..the old hardware
shop...scissors, skates glittering, moonlight on the ice...old Dr.
Brown's head, like a rink. Rink...a queer word! Pigeons in the air
above the housetops--automobiles like elephants. Was her nose
properly powdered?... Had she cared to dance with him after all? is
not absolutely true: it is not the wordless images that float
through the idle mind, but only a symbol of them, more awkward and
less informative than the plain English of what the heroine felt
and thought.
All these instances are barbarous in the Greek sense, and their
perpetrators, no matter how cultivated, how well-meaning, how
useful sometimes as pioneers and pathbreakers, are barbarians.
Some of them should be exposed; some chided; some labored with,
according to the magnitude and the nature of their offense. The
critics who uphold and approve them should be dealt with likewise.
And it is the reader with the liberal mind who is called to the
task. He is in sympathy, at least, with change, and knows that the
history of civilization has been a struggle to break away from
tradition and yet not go empty-handed; he can understand the
passion to express old things in a new and better way, or he is
not intellectually liberal.
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