you do it!" I have never met a German who does not still believe that they could have won the war, but for us. A high army officer told me that a gala celebration followed the entry of each new foe and that the Kaiser used to remark, "Hoch! Another country forcibly annexing itself to Germany!"

The two bitterest people I talked to in all Germany were English women who had married German husbands before the war. Their Government, friends and relatives had treated them worse than "mad dogs," they said, quite in contrast to the treatment they had received in Germany. I was thrown into almost daily contact with a man in Berlin who was in business in Egypt when the war broke out. He had amassed a fortune there after many years of residence. He was arrested, imprisoned four years in Malta, where he lost his health, and his fortune was confiscated. He shrugs his shoulders about it and still hopes that the British will in time consent to his return to Egypt. There was one instance, where I came near suffering from a personal attack. My next neighbor at a banquet in Cologne learning that I was an American, tried to make me answer for America's policies. "What about Wilson and his fourteen points?" When I told him that Wilson had long since passed out of power, he became violent. "Where then is the honor of the American people! America went into the war for money!" This gentleman was effectually silenced by at least a hundred of his compatriots, though I am confident they shared his sentiments. But they have wisely given up talking about the

war. The German people are not wasting energy discussing lost causes. They have declared a new war on the world—a war of work!

There is some feeling on the Rhine where the Army of Occupation still flourishes. In Mainz and Coblenz I made a tour of the rows and rows of new apartments surrounded by parks and gardens, with boulevards and schools and playgrounds, that have been built for the French soldiers. I saw also the mansions in the exclusive quarters that were still occupied by the British and French commands. Soldiers, many black ones, swarm the streets. There has been little or no building yet to take care of the native German housing problem, which has been acute for nearly ten years.

Neither Germans nor the Allied occupants seem unfriendly, however. French soldiers and German girls, arm in arm, were a common sight. French officers too, but never the English officers, may be seen with German girls.

"Ah, but your American doughboys-they were wonderful—just like one of us! Our girls brought them home to supper and they married, hundreds of them. When they first came they too acted very badly. The French spend little or nothing with us, they bring everything from France. The Americans spent all they had!"

When I was in Wiesbaden, seven thousand British troops were quartered there. A ball was given at the Nassauerhof Hotel and two score British Officers in their full red regalia attended. The two Dukes of Anhalt, the former daughter-inlaw of the ex-Kaiser, and other nobles

sat at a table in one corner. They applauded some of the antics of the Red Coats and soon some of the German nobility who had been unseated by the Allies were dancing with their conquerors!

If you want to see the difference in Germany under control and Germany out of control, you should pay a visit to Danzig. It will mean trouble and expense, for you will have to pass through the Polish Corridor and have a Polish visé. This is the same Corridor through which the Germans of East Prussia together with their imports and exports must pass. They have a long tale of industrial and commercial woe to tell about it.

Danzig and its tiny Free State is the enfant terrible of Northern Europe to-day. She is enjoying that grand and glorious feeling of having cut loose from a severe old-fashioned mother's apron-strings, and has drifted into bad company. It is one of the wildest towns of Europe. The best hotel gives a triple performance Saturday nights, beginning in the Music Hall at eight, continuing in the Cabaret at twelve, and winding up in the Scarlet Room at seven o'clock Sunday morning. Only a few miles away, in Zoppot, is the most notorious gambling establishment outside of Monte Carlo. All nationalities surround the tables. But Danzig is as "Dutch as kraut," for all that.

If anybody still doubts that Ger

many is licked he should make two visits: one to Helgoland; the other to the Krupp Works in Essen. Every Sunday, ten thousand or more Germans make a pilgrimage to the island of Helgoland, which was the Gibraltar of Germany, and contemplate the two years' job of Allied engineers in blowing to smithereens the thirty million dollar fortifications and the finest submarine base ever built. I was taken over it all by a German ex-major who had lost one leg in the war. "Nothing could get near it!" he said with a sigh as we stood on a big gun-base filled in with

concrete.

That approximates the German's idea of it all. Nothing could get near them, but they were beaten. “We fought the whole world!" I have heard again and again. Their pride in everything they did is unconquerable. They feel that morally and spiritually, they won the war! Yet a common phrase I heard was, "When we lost the war," meaning materially.

In the Krupp plant I found a little space, possibly a few hundred feet square (in the five mile area) left for the manufacture of arms. The rest is devoted to the manufacture of a thousand engines of peace: plows and propellers, reapers and binders, washing-machines and cash-registers. The whole plant with its forty thousand men is working under full pressure in this new contest for commercial supremacy. What Germany does, she does thoroughly.

M

ORE than a few intelligent men and women, confused and bewildered by the difficulties of selecting from the roiled contemporary flood of art anything of enduring value or more than momentary vitality, turn in despair to man's artistic products that have withstood the terrible attrition of the ages.

This is, I suppose, a defensible attitude. One may say that all great thoughts have been thought and set down on paper, since there are, after all, only a few; that all the great music has been composed, all the great pictures painted, and all the great dreams of architects come to their realization in brick and stone.

Our time for grappling with the problems of life and for comprehending the beauty that art of any kind offers us is pathetically limited. At most, the span of an individual mind is inconceivably short, measured by man's stay on earth and his achieve ments during his mundane residence. Why not, then, some argue, take the easy way out of the situation and depend upon the sound judgment of time-make one's library exclusively of the small winnowings of the centuries, look only upon a dozen accepted and unquestioned masterpieces of painting and sculpture,

stand in awe before only a few ancient temples and cathedrals that have taught us what architecture can do to uplift the human spirit, and listen only to Beethoven?

