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Show AMERICANS AND ABT. To live means to - live beautifully, bravely, and with all, the power of the souL To live means to embrace with our minds the whole universe, to mingle our thoughts with ail the secrets of existence, ex-istence, and.to do-all that is possible in order to make life -around us more beautiful, more - varied, , freer -. and brighter. It seems to . me that what ' is superlatively super-latively lacking -to America is a desire for beauty, a -thirst for those pleasures which it alone can give to the mind and to the heart. Our earth" is the heart of the universe, our art the heart of the earth. The stronger, it. beats, -the more beautiful is life. In America the heart beats feebly. I was both surprised and pained - to find that in America the theaters were in the hands, of a trust, and that; the men of the trust, being the possessors, had also -become the dictators 'in matters mat-ters of the drama. This evidently ex- Elains the fact- that a country which as - excellent' novelists,- has not produced pro-duced a single eminent dramatist. To turn art into a means of profit is, under all circumstances, a serious misdemeanor,' mis-demeanor,' but in this particular case it is positive crime, because it offers violence vio-lence to the author's person and adulterates adul-terates art. " If the law provides punishments pun-ishments for the adulteration of food, it onght to deal unmercifully with tboso who adulterate the people's spiritual food. . ...... The theater-is - called the people's school; it teaches us to leil auu iu think. It has its origin in the same source as the church, but it has always served the people more sincerely and truly than tne church. While the Government Gov-ernment has been able to make' .the church subserve its own interests, it has never been able to ' enslave the theater. "The - Sunken Bell" of Hauptmann is a liturgy of beauty and of thought, as are many of the plays of Ibsen, Shakespeare ana Aeschylus. The exploitation of the theater by capital ought not to-be permitted by people who are interested in. the development of the spiritual forces of the country. Maxim Gorky , in-August Appleton. |