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describing is but the bitter dregs of the whole dreadful cup. In a sense they are partly right; in another sense they are wholly wrong. True, it comes from the very depths of naturalism; the audacities of to-morrow spring from the depressions of yesterday; the fire of new affirmations has been struck from the coldness and hardness of negation. As these have given nerve to the passions of the Man in the Street, so to the dreams of poet and philosopher they have given substance and reality. In this mood, it is true, you will find all the discipline of naturalism: the direct gaze, the endurance of ideas, the hardness of spiritual fibre.

But you will also find something more, something not present in earlier realism, something that really marks its passing. In naturalism there is no place for this joyous acceptance of harshness, indelicacy, absurdity; still less for this sense of the extravagant mystery of things. In naturalism there is hardness, but not this splendid hardihood of soul. This is the new spirit that, like a breath from the unknown, has not only blown away the outlived sentiments of the past, but has dispersed the sultry clouds that had settled down upon naturalism itself.

But let me try to make my meaning clearer. Ibsen has said of a group of his compatriots, 'All these men had to fight their way to skepticism, and then to fight their skepticism.' Similarly, of those that have come after Ibsen, it may be said that all had to fight their way to naturalism, and then to fight their way through. Of the vicissitudes of that adventure we need not be told. Forward and backward they pressed, to the origins of life and the finalities of death. At the revelation of the lowly origin of all our modesties, of the precarious sanction of our nobilities and sublimities, they became sick at heart. But just as they had reached

the limits of thought and will, the first things and the last things, there came I know not what change over the spirit of their dreams. At least they were able to say with a new and unheardof audacity: What does it matter if intelligence questioning, truthful, bold - show us our instincts for what they have been, with all their harshness and indelicacy, if it also enable us to clarify our presentiments of the harmony and beauty which, despite their wanderings and illusions, they have never ceased to mean? what does it matter if both are in the infinite mystery of things? It is the translation of this revulsion of thought into the audacities of action and feeling that gives the key to the life and art of the present.

'Whatever we want to do, we must,' says Solness in Ibsen's Master Builder. This is the last word of naturalism. But the spirit that followed naturalism has a new word: What we really, at the bottom of our hearts, want, that we also choose; and in choosing it we shall find the truth of desire and the beauty that alone is intelligible. This, at least, is the inspiration of all those hardy poets and novelists who have ventured to tear the veil of illusion woven by our unconventional selves, and to show us, under its apparent truth, the deeper truth of that which we really will to be.

III

All this may seem somewhat remote from the breezy heroines, the moral and spiritual picaresques that challenge the taste of the present. But in truth, as one soon comes to see, it is the very heart of the matter, for taste is indeed the most metaphysical of all things. After the ebb of will there has come the flood-tide of willfulness, after the impasse of intellect, the struggle to break through. If, therefore, we find

something harsh and ridiculous in the disorderly vanguard of our modern taste, it is merely that we are hearing the tumult and the shouting of those who have fought their way through.

It is easy to deride the extremes of affirmation and negation, the extravagances and contradictions that characterize the modern mood; it is much more important that we should understand them. It is something at least that we are coming to know that they are the fruit of no casual motion, but have their roots deep in the vicissitudes of the spirit — that in them we may find the whole equivocal story of man's adventure with nature, the alternate heats and colds, the cosmic depression and cosmic elation, the hardness as well as hardihood of soul; and that all these have had their part in creating that tension of will, that springing back of instinct and emotion, that gives rise to the extravagances of the present. For if we have at times reached the limits of taste, it is, after all, because we have also reached the limits of thought and will. If, in all that concerns our feeling in matters of literature and art, we are inexorable in our demands for the impact of reality, it is because reality itself has not been sparing in the demands it has made upon us; and if, finally, we have at times a somewhat urgent sense of a new grace and beauty in the making, it is because there has also been forced upon us a revaluation of our ideas of the good and the

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the extravagances of the moment cannot wholly hide. One might almost believe that this is fully understood by us deep down in our hearts. For, after all, one cannot be extravagant without a persuasion, founded or unfounded, of the inexhaustible riches of the soul. If one does not risk harshness, indelicacy, and the ridiculous (still less the irrational, disorderly, and unpredictable), unless he believes them to be in the exuberant mystery of things, no more does one risk them unless this same mystery, so lightly and so hardily fronted, be also felt to contain, above them and beyond them, a world of inexhaustible values; unless indeed and this is, perhaps, the credo quia impossibile of the modern mood-we are at once absurd and full of sublimity, and most absurd when we are most concerned to render the real splendors that pervade us!'

In all this, it is true, there is scarcely complete justification for our audacities; but it is at least something to know that when, perhaps against our will, these purveyors of modernity, with all their absurdity, indelicacy, and harshness, succeed in putting us on their side, it is because the silent processes of the life and thought about us have already smoothed their way; to know that if, with them, we are willing to contemplate the possibility of truer virtues in men and women, a truer manliness and womanliness in volition that is without indirections, a deeper purity in revelation—that if, for example, to take one instance from many, we are persuaded that 'real justice is beautiful in Marco, real morality in Vanna, and real love in Prinzivalle,' it is because we have been compelled unconsciously to reconstruct our conceptions of reality and truth, because the same forces of life that have broken up the external and rigid categories of the intellect, have at the same time

fractured the conventions that incrust the soul.

