Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1913-08-23
AISCHROLATREIA.
BY DIR. FRANK CRANE.
Copyright. 1913. by Frank Crane,

Aischroatreia is q word used BY
Frederic Harrison. and his definition OF
1t is 1.-THE worship OF the ugly, the nasty
and the brutal"
The human soul has its laws as fixed
as the laws OF the human body. Feed
the body enough alcohol and you will
get delirium tremens Feed the soul
enough sensual emotion and cultivate 1t
with introspection and you get aischrola-
treia.
egotism is poison.
The best part of life is feeling. but il
is always the best things that are most
liable to excess. Beyond a certain point
enthusiasm becomes madness, love be-
comes perversion. and the taste for
beauty becomes the taste for the hid
eouS
Even in religious emotion this is true
AS Charles H. Sturgeon said. Excessive
spirituality is akin to sensuaiity."
The antidote to toxic emotion is work
accomplishment. activity. Where one
has no task, no pressure of duty, the
soul rots. 1t is the idle class that is the
dangerous class, because having no
work the soul gives itself over to the
search for new sensations. This is as
bad as taking opium, cocaine or whisky.
The nrSt buds of passion I'm the soul
are the most exquisitely beautiful of all
human experience. Give yourself over TO
the pursuit Of passion, however, and
your end will be the most horrible tor
ture conceivable.
Cubism and futurism in art are the re-
suits of unrestrained love of beauty:
they are that hideousness into which
egoistic emotional drunkenness leads.
After awhile the art drunkard finds no
satisfaction in the simplicities of ma
ture: nothing but the distorted can
arouse him. just as after awhile the VIC
tim of alcoholism has no taste for beer
or honest wine, but must have absinthe,
mescal or vodka
1t was because of the cumulative dam
ger of pleasure. when followed solely.
that the Puritans sought to prohibit it,
But the master word of morality is not
prohibition: 1t is self-control Life needs
love. beauty, laughter and its measure
OF rational inebriation. Without these
the soul hardens Yet with these and
without self-control, the soul fevers and
decays.
The law Of life is not Never 1t 10
Of Socrates.
good example of the ruin of over
emotionalism is found in the poet Bau-
delaire. He gave himself up to feeling
and to analyzing the emotions of his in
ner life. Typical of his philosophy are
these words from one Of his prose-
poems:
'One' must ever be drunken. Every
thing is in that; it is the only question.
In order not to feel the horrible burden
of time that is breaking your shoulders.
bending you earthwards, you must be
ceaselessly drunken.
But with what? With wine. poetry
or virtue, as you wfll-only intoxicate
yourself: and If sometimes, ON the steps
of palace, on the greensward of a
grave, or in the mournful solitude OF
your room. you wake to find the intoxi-
cation diminished or vanished. ask of the
wind, or the wave, or the star, or the
bird or the clock ask what
time it is, and the wind wave, star bird
and clock will tell you: 1T is time 10 be
drunken Lest you should De the mar
tyred slaves of Time, be ceaselessly
drunken. With wine. poetry or virtue. as
you will
The. life of Baudelaire went out I'm the
impotence of despair, the agony of self
torture. His beauty worship finished in
aischrolatreia. His sterile genius left
nothing to mankind.
Compare his sentiment with that OF
another man who gave as his life
motive: II must work the works OF him
that sent me, while it is day; for the
night cometh when no man can work.
The life of this man has been foun-
tain of inexhausted passion for thou
sand years.