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Dividend Two Directory 07
Page 10
These characters make their appearance four times during the course of the night, the spectators dancing during the intervals. After their last exit dancing continues until shortly before sunrise; then the medicine-man and the singers arise, and, forming a circle about the fire in the centre of the _kozhan_, sing a number of songs. A maiden is summoned from the gathering to carry a basket of sacred meal, and the medicine-man, taking up the top of the spruce tree, passes out of the enclosure toward the rising sun, followed by the maiden, the patient, the singers, and any who may be afflicted with a bodily ailment. At a distance of about a hundred yards the medicine-man stops and plants the little spruce tip, to which the disease is now supposed to have been transferred, under a tree, sprinkling over it quantities of the sacred meal. Then each of the others, the patient leading, steps forward, throws a pinch of the meal on the tree, and passes on, always facing the east. When the last one has thus passed, the procession stops, everybody holds his blanket ready, and on signal from the medicine-man, just as the sun appears, gives it a shake and runs at full speed to the _kozhan_ and around the fire. Thus is disease shaken out and the pursuit of the evil spirits of sickness eluded.
Falerii was almost the only one of the Etruscan cities which had assisted Veii, and she was now exposed single-handed to the vengeance of the Romans. It is related that, when Camillus appeared before Falerii, a schoolmaster of the town treacherously conducted the sons of the noblest families into the Roman camp, but that Camillus, scorning the baseness of the man, ordered his arms to be tied behind him, and the boys to flog him back into the town; whereupon the inhabitants, overcome by such generosity, gave up their arms, and surrendered to the Romans (B.C. 394).
Then again there seem to me to be some simply coarse, obscene, unpleasant passages, not of relentless realism but of dull inquisitiveness. They do not attract or impress; they do not provide a contrast or an emphasis. They simply lie, like piles of filth, in rooms designed for human habitation. If it is argued that art may use any materials, I can only fall back upon my belief that such passages are as instinctively repulsive to the artistic sense as strong-smelling cheeses stacked in a library! There is no moral or ethical law against such a practice; but the aesthetic conscience of humanity instinctively condemns it. When I examine the literature which has inspired and attracted the minds of humanity, whether trained or untrained, I find that they avoid this hideous intrusion of nastiness; and I am inclined to infer that writers who introduce such episodes, and readers who like them, have some other impulse in view, which is neither the sense of beauty nor the perception of art. But if Whitman, or anyone else, can convert the world to call this art, and to enjoy it as art, then he will prove that he understands the law of preference better than I do.
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