Puslapio vaizdai
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fairy-tales from the beginning of time have taught us the prince wears his rags as if they were purple. And, to do that, he not only must once have worn purple, but must never forget the purple that he has worn. And to the argument that all cannot wear purple, I can, as I say, only reply that that seems to me to be no reason why all should wear rags.

Until every one is too good to be a parlormaid, let us open our own doors, if we mustprovided we do it according to the great tradition of door-opening; but how can we do it according to the great tradition if we abolish parlor-maids and dry up the fount of the great tradition? And, whatever the simplifiers say, there is no doubt that, as yet, there are, to one person who is too good for door-opening, ten persons who are by no means good enough for it. I have never been able to imagine just how the sound of the Last Trump is going to shiver the aristocracy of earth into the democracy of Heaven. To be sure, it is not my affair. But at least one can have, this side the grave, little patience with the altruisms of the Procrusteans. They merely wish to make each of us an incompetent Jack-at-all-trades. And one had thought the German universities, if they had done nothing else, had blown that bubble!

A friend of mine asked me the other day if I did not feel degraded to be at the mercy of servants; humiliated by knowing that they

could perform domestic tasks better than I, and could take advantage of that fact. I confess it had never occurred to me. If my cook felt degraded by being unable to talk French, I should think her a silly snob. Are we not all, economically, at one another's mercy? Of what does enthusiastic living of the "simple" life make us independent, save of a few hardlearned and precious lessons of taste? The successful housewife is the one who has succeeded in imitating perfectly several trained. servants. But the criterion is still the trained servant. The distinguished beggar is the one who wears his rags as if they were purple. But, to appreciate him, we must know the look of purple rightly worn. The admirable vegetarian eats his shredded wheat as if it were caviare. But where would be the beauty of his performance were not someone, somewhere, eating caviare as if it were shredded wheat?

THE EXTIRPATION OF CULTURE

'T is odd how words recur. There has been

I

more talk about culture, among educated

people in America, during the last months, than there had been for years. To be sure, the culture discussed since August, 1914, has been German Kultur; but that does not matter. We have actually been talking about culture once more; rehabilitating it, if only for the sake of denying that the Germans, by and large, have a monopoly of anything so good. To some of us, this recurrence of a word so long tabu is welcome and as side-splittingly funny as it is welcome. For the fact is that for twenty years -ever since Matthew Arnold went out of fashion-to speak of culture has meant that one did not have it. The only people who have talked about it have been the people who have thought you could get it at Chautauquas. To use the word damned you in the eyes of the knowing. Now I have always, privately and humbly, thought it a pity that so good a word should go out of the best vocabularies; for when you lose an abstract term, you are very apt to lose the thing it stands for. Indeed, it has seemed only too clear that we were doing all in our power to lose both the word and the

thing. I fancy we ought to be grateful to the Germans for getting "culture" on to all the editorial pages of the country; though I admit it sometimes seems as if the Germans bore out the rule that only those people talk about it who have it not. I should really like to make a plea for the temporary reversal of the rule. Indeed, I think we are getting to a point where we are so little "cultured" that we can really afford to talk about it. When the plutocrat goes bankrupt, he may once more, with decency, mention the prices of things. Culture has ceased to be a passionate American preoccupation. Perhaps we shall not offend modesty if we use the word once more.

Now there are some who, believing that all is for the best in the best of possible worlds, and that to-morrow is necessarily better than to-day, may think that if culture is a good thing we shall infallibly be found to have more of it than we had a generation since; and that if we can be shown not to have more of it, it can be shown not to be worth seeking. Having, myself, a congenital case of agoraphobia, I habitually say nothing to the professional optimists in the public square. The wilderness is a good place to cry in; the echoes are magnificent. So I shall not attempt to deprive any one of Candide's happy conviction. If any person is kind enough to listen, I will simply ask him to contemplate a few facts with me.

No one will be too optimistic, I fancy, to grant that there are proportionally fewer Americans who care about culture-and who know the real thing when they see it-than there were one or two generations ago. Contact with "the best that has been thought and said in the world" is not desired by so large a proportion of the community as it was. That there are new and parvenu branches of learning, furiously followed, I, on my part, shall not attempt to deny. But culture is another matter. Perhaps the sociologists can show that this is a good thing. I do not ask any one to deplore anything. I only ask the well-disposed to examine the change that has come over the spirit of our American dream.

If I were asked to give, off hand, the causes of the gradual extirpation of culture among us, I should name the following:

1. The increased hold of the democratic fallacy on the public mind.

2. The influx of a racially and socially inferior population.

3. Materialism in all classes.

4. The idolatry of science.

Only one of these is purely intellectual; two might almost be called political. In point of fact, all four are interwoven.

I should be insultingly trite if I proceeded here to expound the fallacy of the historic statement that all men are born free and equal.

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