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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Adventures in the Arts, by Marsden Hartley
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Adventures in the Arts
+       Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets
+
+Author: Marsden Hartley
+
+Release Date: March 28, 2007 [EBook #20921]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Clarke, Sankar Viswanathan, and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+(This file was produced from images generously made
+available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                              ADVENTURES
+
+                             IN THE ARTS
+
+
+
+                               INFORMAL
+
+                               CHAPTERS
+
+                             ON PAINTERS
+
+                              VAUDEVILLE
+
+                              AND POETS
+
+
+
+                                  BY
+
+                           MARSDEN HARTLEY
+
+
+
+
+                          BONI AND LIVERIGHT
+
+                      Publishers        New York
+
+
+
+
+                         COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
+
+                        BONI & LIVERIGHT, INC.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+PREFATORY NOTE
+
+
+The papers in this book are not intended in any way to be professional
+treatises. They must be viewed in the light of entertaining
+conversations. Their possible value lies in their directness of
+impulse, and not in weight of argument. I could not wish to go into
+the qualities of art more deeply. A reaction, to be pleasant, must be
+simple. This is the apology I have to offer: Reactions, then, through
+direct impulse, and not essays by means of stiffened analysis.
+
+MARSDEN HARTLEY.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     Some of the papers included in this book have appeared in
+     _Art and Archeology_, _The Seven Arts_, _The Dial_, _The
+     Nation_, _The New Republic_, and _The Touchstone_. Thanks
+     are due to the editors of these periodicals for permission
+     to reprint.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+TO
+
+ALFRED STIEGLITZ
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+TO
+
+ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS
+
+
+Perhaps the most important part of Criticism is the fact that it
+presents to the creator a problem which is never solved. Criticism is
+to him a perpetual Presence: or perhaps a ghost which he will not
+succeed in laying. If he could satisfy his mind that Criticism was a
+certain thing: a good thing or a bad, a proper presence or an
+irrelevant, he could psychologically dispose of it. But he can not.
+For Criticism is a configuration of responses and reactions so
+intricate, so kaleidoscopic, that it would be as simple to category
+Life itself.
+
+The artist remains the artist precisely in so far as he rejects the
+simplifying and reducing process of the average man who at an early
+age puts Life away into some snug conception of his mind and race.
+This one turns the key. He has released his will and love from the
+vast Ceremonial of wonder, from the deep Poem of Being, into some
+particular detail of life wherein he hopes to achieve comfort or at
+least shun pain. Not so, the artist. In the moment when he elects to
+avoid by whatever makeshift the raw agony of life, he ceases to be
+fit to create. He must face experience forever freshly: reduce life
+each day anew to chaos and remould it into order. He must be always a
+willing virgin, given up to life and so enlacing it. Thus only may he
+retain and record that pure surprise whose earliest voicing is the
+first cry of the infant.
+
+The unresolved expectancy of the creator toward Life should be his way
+toward Criticism also. He should hold it as part of his Adventure. He
+should understand in it, particularly when it is impertinent, stupid
+and cruel, the ponderable weight of Life itself, reacting upon his
+search for a fresh conquest over it. Though it persist unchanged in
+its rôle of purveying misinformation and absurdity to the Public, he
+should know it for himself a blessed dispensation.
+
+With his maturity, the creator's work goes out into the world. And in
+this act, he puts the world away. For the artist's work defines: and
+definition means apartness: and the average man is undefined in the
+social body. Here is a danger for the artist within the very essence
+of his artistic virtue. During the years of his apprenticeship, he has
+struggled to create for himself an essential world out of experience.
+Now he begins to succeed: and he lives too fully in his own selection:
+he lives too simply in the effects of his effort. The gross and
+fumbling impact of experience is eased. The grind of ordinary
+intercourse is dimmed. The rawness of Family and Business is refined
+or removed. But now once more the world comes in to him, in the form
+of the Critic. Here again, in a sharp concentrated sense, the world
+moves on him: its complacency, its hysteria, its down-tending
+appetites and fond illusions, its pathetic worship of yesterdays and
+hatred of tomorrows, its fear-dogmas and its blood-avowals.
+
+The artist shall leave the world only to find it, hate it only because
+he loves, attack it only if he serves. At that epoch of his life when
+the world's gross sources may grow dim, Criticism brings them back.
+Wherefore, the function of the Critic is a blessing and a need.
+
+The creator's reception of this newly direct, intense, mundane
+intrusion is not always passive. If the artist is an intelligent man,
+he may respond to the intervening world on its own plane. He may turn
+critic himself.
+
+When the creator turns critic, we are in the presence of a
+consummation: we have a complete experience: we have a sort of
+sacrament. For to the intrusion of the world he interposes his own
+body. In his art, the creator's body would be itself intrusion. The
+artist is too humble and too sane to break the ecstatic flow of vision
+with his personal form. The true artist despises the personal as an
+end. He makes fluid, and distils his personal form. He channels it
+beyond himself to a Unity which of course contains it. But Criticism
+is nothing which is not the sheer projection of a body. The artist
+turns Self into a universal Form: but the critic reduces Form to Self.
+Criticism is to the artist the intrusion, in a form irreducible to
+art, of the body of the world. What can he do but interpose his own?
+
+This is the value of the creator's criticism. He gives to the world
+himself. And his self is a rich life.
+
+It includes for instance a direct experience of art, the which no
+professional critic may possess. And it includes as well a direct
+knowledge of life, sharpened in the retrospect of that devotion to the
+living which is peculiarly the artist's. For what is the critic after
+all, but an "artistic" individual somehow impeded from satisfying his
+esthetic emotion and his need of esthetic form in the gross and
+stubborn stuff of life itself: who therefore, since he is too
+intelligent for substitutes, resorts to the already digested matter of
+the hardier creators, takes their assimilated food and does with it
+what the athletic artist does with the meat and lymph and bone of God
+himself? The artist mines from the earth and smelts with his own fire.
+He is higher brother to the toilers of the soil. The critic takes the
+products of the creator, reforges, twists them, always in the cold.
+For if he had the fire to melt, he would not stay with metals already
+worked: when the earth's womb bursts with richer.
+
+When the creator turns critic, we are certain of a feast. We have a
+fare that needs no metaphysical sauce (such as must transform the
+product of the Critic). Here is good food. Go to it and eat. The
+asides of a Baudelaire, a Goethe, a Da Vinci outweight a thousand
+tomes of the professional critics.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I know of no American book like this one by Marsden Hartley. I do not
+believe American painting heretofore capable of so vital a response
+and of so athletic an appraisal. Albert Ryder barricaded himself from
+the world's intrusion. The American world was not intelligent enough
+in his days to touch him to an activer response. And Ryder, partaking
+of its feebleness, from his devotion to the pure subjective note
+became too exhausted for aught else. As a world we have advanced. We
+have a fully functioning Criticism ... swarms and schools of makers of
+the sonorous complacencies of Judgment. We have an integral body of
+creative-minded men and women interposing itself with valiance upon
+the antithesis of the social resistance to social growth. Hartley is
+in some ways a continuance of Ryder. One stage is Ryder, the solitary
+who remained one. A second stage is Hartley, the solitary who stands
+against the more aggressive, more interested Marketplace.
+
+You will find in this book the artist of a cultural epoch. This man
+has mastered the plastic messages of modern Europe: he has gone deep
+in the classic forms of the ancient Indian Dance. But he is, still,
+not very far from Ryder. He is always the child--whatever wise old
+worlds he contemplates--the child, wistful, poignant, trammeled, of
+New England.
+
+Hartley has adventured not alone deep but wide. He steps from New
+Mexico to Berlin, from the salons of the Paris of Marie Laurencin to
+the dust and tang of the American Circus. He is eclectic. But wherever
+he goes he chronicles not so much these actual worlds as his own
+pleasure of them. They are but mirrors, many-shaped and lighted, for
+his own delicate, incisive humor. For Hartley is an innocent and a
+_naïf_. At times he is profound. Always he is profoundly simple.
+
+Tragedy and Comedy are adult. The child's world is Tragicomic. So
+Marsden Hartley's. He is not deep enough--like most of our Moderns--in
+the pregnant chaos to be submerged in blackness by the hot struggle of
+the creative will. He may weep, but he can smile next moment at a
+pretty song. He may be hurt, but he gets up to dance.
+
+In this book--the autobiography of a creator--Marsden Hartley peers
+variously into the modern world: but it is in search of Fairies.
+
+WALDO FRANK.
+
+_Lisbon_, June, 1921.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+     INTRODUCTION BY WALDO FRANK
+
+_Foreword_
+
+     CONCERNING FAIRY TALES AND ME
+
+_Part One_
+
+1.   THE RED MAN
+
+2.   WHITMAN AND CÉZANNE
+
+3.   RYDER
+
+4.   WINSLOW HOMER
+
+5.   AMERICAN VALUES IN PAINTING
+
+6.   MODERN ART IN AMERICA
+
+7.   OUR IMAGINATIVES
+
+8.   OUR IMPRESSIONISTS
+
+9.   ARTHUR B. DAVIES
+
+10.  REX SLINKARD
+
+11.  SOME AMERICAN WATER-COLORISTS
+
+12.  THE APPEAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY
+
+13.  SOME WOMEN ARTISTS
+
+14.  REVALUATIONS IN IMPRESSIONISM
+
+15.  ODILON REDON
+
+16.  THE VIRTUES OF AMATEUR PAINTING
+
+17.  HENRI ROUSSEAU
+
+_Part Two_
+
+18.  THE TWILIGHT OF THE ACROBAT
+
+19.  VAUDEVILLE
+
+20.  A CHARMING EQUESTRIENNE
+
+21.  JOHN BARRYMORE IN PETER IBBETSON
+
+_Part Three_
+
+22.  LA CLOSERIE DE LILAS
+
+23.  EMILY DICKINSON
+
+24.  ADELAIDE CRAPSEY
+
+25.  FRANCIS THOMPSON
+
+26.  ERNEST DOWSON
+
+27.  HENRY JAMES ON RUPERT BROOKE
+
+28.  THE DEARTH OF CRITICS
+
+_Afterword_
+
+     THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING "DADA"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+FOREWORD
+
+CONCERNING FAIRY TALES AND ME
+
+
+Sometimes I think myself one of the unique children among children. I
+never read a fairy story in my childhood. I always had the feeling as
+a child, that fairy stories were for grown-ups and were best
+understood by them, and for that reason I think it must have been that
+I postponed them. I found them, even at sixteen, too involved and
+mystifying to take them in with quite the simple gullibility that is
+necessary. But that was because I was left alone with the incredibly
+magical reality from morning until nightfall, and the nights meant
+nothing more remarkable to me than the days did, no more than they do
+now. I find moonlight merely another species of illumination by which
+one registers continuity of sensation. My nursery was always on the
+edge of the strangers' knee, wondering who they were, what they might
+even mean to those who were as is called "nearest" them.
+
+I had a childhood vast with terror and surprise. If it is true that
+one forgets what one wishes to forget, then I have reason for not
+remembering the major part of those days and hours that are supposed
+to introduce one graciously into the world and offer one a clue to
+the experience that is sure to follow. Not that my childhood was so
+bitter, unless for childhood loneliness is bitterness, and without
+doubt it is the worst thing that can happen to one's childhood. Mine
+was merely a different childhood, and in this sense an original one. I
+was left with myself to discover myself amid the multitudinous other
+and far greater mysteries. I was never the victim of fear of goblins
+and ghosts because I was never taught them. I was merely taught by
+nature to follow, as if led by a rare and tender hand, the then almost
+unendurable beauty that lay on every side of me. It was pain then, to
+follow beauty, because I didn't understand beauty; it must always, I
+think, be distressing to follow anything one does not understand.
+
+I used to go, in my earliest school days, into a little strip of
+woodland not far from the great ominous red brick building in a small
+manufacturing town, on the edge of a wonderful great river in Maine,
+from which cool and quiet spot I could always hear the dominant clang
+of the bell, and there I could listen with all my very boyish
+simplicity to the running of the water over the stones, and watch--for
+it was spring, of course--the new leaves pushing up out of the mould,
+and see the light-hued blossoms swinging on the new breeze. I cared
+more for these in themselves than I did for any legendary presences
+sitting under them, shaking imperceptible fingers and waving invisible
+wands with regality in a world made only for them and for children
+who were taught mechanically to see them there.
+
+I was constantly confronted with the magic of reality itself,
+wondering why one thing was built of exquisite curves and another of
+harmonic angles. It was not a scientific passion in me, it was merely
+my sensing of the world of visible beauty around me, pressing in on me
+with the vehemence of splendor, on every side.
+
+I feel about the world now precisely as I did then, despite all the
+reasons that exist to encourage the change of attitude. I care for the
+magic of experience still, the magic that exists even in facts, though
+little or nothing for the objective material value.
+
+Life as an idea engrosses me with the same ardor as in the earlier
+boyish days, with the difference that there is much to admire and so
+much less to reverence and be afraid of. I harp always on the "idea"
+of life as I dwell perpetually on the existence of the moment.
+
+I might say, then, that my childhood was comparable, in its simplicity
+and extravagance of wonder, to the youth of Odilon Redon, that
+remarkable painter of the fantasy of existence, of which he speaks so
+delicately in letters to friends. His youth was apparently much like
+mine, not a youth of athleticism so much as a preoccupancy with wonder
+and the imminence of beauty surrounding all things.
+
+I was preoccupied with the "being" of things. Things in themselves
+engrossed me more than the problem of experience. I was satisfied with
+the effect of things upon my senses, and cared nothing for their
+deeper values. The inherent magic in the appearance of the world about
+me, engrossed and amazed me. No cloud or blossom or bird or human ever
+escaped me, I think.
+
+I was not indifferent to anything that took shape before me, though
+when it came to people I was less credulous of their perfection
+because they pressed forward their not always certain credentials upon
+me. I reverenced them then too much for an imagined austerity as I
+admire them now perhaps not enough for their charm, for it is the
+charm of things and people only that engages and satisfies me. I have
+completed my philosophical equations, and have become enamored of
+people as having the same propensities as all other objects of nature.
+One need never question appearances. One accepts them for their face
+value, as the camera accepts them, without recommendation or
+specialized qualification. They are what they become to one. The
+capacity for legend comes out of the capacity for experience, and it
+is in this fashion that I hold such high respect for geniuses like
+Grimm and Andersen, but as I know their qualities I find myself
+leaning with more readiness toward Lewis Carroll's superb "Alice in
+Wonderland."
+
+I was, I suppose, born backward, physically speaking. I was
+confronted with the vastitude of the universe at once, without the
+ingratiating introduction of the fairy tale. I had early made the not
+so inane decision that I would not read a book until I really wanted
+to. One of the rarest women in the world, having listened to my
+remark, said she had a book she knew I would like because it was so
+different, and forthwith presented me with Emerson's Essays, the first
+book that I have any knowledge of reading, and it was in my eighteenth
+year. Until then I had been wholly absorbed with the terrors and the
+majestical inferences of the moment, the hour, and the day. I was
+alone with them, and they were wonderful and excessively baffling in
+their splendors; then, after filling my mind and soul with the
+legendary splendors of Friendship, and The Oversoul-Circles, and
+Compensation, each of these words of exciting largeness in themselves,
+I turned to the dramatic unrealities of Zarathustra, which, of course,
+was in no way to be believed because it did not exist. And then came
+expansion and release into the outer world again through
+interpretation of Plato, and of Leaves of Grass itself.
+
+I have saved myself from the disaster of beliefs through these magical
+books, and am free once more as in my early childhood to indulge
+myself in the iridescent idea of life, as Idea.
+
+But the fairy story is nothing after all but a means whereby we, as
+children, may arrive at some clue as to the significance of things
+around us, and it is through them the child finds his way out from
+incoherency toward comprehension. The universe is a vast place, as we
+all know who think we comprehend it in admiring it. The things we
+cannot know are in reality of no consequence, in comparison with the
+few we can know. I can know, for instance, that my morning is the new
+era of my existence, and that I shall never live through another like
+it, as I have never lived through the one I recall in my memory, which
+was Yesterday. Yesterday was my event in experience then, as it is my
+event in memory now. I am related to the world by the way I feel
+attached to the life of it as exemplified in the vividness of the
+moment. I am, by reason of my peculiar personal experience, enabled to
+extract the magic from the moment, discarding the material husk of it
+precisely as the squirrel does the shell of the nut.
+
+I am preoccupied with the business of transmutation--which is to say,
+the proper evaluation of life as idea, of experience as delectable
+diversion. It is necessary for everyone to poetize his sensations in
+order to comprehend them. Weakness in the direction of philosophy
+creates the quality of dogmatic interrogation. A preoccupancy with
+religious characteristics assists those who are interested in the
+problem of sublimation. The romanticist is a kind of scientific person
+engaged in the correct assembling of chemical constituents that will
+produce a formula by which he can live out every one of his moments
+with a perfect comprehension of their charm and of their everlasting
+value to him. If the romanticist have the advantage of comprehension
+of the sense of beauty as related to art, then he may be said to be
+wholly equipped for the exquisite legend of life in which he takes his
+place, as factor in the perfected memory of existence, which becomes
+the real history of life, as an idea. The person of most power in life
+is he who becomes high magician with the engaging and elusive trick.
+
+It is a fairy-tale in itself if you will, and everyone is entitled to
+his or her own private splendor, which, of course, must be invented
+from intelligence for oneself.
+
+There will be no magic found away from life. It is what you do with
+the street-corner in your brain that shall determine your gift. It
+will not be found in the wilderness, and in one's toying with the
+magic of existence is the one gift for the management of experience.
+
+I hope one day, when life as an "idea" permits, and that I have
+figured will be somewhere around my ninetieth year, to take up books
+that absorb the brains of the intelligent. When I read a book, it is
+because it will somehow expose to me the magic of existence. My fairy
+tales of late have been "Wuthering Heights," and the work of the
+Brothers James, Will and Henry. I am not so sure but that I like
+William best, and I assure you that is saying a great deal, but it is
+only because I think William is more like life as idea.
+
+I shall hope when it comes time to sit in a garden and fold one's
+hands gently, listening to the birds all over again, watching the
+blossoms swinging with a still acuter eye, to take up the books of
+Grimm and Andersen, for I have a feeling they will be the books that
+will best corroborate my comprehension of life as an idea. I think it
+will be the best time to read them then, to go out with a memory
+softened by the warm hues and touches of legend that rise out of the
+air surrounding life itself.
+
+There will be a richer comprehension of "once upon a time there was a
+princess"--who wore a great many jewelled rings on her fingers and
+whose eyes were like deep pools in the farthest fields of the sky--for
+that will be the lady who let me love in the ways I was made to
+forget; the lady whose hands I have touched as gently as possible and
+from whom I have exacted no wish save that I might always love someone
+or something that was so like herself as to make me think it was no
+other than herself. It is because I love the idea of life better than
+anything else that I believe most of all in the magic of existence,
+and in spite of much terrifying and disillusioning experience of late,
+I _believe_.
+
+
+
+
+PART ONE
+
+
+
+
+THE RED MAN
+
+
+It is significant that all races, and primitive peoples especially,
+exhibit the wish somehow to inscribe their racial autograph before
+they depart. It is our redman who permits us to witness the signing of
+his autograph with the beautiful gesture of his body in the form of
+the symbolic dance which he and his forefathers have practiced through
+the centuries, making the name America something to be remembered
+among the great names of the world and of time. It is the redman who
+has written down our earliest known history, and it is of his symbolic
+and esthetic endeavors that we should be most reasonably proud. He is
+the one man who has shown us the significance of the poetic aspects of
+our original land. Without him we should still be unrepresented in the
+cultural development of the world. The wide discrepancies between our
+earliest history and our present make it an imperative issue for
+everyone loving the name America to cherish him while he remains among
+us as the only esthetic representative of our great country up to the
+present hour. He has indicated for all time the symbolic splendor of
+our plains, canyons, mountains, lakes, mesas and ravines, our forests
+and our native skies, with their animal inhabitants, the buffalo, the
+deer, the eagle and the various other living presences in their midst.
+He has learned throughout the centuries the nature of our soil and has
+symbolized for his own religious and esthetic satisfaction all the
+various forms that have become benefactors to him.
+
+Americans of this time and of time to come shall know little or
+nothing of their spacious land until they have sought some degree of
+intimacy with our first artistic relative. The redman is the one truly
+indigenous religionist and esthete of America. He knows every form of
+animal and vegetable life adhering to our earth, and has made for
+himself a series of striking pageantries in the form of stirring
+dances to celebrate them, and his relation to them. Throughout the
+various dances of the Pueblos of the Rio Grande those of San Felipe,
+Santo Domingo, San Ildefonso, Taos, Tesuque, and all the other tribes
+of the west and the southwest, the same unified sense of beauty
+prevails, and in some of the dances to a most remarkable degree. For
+instance, in a large pueblo like Santo Domingo, you have the dance
+composed of nearly three hundred people, two hundred of whom form the
+dance contingent, the other third a chorus, probably the largest
+singing chorus in the entire redman population of America. In a small
+pueblo like Tesuque, the theme is beautifully represented by from
+three to a dozen individuals, all of them excellent performers in
+various ways. The same quality and the same character, the same sense
+of beauty, prevails in all of them.
+
+It is the little pueblo of Tesuque which has just finished its series
+of Christmas dances--a four-day festival celebrating with all but
+impeccable mastery the various identities which have meant so much to
+them both physically and spiritually--that I would here cite as an
+example. It is well known that once gesture is organized, it requires
+but a handful of people to represent multitude; and this lonely
+handful of redmen in the pueblo of Tesuque, numbering at most but
+seventy-five or eighty individuals, lessened, as is the case with all
+the pueblos of the country to a tragical degree by the recent
+invasions of the influenza epidemic, showed the interested observer,
+in groups of five or a dozen dancers and soloists including drummers,
+through the incomparable pageantry of the buffalo, the eagle, the
+snowbird, and other varying types of small dances, the mastery of the
+redman in the art of gesture, the art of symbolized pantomimic
+expression. It is the buffalo, the eagle, and the deer dances that
+show you their essential greatness as artists. You find a species of
+rhythm so perfected in its relation to racial interpretation as hardly
+to admit of witnessing ever again the copied varieties of dancing such
+as we whites of the present hour are familiar with. It is nothing
+short of captivating artistry of first excellence, and we are familiar
+with nothing that equals it outside the Negro syncopation which we
+now know so well, and from which we have borrowed all we have of
+native expression.
+
+If we had the redman sense of time in our system, we would be better
+able to express ourselves. We are notoriously unorganized in esthetic
+conception, and what we appreciate most is merely the athletic phase
+of bodily expression, which is of course attractive enough, but is not
+in itself a formal mode of expression. The redman would teach us to be
+ourselves in a still greater degree, as his forefathers have taught
+him to be himself down the centuries, despite every obstacle. It is
+now as the last obstacle in the way of his racial expression that we
+as his host and guardian are pleasing ourselves to figure. It is as
+inhospitable host we are quietly urging denunciation of his pagan
+ceremonials. It is an inhospitable host that we are, and it is amazing
+enough, our wanting to suppress him. You will travel over many
+continents to find a more beautifully synthesized artistry than our
+redman offers. In times of peace we go about the world seeking out
+every species of life foreign to ourselves for our own esthetic or
+intellectual diversion, and yet we neglect on our very doorstep the
+perhaps most remarkable realization of beauty that can be found
+anywhere. It is of a perfect piece with the great artistry of all
+time. We have to go for what we know of these types of expression to
+books and to fragments of stone, to monuments and to the preserved
+bits of pottery we now may see under glass mostly, while there is the
+living remnant of a culture so fine in its appreciation of the beauty
+of things, under our own home eye, so near that we can not even see
+it.
+
+A glimpse of the buffalo dance alone will furnish proof sufficient to
+you of the sense of symbolic significances in the redman that is
+unsurpassed. The redman is a genius in his gift of masquerade alone.
+He is a genius in detail, and in ensemble, and the producer of today
+might learn far more from him than he can be aware of except by
+visiting his unique performances. The redman's notion of the theatric
+does not depend upon artificial appliances. He relies entirely upon
+the sun with its so clear light of the west and southwest to do his
+profiling and silhouetting for him, and he knows the sun will
+cooperate with every one of his intentions. He allows for the sense of
+mass and of detail with proper proportion, allows also for the
+interval of escape in mood, crediting the value of the pause with the
+ability to do its prescribed work for the eye and ear perfectly, and
+when he is finished he retires from the scene carefully to the beating
+of the drums, leaving the emotion to round itself out gradually until
+he disappears, and silence completes the picture for the eye and the
+brain. His staging is of the simplest, and therefore, the most
+natural. Since he is sure of his rhythms, in every other dancer as
+well as himself, he is certain of his ensemble, and is likewise sure
+there will be no dead spots either in the scenario or in the
+presentation. His production is not a show for the amusement of the
+onlooker; it is a pageant for the edification of his own soul. Each
+man is therefore concerned with the staging of the idea, because it is
+his own spiritual drama in a state of enaction, and each is in his own
+way manager of the scene, and of the duos, trios, and ensembles, or
+whatever form the dances may require. It is therefore of a piece with
+his conception of nature and the struggle for realism is not
+necessary, since he is at all times the natural actor, the natural
+expresser of the indications and suggestions derived from the great
+theme of nature which occupies his mind, and body, and soul. His
+acting is invented by himself for purposes of his own, and it is
+nature that gives him the sign and symbol for the expression of life
+as a synthesis. He is a genius in plastic expression, and every
+movement of his is sure to register in the unity of the theme, because
+he himself is a powerful unit of the group in which he may be
+performing. He is esthetically a responsible factor, since it concerns
+him as part of the great idea. He is leading soloist and auxiliary in
+one. He is the significant instrument in the orchestration of the
+theme at hand, and knows his body will respond to every requirement of
+phrasing. You will find the infants, of two and three years of age
+even, responding in terms of play to the exacting rhythms of the
+dance, just as with orientals it was the children often who wove the
+loveliest patterns in their rugs.
+
+In the instance of the buffalo dance of the Tesuque Indians, contrary
+to what might be expected or would popularly be conceived, there is
+not riotry of color, but the costumes are toned rather in the sombre
+hues of the animal in question, and after the tone of the dark flanks
+of the mountains crested and avalanched with snows, looking more like
+buffaloes buried knee deep in white drifts than anything else one may
+think of. They bring you the sense of the power of the buffalo
+personality, the formidable beast that once stampeded the prairies
+around them, solemnized with austere gesturing, enveloping him with
+stateliness, and the silence of the winter that surrounds themselves.
+Three men, two of them impersonating the buffalo, the third with bow
+and arrow in hand, doubtless the hunter, and two women representing
+the mother buffalo, furnish the ensemble. Aside from an occasional
+note of red in girdles and minor trappings, with a softening touch of
+green in the pine branches in their hands, the adjustment of hue is
+essentially one of the black and white, one of the most difficult
+harmonies in esthetic scales the painter encounters in the making of a
+picture, the most difficult of all probably, by reason of its limited
+range and the economic severity of color. It calls for nothing short
+of the finest perception of nuance, and it is the redman of America
+who knows with an almost flawless eye the natural harmonies of the
+life that surrounds him. He has for so long decorated his body with
+the hues of the earth that he has grown to be a part of them. He is a
+living embodiment in color of various tonal characteristics of the
+landscape around him. He knows the harmonic value of a bark or a hide,
+or a bit of broken earth, and of the natural unpolluted coloring to be
+drawn out of various types of vegetable matter at his disposal. Even
+if he resorts to our present-day store ribbons and cheap trinkets for
+accessories, he does it with a view to creating the appearance of
+racial ensemble. He is one of the essential decorators of the world. A
+look at the totem poles and the prayer robes of the Indians of Alaska
+will convince you of that.
+
+In the buffalo dance, then, you perceive the redman's fine knowledge
+of color relations, of the harmonizing of buffalo skins, of white
+buckskins painted with most expressively simple designs symbolizing
+the various earth identities, and the accompanying ornamentation of
+strings of shells and other odd bits having a black or a grey and
+white lustre. You get an adjusted relation of white which traverses
+the complete scale of color possibility in monochrome. The two men
+representing the buffalo, with buffalo heads covering their heads and
+faces from view, down to their breasts, their bodies to the waist
+painted black, no sign of pencillings visible to relieve the austerity
+of intention, legs painted black and white, with cuffs of skunk's fur
+round the ankles to represent the death mask symbol, relieving the
+edges of the buckskin moccasins--in all this you have the notes that
+are necessary for the color balance of the idea of solemnity
+presented to the eye. You find even the white starlike splashes here
+and there on backs, breasts and arms coinciding splendidly with the
+flecks of eagles-down that quiver in the wind down their black bodies,
+and the long black hair of the accompanying hunter, as flecks of foam
+would rise from waterfalls of dark mountain streams; and the feathers
+that float from the tips of the buffalo horns seem like young eaglets
+ready to leave the eyry, to swim for the first time the far fields of
+air above and below them, to traverse with skill the sunlit spaces
+their eyes have opened to with a fierce amazement. Even the clouds of
+frozen breath darting from the lips of the dancers served as an
+essential phase of the symbolic decoration, and the girdles of tiny
+conchlike shells rattling round their agile thighs made a music you
+were glad to hear. The sunshine fell from them, too, in scales of
+light, danced around the spaces enveloping them along with the flecks
+of eagle-down that floated away from their bodies with the vigors of
+the dance, floating away from their dark warm bodies, and their
+jet-blue hair. It is the incomparable understanding of their own
+inventive rhythms that inspire and impress you as spectator. It is the
+swift comprehension of change in rhythm given them by the drummers,
+the speedy response of their so living pulsating bodies, the
+irresistible rapport with the varying themes, that thrills and invites
+you to remain close to the picture. They know, as perfect artists
+would know, the essential value of the materials at their disposal,
+and the eye for harmonic relationships is as keen as the impeccable
+gift for rhythm which is theirs. The note of skill was again
+accentuated when, at the close of the season's ensemble with a
+repetition of the beautiful eagle dance, there appeared two
+grotesqueries in the form of charming devil spirits in the hues of
+animals also, again in startling arrangements of black and white, with
+the single hint of color in the red lips of the masks that covered
+their heads completely from view, and from which long tails of white
+horsehair fell down their grey white backs--completing the feeling
+once again of stout animal spirits roaming through dark forests in
+search of sad faces, or, it may even be, of evil doers.
+
+All these dances form the single spectacle surviving from a great race
+that no American can afford actually to miss, and certainly not to
+ignore. It is easy to conceive with what furore of amazement these
+spectacles would be received if they were brought for a single
+performance to our metropolitan stage. But they will never be seen
+away from the soil on which they have been conceived and perpetuated.
