Evening star., 1933-09-10


his wife in haste that he is going into the
country for q few days and wouldn't she see
to it that the bathroom at last put IN
order.
Now, you may object that the correspond
ence between the arabesques of everyday HE
1000 years ago and that of today proves little
What matters, you may contend, is something
quite different, namely, the question OF whether
our greater wealth. our higher standard OF liv-
ing, have not altered our sense of life. You
may ask me to prove to you that the inward
expression, 50 to say, the inner state, OF man
of antiquity is as comprehensive to us as the
inwardness Of contemporaries. You may
ask me to prove that you and react TO the
same event. the same phenomenon, the same
situation, just some Caius or Quintus or
Curtius did 1000 years ago
To such a challenge I can only answer:
Yes, we can prove that respond to an iden-
tical situation with inner reaction identical
with that Of ancient man. / am SO convinced
Of this that at bottom I've put all Of my writ
ing on this basis for otherwise it would be
impossible to write historical novels according
to my method. stress in my historical novels
that which We have In common with the past,
and attach no weight to that which separates
from the earlier period.
know, Of course that his milieu Is i'm
portant component Of the human being and
that q human being cannot be torn out Of his
environment without material alteration OF hls
own outline. On the other hand I am firmly
convinced that essential part Of his selr
the most essential part, his subconscious, is not
touched by the milieu
How can we ascertain what the inwardness
of of a former period may have looked
like? We can test this In the directest way
by their works Of art and literature. The test.
then whether the men OF a given period felt
things as We do can be made by asceT-
tanning whether their art and literature is still
alive to whether it has only mu-
scum character.
THE average man Of today has a certain shy
ness about reading books of the great an
cient writer's. He esteems them very highly
He esteens Homer and Tacitus very highly, but
in fact he reads Edgar Wallace But if you
will really risk going into ancient books you
discover with pleased astonishment how few
of them are dead BY far the most of them
alive. These are our own feelings that
here speak to US: the subconecious in these
writings is our own subconscious. Whether the
destructive urge is stimulated, or the social m
stinct whether the poet appeals TO our sens1-
tivty toward the magical or to our matter-of-
fact sense Of reality; whether he invokes the
great elemental emotions minute subtle -four
shes of feeling born Of civilization; always
they are our very own feelings.
When Ulysses comes home after 10 years OF
adventure, a la Jack London, and when no one
recognizes him, not soul but the old watch
dog. then this incident affects US precisely as
it affected men 5000 years ago And when
Horace relates how he encounters an acquaint-
ance on the way, q bad writer, who at all odds
must read him his latest short story, and how
Horace, more desperate, hunts for ever
new excuses. in order to escape, then We grln
grinned the readers Of 1000 years ago
And when in Aristophanes, some one charged
with message for a dead man encounters
funeral procession and would give his message
to this dead man to have him convey it to the
other one and the dead man rises up suddenly
and says: "An right, I'll do it. but only for a
dime tip; then we understand Aristophanes
and his dead man precisely they were un-
derstood by the Athenians 1900 years ago
1 am convinced, then, as much as the dress,
the techniques, the science and certain external
conditions of life of civilized mankind have
changed in the last 1000 years just SO little
has been the change in their inward selves.
Now you may want to know why 1 chose
just the Roman Empire of 1000 years ago as
my starting point. and you will ask yourselves
and me whether I consider it profitable IN
any special sense to undertake a comparison
between ourselves and the men living then.
chose the eliminating period of Greco
Roman civilization for the following reason:
believe that the last essential change in the
Whlte mans soul took place when he evolved
from hunter and nomad into permanent
settler. The settlement, the large settlement,
above all, the large city, in which neighbor no
longer was acquainted with neghbor demands
in quite other degree than the hunter state or
the nomadic existence, that social instinct and
morals be cultivated with the utmost effort
else such settlements could not have maintained
themselves. This development reached a cn-
max in the urban civilization of the Roman
E1y,ni IoVa tIo~A ef,hi1 ,I.~&
been gained spiritually up to that point. Then
was clearly shown how the souls of white men
look when they no longer live nomadcally, but
close together and domiciled in large settle