And then, too, poor America is so many different kinds of persons and places. What we are going to be lies on the lap of the Gods. But it seems quite clear that, whatever it is, it will not be Anglo-Saxon.
Go to any vaudeville theatre and you will see Americans "turkey-trotting" to an intricately syncopated music we have dubbed "rag-time." No European can dance it with just that zip and swing. It is a purely American thing. Stop a minute! Do you realize that this is America's first original contribution to the arts! Low or high, that is not the point; it is America's own product, and for that reason I regret to see the tango superseding it, although the tango is a better dance. I am told by those who know, that dancing is the first art practised by primitive peoples. I believe that in our "turkey-trotting" and "rag-time" we have the earliest artistic gropings of a new race. Our musicians scorn "rag-time," and it takes the clear eye of a Frenchman to see its interest. Debussy has seen it in his Minstrels.
We are afraid. We are all horribly afraid. The seal of poetic propriety is laid upon our lips, the burden of tradition bows us down. Crouched and abject beneath the dominance of the slave-driver, gap-toothed Custom, we set our shoulders to the toil--the useless toil--of dragging through the mile-years of simoom-whipped sand the impassive statue of Mediocrity.
What, if the vulture scream above us, can we dare to tell the meaning of its cry? Sharp will descend the whip of circumstance to warn that otherwhere the nightingales are singing under a full-orbed moon and we must sing of them.
Does an all-reckless slave defy his Maker with a thunderbolt of blasphemy, forged in the furnace of his agony? Straight comes the penalty decreeing silence and neglect unless we chant apocalyptic anodynes.
If the challenge of the blood outbeats the clanging of the bonds and in the glowing dusk man and woman cling to each other until the uttermost is won, shall this be told in paean and in song? Not unless social usage has been satisfied and it be ascertained that desire has given place to design, that love has been exchanged for lucre, and that marriage has been substituted for mating; then are we bidden cull from the common-casket of permitted phrases the veil, the orange-flower wreath, and all the weary paraphernalia of convention, and write an epithalamium to the plaudits of the admiring throng.