_ THIS war is going to have a tremendous in-
fluence on Art -- vitalize it, you know, and
make it REAL, and all that sort of thing.
In fact, it's doing it already. We took up the war
last night -- our Little Group of Serious Thinkers,
you know -- in quite a serious way and considered
it thoroughly in all its aspects and we decided
that it would put more SOUL into Art.
And into life, too, you know.
Already you can see it on every hand how much
serious purpose it is putting into lives that were
merely trivial before. Even poor, dear Mamma --
and really, it would be hard to imagine a more
trivial person than Mamma! -- is knitting socks.
She is going to send them to the Poles. She
wanted to send them to the Belgians.
But I said to her, "Positively, Mamma, you are
ALWAYS behind the times. Don't you know the
Belgians are going out and the Poles are coming in?"
And, you know, it's been months since really
Smart People have knit for the Belgians. The Poles
are QUITE the thing now.
It's strange how great movements keep going on
and on from mountain peak to mountain peak of
usefulness like that, isn't it? -- changing their
direction now and then as evolution itself does,
but always progressing, progressing!
That is one wonderful thing about evolution -- it
ALWAYS progresses.
When one thinks it over, one grows more and
more conscious that the human race owes a great
deal to Evolution, doesn't one?
WHAT could we have done without it?
It's as somebody said about something else one
time -- if we hadn't had it, you know, it would have
been necessary to invent it, though for the life of
me, I can't remember who it was or what he said
about it. Although likely it was Madame de Stael.
We took her up once and it developed that she had
said a most surprising number of things like that
things, you know, that would be quite quotable if
you could only remember them.
Isn't memory a wonderful facility, though?
I've always intended to go in for developing mine
systematically and scientifically.
But I've never done it because I always forget
whether I should order the book-shop people to
send home a work on numismatics or a work on
mnemonics. One of them is about money, you
know, and the other is about memory. And once
when I was shopping and thought I had it right it
turned out -- the book did, when I got it home -- to
be all about air and things. Pneumatics, you know!
Wasn't it perfectly ridiculous?
But, of course, one learns by one's mistakes.
Have you seen dear Nijinsky?
We were discussing him last evening -- our little
group, you know -- and decided that while he has
more Personality than Mordkin he has less
Temperament, if you get what I mean.
One of the girls said last evening, "Mordkin is
more exotic, but Nijinsky is more esoteric."
And another said, "One of them shows intellect
obviously mingled with spirit, but the other shows
spirit occultly mingled with intellect."
Fothergil Finch said, "They are alike in their
differences, but subtly differentiated in their
likenesses, n'est-cd pas?"
Fothy has a simply delightful faculty of summing
a thing up in a sentence like that, but it makes him
very vain if you show you think so; so I put him
in his place and closed the discussion with one remark:
"It is all," I said, "it is ALL a question of Interpretation."
And, quite seriously, when you come to think
about it, it usually is, isn't it? _