“Well, since you will have it I will tell you. You are a great and surprising people. I mean great in the sense of numbers, however, for great, politically and morally, you can never be again. You appear to have attained a certain order of perfection which, however, is only relative. You think you have solved all the great problems; but you have only begun to solve them. In attempting to make the people happy by insuring equality of goods and equal division of property, you have found it necessary to stultify ambition and to kill aspiration. Therefore a healthy, vigorous morale has ceased to exist. In making leisure a law you have robbed it of its sweetness. Ennui is the curse of the land. The arts languish, because the arts depend on the imagination, and imagination has been declared illegal, since all are not born with it. Your libraries and museums are open, but who sees them filled with readers and students? In other words, man having been born heir to all things, has ceased to value them. And so I leave you, well content to go back to my barbaric Sweden, where the forms of political government are so bad that men wrestle like gods to remedy them, and where men themselves are still born so unequal that they have to fight like demons to live at all. We are still chaotic, and unformed, and unredeemed, and unregenerate. But we are tremendously alive. And so I return with eager joy to take my part in the strife, to be a man, in other words, and not a part of a colossal machine. Why not go back with me? It will be a great experience, you would go back at least two hundred years.”
She sighed and murmured: “We are not allowed to travel. It is forbidden. It breeds dissatisfaction. But I wish we were. It sounds so very beautiful and strange.” And so I left her, as I must you, for my letter is a volume. In a few days I shall be telling you all I can not write. Adieu,
Yours,
Wolfgang.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Archaic spelling which may have been in use at the time of publication has been retained.