THE SOUNDS OF PROGRESS

Whatever son of Harvard reads the condemnation of these noisy times by that wit and critic, essayist and Philadelphian, Agnes Repplier, will remember the hammers that are building the new Fogg Museum and which are heard between words of some lecture in Emerson or Sever, and readily agree. "Noise", says Miss Repplier, "is savage. It is time that scientists were concerned with some means of collecting sound, carrying it away somewhere and dumping it. We need, not an invention to reproduce or carry sound, but one to eliminate it." And there is wisdom in her words. The noise of motor cars, the squeals of subways, the various rattles and reverberations of modern times make of life a jagged symphony written by a celestial Gershwin. And escape from it does not come in the home where someone must play a radio or a piano with the electric energy of eternity, nor does it come in the country where the roads are lined with the drums of legions vacating a major racket for a minor dissonance.

Where then is peace, where then is quiet? In the home of culture, in the halls of learning seems the obvious answer. But there the drills and hoists of progress ply their trade. America has growing pains, and they center in her eardrums. If civilization has brought pleasure for some senses, it has brought torture for the hearing. One turns to the pages of history, to the writings of quiet men in quiet times and rests for a moment but only a moment. A typewriter sounds in the next room, a barrel organ in the street, and the book is slammed shut with a bang which last bang proves, after all, noise is victor. Indeed, this age has long ceased to be one of iron it is one of noise. And until there comes some quiet, until there arrives the majestic calm of a calmer century, there can be no deep philosophy, no vital art.