Page:Free Opinions, Freely Expressed on Certain Phases of Modern Social Life and Conduct.djvu/297

 past, destroy old traditions, and cheapen noble attainment, resembles a sudden outbreak of insane persons who strive to smash everything within their reach. It is in its way a form of Imagination,—but Imagination diseased and demoralized. For Imagination, like all other faculties of the brain, can become sickly and perverted. When it is about to die it shows—in common with everything else in that condition,—signs of its dissolution. Such signs of feebleness and decay are everywhere visible in the world at the present time. They are shown in the constant output of decadent and atheistical literature—in the decline of music and the drama from noble and classic forms to the repulsive "problem" play and the comic opera—in the splashy daubing of good canvas called "impressionist" painting—in the acceptance, or passive toleration, of the vilest doggerel verse as "poetry"—and in the wretched return to the lowest forms of ignorance displayed in the "fashionable" craze for palmistry, clairvoyance, crystal-gazing, and sundry other quite contemptible evidences of foolish credulity concerning the grave issues of life and death,—combined with a most sorrowful, most deplorable indifference to the simple and pure teachings of the Christian Faith. Even in the Christian Faith itself, its chosen ministers seem unable to serve their Divine Master without quarrelling over trifles,—which is surely no part of their calling and election.

Everywhere there is a lack of high ideals,—and all the arts suffer severely in consequence. Modern education itself checks and cramps the growth of imaginative originality. The general tendency is