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But the Shakspere of the future will also be the true Shakspere, a little richer with the passing of a century. There will still be a rumor that the poet made indiscreet love to a village girl much older than himself, and that he was arrested for stealing deer. The evidence will remain that he was a shrewd business man, and he may have lost his heart to Mary Fitton or some other person equally alluring and unworthy. The great dramas, "Macbeth" and "King Lear," will be out of the reach of such facts.

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TIRED MEMORY:-Why do people wish to take us back to the true Washington or the true Lincoln? The answer probably is that we grow tired carrying on the myth. It began in love, but it becomes a duty. Here are all these masterpieces to worship and to keep alive. God knows they are wonderful, but they are also numerous. We begin to think that this handing on of the torch takes too much of our attention. We think petulantly that we should like to start a tradition ourselves. When we feel this way, we are approaching the museum stage of art, the last act of piety before the religion dies. We gather the masterpieces in one spot to do them honor, but perhaps also to get them out of the way. We then avoid the places where they are; they become subjects of study and research, no longer our companions, our friends, our daily inspiration.

Or we evolve a philosophy of history to conceal from ourselves our own fatigue. We say that the traditional drama is exhausted, that the novel has come to an end, that

the short story has played itself out; and our conclusion is that the past and all its works may as well be dropped. The great advantage of getting rid of it, we feel, would be a new freedom for ourselves to expand and produce and express our hitherto burdened souls. Of course we do not reach this philosophy all at once; we sink to it through levels of fainting piety. We go through the stage of revivals; we say that an interest in Dickens has revived, or the reputation of Tennyson is coming up a little; we say it as though the poor struggling masterpieces were just keeping their heads above water; and for the sake of old times we do hope they won't drown. Perhaps we pass on to skepticism even in these revivals. We notice that though the masters go under and come up again, they rarely do so simultaneously. In music there has been a great Bach revival; we have managed to put the breath of life into him again. But while our back was turned, Mendelssohn fainted; we must now bring him to. When we have gone so far in our philosophy of history, the time is ripe for the most irritable person among us to tell the "truth" about these masters-how simple they really were, how inadequate to our great souls are their works! How out of date! How encumbering to our young wings! But when we talk like that, the fact is that our wings are not young, or perhaps we have no wings. It is not the masterpieces that are exhausted; it is ourselves. It is not our memory that has wearied; it is our love, from which the myth was born. We have ceased to create. When we are well disengaged from

allegiance to the old myth, we discover no power in us to start a new one. Out of harmony with the old world, we create nothing in our own. The first sign that our love is fading is that the myth becomes merely conservative; it no longer changes. A vital love would feel no obligation to preserve the point of view of the past. On the contrary, On the contrary, it would retell the old stories quite naturally to fit the later mood. When the critic of the myth says he would rather have the facts of his hero's life told frankly than preserve the hollow convention of his praise, he has confessed his own weakness; nobody wanted a hollow convention of praise. The convention becomes hollow only when our love has died.

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KILLING BY FORGETTING:-It is a terrible thought that the best things in this world depend upon our remembrance. We can annihilate them utterly by forgetting them. The best things, I say. I have in mind that the world into which any of us is born is rich and wholesome in proportion as it has much for the spirit to feed on. What a privilege it would be to open one's eyes first in a city like Florence, provided that one's mind also opened to the beauty which fills that marvelous place! But what the young soul would be aware of would depend largely on what its parents and neighbors remembered. Doubtless there are children in Florence to whom Michelangelo and Dante are nothing but names of streets; to whom the paintings in the churches are only a lure for tourists; to whom the spot where Savonarola died is only a special

pavement in a large square. To such children, though they are citizens of one of the richest spots on earth, Michelangelo, Savonarola, and Dante are not immortal; they are dead, and they perished not because of any feebleness in them or their works, but because some people who came after them let them die. If the man who buried his talent had to account for its inactivity, I wonder what would be done to us, in a scheme of infinite justice, for all the spiritual murders we commit, cutting off the immortality of great men because we were tired of remembering them.

Sometimes, when we feel our obligation to keep the great alive, we set up shrines to them, and shrines to them, and put memorial tablets on their houses or on the streets where they walked. This at least is better than writing the so-called truth about them, but the still higher obligation is to love them. So long as we really love them, the myth will survive of its own momentum, and it will take its own direction. So long as we really love the human masterpieces of their days, we grow in life as the myth expands.

Indeed what we kill by forgetting is, in the end, ourselves. We live from this spiritual environment supplied by all the myths, and we proceed from that environment to our proper future. The ancient men of faith, we are told, though they deserved everything good, yet did not receive the promise; a more excellent thing was reserved for us, that they, without us, might not be perfect. I don't know whether my interpretation would be indorsed by the doctors, but these great words are for me the explanation of all myths. The full greatness of Washington or

Lincoln, to which their work entitles them, is not possible unless we contribute to their memory the more excellent thing, our love, giving them at last a perfection they never had in life. Something God-like in us confers this perfection, and unless we can confer it, divinity is absent from us. Our instinct is correct, that all books which revise downward an ideal memory have in them the principle of defect and poverty.

Of course there will always be dispute whether they really do revise the myth downward. A fresh statement of the myth, vitalized by a great love, may seem sacrilegious to the feebler myth-conservers, who have ceased to be creative and hope merely to hold fast what they have inherited. Does the new statement of the myth take away the glamour, or does it add a new love? Time settles this dispute for us-time and this irresistible tendency of the myth to march on. Those who cannot march with it, drop by the wayside, spiritual corpses, casualties of a journey which overtaxes all but strong hearts.

