16
PARTISAN REVIEW
weeping at the sight of a crowd of men standing before a statue and
merely staring at it. On the whole, however, apart from these visits
to the movies to see the newsreel, amusements, bars, restaurants, and
especially museums and theaters lost a great deal of patronage. And
yet those most directly concerned in the matter, the proprietors and
managers, did not seem to be especially troubled, won over, perhaps,
by the general feeling that all was well, at least for the time being.
As
I said, many of the figures were very beautiful; one of them in
particular, located in the middle of Central Park, seemed to be a rich
fulfillment of the plastic imagination. And yet there was, on the
other hand, one figure so shocking, so appalling, that certain of the
citizens of the neighborhood petitioned the Mayor for its removal by
dynamite. It was this which was responsible for the one harsh conflict
of that whole period of good feeling, for immense numbers of people
upon hearing of the petition immediately protested, demanding that
that dread statue remain intact, and communicating the sentiment,
by this time conscious and explicit, that every object of the fall was
in some way important and to be attended to with the greatest of care,
to be preserved at all costs, not destroyed. The situation brought Faber
Gottschalk hurrying to the scene, the most avid advocate of leaving
the statue intact; and it was thus that I me him.
III
On a street corner, near the lamp-post, standing on the rumble–
seat of a motor car, he was engaged in haranguing a huge crowd, most
of whom were decidedly on hi., side. He was near the end of
his
speech, it seemed, and was trying to get a certain conclusiveness or
resolution into what he said, but was troubled, I could see, by the
fact that he did not completely understand his idea himself.
"- so I say to you," he said, "that there is every reason to
be–
lieve that we have no right to alter or modify any of these things.
Now those who have been in favor of getting rid of this statue, which
they consider obscene, have told us that children would be corrupted
by it. I will not say in reply that we cannot permit our lives and our
surroundings to be determined by what the children will see or will
not see. That would be an easy answer, although a good one. And I
will not advance the argument that those of us who really know
children and have lived with them are aware of the fact that
it
is the
children, not we nor these statues, who are corrupt, so that our adult
fires are often a long suffering attempt to free ourselves from the utter
corruption of childhood and even infancy. I myself remember very
well how at the age of eight, when I visited my aunt's house, my two
feminine cousins, aged eleven and nine, took me into the closet and
taught me certain things of which I must already have been somehow
