That much is certain to be true, as it has always been. The critics
of then will be saying that there are no great novelists in 1956 such
as there were in 1916, when giants wrote, but not for money or for
cheap sensations. They will laud the Wilsonian era when America
not only knew a millennium of golden fiction, poetry, drama, humor,
sculpture, painting, architecture, and engineering, but revealed
its greatness in moving-picture classics, in a lofty conception
of the dance as an eloquence; when the nation acted as a sister
of charity to bleeding Europe, pouring eleemosynary millions from
the cornucopia stretched across the sea, and finally entered the war
with reluctant majesty and unexampled might, her citizens unanimously
patriotic. Ye gods! even the politicians will be statesmen and their
debates classics.
Critics of then will be regretting that American fiction, poetry,
drama, art, and journalism are so inferior to foreign work, and
foreign critics will admit it and tell them why. Some military
writers will be pointing out that war is no longer possible,
and others will be crying out that it is inevitable and America
unprepared.
Doctors will be complaining that modern restlessness is creating
new nervous diseases, as doctors did in 1916 A.D., B.C., and B.A.
(which is, Before Adam). Doctors will complain that modern mothers
do not nurse their own babies--which has always been both true and
untrue--and that women do not wear enough clothes for health, not
to mention modesty.
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