The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-06-10

From the New York Post.
 HAGANISM stands in need of clear D definition. When a baccalaureate J orator, the other day, applied the term pagan to Maeterlinck, D 'Annunzio' Hauptmann, Ibsen and Shaw, he oovious- ly brought together birds of different feather. Few people at first sight would deny the justice of the description as applied to the Italian, the Enghshniah and the Norseman. But they would tahe execution to MaeterlinclS whose spirit ana interests are not strilSingly anti-Christian. And they would object to Haupthah'i' ,,hosa career has been consistently one of service to the cause of beauty, no matter into what mystical Vagarles he has latterly fallen Neither in Maeter- lincl< nor Hauptmann can we ma that vigorous and intentional antagonism to established standards of ethics, soclal ille and religious faith which the other three men have manifested, with decency oy Ibsen and Shaw, with license by DAn- nunzio. At bottom none of these fVe men are pagans. and neither other peo- ple's calling them that or their own call 
 Take the entire class of "modernists' Tn contemporary literature and the drama and whatever else they are, they are no, Creeks or Romans. They may De poor Christians. but they are still poorer pag- ans.
 Three radical differences Tn character and temperament mark off the people or the classic world from the representa- lives of the modern spirit. The mod erns are primarily and deiantly individ- uallstic. and the ancients were not. lb- sen and Shaw and Wells and Annunzio are enormously self-conscious, and the ancients were not. Finally, the pagans were very good fighters, whereas ShaW and Wells and the other first appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, are not. After cutting loose from conventional re- licion conventional ethics, and conven- tional social arrangements, the modern ists may formulate a system of their own. but they will find no model for their new institutions either at Athens or al Rome. Neither Solon nor Plato nor the Roman system knew anything of the sacred rights of the individual which Nietzsche, Ibsen and Shaw have TOT their main fulcrum to topple over society. Wheh these men assert the right of the person
 Q live his own life in defiance of worn- ont Christian ecclesiasticism or Chris tian system of ethics and family organ ization. they are warning against the great influence which first turned the center of human interest from the state
 -...x |. to the individual It Is quite certain that C. B. s. would nver have enjoyed the liberty of speech or action under the Creek or Roman republics that he enjoys under Mrs. Grundy and George V.
 The old pagans were not self-conscious. They were not always looking at their tongues in a mirror and feeling their pulse. They were not aware of their own bodies to the painful extent to which the modernists have carried their antipathy for clothes. They did not go about eter- nally fussing about the conflict between duty and beauty. Somehow they man aged to keep the two in harmony, or, if they did not they did 1t with me inno- cence They knew little of the parasltic theory of art from which MT. Shaw mas 1t so difficult to get away That is they did not thing it essential that In order to create beauty, a man must be scala wag. dipsomaniac,. and law unto him- self Plato, to be sure, was aware or the vagaries of the poet. and had ms doubts about his qualifications Tor citi- zenship. But Platos remedy was not 10 ctr topsy -turvy, but to keep poets out of his republic In general these old pagans did not go about as D Annunzio does. saying to themseiVes' | "Go to. I will create beauty; cannot subscribe to the accepted laws Of honor, because I must create beauty. cannot and need not pay my debts or hold to my contracts, because I must create beauty They created beauty as part of the normal days work and without theo- rlzng overmuch about it. Today we