+It is with a simple cordiality the redman permits you to witness the
+esthetic survivals of his great race. It is the artist and the poet
+for whom they seem to be almost especially created, since these are
+probably nearest to understanding them from the point of view of
+finely organized expression; for it is by the artist and the poet of
+the first order that they have been invented and perfected. We as
+Americans of today would profit by assisting as much as possible in
+the continuance of these beautiful spectacles, rather than to assist
+in the calm dismissal and destruction of them. It is the gesture of a
+slowly but surely passing race which they themselves can not live
+without; just as we, if we but knew the ineffable beauty of them,
+would want at least to avail ourselves of a feast for the eye which no
+other country in existence can offer us, and which any other nation in
+the world would be only too proud to cherish and foster.
+
+We are not, I think, more than vaguely conscious of what we possess in
+these redman festivities, by way of esthetic prize. It is with pain
+that one hears rumors of official disapproval of these rare and
+invaluable ceremonials. Those familiar with human psychology
+understand perfectly that the one necessary element for individual
+growth is freedom to act according to personal needs. Once an
+opposition of any sort is interposed, you get a blocked aspect of
+evolution, you get a withered branch, and it may even be a dead root.
+All sorts of complexes and complexities occur. You get deformity, if
+not complete helplessness and annihilation. I can not imagine what
+would happen to the redman if his one racial gesture were denied him,
+if he were forbidden to perform his symbolic dances from season to
+season. It is a survival that is as spiritually imperative to him as
+it is physically and emotionally necessary. I can see a whole flood of
+exquisite inhibitions heaped up for burial and dry rot within the
+caverns and the interstices of his soul. He is a rapidly disappearing
+splendor, despite the possible encouragement of statistics. He needs
+the dance to make his body live out its natural existence, precisely
+as he needs the air for his lungs and blood for his veins. He needs to
+dance as we need to laugh to save ourselves from fixed stages of
+morbidity and disintegration. It is the laughter of his body that he
+insists upon, as well as depends upon. A redman deprived of his racial
+gesture is unthinkable. You would have him soon the bleached carcass
+in the desert out of which death moans, and from which the lizard
+crawls. It would be in the nature of direct race suicide. He needs
+protection therefore rather than disapproval. It is as if you clipped
+the wing of the eagle, and then asked him to soar to the sun, to cut a
+curve on the sky with the instrument dislodged; or as if you asked the
+deer to roam the wood with its cloven hoofs removed. You can not cut
+the main artery of the body and expect it to continue functioning.
+Depriving the redman of his one enviable gesture would be cutting the
+artery of racial instinct, emptying the beautiful chamber of his soul
+of its enduring consciousness. The window would be opened and the bird
+flown to a dead sky. It is simply unthinkable. The redman is
+essentially a thankful and a religious being. He needs to celebrate
+the gifts his heaven pours upon him. Without them he would in short
+perish, and perish rapidly, having no breath to breathe, and no
+further need for survival. He is already in process of disappearance
+from our midst, with the attempts toward assimilation.
+
+Inasmuch as we have the evidence of a fine aristocracy among us still,
+it would seem as if it behooved us as a respectable host to let the
+redman guest entertain himself as he will, as he sublimely does, since
+as guardians of such exceptional charges we can not seem to entertain
+them. There is no logical reason why they should accept an inferior
+hospitality, other than with the idea of not inflicting themselves
+upon a strange host more than is necessary. The redman in the
+aggregate is an example of the peaceable and unobtrusive citizen; we
+would not presume to interfere with the play of children in the
+sunlight. They are among the beautiful children of the world in their
+harmlessness. They are among the aristocracy of the world in the
+matters of ethics, morals, and etiquette. We forget they are vastly
+older, and in symbolic ways infinitely more experienced than
+ourselves. They do not share in tailor-made customs. They do not need
+imposed culture, which is essentially inferior to their own. Soon we
+shall see them written on tablets of stone, along with the Egyptians
+and the others among the races that have perished. The esthetics of
+the redman have been too particular to permit of universal
+understanding, and of universal adaptation. It is the same with all
+primitives, who invent regimes and modes of expression for themselves
+according to their own specific psychological needs. We encourage
+every other sign and indication of beauty toward the progress of
+perfection. Why should not we encourage a race that is beautiful by
+the proof of centuries to remain the unoffensive guest of the sun and
+the moon and the stars while they may? As the infant prodigy among
+races, there is much that we could inherit from these people if we
+could prove ourselves more worthy and less egotistic.
+
+The artist and the poet of perception come forward with heartiest
+approval and it is the supplication of the poet and the artist which
+the redman needs most of all. Science looks upon him as a phenomenon;
+esthetics looks upon him as a giant of masterful expression in our
+midst. The redman is poet and artist of the very first order among the
+geniuses of time. We have nothing more native at our disposal than the
+beautiful creations of this people. It is singular enough that the as
+yet remote black man contributes the only native representation of
+rhythm and melody we possess. As an intelligent race, we are not even
+sure we want to welcome him as completely as we might, if his color
+were just a shade warmer, a shade nearer our own. We have no qualms
+about yellow and white and the oriental intermediate hues. We may
+therefore accept the redman without any of the prejudices peculiar to
+other types of skin, and we may accept his contribution to our culture
+as a most significant and important one. We haven't even begun to make
+use of the beautiful hints in music alone which he has given to us. We
+need, and abjectly so I may say, an esthetic concept of our own. Other
+nations of the world have long since accepted Congo originality. The
+world has yet to learn of the originality of the redman, and we who
+have him as our guest, knowing little or nothing of his powers and the
+beauty he confers on us by his remarkable esthetic propensities,
+should be the first to welcome and to foster him. It is not enough to
+admit of archaeological curiosity. We need to admit, and speedily, the
+rare and excellent esthetics in our midst, a part of our own intimate
+scene. The redman is a spiritual expresser of very vital issues. If
+his pottery and his blankets offer the majority but little, his
+ceremonials do contribute to the comparative few who can perceive a
+spectacle we shall not see the equal of in history again. It would
+help at least a little toward proving to the world around us that we
+are not so young a country as we might seem, nor yet as diffident as
+our national attitude would seem to indicate. The smile alone of the
+redman is the light of our rivers, plains, canyons, and mountains. He
+has the calm of all our native earth. It is from the earth all things
+arise. It is our geography that makes us Americans of the present,
+children. We are the product of a day. The redman is the product of
+withered ages. He has written and is still writing a very impressive
+autograph on the waste places of history. It would seem to me to be a
+sign of modernism in us to preserve the living esthetic splendors in
+our midst. Every other nation has preserved its inheritances. We need
+likewise to do the same. It is not enough to put the redman as a
+specimen under glass along with the auk and the dinosaur. He is still
+alive and longing to live. We have lost the buffalo and the beaver and
+we are losing the redman, also, and all these are fine symbols of our
+own native richness and austerity. The redman will perpetuate himself
+only by the survival of his own customs for he will never be able to
+accept customs that are as foreign to him as ours are and must always
+be; he will never be able to accept a culture which is inferior to his
+own.
+
+In the esthetic sense alone, then, we have the redman as a gift. As
+Americans we should accept the one American genius we possess, with
+genuine alacrity. We have upon our own soil something to show the
+world as our own, while it lives. To restrict the redman now would
+send him to an unrighteous oblivion. He has at least two contributions
+to confer, a very aristocratic notion of religion, and a superb gift
+for stylistic expression. He is the living artist in our midst, and we
+need not think of him as merely the anthropological variation or as an
+archaeological diversion merely. He proves the importance of
+synthetic registration in peoples. He has created his system for
+himself, from substance on, through outline down to every convincing
+detail. We are in a position always of selecting details in the hope
+of constructing something usable for ourselves. It is the superficial
+approach. We are imitators because we have by nature or force of
+circumstance to follow, and improve upon, if we can. We merely
+"impose" something. We can not improve upon what the redman offers us
+in his own way. To "impose" something--that is the modern culture. The
+interval of imposition is our imaginary interval of creation. The
+primitives created a complete cosmos for themselves, an entire
+principle. I want merely, then, esthetic recognition in full of the
+contribution of the redman as artist, as one of the finest artists of
+time; the poetic redman ceremonialist, celebrant of the universe as he
+sees it, and master among masters of the art of symbolic gesture. It
+is pitiable to dismiss him from our midst. He needs rather royal
+invitation to remain and to persist, and he can persist only by
+expressing himself in his own natural and distinguished way, as is the
+case with all peoples, and all individuals, indeed.
+
+
+
+
+WHITMAN AND CÉZANNE
+
+
+It is interesting to observe that in two fields of expression, those
+of painting and poetry, the two most notable innovators, Whitman and
+Cézanne bear a definite relationship in point of similarity of ideals
+and in their attitudes toward esthetic principles. Both of these men
+were so true to their respective ideals that they are worth
+considering at the same time in connection with each other: Cézanne
+with his desire to join the best that existed in the impressionistic
+principle with the classical arts of other times, or as he called it,
+to create an art like the Louvre out of impressionism. We shall find
+him striving always toward actualities, toward the realization of
+beauty as it is seen to exist in the real, in the object itself,
+whether it be mountain or apple or human, the entire series of living
+things in relation to one another.
+
+It is consistent that Cézanne, like all pioneers, was without
+prescribed means, that he had to spend his life inventing for himself
+those terms and methods which would best express his feelings about
+nature. It is natural that he admired the precision of Bouguereau, it
+is also quite natural that he should have worshipped in turn,
+Delacroix, Courbet, and without doubt, the mastery of Ingres, and it
+is indicative too that he felt the frank force of Manet. It was his
+special distinction to strive toward a simple presentation of simple
+things, to want to paint "that which existed between himself and the
+object," and to strive to solidify the impressionistic conception with
+a greater realization of form in space, the which they had so much
+ignored. That he achieved this in a satisfying manner may be observed
+in the best of his landscapes and still-lifes, and in some of the
+figure studies also. The endeavor to eliminate all aspects of
+extraneous conception by dismissing the quality of literature, of
+poetry and romance from painting, was the exact characteristic which
+made him what he is for us today, the pioneer in the field of modern
+art. It was significant enough when he once said to Renoir, that it
+took him twenty years to find out that painting was not sculpture.
+Those earlier and heavy impasto studies of his are the evidence of
+this worthy deduction. It was significant, too, when he said that
+Gaugin was but "a flea on his back," and that "he does nothing but
+paint Chinese images."
+
+The phrase that brings these two strikingly original personages in art
+together is the one of Cézanne: "I remain the primitive of the way I
+have discovered"; and that of Whitman, which comes if I am not
+mistaken from Democratic Vistas, though it may be from elsewhere in
+Whitman's prose, running chiefly: "I only wish to indicate the way for
+the innumerable poets that are to come after me," etc., and "I warn
+you this is not a book, this is a man." These two geniuses are both of
+one piece as to their esthetic intention, despite the great gulf that
+lies between their concepts of, and their attitudes toward life. For
+the one, life was a something to stay close to always, for the other,
+it was something to be afraid of to an almost abnormal degree; Whitman
+and his door never closed, Cézanne and his door seldom or never
+opened, indeed, were heavily padlocked against the intrusion of the
+imaginary outsider. These are the geniuses who have done most for
+these two arts of the present time, it is Whitman and Cézanne who have
+clarified the sleeping eye and withheld it from being totally blinded,
+from the onslaughts of jaded tradition.
+
+There were in Cézanne the requisite gifts for selection, and for
+discarding all useless encumbrances, there was in him the great desire
+for purification, or of seeing the superb fact in terms of itself,
+majestically; and if not always serenely, serenity was nevertheless
+his passionate longing. He saw what there was for him in those old and
+accepted masters who meant most to him, and he saw also what there was
+for him in that newest of old masters, which was also in its way the
+assumed discovery of our time, he saw the relativity of Greco's
+beautiful art to the art of his own making. He saw that here was a
+possible and applicable architectonic suited to the objects of his
+newly conceived principles, he felt in Greco the magnetic tendency of
+one thing toward another in nature, that trees and hills and valleys
+and people were not something sitting still for his special
+delectation, but that they were constantly aspiring to fruition,
+either physical, mental, or let us say, spiritual, even when the word
+is applied to the so-termed inanimate objects. He felt the
+"palpitancy," the breathing of all things, the urge outward of all
+life toward the light which helps it create and recreate itself. He
+felt this "movement" in and about things, and this it is that gives
+his pictures that sensitive life quality which lifts them beyond the
+aspect of picture-making or even mere representation. They are not
+cold studies of inanimate things, they are pulsing realizations of
+living substances striving toward each other, lending each other their
+individual activities until his canvases become, as one might name
+them, ensembles of animation, orchestrated life. We shall, I think,
+find this is what Greco did for Cézanne, and it is Cézanne who was
+among the first of moderns, if not the first, to appreciate that
+particular aspirational quality in the splendid pictures of Greco.
+They "move" toward their design, they were lifted by the quality of
+their organization into spaces in which they were free to carry on the
+fine illusion of life.
+
+Whitman has certainly aspired equally, but being more things in one
+than Cézanne, his task has been in some ways greater, more difficult,
+and may we say for humanistic reasons, loftier. Whitman's
+inclusiveness was at one and the same time his virtue and his defect.
+For mystical reasons, it was imperative for him to include all things
+in himself, and so he set about enumerating all those elements which
+were in him, and of which he was so devoted and affectionate a part.
+That he could leave nothing out was, it may be said, his strongest
+esthetical defect, for it is by esthetical judgment that we choose and
+bring together those elements as we conceive it. It is the mark of
+good taste to reject that which is unessential, and the "tact of
+omission," well exemplified in Cézanne, has been found excellently
+axiomatic. So that it is the tendency in Whitman to catalogue in
+detail the entire obvious universe that makes many of his pages a
+strain on the mind as well as on the senses, and the eye especially.
+The absolute enforcement of this gift of omission in painting makes it
+easier for the artist, in that his mind is perforce engrossed with the
+idea of simplification, directness, and an easy relationship of the
+elements selected for presentation to each other.
+
+It is the quality of "living-ness" in Cézanne that sends his art to
+the heights of universality, which is another way of naming the
+classical vision, or the masterly conception, and brings him together
+with Whitman as much of the same piece. You get all this in all the
+great masters of painting and literature, Goethe, Shakespeare, Rubens,
+and the Greeks. It is the reaching out and the very mastering of life
+which makes all art great, and all artists into geniuses. It is the
+specializing on ideas which shuts the stream of its flow. I have felt
+the same gift for life in a still-life or a landscape of Cézanne's
+that I have felt in any of Whitman's best pieces. The element in
+common with these two exceptional creators is liberation. They have
+done more, these modern pioneers, for the liberation of the artist,
+and for the "freeing" of painting and poetry than any other men of
+modern time. Through them, painting and poetry have become literally
+free, and through them it is that the young painters and poets have
+sought new fields for self deliverance. Discipleship does not hold out
+long with the truly understanding. Those who really know what
+originality is are not long the slave of the power of imitation: it is
+the gifted assimilator that suffers most under the spell of mastery.
+Legitimate influence is a quality which all earnest creators learn to
+handle at once. Both poetry and painting are, or so it seems to me,
+revealing well the gift of understanding, and as a result we have a
+better variety of painting and of poetry than at the first outbreak of
+this so called modern esthetic epidemic.
+
+The real younger creators are learning the difference between surface
+and depth, between exterior semblances, and the underlying substances.
+Both Whitman and Cézanne stand together in the name of one common
+purpose, freedom from characteristics not one's own. They have taught
+the creators of this time to know what classicism really is, that it
+is the outline of all things that endure. They have both shown that it
+is not idiosyncrasy alone which creates originality, that idiosyncrasy
+is but the husk of personal penetration, that it is in no way the
+constituent essential for genius. For genius is nothing but the name
+for higher perception, the greater degree of understanding. Cézanne's
+fine landscapes and still-lifes, and Whitman's majestic line with its
+gripping imagery are one and the same thing, for it reaches the same
+height in the mind. They walk together out of a vivid past, these two
+geniuses, opening the corridors to a possibly vivid future for the
+artists of now, and to come. They are the gateway for our modern
+esthetic development, the prophets of the new time. They are most of
+all, the primitives of the way they have begun, they have voiced most
+of all the imperative need of essential personalism, of direct
+expression out of direct experience, with an eye to nothing but
+quality and proportion as conceived by them. Their dogmas were both
+simple in the extreme, and of immense worth to us in their respective
+spheres. We may think of them as the giants of the beginning of the
+twentieth century, with the same burning desire to enlarge the general
+scope of vision, and the finer capacity for individual experience.
+
+
+
+
+ALBERT P. RYDER
+
+
+Albert P. Ryder possessed in a high degree that strict passivity of
+mental vision which calls into being the elusive yet fixed element the
+mystic Blake so ardently refers to and makes a principle of, that
+element outside the mind's jurisdiction. His work is of the essence of
+poetry; it is alien to the realm of esthetics pure, for it has very
+special spiritual histories to relate. His landscapes are somewhat
+akin to those of Michel and of Courbet. They suggest Michel's wide
+wastes of prodigal sky and duneland with their winding roads that have
+no end, his ever-shadowy stretches of cloud upon ever-shadowy
+stretches of land that go their austere way to the edges of some
+vacant sea. They suggest, too, those less remote but perhaps even more
+aloof spaces of solitude which were ever Courbet's theme in his deeper
+hours, that haunting sense of subtle habitation, that acute invasion
+of either wind or soft fleck of light or bright presence in a breadth
+of shadow, as if a breath of living essences always somehow pervaded
+those mystic woodland or still lowland scenes. But highly populate as
+these pictures of Courbet's are with the spirit of ever-passing feet
+that hover and hold converse in the remote wood, the remoter plain,
+they never quite surrender to that ghostliness which possesses the
+pictures of our Ryder. At all times in his work one has the feeling of
+there having lately passed, if ever so fleetly, some bodily shape
+seeking a solitude of its own. I recall no other landscapes impressed
+with a more terrific austerity save Greco's incredible "Toledo," to my
+thinking a finality in landscape creation.
+
+There is quietude, solace, if you will, in Michel, in Courbet, but
+there is never a rest for the eye or the mind or the spirit in those
+most awesome of pictures which Ryder has presented to us, few as they
+are; for the Ryder legend is akin to the legend of Giorgione. There is
+always splendor in them but it is the splendor of the dream given over
+to a genius more powerful than the vision which has conjured them
+forth. It is distinctly a land of Luthany in which they have their
+being; he has inscribed for us that utter homelessness of the spirit
+in the far tracts that exist in the realm of the imagination; there is
+suffering in his pictures, that fainting of the spirit, that
+breathlessness which overtakes the soul in search of the consummation
+of beauty.
+
+Ryder is akin to Coleridge, too, for there is a direct visional
+analogy between "The Flying Dutchman" and the excessively pictorial
+stanzas of "The Ancient Mariner." Ryder has typified himself in this
+excellent portrayal of sea disaster, this profound spectacle of the
+soul's despair in conflict with wind and wave. Could any picture
+contain more of that remoteness of the world of our real heart as
+well as our real eye, the artist's eye which visits that world in no
+official sense but only as a guest or a courtly spectator? No artist,
+I ought to say, was ever more master of his ideas and less master of
+the medium of painting than Ryder; there is in some of his finest
+canvases a most pitiable display of ignorance which will undoubtedly
+shorten their life by many years.
+
+I still retain the vivid impression that afflicted me when I saw my
+first Ryder, a marine of rarest grandeur and sublimity, incredibly
+small in size, incredibly large in its emotion--just a sky and a
+single vessel in sail across a conquering sea. Ryder is, I think, the
+special messenger of the sea's beauty, the confidant of its majesties,
+its hauteurs, its supremacies; for he was born within range of the sea
+and all its legends have hovered with him continually. Since that time
+I have seen a number of other pictures either in the artist's
+possession or elsewhere: "Death on the Racetrack," "Pegasus," canvases
+from The Tempest and Macbeth in that strange little world of chaos
+that was his home, his hermitage, so distraught with débris of the
+world for which he could seem to find no other place; I have spent
+some of the rare and lovelier moments of my experience with this
+gentlest and sweetest of other-world citizens; I have felt with
+ever-living delight the excessive loveliness of his glance and of his
+smile and heard that music of some far-away world which was his
+laughter; I have known that wisdom which is once and for all wisdom
+for the artist, that confidence and trust that for the real artist
+there is but one agency for the expression of self in terms of beauty,
+the eye of the imagination, that mystical third somewhere in the mind
+which transposes all that is legitimate to expression. To Ryder the
+imagination was the man; he was a poet painter, living ever outside
+the realm of theory.
+
+He was fond of Corot, and at moments I have thought of him as the heir
+and successor to some of Corot's haunting graces; but there was all
+the difference between them that there is between lyric pure and
+tragic pure. Ryder has for once transcribed all outer semblances by
+means of a personality unrelated to anything other than itself, an
+imagination belonging strictly to our soil and specifically to our
+Eastern geography. In his autographic quality he is certainly our
+finest genius, the most creative, the most racial. For our genius, at
+its best, is the genius of the evasive; we are born lovers of the
+secret element, the mystery in things.
+
+How many of our American painters have given real attention to Ryder?
+I find him so much the legend among professional artists, this master
+of arabesque, this first and foremost of our designers, this real
+creator of pattern, this first of all creators of tragic landscape,
+whose pictures are sacred to those that revere distinction and power
+in art. He had in him that finer kind of reverence for the element of
+beauty which finds all things somehow lovely. He understood best of
+all the meaning of the grandiose, of everything that is powerful; none
+of his associates in point of time rose to just that sublimated
+experience; not Fuller, not Martin, not Blakelock, though each of
+these was touched to a special expression. They are more derivative
+than Ryder, more the children of Barbizon.
+
+Ryder gave us first and last an incomparable sense of pattern and
+austerity of mood. He saw with an all too pitiless and pitiful eye the
+element of helplessness in things, the complete succumbing of things
+in nature to those elements greater than they that wield a fatal
+power. Ryder was the last of the romantics, the last of that great
+school of impressive artistry, as he was the first of our real
+painters and the greatest in vision. He was a still companion of Blake
+in that realm of the beyond, the first citizen of the land of Luthany.
+He knew the fine distinction between drama and tragedy, the tragedy
+which nature prevails upon the sensitive to accept. He was the painter
+poet of the immanent in things.
+
+
+
+
+WINSLOW HOMER
+
+
+In Winslow Homer we have yankeeism of the first order, turned to a
+creditable artistic account. With a fierce feeling for truth, a mania,
+almost, for actualities, there must have been somewhere in his make-up
+a gentleness, a tenderness and refinement which explain his fine
+appreciation of the genius of the place he had in mind to represent.
+There is not an atom of legend in Homer, it is always and always
+narrative of the obvious world. There is at once the essential
+dramatic import ruling the scene. With him it is nothing but dramatic
+relationship, the actionary tendency of the facts themselves, in
+nature. You are held by him constantly to the bold and naked theme,
+and you are left to wander in the imagination only among the
+essentials of simple and common realism.
+
+Narrative then, first and last with Homer, and the only creative
+aspect of his pictures is concealed in the technique. The only touch
+of invention in them is the desire to improve the language they speak.
+Dramatic always, I do not call them theatric excepting in the case of
+one picture that I know, called "Morro Castle" I think, now in the
+Metropolitan Museum, reminding me much of the commonplace, "Chateau de
+Chillon" of Courbet's, neither of these pictures being of any value
+in the careers of their authors. But once you sat on the rocks of
+Maine, and watched the climbing of the surf up the morning sky after a
+heavy storm at sea, you realize the force of Homer's gift for the
+realities. His pictures are yankee in their indications, as a work of
+art could be, flinty and unyielding, resolute as is the yankee nature
+itself, or rather to say, the original yankee, which was pioneer then
+in a so rough yet resourceful country. It is the quality of Thoreau,
+but without the genius of Thoreau for the poetry of things.
+
+Homer's pictures give you nothing but the bare fact told in the better
+class terms of illustration, for he was illustrator, first of all.
+While the others were trying to make a little American Barbizon of
+their own, there were Homer, Ryder, Fuller, Martin, working alone for
+such vastly opposite ideas, and yet, of these men, four of them were
+expressing such highly imaginative ideas, and Homer was the
+unflinching realist among them. I do not know where Homer started, but
+I believe it was the sea at Prout's Neck that taught him most. I think
+that William Morris Hunt and Washington Allston must have seemed like
+infant Michelangelos then, for there is still about them a sturdiness
+which we see little of in the American art of that time, or even now
+for that matter. They had a certain massive substance, proving the
+force of mind and personality which was theirs, and while these men
+were proving the abundance and warmth of themselves, Homer was the
+frozen one among them. Nature was nature to him, and that alone he
+realized, and yet it was not precisely slavish imitation that impelled
+him.
+
+There was in him a very creditable sense of selection,--as will be
+seen especially in the water colours, so original with him, so gifted
+in their power of treatment--one of the few great masters of the
+medium the world has known. He knew the meaning of wash as few since
+have known it, he knew that it has scale and limitation of its own,
+and for all that, infinite suggestibility. Not Turner or Whistler have
+excelled him, and I do not know of anyone who has equalled him in
+understanding of this medium outside of Dodge Macknight and John
+Marin. It is in these so expressive paintings on paper that you feel
+the real esthetic longing as well as a certain contribution in Homer,
+the desire to realize himself and to release himself from too slavish
+imitation of nature and the too rigid consideration of truth. He was
+finer in technique than perhaps any that I have mentioned, though the
+two modern men have seconded him very closely, and in point of vision
+have, I am certain, surpassed him. Homer arrived because of his power
+to express what he wished to say, though his reach was far less lofty
+than theirs. He was essentially on the ground, and wanted to paint the
+very grip of his own feet on the rocks. He wanted the inevitability
+put down in recognizable form. He had not feeling for the hint or the
+suggestion until he came to the water-color, which is of course most
+essentially that sort of medium. He knew its scope and its limitations
+and never stepped out of its boundaries, and he achieved a fine
+mastery in it. His imitators will never arrive at his severity because
+they are not flint yankee. They have not the hard head and snappy
+tongue. It was yankee crabbedness that gave Homer his grip on the idea
+he had in mind. Florida lent a softer tone to what Maine rocks could
+not give him. He is American from skin to skeleton, and a leader among
+yankee as well as American geniuses. He probably hated as much as
+Thoreau, and in his steely way admired as much. It was fire from the
+flintlock in them both, though nature had a far softer and loftier
+persuasion with the Concord philosopher and naturalist.
+
+Homer remains a figure in our American culture through his feeling for
+reality. He has learned through slavery to detail to put down the
+essential fact, however abundantly or however sparsely. He has a
+little of Courbet's sense of the real, and none whatever of his sense
+of the imaginative. It was enough for him to classicize the realistic
+incident. He impels me to praise through his yankee insistence upon
+integrity. Story is story with Homer and he leaves legend to itself.
+It is the narrative of the Whittier type, homely, genuine, and
+typical. He never stepped outside of his yankee determination. Homer
+has sent the art of water colour painting to a very high place in
+world consideration. He cannot be ignored as a master in this field.
+His paintings must be taken as they are, solid renderings of fact,
+dramatically considered. He offers nothing else. Once you have seen
+these realistic sea pictures, you may want to remember and you may
+want to forget, but they call for consideration. They are true in
+their living appreciation of reality.
+
+He knew the sea like the old salts that were his neighbors, and from
+accounts he was as full of the tang of the sea as they. He was a foe
+to compromise and a despiser of imposition. The best and most
+impersonal of him is in his work, for he never ventured to express
+philosophies, ethics, or morals in terms of picture-painting. That is
+to his credit at least. He was concerned with illustration first and
+last, as he was illustrator and nothing else. He taught the proceeding
+school of illustrators much in the significance of verity, and in the
+ways and means of expressing verity in terms of pigment. What the
+stiff pen and ink drawings and the cold engravings of his time taught
+him, he conferred upon the later men in terms of freedom of technique.
+And at the same time he rose a place, as painter and artist of no mean
+order, by a certain distinction inherent in him. He had little feeling
+for synthesis outside of the water-colours, and here it was necessary
+by virtue of the limitations of the medium.
+
+Winslow Homer will not stimulate for all time only because his mind
+was too local. There is nothing of universal appeal in him. His
+realism will never reach the height even of the sea-pieces of Courbet,
+and I shall include Ryder as well. Courbet was a fine artist, and so
+was Ryder, and both had the advantage of exceptional imagination.
+Homer and Ryder are natives of the same coast and typify excellently
+the two poles in the New England temper, both in art and in life.
+Homer as realist, had the one idea in mind only, to illustrate realism
+as best he could in the most distinguished terms at the disposal of
+his personality. He succeeded admirably.
+
+Homer typifies a certain sturdiness in the American temper at least,
+and sends the lighter men away with his roughness, as doubtless he
+sent the curious away from his cliffs with the acidity of truth he
+poured upon them. He had lived so much in the close association of the
+roughest elements in existence, rocks and the madly swinging sea that
+glides over and above them defiantly, that he had without doubt taken
+on the character of them. The portrait of Homer gives him as one would
+expect him to look, and he looks like his pictures. His visage bore a
+ferocity that had to be met with a rocky certainty. It is evident
+there was no fooling him. He was filled with yankee tenacity and
+yankee courage. Homer is what you would expect to find if you were
+told to hunt up the natives of "Prout's Neck" or "Perkins Cove," or
+any of the inlets of the Maine coast. These sea people live so much
+with the roughness of the sea, that if they are at all inclined to
+acidity, and the old fashioned yankee was sure to be, they take on the
+hard edges of a man's temper in accordance with the jaggedness of the
+shores on which they live. The man around the rocks looks so very like
+the profiles one sees in the rocks themselves. They have absorbed the
+energy of the dramatic elements they cope with, and you may be sure
+that life around the sea in New England is no easy existence; and they
+give out the same salty equivalent in human association.
+
+If you have lived by the sea, you have learned the significance of the
+bravery of sea people, and you learn to understand and excuse the
+sharpness of them which is given them from battle with the elemental
+facts they are confronted with at all times. That is the character of
+Homer, that is the quality of his painting. That is what makes him
+original in the American sense, and so recognizable in the New England
+sense. He is one of New England's strongest spokesmen, and takes his
+place by the side of Ryder, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Fuller, Whittier, and
+such representative temperaments, and it is this quality that
+distinguishes him from men like Inness, Wyant, and the less typical
+painters. It is obvious, too, that he never painted any other coast,
+excepting of course Florida, in the water colours.
+
+It was Florida that produced the chef d'oeuvre in him. It was Maine
+that taught him the force of the southern aspect. Romancer among the
+realistic facts of nature, he might be called, for he did not merely
+copy nature. He did invest things with their own suggestive reality,
+and he surmounted his earlier gifts for exact illustration by this
+other finer gift for romantic appreciation. Homer was an excellent
+narrator, as will be seen in the "Gulf Stream" picture in the
+Metropolitan Museum. It has the powers of Jack London and of Conrad in
+it. Homer was intense, vigorous, and masculine. If he was harsh in his
+characteristics, he was one who knew the worth of economy in emotion.
+He was one with his idea and his metier, and that is sufficient.
