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the natives of the old European countries how much more efficiently we do by modern invention what they do by manual labor. Then why shall we call aloud to stop them when they follow where we lead? Very few of the inventions of to-day have the charm and poetry of their predecessors. The modern department-store has certainly not the quality of the old guild shops. The modern electric locomotive has not the romance of the steam locomotive. The mechanical loom lacks all the poetry of the old spinning wheel. Yet we proclaim all these changed tools as marks of progress; we shout aloud their greater efficiency. Why ask the Dutch miller to put cotton in his ears so that he may not hear our boastful cries? Is the demolition of his windmill a greater sacrilege than the demolition of beautiful old landmarks in our American cities? Suppose a cry came from the Netherlands to halt our tearing-down of the fine old Dutch houses to make room for skyscrapers or warehouses. We should be the first to ask: 'What business is it of theirs?' Well, what business is it of ours if the Dutch miller wants to live in the present and operate his mill by electricity instead of holding on to his windmill of the past, watching his business fall behind, while his competitor pushes a button at his will and grinds his cereals?

IV

There is a distinctly humorous angle to this memorial that did not seem apparent to the dear, delightful ladies who signed it. This is that the request is made that 'the Government of the Netherlands shall be petitioned to prohibit a miller from discarding his windmill' - the very brand of Federal interference with private business which in the United States we are so strenuously decrying, and which is

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so often and so vociferously argued in women's clubs. Small wonder, then, that a prominent man of affairs in the Netherlands puts his tongue in his cheek and writes: 'Can you blame us if this suggested prohibition, coming from the United States, makes us smile? It sounds a little queer coming from a country whose President recently pleaded so eloquently for "less Government in business, and more business in Government.

The most distinctly humorous phase of the memorial was also overlooked by this group of 'representative American women.' It is signed by the wives of the three largest makers of American machinery who sold their engines to the Dutch millers who have dismantled their windmills! Thus we have the picture of three women having their artistic perceptions outraged while traveling on the very money made by their husbands in the objectionable transition!

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The memorial goes further and likewise deplores the abolishment of the horse- or man-towed canal-boat in the Dutch canals, and the substitution of a 'kicker' in the bowels of the scow. 'A perfect shame!' declare these ladies. This, too, must be stopped. But how about the kicker that the American canal-boat owner is putting into his vessel? Is it any less of 'a shame'? The wide use of the kicker as a motive power is not European it is American. We have shown the way. Only temporarily has the day been put off when a kicker will take the place of the picturesque gondoliers in the gondolas on the Grand Canal at Venice. 'Now that is a sacrilege!' cries Mrs. America, her voice full of emotion. Is it any more sacrilegious than for us to wipe out the most gloriously beautiful thing ever seen on the water, a sailing vessel in full sail, and substitute the hideous barge. or mercantile carrier? Are we to have a monopoly of wiping out the

picturesqueness of the past, and insist that European peoples shall preserve it, to their material disadvantage?

If we so madly clamor for this modern progress, we must pay its price. If we want to live in a world of pushbuttons instead of the picturesque to the eye and the poetical to the soul, we must accept what goes with it.

V

What really will go out with this 'mark of progress' touching the Dutch windmill is not understood by these memorialists. Few Americans realize the poetry and romance that are associated with the Dutch windmill; the intimate relation that existed between the Dutch miller and his windmill. To him it was by no means only a material object put to work, when the wind favored it, to bring water to his cattle or to supply food for his family. It was far more than that it was a living thing, with understanding and a soul. To others his mill might seem simply a dumb, mechanical creature; to the miller it was fraught with human feeling a living creature that sobbed in his sorrow and laughed in his joy. He gave to his mill a name, just as he did to his son or daughter. He called it by that name never a mill. When a daughter was married, the mill was decked out in all its gayest finery; when a member of the family passed away, the mill mourned in its appearance. Professor A. J. Barnouw, of Columbia University, tells that when the mill-owner passed away all the twenty boards in the arms of the mill were taken out, and the mill stood motionless for a given time in grief over the loss of its owner. When the church bells tolled, marking the procession of the funeral from church or home to the cemetery, the boardless blades were turned in unison with the bells. When

the wife of the miller passed away, nineteen boards of the blades of the mill were removed; for a child of the family, thirteen boards; for parents of the miller, eleven boards; and so on down the line of near and remote relatives, till it reached the children of cousins, for whom only one board was removed. As Professor Barnouw well says, a man's handicraft is ennobled when the tool that he plies is thus capable of expressing, not only his skill as a craftsman, but also his feelings as a man. We, of the twentieth century, close the mill or the shop and put away our tools, as if the sight of them interfered with our sorrow. Our ancestors knew better. They ceased not working, in order to mourn they made the work partake of their mourning. It is from that conception of work as an expression and accompaniment of the inner life that all great art has sprung.

