WAR AND ART
THIS war is going to have a tremendous in- fluence on Art — vitalize it, you know, and make it REAL, and all that sort of thing. In fact, it's doing it already. We took up the war last night — our Little Group of Serious Thinkers, you know — in quite a serious way and considered it thoroughly in all its aspects and we decided that it would put more SOUL into Art.
And into life, too, you know.
Already you can see it on every hand how much serious purpose it is putting into lives that were merely trivial before. Even poor, dear Mamma — and really, it would be hard to imagine a more trivial person than Mamma! — is knitting socks.
She is going to send them to the Poles. She wanted to send them to the Belgians.
But I said to her, "Positively, Mamma, you are
ALWAYS behind the times. Don't you know the
Belgians are going out and the Poles are coming in?"
And, you know, it's been months since really Smart People have knit for the Belgians. The Poles are QUITE the thing now.
It's strange how great movements keep going on and on from mountain peak to mountain peak of usefulness like that, isn't it? — changing their direction now and then as evolution itself does, but always progressing, progressing!
That is one wonderful thing about evolution — it
ALWAYS progresses.
When one thinks it over, one grows more and more conscious that the human race owes a great deal to Evolution, doesn't one?