+
+
+
+
+AMERICAN VALUES IN PAINTING
+
+
+There are certain painters who join themselves together in a kind of
+grouping, which, whether they wish to think of themselves in this light
+or not, have become in the matter of American values in painting, a
+fixed associative aspect of painting in America. When we speak of
+American painting, the choice is small, but definite as to the number of
+artists, and the type of art they wished themselves to be considered
+for. From the Hudson River grouping, which up to Inness is not more
+marked than as a set of men copying nature with scrupulous fidelity to
+detail, rather than conveying any special feeling or notion of what a
+picture of, or the landscape itself, may convey; and leaving aside the
+American pupils of the Academy in Paris and Rome, most of whom returned
+with a rich sense of rhetorical conventionalities in art--men like
+William Morris Hunt and Washington Allston--we may turn to that other
+group of men as being far more typical of our soil and temper. I mean
+artists such as Homer Martin, Albert P. Ryder, George Fuller, and the
+later Winslow Homer who certainly did receive more recognition than any
+of them prior to his death.
+
+Martin, Ryder, and Fuller could not have enjoyed much in the way of
+appreciation outside of a few artists of their time, and even now
+they may be said to be the artists for artists. It is reasonable to
+hope that they were not successful, since that which was à la mode in
+the expression of their time was essentially of the dry Academy. One
+would hardly think of Homer Martin's "Border of the Seine" landscape
+in the Metropolitan Museum, hardly more then than now, and it leaves
+many a painter flat in appreciation of its great dignity, austerity,
+reserve, and for the distinguished quality of its stylism. What Martin
+may have gotten, during his stay in Europe, which is called
+impressionism is, it must be said, a more aristocratic type of
+impressionism than issued from the Monet followers. Martin must then
+have been knowing something of the more dignified intellectualism of
+Pissarro and of Sisley, those men who have been the last to reach the
+degrees of appreciation due them in the proper exactitude.
+
+We cannot think of Martin as ever having carried off academic medals
+during his period. We cannot think of Martin as President of the
+Academy, which position was occupied by a far inferior artist who was
+likewise carried away by impressionism, namely Alden Weir. The actual
+attachment in characteristic of introspective temper in Alden Weir is
+not so removed from Martin, Fuller and Ryder as might be imagined; he
+is more like Martin perhaps though far less profound in his sense of
+mystery; Fuller being more the romanticist and Ryder in my estimation
+the greatest romanticist, and artist as well, of all of these men. But
+Alden Weir failed to carry off any honor as to distinctive qualities
+and invention. A genial aristocrat if you will, but having for me no
+marked power outside of a Barbizonian interest in nature with a kind
+of mystical detachedness.
+
+But in the consideration of painters like Martin, Fuller and Ryder we
+are thinking chiefly of their relation to their time as well as their
+relation to what is to come in America. America has had as much
+painting considering its youth as could be expected of it and the best
+of it has been essentially native and indigenous. But in and out of
+the various influences and traditional tendencies, these several
+artists with fine imaginations, typical American imaginations, were
+proceeding with their own peculiarly original and significantly
+personal expressions. They represent up to their arrival, and long
+after as well, all there is of real originality in American painting,
+and they remain for all time as fine examples of artists with purely
+native imaginations, working out at great cost their own private
+salvations for public discovery at a later time.
+
+All these men were poor men with highly distinguished aristocratic
+natures and powerful physiques, as to appearances, with mentalities
+much beyond the average. When an exhibition of modern American
+painting is given, as it surely will and must be, these men and not
+the Barbizonian echoes as represented by Inness, Wyant & Co., will
+represent for us the really great beginning of art in America. There
+will follow naturally artists like Twachtman and Robinson, as likewise
+Kenneth Hayes Miller and Arthur B. Davies for reasons that I think are
+rather obvious: both Hayes Miller and Arthur B. Davies having skipped
+over the direct influence of impressionism by reason of their
+attachment to Renaissance ideas; having joined themselves by
+conviction in perhaps slight degrees to aspects of modern painting.
+Miller is, one might say, too intellectually deliberate to allow for
+spontaneities which mere enthusiasms encourage. Miller is emotionally
+thrilled by Renoir but he is never quite swept. His essential
+conservatism hinders such violence. It would be happier for him
+possibly if the leaning were still more pronounced.
+
+The jump to modernism in Arthur B. Davies results in the same sort of
+way as admixture of influence though it is more directly appreciable
+in him. Davies is more willing, by reason of his elastic temper and
+intellectual vivacity, to stray into the field of new ideas with a
+simple though firm belief, that they are good while they last, no
+matter how long they last. Davies is almost a propagandist in his
+feeling for and admiration of the ultra-modern movement. Miller is a
+questioner and ponders long upon every point of consequence or
+inconsequence. He is a metaphysical analyst which is perhaps the
+extraneous element in his painting. In his etching, that is, the
+newest of it, one feels the sense of the classical and the modern
+joined together and by the classical I mean the quality of Ingres,
+Conjoined with modern as in Renoir, relieved of the influence of
+Italian Renaissance.
+
+But I do not wish to lose sight of these several forerunners in
+American art, Martin, Ryder and Fuller who, in their painting, may be
+linked not without relativity to our artists in literary imagination,
+Hawthorne and Poe. Fuller is conspicuously like Hawthorne, not by his
+appreciation of witchcraft merely, but by his feeling for those eery
+presences which determine the fates of men and women in their time.
+Martin is the purer artist for me since he seldom or never resorted to
+the literary emotion in the sense of drama or narrative, whereas in
+the instances of Ryder or Fuller they built up expression entirely
+from literary experience. Albert Ryder achieves most by reason of his
+vaster poetic sensibility--his Homeric instincts for the drama and by
+a very original power for arabesque. He is alone among the Americans
+in his unique gift for pattern. We can claim Albert Ryder as our most
+original painter as Poe takes his place as our most original poet who
+had of course one of the greatest and most perfect imaginations of his
+time and possibly of all time.
+
+But it is these several painters I speak of, Martin, Ryder, and
+Fuller, who figure for us as the originators of American indigenous
+painting. They will not be copied for they further nothing beyond
+themselves. No influence of these painters has been notable, excepting
+for a time in the early experience of one of the younger modernists
+who, by reason of definite associations of birthright and relativity
+of environment, essayed to claim Albert Ryder as a very definite
+influence; just as Courbet and Corot must in their ways have been
+powerful influences upon Ryder himself. Albert Ryder is too much of a
+figure to dismiss here with group-relationship, he must be treated of
+separately. So far then, there is no marked evidence that the
+influence of Fuller or Martin was powerful enough to carry beyond
+themselves. They had no tenets or theories other than those of
+personal clarification. All three remained the hermit radicals of
+life, as they remain isolated examples in American art; and all of
+them essentially of New England, in that they were conspicuously
+introspective, and shut in upon their own exclusive experience.
+
+But for all these variances, we shall find Homer Martin, George Fuller,
+and Albert Ryder forming the first nucleus for a definite value in
+strictly American painting. They were conscious of nothing really
+outside of native associations and native deductions. The temper of them
+is as essentially American as the quality of them is essentially Eastern
+in flavor. They seldom ventured beyond more than a home-spun richness of
+color, though in Ryder's case Monticelli had assisted very definitely
+in his notion of the volume of tone. We find here then despite the
+impress of artists like William Morris Hunt, Washington Allston, and the
+later Inness with the still later Winslow Homer, that gripping and
+relentless realist who took hold of the newer school of
+painter-illustrators, that the artists treated of here may be considered
+as the most important phase of American painting in the larger sense of
+the term. If I were to assist in the arrangement of an all American
+exhibition to show the trend toward individualism I should begin with
+Martin, Fuller and Ryder. I should then proceed to Winslow Homer, John
+H. Twachtman, Theodore Robinson, Hayes Miller, Arthur B. Davies,
+Rockwell Kent, then to those who come under the eighteen-ninety tendency
+in painting, namely the Whistler-Goya-Velasquez influence.
+
+From this it will be found that an entirely new development had taken
+place among a fairly large group of younger men who came, and very
+earnestly, under the Cézannesque influence. It may be said that the
+choice of these men is a wise one for it is conspicuous among artists
+of today that since Cézanne art will never, cannot ever be the same,
+just as with Delacroix and Courbet a French art could never have
+remained the same. Impressionism will be found to have had a far
+greater value as a suggestive influence than as a creative one. It
+brought light in as a scientific aspect into modern painting and that
+is its valuable contribution. So it is that with Cézanne the world is
+conscious of a new power that will never be effectually shaken off,
+since the principles that are involved in the intention of Cézanne are
+of too vital importance to be treated with lightness of judgment. Such
+valuable ideas as Cézanne contributes must be accepted almost as
+dogma, albeit valuable dogma. Influence is a conscious and necessary
+factor in the development of all serious minded artists, as we have
+seen in the instances of all important ones.
+
+So it is I feel that the real art of America, and it can, I think,
+justly be said that there is such, will be headed by the imaginative
+artists I have named in point of their value as indigenous creators,
+having worked out their artistic destinies on home soil with all the
+virility of creators in the finer sense of the term. They have
+assisted in the establishment of a native tradition which without
+question has by this time a definite foundation. The public must be
+made aware of their contribution to a native production. It will no
+doubt be a matter for surprise to many people in the world today that
+art in general is more national or local than it has ever been, due
+mostly to the recent upheaval, which has been of great service to the
+re-establishment of art interest and art appreciation everywhere in
+the modern world. Art, like life, has had to begin all over again,
+for the very end of the world had been made visible at last. The
+artist may look safely over an utterly new horizon, which is the only
+encouragement the artist of today can hope for.
+
+
+
+
+MODERN ART IN AMERICA
+
+
+The question may be asked, what is the hope of modern art in America?
+The first reply would be that modern art will one day be realized in
+America if only from experience we learn that all things happen in
+America by means of the epidemical principle. It is of little visible
+use that single individuals, by sitting in the solitary confinement of
+their as yet little understood enthusiasms, shall hope to achieve what
+is necessary for the American idea, precisely as necessary for us here
+as for the peoples of Europe who have long since recognized that any
+movement toward expression is a movement of unquestionable importance.
+Until the moment when public sincerity and the public passion for
+excitement is stimulated, the vague art interests of America will go
+on in their dry and conventional manner. The very acute discernment of
+Maurice Vlaminck that "intelligence is international, stupidity is
+national, art is local" is a valuable deduction to make, and applies
+in the two latter instances as admirably to America as to any other
+country. Our national stupidity in matters of esthetic modernity is a
+matter for obvious acceptance, and not at all for amazement.
+
+That art is local is likewise just as true of America as of any other
+country, and despite the judgment of stodgy minds, there is a
+definite product which is peculiar to our specific temper and
+localized sensibility as it is of any other country which is nameable.
+Despite the fact that impressionism is still exaggeration, and that
+large sums are still being paid for a "sheep-piece" of Charles Jacque,
+as likewise for a Ridgeway Knight, there is a well defined grouping of
+younger painters working for a definitely localized idea of modernism,
+just as in modern poetry there is a grouping of poets in America who
+are adding new values to the English language, as well as assisting in
+the realization of a freshly evolved localized personality in modern
+poetics.
+
+Art in America is like a patent medicine, or a vacuum cleaner. It can
+hope for no success until ninety million people know what it is. The
+spread of art as "culture" in America is from all appearances having
+little or no success because stupidity in such matters is so national.
+There is a very vague consideration of modern art among the directors
+of museums and among art dealers, but the comprehension is as vague as
+the interest. Outside of a Van Gogh exhibition, a few Matisses, now
+and then a Cézanne exhibited with great feeling of condescension,
+there is little to show the American public that art is as much a
+necessity as a substantial array of food is to an empty stomach. The
+public hunger cannot groan for what it does not recognize as real
+nourishment. There is no reason in the world why America does not have
+as many chances to see modern art as Europe has, save for minor
+matters of distance. The peoples of the world are alike, sensibilities
+are of the same nature everywhere among the so-called civilized, and
+it must be remembered always that the so-called primitive races
+invented for their own racial salvation what was not to be found ready
+made for them. Modern art is just as much of a necessity to us as art
+was to the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Greeks. Those peoples have
+the advantage of us only because they were in a higher state of
+culture as a racial unit. They have no more of a monopoly upon the
+idea of rhythm and organization than we have, because that which was
+typical of the human consciousness then, is typical of it now. As a
+result of the war, there has been, it must be said, a heightening of
+national consciousness in all countries, because creative minds that
+were allowed to survive were sent home to struggle with the problem of
+their own soil.
+
+There is no reason whatever for believing that America cannot have as
+many good artists as any other country. It simply does not have them
+because the integrity of the artist is trifled with by the intriguing
+agencies of materialism. Painters find the struggle too keen and it is
+easy to become the advertising designer, or the merchant in painting,
+which is what many of our respectable artists have become. The lust
+for prosperity takes the place of artistic integrity and courage. But
+America need not be surprised to find that it has a creditable
+grouping of artists sufficiently interested in the value of modern art
+as an expression of our time, men and possibly some women, who feel
+that art is a matter of private aristocratic satisfaction at least,
+until the public is awakened to the idea that art is an essentially
+local affair and the more local it becomes by means of comprehension
+of the international character, the truer it will be to the place in
+which it is produced.
+
+A catalogue of names will suffice to indicate the character and
+variation of the localized degree of expression we are free to call
+American in type: Morgan Russell, S. Macdonald Wright, Arthur G. Dove,
+William Yarrow, Dickinson, Thomas H. Benton, Abraham Walkowitz, Max
+Weber, Ben Benn, John Marin, Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler, Marsden
+Hartley, Andrew Dasburg, William McFee, Man Ray, Walt Kuhn, John
+Covert, Morton Schamberg, Georgia O'Keeffe, Stuart Davis, Rex
+Slinkard. Added to these, the three modern photographers Alfred
+Stieglitz, Charles Sheeler, and Paul Strand must be included. Besides
+these indigenous names, shall we place the foreign artists whose work
+falls into line in the movement toward modern art in America, Joseph
+Stella, Marcel Duchamp, Gaston Lachaise, Eli Nadelman. There may be no
+least questioning as to how much success all of these artists would
+have in their respective ways in the various groupings that prevail in
+Europe at this time. They would be recognized at once for the
+authenticity of their experience and for their integrity as artists
+gifted with international intelligence. There is no reason to feel
+that prevailing organizations like the Society of Independent Artists,
+Inc., and the Société Anonyme, Inc., will not bear a great increase of
+influence and power upon the public, as there is every reason to
+believe that at one time or another the public will realize what is
+being done for them by these societies, as well as what was done by
+the so famous "291" gallery.
+
+The effect however is not vast enough because the public finds no
+shock in the idea of art. It is not melodramatic enough and America
+must be appealed to through its essentially typical melodramatic
+instincts. There is always enough music, and there are some who
+certainly can say altogether too much of the kind there is in this
+country. The same thing can be said of painting. There is altogether
+too much of comfortable art, the art of the uplifted illustration. It
+is the reflex of the Anglo-Saxon passion for story-telling in pictures
+which should be relegated to the field of the magazines. Great art
+often tells a story but great art is always something plus the idea.
+Ordinary art does not rise above it.
+
+I often wonder why it is that America, which is essentially a country
+of sports and gamblers, has not the European courage as well as
+rapacity for fresh development in cultural matters. Can it be because
+America is not really intelligent? I should be embarrassed in
+thinking so. There is nevertheless an obvious lethargy in the
+appreciation of creative taste and a still lingering yet old-fashioned
+faith in the continual necessity for importation. America has a great
+body of assimilators, and out of this gift for uncreative assimilation
+has come the type of art we are supposed to accept as our own. It is
+not at all difficult to prove that America has now an encouraging and
+competent group of young and vigorous synthesists who are showing with
+intelligence what they have learned from the newest and most engaging
+development of art, which is to say--modern art. The names which have
+been inserted above are the definite indication, and one may go so far
+as to say proof, of this argument that modern art in America is
+rapidly becoming an intelligently localized realization.
+
+
+
+
+OUR IMAGINATIVES
+
+
+Is it vision that creates temperament or temperament that creates
+vision? Physical vision is responsible for nearly everything in art,
+not the power to see but the way to see. It is the eye perfect or the
+eye defective that determines the kind of thing seen and how one sees
+it. It was certainly a factor in the life of Lafcadio Hearn, for he
+was once named the poet of myopia. It was the acutely sensitive eye of
+Cézanne that taught him to register so ably the minor and major
+variations of his theme. Manet saw certainly far less colour than
+Renoir, for in the Renoir sense he was not a colourist at all. He
+himself said he painted only what he saw. Sight was almost science
+with Cézanne as it was passion.
+
+In artists like Homer Martin there is a something less than visual
+accuracy and something more than a gift of translation. There is a
+distinguished interpretation of mood coupled with an almost
+miniature-like sense of delicate gradation, and at the same time a
+something lacking as to a sense of physical form. In the few specimens
+of Martin to be seen there is, nevertheless, eminent distinction
+paramount. He was an artist of "oblique integrity": He saw
+unquestionably at an angle, but the angle was a beautiful one, and
+while many of his associates were doing American Barbizon, he was
+giving forth a shy, yet rare kind of expression, always a little
+symbolic in tendency, with the mood far more predominant. In "The sand
+dunes of Ontario" there will be found at once a highly individualistic
+feeling for the waste places of the world. There is never so much as a
+hint of banality in his selection. He never resorts to stock rhetoric.
+
+Martin will be remembered for his singularly personal touch along with
+men like Fuller and Ryder. He is not as dramatic as either of these
+artists, but he has greater finesse in delicate sensibility. He was, I
+think, actually afraid of repetition, a characteristic very much in
+vogue in his time, either conscious or unconscious, in artists like
+Inness, Wyant, and Blakelock, with their so single note. There is
+exceptional mysticity hovering over his hills and stretches of dune
+and sky. It is not fog, or rain, or dew enveloping them. It is a
+certain veiled presence in nature that he sees and brings forward. His
+picture of peaks of the White Mountains, Jefferson and Madison, gives
+you no suggestion of the "Hudson River" emptiness. He was searching
+for profounder realities. He wanted the personality of his places, and
+he was successful, for all of his pictures I have seen display the
+magnetic touch. He "touched it off" vividly in all of them. They
+reveal their ideas poetically and esthetically and the method is
+personal and ample for presentation.
+
+With George Fuller it was vastly different. He seemed always to be
+halting in the shadow. You are conscious of a deep and ever so earnest
+nature in his pictures. He impressed himself on his canvases in spite
+of his so faulty expression. He had an understanding of depth but
+surface was strange to him. He garbled his sentences so to speak with
+excessive and useless wording. "The Octoroon" shows a fine feeling for
+romance as do all of the other pictures of Fuller that have been
+publicly visible, but it is romance obsessed with monotone. There is
+the evidence of extreme reticence and moodiness in Fuller always. I
+know little of him save that I believe he experienced a severity of
+domestic problems. Farmer I think he was, and painted at off hours all
+his life. It is the poetry of a quiet, almost sombre order, walking in
+the shadow on the edge, of a wood being almost too much of an
+appearance for him in the light of a busy world.
+
+Why is it I think of Hawthorne when I think of Fuller? Is there a
+relationship here, or is it only a similarity of eeriness in temper? I
+would suspect Fuller of having painted a Hester Prynne excepting that
+he could never have come to so much red in one place in his pictures.
+
+There was vigour in these strong, simple men, masculine in sensibility
+all of them, and a fine feeling for the poetic shades of existence.
+They were intensely serious men, and I think from their isolation in
+various ways, not popular in their time. Neither are they popular now.
+They will only be admired by artists of perception, and by laymen of
+keen sensibility. Whether their enforced isolations taught them to
+brood, or whether they were brooders by nature, it is difficult to
+say. I think they were all easterners, and this would explain away
+certain characteristic shynesses of temper and of expression in them.
+Ryder, as we know, was the typical recluse, Fuller in all likelihood
+also. Martin I know little of privately, but his portrait shows him to
+be a strong elemental nature, with little feeling for, or interest in,
+the superficialities either of life or of art. Of Blakelock I can say
+but little, for I do not know him beyond a few stylish canvases which
+seem to have more of Diaz and Rousseau in them than contributes to
+real originality, and he was one of the painters of repetition also. A
+single good Blakelock is beautiful, and I think he must be included
+among the American imaginatives, but I do not personally feel the
+force of him in several canvases together.
+
+All of these artists are singularly individual, dreamers like Mathew
+Maris and Marées of Europe. They all have something of Coleridge about
+them, something of Poe, something of the "Ancient Mariner" and the
+"Haunted Palace", sailors in the same ship, sleepers in the same
+house. All of these men were struggling at the same time, the painters
+I mean, the same hour it might be said, in the midst of conventions
+of a severer type of rigidity than now, to preserve themselves from
+commonplace utterance. They were not affected by fashions. They had
+the one idea in mind, to express themselves in terms of themselves,
+and they were singularly successful in this despite the various
+difficulties of circumstance and of temper that attended them. They
+understood what this was better than anyone, and the results in
+varying degrees of genius attest to the quality of the American
+imagination at its best.
+
+I should like, for purposes of reference, to see a worthy exhibition
+of all of these men in one place. It would I am sure prove my
+statement that the eastern genius is naturally a tragic one, for all
+of these men have hardly once ventured into the clear sunlight of the
+world of every day. It would offset highly also, the superficial
+attitude that there is no imagination in American painting. We should
+not find so much of form or of colour in them in the stricter meaning
+of these ideas, as of mood. They might have set themselves to be
+disciples of William Blake's significant preachment, "put off
+intellect and put on imagination, the imagination is the man"; the
+intellect being the cultivated man, and the imagination being the
+natural man. There is imagination which by reason of its power and
+brilliance exceeds all intellectual effort, and effort at
+intellectualism is worse than a fine ignorance by far. Men who are
+highly imaginative, create by feeling what they do not or cannot
+know. It is the sixth sense of the creator.
+
+These artists were men alone, touched with the pristine significance
+of nature. It was pioneering of a difficult nature, precarious as all
+individual investigation of a spiritual or esthetic character is sure
+to be. Its first requisite is isolation, its last requisite is
+appreciation. All of these painters are gone over into that place they
+were so eager to investigate, illusion or reality. Their pictures are
+witness here to their seriousness. They testify to the bright
+everlastingness of beauty. If they have not swayed the world, they
+have left a dignified record in the art of a given time. Their
+contemporary value is at least inestimable. They are among the very
+first in the development of esthetics in America in point of merit.
+They made no compromise, and their record is clear.
+
+If one looks over the record of American art up to the period of
+ultra-modernism, it will be found that these men are the true
+originals among American painters. We shall find outside of them and a
+very few others, so much of sameness, a certain academic convention
+which, however pronounced or meagre the personalities are, leave those
+personalities in the category of "safe" painters. They do not disturb
+by an excessively intimate point of view toward art or toward nature.
+They come up to gallery requirements by their "pleasantness" or the
+inoffensiveness of their style. They offer little in the way of
+interpretive power or synthetic understanding. It is the tendency to
+keep on the comfortable side in American art. Doubtless it is more
+practical as any innovator or investigator has learned for himself.
+Artists like Ryder and Martin and Fuller had nothing in common with
+market appreciations. They had ideas to express, and were sincere to
+the last in expressing them.
+
+You will find little trace of commercialism in these men, even when,
+as in the case of Martin and Ryder and I do not know whom else, they
+did panels for somebody-or-other's leather screen, of which
+"Smuggler's Cove" and the other long panel of Ryder's in the
+Metropolitan Museum are doubtless two. They were not successful in
+their time because they could not repeat their performances. We know
+the efforts that were once made to make Ryder comfortable in a
+conventional studio, which he is supposed to have looked into once;
+and then he disappeared, as it was altogether foreign to him. Each
+picture was a new event in the lives of these men, and had to be
+pondered over devoutly, and for long periods often, as in the case of
+Ryder. Work was for him nine-tenths reflection and meditation and
+poetic brooding, and he put down his sensations on canvas with great
+difficulty in the manner of a labourer. It seems obvious that his
+first drafts were always vivid with the life intended for them, but no
+one could possibly have suffered with the idea of how to complete a
+picture more than he. His lack of facility held him from spontaneity,
+as it is likewise somewhat evident in Martin, and still more in
+Fuller.
+
+They were artists in timidity, and had not the courage of physical
+force in painting. With them it was wholly a mental process. But we
+shall count them great for their purity of vision as well as for the
+sincerity and conviction that possessed them. Artistry of this sort
+will be welcomed anywhere, if only that we may take men seriously who
+profess seriousness. There is nothing really antiquated about
+sincerity, though I think conventional painters are not sure of that.
+It is not easy to think that men consent to repeat themselves from
+choice, and yet the passing exhibitions are proof of that. Martin and
+Ryder and Fuller refresh us with a poetic and artistic validity which
+places them out of association among men of their time or of today, in
+the field of objective and illustrative painters. We turn to them with
+pleasure after a journey through the museums, for their reticence let
+us say, and for the refinement of their vision, their beautiful gift
+of restraint. They emphasize the commonness of much that surrounds
+them, much that blatantly would obscure them if they were not
+pronouncedly superior. They would not be discounted to any
+considerable degree if they were placed among the known masters of
+landscape painters of all modern time. They would hold their own by
+the verity of feeling that is in them, and what they might lose in
+technical excellence, would be compensated for in uniqueness of
+personality. I should like well to see them placed beside artists like
+Maris and Marées, and even Courbet. It would surprise the casual
+appreciator much, I believe.
+
+
+
+
+OUR IMPRESSIONISTS
+
+
+I have for purely personal reasons chosen the two painters who
+formulate for me the conviction that there have been and are but two
+consistently convincing American impressionists. These gentlemen are
+John H. Twachtman and Theodore Robinson. I cannot say precisely in
+what year Twachtman died but for purposes intended here this data is
+of no paramount consequence, save that it is always a matter of query
+as to just how long an artist must live, or have been dead, to be
+discovered in what is really his own time.
+
+John H. Twachtman as artist is difficult to know even by artists; for
+his work is made difficult to see either by its scarcity as determined
+for himself or by the exclusiveness of the owners of his pictures. It
+requires, however, but two or three of them to convince one that
+Twachtman has a something "plus" to contribute to his excursions into
+impressionism. One feels that after a Duesseldorf blackness which
+permeates his earlier work his conversion to impressionism was as
+fortunate as it was sincere. Twachtman knew, as is evidenced
+everywhere in his work, what he wished to essay and he proceeded with
+poetic reticence to give it forth. With a lyricism that is as
+convincing as it is authentic, you feel that there is a certain
+underlying spirit of resignation. He surely knew that a love of
+sunlight would save any man from pondering on the inflated importance
+of world issues.
+
+Having seen Twachtman but once my memory of his face recalls this
+admixture of emotion. He cared too much for the essential beauties to
+involve them with analyses extraneous to the meaning of beauty. That
+the Japanese did more for him than any other Orientals of whom he
+might have been thinking, is evident. For all that, his own personal
+lyricism surmounts his interest in outer interpretations of light and
+movement, and he leaves you with his own notion of a private and
+distinguished appreciation of nature. In this sense he leads one to
+Renoir's way of considering nature which was the pleasure in nature
+for itself. It was all too fine an adventure to quibble about.
+
+Twachtman's natural reticence and, I could also believe, natural
+skepticism kept him from swinging wildly over to the then new
+theories, a gesture typical of less intelligent natures. He had the
+good sense to feel out for himself just where the new theories related
+to himself and set about producing flat simplicity of planes of color
+to produce a very distinguished notion of light. He dispensed with the
+photographic attitude toward objectivity and yet at the same time held
+to the pleasing rhythmical shapes in nature. He did not resort to
+divisionalism or to ultra-violence of relationship. The pictures that
+I have seen such as "February", for instance, in the Boston Museum,
+present for me the sensation of a man of great private spiritual and
+intellectual means, having the wish to express tactfully and
+convincingly his personal conclusions and reactions, leaning always
+toward the side of iridescent illusiveness rather than emotional
+blatancy and irrelevant extravagance. His nuances are perhaps too
+finely adjusted to give forth the sense of overwhelming magic either
+in intention or of execution. It is lyrical idea with Twachtman with
+seldom or never a dramatic gesture. He is as illusive as a phrase of
+Mallarmé and it will be remembered that he is of the period more or
+less of the rose and the lily and the lost idea in poetry. He does
+recall in essence at least the quality of pastels in prose, though the
+art intention is a sturdier one. It is enough that Twachtman did find
+his relationship to impressionism, and that he did not evolve a system
+of repetition which marks the failure of all influence.
+
+Twachtman remains an artist of super-fine sensibility and distinction,
+and whatever he may have poured into the ears of students as an
+instructor left no visible haggard traces on his own production other
+than perhaps limiting that production. But we know that while the
+quality is valuable in respect of power it has no other precise value.
+We remember that Giorgione perished likewise with an uncertain product
+to his credit, as to numbers, but he did leave his immemorial
+impression. So it is with John H. Twachtman. He leaves his indelible
+influence among Americans as a fine artist, and he may be said to be
+among the few artists who, having taken up the impressionistic
+principle, found a way to express his personal ideas with a true
+degree of personal force. He is a beautifully sincere product and that
+is going far. Those pictures I have seen contain no taint of the
+market or clamoring for praise even. They were done because their
+author had an unobtrusive yet very aristocratic word to say, and the
+word was spoken with authority. John H. Twachtman must be counted as
+one of the genuine American artists, as well as among the most genuine
+artists of the world. If his pictures do not torment one with
+problematic intellectualism, they do hold one with their inherent
+refinement of taste and a degree of aristocratic approach which his
+true intelligence implies.
+
+With the work of Theodore Robinson, there comes a wide divergence of
+feeling that is perhaps a greater comprehension of the principles of
+impressionism as applied to the realities involved in the academic
+principle. One is reminded of Bastien Le Page and Léon L'Hermitte, in
+the paintings of Robinson, as to their type of subject and the
+conception of them also. That he lived not far from Giverney is
+likewise evident. Being of New England yankee extraction, a Vermonter
+I believe, he must have essayed always a sense of economy in emotion.
+No one could have gone so far as the then incredible Monet, whose
+pictures wear us to indifference with vapid and unprofitable
+thinking. What Monet did was to encourage a new type of audacity and a
+brand-new type in truth, when no one had up to then attempted to see
+nature as prismatical under the direct influence of the solar rays.
+All this has since been worked out with greater exactitude by the
+later theorists in modernism.
+
+While Van Gogh was slowly perishing of a mad ecstasy for light,
+covering up a natural Dutch realism with fierce attempts at prismatic
+relationship, always with the rhythms in a state of ecstatic
+ascendency; and Seurat had come upon the more satisfying pointillism
+as developed by himself; somewhere in amid all these extravagances men
+like Robinson were trying to combine orthodoxy of heritage and
+radicalist conversion with the new and very noble idea of
+impressionism. That Robinson succeeded in a not startling but
+nevertheless honorable and respectable fashion, must be conceded him.
