ANNOUNCEMENT
IN case there be any unhappy person from the spiritual state known as Missouri who after fifty monthly issues of The Dial have, each in quaint turn, greeted the American News Company and God's sun—if there be any such who yet does cling limpet-wise to the vain notion that the contemporary movement in art—the movement fathered by Cézanne, God-fathered by El Greco, and strappingly alive dappertutto to-day—that this movement is not what it is, is not at once the richest and the most beneficent complex in the whole snarled spiritual life of our queer age, this person should be presented by his fellow-citizens, in convocation, with a scallop-shell of legitimate pilgrimage and a tough umbrella. He should be escorted New Yorkward. And when the little earnest party, straggling upward as well as onward, shall thus disarmingly have attained to the hushed peaks of the parthenian Kittatinnies, this fortunate pilgrim may gravely be taken leave of, as of one who will soon have beheld Rome, and who so may, obedient to the old saying, thereafter die. He should then, quite alone with his umbrella, proceed carefully onward, at first picking his way amongst the Alpine huts of Hither Pennsylvania, and later winding down along the poplared ways of industrious New Jersey, of antique Hoboken, and of the humane Tube. He will then proceed, in scholarly and pious admiration, up and along the forthright opulence of storied Fifth Avenue. He will hand over to the door-keeper in the art-gallery of Mr Newman Emerson Montross a votive umbrella.
There he will at once discover himself—and without having exposed his person to the discommodations of mal de mer—dry-shod (albeit gasolene-poisoned) within the walls of Living Rome. By "Rome" I designate that central spiritual core, wherein glow focused those racially many strains in the inward life of an outwardly split time—those strains of direct and luminous passion which, for them who possess the anima naturaliter oculata, almost can burn away and quite disperse those Horrid Powers of Darkness which, so clangorously and so stinkingly, marshal and press about us. We are daily knocked on the head in a Black Age. But the human heart (like Mr Hughes' Government
