We have applied Kultur to money-getting. In doing it we were copying Germany. It was Germany that discovered the modern world and no one was at fault for the War. Its cause was cosmic; biological, an impulse of world-growth not to be turned aside. Cosmic impulses lift nations like waves, hurl them against other nations, lightly as helpless fish, and tangled sea-weeds, shells, in season of tides and storms. It was merely a mighty migration of peoples. It was dumb forces turning over races, with results we can not know.
The world felt the cataclysm coming. This is proven by the many writing nervously about spirit of the times. The increase, too, in knowledge, wealth, material power, knowledge poured into the human mind too swiftly and in quantities too great for assimilation. Lack of balance resulted. There was top-heavy overturning. Re-adjustments had to be made too soon. A different basis of morals became effective without being recognized in mind. Things merely fine began to be looked down upon as superfluities. The changing moral self began to wear a new garment, which was ill-fitting.
De Hoc—Cubism of the Spirit.
I trust there will not be silence eternal when the Troubadours are no more.
In reading many years in many languages, merely for pleasure, a peculiar unmentioned fact has come to notice. Most creative artists in whom imagination plays predominant part, (writers, musicians, painters), are born in the months of the fall and winter. It is true of all ages and nations. To prove conclusively the statement would be to fill pages with lists of names.
This occurred to me when I was studying Russian, reading Russian poets. There the list born in fall and winter is astonishing: Chemnitzer, Kapnist, Neledinski-Meletzki, Karamsin, Krylov, Schukowski, Ryleiev, Griboiedow, Baratinsky, Kolzow, Lermontov, Countess Rostoptchchin, Tjutchew, Benedikkow, Schevtschenko, Nikitin, Nekrassow, Turgenev, Aksakow, Pleschtschejow, Polonsky, Minajew. To be sure the greatest Russian writers are the exception that prove the rule, Puschkin and Gogol. In other countries I recall just at this moment, Rimbaud, Racine, Heine, Poe, Alexander Petofi, the fluent lyric poet of the Magyar race, Bobby Burns, Cervantes, Milton, André Chenier, Flaubert, Kolomon Mikszáth, the Hungarian of ironical fantastic prose and José Asuncion Silvá and Blanco-Fombona, born in grey November. Unexplored scientific fact underlies this. January and December claim those of maddest mind. And March has been the birth month of the greatest number of murderers.
The more I read Goethe the more conscious I am of the depth of untapped power he held in reserve. He was never written out.
Today the period of a writer’s productivity is brief. Life saps him. Its interests are too complex. Kipling has been written out for years. I could name others. Goethe was last of the great. After him there are no monumental figures.
He worked, off and on, at his Faust for sixty years. The general reading public has no comprehension of what a unique, powerful, creation of the mind that is, nor what unplumbed depth is in it. Byron, in his Manfred, had it in mind. Manfred is a copy. So is the Russian Lermontov’s Demon, which is superior, considered as poetry, to Manfred.