+I sometimes think that Vignon, a seemingly obscure associate of the
+impressionists, with a similar impassioned feeling of realism, outdid
+him and approached closer to the principles as understood by Pissarro:
+probably better by a great deal than Monet himself, who is accredited
+with the honor of setting the theme moving in a modern line of that
+day. And Pissarro must have been a man to have so impressed all the
+men young and old of his time. After seeing a great number of Monet's
+one turns to any simple Pissarro for relief. And then there was also
+Sisley.
+
+But the talk is of Theodore Robinson. He holds his place as a realist
+with hardly more than a realist's conception, subjoined to a really
+pleasing appreciation of the principles of impressionism as imbibed by
+him from the source direct. Here are, then, the two true American
+impressionists, who, as far as I am aware, never slipped into the
+banalities of reiteration and marketable self-copy. They seem to have
+far more interest in private intellectual success than in a practical
+public one. It is this which helped them both, as it helps all serious
+artists, to keep their ideas clean of outward taint. This is one of
+the most important factors, which gives a man a place in the art he
+essays to achieve. When the day of his work is at an end it will be
+seen by everyone precisely what the influences were that prompted his
+effort toward deliverance through creation. It is for the sake of this
+alone that sincere artists keep to certain principles, and with
+genuine sacrifice often, as was certainly the case with Twachtman. And
+after all, how can a real artist be concerned as to just how salable
+his product is to be? Certainly not while he is working, if he be
+decent toward himself. This is of course heresy, with Wall Street so
+near.
+
+
+
+
+ARTHUR B. DAVIES
+
+
+If Arthur B. Davies had found it necessary, as in the modern time it
+has been found necessary to separate literature from painting, we
+should doubtless have had a very delicate and sensitive lyric poetry
+in book form. Titles for pictures like "Mirrored Dreaming,"
+"Sicily-Flowering Isle," "Shell of Gold," "A Portal of the Night,"
+"Mystic Dalliance," are all of them creations of an essentially poetic
+and literary mind. They are all splendid titles for a real book of
+legendary experience. The poet will be first to feel the accuracy of
+lyrical emotion in these titles. The paintings lead one away entirely
+into the land of legend, into the iridescent splendor of reflection.
+They take one out of a world of didactic monotone, as to their
+artistic significance. They are essentially pictures created for the
+purpose of transportation.
+
+From the earlier days in that underground gallery on Fifth Avenue near
+Twenty-seventh Street to the present time, there has been a constantly
+flowing production of lyrical simplicity and purification. One can
+never think of Davies as one thinks of Courbet and of Cézanne, where
+the intention is first and last a technically esthetic one; especially
+in Cézanne, whose object was the removal of all significance from
+painting other than that of painting for itself. With Cézanne it was
+problem. One might even say it was the removal of personality. With
+Davies you are aware that it is an entirely intimate personal life he
+is presenting; a life entirely away from discussion, from all sense of
+problem; they are not problematic at all, his pictures; they have
+lyrical serenity as a basis, chiefly. Often you have the sensation of
+looking through a Renaissance window upon a Greek world--a world of
+Platonic verities in calm relation with each other. It is essentially
+an art created from the principle of the harmonic law in nature,
+things in juxtaposition, cooperating with the sole idea of a poetic
+existence. The titles cover the subjects, as I have suggested. Arthur
+B. Davies is a lyric poet with a decidedly Celtic tendency. It is the
+smile of a radiant twilight in his brain. It is a country of green
+moon whispers and of shadowed movement. Imagination illuminating the
+moment of fancy with rhythmic persuasiveness. It is the Pandaean
+mystery unfolded with symphonic accompaniment. You have in these
+pictures the romances of the human mind made irresistible with melodic
+certainty. They are _chansons sans paroles_, sung to the syrinx in
+Sicilian glades.
+
+I feel that it is our own romantic land transposed into terms of
+classical metre. The color is mostly Greek, and the line is Greek. You
+could just as well hear Glück as Keats; you could just as well see the
+world by the light of the virgin lamp, and watch the smoke of old
+altars coiling among the cypress boughs. The redwoods of the West
+become columns of Doric eloquence and simplicity. The mountains and
+lakes of the West have become settings for the reading of the
+"Centaur" of Maurice de Guerin. You see the reason for the titles
+chosen because you feel that the poetry of line and the harmonic
+accompaniment of color is the primal essential. They are not so
+dynamic as suggestive in their quality of finality. The way is left
+open, in other words, for you yourself to wander, if you will, and
+possess the requisite instincts for poetry.
+
+The presence of Arthur B. Davies, and conversation with him convince
+one that poetry and art are in no sense a diversion or a delusion
+even. They are an occupation, a real business for intelligent men and
+women. He is occupied with the essential qualities of poetry and
+painting. He is eclectic by instinct. Spiritually he arrives at his
+conviction through these unquestionable states of lyrical existence.
+He is there when they happen. That is authenticity sufficient. They
+are not wandering moods. They are organized conditions and attitudes,
+intellectually appreciated and understood. He is a mystic only in the
+sense that perhaps all lyrical poetry is mystic, since it strives for
+union with the universal soul in things.
+
+It is perfectly autobiographical, the work of Arthur B. Davies, and
+that is so with all genuine expression. You find this gift for
+conviction in powerful painter types, like Courbet and Delacroix, who
+are almost propagandic in their fiercely defined insistence upon the
+chosen esthetic principle. Whatever emanation, illusion, or "aura,"
+dreadful word that it is, springing from the work of Davies, is only
+typical of what comes from all magical intentions, the magic of the
+world of not-being, made real through the operation of true fancy.
+Davies' pictures are works of fancy, then, in contradistinction to the
+essays of the imagination such as those of William Blake. Poets like
+Davies are lookers-in. Poets like Blake are the austere residents of
+the country they wander in. The lookers-in are no less genuine. They
+merely "make" their world. It might be said they make the prosaic
+world over again, transform it by a system of prescribed magic. This
+work, then, becomes states of fancy dramatized in lyric metre. Davies
+feels the visionary life of facts as a scientist would feel them
+actually. He has the wish for absolute order and consistency. There is
+nothing vague or disconcerting in his work, no lapses of rhetoric. It
+is, in its way, complete, one may say, since it is the intelligently
+contrived purpose of this poet to arrive at a scheme of absolute
+spiritual harmony.
+
+He is first of all the poet-painter in the sense that Albert Ryder is
+a painter for those with a fine comprehension of the imagination.
+Precisely as Redon is an artist for artists, though not always their
+artist in convincing esthetics, he too, satisfies the instinct for
+legend, for transformation. Painters like Davies, Redon, Rops, Moreau,
+and the other mystical natures, give us rather the spiritual trend of
+their own lives. In Redon and in Davies the vision is untouched by the
+foul breath of the world around them. In Rops and Moreau you feel the
+imagination hurrying to the arms and breasts of vice for their sense
+of home. The pathos of deliverance is urgent in them. In the work of
+Davies, and of Redon, there is the splendid silence of a world created
+by themselves, a world for the reflection of self. There is even a
+kind of narcissian arrogance, the enchantment of the illumined fact.
+
+Beauty recognizing herself with satisfaction--that seems to be the
+purpose of the work of Arthur B. Davies. It is so much outside the
+realm of scientific esthetics as hardly to have been more than
+overheard. These pictures are efficiently exemplary of the axiom that
+"all art aspires to the condition of music." I could almost hear
+Davies saying that, as if Pater had never so much as thought of it.
+They literally soothe with a rare poetry painted for the eye. They are
+illuminations for the manuscripts of the ascetic soul. They are
+windows for houses in which men and women may withdraw, and be
+reconciled to the doom of isolation.
+
+With the arrival of Cubism into the modern esthetic scene, there
+appeared a change in the manner of creation, though the same methods
+of invention remained chiefly without change. The result seems more
+in the nature of kaleidoscopic variance, a perhaps more acutely
+realized sense of opposites, than in the former mode. They register
+less completely, it seems to me, because the departure is too sudden
+in the rhythmus of the artist. The art of Davies is the art of a
+melodious curved line. Therefore the sudden angularity is abrupt to an
+appreciative eye.
+
+It is the poetry of Arthur B. Davies that comes to the fore in one's
+appreciation. He has the almost impeccable gift for lyrical truth, and
+the music of motion is crystallized in his imagination to a masterful
+degree. He is the highly sensitized illustrator appointed by the
+states of his soul to picture forth the pauses of the journey through
+the realm of fancy. It has in it the passion of violet and silver
+dreaming, the hue of an endless dawn before the day descends upon the
+world. You expect the lute to regain its jaded tune there. You expect
+the harp to reverberate once again with the old fervors. You expect
+the syrinx to unfold the story of the reed in light song. It contains
+the history of all the hushed horizons that can be found over the
+edges of a world of materiality. It holds in it always the warm soul
+of every digit of the moon. Human passion is for once removed, unless
+it be that the mere humanism of motion excites the sense of passion.
+You are made to feel the non-essentiality of the stress of the flesh
+in the true places of spiritual existence. The life of moments is
+carried over and made permanent in fancy, and they endure by the
+purity of their presence alone. There is no violence in the work of
+Davies. It is the appreciable relation of harmony and counterpoint in
+the human heart and mind. It is the logic of rhythmical equation felt
+there, almost exclusively. It is the condition of music that art in
+the lyrical state has seemed to suggest.
+
+The artistic versatility of Davies is too familiar to comment upon. He
+has no distress with mediums. His exceptional sensitivity to substance
+and texture gives him the requisite rapport with all species of
+mediums to which the artist has access. One might be inclined to think
+of him as a virtuoso in pastel possibly, and his paintings in the
+medium of oil suggest this sort of richness. He is nevertheless at
+home in all ways. All these are issues waved away to my mind, in view
+of his acute leaning to the poet that leads the artist away from
+problems other than that of Greek rhythmical perfection. It is
+essentially a Platonic expression, the desire of the perfect union of
+one thing with another. That is its final consummation, so it seems to
+me.
+
+
+
+
+REX SLINKARD
+
+     "_I doubt not that the passionately wept deaths of young men
+     are provided for._"--WALT WHITMAN.
+
+
+We have had our time for regretting the loss of men of genius during
+the war. We know the significance of the names of Rupert Brooke,
+Edward Thomas, Elroy Flecker on the other side of the sea, to the hope
+of England. And on this side of the sea the names of Joyce Kilmer,
+Alan Seeger and Victor Chapman have been called out to us for the
+poetic spell they cast upon America. All of them in their manful,
+poetic way. They were all of them poets in words; all but Victor
+Chapman were professional poets, and he, even if he himself was not
+aware, gave us some rare bits of loveliness in his letters. There are
+others almost nameless among soldier-hero people who gave us likewise
+real bits of unsuspected beauty in their unpretentious letters.
+
+Rex Slinkard was a soldier, poet-painter by inclination, and ranchman
+as to specific occupation. Rex has gone from us, too. How many are
+there who know, or could have known, the magic of this unassuming
+visionary person. Only a few of us who understand the meaning of magic
+and the meaning of everlasting silences. It is the fortune of America
+that there remain with us numbers of highly indicative drawings and a
+group of rare canvases, the quality of which painters will at once
+acclaim, and poets will at once verify the lyric perfection of,
+paintings and drawings among the loveliest we have in point of purity
+of conception and feeling for the subtle shades of existence, those
+rare states of life which, when they arrive, are called perfect
+moments in the poetic experience of men and women.
+
+There will be no argument to offer or to maintain regarding the work
+of Rex Slinkard. It is what it is, the perfect evidence that one of
+the finest lyric talents to be found among the young creators of
+America has been deprived of its chance to bloom as it would like to
+have done, as it so eagerly and surely was already doing. Rex Slinkard
+was a genius of first quality. The word genius may be used these days
+without fear of the little banalities, since anyone who has evolved
+for himself a clear vision of life may be said to possess the quality
+of genius.
+
+"The day's work done and the supper past. I walk through the horse-lot
+and to my shack. Inside I light the lantern, and then the fire, and
+sitting, I think of the inhabitants of the earth, and of the world, my
+home."
+
+These sentences, out of a letter to a near friend, and the marginalia
+written upon the edges of many of his drawings, show the varying
+degrees of delicacy Rex was eager to register and make permanent for
+his own realization. His thought was once and for all upon the
+realities, that is, those substances that are or can be realities
+only to the artist, the poet, and the true dreamer, and Rex Slinkard
+was all of these. His observation of himself, and his understanding of
+himself, were uncommonly genuine in this young and so poetic painter.
+He had learned early for so young a man what were his special
+idealistic fervors. He had the true romanticist's gift for
+refinements, and was working continually toward the rarer states of
+being out from the emotional into the intellectual, through spiritual
+application into the proper and requisite calm. He lived in a
+thoroughly ordered world of specified experience which is typified in
+his predilection for the superiority of Chinese notions of beauty over
+the more sentimental rhythms of the Greeks. He had found the proper
+shade of intellectuality he cared for in this type of Oriental
+expression. It was the Buddhistic feeling of reality that gave him
+more than the platonic. He was searching for a majesty beyond
+sensuousness, by which sensuous experience is transformed into greater
+and more enduring shades of beauty. He wanted the very life of beauty
+to take the place of sensuous suggestion. Realities in place of
+semblances, then, he was eager for, but the true visionary realities
+as far finer than the materialistic reality.
+
+He had learned early that he was not, and never would be, the
+fantasist that some of his earlier canvases indicate. Even his essays
+in portraiture, verging on the realistic, leaned nevertheless more
+toward the imaginative reality always. He knew, also, with clarity,
+the fine line of decision between imagination and vision, between the
+dramatic and the lyric, and had realized completely the supremacy of
+the lyric in himself. He was a young boy of light walking on a man's
+strong feet upon real earth over which there was no shadow for him. He
+walked straightforwardly toward the elysium of his own very personal
+organized fancies. His irrigation ditches were "young rivers" for him,
+rivers of being, across which white youths upon white horses, and
+white fawns were gliding to the measure of their own delights. He had,
+this young boy of light, the perfect measure of poetic accuracy
+coupled with a man's fine simplicity in him. He had the priceless calm
+for the understanding of his own poetic ecstasies. They acted upon him
+gently with their own bright pressure. He let them thrive according to
+their own relationships to himself. Nothing was forced in the mind and
+soul of Rex Slinkard. He was in quest of the modern rapture for
+permanent things such as is to be found in "L'après midi d'un Faun" of
+Mallarmé and Debussy for instance, in quest of those rare, whiter
+proportions of experience. It was radiance and simplicity immingled in
+his sense of things.
+
+He would have served his country well as one of its clearest and best
+citizens, far more impressively by the growth and expansion of his
+soul in his own manly vision, than by the questionable value of his
+labors in the military service. He did what he could, gladly and
+heroically, but he had become too weakened by the siege of physical
+reverses that pursued his otherwise strong body to endure the strain
+of labor he performed, or wanted to accomplish. He knew long before he
+entered service the significance of discipline from very profound
+experience with life from childhood onward. Life had come to him
+voluminously because he was one who attracted life to him,
+electrically. He did not "whine" or "postpone," for he was in all of
+his hours at least mentally and spiritually equal to the world in all
+of its aspects. He was physically not there for the thing he
+volunteered to do, despite the appearance of manly strength in him, or
+thought he would be able to do. He hoped strongly to serve. None knew
+his secret so well as himself, and he kept his own secret royally and
+amicably.
+
+Exceptional maturity of understanding of life, of nature, and all the
+little mysteries that are the shape of human moments, was
+conspicuously evidenced for as long as his intimates remember. The
+extraordinary measure of calm contained in his last pictures and in so
+many of the drawings done in moments of rest in camp is evidence of
+all this. He had a boy's brightness and certainty of the fairness of
+things, joined with a man's mastery of the simple problem. He was a
+true executive in material affairs and his vision was another part of
+the business of existence.
+
+As I have said, Rex Slinkard had the priceless poise of the true lyric
+poet, and it was the ordered system in his vision that proved him. He
+knew the value of his attitudes and he was certain that perfection is
+imperishable, and strove with a poet's calm intensity toward that. He
+had found his Egypt, his Assyria, his Greece, and his own specific
+Nirvana at his feet everywhere.
+
+As he stood attending to the duties of irrigation and the ripening of
+the alfalfa crops, he spent the moments otherwise lost in carving
+pebbles he found about him with rare gestures and profiles, either of
+his own face or body which he knew well, or the grace of other bodies
+and faces he had seen. He was always the young eye on things, an avid
+eye sure of the wonder about to escape from every living thing where
+light or shadow fell upon them gently. He was a sure, unquestionable,
+and in this sense a perfect poet, and possessed the undeniable
+painter's gift for presentation.
+
+He was of the company of Odilon Redon, of whom he had never heard, in
+his feeling for the almost occult presence emanating from everything
+he encountered everywhere, and his simple letters to his friends hold
+touches of the same beauty his drawings and paintings and carvings on
+pebbles contain.
+
+A born mystic and visionary as to the state of his soul, a boy of
+light in quest of the real wisdom that is necessary for the lyrical
+embodiment, this was Rex Slinkard, the western ranchman and
+poet-painter. "I think of the inhabitants of the earth and of the
+world, my home." This might have been a marginal note from the Book of
+Thel, or it might have been a line from some new songs of innocence
+and experience. It might have been spoken from out of one of the oaks
+of William Blake. It must have been heard from among the live oaks of
+Saugus. It was the simple speech of a ranchman of California, a real
+boy-man who loved everything with a poet's love because everything
+that lived, lived for him.
+
+Such were the qualities of Rex Slinkard, who would like to have
+remained in the presence of his friends, the inhabitants of the earth,
+to have lived long in the world, his home.
+
+It is all a fine clear testimony to the certainty of youth, perhaps
+the only certainty there can be. He was the calm declaimer of the life
+of everlasting beauty. He saw with a glad eye the "something" that is
+everywhere at all times, and in all places, for the poet's and the
+visionary's eye at least. He was sure of what he saw; his paintings
+and drawings are a firm conviction of that. Like all who express
+themselves clearly, he wanted to say all he had to say. At thirty he
+had achieved expression remarkably. He had found the way out, and the
+way out was toward and into the light. He was clear, and entirely
+unshadowed.
+
+This is Rex Slinkard, ranchman, poet-painter, and man of the living
+world. Since he could not remain, he has left us a carte visite of
+rarest clarity and beauty. We who care, among the few, for things in
+relation to essences, are glad Rex Slinkard lived and laughed and
+wondered, and remained the little while. The new silence is but a
+phase of the same living one he covered all things with. He was glad
+he was here. He was another angle of light on the poetic world around
+us, another unsuspected facet of the bright surface of the world.
+Surfaces were for him, too, something to be "deepened" with a fresh
+vividness. He had the irresistible impulse to decorate and to decorate
+consistently. His sense of decoration was fluid and had no hint of the
+rhetorical in it. He felt everything joined together, shape to shape,
+by the harmonic insistence in life and in nature. A flower held a
+face, and a face held a flowery substance for him. Bodies were young
+trees in bloom, and trees were lines of human loveliness. The body of
+the man, the body of the woman, beautiful male and female bodies, the
+ideal forms of everyone and everything he encountered, he understood
+and made his own. They were all living radiances against the dropped
+curtain of the world. He loved the light on flesh, and the shadows on
+strong arms, legs, and breasts. He avoided theory, either philosophic
+or esthetic. He had traveled through the ages of culture in his
+imagination, and was convinced that nothing was new and nothing was
+old. It was all living and eternal when it was genuine. He stepped out
+of the world of visible realities but seldom, and so it was, books and
+methods of interpretation held little for him. He didn't need them,
+for he held the whole world in his arms through the power of dream and
+vision. He touched life everywhere, touched it with himself.
+
+Rex Slinkard went away into a celestial calm October 18, 1918, in St.
+Vincent's Hospital, New York City. It is the few among those of us who
+knew him as poet and visionary and man, who wish earnestly that Rex
+might have remained. He gave much that many wanted, or would have
+wanted if they had had the opportunity of knowing him. The pictures
+and drawings that remain are the testimony of his splendid poetic
+talents. He was a lyrical painter of the first order. He is something
+that we miss mightily, and shall miss for long.
+
+
+
+
+SOME AMERICAN WATER-COLORISTS
+
+
+With the arrival of Cézanne into the field of water-color painting,
+this medium suffers a new and drastic instance for comparison. It is
+not technical audacity alone, of course, that confronts us in these
+brilliantly achieved performances, so rich in form as well as radiant
+with light. It is not the kind of virility for its own sake that is
+typical of our own American artists so gifted in this special medium,
+like Whistler, Sargent, Winslow Homer, Dodge Macknight, John Marin,
+and Charles Demuth. With Cézanne it was merely a new instrument to
+employ for the realization of finer plastic relations. The medium of
+water-color has been ably employed by the English and the Dutch
+painters, but it seems as if the artists of both these countries
+succeeded in removing all the brilliance and charm as well as the
+freshness which is peculiar to it; few outside of Cézanne have, I
+think, done more with water-color than the above named American
+artists, none who have kept more closely and consistently within the
+confines and peculiarities of this medium.
+
+In the consideration of the American water-color artists it will be
+found that Sargent and Homer tend always toward the graphic aspect of
+a pictorial idea, yet it is Homer who relieves his pictures of this
+obsession by a brilliant appreciation of the medium for its own sake.
+Homer steps out of the dry conventionalism of the English style of
+painting, which Sargent does not do. Much of that metallic harshness
+which is found in the oil pictures of Homer is relieved in the
+water-colors and there is added to this their extreme virtuosity, and
+a great distinction to be discovered in their sense of light and life,
+the sense of the object illumined with a wealth of vibrancy that is
+peculiar to its environment, particularly noticeable in the Florida
+series.
+
+Dodge Macknight has seen with a keen eye the importance of this
+virility of technique to be found in Homer, and has added to this a
+passion for impressionistic veracity which heightens his own work to a
+point distinctly above that of Sargent, and one might almost say above
+Winslow Homer. Macknight really did authenticate for himself the
+efficacy of impression with almost incredible feats of visual bravery.
+There is no array of pigment sufficient to satisfy him as for what
+heat and cold do to his sensibility, as experienced by the opposite
+poles of a New England winter and a tropical Mexican landscape. He is
+always in search of the highest height in contrasts, all this joined
+by what his sense of fierceness of light could bring to the fantastic
+dune stretches of Cape Cod in fiery autumn. His work in water-color
+has the convincing charm of almost fanaticism for itself; and we find
+this medium progressing still further with the fearlessness of John
+Marin in the absolute at-home-ness which he displays on all occasions
+in his audacious water-color pictures.
+
+Marin brings you to the feeling that digression is for him imperative
+only as affording him relief from the tradition of his medium. John
+Marin employs all the restrictions of water-color with the wisdom that
+is necessary in the case. He says that paper plus water, plus emotion
+will give a result in themselves and proceeds with the idea at hand in
+what may without the least temerity be called a masterly fashion; he
+has run the gamut of experience with his materials from the earliest
+Turner tonalities, through Whisterian vagaries on to American
+definiteness, and has incidentally noted that the Chinese have been
+probably the only supreme masters of the wash in the history of
+water-color painting. I can say for myself that Marin produces the
+liveliest, handsomest wash that is producible or that has ever been
+accomplished in the field of water-color painting. Perhaps many of the
+pictures of John Marin were not always satisfying in the tactile sense
+because many of them are taken up with an inevitable passion for
+technical virtuosity, which is no mean distinction in itself but we
+are not satisfied as once we were with this passion for audacity and
+virtuosity. We have learned that spatial existence and spatial
+relationships are the important essentials in any work of art. The
+precise ratio of thought accompanied by exactitude of emotion for the
+given idea is a matter of serious consideration with the modern
+artists of today. That is the special value of modern painting to the
+development of art.
+
+The Chinese really knew just what a wash was capable of, and confined
+themselves to the majesty of the limitations at hand. John Marin has
+been wise in this also though he is not precisely fanatical, which may
+be his chief defect, and it is probably true that the greatest
+experimenters have shown fanatical tendency, which is only the
+accentuated spirit of obsession for an idea. How else does one hold a
+vision? It is the only way for an artist to produce plastic exactitude
+between two planes of sensation or thought. The parts must be as
+perfect as the whole and in the best art this is so. There must be the
+sense of "existence" everywhere and it might even be said that the
+cool hue of the intellect is the first premise in a true work of art.
+Virtuosity is a state of expression but it is not the final state. One
+must search for as well as find the sequential quality which is
+necessitated for the safe arrival of a work of art into the sphere of
+esthetic existence.
+
+The water-colors of John Marin are restless with energy, which is in
+its way a real virtue. They do, I think, require, at times at least,
+more of the calm of research and less of the excitement of it. All
+true artistry is self-contained and never relies upon outer physical
+stimulus or inward extravagance of phantasy, or of idiosyncrasy. A
+work of art is never peculiar, it is always a natural thing. In this
+sense John Marin approaches real art because he is probably the most
+natural water-colorist in existence.
+
+With Charles Demuth water-color painting steps up into the true
+condition of ideas followed by experience. He has joined with
+modernism most consistently, having arrived at this state of
+progression by the process of investigation. The tradition of
+water-color painting takes a jump into the new field of modernism, and
+Demuth has given us his knowledge of the difference between
+illustration, depiction, and the plastic realization of fact. Probably
+no young artist has accomplished a finer degree of artistic finesse in
+illustration than has Charles Demuth in his series of illustrations
+for "The Two Magics" of Henry James, or more explicitly to say "The
+Turn of the Screw". These pictures are to the true observer all that
+could be hoped for in imaginative sincerity as well as in technical
+elusiveness. Demuth has since that time stepped out of the confinement
+of water-color pure, over into the field of tempera, which brings it
+nearer to the sturdier mediums employed in the making of pictures
+evolving a greater severity of form and a commendable rigidity of
+line. He has learned like so many moderns that the ruled line offers
+greater advantages in pictorial structure. You shall find his approach
+to the spirit of Christopher Wren is as clear and direct as his
+feeling for the vastiness of New England speechlessness. He has come
+up beyond the dramatisation of emotion to the point of expression for
+its own sake. But he is nevertheless to be included among the arrived
+water-colorists, because his gifts for expression have been evolved
+almost entirely through this medium. There is then a fine American
+achievement in the art of water-color painting which may safely be
+called at this time a localized tradition. It has become an American
+realization.
+
+
+
+
+THE APPEAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY
+
+
+Photography is an undeniable esthetic problem upon our modern artistic
+horizon. The idea of photography as an art has been discussed no doubt
+ever since the invention of the pinhole. In the main, I have always
+said for myself that the kodak offers me the best substitute for the
+picture of life, that I have found. I find the snapshot, almost
+without exception, holding my interest for what it contains of simple
+registration of and adherence to facts for themselves. I have had a
+very definite and plausible aversion to the "artistic" photograph, and
+we have had more than a surfeit of this sort of production for the
+past ten or fifteen years. I have referred frequently in my mind to
+the convincing portraits by David Octavius Hill as being among the
+first examples of photographic portraiture to hold my own private
+interest as clear and unmanipulated expressions of reality; and it is
+a definite as well as irresistible quality that pervades these
+mechanical productions, the charm of the object for its own sake.
+
+It was the irrelevant "artistic" period in photography that did so
+much to destroy the vital significance of photography as a type of
+expression which may be classed as among the real arts of today. And
+it was a movement that failed because it added nothing to the idea
+save a distressing superficiality. It introduced a fog on the brain,
+that was as senseless as it was embarrassing to the eye caring
+intensely for precision of form and accuracy of presentation.
+Photography was in this sense unfortunate in that it fell into the
+hands of adepts at the brush who sought to introduce technical
+variations which had nothing in reality to do with it and with which
+it never could have anything in common. All this sort of thing was
+produced in the age of the famous men and women, the period of
+eighteen ninety-five to nineteen hundred and ten say, for it was the
+age when the smart young photographer was frantic to produce famous
+sitters like Shaw and Rodin. We do not care anything about such things
+in our time because we now know that anybody well photographed
+according to the scope as well as the restrictions of the medium at
+hand could be, as has been proven, an interesting subject.
+
+It has been seen, as Alfred Stieglitz has so clearly shown, that an
+eyebrow, a leg, a tree trunk, a body, a breast, a hand, any part being
+equal to the whole in its power to tell the story, could be made as
+interesting, more so indeed than all the famous people in existence.
+It doesn't matter to us in the least that Morgan and Richard Strauss
+helped fill a folio alongside of Maeterlinck and such like persons.
+All this was, of course, in keeping with the theatricism of the period
+in which it was produced, which is one of the best things to be said
+of it. But we do know that Whistler helped ruin photography along
+with Wilde who helped ruin esthetics. Everyone has his office
+nevertheless. As a consequence, Alfred Stieglitz was told by the
+prevailing geniuses of that time that he was a back number because of
+his strict adherence to the scientific nature of the medium, because
+he didn't manipulate his plate beyond the strictly technical
+advantages it offered, and it was not therefore a fashionable addition
+to the kind of thing that was being done by the assuming ones at that
+time. The exhibition of the life-work of Alfred Stieglitz in March,
+1921, at the Anderson Galleries, New York, was a huge revelation even
+to those of us who along with our own ultra modern interests had found
+a place for good unadulterated photography in the scheme of our
+appreciation of the art production of this time.
+
+I can say without a qualm that photography has always been a real
+stimulus to me in all the years I have been personally associated with
+it through the various exhibitions held along with those of modern
+painting at the gallery of the Photo-Secession, or more intimately
+understood as "291". Photography was an interesting foil to the kind
+of veracity that painting is supposed to express, or rather to say,
+was then supposed to express; for painting like all other ideas has
+changed vastly in the last ten years, and even very much since the
+interval created by the war. I might have learned this anywhere else,
+but I did get it from the Stieglitz camera realizations with more
+than perhaps the expected frequency, and I am willing to assert now
+that there are no portraits in existence, not in all the history of
+portrait realization either by the camera or in painting, which so
+definitely present, and in many instances with an almost haunting
+clairvoyance, the actualities existing in the sitter's mind and body
+and soul. These portraits are for me without parallel therefore in
+this particular. And I make bold with another assertion, that from our
+modern point of view the Stieglitz photographs are undeniable works of
+art, as are also the fine photographs of the younger men like Charles
+Sheeler and Paul Strand. Sheeler, being also one of our best modern
+painters, has probably added to his photographic work a different type
+of sensibility by reason of his experience in the so-called creative
+medium of painting. It is, as we know, brain matter that counts in a
+work of art, and we have dispensed once and for all with the silly
+notion that a work of art is made by hand. Art is first and last of
+all, a product of the intelligence.