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THE MORALS OF REMEMBRANCE: Since the myth-making faculty operates on all subject-matter, the skeptical might say that without the historians to check us up we should be lost in indiscriminate and too voluminous admirations. Part of the answer is that we instinctively choose among the many things of each moment only a few to remember. The chief work of our so-called memory seems to be forgetting; so much so that when every insignificant thing remains vivid to us, we suspect that our minds are unhealthy, or our

nerves are about to collapse. But there is an active choice for all of us, a morality in what we remember and what we forget. If we are responsible for the life or the death of great spiritual influences, we shall have to choose more and more as the centuries inherit more; we shall have to select among many good things the few supreme memories which are to influence the future. Why should this selection be entirely haphazard? We are supposed to be psychologists, all of us, or at least we are supposed to know the importance of psychology in every department of our experience. When we have mastered the sound principles of eugenics in the physical realm of life, no doubt we shall consider the psychological conditions into which souls ought to be born. We shall inquire what emotions should surround man when he comes upon this earth, what inspirations we should contrive for him in advance, what myths should to him be natural. The idea is fanciful, but it is implied in any dream of a civilization in which forethought and science are to have a share.

The most famous advice in the matter is the old admonition to think of the things which are honest, just, pure, lovely, and of good report. By implication we are to take our minds off other things. If our attention were confined to those aspects of history or biography which illustrate great virtues, then our myths would be automatic prolongations of those virtues into an ideal world, and that ideal world would be the natural inheritance of those who follow us. who follow us. There may seem to be some narrowness in the advice; we may fear that the exclusive con

templation of what is good and beautiful and true may develop a certain selfishness in us, a tendency to turn away from those of our fellows who are unhappy or unfortunate. But

the ancient admonition meant nothing so mean. In actual life we can hardly select our experiences, yet out of the unpleasant things we have to face we instinctively remember only those which have permanent meaning for us, and the dull or painful things die with their moment.

To think of all myths as a deception which nature plays upon us is to set up a fundamental antagonism between us and our minds. Just how we and our minds could be at such variance I cannot understand. I suspect the conflict is a matter only of words; and I believe that the sort of poetry which from time to time we dread, the universal tendency to praise the great men gone and to think better of them than they actually were, is in harmony with all of nature's ways of converting crude matter into magnificent effects.

It is the easier to believe this when we observe the results of the occasional attempt at a "true" portrait. The so-called truth makes its sensation of the hour, but afterward it is either neglected and forgotten, or, if it has caught our admiration, it becomes in turn the subject of a myth. It ceases to be a protest against the old legend, and becomes a branch of it. King Arthur, for example, was a great man. Those Those who remembered him first had theories of greatness which are not ours, and some of the early stories about him would now shock us. times admired him for his friendship with Lancelot. We still share that

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admiration, though we are a little surprised when King Arthur, in the old story, expresses his preference for Lancelot over Guinevere. "It is not for the Queen I am weeping," he said, when they told him of her unfaithfulness; "there are many beautiful women in the world, and if not one, I shall have another, but where can I find again such a friend as this man?" I am afraid this speech of his, once tragic, now seems

us comic. Later poets made Arthur so austere and so exalted in his mood that he seemed almost identical with God; he was perfection. Love of his character could certainly do no more for the myth than this. Yet some of those older stories about him, which once were thought not dignified enough, haunt our memory as portraits of splendid manhood, to be loved not less than the deified Arthur. These secondary accounts of him are offshoots of the main tree, but in time perhaps they may gain importance and become the center of the tradition. The important thing is that Arthur is still a vital character to us, still a subject of our spontaneous interest and love.

Music gives us a final illustration. We play Beethoven one way, and another man plays Beethoven his way, and a greater artist may play him a third way. If you come along and say you will show us the "true" Beethoven, I hope that means you will play him a fourth way. Don't tell us just what was the cause of Beethoven's deafness, or how clumsily he shaved himself, or how untidy his manuscripts looked. When we have loved our heroes into immortality, these foot-notes of time become irrelevant.

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MENCKEN'S MUSIC:-It is hardly more than half a dozen years since H. L. Mencken, his powers already well grown, was first observed to have taken a seat above the salt at the native literary table and to be holding it with a cheerful ease which promised that he would remain there while the feast lasted. The intervening years have put him at the head of the table or at least so near it that from any distance it is difficult to tell who else, if not Mr. Mencken, is presiding. What events or virtues have promoted him from chair to chair? Has a change of temper among Americans assisted him? Has he converted his countrymen, this rollicking Hammer of Non-Heretics? Have his light-hearted, iron-handed arguments prevailed? Is the civilized minority conspicuously larger than it was? Many observers of the phenomenon of his rise must have racked their brains over the delightful mystery, when a single season saw him not only guiding his pack in the "American Mercury" and swinging round the circle on a more or less political mission, but also putting forth his annual anthology of "Americana," a Fifth Series of his "Prejudices" (Knopf), and a deliberate treatise called, modestly, "Notes on Democracy" (Knopf).

What that season saw, or rather heard, was a burst of Mencken music. The image supplies a hint toward the solution of the mystery. The public events of the past halfdozen years are not by themselves enough to explain why the roaring critic should have been so generally accepted; look at the stubborn forces which actually administer the country. The arguments of Mr. Mencken are not enough explanation; his method in "Notes on Democracy" is only the method of his "Prejudices" employed on a larger scale. Knowing that democracy may be a stupid form of government, he falls hilariously upon it, as if aristocracies were not stupid too, and as if government everywhere did not seek its level, which is democracy, much as water does. Mr. Mencken's prejudices do his arguing. But they also make his music.

The music is what matters, and the music is the thing which has got him his hearing. Arguments do not spread so rapidly. After a period of natural resistance to him because of the vigor of his ideas, Americans found that they liked the sound of his censorious yet sonorous voice. Actually it was by no means so unfamiliar as they had at first thought, for it recalled several of the most

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