done more, poetically, had he been freer; but it is not so light a matter, when you have other grave claims on your powers, to submit voluntarily to the exhaustion of the best poetical production in a time like this. Goethe speaks somewhere of the endless matters on which he had employed himself, and says that with the labour he had given to them he might have produced half a dozen more good tragedies; but to produce these, he says, I must have been sehr zerrissen. It is only in the best poetical epochs (such as the Elizabethans) that you can descend into yourself and produce the best of your thought and feeling naturally, and without an overwhelming and in some degree morbid effort; for then all the people around you are more or less doing the same thing. It is natural, it is the bent of the time to do it; its being the bent of the time, indeed, is what makes the time a poetical one.

-Matthew Arnold

SONGS I SANG LONG AGO

Songs I sang long ago

I would forget; I do not know

Why I sang shrilly, frailly,

Crudely, harshly, poorly, palely.

But the little song I sang last night

Is the song of my delight,

Dearest of all the songs of men,

And will be-till I sing again!

-Marguerite Wilkinson

When poems ripen into form,
Let them be harvested by a storm;
Let a great gale blow them down.
You will not find them late or soon
In orchards where such fruit should be,
But globes of amber out of the sea
Flung by the spinning black typhoon:
Apples of uncertainty:

An island pomegranate laced with brown:
A nectarine like a cloven moon.

-Grace Hazard Conkling

Art is a disciplining of some excitement of the mind. It is a strong excitement in perfect control. It should be an excitement about some permanent element in life. It demands an eagerness of mind, and a balance or steadiness of nature.

Beyond this it is difficult to go; except to say that it is an exacting thing, like athletics, and demands good bodily trim. The body is the machine by which the mind has to work. The artist works better when he is in good condition. Some strange and very beautiful art has been made by men suffering from disease; but the best art is the work of superb health of mind and body; it is the happy and healthy exercise of mental power.

-John Masefield

A CONVERSATION

The scene is Elysium. Fields of asphodel surround a spacious amphitheatre. Two persons are discovered standing on the steps, engaged in talk. One of them, an elderly gentleman of agreeable aspect and with a reedy voice, is clothed in a chiton. The other, a tall, handsome swarthy shade, wearing a suit of cinque-cento richness and elaborate gems, is a man of forty-three. The old Greek is called Plato, the middle-aged Florentine, Lorenzo, surnamed the Magnificent.

LORENZO: The most anarchic days in Florence hold no candle to the state of affairs down here. Per bacco! what we need is a tyrant, who could at least order a festival decently. They are forever wanting to celebrate the arrival of heroes newly dead, and all the talent in Hades is wasted for want of a leading spirit.

PLATO: Do these festivals really seem to you of so much importance? I had thought that having once met face to face, I could persuade you that what matters is not the life of art, but the art of life.

LORENZO: That's all very well for one who has never been coffined. But after we have once tasted the subterrene air we must admit that it is only art that endures past the grave itself. They tell me that more people have come to look at my tomb than ever studied you in the palace of the Medicis!

(Enter a third party-a rugged-faced ghost in a sack suit, with an old tam pulled over one ear and a musical score sticking out of one pocket.)

LORENZO (hailing him): Hallo there, friend-Ricardo, is it?

WAGNER (for it is indeed he, turning about and inspecting Lorenzo gravely): Richard Wagner, if you please.

Not that names matter very much down here: we are all dead together. And yet (he pauses a moment, lost in an old revery)-I have sometimes thought I could wake the departed to life if I could only find the right myth for a new music-drama. A myth as old as those of your Hellenes (he glances toward Plato) and still vivid with a sense of all we have learned since Jupiter and Jehovah surrendered to the Immanent Will whereof Schopenhauer wrote.

LORENZO: What barbarians you Germans are! No offense, of course. But I can't help thinking how few of you understand what our good Pico so eloquently taught— that in Christian Platonism theology and philosophy embrace like lovers. (To Plato): Isn't that true, my friend?

PLATO (gently putting this question aside for that which really interests him): I died before the Christ myth was born, but I understand that it produced longer wars than did the rape of Helen. What troubles me in this musician's talk is that he seems to think that the poet's business is with things untrue, and with evil things, like the quarrels of the gods.

WAGNER: No-oh, no. You mistake me. We must recreate the myth, which is fundamentally truer than any history, so that it will rouse a sense of wonder, an assenting emotion, as valid as anything felt by you Greeks before an Aeschylean tragedy, but richer by all the emotional values growing out of the new industrial and social order. But all this is only a dream. There is no public among us capable of responding to such an emotional stimulus. We are too separate for any such new and holy catharsis.

LORENZO: It is not the public that is wanting here. As

I was about to remark to Plato-Elysium is as unendurable as Milan or Naples because there is no one to manage things in an orderly fashion. If only we had such a patron as my grandfather, Cosimo, was in his day, and, in all modesty, as I tried to be in my own.

WAGNER: A patron, do you say? What good is a patron without a public? Even Ludwig of Bavaria, blessed be his memory, couldn't build the theatre for my musicdramas without the help of all the other "Wagnerians," from Cairo to St. Petersburg. Besides, the proper patron, as I discovered so late in life, is a king. A king is surrounded by a court. A court is a nest of intrigue, conspiracy, cabal. . . . Ach! if one could but achieve a republic of artists, governed by a tyrant

LORENZO (interrupting triumphantly): Florence! Florence under the Medicis! Didn't I say so!

PLATO: A republic governed by a tyrant? A republic of artists! What curious notions! Why, these artists would be so busy with their lutes and their pretty lies that they would never give a thought to virtue. Nor would they ever propagate. Their State would perish for want of citizens within two generations.

WAGNER (impatiently reverting to the question that chiefly agitates him): But how shall the artist be enabled to do his work? He can't depend on the mob. They don't want to hear him. He has too much on his shoulders: he must build not merely his own creations-and what a terrific task that is, you are better off not knowing-he must build up his very audience! A man must be more than a genius to go on under such conditions as that.

LORENZO: You are right. And yet, what a thing it is to