+
+I think the photographers must at least have been a trifle upset with
+this Stieglitz Exhibition. I know that many of the painters of the day
+were noticeably impressed. There was much to concern everyone there,
+in any degree that can be put upon us as interested spectators. For
+myself, I care nothing for the gift of interpretation, and far less
+for that dreadful type of effete facility which produces a kind of
+hocus-pocus technical brilliancy which fuddles the eye with a
+trickery, and produces upon the untrained and uncritical mind a kind
+of unintelligent hypnotism. Art these days is a matter of scientific
+comprehension of reality, not a trick of the hand or the old-fashioned
+manipulation of a brush or a tool. I am interested in presentation
+pure and simple. All things that are living are expression and
+therefore part of the inherent symbology of life. Art, therefore, that
+is encumbered with excessive symbolism is extraneous, and from my
+point of view, useless art. Anyone who understands life needs no
+handbook of poetry or philosophy to tell him what it is. When a
+picture looks like the life of the world, it is apt to be a fair
+picture or a good one, but a bad picture is nothing but a bad picture
+and it is bound to become worse as we think of it. And so for my own
+pleasure I have consulted the kodak as furnishing me with a better
+picture of life than many pictures I have seen by many of the
+so-called very good artists, and I have always delighted in the
+rotograph series of the Sunday papers because they are as close to
+life as any superficial representation can hope to be.
+
+It was obvious then that many of those who saw the Stieglitz
+photographs, and there were large crowds of them, were non-plussed by
+the unmistakable authenticity of experience contained in them. If you
+stopped there you were of course mystified, but there is no mystery
+whatever in these productions, for they are as clear and I shall even
+go so far as to say as objective as the daylight which produced them,
+and aside from certain intimate issues they are impersonal as it is
+possible for an artist to be. It is this quality in them which makes
+them live for me as realities in the art world of modern time. All art
+calls for one variety of audacity or another and so these photographs
+unfold one type of audacity which is not common among works of art,
+excepting of course in highly accentuated instances of autographic
+revelation. It is the intellectual sympathy with all the subjects on
+exhibition which is revealed in these photographs: A kind of spiritual
+diagnosis which is seldom or never to be found among the photographers
+and almost never among the painters of the conventional portrait. This
+ability, talent, virtue, or genius, whatever you may wish to name it,
+is without theatricism and therefore without spectacular demonstration
+either of the sitter or the method employed in rendering them.
+
+It is never a matter of arranging cheap and practically unrelated
+externals with Alfred Stieglitz. I am confident it can be said that he
+has never in his life made a spectacular photograph. His intensity
+runs in quite another channel altogether. It is far closer to the
+clairvoyant exposure of the psychic aspects of the moment, as
+contained in either the persons or the objects treated of. With these
+essays in character of Alfred Stieglitz, you have a series of types
+who had but one object in mind, to lend themselves for the use of the
+machine in order that a certain problem might be accurately rendered
+with the scientific end of the process in view, and the given
+actuality brought to the surface when possible. I see nothing in these
+portraits beyond this. I understand them technically very little only
+that I am aware that I have not for long, and perhaps never, seen
+plates that hold such depths of tonal value and structural
+relationship of light and shade as are contained in the hundred and
+fifty prints on exhibition in the Anderson Galleries. Art is a vastly
+new problem and this is the first thing which must be learned.
+Precisely as we learn that a certain type of painting ended in the
+history of the world with Cézanne.
+
+There is an impulse now in painting toward photographic veracity of
+experience as is so much in evidence in the work of an artist of such
+fine perceptions as Ingres, with a brushing aside of all old-fashioned
+notions of what constitutes artistic experience. There is a deliberate
+revolt, and photography as we know it in the work of Alfred Stieglitz
+and the few younger men like Strand and Sheeler is part of the new
+esthetic anarchism which we as younger painters must expect to make
+ourselves responsible for. It must be remembered you know, that there
+has been a war, and art is in a condition of encouraging and
+stimulating renascence, and we may even go so far as to say that it is
+a greater world issue than it was previous to the great catastrophe.
+And also, it must be heralded that as far as art is concerned the end
+of the world has been seen. The true artist, if he is intelligent, is
+witness of this most stimulating truth that confronts us. We cannot
+hope to function esthetically as we did before all this happened,
+because we are not the same beings intellectually. This does not mean
+in relation to photography that all straight photography is good. It
+merely means that the kind of photography I must name "Fifth Avenue"
+art, is a conspicuous species of artistic bunkum, and must be
+recognized as such.
+
+Photographers must know that fogging and blurring the image is
+curtailing the experience of it. It is a foolish notion that
+mystification is of any value. Flattery is one of the false elements
+that enter into the making of a work of art among the artists of
+doubtful integrity, but this is often if not always the commercial
+element that enters into it. There is a vast difference between this
+sort of representation and that which is to be found in Greek
+sculpture which is nothing short of conscious plastic organization.
+These figures were set up in terms of the prevailing systems of
+proportion. Portraits were likewise "arranged" through the artistry of
+the painter in matters of decoration for the great halls of the
+periods in which they were hung. They were studies on a large scale of
+ornamentation. Their beauty lies chiefly in the gift of execution. In
+these modern photographs of Stieglitz and his followers there is an
+engaging directness which cannot be and must not be ignored. They do
+for once give in the case of the portraits, and I mean chiefly of
+course the Stieglitz portraits, the actuality of the sitter without
+pose or theatricism of any sort, a rather rare thing to be said of the
+modern photograph.
+
+Stieglitz, therefore, despite his thirty or more years of
+experimentation comes up among the moderns by virtue of his own
+personal attitude toward photography, and toward his, as well as its,
+relation to the subject. His creative power lies in his ability to
+diagnose the character and quality of the sitter as being peculiar to
+itself, as a being in relation to itself seen by his own clarifying
+insight into general and well as special character and characteristic.
+It need hardly be said that he knows his business technically for he
+has been acclaimed sufficiently all over the world by a series of
+almost irrelevant medals and honours without end. The Stieglitz
+exhibition is one that should have been seen by everyone regardless of
+any peculiar and special predilection for art. These photos will have
+opened the eye and the mind of many a sleeping one as to what can be
+done by way of mechanical device to approach the direct charm of life
+in nature.
+
+The moderns have long since congratulated Alfred Stieglitz for his
+originality in the special field of his own creative endeavor. It will
+matter little whether the ancients do or not. His product is a fine
+testimonial to his time and therefore this is his contribution to his
+time. He finds himself, and perhaps to his own embarrassment even,
+among the best modern artists; for Stieglitz as I understand him cares
+little for anything beyond the rendering of the problem involved which
+makes him of course scientific first and whatever else afterward,
+which is the hope of the modern artists of all movements, regardless.
+Incidentally it may be confided he is an artistic idol of the Dadaists
+which is at least a happy indication of his modernism. If he were to
+shift his activities to Paris, he would be taken up at once for his
+actual value as modern artist expressing present day notions of actual
+things. Perhaps he will not care to be called Dada, but it is
+nevertheless true. He has ridden his own vivacious hobby-horse with as
+much liberty, and one may even say license, as is possible for one
+intelligent human being. There is no space to tell casually of his
+various aspects such as champion billiard player, racehorse
+enthusiast, etcetera. This information would please his dadaistic
+confrères, if no one else shows signs of interest.
+
+
+
+
+SOME WOMEN ARTISTS IN MODERN PAINTING
+
+
+It is for the purpose of specialization that the term woman is
+herewith applied to the idea of art in painting. Art is for anyone
+naturally who can show degree of mastery in it. There have been a
+great many women poets and musicians as well as actors, though
+singularly enough the women painters of history have been few, and for
+that matter in question of proportion remain so. Whatever the wish may
+be in point of dismissing the idea of sex in painting, there has so
+often been felt among many women engaging to express themselves in it,
+the need to shake off marked signs of masculinity, and even
+brutishness of attack, as denoting, and it must be said here, a
+factitious notion of power. Power in painting does not come from
+muscularity of arm; it comes naturally from the intellect. There are a
+great many male painters showing too many signs of femininity in their
+appreciation and the conception of art in painting. Art is neither
+male nor female. Nevertheless, it is pleasing to find women artists
+such as I wish to take up here, keeping to the charm of their own
+feminine perceptions and feminine powers of expression. It is their
+very femininity which makes them distinctive in these instances. This
+does not imply lady-like approach or womanly attitude of moral. It
+merely means that their quality is a feminine quality.
+
+In the work of Madame Delaunay Terck, who is the wife of Delaunay, the
+French Orphiste, which I have not seen since the war came on, one can
+say that she was then running her husband a very close second for
+distinction in painting and intelligence of expression. When two
+people work so closely in harmony with each other, it is and will
+always remain a matter of difficulty in knowing just who is the real
+expressor of an idea. Whatever there is of originality in the idea of
+Orphisme shall be credited to Delaunay as the inventor, but whether
+his own examples are more replete than those of Mme. Delaunay Terck is
+not easy of statement. There was at that time a marked increase of
+virility in production over those of Delaunay himself, but these are
+matters of private personal attack. Her Russian temper was probably
+responsible for this, at least no doubt, assisted considerably. There
+was nevertheless at that time marked evidence that she was in mastery
+of the idea of Orphisme both as to conception and execution. She
+showed greater signs of virility in her approach than did Delaunay
+himself. There was in his work a deal of what Gertrude Stein then
+called "white wind", a kind of thin escaping in the method. The
+designs did not lock so keenly. His work had always typical charm if
+it had not always satisfying vigor. His "Tour Eiffel" and a canvas
+called "Rugby" I think, I remember as having more grace than depth,
+but one may say nevertheless, real distinction.
+
+In the exchanging of ideas so intimately as has happened splendidly
+between Picasso and Braque, which is in the nature of professional
+dignity among artists, there is bound to be more or less confusion
+even to the highly perceptive artist and this must therefore confuse
+the casual observer and layman. So it is, or was at that time with the
+painting of Robert Delaunay and Mme. Delaunay Terck; what you learned
+in this instance was that the more vigorous of the pictures were hers.
+She showed the same strength and style in her work as in her
+interesting personality which was convincing without being too
+strained or forced; she was most probably an average Russian woman
+which as one knows means a great deal as to intelligence and personal
+power.
+
+
+MARIE LAURENCIN
+
+With Marie Laurencin there was a greater sense of personal and
+individual creation. One can never quite think of anyone in connection
+with her pictures other than the happy reminiscence of Watteau. With
+her work comes charm in the highest, finest sense; there is nothing
+trivial about her pictures, yet they abound in all the graces of the
+18th Century. Her drawings and paintings with spread fans and now and
+then a greyhound or a gazelle opposed against them in design, hold
+grace and elegance of feeling that Watteau would certainly have
+sanctioned. She brings up the same sense of exquisite gesture and
+simplicity of movement with a feeling for the romantic aspect of
+virginal life which exists nowhere else in modern painting. She
+eliminates all severities of intellect, and super-imposes wistful
+charm of idea upon a pattern of the most delicate beauty. She is
+essentially an original which means that she invents her own
+experience in art.
+
+Marie Laurencin concerns herself chiefly with the idea of girlish
+youth, young girls gazing toward each other with fans spread or
+folded, and fine braids of hair tied gently with pale cerise or pale
+blue ribbon, and a pearl-like hush of quietude hovers over them. She
+arrests the attention by her fine reticence and holds one's interest
+by the veracity of esthetic experience she evinces in her least or
+greatest painting or drawing. She paints with miniature sensibility
+and knows best of all what to leave out. She is eminently devoid of
+excessiveness either in pose or in treatment, with the result that
+your eye is refreshingly cooled with the delicate process.
+
+That Marie Laurencin keeps in the grace of French children is in no
+way surprising if you know the incomparable loveliness of them. Apart
+from her modernistic excellence as artist, she conveys a poetry so
+essentially French in quality that you wish always for more and more
+of it. It is the light breath of the Luxembourg gardens and the
+gardens of the Tuilleries coming over you once more and the same
+grace in child-life as existed in the costly games at Versailles among
+the grown-ups depicted so superbly by Watteau and his most worthy
+followers, Lancret and Pater, in whom touch is more breath than
+movement. It is a sensitive and gracefully aristocratic creation Marie
+Laurencin produces for us, one that makes the eye avid of more
+experience and the mind of more of its subtlety. It is an essentially
+beautiful and satisfying contribution to modern painting, this
+nacreous cubism of Marie Laurencin.
+
+
+GEORGIA O'KEEFFE[1]
+
+With Georgia O'Keeffe one takes a far jump into volcanic crateral
+ethers, and sees the world of a woman turned inside out and gaping
+with deep open eyes and fixed mouth at the rather trivial world of
+living people. "I wish people were all trees and I think I could enjoy
+them then," says Georgia O'Keeffe. Georgia O'Keeffe has had her feet
+scorched in the laval effusiveness of terrible experience; she has
+walked on fire and listened to the hissing of vapors round her person.
+The pictures of O'Keeffe, the name by which she is mostly known, are
+probably as living and shameless private documents as exist, in
+painting certainly, and probably in any other art. By shamelessness I
+mean unqualified nakedness of statement. Her pictures are essential
+abstractions as all her sensations have been tempered to abstraction
+by the too vicarious experience with actual life. She had seen hell,
+one might say, and is the Sphynxian sniffer at the value of a secret.
+She looks as if she had ridden the millions of miles of her every
+known imaginary horizon, and has left all her horses lying dead in
+their tracks. All in quest of greater knowledge and the greater sense
+of truth. What these quests for truth are worth no one can precisely
+say, but the tendency would be to say at least by one who has gone far
+to find them out that they are not worthy of the earth or sky they are
+written on. Truth has soiled many an avenue, it has left many a
+drawing room window open. It has left the confession box filled with
+bones. However, Georgia O'Keeffe pictures are essays in experience
+that neither Rops nor Moreau nor Baudelaire could have smiled away.
+
+[Footnote 1: American.--Ed.]
+
+She is far nearer to St. Theresa's version of life as experience than
+she could ever be to that of Catherine the Great or Lucrezia Borgia.
+Georgia O'Keeffe wears no poisoned emeralds. She wears too much white;
+she is impaled with a white consciousness. It is not without
+significance that she wishes to paint red in white and still have it
+look like red. She thinks it can be done and yet there is more red in
+her pictures than any other color at present; though they do, it must
+be said, run to rose from ashy white with oppositions of blue to keep
+them companionable and calm. The work of Georgia O'Keeffe startles by
+its actual experience in life. This does not imply street life or sky
+life or drawing room life, but life in all its huge abstraction of
+pain and misery and its huge propensity for silencing the spirit of
+adventure. These pictures might also be called expositions of psychism
+in color and movement.
+
+Without some one to steady her, I think O'Keeffe would not wish the
+company of more tangible things than trees. She knows why she despises
+existence, and it comes from facing the acute dilemma with more
+acuteness than it could comprehend. She is vastly over-size as to
+experience in the spiritual geometric of the world. All this gives her
+painting as clean an appearance as it is possible to imagine in
+painting. She soils nothing with cheap indulgence of wishing
+commonplace things. She has wished too large and finds the world
+altogether too small in comparison.
+
+What the future holds for Georgia O'Keeffe as artist depends upon
+herself. She is modern by instinct and therefore cannot avoid
+modernity of expression. It is not willed, it is inevitable. When she
+looks at a person or a thing she senses the effluvia that radiate from
+them and it is by this that she gauges her loves and hates or her
+tolerance of them. It is enough that her pictures arrive with a
+strange incongruous beauty which, though metaphysically an import,
+does not disconcert by this insistence. She knows the psychism of
+patterns and evolves them with strict regard for the pictural aspects
+in them which save them from banality as ideas. She has no preachment
+to offer and utters no rubbish on the subject of life and the problem.
+She is one of the exceptional girls of the world both in art and in
+life. As artist she is as pure and free from affectation as in life
+she is relieved from the necessity of it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If there are other significant women in modern art I am not as yet
+familiarized with them. These foregoing women take their place
+definitely as artists within the circle of women painters like Le
+Brun, Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, and are in advance of them by
+being closer to the true appreciation of esthetics in inventing them
+for themselves.
+
+
+
+
+REVALUATIONS IN IMPRESSIONISM
+
+
+In the consideration of the real factors in the impressionistic
+movement, we learn that it is not Monet and the younger crew such as
+Moret, Maufra, George d'Espagnat and Guillaumin who give us the real
+weight of this esthetic argument. We find Monet going in for
+hyper-sentimentalized iridiscences which culminate or seem to
+culminate in the "Lily" series until we are forced to say he has let
+us out, once and for all, as far as any further interest in the theory
+with which he was concerned. We are no longer held by these artificial
+and overstrained hues, and we find the younger followers offering
+little or nothing to us save an obvious integrity of purpose. These
+younger men had apparently miscomprehended idiosyncrasies for ideas
+and that, save for a certain cleanness of intention, they were
+offering scarcely anything of what is to be found by way of
+realization in the pictures of a really great colorist like Renoir.
+
+The two artists who give the true thrill of this phase of the modern
+movement are without question Pissarro and Sisley. It is the belief of
+these two artists in the appearance of things for themselves, under
+the influence of the light problem, which gives them a strength not
+always visible at first by reason of a greater simplicity of effect
+which dominates all of their pictures. We see in both these men a real
+and impressive desire for a more exacting scientific relation as
+discovered by intellectual consideration, than is to be found in the
+emotional outcry predominating in most of the pictures of Monet. These
+do not hold for us in this day as solidly as they were expected to.
+There is a kind of superficiality and consequent dissatisfaction in
+the conspicuous aspiration toward the first flush, one may call it, of
+enthusiasm for impressionistic experience. There comes to one who is
+really concerned, the ever increasing desire to turn toward Pissarro
+and Sisley and to quietly dispense with many or most of Monet's
+pictures, not to speak of a legitimate haste to pass over the
+phlegmatic enthusiasms of the younger followers.
+
+One feels that Pissarro must have been a great man among men not so
+great. One feels likewise that the stately reticence of a man like
+Sisley is worth far more to us now, if only because we find in his
+works as they hang one beside another in numbers, a soberer and more
+cautious approach to the theme engrossing him and the other artists of
+the movement of that time. In the pictures of Sisley there is the
+charm of the fact for itself, the delight of the problem of placing
+the object in relation to the luminous atmosphere which covers it.
+
+Men like Pissarro and Sisley were not forgetting Courbet and his
+admirable knowledge of reality. They were not concerned with the
+spectacular aspect of the impressionistic principle, not nearly so
+much as with the satisfying realization of the object under the
+influence of the new scientific problem in esthetics with which they
+were concerned. For myself I am out of touch with Monet as a creator
+and I find myself extracting far more satisfaction and belief from
+Pissarro and Sisley, who deal with the problem of nature plus idea,
+with a much greater degree of let me even say sincerity, by reason of
+one fact and perhaps the most important one: they were not dramatizing
+the idea in hand. They were not creating a furor with pink and
+lavender haystacks. They were satisfied that there was still something
+to be found in the old arrangement of negative and positive tones as
+they were understood before the application of the spectrum turned the
+brains and sensibilities of men. In other words Courbet survived while
+the Barbizonians perished. There was an undeniable realization of fact
+still there, clamoring for consideration. There was the reality then
+even as now, as always. With Pissarro and Sisley there appeared the
+true separation of tone, making itself felt most intelligently in the
+work of these men from whom the real separatists Seurat, Signac, and
+Cross were to realize their principle of pointilism, of which
+principle Seurat was to prove himself the most satisfactory creative
+exponent.
+
+The world of art lost a very great deal in the untimely death of
+Seurat; he was a young man of great artistic and intellectual gifts.
+There was an artist by the name of Vignon who came in for his share
+during the impressionistic period, probably not with any more dramatic
+glamour than he achieves now by his very simple and unpretentious
+pictures. I am sorry for my own pleasure that I have not been able to
+see more of this artist's pictures from whom I think our own Theodore
+Robinson must have gained a deal of strength for his own bridge
+building between Bastien Le Page and the Monet "eccentricity," so to
+call it.
+
+There is always a reason for reticence, and it is usually apt to come
+from thinking. Sisley and Pissarro, Vignon, Seurat, and Robinson were
+thinking out a way to legitimize the new fantastic craze for prismatic
+violence, and they found it in the direct consideration for the fact.
+They knew that without objects light would have nowhere to fall, that
+the earth confronted them with indispensable phenomena each one of
+which had its reason for being. They were finding instead of losing
+their heads, which is always a matter of praise. I could stay with
+almost any Pissarro or Sisley I have ever seen, as I could always want
+any Seurat near me, just as I could wish almost any Monet out of sight
+because I find it submerged with emotional extravagance, too much
+enthusiasm for his new pet idea.
+
+Scientific appreciation had not come with scientific intentions. Like
+most movements, it was left to other than the accredited innovators
+for its completion and perfection. That is why we find Cézanne
+working incessantly to create an art which would achieve a union of
+impressionism and an art like the Louvre, as he is said to have
+characterized it for himself. We know now how much Cézanne cared for
+Chardin as well as for Courbet, and Greco. There is a reason why he
+must have respected Pissarro, far more than he did at any time such
+men as Gaugin, the "flea on his back" as he so vividly and perhaps
+justly named him. There was far more hope for a possible great art to
+come out of Van Gogh, who, in his brief seven years had experimented
+with every aspect of impressionism that had then been divulged. He too
+was in search of a passionate realization of the object. His method of
+heavy stitching in bright hues was not a perfected style. It was an
+extravagant hope toward a personal rhythm. He was an "upwardly"
+aspiring artist by reason of his hyper-accentuated religious fervours.
+All these extraneous and one might even say irrelevant attempts toward
+speedy arrivism are set aside in the presence of the almost solemn
+severity of minds like Pissarro and Sisley, and of Cézanne, who
+extracted for himself all that was valuable in the passing idea of
+impressionism. The picture which lasts is never the entirely
+idiosyncratic one. It is that picture which strives toward realization
+of ideas through a given principle with which it is involved.
+
+So it seems then, that if Monet invented the principle of
+impressionism as applied to painting, Pissarro and Sisley assisted
+greatly in the creative idea for our lasting use and pleasure by the
+consideration of the intellect which they applied to it; just as
+Seurat has given us a far greater realization than either Signac or
+Cross have offered us in the principle of pointillism.
+
+The "test of endurance" in the impressionistic movement is borne out;
+the strength of realization is to be found in Pissarro and Sisley and
+not in the vapid niceties of Monet, whose work became thinner and
+thinner by habitual repetitive painting, and by a possible false sense
+of security in his argument. Monet had become the habitual
+impressionist, and the habitual in art is its most conspicuous
+fatality. The art of Monet grew weaker throughout the various stages
+of Waterloo, Venice, Rouen, Giverney, and the Water Lilies which
+formed periods of expression, at least to the mind of the observer.
+Monet's production had become a kind of mercerized production, and a
+kind of spurious radiance invested them, in the end. It remained for
+Pissarro, Sisley, Cézanne, and Seurat to stabilize the new discovery,
+and to give it the stamina it was meant to contain, as a scientific
+idea, scientifically applied.
+
+
+
+
+ODILON REDON
+
+
+With the passing of this rare artist during the late summer months,[2]
+we are conscious of the silencing of one of the foremost lyricists in
+painting, one of the most delicate spirits among those who have
+painted pictures so thoroughly replete with charm, pictures of such
+real distinction and merit. For of true charm, of true grace, of true
+melodic, Redon was certainly the master. I think no one has coveted
+the vision so much as, certainly no more than, has this artist,
+possessed of the love of all that is dream-like and fleeting in the
+more transitory aspect of earthly things. No one has ever felt more
+that fleeting treasure abiding in the moment, no one has been more
+jealous of the bounty contained in the single glancing of the eye
+upward to infinity or downward among the minuter fragments at his
+feet.
+
+[Footnote 2: Of 1917.--Ed.]
+
+It would seem as if Redon had surely walked amid gardens, so much of
+the morning is in each of his fragile works. There seems always to be
+hovering in them the breath of those recently spent dawns of which he
+was the eager spectator, never quite the full sunlight of the later
+day. Essentially he was the worshipper of the lip of flower, of dust
+upon the moth wing, of the throat of young girl, or brow of young
+boy, of the sudden flight of bird, the soft going of light clouds in a
+windless sky. These were the gentle stimulants to his most virile
+expression. Nor did his pictures ever contain more; they never
+struggled beyond the quality of legend, at least as I know them. He
+knew the loveliness in a profile, he saw always the evanescences of
+light upon light and purposeless things. The action or incident in his
+pictures was never more than the touch of some fair hand gently and
+exquisitely brushing some swinging flower. He desired implicitly to
+believe in the immortality of beauty, that things or entities once
+they were beautiful could never die, at least for him. I followed
+faithfully for a time these fine fragments in those corners of Paris
+where they could be found, and there was always sure to be in them,
+always and ever that perfect sense of all that is melodic in the
+universe.
+
+I do not know much of his early career as an artist. I have read
+passages from letters which he wrote not so long ago, in which he
+recounts with tenderness the dream life of his childhood, how he used
+to stand in the field for hours or lie quietly upon some cool hill
+shaded with young leaves, watching the clouds transforming themselves
+into wing shapes and flower shapes, staining his fancy with the magic
+of their delicate color and form--indeed, it would seem as if all
+things had for him been born somewhere in the clouds and had
+condescended to an earthward existence for a brief space, the better
+to show their rarity of grace for the interval. Although obviously
+rendered from the object, they were still-lifes which seemed to take
+on a kind of cloud life during the very process of his creation. They
+paid tribute to that simple and unaffected statement of his--"I have
+fashioned an art after myself." Neither do I know just how long he was
+the engraver and just how long he was the painter--it is evident
+everywhere that his line is the line of the fastidious artist on steel
+and stone.
+
+Beyond these excessively frail renderings of his, whether in oil or in
+pastel, I do not know him, but I am thinking always in the presence of
+them that he listened very attentively and with more than a common ear
+to the great masters in music, absorbing at every chance all that was
+in them for him. He had in his spirit the classical outline of music,
+with nothing directly revolutionary, no sign of what we call revolt
+other than the strict adherence to personal relationship, no other
+prejudice than the artist's reaction against all that is not really
+refined to art, with but one consuming ardor, and that to render with
+extreme tranquillity everything delicate and lovely in passing things.
+There is never anything in his pictures outside the conventional logic
+of beauty, and if they are at all times ineffably sweet, it is only
+because Redon himself was like them, joyfully living out the days
+because they were for him ineffably sweet, too. Most of all it is
+Redon who has rendered with exceptional elegance and extreme
+artistry, the fragment.
+
+It is in his pictures, replete with exquisiteness, that one finds the
+true analogy to lyric poetry. This lyricism makes them seem mostly
+Greek--often I have thought them Persian, sometimes again, Indian;
+certainly he learned something from the Chinese in their porcelains
+and in their embroidery. I am sure he has been fond of these outer
+influences, these Oriental suggestions which were for him the
+spiritual equivalent from the past for his spontaneous ideas, for he,
+too, had much of all this magic, as he had much of the hypnotic
+quality of jewelry and precious stones in all his so delicate
+pictures, firelike in their subtle brilliancy. They have always seemed
+to contain this suggestion for me: flowers that seemed to be much more
+the embodiment of jades, rubies, emeralds, and ambers, than just
+flowers from the common garden. His flamelike touches have always held
+this preciousness: notations rather for the courtly robe or diadem
+than just drawings. All this gift of goldsmithery comes as one would
+expect, quite naturally, from his powers as an engraver, in which art
+he held a first place in his time and was the master of the younger
+school, especially in Belgium and Germany. Of all the painters of this
+time it is certain he was first among them essaying to picture the
+jewelled loveliness of nature; it is most evident in La Touche who was
+in no way averse to Renoir either, but Redon has created this touch
+for himself and it is the touch of the virtuoso. Perhaps it would have
+been well if Moreau, who had a sicker love of this type of expression,
+had followed Redon more closely, as he might then have added a little
+more lustre to these very dead literary failures of his.
+
+I cannot now say who else beside Ferdinand Khnopff has been influenced
+greatly by him, but I do know that he was beloved by the more modern
+men, that he was revered by all regardless of theories or tenets, for
+there is in existence somewhere in Paris a volume of letters and
+testimonials celebrating some anniversary of Redon in proof of it. And
+I think that--regardless of ideas--the artist must always find him
+sympathetic, if for no other reason than that he was the essence of
+refinement, of delicacy, and of taste. When I think of Redon I think
+of Shelley a little, "he is dusty with tumbling about among the
+stars," and I think somewhat, too, of some phrases in Debussy and his
+unearthly school of musicians, for if we are among those who admire
+sturdier things in art we can still love the fine gift of purity. And
+of all gifts Redon has that, certainly.
+
+His art holds, too, something of that breathlessness among the trees
+one finds in Watteau and in Lancret, maybe more akin to Lancret, for
+he, also, was more a depicter of the ephemeral. We think of Redon as
+among those who transvaluate all earthly sensations in terms of a
+purer element. We think of him as living with his head among the
+mists, alert for all those sudden bursts of light which fleck here and
+there forgotten or unseen places, making them live with a new
+resplendency, full of new revealment, perfect with wonder. Happily we
+find in him a hatred of description and of illustration, we find these
+pictures to be illuminations from rich pages not observed by the
+common eye, decorations out of a world the like of which has been but
+too seldom seen by those who aspire to vision. _Chansons sans paroles_
+are they, ringing clearly and flawlessly to the eye as do those songs
+of Verlaine (with whom he has also some relationship) to the
+well-attuned ear.
+
+He was the master of the nuance, and the nuance was his lyricism, his
+special gift, his genius. He knew perfectly the true vibration of note
+to note, and how few are they whose esthetic emotions are built upon
+the strictly poetic basis, who escape the world-old pull towards
+description and illustration. How few, indeed, among those of the
+materialistic vision escape this. But for Redon there was but one
+world, and that a world of imperceptible light on all things visible,
+with always a kind of song of adoration upon his lips, as it were,
+obsessed with reverence and child wonder toward every least and
+greatest thing, and it was in these portrayals of least things that he
+exposed their naked loveliness as among the greatest. Never did Redon
+seek for the miniature; he knew merely that the part is the
+representation of the whole, that the perfect fragment is a true
+representative of beauty, and that the vision of some fair hand or
+some fair eye is sure to be the epitome of all that is lovely in the
+individual.
+
+We have as a result of this almost religious devotion of Redon's, the
+fairest type of the expression of that element which is the eye's
+equivalent for melodious sound. In his pictures he perpetuated his
+belief in the unfailing harmony in things. Either all things were
+lovely in his eye, or they are made beautiful by thinking beautifully
+of them. That was the only logic in Redon's painting. He questioned
+nothing; he saw the spiritual import of every object on which his eye
+rested. No one shall go to Redon for any kind of intellectual
+departure or for any highly specialized theory--it is only too evident
+from his work that he had none in mind. He had, I think, a definite
+belief in the theosophic principle of aura, in that element of
+emanation which would seem sometimes to surround delicate objects
+touched with the suffusion of soft light. For him all things seemed
+"possessed" by some colorful presence which they themselves could in
+no way be conscious of, somewhat the same sort of radiance which
+floods the features of some beauteous person and creates a presence
+there which the person is not even conscious of, the imaginative
+reality, in other words, existing either within or without everything
+the eye beholds. For him the very air which hovered about all things
+seemed to have, as well, the presence of color not usually seen of
+men, and it was this emanation or presence which formed the living
+quality of his backgrounds in which those wondrous flowery heads and
+hands and wings had their being, through which those dusty wings of
+most unearthly butterflies or moths hurry so feverishly. He has given
+us a happy suggestion of the reality of spiritual spaces and the way
+that these fluttering bodies which are little more than spirit
+themselves have enjoyed a beauteous life. He was Keats-like in his
+appreciation of perfect loveliness, like Shelley in his passionate
+desire to transform all local beauty into universal terms.
