dedly have been increased. One would
not have that maddening feeling, which one so frequently does have
when the shades of night are falling fast, that the day had been
"frittered away." And yet--and yet--I gravely doubt whether this
wholesale massacre of those poor petty artificialities would bring us
appreciably nearer the millennium.

For there is one thing, and a thing of fundamental importance, which
the revolutionists against petty artificialities always fail to
appreciate, and that is the necessity and the value of convention. I
cannot in a paragraph deal effectively with this most difficult and
complex question. I can only point the reader to analogous phenomena
in the arts. All the arts are a conventionalization, an ordering of
nature. Even in a garden you put the plants in rows, and you
subordinate the well-being of one to the general well-being. The sole
difference between a garden and the wild woods is a petty
artificiality. In writing a sonnet you actually cramp the profoundest
emotional conceptions into a length and a number of lines and a
jingling of like sounds arbitrarily fixed beforehand! Wordsworth's
"The world is too much with us" is a solid, horrid mass of petty
artificiality. Why couldn't the fellow say what he meant and have
done with it, instead of making "powers" rhyme with "ours," and
worrying himself to use exactly a hundred and forty syllables? As for
music, the amount of time that must have been devoted to petty
artificiality in the construction of an affair like Bach's Chaconne is
simply staggering. Then look at pictures, absurdly confined in frames,
with their ingenious contrasts of light and shade and mass against
mass. Nothing but petty artificiality! In other words, nothing but
"form"--"form" which is the basis of all beauty, whether material or
otherwise.

Now, what form is in art, conventions (petty artificialities) are in
life. Just as you can have too much form in art, so you can have too
much convention in life. But no art that is not planned in form is
worth consideration, and no life that is not planned in convention can
ever be satisfactory. Convention is not the essence of life, but it is
the protecting garment and preservative of life, and it is also one
very valuable means by which life can express itself. It is largely
symbolic; and symbols, while being expressive, are also great
time-savers. The despisers of petty artificialities should think of
this. Take the striking i