Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/267

 charm or power. In cruel old myths, in grotesque images of primitive art, in the hard brilliance of early eighteenth century verse, in the perhaps excessive saccharinity of early Victorian representations of women, even in fashion-plates five years old, there is the pathos of things that Time, the "eternal philanderer," once loved and caressed and swore eternal fidelity to, and then left behind him in the vacant banquet halls and the grey solitudes of history. One of our newspapers has the custom of displaying every Sunday, side by side with the latest idols of stage and society, the idols of 1900, in all the borrowed glories that twenty years have filched. If we think a guffaw the right reaction to the best effect that 1900 could produce, we had better laugh quickly and have it over with, before our laughter is drowned by an outburst from the chucklers at our heels. But in the contemplation of these contrasts, the finer sense will shiver, knowing how soon le dernier cri becomes the farewell of warm life frozen into the past.

The literary Mohawks, however, are somewhat deficient in the finer sense. As the fighting organization of the younger generation, they fear the past as an enemy at their rear, and they hold that military considerations demand the devastation of the territory immediately behind their lines, and the destruction of all able-bodied men who will not actively enlist in their band. For some time, as everyone knows, they have been trying to blow up the National Academy of Arts and Letters as the