+
+No one will quarrel with Redon on account of what is not in him. What
+we do find in him is the poetry of a quiet, sweet nature in quest
+always of perfect beauty, longing to make permanent by means of a rare
+and graceful art some of those fragments which have given him his
+private and personal clue to the wonders of the moment, creating a
+personal art by being himself a rare and lovely person. He remains for
+us one of the finest of artists, who has reverted those whisperings
+from the great world of visual melody in which he lived. It was with
+these exquisite fragments that he adorned the states of his own soul
+in order that he might present them as artist in tangible art form. We
+are grateful for his lyricism and for his exquisite goldsmithery.
+After viewing his delicately beautiful pictures, objects take on a new
+poetic wonder.
+
+
+
+
+THE VIRTUES OF AMATEUR PAINTING
+
+WITH SPECIAL PRAISES FOR JENNIE VANVLEET COWDERY
+
+
+Some of the finest instances of pure painting will be found, not as
+might be imagined by the layman, among the professional artists, but
+among those amateurs whose chief occupation is amusing themselves first
+of all. If you who read will make close reference to those rich examples
+of the mid-Victorian period, when it was more or less distinguished to
+take up painting along with the other accomplishments, you will find
+that the much tabooed antimacassar period produced a species of painting
+that was as indicative of personal style and research as it was fresh in
+its elemental approach. The perfect instance in modern art of this sort
+of original painting raised to the highest excellence is that of Henri
+Rousseau, the true primitive of our so eclectic modern period. No one
+can have seen a picture of this most talented douanier without being
+convinced that technique for purely private personal needs has been
+beautified to an extraordinary degree.
+
+Rousseau stands among the very best tonalists as well as among the
+best designers of modern time, and his pictures hold a quality so
+related to the experience contained in their subjects, as to seem
+like the essence of the thing itself. You feel that unquestionably
+Rousseau's Paris is Paris, and you are made to feel likewise that his
+jungle scenes are at very least his own experiences of his earlier
+life in Mexico. Rousseau convinces by his unquestionable sensitivity
+and integrity of approach. He was not fabricating an art, he was
+endeavoring to create a real picture for his own private satisfaction,
+and his numerous successes are both convincing and admirable.
+
+As I have said, if you have access to a variety of amateur pictures
+created during the mid-Victorian era, of whatever style or subject,
+you will find in them the most admirably sincere qualities of painting
+as well as singularly enchanting gifts for simplication and the always
+engaging respect for the fact itself out of which these painted
+romanzas are created. There was the type of memorial picture for
+instance, with its proverbial tombstone, its weeping willow tree, and
+its mourner leaning with one elbow, usually on the cornice above,
+where the name of the beloved deceased is engraved; below it the
+appropriate motto and its added wealth of ornamentation in the way of
+landscape, with houses, hills, winding roads, with maybe an animal or
+two grazing in the field, and beyond all this vista, an ocean with
+pretty vessels passing on their unmindful way, and more often than
+not, many species of bright flowers in the foreground to heighten the
+richness of memory and the sentimental aspects of bereavement.
+
+I wish I could take you to two perfect examples of this sort of
+amateur painting which I have in mind, now in the possession of the
+Maine Historical Society, of Portland, Maine, as well as one other
+superb and still more perfect example of this sort of luxuriously
+painted memory of life, in the collection of a noted collector of
+mid-Victorian splendours, near Boston. It is sensation at first hand
+with these charmingly impressive amateur artists. They have been
+hampered in no way with the banality of school technique learned in
+the manner of the ever-present and unoriginal copyist. They literally
+invent expression out of a personally accumulated passion for beauty
+and they have become aware of it through their own intensely
+personalised contact with life. The marine painters of this period,
+and earlier, of which there have been almost numberless instances, and
+of whose fine performances there are large numbers on view in the
+Marine Museum in Salem, Mass., offer further authentication of private
+experience with phases of life that men of the sea are sure to know,
+the technical beauty alone of which furnishes the spectator with many
+surprises and fascinations in the line of simplicity and directness of
+expression.
+
+Many of these amateur painters were no longer young in point of actual
+years. Henri Rousseau was as we know past forty when he was finally
+driven to painting in order to establish his own psychic entity. And
+so it is with all of them, for there comes a certain need somewhere in
+the consciousness of everyone, to offset the tedium of common
+experience with some degree of poetic sublimation. With the result
+that many of them find their way out by taking to paints and brushes
+and canvas, astonishing many a real painter, if not the untutored
+layman, who probably expects to be mystified in one way or another by
+something which he thinks he does not understand. It is of the
+charming pictures of Jennie Vanvleet Cowdery that I wish to speak
+here.
+
+Mrs. Cowdery is a southern lady, and of this fact you become aware
+instantly you find yourself in conversation with her. She evidences
+all the traits and characteristics of a lady of her period, which is
+to say the late mid-Victorian, for she must have been a graceful young
+woman herself at the close of this fascinating period. And you find,
+therefore, in her quaint and convincingly original pictures, the
+passion for the charms and graces that were consistent with the period
+in which she spent her girlhood, and which has left upon her
+consciousness so dominant a trace. The pictures of Mrs. Cowdery,
+despite their remoteness of surrounding--for she always places her
+graceful figures, which are no less than the embodiments of her own
+graceful states of being, in a dense woodland scene--bring up to the
+senses all the fragrances of that past time, the redolence of the
+oleander by the wall, of the camelia in the shadow, and of the pansy
+by the hedge. You expect these ladies to shake gently upon the air,
+like flowers in the morning, their own fascinating perfumes, as you
+expect them to recite in the quietude of the wood in which they are
+walking those sentiments which are appropriate to the season and of
+other soft remembrances.
+
+Mrs. Cowdery might have taken to needlework, and sat like many another
+young woman of that time by the window with the sunlight streaming in
+upon the coloured stitches of her work, or she might perhaps more
+strictly have taken to miniature painting, the quality of which style
+is so much in evidence in these pleasant pictures of hers. The
+pictures of Mrs. Cowdery will not stimulate the spectator to reflect
+with gravity upon the size of the universe, but they dwell entirely
+upon the intimate charm of it, the charm that rises out of breeding
+and cultivation, and a feeling for the finer graces of the body and
+sweet purities of mind. Mrs. Cowdery is essentially a breather and a
+bringer of peace. There is no purpose in these gracious and
+entertaining pictures, for they are invented solely to recall and make
+permanent, for this lady's own delight, those moments of joy of which
+there must have been many if the gentleness and the clear quality of
+revery in them is to be taken; and these pictures are to be taken
+first and last as genuine works of art in their own way, which is the
+only way that true works of art can be taken seriously.
+
+The most conspicuous virtue of these quaintly engaging pictures of
+Mrs. Cowdery is the certainty you find in them of the lack of
+struggle. Their author is, without doubt, at peace with the world, for
+the world is without significance in the deeper sense to all really
+serious artists, those who have vital information to convey. Mrs.
+Cowdery's career as a painter is of short and impressive duration,
+barely four years she confides, and she has been an engaging feature
+of the Society of Independent Artists for at least three of these
+years, I believe. It is her picture which she names "1869" which has
+called most attention to her charming talents, and which created so
+convincing an impression among the artists for its originality and its
+insistence upon the rendering of beautified personal experience.
+
+Mrs. Cowdery must have loved her earliest girlish hours with excessive
+delight, and perhaps it is the garish contrast of the youth of the
+young women of this time, energetic and, from the mid-Victorian
+standpoint certainly, so unwomanly, that prompts this gentle and
+refined woman to people her gracious solitudes of spirit with those
+still more gracious lady-like beings which she employs. For her
+pictures, that is her most typical ones, contain always these
+groupings of figures in crinoline-like gowns with perhaps more of the
+touch of eighteen-eighty than of seventy in them, so given to flounces
+and cascades of lace with picture hats to shade the eyes, and
+streamers of velvet ribbon to give attenuated sensations of grace to
+their quietly sweeping figures that seem to be always in a state of
+harmless gossip among themselves. One never knows whether it is to be
+quite morning or afternoon for there is seldom or never present the
+quality of direct sunlight; but as ladies and gentlemen usually walk
+in the afternoon even now, if there are still such virtuous entities
+as ladies and gentlemen, we may presume that these are afternoon
+seances, poetically inscribed, which Mrs. Cowdery wishes to convey to
+us. That Mrs. Cowdery has a well adjusted feeling for the harmony of
+hues is evident in her production as well as in the outline of her
+simple and engaging conversation.
+
+Thus the lady lives, in a world gently fervorous with lyric
+delicacies, and her own almost girlish laughter is like a kind of
+gracious music for the scenes she wishes to portray. I am reminded in
+this instance to compare her gentle voice with the almost inaudible
+one of Albert Ryder, that greatest of visionaries which America has so
+far produced. It is probable that all mystical types have voices
+softened to whispers by the vastness of the experience which they have
+endured. These gentle souls survive the period they were born in, and
+it is their clean and unspoiled vision that brings them over to us in
+this hectic and metallic era of ours. They come, it must be
+remembered, from the era of Jenny Lind and Castle Garden, though of
+course in Mrs. Cowdery's case she is too young actually to have
+survived that period literally. It is the grace of that period,
+however, to which she has become heir and all her efforts have been
+exercised in rendering of the graces of this playful and pretty hour
+of human life.
+
+We are reminded, for the moment only, of Monticelli, chiefly through
+similarity of subject, for he also was fond of the silent park
+inhabited with gracious beings in various states of spiritual ecstasy
+and satisfaction. In the pictures of Mrs. Cowdery there is doubtless
+greater intimacy of feeling, because it is a private and very personal
+issue with her own happy soul. She has come out on the other edge of
+the horizon of the world of humans, and finds the looking backward so
+imperatively exquisite as to make it necessary for her to paint them
+with innocent fidelity; and so she has set about, without any previous
+experience in the handling of homely materials, to make them tell in
+quaint and gracious accents the pretty story of the life of her
+revivified imagination. In these ways she becomes a kind of
+revivification of the spirit of Watteau, who has made perfect, for us
+all, what is perfect in the classicized ideality of experience.
+
+I think of Mrs. Cowdery's pictures as mid-Victorian fans, for they
+seem more like these frail shapes to be wafted by frail and slender
+hands; I seem to feel the quiet glitter of prisms hanging from huge
+chandeliers in a ball-room, as I look at them; for they become, if you
+do not scrutinize them too closely as works of art, rather as
+prismatic memories bathed in the light of that other time, when men
+and women now grandfathers and grandmothers were young and handsome
+boys and girls, seeking each other out in the fashion of polite beaus
+and belles, a period that will never come again, it is certain. Mrs.
+Cowdery need not be alarmed that modern painters wish to offer plain
+homage to her fresh and engaging talents. It is an object lesson, if
+such is necessary, to all men and women past fifty: that there is
+still something for each of them to do in a creative way; and I can
+think of no more engaging way for them than to recite the romantic
+history of their youthful longings and realizations to a world that
+has little time for making history so romantically inoffensive.
+
+Mrs. Cowdery may be complimented therefore that she has followed her
+professional daughter's advice to take up painting as a pastime, and
+she has already shown in these brief four years, with all the
+intermissions that are natural to any ordinary life, that she is a
+fine type of amateur artist with all the world of rediscovery at her
+disposal. She will be hampered in no way with the banalities of
+instruction offered her by the assuming ones. She is beyond the need
+of anything but self-invention, and this will be her own unique and
+satisfying pleasure. It is in no way amiss, then, to congratulate
+Mrs. Cowdery upon her new and vital artistic career. That she will
+have further success is proven by the few pictures already created by
+her. They show the unmistakable signs of taste and artistic
+comprehension as applied to her own spiritual vision. No intervention
+will be of any avail, save perhaps the permissible intervention of
+praise and congratulations.
+
+Incidentally, I would recommend to those artists who are long since
+jaded with repetition and success, and there are many of them, to
+refresh their eyes and their senses with the work of these outwardly
+unassuming but thoroughly convincing amateurs, like Henri Rousseau,
+Mrs. Cowdery and the many others whose names do not appear on their
+handsome works of art. There is such freshness of vision and true art
+experience contained in them. They rely upon the imagination entirely
+for their revelations, and there is always present in these
+unprofessional works of art acute observation of fact and fine gifts
+for true fancy. These amateurs are never troubled with the "how" of
+mediocre painting; neither are they troubled with the wiles of the
+outer world. They remain always charming painters of personal
+visionary experience, and as such are entitled to praise for their
+genuine gifts in rendering, as well as for a natural genius for
+interpretation.
+
+
+
+
+HENRI ROUSSEAU
+
+
+Not long since, we heard much of naïveté--it was the fashion among the
+schools and the lesser individuals to use this term in describing the
+work of anyone who sought to distinguish himself by eccentricity of
+means. It was often the term applied to bizarrerie--it was fashionable
+to draw naïvely, as it was called. We were expected to believe in a
+highly developed and overstrained simplicity, it was the resort of a
+certain number who wanted to realize speedy results among the
+unintelligent. It was a pose which lasted not long because it was
+obviously a pose, and a pose not well carried, it had not the
+prescribed ease about it and showed signs of labor. It had, for a
+time, its effect upon really intelligent artists with often
+respectable results, as it drew the tendency away from too highly
+involved sophistication. It added a fresh temper in many ways, and
+helped men to a franker type of self-expression; and was, as we may
+expect, something apart from the keen need of obliviousness in the
+great modern individualists, those who were seeking direct contact
+with subject.
+
+We have learned in a short space of time that whatever was exceptional
+in the ideas and attitudes of the greater ones, as we know them, was
+not at all the outcome of the struggle toward an affected naïveté
+such as we have heard so much about, but was, on another hand, a real
+phase of their originality, the other swing of the pendulum, so to
+call it. It was the "accent" of their minds and tempers, it was a true
+part of their personal gesture, and was something they could not, and
+need not, do anything about, as if it were the normal tendency in them
+in their several ways. We all of us know that modern art is not
+haphazard, it is not hit or miss in its intention at least, certainly
+not the outcome of oddity, of whim, or of eccentricity, for these
+traits belong to the superficial and cultivated. We have found that
+with the best moderns there has been and is inherent in them the same
+sincerity of feeling, the same spirit directing their research. The
+single peculiarity of modern art therefore, if such there be, is its
+special relationship to the time in which it is being produced,
+explicitly of this age.
+
+What we know of the men, much or little, proves that they are, and
+have all been, simple earnest men, intelligent, following nowise
+blindly in pursuit of fresh sensation, excitement, a mere phantasy, or
+freak of the mind. It was, and is, the product of a logic essentially
+of themselves, and of the period they represent; and because this
+period is not the period of sentimentality in art, but a period
+striving toward a more vigorous type of values--something as beautiful
+as the machinery of our time--it is not as yet to any great degree
+cared for, understood nor, up to very recently, even trusted. It has
+destroyed old fashioned romance, and the common eye has ceased to
+focus, or rather, does not wish to concentrate on things which do not
+visualize the literary sensation. In the midst of all this struggle
+was Henri Rousseau, the real and only naif of this time, and certainly
+among the truest of all times. As much as a man can remain child,
+Rousseau remained the child, and as much as a man could be naïve and
+childlike, certainly it was this simple artist who remained so.
+
+If report has the truth correctly, Rousseau began his career as
+painter at the age of forty, though it is quite possible and probable
+that he was painting whenever he could, in his untutored fashion, in
+all of his spare intervals, and with but one object in view apparent:
+to give forth in terms of painting those phases of his own personal
+life which remained indelibly impressed upon his memory, pictorially
+always vivid to him, as in his pictures they are seen to be the scenes
+or incidents of loveliness to his fine imagination. We find them
+covering a rather wide range of experience, apparently in two places,
+somewhere in the tropics of Mexico, and Paris; the former, experiences
+of youth in some sort of governmental service I believe, and the
+latter, the more intimate phases of life about him in Paris, of Paris
+herself and of those people who created for him the intimacy of his
+home life, and the life which centered about the charming rue de
+Perelle where he lived.
+
+In Rousseau then, we have one of the finest individual expressions of
+the amateur spirit in painting, taking actually a place among the
+examples of paintings, such as those of the Kwakiutl Indians, or the
+sculpture of the Congo people, partaking of the very same quality of
+directness and simplicity, and of contact with the prevailing image
+chosen for representation. He was too evidently the product of
+himself, he was not hybrid, nor was he in any sense something strange
+springing up out of the soil in the dark of night, he was not
+mushroom. He did not know the meaning of affectation, and I doubt if
+he even knew what was meant by simplicity, so much was he that element
+himself.
+
+It is with fascination that we think of him as living his life out
+after his discharge for incompetency from the customs service outside
+the fortifications of Paris, and doubtless with the strain of poverty
+upon him also, within a ten minutes' walk from the world famous
+quartiers, and almost certainly knowing nothing of them. That there
+was a Julian's or a Colarossi's anywhere about, it is not likely that
+he knew, or if he knew, not more than vaguely. He drew his quaint
+inspirations directly from the sources of nature and some pencil
+drawings I have seen prove the high respect and admiration, amounting
+to love and worship, which he had for nature and the phenomena of
+her, to be disclosed at every hedge.
+
+If he was no success as a douanier, he was learning a great deal,
+meanwhiles, about those delicate and radiant skies which cover Paris
+at all times, charming always for their lightness and delicacy,
+pearl-like in their quiet splendour; and it was during this service of
+his at the city's gates that he learned his lovely sense of blacks and
+greys and silvers, of which Paris offers so much always, and which
+predominate in his canvases. Even his tropical scenes strive in no way
+toward artificiality of effect, but give rather the sense of their
+profundity than of oddity, of their depth and mystery than of
+peculiarity. He gives us the sense of having been at home in them in
+his imagination, being so well at home in those scenes of Paris which
+were daily life to him. We find in Rousseau true naïveté, without
+struggle, real child-likeness of attitude and of emotion, following
+diligently with mind and with spirit the forms of those stored images
+that have registered themselves with directness upon the area of his
+imagination, never to be forgotten, rendered with perfect simplicity
+for us in these quaint pictures of his, superb in the richness of
+quality which makes of them, what they are to the eye that is
+sympathetic to them, pictures out of a life undisturbed by all the
+machinations and intrigues of the outer world, a life intimate with
+itself, remote from all agencies having no direct association with it,
+living with a sweet gift of enchantment with the day's disclosures,
+occupied apparently with nothing beyond the loveliness contained in
+them.
+
+There is not once, anywhere, a striving of the mind in the work of
+this simple man. It was a wealth of innocence that tinged all his
+methods, and his pictures are as simple in their appeal as are the
+declarations of Jacob Boehme--they are the songs of innocence and
+experience of a nature for whom all the world was beautiful, and have
+about them the element of song itself, a poetry that has not yet
+reached the shaping of words. Who looks at the pictures of this true
+and charming naif, will find nothing to wonder at beyond this extreme
+simplicity, he had no prescribed attitude, no fixity of image that
+characterizes every touch of school. He was taught only by nature and
+consulted only her relationships and tendencies. There is never a
+mistaking of that. Nature was his influence, and he saw with an
+untrammelled eye the elemental shape of all things, and affixed no
+falsity of feeling, or anything, to his forms which might have
+detracted from their extreme simplicity. He had "first sight," first
+contact with the image, and sought nothing else beyond this, and a
+very direct correspondence with memories dictated all his efforts.
+
+That Rousseau was musical, is shown in the natural grace of his
+compositions, and his ideas were simple as the early songs of France
+are simple, speaking of everyday things with simple heart and voice,
+and he painted frankly what he saw in precisely the way he saw it. We,
+who love richness and sobriety of tone, will never tire of Rousseau's
+beautiful blacks and greys, and probably no one has excelled them for
+delicacy of appreciation, and perfection of gradation. It will be long
+before the landscapes will be forgotten, it will be long before the
+exquisite portrait of the "Child with the Harlequin" will fade from
+remembrance, we shall remember them all for their loveliness in
+design, a gift which never failed him, no matter what the subject.
+Simple arabesque, it was the jungle that taught him this, and therein
+lay his special power, a genuine feeling for the richness of laces and
+brocades in full and subdued tones, such as one would find in the
+elaborate intricacies of tropical foliage, strange leaves intermingled
+with parrots, monkeys, strange white lilies on high stalks, tigers
+peering through highly ornate foliage and branches intertwined, all
+excellently suggestive of that foreign land in which the mind wanders
+and finds itself so much at home.
+
+"Le Charmeur," "Jadwigha," in these are concentrated all that is
+lovely in the land of legend; and, like all places of legend, replete
+with imaginative beauty, the places where loveliness and beauty of
+form congregate, after they have passed through the sensuous spaces of
+the eye travelling somewhere to an abode where all those things are
+that are perfect, they live forever. Rousseau was a charming and
+lovable child, whether he was painting or whether he was conducting
+his own little orchestra, composed of those people who kept shop
+around his home, and it is as the child of his time that he must be
+considered, child in verity among the sophisticated moderns who
+believed and believe more in intellect than in anything else, many of
+whom paid tribute to him, and reverenced him, either in terms of
+sincere friendship, or by occasional visit. The various anecdotes,
+touching enough, are but further proof of the innocence of this so
+simple and untutored person.
+
+The real amateur spirit has, we like to think, much in its favor, if
+only for its freshness, its spontaneity, and a very gratifying
+naturalness. Rousseau was all of this, and lived in a world untouched,
+he wove about himself, like other visionaries, a soft veil hiding all
+that was grossly unreal to him from all that was real, and for
+Rousseau, those things and places he expressed existed vividly for
+him, and out of them his pictures became true creations. He was the
+real naif, because he was the real child, unaffected and unspoiled,
+and painting was for him but the key of heaven that he might open
+another door for the world's weary eye.
+
+
+
+
+PART TWO
+
+
+
+
+THE TWILIGHT OF THE ACROBAT
+
+
+Where is our once charming acrobat--our minstrel of muscular music?
+What has become of these groups of fascinating people gotten up in
+silk and spangle? Who may the evil genius be who has taken them and
+their fascinating art from our stage, who the ogre of taste that has
+dispensed with them and their charm? How seldom it is in these times
+that one encounters them, as formerly when they were so much the
+charming part of our lighter entertainment. What are they doing since
+popular and fickle notions have removed them from our midst?
+
+It is two years since I have seen the American stage. I used to say to
+myself in other countries, at least America is the home of real
+variety and the real lover of the acrobat. But I hear no one saying
+much for him these days, and for his charming type of art.
+
+What has become of them all, the graceful little lady of the slack
+wire, those charming and lovely figures that undulate upon the air by
+means of the simple trapeze, those fascinating ensembles and all the
+various types of melodic muscular virtuosity?
+
+We have been given much, of late, of that virtuosity of foot and leg
+which is usually called dancing; and that is excellent among us here,
+quite the contribution of the American, so singularly the product of
+this special physique. Sometimes I think there are no other dancers
+but Americans. It used to be so delightful a diversion watching our
+acrobat and his group with their strong and graceful bodies writhing
+with rhythmical certitude over a bar or upon a trapeze against a
+happily colored space. Now we get little more in the field of
+acrobatics beyond a varied buck and wing; everything seems tuxedoed
+for drawing room purposes. We get no more than a decent handspring or
+two, an over-elaborated form of split. It all seems to be over with
+our once so fashionable acrobat. There is no end of good stepping, as
+witness the Cohan Revue, a dancing team in Robinson Crusoe, Jr., and
+"Archie and Bertie" (I think they call themselves). This in itself
+might be called the modern American school: the elongated and elastic
+gentleman who finds his co-operator among the thin ones of his race,
+artistically speaking. I did not get to the circus this year, much to
+my regret; perhaps I would have found my lost genius there, among the
+animals disporting themselves in less charitable places. But we cannot
+follow the circus naturally, and these minstrel folk are disappearing
+rapidly. Variety seems quite to have given them up and replaced them
+with often very tiresome and mediocre acts of singing.
+
+How can one forget, for instance, the Famille Bouvier who used to
+appear regularly at the fêtes in the streets of Paris in the summer
+season, living all of them in a roving gipsy wagon as is the custom of
+these fête people. What a charming moment it was always to see the
+simple but well built Mlle. Jeanne of twenty-two pick up her stalwart
+and beautifully proportioned brother of nineteen, a strong,
+broad-shouldered, manly chap, and balance him on one hand upright in
+the air. It was a classic moment in the art of the acrobat,
+interesting to watch the father of them all training the fragile
+bodies of the younger boys and girls to the systematic movement of the
+business while the mother sat in the doorway of the caravan nursing
+the youngest at the breast, no doubt the perfect future acrobat. And
+how charming it was to look in at the doors of these little houses on
+wheels and note the excellent domestic order of them, most always with
+a canary or a linnet at the curtained window and at least one cat or
+dog or maybe both. This type is the progenitor of our stage acrobat,
+it is the primitive stage of these old-time troubadours, and it is
+still prevalent in times of peace in France. The strong man gotten in
+tawdry pink tights and much worn black velvet with his very elaborate
+and drawn out speeches, in delicate French, concerning the marvels of
+his art and the long wait for the stipulated number of _dix centimes_
+pieces before his marvellous demonstration could begin. This is, so to
+say, the vagabond element of our type of entertainment, the wandering
+minstrel who keeps generation after generation to the art of his
+forefathers, this fine old art of the pavement and the open country
+road. But we look for our artist in vain these days, those groups
+whose one art is the exquisite rhythmical display of the human body,
+concerted muscular melody. We cannot find him on the street in the
+shade of a stately chestnut tree as once in Paris we found him at
+least twice a year, and we seek him in vain in our modern music hall.
+
+Is our acrobatic artist really gone to his esthetic death; has he
+given his place permanently to the ever present singing lady who is
+always telling you who her modiste is, sings a sentimental song or two
+and then disappears; to the sleek little gentleman who dances off a
+moment or two to the tune of his doll-like partner whose voice is
+usually littler than his own? Perhaps our acrobat is still the delight
+of those more characteristic audiences of the road whose taste is less
+fickle, less blasé. This is so much the case with the arts in
+America--the fashions change with the season's end and there is never
+enough of novelty; dancing is already dying out, skating will not
+prevail for long among the idle; what shall we predict for our variety
+which is in its last stages of boredom for us?
+
+I suspect the so-called politeness of vaudeville of the elimination of
+our once revered acrobats. The circus notion has been replaced by the
+parlor entertainment notion. Who shall revive them for us, who admire
+their simple and unpretentious art; why is there not someone among
+the designers with sufficient interest in this type of beauty to make
+attractive settings for them, so that we may be able to enjoy them at
+their best, which in the theater we have never quite been able to
+do--designs that will in some way add luster to an already bright and
+pleasing show of talents.
+
+I can see, for instance, a young and attractive girl bareback rider on
+a cantering white horse inscribing wondrous circles upon a stage
+exquisitely in harmony with herself and her white or black horse as
+the case might be; a rich cloth of gold backdrop carefully suffused
+with rose. There could be nothing handsomer, for example, than young
+and graceful trapezists swinging melodically in turquoise blue
+doublets against a fine peacock background or it might be a rich pale
+coral--all the artificial and spectacular ornament dispensed with. We
+are expected to get an exceptional thrill when some dull person
+appears before a worn velvet curtain to expatiate with inappropriate
+gesture upon a theme of Chopin or of Beethoven, ideas and attitudes
+that have nothing whatsoever to do with the musical intention; yet our
+acrobat whose expression is certainly as attractive, if not much more
+so generally, has always to perform amid fatigued settings of the
+worst sort against red velvet of the most depraved shade possible. We
+are tired of the elaborately costumed person whose charms are trivial
+and insignificant, we are well tired also of the ordinary gentleman
+dancer and of the songwriter, we are bored to extinction by the
+perfectly dull type of playlet which features some well known
+legitimate star for illegitimate reasons. Our plea is for the
+re-creation of variety into something more conducive to light pleasure
+for the eye, something more conducive to pleasing and stimulating
+enjoyment. Perhaps the reinstatement of the acrobat, this revival of a
+really worthy kind of expression, would effect the change, relieve the
+monotony. The argument is not too trivial to present, since the
+spectator is that one for whom the diversion is provided.
+
+I hear cries all about from people who once were fond of theater and
+music hall that there is an inconceivable dullness pervading the
+stage; the habitual patron can no longer endure the offerings of the
+present time with a degree of pleasure, much less with ease. It has
+ceased to be what it once was, what its name implies. If the old
+school inclined toward the rough too much, then certainly the new
+inclines distressingly toward the refined--the stage that once was so
+full of knockabout is now so full of stand-still; variety that was
+once a joy is now a bore. Just some uninteresting songs at the piano
+before a giddy drop is not enough these days; and there are too many
+of such. There is need of a greater activity for the eye. The return
+of the acrobat in a more modern dress would be the appropriate
+acquisition, for we still have appreciation for all those charming
+geometrics of the trapeze, the bar, and the wire.
+
+It is to be hoped that these men will return to us, stimulating anew
+their delightful kind of poetry of the body and saving our variety
+performances from the prevailing plague of monotone.
+
+
+
+
+VAUDEVILLE
+
+
+I have but recently returned from the vaudeville of the centuries.
+Watching the kick and the glide of very ancient performers. I have
+spent a year and a half down in the wonderful desert country of the
+Southwest. I have wearied, however, of the ancient caprice, and turn
+with great delight to my old passion, vaudeville. I return with glee
+to the ladies and gentlemen and pet animals of the stage, including
+the acrobats. Is there one who cares for these artists and for their
+rhythmical gesture more than myself? I cannot think so. I have wished
+with a real desire to create new sets for them, to establish an
+altogether new tradition as regards the background of these charming
+artists. If that were the chosen field for my esthetic activities, I
+should be famous by now for the creation of sets and drops by which
+these exceptional artists might make a far more significant impression
+upon the type of public they essay to interest and amuse.
+
+I would begin first of all by severing them from the frayed traditions
+of worn plush and sequin, rid them of the so inadequate back drop such
+as is given them, the scene of Vesuvius in eruption, or the walk in
+the park at Versailles. They need first of all large plain spaces upon
+which to perform, and enjoy their own remarkably devised patterns of
+body. I speak of the acrobats, the animals, the single and double
+dancers who perform "down in one" more especially. The so called
+headliners have their plush parlours with the inevitable purple or
+rose lamp, and the very much worn property piano just barely in tune.
