For the man and his race
are everlastingly tugging in different directions, and unreasoning
subservience to race-ideals has clouded many a bright intellect. How
many things a race can do which its component members, taken separately,
would blush to imitate! Our masses are now fighting for commercial
supremacy. The ideal may well be creditable to a nation. It is hardly
good enough for a gentleman. He reacts; he meditates a Gospel of Revolt
against these vulgarities; he catches himself saying, as he reads the
morning paper full of national-flag fetishism and sanguinary nonsense:
"One Beethoven symphony is a greater victory than the greatest of these,
and reasonable folks may live under any rule save that of a wind-fed
herd."
It avails nothing. The day has dawned, the day of those who pull
downwards--stranglers of individualism. Can a man subscribe to the
aspirations of a mob and yet think well of himself? Can he be black and
white? He can be what he is, what most of us are: neutral tint. Look
around you: a haze of cant and catchwords. Such things are employed on
political platforms and by the Press as a kind of pepsine, to aid our
race-stomach in digesting certain heavy doses of irrationalism. The
individual stomach soon discovers their weakening effect....
Looking back upon these months of uneventful wanderings, I became aware
of a singular phenomenon. I find myself, for some obscure reason, always
returning to the same spot. I was nine times in Rome, twice in Florence
and Viareggio and Olevano and Anticoli and Alatri and Licenza and
Soriano, five times at Valmontone, thrice at Orvinio; and if I did not
go a second time to Scanno and other places, there may be a reason for
it.
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