Page 28 - 1911 November - To Dragma

TO DRAGMA OF ALPHA OMICRON PI 25

blight of smartness. To quote from an editorial in a recent copy of
Harper's Weekly—"Its facility is miraculous, it almost compels our
admiration by its conquering air. But the real matters of faithful
living, the real secrets of souls, the great truths of arts, will never
reveal themselves to smart thinkers, and cheap cynics. They are to
to be moved patiently, religiously, with subtlety, and with depth of
consciousness and reverent awe."

California has something like a literature of its own, with a kind
of emotional freedom, of warm and unsustained artistic impulse,
hitherto prevented elsewhere by an intensity of moral tradition from
which the atmosphere of the Pacific slope is free.

But great literature must be beyond depending upon local color
for its appeal, so that in the work you forget the environment of
its orator. I t is no easy matter to portray a country so enormous,
and a society so various, so that in the completed work, its nationalism
would be its key note. And yet it would seem that from a nation
whose spirit is so individual, might come a work so intensely human
that it would carry America's message to the world.

But as yet we have not a great American novel of social life.
Nor are we likely to have it until we have a public ready for i t —
barring of course the appearance of a genius, concerning whom there
can be no laws.

On whom then rests the responsibility of educating the popular
taste, and what means might legitimately be employed toward this
end. Mr. Parker places the responsibility upon the universities! To
me this seems somewhat exclusive. I n the several institutions I have
known about, the courses were adequate, the professors well grounded,
and the ideals high. Moreover, the multitude that raises the popular
voice seldom gets as far as the universities.

Granting that the colleges are partly responsible—to me it seems
to fall as well in three other quarters.

Upon the mothers who fail to oversee the reading of their young
people, when they might stimulate and guide them to the finer things,
with a resulting cessation of the complaint made by so many teach-
ers that a great deal of time in the high schools is diverted from
legitimate work, that they may teach their pupils mythology and folk
lore with which they should be perfectly familiar.

I would place it on the shoulders of the tired business man, who
prefers Rex Beach and the "Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum" by his
fireside to the novels of Herrick. or of Mrs. Wharton—who is con-
tent to spend many evenings at musical comedies or at vaudeville
performances, when he will wear the martyr's crown for weeks i f he