+Only the dressmaker and the interior decorator can do things for them,
+as we see in the case of Kitty Gordon. It is to be hoped that a
+Beardsley of the stage will one day appear and really do something for
+the dainty type of person or the superbly theatric artist such as Miss
+Gordon, Valeska Suratt, and the few other remarkable women of the
+vaudeville stage.
+
+I am more concerned with the less appreciated artists. I would see
+that they glitter by their own brilliance. Why, for instance, should a
+fine act like the Four Danubes and others of their quality be tagged
+on to the end of a bill, at which time the unmannerly public decides
+to go home or hurry to some roof or other, or dining place?
+
+I should like seeing the Brothers Rath likewise, perhaps as refined
+acrobatic artists as have been seen on our stage for some time, in a
+set that would show them to better advantage, and give the public a
+greater intimacy with the beauty of their act than can be had beyond
+the first six rows of the Winter Garden. They are interposed there as
+a break between burlesques, which is not the place for them. I would
+"give" them the stage while they are on it. Theirs is a muscular
+beauty which has not been excelled. I have no doubt that if I
+attempted to establish these ideas with the artists whom I spend so
+much time in championing, they would no doubt turn aside with the word
+"highbrow" on their lips. They would have to be shown that they need
+these things, that they need the old-fashioned ideas removed, and
+fresher ones put in their place. I have expressed this intention once
+before in print, perhaps not so vehemently. I should like to
+elaborate. I want a Metropolitan Opera for my project. An orchestra of
+that size for the larger concerted groups, numbers of stringed
+instruments for the wirewalkers and jugglers, a series of balanced
+woodwinds for others, and so on down the line, according to the
+quality of the performer. There should be a large stage for many
+elephants, ponies, dogs, tigers, seals. The stage should then be made
+more intimate for the solos, duets, trios, and quartets among the
+acrobats. I think a larger public should be made aware of the beauty
+and skill of these people, who spend their lives in perfecting grace
+and power of body, creating the always fascinating pattern and form,
+orchestration if you will, the orchestration of the muscles into a
+complete whole. You will of course say, go to the circus, and get it
+all at once. The circus is one of the most charming places in
+existence, because it is one of the last words in orchestrated
+physical splendour. But the circus is too diffused, too enormous in
+this country to permit of concentrated interest, attention, or
+pleasure. One goes away with many little bits. It is because the
+background is made up of restless nervous dots, all anxious to get the
+combined quota which they have paid for, when in reality they do not
+even get any one thing. It is the alert eye which can go over three
+rings and two stages at once and enjoy the pattern of each of them. It
+is a physical impossibility really.
+
+I think we should be made aware in finer ways of the artists who open
+and close our bills. Why must the headliner always be a talking or a
+singing person who tells you how much money he needs, or how much she
+is getting? There is more than one type of artistic personality for
+those who care for vaudeville. Why doesn't a team like the Rath
+Brothers, for example, find itself the feature attraction? Must there
+always be the string of unnecessary little men and women who have such
+a time trying to fill up their twenty-two minutes or their fourteen?
+Why listen forever to puppy-like song writers when one can hear and
+watch a great artist like Ella Shields? My third visit to Ella Shields
+convinces me that she is one of the finest artists I have ever heard,
+certainly as fine in her way as Guilbert and Chevalier were. It is a
+rare privilege to be able to enjoy artists like Grock--Mark
+Sheridan--who is now dead, I am told. Mark, with his "They all walk
+the wibbly-wobbly walk, they all wear the wibbly-wobbly ties," and so
+on. Mark is certainly being missed by a great many who care for the
+pleasure of the moment. When I look at and listen to the aristocratic
+artist Ella Shields, I feel a quality in her of the impeccable Mrs.
+Fiske. And then I am thinking of another great woman, Fay Templeton.
+What a pity we must lose them either by death or by decisions in life.
+Ella Shields with her charming typification of "Burlington Bertie from
+Bow."
+
+The other evening as I listened to Irene Franklin, I heard for certain
+what I had always thought were notes from the magic voice of dear old
+Fay. Unforgettable Fay. How can one ever say enough about her? I think
+of Fay along with my single glimpses of Duse, Ada Rehan, Coquelin. You
+see how I love her, then. Irene Franklin has the quality of imitation
+of the great Fay without, I think, the real magic. Nevertheless I
+enjoy her, and I am certain she has never been finer than now. She has
+enriched herself greatly by her experiences the last two years, and
+seems at the height of her power. It was good to get, once again,
+little glimpses of her Childs waitress and the chambermaid. It seemed
+to me that there was a richer quality of atmosphere in the little
+Jewish girl with the ring curls and the red mittens, as also in her
+French girl with, by the way, a beautiful gown of rich yellow silk
+Frenchily trimmed in vermilion or orange, I couldn't make out which.
+The amusing French girl, who having picked up many fag-ends of English
+from her experience with the _soldats Américains_--got her "animals"
+mixed--"you have my goat, I have your goat, et--tie ze bull outside,"
+and so on. I am crossing Irene and Fay here because I think them
+similar, only I must say I think the magic was greater in Fay, because
+possibly Fay was the greater student of emotion. Fay had the
+undercurrent, and Irene has perfected the surface. If Irene did study
+Fay at any time, and I say this respectfully, she perhaps knows that
+Fay went many times to Paris to study Rejane. The light entertainer
+is, as we know, very often a person of real intellect.
+
+If you want distinction, then, you will get it in the presence of Ella
+Shields. Her "Burlington Bertie" is nothing less than a chef
+d'oeuvre; "Tom Lipton, he's got lots of 'oof--he sleeps on the roof,
+and I sleep in the room over him." Bertie, who, having been slapped on
+the back by the Prince of Wales (and some others) and asked why he
+didn't go and dine with "Mother," replied--"I can't, for I've just had
+a banana with Lady Diana.... I'm Burlington Bertie from Bow." Miss
+Shields shows also that she can sing a sentimental song without
+slushing it all over with saccharine. She has mastered the droll
+English quality of wit with real perfection. I regret I never saw
+Vesta Tilley, with whom the old tops compare her so favourably. Superb
+girls all these, Fay, Ella, Cissie, Vesta, as well as Marie Lloyd, and
+the other inimitable Vesta--Victoria.
+
+Among the "coming soon," we have Miss Juliet, whom I recall with so
+much pleasure from the last immemorable Cohan Revue. I wait for her. I
+consider myself fortunate to be let in on James Watts. We thought our
+Eddy Foy a comic one. He was, for I remember the Gibson girl with the
+black velvet gown and the red flannel undershirt. I swing my swagger
+stick in the presence of Mr. Watts by way of applause. His art is very
+delicately understood and brought out. It has a fine quality of broad
+caricature with a real knowledge of economy such as Grock is master
+of. The three episodes are certainly funny enough. I find myself
+caring more for the first, called "June Day," since he reminds me so
+strongly in make-up of the French caricaturists in drawing, Rouveyre
+and Toulouse-Lautrec. Mr. Watts's feeling for satirical make-up is a
+fine shade of artistry in itself. He has excellent feeling for the
+broad contrast and for fierce insinuation at the same time. If you
+want real unalloyed fun, Mr. Watts will supply you. Nor will Grock
+disappoint you. Quite on the contrary, no matter what you are
+expecting.
+
+I do not know why I think of vaudeville as I think of a collection of
+good drawings. Unless it is because the sense of form is the same in
+all of the arts. The acrobat certainly has line and mass to think of,
+even if that isn't his primal concern. He knows how he decorates the
+space on which he operates. To make another comparison, then, Grock is
+the Forain of vaudeville. He achieves great plastic beauty with
+distinguished economy of means. He dispenses with all superfluous
+gesture, as does the great French illustrator. Grock is entirely right
+about clownery. You are either funny or you are not. No amount of
+study will produce the gift for humour. It is there, or it isn't.
+Grock's gift for musicianship is a singular combination to find with
+the rest of his artistry. It goes with the remarkably refined look in
+his face, however, as he sits upon the back of the seatless chair, and
+plays the little concertina with superb execution. There are no
+"jumps" in Grock's performance. His moods flow from one into another
+with a masterly smoothness, and you are aware when he is finished that
+you have never seen that sort of foolery before. Not just that sort.
+It is the good mind that satisfies, as in the case of James Watts, and
+Miss Shields.
+
+From elephants carrying in their trunks chatelaines of Shetland
+ponies, curtseying at the close of the charming act like a pretty miss
+at her first coming out, to such work as the Four Danubes give you as
+the closing number, with Irene as a lead, you are, to say the least,
+carried over the dreadful spots, such as the young man who sways out
+like a burlesque queen and tells you whom he was with before Keith got
+him. His name should be "Pusher," "Advance Man," or something of that
+sort, and not artist. What he gives you, you could find just as well
+if not better done on Fourteenth Street. He has a ribbon-counter,
+adenoid voice production that no really fine artist could afford. He
+will "get by," because anything does, apparently.
+
+One turns to the big artist for relief, even though minor artists like
+The Brown Sisters charm so surely with their ivory and silver
+diamond-studded accordions, giving very pleasing transitions from
+grave to gay in arias and tunes we know. Accordions and concertinas
+are very beautiful to me, when played by artists like these girls, and
+by such as Joe Cawthorne, and Grock.
+
+There are more dancing men of quality this season, it seems to me, who
+are obscured by dancing ladies of fame, and not such warrantable
+artistry. Perhaps it is because male anatomy allows of greater
+eccentricity and playfulness. There are no girls who have just such
+laughing legs as the inimitable Frances White. It is the long-legged
+American boy who beats the world in this sort of thing.
+
+The lovely bit of hockey which James Barton gives is for me far more
+distinguished than all the rest of his work in the Winter Garden
+Revue. He is a real artist, but it is work that one sees rather a deal
+of this season, whereas the hockey dance is like nothing else to be
+found. A lovely moment of rhythmic leg work. We are now thoroughly
+familiar with the stage drunk, as we have long been familiarized by
+Weber and Fields with the stage Jew, which is fortunately passing out
+for lack of artist to present it. Léon Errol is good for once, even
+twice. He is quite alone in his very witty falls and runs. They are
+full of the struggle of the drunk to regain his character and manhood.
+The act lives on a very flat plane otherwise. It has no roundness.
+
+I have come on my list to Mijares and Co., in "Monkey Business." We
+have the exquisite criterion always for the wire, in the perfect Bird
+Millman. "Monkey Business" is a very good act, and both men do
+excellent work on the taut and slack wire. "Monkey," in this case
+being a man, does as beautiful a piece of work as I know of. I have
+never seen a back somersault upon a high wire. I have never heard of
+it before. There may be whole generations of artists gifted in this
+particular stunt. You have here, nevertheless, a moment of very great
+beauty in the cleanness of this man's surprising agility and sureness.
+The monkey costume hinders the beauty of the thing. It should be done
+with pale blue silk tights against a cherry velvet drop, or else in
+deep ultramarine on an old gold background.
+
+The acrobatic novelty called "The Legrohs" relies chiefly on its most
+exceptional member, who would be complete without the other two. He is
+most decidedly a virtuoso in vaudeville. Very gifted, certainly, if at
+moments a little disconcerting in the flexibility and the seemingly
+uncertain turns of his body. It is the old-fashioned contortionism
+saved by charming acrobatic variations. This "Legroh" knows how to
+make a superb pattern with his body, and the things he does with it
+are done with such ease and skill as to make you forget the actual
+physical effort and you are lost for the time being in the beauty of
+this muscular kaleidoscopic brilliancy. You feel it is like
+"puzzle--find the man" for a time, but then you follow his exquisite
+changes from one design into another with genuine delight, and
+appreciate his excessive grace and easy rapidity. He gives you chiefly
+the impression of a dragon-fly blown in the wind of a brisk morning
+over cool stretches of water. You would expect him to land on a
+lily-pad any moment and smooth his wings with his needle-like legs.
+
+So it is the men and women of vaudeville transform themselves into
+lovely flower and animal forms, and the animals take on semblances of
+human sensibility in vaudeville. It is the superb arabesque of the
+beautiful human body that I care for most, and get the most from in
+these cameo-like bits of beauty and art. So brief they are, and like
+the wonders of sea gardens as you look through the glass bottoms of
+the little boats. So like the wonders of the microscopic, full of
+surprising novelties of colour and form. So like the kaleidoscope in
+the ever changing, ever shifting bits of colour reflecting each other,
+falling into new patterns with each twist of the toy. If you care for
+the iridescence of the moment you will trust vaudeville as you are not
+able to trust any other sort of a performance. You have no chance for
+the fatigue of problem. You are at rest as far as thinking is
+concerned. It is something for the eye first and last. It is something
+for the ear now and then, only very seldomly, however. For me, they
+are the saviours of the dullest art in existence, the art of the
+stage. Duse was quite right about it. The stage should be swept of
+actors. It is not a place for imitation and photography. It is a place
+for the laughter of the senses, for the laughter of the body. It is a
+place for the tumbling blocks of the brain to fall in heaps. I give
+first place to the acrobat and his associates because it is the art
+where the human mind is for once relieved of its stupidity. The
+acrobat is master of his body and he lets his brain go a-roving upon
+other matters, if he has one. He is expected to be silent. He would
+agree with William James, transposing "music prevents thinking" into
+"talking prevents silence." In so many instances, it prevents
+conversation. That is why I like tea chitchat. Words are never meant
+to mean anything then. They are simply given legs and wings, and they
+jump and fly. They land where they can, and fall flat if they must.
+The audience that patronizes vaudeville would do well to be present at
+most first numbers, and remain for most or many of the closing ones. A
+number, I repeat, like the Four Danubes, should not be snubbed by any
+one.
+
+I have seen recently, then, by way of summary, four fine bits of
+artistry in vaudeville--Ella Shields, James Watts, the Brothers Rath,
+and the Four Danubes. I shall speak again of these people. They are
+well worth it. They turn pastime into perfect memory. They are,
+therefore, among the great artists.
+
+
+
+
+A CHARMING EQUESTRIENNE
+
+
+I am impelled to portray, at this time, my devotion to the little
+equestrienne, by the presence of a traveling circus in these lofty
+altitudes in which I am now living, seven thousand feet above the sea,
+in our great southwest. The mere sight of this master of the miniature
+ring, with all the atmosphere of the tent about him, after almost
+insurmountable difficulties crossing the mountains, over through the
+canyons of this expansive country, delivering an address in
+excellently chosen English, while poised at a considerable height on
+the wire, to the multitude on the ground below him, during which time
+he is to give what is known as the "free exhibit" as a high wire
+artist--all this turns me once more to the ever charming theme of
+acrobatics in general and equestrianism in particular, and it is of a
+special genius in this field that I wish to speak.
+
+I have always been a lover of these artists of bodily vigour, of
+muscular melody, as I like to call it. As I watched this ringmaster of
+the little traveling circus, this master mountebank of the sturdy
+figure, ably poised upon his head on the high wire, outlined against
+the body of the high mountain in the near distance, about which the
+thunder clouds were huddling, and in and out of which the lightning
+was sharply playing, it all formed for me another of those perfect
+sensations from that phase of art expression known as the circus. My
+happiest memories in this field are from the streets of Paris before
+the war, the incomparably lovely fêtes. Only the sun knows where these
+dear artists may be now.
+
+But I am wanting to tell of the little equestrienne, whose work has
+for the past five years been a source of genuine delight to me,
+charming little May Wirth, of Australian origin, with her lovely dark
+eyes, and captivating English accent. If you have a genuine sympathy
+for this sort of expression, it is but natural that you want to get
+inside the ring, and smell the turf with them, and so it was the
+representative of this gifted little woman who brought us together. It
+is, in the first place, a pity that there is so little written of the
+history of these people, so little material from which to gather the
+development of the idea of acrobatics in general, or of any one phase
+in particular. It would be impossible to learn who was the first
+aerial trapezist, for instance, or where high wire performing was
+brought from, just when the trick of adjusting the body to these
+difficult and strenuous rhythms was originated. They cannot tell you
+themselves. Only if there happens to be more than two generations in
+existence can you trace the development of this form of athletic
+entertainment. It may have begun with the Egyptians, it may have begun
+with the first gypsies.
+
+These people do not write their history, they simply make it among
+themselves, and it is handed down through the generations. When I
+asked May Wirth for information, she said she knew of none on the
+subject, save that she herself sprang from five generations of
+acrobats and equestrians, and that it is terrifically hard labour from
+beginning to end, equestrianism in particular, since it requires a
+knowledge of several if not all the other physical arts combined, such
+as high wire walking, handspring and somersault, trapeze work, bars,
+ballet dancing, etc.; that she herself had begun as a child, and had
+run the entire gamut of these requirements, coming out the finished
+product, so to speak, in all but ballet dancing, which she disliked,
+and wept always when the time came for her lesson in this department.
+
+When one sees the incomparable brilliancy of this little woman of the
+horse, watching her marvellous ground work, which is in itself an
+example of virtuosity, one realizes what accomplishment alone can do,
+for she is not yet twenty-five, and the art is already in the
+condition of genius with her. Five handsome side-wheels round the
+ring, and a flying jump on the horse, then several complete
+somersaults on the horse's back while he is in movement round the
+ring, is not to be slighted for consideration, and if, as I have said,
+you have a love or even a fancy for this sort of entertainment, you
+all but worship the little lady for the thrill she gives you through
+this consummate mastery of hers.
+
+"I always wanted to do what the boys could do, and I was never
+satisfied until I had accomplished it." This was the strongest
+assertion the little lady of the horse was moved to make while in
+conversation, and that the ring is more beautiful to work in than on a
+mat upon a stage, for it is in the ring that the horse is most at
+home, it is easier for him, and gives him greater muscular freedom,
+with the result naturally, that it is easier on the muscles of the
+human body while in action. I have never tired of this species of
+entertainment. It has always impressed me as being the most natural
+form of transposed physical culture, esthetically speaking. It does
+for the eye, if you are sensitive, what music does for the ear. It
+gives the body a chance to show its exquisite rhythmic beauty, as no
+other form of athletics can, for it is the beautiful plastic of the
+body, harmonically arranged for personal delight.
+
+It is something for so young a woman to have walked away with first
+honours in her chosen field, yet like the true artist that she is, she
+is thinking always of how she can beautify her accomplishment to a
+still greater degree. She is mistress of a very difficult art, and yet
+the brilliancy of her performance makes it seem as if it were but the
+experiment of an afternoon, in the out-of-doors. Like all fine
+artists, she has brushed away from sight all aspects of labour, and
+presents you, with astounding ease, the apparent easiness of the
+thing. She is powerfully built, and her muscles are master of
+coordination, such as would be the envy of multitudes of men, and
+with all this power, she is as simple in her manner and appearance as
+is the young debutante at her coming out function. You are impressed
+with her sweetness and refinement, first of all, and the utter lack of
+show about her, as also with her brother who is a dapper young man of
+the very English type, who works with her, and acts as the
+dress-suited gentleman in this acrobatic ringplay of theirs. Three
+other members of her family take part also with her, the
+ring-mistress, a woman of possibly forty, acting as host, looking
+exceptionally well, handsome indeed, in grey and silver evening dress,
+with fine dark eyes and an older sister who opens the performance with
+some good work. This seems to me to be the modern touch, for there was
+a time when it was always the very well groomed ringmaster, with top
+hat and monocle, who acted as host of the ring.
+
+It will likewise be remembered by those who saw the Hannafords at the
+circus, that they were also possessed of a very handsome
+ring-mistress, elegantly gowned, both of these older ladies lending
+great distinction, by their presence, to already brilliant
+performances. I would be very pleased to make myself historian for
+these fine artists, these esthetes of muscular melody. I should like
+very much to be spokesman for them, and point out to an enforcedly
+ignorant public, the beauties of this line of artistic expression, and
+to give historical account of the development of these various
+picturesque athletic arts. Alas, that is not possible, for it must
+remain forever in the limbo of tradition.
+
+We shall have to be grateful beyond expression for the beautiful art
+of May Wirth, and devote less enthusiasm to asking of when and how it
+came about. To have established one's art at the perfect point in
+one's girlhood, is it not achievement, is it not genius itself?
+Charming little May Wirth, first equestrienne of the world, I
+congratulate you for your beautiful presentation, for the excellence
+of its technique, and for the grace and fascination contained therein.
+Triumph in youth, victory in the heroic period of life, that surely is
+sufficient. Let the bays fall upon her young head gleefully, for she
+earned them with patience, devotion, intelligence, and very hard
+labours. Salutations, little lady of the white horse! How charming,
+how simple she was, the little equestrienne as she rode away from the
+door of the huge theatre, in her pale blue touring car. "I love the
+audiences here in this great theatre, but O, I love the circus so much
+more!" These were the sentiments of the little performer as she rode
+away. She is now touring, performing under the huge canvases in the
+open areas of the middle West, and the little traveling circus is on
+its way over the mountains. Fascinating people, and a fascinating life
+for whom there is not, and probably never will be, a written history;
+the story of whose origin lies almost as buried as that of the
+primitive peoples. Charming rovers, content with life near to the
+bright sky, charming people, for whom life is but one long day in
+which to make beautiful their bodies, and make joyful the eyes of
+those who love to look at them!
+
+
+
+
+JOHN BARRYMORE IN PETER IBBETSON
+
+
+The vicissitudes of the young boy along the vague, precarious way, the
+longing to find the reality of the dream--the heart that knew him
+best--a study in sentimentality, the pathetic wanderings of a "little
+boy lost" in the dream of childhood, and the "little boy found" in the
+arms of his loved mother, with all those touches that are painful and
+all that are exquisite and poignant in their beauty--such is the
+picture presented by John Barrymore, as nearly perfect as any artist
+can be, in "Peter Ibbetson." Certainly it is as finished a creation in
+its sense of form, and of color, replete with a finesse of rare
+loveliness, as gratifying a performance, to my notion, as has been
+seen on our stage for many years. Perhaps if the author, recalling
+vain pasts, could realize the scum of saccharinity in which the play
+is utterly submerged, and that it struggles with great difficulty to
+survive the nesselrodelike sweetness with which it is surfeited, he
+would recognize the real distinction that Barrymore lends to a rôle so
+clogged by the honeyed sentimentality covering most of the scenes.
+Barrymore gives us that "quickened sense" of the life of the young
+man, a portrayal which takes the eye by "its fine edge of light," a
+portrayal clear and cool, elevated to a fine loftiness in his
+rendering.
+
+The actor has accomplished this by means of a nice knowledge of what
+symbolic expression means to the art of the stage. He is certainly a
+painter of pictures and moods, the idea and his image perfectly
+commingled, endowing this mediocre play with true charm by the
+distinction he lends it, by sheer discretion, and by a power of
+selection. All this he brings to a play which, if it had been written
+nowadays, would certainly have convicted its author, and justly too,
+of having written to stimulate the lachrymal effusions of the
+shop-girl, a play about which she might telephone her girl friend, at
+which she might eat bon bons, and powder her nose again for the
+street. No artist, no accepted artist, has given a more suggestive
+rendering than has Barrymore here. It would be difficult to say where
+he is at his best, except that the first half of the play counts for
+most in point of strength and opportunity.
+
+A tall frail young man, we find him, blanched with wonder and with awe
+at the perplexity of life, seeking a solution of things by means of
+the dream, as only the dreamer and the visionary can, lost from first
+to last, seemingly unloved in the ways boys think they want to be
+loved; that is, the shy longing boy, afraid of all things, and mostly
+of himself, in the period just this side of sex revelation. He is the
+neophyte--the homeless, pathetic Peter, perplexed with the strangeness
+of things real and temporal--vision and memory counting for all there
+is of reality to him, with life itself a thing as yet untasted. Who
+shall forget (who has a love for real expression) the entrance of
+Peter into the drawing-room of Mrs. Deane, the pale flowery wisp of a
+boy walking as it were into a garden of pungent spices and herbs, and
+of actions so alien to his own? We are given at this moment the
+keynote of mastery in delicate suggestion, which never fails
+throughout the play, tedious as it is, overdrawn on the side of
+symbolism and mystical insinuation.
+
+One sits with difficulty through many of the moments, the literary
+quality of them is so wretched. They cloy the ear, and the mind that
+has been made sensitive, desiring something of a finer type of
+stimulation. Barrymore has evoked, so we may call it, a cold
+method--against a background of what could have been overheated acting
+or at least a superabundance of physical attack--the warmth of the
+play's tender sentimentalities; yet he covers them with a still
+spiritual ardor which is their very essence, extracting all the
+delicate nuances and arranging them with a fine sense of proportion.
+It is as difficult an accomplishment for a man as one can imagine. For
+it is not given to many to act with this degree of whiteness, devoid
+of off colorings or alien tones. This performance of Barrymore in its
+spiritual richness, its elegance, finesse, and intelligence, has not
+been equaled for me since I saw the great geniuses Paul Orleneff and
+Eleonora Duse.
+
+It is to be at once observed that here is a keen pictorial mind, a
+mind which visualizes perfectly for itself the chiaroscuro aspects of
+the emotion, as well as the spiritual, for Barrymore gives them with
+an almost unerring felicity, and rounds out the portrayal which in any
+other hands would suffer, but Barrymore has the special power to feel
+the value of reticence in all good art, the need for complete
+subjection of personal enthusiasm to the force of ideas. His art is
+akin to the art of silver-point, which, as is known, is an art of
+directness of touch, and final in the instant of execution, leaving no
+room whatever for accident or untoward excitement of nerve.
+
+We shall wait long for the silver suggestiveness such as Barrymore
+gives us when Peter gets his first glimpse of Mary, Duchess of Towers.
+Who else could convey his realization of her beauty, and the quality
+of reminiscence that lingers about her, of the rapt amaze as he stands
+by the mantel-piece looking through the door into the space where he
+sees her in the midst of dancers under a crystal chandelier somewhere
+not very distant? Or the moment when he finds her bouquet neglected on
+the table in the drawing-room, with her lace shawl not far from his
+hands? Or when he finds himself alone, pressing his lips into the
+depth of the flowers as the curtain gives the finale to the scene with
+the whispered "l'amour"! These are moments of a real lyrist, and
+would match any line of Banville, of Ronsard, or of Austin Dobson for
+delicacy of touch and feeling, for freshness, and for the precise
+spiritual gesture, the "intonation" of action requisite to relieve the
+moments from what might otherwise revert to commonplace
+sentimentality.
+
+Whatever the prejudice may be against all these emotions glacé with
+sugary frosting, we feel that his art has brought them into being with
+an unmistakable gift of refinement coupled with superb style. How an
+artist like Beardsley would have revelled in these moments is easy to
+conjecture. For here is the quintessence of intellectualized
+aquarelle, and these touches would surely have brought into being
+another "Pierrot of the Minute"--a new line drawing out of a period he
+knew and loved well. These touches would have been graced by the hand
+of that artist, or by another of equal delicacy of appreciation,
+Charles Conder--unforgettable spaces replete with the essence of
+fancy, of dream, of those farther recesses of the imagination.
+
+Although technically and historically Barrymore has the advantage of
+excellent traditions, he nevertheless rests entirely upon his own
+achievements, separate and individual in his understanding of what
+constitutes plastic power in art. He has a peculiar and most sensitive
+temper, which can arrange points of relation in juxtaposition with a
+keen sense of form as well as of substance. He is, one might say, a
+masterly draftsman with a rich cool sense of color, whose work has
+something of the still force of a drawing of Ingres with, as well, the
+sensitive detail one finds in a Redon, like a beautiful drawing on
+stone. An excellent knowledge of dramatic contrasts is displayed by
+the brothers Barrymore, John and Lionel, in the murder scene, one of
+the finest we have seen for many years, technically even, splendid,
+and direct, concise in movement. Every superfluous gesture has been
+eliminated. From the moment of Peter's locking the door upon his uncle
+the scene is wrapped in the very coils of catastrophe, almost
+Euripedean in its inevitability. All of this episode is kept strictly
+within the realm of the imagination. It is an episode of hatred, of
+which there is sure to be at least one in the life of every young
+sensitive, when every boy wants, at any rate somewhere in his mind, to
+destroy some influence or other which is alien or hateful to him. The
+scene emphasizes once again the beauty of technical power for its own
+sake, the thrill of discarding all that is not immediately essential
+to simple and direct realization.
+
+Little can be said of the play beyond this point, for it dwindles off
+into sentimental mystification which cannot be enjoyed by anyone under
+fifty, or appreciated by anyone under eighteen. It gives opportunity
+merely for settings and some rare moments of costuming, the lady with
+the battledore reminding one a deal of a good Manet. This and, of
+course, the splendid appearance of the Duchess of Towers in the first
+act--all these touches furnish more than a satisfying background for
+the very shy and frail Peter.
+
+This performance of Barrymore holds for me the first and last
+requisite of organized conception in art--poise, clarity, and perfect
+suggestibility. Its intellectual soundness rules the emotional
+extravagance, giving form to what--for lack of form--so often perishes
+under an excess of energy, which the ignorant actor substitutes for
+the plastic element in all art. It has the attitude, this performance,
+almost of diffidence to one's subject-matter, except as the intellect
+judges clearly and coolly. Thus, in the sense of esthetic reality, are
+all aspects clarified and made real. From the outward inward, or from
+the inward outward, surface to depth or depth to surface--it is
+difficult to say which is the precise method of approach. John
+Barrymore has mastered the evasive subtlety therein, which makes him
+one of our greatest artists. The future will surely wait for his riper
+contributions, and we may think of him as one of our foremost artists,
+among the few, "one of a small band," as the great novelist once said
+of the great poet.
+
+
+
+
+PART THREE
+
+
+
+
+LA CLOSERIE DE LILAS
+
+
+Divine Tuesday! I had wondered if those remarkable evenings of
+conversation in the rue de Rome with Mallarmé as host, and Henri de
+Regnier as guest, among many others, had been the inspiration of the
+evenings at the Closerie de Lilas, where I so often sat of an evening,
+watching the numbers of esthetes gather, filling the entire café, rain
+or shine, waiting unquestionably, for it pervaded the air always, the
+feeling of suspense, of a dinner without host, of a wedding without
+bridegroom, in any event waiting for the real genius of the evening,
+le grand maitre prince de poètes, Paul Fort. The interesting book of
+Amy Lowell's, "Six French Poets," recalls these Tuesday evenings
+vividly to my mind, and a number of episodes in connection with the
+idea of poetry in Paris.
+
+Poetry an event? A rather remarkable notion it would seem, and yet
+this was always so, it was a constituent of the day's passing, there
+was never a part of the day in this arrondissement, when you would not
+find here, there, everywhere, from the Boul-Mich up, down Montparnasse
+to Lavenue's, and back to the Closerie, groups of a few or of many,
+obviously the artist or poet type, sometimes very nattily dressed,
+often the reverse, but you found them talking upon one theme, art,
+meaning either poetry or painting, cubistes, futuristes, orphistes and
+doubtless every "iste" in poetry from the symboliste period up to the
+"unanimistes" of the present time, or the then present time nearly two
+years before the war. It was a bit novel, even for a sensitive
+American, sitting there, realizing that it was all in the name of art,
+and for the heralding of genius--a kind of sublimated recruiting
+meeting for the enlistment in the army of expression of personality,
+or for the saving of the soul of poetry.
