Lit 2115.22 HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY GIFT OF JAMES STURGIS PRAY May 12, 1925 Copyright, 1905 BY H. M. CALDWELL Co. COLONIAL PRESS Electrotyped and Printed by C. H. Simonds & Co. INTRODUCTION We are living in an age of show and splendour. The ambitions of society have grown with its achievements, and a spirit of excess has come to prevail among us which is likely to bring with it a deterioration of public taste and sentiment. There is need to bring to our remembrance the examples of a life less cumbered with exaggeration than that of our own time. If our Republic is to continue, we who form it must be republican in our judgment and feeling. Neither the manly nor the womanly virtues will thrive in an atmosphere that breeds perpetual unrest. We, children of the Puritans, are surely not altogether made for a career of fuss and feathers. Our living must come out of the plain earth. Our spiritual growth is maintained by certain vital principles, which cannot be discerned in the excitement of perpetual pleasure-seeking. In order to ascertain where we stand and whither we tend, we must put aside the show and glitter of mere frivolity, and give ourselves room and leisure for the lessons of deeper thought. It sometimes seems as if the opposing elements of human nature took shape in periods of plus and minus. The history of art shows us generations which desire and seek exuberance in ornament and in style. We Americans have passed through a season of wearisome adornment, in which some sort of aesthetic disguise was invented for the familiar pieces of household furniture. We hung embroidered scarfs on easel and mantelpiece, and made portières take the place of doors. I have even heard of places remote from centres of civilization in which well-meaning housewives adorned or disfigured the walls of their houses with strips of cotton cloth, worked in gaudy crewels. A change of feeling takes place, and these superfluities are swept away, pleasing no more. The thesis which I advance is this. Human beings of normal character and condition are satisfied only with enjoyments which exercise their best faculties, to wit, the perception of beauty and harmony, and of the high ideals of thought and conduct to which humanity is able to aspire. To these noble satisfactions luxury presents a bar. It will have us occupied with itself, and so diverts our attention from what we should most covet to enjoy. Let us take for an instance the pleasure which good music ought to give. This pleasure is of so high a grade that one should bring to it calm thought and concentrated attention. |