We lose something very precious and real in all these modern inventions, this march which we call progress, and of which we are so boastful something which, as the years go on, we shall find it increasingly difficult to replace. But, judging from the way we talk and the zest with which we go at the destruction of the old, we are apparently willing that this shall go out of our lives. Or is it, perhaps, that we are not quite conscious of what we are doing? A world all materialistic is, to some minds, an uncomfortable sphere to contemplate.

VI

I wonder that it has not occurred to someone to suggest that we stop certain brands of progress for a while!

The ladies of the Dutch windmill appeal might, for example, memorialize the husbands of their three coöperating sisters to stop selling engines to the Dutch millers!

SAGA SYMPHONIC OF ROMAIN ROLLAND

BY LUCIEN PRICE

On the twenty-ninth of this month Romain Rolland will be sixty years old. His life has been a Symphony Eroica. When has forerunner been worse hated or better loved? It is with his life as with his art - so habitually does he conceive on the grand scale as to permit of nothing halfway. The work will have to be fizzle or masterpiece. Who dare leave the hall midway in the finale and assign to a life-symphony of such proportions its permanent station in Valhalla? Giorgio Vasari tells of a young sculptor who was fretting over the fall of light and shadow across his statue, anxious that the work might be seen to advantage. Michelangelo, overhearing him, remarked dryly that it was the light of the public square that would decide the matter.

I

A frail lad, fair-haired and blue-eyed, of the old Gallic type from that region where it remains purest, the Burgundian Nivernais, is born and reared in a drowsy country-house beside a sluggish canal amid the rich torpor of rural sights and sounds. He is son of a notary from a family of notaries, and of a mother dowered with intellectuality and a grave and quiet piety. It is a family, on the father's side, sired out of revolutionists, at least one of whom was possessed with a passion for jotting down everything he saw, heard, or experienced - the familiar 'Notebook habit' of artists, authors, and composers instinctively

rifling life's orchard-blossoms of their honey. At least one of these Notebooks - describing the fall of the Bastille is extant.

The boy finds a set of Shakespeare in the garret. It strikes the first match to the bonfire of his ambition. He is one of those youngsters who, far from taking things for granted as they are, find their busy young brains buzzing with queer questionings and their clean young hearts seething with secret conflicts. His mother teaches him the piano. Beethoven becomes his other demigod. His local high-schooling completed, the family-father and mother and sister mother and sister at resolute sacrifice move to Paris that the children may have the best schooling obtainable. There, on hard wooden benches, in a suffocating hall on Sunday afternoons at popular orchestral concerts, the boy finds his third Promethean Richard Wagner. A season in the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, a celebrated high-school in the heart of Paris, and, in 1886, at the age of twenty, Rolland passes the entrance examinations to the Ecole Normale Supérieure, matriculating in the departments of history and geography.

It was just at the moment when Tolstoy's voice was ringing through the moral void of Europe. At the École Normale, Rolland had become a leading spirit in one of those obscure bands of youthful idealists who seem to themselves and to the world to mean so little and who end by meaning so much. Dissatisfied with the pessimism

of Ibsen and the egoism of Nietzsche, revolted by the materialism of Zola and the cynicism of Maupassant, they turned toward Russia, where a cry of hope was ascending from the blackness of the pit. Then befell one of those lucky misfortunes. Suddenly young Rolland's living hero launched lightnings against his three demigods. Tolstoy published his What Is To Be Done? Shakespeare a toady? Beethoven an intellectual sensualist? Wagner a pandar? Tolstoy the artist had become Tolstoy the prophet. This may have been an orderly development for Tolstoy, the matter is open to dispute, but how about a young artist-thinker still toiling to acquire his technical proficiency? What was to be done?

From his Parisian attic young Rolland, scarcely crediting his own presumption, wrote to his prophet. Months passed. Silence. If the boy thought of his letter at all it was with that hot shame which vexes us after a youthful ardor which has exceeded the world's heavy-lidded view of decorum. Then, on October 14, 1887, came a letter from Tolstoy, thirtyeight pages, in French, a veritable treatise, beginning 'Dear Brother - The old man had read the boy's letter with tears, and had set himself, in loving humility, to relieve the youngster's bewilderment and pain. He said, in sum, that the precondition of every true calling is not love for art but love for mankind. That alone is of value which binds men together. Those only who love their fellow creatures can hope as artists to do anything worth doing.

