THE GREAT ENIGMA

The regular habitués of the symphony concerts soon learn to know the members of the audience and to feel strongly drawn to them by the bond of musical sympathy.

One of the most interesting of the regular attendants last year was a young girl rather stout, fair and with a singularly attractive face, attractive chiefly because puzzling. Her mouth was just saved from complete severity by a slight fullness of the lower lip, which seemed rather an after-thought of her Creator, all the innate and inherited tendencies that never betray themselves in the realm of action.

Her chin did its best to counteract this apology by hard lines of determination, but in spite of its best efforts, she remained distinctly lovable.

Whenever the music touched her deeply, her eyes would crease and wrinkle with an inimitable charm. All the woman in her was expressed by that delicious crinkling about the eyes.

A young man, also a regular attendant, seemed very conscious of this young girl’s charm. He would sit busily twisting his little mustache and stare at her persistently. She never seemed to notice him and he never made any effort to know her. It was enough, he thought, to listen to Beethoven and to look at her. Certainly no reasonable man could ask for more.

One night however they were introduced by a mutual friend. The acquaintance once begun, ripened rapidly. Almost nightly the young man climbed the hill to her house, rang the bell, and then sat silently peacefully the whole evening, twisting his little mustache, and occasionally bringing out a slow, quiet remark.

The girl did not know what to make of this strange, unsocial creature, who observed none of the ordinary laws customs of society and knew no small talk. At first she was only amazed, then puzzled, and finally amused.

They were perfect antipodes these two. He was a completely negative character, always peaceful, and slow, both by nature and by design for he had found slowness very useful to him in business relations. He was very bashful, but his silence kept people from recognizing this in him. On the contrary, they thought him a very consciously superior young man. He was always imperturble, and whenever a quarrel was raging around him he would either look up sleepily and inquire of one of the heated disputants “Why what’s the matter?”, or else he would make for the most comfortable chair and go peacefully to sleep.

He had absolutely no moral sense and was always mildly surprised at other peoples moral flights, but nevertheless he was thoroughly trustworthy, He had no scruples and was completely selfish but he abhorred cruelty with an almost physical loathing and was good-natured and very obliging, when it was not too much trouble. He was a thorough coward but he acknowledged it with such complete naivtè that you only laughed at him and never thought of disprising him.

There could hardly be a finer impersonation of complete yet inarticulate joy than in the first figure of the procession in Gervelli picture at the Art Club.

The figure is full of sunshine and of the fresh and gladsome spring. Its feet cling closely to the earth as if loathe to leave even for a step that soft fragrant grass. Its arms wave with a deliciously sensuous movement and through its closed teeth issues a whistling breath that expresses more than the most exstatic shout. The figure is as delicate as a sun-beam, it seems light enough to ascend to the heavens and yet it is wholly a piece of earth.

To the true lover of argument the tame process of writing firstlies, secondlies and thirdlies on paper does not seem a peculiarly valiant task. He is accustomed to win or lose his point in a drawn battle where all talk at once., each trying to outdo each other, not alone by argument but by loudness of voice, number of words and violence of manner. Thus and thus only does the true lover of debate feel himself in his glory. But his natural tendency to object can get some slight satisfaction in writing a set argument. The the question is, as he with his tendency to dispute will manage to get argument into every thesis he writes for all his other courses should he not in English 22 restrain himself and indulge in the purely artistic form. On the other hand those poor brighted [blighted ?] beings, who love not logic and who are content to betray man make any statement rather than contradict, a few feeble and ineffectual efforts are almost as bad as no effort if the soul loves not a drawn battle.

Now for the personal equation. Argument is to me as the air I breathe. Given any proposition I cannot help believing the other side and defending it. But I would be virtuous and would rather make a dismal failure of a description than revel in an argument. The one I get all the time; the other in English 22.

What wonderful vitality there is in those old Norse legends. In the tales of Siegfried and the Niebelungen Lied.

No matter how often one tells those old stories the excitement is still as great. Your blood is stirred as much as when you were a little child and all the heroic deeds are relived. What a pleasure in this psychological nineteenth century to live again the simple thoughts and the down-right strokes of the race of the Volsung.

Once my Not many years ago, my self-analysis ended in heroics, but now it simply turns into mild meditation, with a flavor of cynicism, and contents itself with inventing wise saws to garnish a Daily Theme.

In the last few books of Marius the Epicurean I felt a decided falling away in strength and truth. In trying to analyse the cause, insofar as it concerned the delineation of the character of Marius himself, it occurred to me that Pater gave us two decidedly antagonistic elements in the process of conversion.

On the one hand he discourses on the suddenness of the change, the deep impression that here was a revelation, a something utterly different and shows us that the spirit was the same and the ritual largely that of his old faith. Soon, however, I felt that this far from leading in the direction I supposed forced me to quite a contrary conclusion, and showed a clear insight in the order of influence necessary to produce not a violent conversion, but the quiet slow-working change that took place in Marius.

I now found that my dissatisfaction consisted rather in the purely emotional flavor of this new belief. It seemed hardly probable that the student of philosophy would so completely throw all his systematic thought to the winds and rely on the emotional wave alone.