlatan "psychiatrists," figured as a means of estimating genius. This method has quite vanished among reputable thinkers, though it has left behind it another misunderstood vocable--decadence. Wagner is called decadent. So is Chopin. While Richard Strauss is held up as the prime exponent of musical decadence. What precisely is decadent? Says Havelock Ellis: "Technically, a decadent style is only such in relation to a classic style. It is simply a further development of a classic style, a further specialisation, the homogeneous, in Spencerian phraseology, having become heterogeneous. The first is beautiful because the parts are subordinated to the whole; the second is beautiful because the whole is subordinated to the parts.... Swift's prose is classic, Pater's decadent.... Roman architecture is classic, to become in its Byzantine developments completely decadent, and Saint Mark's is the perfected type of decadence in art; pure early Gothic, again, is strictly classic in the highest degree because it shows an absolute subordination of detail to the bold harmonies of structure, while the later Gothic ... is decadent.... All art is the rising and falling of the slopes of a rhythmic curve between these two classic and decadent extremes."