



Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org
(From images generously made available by the Internet
Archive.)





GOBLINS AND PAGODAS

BY

JOHN GOULD FLETCHER



BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

The Riverside Press Cambridge

1916





TO

DAISY



Thanks are due to the editor of The Egoist, London, for permission to
reprint The Ghosts of an Old House and the Orange Symphony; to the
editor of Poetry, Chicago, for permission to reprint the Blue Symphony;
and to the editor of The Little Review for permission to reprint the
Green Symphony.




PREFACE


I

The second half of the nineteenth and the first fifteen years of the
twentieth century have been a period of research, of experiment, of
unrest and questioning. In science and philosophy we have witnessed an
attempt to destroy the mechanistic theory of the universe as developed
by Darwin, Huxley, and Spencer. The unknowable has been questioned:
hypotheses have been shaken: vitalism and idealism have been proclaimed.
In the arts, the tendency has been to strip each art of its inessentials
and to disclose the underlying basis of pure form. In life, the
principles of nationality, of racial culture, of individualism, of
social development, of Christian ethics, have been discussed, debated,
and examined from top to bottom, until at last, in the early years of
the twentieth century we find all Europe, from the leaders of thought
down to the lowest peasantry, engaged in a mutually destructive war of
which few can trace the beginnings and none can foresee the end. The
fundamental tenets of thought, art, life itself, have been shaken: and
either civilization is destined to some new birth, or mankind will
revert to the conditions of life, thought, and social intercourse that
prevailed in the