certain
spring came back to Telemachus's fatigue-sodden legs. He noticed with
envy that Lyaeus took little skips as he walked.

"If we properly exploited our exports we should be the richest people
in Europe," the universal agent kept shouting with far-flung gestures
of despair. And the last they heard from him as they left him to turn
into the manure-littered, chicken-noisy courtyard of the Posada de la
Luna was, "_!Que pueblo indecente!_... What a beastly town ... yet if
they exploited with energy, with modern energy, their exports...."

_IX: An Inverted Midas_

Every age must have had choice spirits whose golden fingers turned
everything they touched to commonplace. Since we know our own
literature best it seems unreasonably well equipped with these inverted
Midases--though the fact that all Anglo-American writing during the
last century has been so exclusively of the middle classes, by the
middle classes and for the middle classes must count for something.
Still Rome had her Marcus Aurelius, and we may be sure that platitudes
would have obscured the slanting sides of the pyramids had
stone-cutting in the reign of Cheops been as disastrously easy as is
printing to-day. The addition of the typewriter to the printing-press
has given a new and horrible impetus to the spread of half-baked
thought. The labor of graving on stone or of baking tablets of brick or
even of scrawling letters on paper with a pen is no longer a curb on
the dangerous fluency of the inverted Midas. He now lolls in a Morris
chair, sipping iced tea, dictating to four blonde and two dark-haired
stenographers; three novels, a couple of books of travel and a short
story written at once are nothing to a really enterprising universal
genius. Poor Julius Caesar with his letters!

We complain that we have no supermen nowadays, that we can't live as
much or as widely or as fervently or get through so much work as could
Pico della Mirandola or Erasmus or Politian, that the race drifts
towards mental and physical anaemia. I deny it. With the typewriter all
these things shall be added unto us. This age too has its great
universal geniuses. They overrun the seven continents and their
respective seas. Accompanied by maenadic bands of stenographers, and a
music of typewriters deliriously clicking, they go about the world,
catching all the butterflies, rubbing the bloom off all the plums,
tunneling mountains, bridging seas, smoothing the facets off idea