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wonder if some of the embattled youths of the Younger Set, who so fiercely defy and reject the wiles of the Foundering Fathers, have ever really seen or known an Older Man? Moreover one is tempted to think that those who are so certain that Intellect and everything really interesting began about the year 1919 are insecurely rooted in the great soil of life itself. Considering that every essential joy and agony of the human spirit was already Old Stuff when Lucretius wrote, that view seems to show a disrespect to Life itself—a serious disability in any artist.
Alas, I have now far overshot my mark, and after these heroics I fear my darling Old Mandarin will seem rather tame. You yourself, dear Pearsall Smith, with your keen excisive sense, could have intimated all this in one glittering page.
New York,
March, 1922.