This is the attitude of the academic mind, which turns aghast from the making of many books, most of them admittedly bad, from the painting of many pictures, most of them concededly inferior, and the composing of much music and the building of many buildings with little edification in either.

To understand and appreciate what is good among so much that is bad calls for time and effort; more, perhaps, than time and effort, for a certain elasticity of mind, and a willingness to suffer much for the keen joy of discovering now and again a gleam of the master spirit among the rubbish.

There are, however, a good many fallacies in the strictly academic attitude. First, it must be remembered that all old things were once new, and many of the best of the old things shocked their own ages. beyond words. And in due time, also, all new things become old, some of them dying in the process, others proving their immortality.

All that has come down to us from past ages was once a part of a

welter of the art of another period; the classics were once merely new books that some one had written, hailed with mingled cheers and groans, and so with pictures and statues and music. A single thought upon the history of these arts is sufficient to make the foregoing words seem almost too obvious.

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Let us suppose for a moment that the type of mind which refuses to allow itself contact with the art of its own age, had ruled every other age, that people of intelligence had always turned their backs on their own times and buried their noses in the past, would we have many of the classics which some of us cherish with such vehemence to-day?

Or do we not owe a deep and everlasting debt of gratitude to the open-minded of other ages who have not allowed themselves to become discouraged at the difficulty of discovering the little good among so much bad, and by the discovery, helping to pass along the good to those that come after?

And is there not a reasonable middle ground between the adoration of the little that bears the clearcut hall-mark of Time and the condemnation of everything of our own period, and the equally stupid adoration of everything of our own period and the condemnation or neglectof all our racial inheritance?

This is not to disparage the necessity for a sound knowledge of accepted masterpieces. The full and satisfying esthetic life cannot be lived without this knowledge. Where else are we to acquire standards except from an examination of this small store of pure gold smelted from

the millions of tons of crude ore by the slow processes of the suns?

And without standards, we are utterly lost. What else prevents us from thinking and even asserting dogmatically that the newest book off the press is the greatest of its kind ever written, that the newest sky-scraper is man's most magnificent architectural, achievement, that George Gershwin's "Concerto in F" is the first and the last word in orchestral compositions?

And having acquired these standards, we must keep them ready at hand by frequent reëxaminations. But who is there, once so equipped, that would not long for the great adventure of applying his standards -of trying to discover something to measure up to the ideal of the good, the true, the beautiful in what lies about him? Is this not the more admirable course, as well as the more delightful?

This is not to say that any one is to make a fetish out of novelty, or what appears to be novelty; let me make that point clear. To run after the new for the sake of its newness and not in the hope of discovering something in it worthy of becoming old, is stupid.

But to read, and to see, and to hear new things and to keep one's balance in their presence, closing neither mind nor eye nor ear against them because they are strange and as yet unindorsed by the pundits, is another matter. It would be a pessimist indeed who would dare try to maintain that any age even our scorned own-could not produce something worthy of examination.

Why is it not possible to discardor, at least, to modify—the shut

minded academic attitude of soulabasement before only that which other people tell us is good, but which may not happen to satisfy our own peculiar selves, a little different from any other selves, and dwelling, at least, in an environment unlike any others that have preceded it?

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If presented with the choice between looking at any one of the great cathedrals of Europe and a New York sky-scraper of the new period, most of us would choose the cathedral. And yet, I for one, have never looked at the Bush Terminal Building at night without being deeply moved, and without a feeling that there is beauty among us, not the beauty of Rheims, certainly, but stirring beauty nevertheless, and peculiarly our own.

I mention that building because it has long been a personal favorite; it belongs to a period in New York architecture earlier than many of the daring new structures that thrust tower and terrace skyward in soaring line, adapting to our own age what the classical architects-Gothic may become classic, I suppose, if one allows words sufficient flexibilitygave to the world.

I have sat for many hours before the masterpieces of Velásquez, so impressively gathered together in one large room of the Prado, and reveled in the work of a great master who always knew exactly what he wished to say with his color and design, and I have looked, too, upon the masterpieces of the Cretan whose mind was less definite and whose strange spirit often took his brushes away from him. And yet I have enjoyed many modern pictures; even

pictures so modern and so distinct a departure from the traditions of painting as Augustus Vincent Tack's abstraction, "The Voice of Many Waters" in Waters" in the Duncan Phillips Gallery in Washington. Here Mr. Tack has invaded the field once sacred to music, and how are we to know whether he has succeeded or failed? We can and do know that a fine craftsman has made an experiment. Shall we refuse to look at it because it violates tradition or because we are as yet uncertain of what time will have to say about it?

The point of this is that the academic mind would shut itself against anything painted after, let us say, the end of the eighteenth-certainly the end of the nineteenth-century. By that time the limits of the possibilities of the brush seemed to have been reached; the "perfect painter" had lived and died, and there were sufficient masterpieces to fill the galleries of a half-dozen countries.

And yet would not this obviously stupid attitude closely parallel the point of view that would deny attention to anything new, that would condemn with a sweeping generalization the literature of its own period as pap and swill, and the people who find satisfaction and nourishment in it as dishonest nincompoops?

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Not even the briefness of our time on earth can prevent us from dividing it between the recognized old and the interesting new. What after all is there to prevent the open-minded person from delighting in a very ancient piece of sculpture such as, let us say, "The Lady of Elche" of which Havelock Ellis has written so eloquently in "The Soul of Spain,"