In New York the mean is sacrificed. There is nothing that is good. It is best or else it is worst. The people live, breathe, and have their being in superlatives. We have become a poster art, where everything is black or white. Intermediary shading disappears. Values are not considered. Distinctions are lost. In such a multitude, mind, manners, levels, disappear. Compilation takes place of life.
We pose as the world’s Wunderkind. We are looked over, called l’enfant terrible, while we throw bouquets, dollars at them and waste champagne we ought to save. The doings of this self-conscious Wunderkind occupy the front elevation of illustrated papers.
Other cities permit you to be yourself. New York does not. It begins to set seal upon you. It makes changes in body, in mind. Its distances, its streets, its miles of gallery floors, exhaust the flesh. Its emotional appeal is great. After weariness has done wrong to body, brain, it dulls with superfluity. Buildings of excessive size stun instead of stimulate. They who endure it, survive, become of a separate race; a highly specialized race. They are deformed like athletes who manned the triremes of Caesar. It is a city without national stamp of any people. It is made, to wonder at.
It is so huge the individual is inconsequential. He feels this. It reacts upon him. He loses hope. A less fine pride envelopes him. Cabbages of course grow largest in gardens. There is no other city where money, its power, is so worshipped. There is no other, where life is discounted, where the young so speedily become the old. There is no other place where life just as life, counts so little. Here labor loses dignity, because it is looked down upon. It becomes ignoble. It slips back too soon to that thing called servitude. Visions of useless, unearned wealth breed discontent. Into the port of New York the splendors of the world are poured. Superlatives are standards: highest buildings, the largest shops, greatest park, the most expensive houses. Taste, discrimination, weaken.
Races, religions are poured together like left-overs from a boardinghouse table, to make soup for beggars. Honor is lessened. The premium is so high man cannot buy. Even if man has not honor, he must have meat. Honor is old-fashioned, a rag. Before the eyes that see, minds that judge, merit is nothing; system everything. In his palmiest days Louis the Fourteenth was not acclaimed as New York, city of democratic America, acclaims the dollar, and only what the dollar buys.
I can not read Romain Rolland, Claudel, nor O. Henry. If I had to be punished with one of the three I think I should choose Rolland.
It is too bad that in the letters of Seneca, in which he mentions Pompeii, he does not describe the city. He saw it in its heydey. What a picture he could draw! Not one single glimpse can I get from his letters, however I search. What a Rome it was that had passed in long, glittering pageant before his eyes! He is old, weary of life, as he writes. He tries to prop himself up with stoic mind. Like the majority of thinkers, he learned poverty is best. He declares a life of continued prosperity is a Dead Sea. Lao Tzu on one side of the globe, the Roman thinker on the other declare: He is not poor who has little, but he who desires much.
Again Seneca writes: Riches keep you from wisdom. But poverty is free and without care. The Latin letters of Seneca, and Cicero, have given me a kind of courage I can not procure elsewhere. Cicero is master stylist. There are climaxes in the orations not to be surpassed. I have liked the winged, broad visioned, eagle-mind that contemplated old age in De Senectute.
There will be no more essays like De Amicitia, because friendship does not exist. It perished with the toga virilis, the muscular manhood of Rome. Powerful dramatic anger is gone. And glittering, sword-swinging satire! Where is a Firdusi to write against Sultan Mahmoud? Small, base, worm-like, eating envies crawl in, in place of kings. Not the noble, fearless lion, but the crawling lizard keeps assuredly today the palaces where Mahmoud gloried.
Greek and Latin are out of fashion. However, I do not know of many things of which I should be so proud, as to be called, Greek Scholar. And then merit the name.