subtle dream-toxins of the European imagination—a process whereby New York, the capital of the world (as it has now become in a certain sense owing to the war) has begun magically to attract all those individuals who are the carriers, in any sphere, of Europe's artistic and intellectual life. It makes no difference to me whether these individuals are called Bergson or France, or Chaliapine, Reinhardt, or Stanislawsky, or Anna Pavlowa, Elly Ney, or Maria Jeritza; or whether these results deriving from Europe are obtained through the subtleties of words and sentences with their spiritual import, through the soaring of a voice, the tones of an instrument, or the movements by which an inspired human body can display the incomprehensible. Also I completely and intentionally neglect the somewhat external and superficial forms in which this re-absorption seems to be taking place, and the primarily pleasure-seeking spirit behind the classes of the public who are the receivers of these influences. But no one who looks into such things can avoid the analogy between this situation and the situation which began with the last century of the Roman Republic and determined the nature of the centuries following—an analogy of course which, like any other, cannot be followed through too strictly. I refer to the invasion of the young Roman metropolis by the graeculus histrio, the Greek sophist, the Greek artist, the Greek dancer. With them enter Plato and his dreams, Egypt and its secrets, Persia, Babylon, Syria, Zoroaster, Mithras, and finally the gospel. The superficies of this society over which the invasion first spread, were, to be sure, only the rich classes, the pleasure-seekers, the sophisticated, and the curious. But the spirit is the subtlest of all poisons; inside of a century Rome was hollowed out, and in place of a relatively young and naïve, half-peasant civilization, it housed the mightiest and most portentous mixture of minds and religions that the world has ever seen. For such an intellectual infusion swiftly penetrates the blood vessels and the lymphatic chambers, and I believe that the United States, in the obscure depths of its becoming, conceals all those elements which are predestined, in making a contact with such enormous ferment as is contained in the intellectual life of Europe, to take on quite astonishing new extensions—especially of a religious nature, perhaps also artistic.
With this, by way of preliminary remarks, I shall try to outline in very rough strokes the inner aspect of spiritual Germany after the catastrophe of the war and of the peace which is continuing the
