But I believe if we could take the time to investigate, we would find that most of these miraculous and glorious oaks grow out of a quiet commonplace acorn.
Richard Wagner once held an idea--perhaps it would better be termed an ideal--concerning art expression.

He declared (you may read it in "_Oper und Drama_" unless you are too war-sided) that all the art forms belonged together: that no one branch of the perfect art form could live apart from its fellows, that is, in its integral parts.

He contended (and enforced in Bayreuth) that all the arts were akin: that the brains which created music, drama, colour effects, plastic sculptural effects--anything and everything that belonged to artistic expression--were, or should be, welded into one supreme artistic expression.

He believed this implicitly, and like other persons who believe well enough, he "got away with it." In Bayreuth, he established for all time a form of synthetic art which has never been rivalled.
Now Wagner has very little apparently to do with Greenwich Village.
And yet this big world-notion is gaining way there.

They are finding--as anyone must have known they would find--a new mood expression, a new voice.