There is
something wonderful in the vitality of her nation. They jar dreadfully
upon us old tired peoples in their worst aspects--but in their best we
must recognize a new spring of life and youth for the world. Yonder
young woman is not troubling about a soul, if she has one; she is a
fountain of living water. She has not taken on the shadows of our
crowded past. Halcyone, my dear, you and I are the inheritance of too
much culture. When I see her I want to cry with Epicurus: 'Above all,
steer clear of Culture!'" And then he branched from this subject and
plunged into a learned dissertation upon the worship of Dionysus, and
how it had cropped up again and again with wild fervor among the ancient
worlds whose senses and brains were wearied with the state religions,
and he concluded by analogy that this wild longing to return to youth's
follies and mad ecstasies, to get free from restraints, to seek
communion with the spiritual beyond in some exaltation of the
emotions--in short, to get back to nature--was an instinct in all human
beings and all nations, when their zeniths of art and cultivation had
come.
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