magic. I have never been able to discover a new formula; I have worked with the formule of other artists, only to see the cryptogram blot and blur under my hands. My manipulation of the mystic figures and the cabalistic secrets has never raised the right demons. . . .
What is there anyway? All expression lifts us further away from simplicity and causes unhappiness. . . . Material, scientific expression: flyingmachines, moving pictures, and telegraphy are simply disturbing. They add nothing valuable to human life. Any novelist who invokes the aid of science dies a swift death. Zola's novels are stuffed with theories of heredity but ideas about heredity change every day. The current craze is for psychoanalytic novels, which are not half so psychoanalytic as the books of Jane Austen, as posterity will find out for itself. . . . Art in this epoch is too self-conscious. Everybody is striving to do something new, instead of writing or painting or composing what is natural. . . . Even the disturbing irony and pessimism of Anatole France and Thomas Hardy add nothing to life. We shall be happier if we go back to the beginning. . . .
The great secret is the cat's secret, to do what one has to do. Let IT do it, let IT, whatever IT is, low through you. The writer should say, with Sancho Panza, De mis viñas vengo, no sé nada. Labanne, in Le Chat Maigre, cries: Art declines in the degree that thought develops. In Greece, in
