It might be found, perhaps:
The joke's on someone!
OLDHAM
There's no joke in it!
It is the waste, the pitiful waste of life!
Men—slaves to gather gold—become then slaves
Beneath its gathered weight. For this one hope,
All finer longings perish at their birth.
Men's eyes to-day envy no sage or seer
Or conqueror except his triumphs be
In this base sphere of commerce. The stars go out
In factory smoke; the spirit wanes and pales
In poisoned air of greed. It is an age
Of traders and of tricksters; all the high
And hounded malefactors of great wealth
Differ from the masses, in their wealth, indeed;
But in their malefaction, not at all.
Your grocer and my butcher have at heart
The selfsame aims as he to whom we pay
Tribute for every pound of coal we burn.
Their scope is narrower, but their act the same
As his—against whose millions all the tongues
Of little tricksters in each corner store
Babble and rail and shriek!
FAUST
Almost you do
Persuade me to turn humorist on the spot!
Was ever, since Gargantua, such a vine
Heavy with bursting clusters of the grape
Of humor?
OLDHAM
Of corruption! You may laugh;
But there's in all your laughter hardly more
Mirth than in my upbraidings. Ah, I grow
So weary of this low-horizoned scene,
Our generation; I am always drawn
In thought toward that great noon of human life
When in the streets of Florence walked the powers
And princes of the earth—Politian, Pico,
Angelo, Leonardo, Botticelli—
And a half-hundred more of starry-eyed
Sons of the morning, in whose hearts the god
Struggled unceasing. Ah, those lucent brains,
Those bright imaginations, those keen souls,
Arrowy toward each target where truth's gold
Glimmered, or beauty's! Those were days indeed;
We shall not look upon their like again.
FAUST
I am not sure.
OLDHAM