With wild winged thoughts of which these remarks are vague memories I took Change in my consciousness from the theatre. No thoughtful person could have returned unchanged from the playhouse. The transitoriness of religions, institutions, customs, and all other so-called fixtures which constitute modern civilization is the tremendous fact that makes Change a powerful supplement to social forces. Of course to the modern mind the idea is already old, but to the primitive majority it is a prophecy.
The author tempered his mild radicalism with the hard-headed sagacity of Sam Thatcher, a one-armed pointsman, who, while unintellectually aware of the changelessness of change, "figured it out" that life is cyclic; that as experience broadens the attitudes of men they lose their little individualities in a common resignation, defeat, and decay, which to him meant contentment. "I've been round the world some--round and round. That's how things go--round and round--I know, round and round." Sam thus epitomized an old theory which has so many supporters that it must be wrong. But if we do not go "round and round" in what direction do we go? Nobody knows. If our movement is circular there is the desperate possibility of sufficient momentum to gain new territory by virtue of centrifugal force. We can at least make the circle larger. Races have bloomed, fruited, and passed; planets have shone for an abbreviated eternity and disappeared; baffling facts about life-forms upon the earth have come to light. Our conscious life is young, densely ignorant, and full of pain; our instinctive life is ageless, has perfected its knowledge and can endure, as it has endured, the aeons of change. We shall some day get the idea of change into our consciousness.
Unthinkingly one might regret that Sam was clever enough to sway back toward dogma those wavering minds which might otherwise have yielded to the drama's punches. But his pathetically amusing romance should have made it clear to respectable auditors flirting with new ideas that he was not a competent critic of their particular class-slice of life. What he said was reassuring, assuaging, brilliantly trite, and an untroubled mind would take it and reject the austere, burning truth of the essential message of the play.