The Birmingham age-herald., 1919-07-20


 i, one part of the country than are the [ Arabs of the desert who. when the mo-
 tion strikes them, strike their tens, and
 in the language of the peot, silently i steal away to another part of the coun- try. The great state of Texas was not peopled by immigrants from Europe, ! but by citizens of the other states of ! the union who cared as little for tear i ing away from their former moorings, 1 from the place:
 Where the flowers of memory twin ! ed in affection.
 Retain every smile, every nod that they bore,
 When they blossomed at first on a 1 fond recollection,
 And breathe the same incense they
 breathed as of yore,"
 ] as the nomad of the desert who moves from one water hole to another. The doctor bemoans the decadence of art generally, and the meagre evidences of inclination thereto in the United States; | but may he not stop a movement to con | slider of the art of a nomadic people? | Are certain conditions observed by him ! in the United States. other than those which ought to obtain among a highly 1 enlightened nomadic people. Few have | lived long enough in one district to permit of the development of idealistic or artistic temperaments; but all being great money-makers and being able to gratify their artistic tastes or af- fectations. the price is told down, and the sphinx itself would find a buyer in stanter it arrived on the shores of Am erica. We simply have not the time to devote to the production of these works of art, but will buy them at any price.
 IT" quite and repose of a long-fix ed habitation with never a thought of leaving it, are essential to the develop ment of the ideal and of the artistic in man. and it may require generations to produce one single artist whether in literature, architecture, sculpture. painting or music. and nothing is to be expected in this country until the fires of nomadism shall have been burned out. There is more than mere rhyme in the lines
 "Breathes there the man with soul
 so dead,
 Who never to himself hath said.
 This is my own, my native land"
 The man who is not so bound to any country. state, city, town or village is
 likely to shake off all bonds which rest In the affections of the heart, and this same nomadism has weakened the bonds upon which the poets dilate, between the master and the servant; the husband and the wife; parent and child-and, be
  coming rather a thin soul potation. The doctor might have gone deeper into these matters to his great credit, but he was either in eSeat haste to produce some- what at the earliest possible moment or his innate Latin tenderness and re- finement of feeling for others have got ten the better of his abilities. History discovers nothing of a national of a epochal importance which was not born of what we call belief in some thing Homer believed his own marvel lous tales, and without that belief he could never have set them down. Milton is not purely imaginative. nor is Dante; belief, a strong belief, worked in them tor expression. The sculptures of my thology, and it's great circumstantial temples; the great churches and cathed- dals of Christianity. built as fitting places In which to receive the prophet upon the occasion of his second coming, are all ex- pressions of belief; and the crusades were eloquent of belief, and of the sense of tegradation ever present with believers that the holy sepulchre should be in the hands of the infdel on that great oc- casion The absurdity or vanity of the belief signifies nothing, it constituted the spring of action of which the work of art Is the monument. The doctor need not sigh 70 tempora; O mores;' no time brings down to us charter of infalli- y, cadence of a belief which has produced the very noblest works of art, should we not address ourselves to the formulation | of a belief which. being the inspiration of the future. shall produce even greater 1 works of art than any that have come | down to us.
 In literature, in temple building. in sculpture in painting. in music. man has, | during the past 2500 years or thereabout 1 fchiefly during the past 1900 years), de- | voted his dearest energies to what he IS | pleased to dominate the divine worship
 of sorrow" but science, and the vast | achievements of one Jack Horner, who | sat in his corner eating his Christmas | pie. and who put in his thumb and pulled out a plum, saying, What smart boy am l." are about to cure him of his l melancholy mental condition, and signing 1 and grief that blow a man up like a 1 bladder are to be forgotten amid the 1 exuberance of mere animal spirits. ECO monies and gastronomics are the order Of the day, and all former knowledge and notions are being absorbed or swallowed up in the vortex or vortices of trade, traf- lie and profit and loss, and music and money alone are left: No other sources l of distinction exist in a republic save those which rest in wealth, which is dis posed to declare itself through the pos session of those things which money can
 
 has no terrors for the plutonist df I may borrow term for the occason). There
 Is nothing sacred about that from which the soul of inspiration has fled: con-
 sciousness of the fact that the inspira
 ton is dead but raising the value of the
 work of art as a mere commodity on the
 market. In a republic like ours men
 do not plume themselves on the street
 corners with outward evidences of inward
 graces (except, of course, some few strag' gling laborers in the vineyard; nor dc
 they court the favor of the people lex
 cept, of course, some few struggling pa triots); nor do they pretend to other in spiration than that which is of the chinl of gold or silver; and the doctor ought rot to take it so seriously that the wall: of our new Jerusalem are built so higf as to throw the streets of the cities intf perpetual shade, for the voice of utility vibrates and revibrates throughout thu length and breadth, and the height there !, of. the which, to the ear of science is ) music. Let the good doctor look abou T him upon the full tide of human life ir which he lives, and note the decadenct of inspiration, and he will be reconciled