ponent of Fascism, Henry A. Wallace, Vice President of the United States of America, held before the members and guests of the Free World Association on the 8th of May of this year? This speech, "The Price of Free World Victory" is, I think, a beautiful example of the unification of tradition and revolution in the sphere of the Humane; the stirring proof that today the conserving and the revolutionary will are one and the same, are simply the good will.
May I say, that my composition is of a somewhat similar nature? It bases its concept of piety upon the idea of time, of change, of development, of advancement toward perfection, an advancement for which God and man ally themselves,—but at the same time the idea of tradition plays in it a thematic part of the first order. I related to you how a Goethe memory, a word of his about the Joseph tale, entered into my first reveries when I tried my hand at this subject; I also told you of the secret reference to Goethe's Faust which my work dared to take while it grew. That was playful boldness which sprang from the sense for tradition and succession and corresponded to the inner nature of my task, mythical task. For what else is myth but succession and recollection, the forming and coining of the present with the past, the childlike identification with an admired idol—in short, tradition? Myth is tradition, and to live in tradition means to live in the myth.
An artist's life, Ladies and Gentlemen, is a life of experience in manifold ways: when it strives to follow the great, it also becomes a means of experiencing greatness,—not like the scientist, nor the historian: not objectively and from without, but in a subjective, practical, productive way. Three times, at different stages of my life, have I lived under the prolonged tension of tasks, which had a certain affinity to
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