It is even more to know that if we are sometimes over-reckless with the beauty that has been found tried and true, it is because we are aware of a still more intelligible beauty yet to come; if, for the moment, we appear too garrulous of life, it is only that we may suggest its deeper silences; if, for the time, life may seem to be made unlivable, it is only that we may make possible that deeper life that is already partially and unconsciously lived; to know, in fine, that if we have come to exult in all sublime risks of freedom, knowledge, and creative powers, it is because we have come to believe in a freedom that is really free, in a wisdom that knows no fear, and in that creative evolution that brings forth forever things that, in very truth, are 'new and all.'

It is this, at least, that gives us our sense of spiritual adventure. On the great divide between the past, into which we can no longer enter, and the future we have but vaguely begun to feel, we may for the moment stand distraught. An intolerable regret, a pitiful anxiety to stop the relentless action of intellect upon instinct, alternates with a mad desire to press on. Our 'anxious morality,' the trembling state, and religion the conserver and miser of all values, know not whether to go backward or forward. Art, the reliever of pain and enhancer of pleasure, from which the heart had wellnigh been taken, knows not whether to cling to romance and the distance of the centuries, or to glorify the brute, and creep nearer and nearer to him. Yet in all this disarray of sentiment and emotion, we know that the best is

yet to come. For, turning one way, we are aware of the sub-conscious and sub-human, of planes of experience and existence exuberant with an emotion still unspoiled by thought. Turning yet another way, we are conscious of still more imperious passions and admirations, luring us on to an intensification of thought and feeling that shall translate human experience into something superhuman and divine.

In any case, modern taste drives on toward the limits of thought and will. If there is raillery at those limits, there is also exhilaration. There at least the wind blows; there at least are the contentions of wind and sun. Novel sensations and emotions play about these boundaries, and like the north wind and the south wind they bear haunting suggestions of the remote fastnesses and impossible distances whence they come! There are in truth no distances like those of the interior life. The distances of space and time are parochial and homely, for we have made them; but the everreceding goals of the human will are unspeakable and inhuman, for these goals are not our own. To journey to the North Pole is a child's adventure, but to stand upon the outermost boundaries of knowledge, beyond the last human habitation, makes the strong man quake. To shrink from the abyss of space is a matter of the nerves, to recoil before the abysses of the soul is the true vertige des choses! To stand exultant on a peak in Darien, that is indeed a joy, but what is it compared with the joy of him who is led up into a high mountain where he may see all the kingdoms of the world within us, and of that world that is yet to be?

REST AT NOON

BY HERMANN HAGEDORN

Now with a recreated mind

Back to the world my way I find,

Fed by the hills one little hour,
By meadow-slope and beechen-bower,

Cedar serene, benignant larch,
Hoar mountains and the azure arch

Where dazzling vapors make vast sport
In God's profound and spacious court.

The universe played with me. Earth, Harped unto heaven, made tuneful mirth;

The clouds built castles for my pleasure,
And airy legions, without measure,

Flung, spindrift-wise, across the sky,
To thrill my heart once and to die.

I have held converse with large things;
For cherubim with cooling wings

Brushed me; the stars that hide by day Called through their latticed windows gay,

And clapped their hands: 'These veils uproll And see the comrades of your soul.'

The very flowers that ringed my bed
Their little 'God-be-with-you' said.

And every insect, bird, and bee
Brought cool cups from eternity.

GARDENS AND GARDENS

BY H. G. DWIGHT

Is it too ingenuous to imagine that anything can be left to say about a garden? Garden literature, descriptive, reminiscent, and technical, has blossomed so profusely among us during the last decade, that he should be an expert indeed who ventures to add thereto. Gardening is distinctly the fashion, and American gardens have already begun to form a school of their own. But literature in general is there to prove that, on a worthy subject, or one merely interesting to successive generations, too much, apparently, can never be said. Only ephemeral matters are over-written. And as a friend of gardens goes about the land he observes that, while they are a good deal the fashion, they are not nearly enough the fashion. They seem chiefly to be the fashion, that is, among possessors of many acres, or those who keep up at least two permanent homes. There are still many dwellers in great houses, however, who would ransack five continents to match a curtain and a carpet, but whose grounds show scarcely a trace of human intelligence; while to too many inhabitants of suburbs and villages a garden means no more than a cabbage-patch. Until such as these, therefore, are turned from the error of their way, until America ceases to be the most gardenless country in the world, too much. cannot be said about gardens.

Let no one conclude that I am about to break into a panegyric of the spade and the watering-pot, of weeding and early rising, and I know not what other

salutary exercises. These have been sufficiently celebrated. There is no need for me to mention them, save by way of insinuating how fractional a part of a garden they are. As for vegetables, I do not consider a plot of ground devoted to them worthy of the honorable name of garden. Vegetables are, of course, a part of gardening, but the least, the last, for those who do not have to raise them, the most dishonorable part.

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Even the culture of flowers is not the whole of a garden. It is a larger part than the preceding because it gives play to the rarer, the more trampled instincts of man, his sense of color, his feeling for beauty, his reaching out after something beyond the mere necessity of the instant, but the cultivation of flowers is only a rudimentary stage of a greater art; and happy are they who pass beyond it into the higher degrees of initiation.

Having said so much I may, perhaps, be expected, particularly by the outraged allies of the onion and the bean, to state in so many words what I conceive a garden to be. Not at all. I propose to make no such mistake. Has any one yet defined religion, or virtue, or love, or life? Only by experience may these, and gardens, be known, and by study of the great examples. Garden masterpieces are to be found. in almost every part of the world where travelers go. The Arabs, the Persians, and the Japanese, among remoter peoples, have in their several ways carried the art to great perfection,

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