not in the days of Adam and Eve but when Adam

      was alone; when there was no smoke and color was

    fine, not with the fineness of

      early civilization art but by virtue

    of its originality, with nothing to modify it but the

    mist that went up, obliqueness was a varia-

      tion of the perpendicular, plain to see and

    to account for: it is no

      longer that; nor did the blue red yellow band

    of incandescence that was color, keep its stripe: it also is one of

    those things into which much that is peculiar can be

      read; complexity is not a crime but carry

    it to the point of murki-

      ness and nothing is plain. A complexity

    moreover, that has been committed to darkness, instead of granting

      it-

    self to be the pestilence that it is, moves all a-

      bout as if to bewilder with the dismal

    fallacy that insistence

      is the measure of achievement and that all

    truth must be dark. Principally throat, sophistication is as it al-

    ways has been—at the antipodes from the init-

      ial great truths. “Part of it was crawling, part of it

    was about to crawl, the rest

      was torpid in its lair.” In the short legged, fit-

    ful advance, the gurgling and all the minutiæ—we have the classic

    multitude of feet. To what purpose! Truth is no Apollo

      Belvedere, no formal thing. The wave may go over it if it likes.

    Know that it will be there when it says:

      “I shall be there when the wave has gone by.”