THE HELIX OF HISTORY 39 



havior,* Frank finds it necessary to argue against the assump- 

 tion that Roman la^v had behind it nothing but a develop- 

 ment from a most primitive cuUure and reminds his readers 

 that the human race had existed many thousands of years be- 

 fore the reign of Romukis. He complains of some evolution- 

 ists, who write "as though Homer had just bid good-bye to a 

 grandfather A\ho hung by a tail from a Thracian oak tree." f 

 The cyclic theory is of valu.e, ho^vever, not only as a guide 

 to the thinking of the historian but also as a suggestion to the 

 modern philosopher. In an essay on modernism, Raymond 

 Dexter Havens expresses his uneasiness at the trend of art. J 

 He finds himself unhappy in a ^vorld in which Picasso is one 

 of the most esteemed of living artists, Schonberg and Hinde- 

 muth are representatives of music, and James Joyce and E. E. 

 Cuminings are leaders of literature, though he finally braces 

 hiinself to accept his fate and to see ^vhat he can make of God 

 in these "modern" methods of expression. But this type of 

 art is not really modern; there are many examples of it in 

 the past. If Picasso and many of his followers had painted in 

 the sixth century, we shoidd have classified the \vo\k very 

 simply as decadent. Epstein's sculpture would have been in 

 its natural home in Greece during the Byzantine period or, 

 for that matter, in Thebes in the ninth century B.C. Art is 

 not moving do^vn^vards permanently; it is merely moving 

 through the decadent stages of its cycle. And just as the 

 archaic and classical periods followed the decadent Egyptian 

 work of the ninth century B.C. and architecture in Europe 

 developed from that of the sixth century to its glorious maxi- 

 mum in the early Gothic of the twelfth, so there ^\'ill again 

 be artists who can depict natural objects and writers who can 

 explain what they mean. 



* Tenney Frank, Aspects of Social Behavior, Cambridge, Harvard 

 University Press, 1932. 



-j- This shows the danger of a classicist using scientific analogies. 

 Monkeys with prehensile tails are unknown in the Eastern Hemisphere! 



X Raymond Dexter Havens, The Burden of Incertitude, Rochester, 

 University of Rochester, 1944. 