Tolstoy's remarks on Shakespeare and Beethoven may or may not have been happy. The tenderness and humility of his writing such an essayletter to an obscure youth betoken one of those acts which are the stamp of

a great soul and a great Christian, to whom in very deed all men are brothers. The creative spirit, like nature, produces thousands of seeds for one that it ever brings to fruition. But spare not the sowing and neither shall the harvest be stinted. The great believers know this law and trust it. Tolstoy's letter to that young Frenchman begot his spiritual successor.

II

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From the Ecole Normale, on a traveling scholarship, Rolland went for two years to Italy. 'History and geography'-Rome and the golden purity of the Italian landscapeenchanted him. He sketched a cycle of dramas on the Renaissance. Fräulein Malwida von Meysenbug- still valiant revolutionary idealist after seventy years of it as friend and comrade of Kossuth, Mazzini, Garibaldi, Wagner, Liszt, Nietzsche, and Ibsen - identified Rolland as one of the confraternity under his disguise as a French youth of twenty-three. She deliberately set herself to confirm in him a high life-purpose, as seal and consecration of which she finally took him to Bayreuth for one of the Wagnerian festivals.

This strange blend of artist, scholar, and musician is obliged to invent his own profession. On June 19, 1895, his doctorate thesis, "The Origin of the Modern Lyrical Drama,' is sustained before the faculty of the Sorbonne the first dissertation on music ever presented to that conservative body, and definitely intended as a corrective to the disdain with which music, in comparison with the other arts, had always been treated by the University. His ensuing professorship of history, at the Normal School, Rolland. daringly manœuvres into one of history in terms of music, which procedure he

maintains when the Normal School is later assimilated into the Sorbonne.

Now come the dozen or fifteen years which make or break the man vowed to a generous and creative career. Poverty, obscurity, failure. This is the great school of free spirits in which life teaches indifference to the opinion of contemporaries. Rolland's fifteen years are fairly typical. A mind of the first rank is revolutionary as a fish swims. Rolland flings himself into an enterprise to rescue the drama from boulevard adultery, bring her back to her humble working-class home, and make an honest woman of her. The project is to found a People's Theatre and through it to reanimate the ideals of the masses. Rolland writes several plays in a still uncompleted cycle of the French Revolution. The crusade fails. His professorship remains, meanwhile, his bread labor. But what for that plus-quantity of life, that overand-above toil in contribution to an ideal, done without thought of money, fame, or any other material reward? Seldom has David faced Goliath with a smaller stone or a sling more slender. As a deliberate venture of faith, to set an example and to rehabilitate French idealism, Rolland joins with a group of friends in writing and editing the Cahiers de la Quinzaine. There is no advertising, and little circulation save among students and a few intellectuals; it is not for sale in the ordinary places. Let us see if merit can still make its way without the modern ballyhoo. For ten years all of Rolland's works appear in these obscure pages - JeanChristophe, the plays, and those heroic biographies of Michelangelo and Beethoven which so magically kindle a fellow feeling for greatness on the hearthstones of common life. Not a cent does he receive for these writings. Life's battles appear to be three property, sex, and religion. Rolland's

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On the threshold of middle life, unknown and impecunious, his plays failures, his first volumes stillborn, his domestic life in ashes, all but cleaned out, one would be tempted to say, he is just gathering his forces. He is a blade forged and whetted. Now, with the base alloy of personal careerism burnt and hammered out of him, he is ready for use.

Stillschweigen und Einsamkeit silence and solitude. For ten years he vanishes. He has climbed above the mists that cling round the breast of the Mount of Vision. His Mount of Vision is outwardly prosaic - two attic rooms amid the roar of Paris on the Boulevard Montparnasse, with a view over roofs to the trees of a venerable convent garden; a bedroom and a study, this last walled, heaped, and strown with books, its furniture a writing-table, two chairs, a stove, a cabinet piano, and a bust of Beethoven. It is one of life's little ironies that those who create live in one room, or two at most, while those who own and enjoy live in let us say several. The score gets evened. Those who enjoy perish. Those who create live. Here, among his newspaper cuttings, his indefatigable transcripts from reviews, his manuscripts, and his music, with five hours for sleep, his recreation being to write letters instead of books, to read philosophy instead of poetry, or to sit at the piano instead of at his

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