+
+It was a spectacle, edifying in its purport, or even a little
+distressing if one had no belief in a sense of humour, for there were
+moments of absurdity about it as there is sure to be in a room filled
+with any type of concerted egotism. But you did not forget the raison
+d'etre of it all, you did not forget that when the "prince" arrived
+there was the spirit of true celebration about it, the celebration not
+only of an arrived artist, but of an idea close to the hearts and
+minds of those present, and you had a sense, too, of what it must have
+been like in that circle of, no doubt, a higher average of adherents,
+in the drawing room of the genius Mallarmé, who, from all accounts,
+was as perfected in the art of conversation, as he was in expression
+in art. When I read Miss Lowell's chapter on Henri de Regnier, I find
+myself before the door of the Mallarmé house in the rue de Rome,
+probably the only American guest, on that Sunday morning in June, just
+one given a privilege that could not mean as much as if I had been
+more conversant with the delicacies of the language.
+
+It was the occasion of the placing of a tablet of homage to the great
+poet, at which ceremony Henri de Regnier himself was the chief
+speaker: a tall, very aristocratic, very elegant looking Frenchman,
+not any more to be called young, nor yet to be called old, but
+conspicuously simple, dignified, dressed in a manner of a gentleman of
+the first order, standing upon a chair, speaking, as one would
+imagine, with a flow of words which were the epitome of music itself
+to the ear. I had been invited by a poet well known in Paris, with
+several volumes to his credit and by a young literary woman, both of
+whom spoke English very creditably. After the ceremonies, which were
+very brief, and at which Madame Mallarmé herself was present, standing
+near the speaker, de Regnier, the entire company repaired to a
+restaurant near the Place Clichy, if I remember rightly. My hostess
+named for me the various guests as they appeared, Madame Rachilde,
+Reynaldo Hahn, André Gide, and a dozen other names less conspicuous,
+perhaps, excepting one, Léon Dierx, who was an old man, and whose
+death was announced about the city some days later. It was, needless
+to say, a conspicuous company and the dinner went off very quietly,
+allowing of course for the always feverish sound of the conversation
+of many people talking in a not very large room.
+
+But all these suggestions recall for me once more what such things
+mean to a people like the French, or, let one say, Europeans as well.
+I wonder what poetry or even painting will do, if they shall rise to
+such a state in this country that we shall find our masters of
+literature holding audience with this degree of interest like Fort, or
+as did all the great masters of literature in Paris, hold forth in the
+name of art, a divine Tuesday set apart for the admirable worship of
+poetry, or of things esthetic. I can imagine Amy Lowell doing
+something of this sort after the custom of those masters she so
+admires, with her seemingly quenchless enthusiasms for all that is
+modern in poetry. I think we shall wait long for that, for the time
+when we shall have our best esthetics over the coffee, at the curbside
+under the trees with the sun shining upon it, or the shadow of the
+evening lending its sanction, under the magnetic influence of such a
+one as Paul Fort or Francis Jammes, or Emile Verhaeren--as it was once
+to be had among such as Verlaine, Baudelaire and that high company of
+distinguished painters who are now famous among us.
+
+The studio of Gertude Stein, that quiet yet always lively place in the
+rue de Fleurus, is the only room I have ever been in where this spirit
+was organized to a similar degree, for here you had the sense of the
+real importance of painting, as it used to be thought of in the days
+of Pissarro, Manet, Degas, and the others, and you had much, in all
+human ways, out of an evening there, and, most of all, you had a fund
+of good humour thrust at you, and the conversation took on, not the
+quality of poetic prose spoken, as you had the quality of yourself and
+others, a kind of William James intimacy, which, as everyone knows, is
+style bringing the universe of ideas to your door in terms of your own
+sensations. There may have been a touch of all this at the once famed
+Brook Farm, but I fancy it was rather chill in its severity.
+
+There is something of charm in the French idea of taking their
+discussions to the sunlight or the shadow under the stars, either
+within or outside the café, where you feel the passing of the world,
+and the poetry is of one piece with life itself, not the result of
+stuffy studios, and excessively ornate library corners, where books
+crowd out the quality of people and things. You felt that the café was
+the place for it, and if the acrobat came and sang, it was all of one
+fabric and it was as good for the poetry, as it was for the eye and
+the ear that absorbed it. Despite the different phases of the
+spectacle of Tuesday, at the Closerie de Lilas, you had the feeling of
+its splendour, its excellence, and, most of all, of its reality, its
+relationship to every other phase of life, and not of the
+hypersensitivity of the thing as we still consider it among ourselves
+in general; and if you heard the name of Paul Fort, or Francis Jammes,
+it was a definite issue in daily life, equal with the name of the
+great statesmen in importance, you were being introduced into a
+sphere of activities of the utmost importance, _that_ poetry was
+something to be reckoned with.
+
+It was not merely to hear oneself talk that artists like Mallarmé held
+forth with distinction, that artists like de Regnier and Fort devote
+themselves, however secretly, or however openly to the sacred theme.
+They had but one intention, and that to arrive at, and assist in the
+realization of the best state of poetry, that shall have carried the
+art further on its way logically, and in accordance with the
+principles which they have created for their time; endeavoring always
+to create fresh values, new points of contact with the prevailing as
+well as with the older outlines of the classics. It was, then, a
+spectacle, from our removed point of view, the gathering of the poetic
+multitude around the café tables, over the Dubonnet, the grenadines,
+and the café noir, of a Tuesday evening. It gave one a sense of
+perpetuity, of the indestructibility of art, in spite of the obstacles
+encountered in the run of the day, that the artist has the advantage
+over the layman in being qualified to set down, in shapes
+imperishable, those states of his imagination which are the shapes of
+life and of nature.
+
+We may be grateful to Amy Lowell for having assembled for our
+consummation, in a world where poetry is not as yet the sublime issue
+as it was to be felt at every street corner, much of the spirit of the
+rue de Rome, the Café Novelles D'Athènes, and the Closerie de Lilas,
+as well as the once famed corner of the Café D'Harcourt where the
+absinthe flowed so continuously, and from which some very exquisite
+poetry has emanated for all time. It is the first intimation we have
+of what our best English poetry has done for the best French poets of
+the present, and what our first free verse poet has done for the
+general liberation of emotions and for freedom of form in all
+countries. He has indicated the poets that are to follow him. He would
+be the first to sanction all this poetic discussive intensity at the
+curbside, the liberty and freedom of the café, the excellence of a
+divine Tuesday evening.
+
+
+
+
+EMILY DICKINSON
+
+
+If I want to take up poetry in its most delightful and playful mood, I
+take up the verses of that remarkable girl of the sixties and
+seventies, Emily Dickinson, she who was writing her little worthless
+poetic nothings, or so she was wont to think of them, at a time when
+the now classical New England group was flourishing around Concord,
+when Hawthorne was burrowing into the soul of things, Thoreau was
+refusing to make more pencils and took to sounding lake bottoms and
+holding converse with all kinds of fish and other water life, and
+Emerson was standing high upon his pedestal preaching of
+compensations, of friendship, society and the oversoul, leaving a
+mighty impress upon his New England and the world at large as well.
+
+I find when I take up Emily Dickinson, that I am sort of sunning
+myself in the discal radiance of a bright, vivid, and really new type
+of poet, for she is by no means worn of her freshness for us, she
+wears with one as would an old fashioned pearl set in gold and dark
+enamels. She offsets the smugness of the time in which she lived with
+her cheery impertinence, and startles the present with her uncommon
+gifts. Those who know the irresistible charm of this girl--who gave
+so charming a portrait of herself to the stranger friend who inquired
+for a photograph: "I had no portrait now, but am small like the wren,
+and my hair is bold like the chestnut burr, and my eyes like the
+sherry in the glass that the guest leaves," this written in July,
+1862--shall be of course familiar with the undeniable originality of
+her personality, the grace and special beauty of her mind, charm
+unique in itself, not like any other genius then or now, or in the
+time before her, having perhaps a little of relationship to the
+crystal clearness of Crashaw, like Vaughan and Donne maybe, in respect
+of their lyrical fervour and moral earnestness, yet nevertheless
+appearing to us freshly with as separate a spirit in her verse
+creations as she herself was separated from the world around her by
+the amplitude of garden which was her universe. Emily Dickinson
+confronts you at once with an instinct for poetry, to be envied by the
+more ordinary and perhaps more finished poets. Ordinary she never was,
+common she never could have been, for she was first and last
+aristocrat in sensibility, rare and untouchable if you will, vague and
+mystical often enough, unapproachable and often distinctly aloof, as
+undoubtedly she herself was in her personal life. Those with a
+fondness for intimacy will find her, like all recluses, forbidding and
+difficult, if not altogether terrifying the mind with her vagueries
+and peculiarities.
+
+Here was New England at its sharpest, brightest, wittiest, most
+fantastic, most wilful, most devout, saint and imp sported in one,
+toying with the tricks of the Deity, taking them now with extreme
+profundity, then tossing them about like irresistible toys with an
+incomparable triviality. She has traced upon the page and with
+celestial indelibility that fine line from her soul which is like a
+fine prismatic light, separating one bright sphere from another, one
+planet from another planet, and the edge of separation is but faintly
+perceptible. She has left us this bright folio of her "lightning and
+fragrance in one," scintillant with stardust as perhaps no other
+before her, certainly not in this country, none with just her
+celestial attachedness, or must we call it detachedness, and withal
+also a sublime, impertinent playfulness which makes her images dance
+before one like offspring of the great round sun, fooling zealously
+with the universes at her feet, and just beyond her eye, with a
+loftiness of spirit and of exquisite trivialness seconded by none. Who
+has not read these flippant renderings, holding always some touch of
+austerity and gravity of mood, or the still more perfect "letters" to
+her friends, will, I think, have missed a new kind of poetic
+diversion, a new loveliness, evasive, alert, pronounced in every
+interval and serious, modestly so, and at a bound leaping as it were
+like some sky child pranking with the clouds, and the hills and the
+valleys beneath them, child as she surely was always, playing in some
+celestial garden space in her mind, where every species of tether was
+unendurable, where freedom for this childish sport was the one thing
+necessary to her ever young and incessantly capering mind--"hail to
+thee, blithe spirit, bird thou ever wert"!
+
+It must be said in all justice, then, that "fascination was her
+element," everything to her was wondrous, sublimely magical, awsomely
+inspiring and thrilling. It was the event of many moons to have
+someone she liked say so much as good morning to her in human tongue,
+it was the event of every instant to have the flowers and birds call
+her by name, and hear the clouds exult at her approach. She was the
+brightest young sister of fancy, as she was the gifted young daughter
+of the ancient imagination. One feels everywhere in her verse and in
+her so splendid and stylish letters an unexcelled freshness,
+brightness of metaphor and of imagery, a gift of a peculiarity that
+could have come only from this part of our country, this part of the
+world, this very spot which has bred so many intellectual and
+spiritual entities wrapped in the garments of isolation, robed with
+questioning. Her genius is in this sense essentially local, as much
+the voice of the spirit of New England as it is possible for one to
+hold. If ever wanderer hitched vehicle to the comet's tail, it was the
+poetic, sprite woman, no one ever rode the sky and the earth as she
+did in this radiant and skybright mind of her.
+
+She loved all things because all things were in one way or in another
+way bright for her, and of a blinding brightness from which she often
+had to hide her face. She embroidered all her thoughts with starry
+intricacies, and gave them the splendour of frosty traceries upon the
+windowpane in a frigid time, and of the raindrop in the sun, and
+summered them with fragrancing of the many early and late flowers of
+her own fanciful conjuring. They are glittering garlands of her clear,
+cool fancies, these poems, fraught in some instances, as are certain
+finely cut stones, with an exceptional mingling of lights coursing
+swiftly through them. She was avid of starlight and of sunlight alike,
+and of that light by which all things are illumined with a splendour
+not their own merely, but lent them by shafts from that radiant sphere
+which she leaned from, looking out gleefully upon them from the window
+of that high place in her mind.
+
+To think of this poet is to think of crystal, for she lived in a
+radianced world of innumerable facets, and the common instances were
+chariots upon which to ride widely over the edges of infinity. She is
+alive for us now in those rare fancies of hers, with no other wish in
+them save as memorandum for her own eyes, and when they were finished
+to send them spinning across the wide garden, many of them to her
+favorite sister who lived far, far away, over beyond the hedge. You
+shall find in her all that is winsome, strange, fanciful, fantastic
+and irresistible in the eastern character and characteristic. She is
+first and best in lightsomeness of temper, for the eastern is known
+as essentially a tragic genius. She is perhaps the single exponent of
+modern times of the quality of true celestial frivolity. Scintillant
+was she then, and like dew she was and the soft summer rain, and the
+light upon the lips of flowers of which she loved to sing. Her mind
+and her spirit were one, soul and sense inseparable, little sister of
+Shelley certainly she was, and the more playful relative of Francis
+Thompson.
+
+She had about her the imperishable quality that hovers about all
+things young and strong and beautiful, she was the sense of beauty
+ungovernable. What there are of tendencies religious and moral disturb
+in nowise those who love and have appreciation for true poetic
+essences. She had in her brain the inevitable buzzing of the bee in
+the belly of the bloom, she had in her eyes the climbing lances of the
+sun, she had in her heart love and pity for the innumerable pitiful
+and pitiable things. She was a quenchless mother in her gift for
+solace and she was lover to the immeasurable love. Like all
+aristocrats she hated mediocrity, and like all first rate jewels, she
+had no rift to hide. She was not a maker of poetry, she was a thinker
+of poetry. She was not a conjurer of words so much as a magician in
+sensibility. She has only to see and feel and hear to be in touch with
+all things with a name or with things that must be forever nameless.
+If she loved people, she loved them for what they were, if she
+despised them she despised them for what they did, or for lack of
+power to feel they could not do. Silence under a tree was a far more
+talkative experience with her than converse with one or a thousand
+dull minds. Her throng was the air, and her wings were the multitude
+of flying movements in her brain. She had only to think and she was
+amid numberless minarets and golden domes, she had only to think and
+the mountain cleft its shadow in her heart.
+
+Emily Dickinson is in no sense toil for the mind accustomed to the
+labours of reading, she is too fanciful and delicious ever to make
+heavy the head, she sets you to laughter and draws a smile across your
+face for pity, and lets you loose again amid the measureless pleasing
+little humanities. I shall always want to read Emily Dickinson, for
+she points her finger at all tiresome scholasticism, and takes a
+chance with the universe about her and the first rate poetry it offers
+at every hand within the eye's easy glancing. She has made poetry
+memorable as a pastime for the mind, and sent the heavier ministerial
+tendencies flying to a speedy oblivion. What a child she was, child
+impertinent, with a heavenly rippling in her brain!
+
+These random passages out of her writings will show at once the rarity
+of her tastes and the originality of her phrasing. "February passed
+like a kate, and I know March. Here is the light the stranger said was
+not on sea or land--myself could arrest it, but will not chagrin
+him"--
+
+"The wind blows gay today, and the jays bark like blue terriers."
+
+"Friday I tasted life, it was a vast morsel. A circus passed the
+house--still I feel the red in my mind though the drums are out."
+
+"The lawn is full of south and the odors tangle, and I hear today for
+the first the river in the tree."
+
+    "The zeros taught us phosphorus
+    We learned to like the fire
+    By playing glaciers when a boy
+    And tinder guessed by power
+
+    "Of opposite to balance odd
+    If white a red must be!
+    Paralysis, our primer dumb
+    Unto vitality."
+
+Then comes the "crowning extravaganza.... If I read a book, and it
+makes my whole body so cold no fire will ever warm me, I know that is
+poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off,
+I know that is poetry. Is there any other way? These are the only ways
+I know it."
+
+No one but a New England yankee mind could concoct such humours and
+fascinatingly pert phrases as are found here. They are like the
+chatterings of the interrupted squirrel in the tree-hole at nut-time.
+There is so much of high gossip in these poetic turns of hers, and so,
+throughout her books, one finds a multitude of playful tricks for the
+pleased mind to run with. She was an intoxicated being, drunken with
+the little tipsy joys of the simplest form, shaped as they were to
+elude always her evasive imagination into thinking that nothing she
+could think or feel but was extraordinary and remarkable. "Your
+letter gave no drunkenness because I tasted rum before--Domingo comes
+but once," etc., she wrote to Col. Higginson, a pretty conceit, surely
+to offer a loved friend. The passages offered will give the unfamiliar
+reader a taste of the sparkle of this poet's hurrying fancy and set
+her before the willing mind entrancingly, it seems to me. She will
+always delight those who find it in their way to love her elfish,
+evasive genius, and those who care for the vivid and living element in
+words will find her, to say the least, among the masters in her
+feeling for their strange shapes and the fresh significance contained
+in them. A born thinker of poetry, and in a great measure a gifted
+writer of it, refreshing many a heavy moment made dull with the
+weightiness of books, or of burdensome thinking. This poet-sprite sets
+scurrying all weariness of the brain, and they shall have an hour of
+sheer delight who invite poetic converse with Emily Dickinson. She
+will repay with funds of rich celestial coin from her rare and
+precious fancyings. She had that "oblique integrity" which she
+celebrates in one of her poems.
+
+
+
+
+ADELAIDE CRAPSEY
+
+
+One more satellite hurried away too soon! High hints at least, of the
+young meteor finding its way through space. Here was another of those,
+with a vast fund of wishing in her brain, and the briefest of hours in
+which to set them roaming. Brevities that whirl through the mind as
+you read those cinquains of Adelaide Crapsey, like white birds through
+the dark woodlands of the night. Cameos or castles, what is size? Is
+it not the same if they are of one perfection of feeling? Such a
+little book of Adelaide Crapsey, surely like cameos cut on shell, so
+clear in outline, so rich in form, so brave in indications, so much of
+singing, so much of poetry, of courage.
+
+    "Just now,
+    Out of the strange
+    Still dusk--as strange, as still,
+    A white moth flew; Why am I grown
+    So cold?"
+
+Isn't the evidence sufficient here of first rate poetic gifts,
+sensibility of an exceptional order? Contrast in so many ways with
+that perhaps more radiant and certainly more whimsical girl, with her
+rarest of flavours, she with her "whip of diamond, riding to meet the
+Earl"! I think geniuses like Keats or Shelley would have said "how do
+you do, poet?" to Adelaide Crapsey and her verse, lamenting also that
+she flew over the rainbowed edge of the dusk too soon, like the very
+moth over the garden wall, early in the evening. It is sure that had
+this poet been allowed her full quota of days, she would have left
+some handsome folios bright enough for any one caring for verse at its
+purest. Pity there was not time for another book at least, of her
+verses, to verify the great distinction conferred. She might have
+walked still more largely away with the wreaths of recognition. Not
+time for more books, instead of so much eternity at her bedside. She
+would surely have sent more words singing to their high places and
+have impressed the abundant output of the day with its superficiality
+by her seriousness. There is no trifling in these poetic things of
+hers. Trivial might some say who hanker after giantesque composition.
+Fragile are they only in the sense of size, only in this way are they
+small.
+
+Those who know the difficulties of writing poetic composition are
+aware of the task involved in creating such packed brevities. Emily
+Dickinson knew this power. "H. D." is another woman who understands
+the beauty of compactness. Superb sense of economy, of terseness the
+art calls for, excessive pruning and clipping. Singular that these
+three artists, so gifted in brevity were women. There is little, after
+all, in existence that warrants lengthy dissertation. Life itself is
+epigrammatic and brief enough. No volumes needed by way of
+explanation. The fascinating enigma diverts and perplexes everyone
+alike. The simple understand it best, or at least they seem to do so.
+Segregation, aloofness, spiritual imprisonment, which is another name
+for introspection, the looking out from bars of the caged house, all
+this discovers something through penetration. Walking with life is
+most natural, grazing its warm shoulder. There is little room for
+inquiry if one have the real feeling of life itself. Poetry is that
+which gleans most by keeping nearest to life. Books and firesides
+avail but little. Secretaries for the baggage of erudition do not
+enhance poetic values, they encumber them. Poetry is not declamation,
+it is not propaganda, it is breathing natural breaths. There is
+nothing mechanical about poetry excepting the affectation of forms.
+Poetry is the world's, it is everybody's. You count poetry by its
+essence, and no amount of studied effect, or bulging erudition will
+create that which is necessary, that which makes poetry what it is.
+The one essential is power to sing, and the intelligence to get it
+down with degrees of mastery or naturalness, which is one and the same
+thing.
+
+Real singing is unusual as real singers are rare. Adelaide Crapsey
+shows that she was a real singer, essentially poet, excellent among
+those of our time. She impresses her uncommon qualities upon you, in
+the cinquains of hers, with genuinely incisive force. She has so much
+of definiteness, so much of technical beauty, economy, all very
+valuable assets for a true poet. She had never been touched with the
+mania for journalistic profusion. She cared too much for language to
+ride it. She cared too much for words to want to whip them into
+slavery. She was outside of them, looking on, as it might be, through
+crystal, at their freshness. She did not take them for granted. They
+were new to her and she wanted the proper familiarity. She worked upon
+a spiritual geometric all her own. She did not run to the dictionary
+for eccentricities, she did not hunt words out of countenance. They
+were natural to her. She wanted most their simple beauty, and she
+succeeded. She had dignity, a rare gift in these times. She raises
+herself above the many by her fine feeling for the precision. That is
+her artistry, the word, the thing of beauty and the joy forever with
+her.
+
+It is to be regretted that Adelaide Crapsey had no more time for the
+miniature microscopic equations, the little thing seen large, the
+large thing seen vividly. She might have spent more hours with them
+and less with her so persistent guest, this second self at her side;
+ironic presence, when she most would have strode with the brighter
+companion, her first and natural choice. Her contribution is
+conspicuous among us for its balance and its intellectualism tempered
+with fine emotions. She had so much to settle for herself, so much
+bargaining for the little escapes in which to register herself
+consistently, so much of consultation for her body's sake, that her
+mind flew the dark spaces about her bed with consistent feverishness.
+
+Reckoning is not the genius of life. It is the painful, residual
+element of reflection. One must give, one must pay. It is not
+inspiring to beg for breath, yet this has come to many a fine artist,
+many a fine soul whose genius was far more of the ability for living,
+with so little of the ability for dying. You cannot think along with
+clarity, with the doom of dark recognition nudging your shoulder every
+instant. There must be somehow apertures of peace for production.
+Adelaide Crapsey's chief visitant was doom. She saw the days
+vanishing, and the inevitable years lengthening over her. No wonder
+she could write brevities, she whose existence was brevity itself. The
+very flicker of the lamp was among the last events. What, then, was
+the fluttering of the moth but a monstrous intimation. If her work was
+chilled with severity, it was because she herself was covered with the
+cool branches of decision. Nature was cold with her, hence there is
+the ring of ice in these little pieces of hers. They are veiled with
+the grey of many a sunless morning.
+
+    "These be
+    Three silent things;
+    The falling snow,--the hour
+    Before the dawn,--the mouth of one
+    Just dead."
+
+Here you have the intensity once more of Adelaide Crapsey. It haunts
+you like the something on the dark stairway as you pass, just as when,
+on the roadway in the dead of night, the twig grazing one's cheek
+would seem like the springing panther at one's throat. Dramatic
+vividness is certainly her chief distinction. No playfulness here, but
+a stout reckoning with austere beauty. The wish to record the element
+at its best that played so fierce a rôle in her life. She writes her
+own death hymn, lays her own shroud out, spaces her own epilogue as if
+to give the engraver, who sets white words on white stone, the clue,
+stones the years stare on, leaving the sunlight to streak the old
+pathos there, and then settles herself to the long way of lying, to
+the sure sleep that glassed her keen eyes, shutting them down too soon
+on a world that held so much poetry for her.
+
+The titles of her cinquains, such as "November night", "The guarded
+wound", "The warning", "Fate defied", and the final touch of
+inevitability in "The Lonely Death", so full of the intensity of last
+moments, intimate the resolute presence of the grey companion of the
+covering mists. It must be said hurriedly that Adelaide Crapsey was
+not all doom. By no means. The longer pieces in her tiny book attest
+to her feeling for riches, and the lyrical wonders of the hour. Her
+fervour is the artist's fervour, the longing, coming really to
+passion, to hold and fix forever the shapes that were loveliest to
+her. That is the poet's existence, that is the poet's labour, and his
+last distress. No one wants to give in to a commonplace world when the
+light that falls on it is lovelier than the place it falls on. If you
+cannot transpose the object, transport it, however simply, however
+ornately, then of what use is poetry? It is transport!
+
+Adelaide Crapsey was efficient in her knowledge of what poetry is, as
+she was certainly proficient as workman. She was lapidary more than
+painter or sculptor. It was a beautiful cutting away, and a sweeping
+aside of the rifts and flaws. That is to say, she wanted that. She
+wanted the white light of the perfect gem, and she could not have been
+content with just matrix, with here and there embedded chips. She was
+a washer of gold, and spared no labours for the bright nuggets she
+might get, and the percentage of her panning was high. But the cloud
+hung on the mountain she clomb, and her way was dimmed.
+
+    "In the cold I will rise, I will bathe
+    In the waters of ice; Myself
+    Will shiver, and will shrive myself
+    Alone in the dawn, and anoint
+    Forehead and feet and hands;
+    I will shutter the windows from light,
+    I will place in their sockets the four
+    Tall candles and set them a-flame
+    In the grey of the dawn; And myself
+    Will lay myself straight in my bed,
+    And draw the sheet under my chin."
+
+There could be no more of resolute finality in this chill epilogue.
+There is the cold of a thousand years shuddering out of this scene, it
+is the passing, the last of this delicate and gifted poet, Adelaide
+Crapsey. If she has written more than her book prints, these must
+surely be of her best. She took the shape of that which she made so
+visible, so cold, so beautiful. With her white wings she has skirted
+the edge of the dusk with an incredible calm. No whimpering here. Too
+much artistry for that; too much of eye to let heart rule. The gifts
+of Adelaide Crapsey were high ones, and that she left so little of
+song is regrettable, even though she left us a legacy of some of the
+best singing of the day. It is enough to call her poet, for she was
+among the first of this hour and time. She had no affectations, no
+fashionable theories and ambitions. She simply wrote excellent verse.
+That is her beautiful gift to us.
+
+
+
+
+FRANCIS THOMPSON
+
+
+If ever a meteor fell to earth it was Francis Thompson. If ever a star
+ascended to that high place in the sky where sit the loftier planets
+in pleasant company, it was this splendid poet. Stalking through the
+shadows of the Thames Embankment to find his clear place in the milky
+way, is hardly the easiest road for so exceptional a celebrity. It is
+but another instance of the odd tradition perpetuating itself, that
+some geniuses must creep hand and knee through mire, heart pierced
+with the bramble of experience, up over the jagged pathways to that
+still place where skies are clear at last. Thompson is the last among
+the great ones to have known the dire vicissitude, direst, if legends
+are true, that can befall a human being. We have the silence of his
+saviour friends, the Meynells, saying so much more than their few
+public words, tender but so careful. What they knew, and what the
+walls of the monastery of Storrington must have heard in that so
+pained stillness, there, is probably beyond repetition for pathos. De
+Quincey had taught him much in the knowledge of hardship. Whether it
+is just similarity of experience or a kind of imitation in nature, is
+not easy to say. It was hardly the example to repeat. It is singular
+enough also, that De Quincey's "Ann" should have become so vivid a
+repetition to Thompson, in just the same terms.
+
+London has no feeling for the peace of poets. They are the little
+things in the confused maelstrom of human endeavor. Poets are taught
+with the whip. They must bleed for their divine idea, or so it was
+then. Sometimes it seems as if a change had come, for so many poets
+sit in chairs of ease these days. Science produces other kinds of
+discomfort, and covers the old misery with a new tapestry of
+contrasts. I doubt if many poets are selling matches these days,
+living on eleven pence a day. There is still the poet who knows his
+cheap lodging. There seems enough of them still for high minds to
+crawl into, and yet there is another face to the misery.
+
+Thompson was seraph from the first. You see the very doom burning out
+of his boy's eyes in the youthful portrait, and you see the logical
+end in that desperate and pitiful mask, the drawing of the last period
+in the Meynell Book. His was certainly the severed head, and his feet
+were pathetically far away, down on a stony earth. That he should have
+forfeited the ordinary ways of ease, is as consistent with his
+appearance, as it was necessary to his nature. That he should find
+himself on the long march past the stations of the cross, to the very
+tree itself, for his poetic purpose, if it is in keeping with
+tradition, is not precisely the most inspiring aspect of human
+experiences. Human he was not, as we like to think of human, for he
+was too early in his career marked for martyr. There is the note of
+cricket-time in his earlier life, and how long this attached to the
+physical delights of his being cannot be told here. His eyes were
+lodged too far in heaven to have kept the delights for long, to have
+comprehended all that clogged his impatiently mercurial feet.
+
+"The abashless inquisition of each star" was the scrutiny that
+obsessed his ways, the impertinence that he suffered most; for he had
+the magnitude of soul that hungered for placement, and the plague of
+two masters was on him. Huntress and "Hound" he had to choose between,
+beauty and the insatiable Prince; harsh and determined lovers, both of
+them, too much craving altogether for an artistic nature. The earth
+had no room for him and he did not want heaven so soon. He was not
+saint, even though his name followed him even, for recognition.
+
+"Stood bound and helplessly, for Time to shoot his barbed minutes at
+me, suffered the trampling hoof of every hour," etc., all this
+confided to some childish innocent in "The child's kiss". Whom else
+should he tell but a child? Where is the man or woman with
+understanding but has the "child" lodged somewhere for sympathy, for
+recognition? The clearest listener he could find, and the least
+commiserative, happily. "The heart of childhood, so divine for me", is
+but typical of a being so dragged, and emaciate with the tortures of
+the body, in earth places where no soul like his could ever be at
+home. What was Preston, or Ashton-under-Lyne to him, more than Kensall
+Green is to him now? What is such dust in his sky but some blinding
+and blowing thing? What is there for singer to do but sing until the
+throat cracks? Even the larks and the thrushes do that. They end their
+morning and evening with a song. He was brother to these birds in that
+loftiness. He sang, and sang, and sang, while flesh fainted from
+hunger and weakness.
+
+Had not Storrington come to him in the dark places of London, we
+should have had no "Hound of Heaven", and without that masterpiece
+what would modern poetry do? He sang to cover up his wounds with
+climbing music. That was his sense of beauty. He filled his hollowing
+cheek with finer things than moaning. He might have wept, but they
+were words instead of drops.
+
+It will be difficult to find loftier song as to essences. We shall
+have room for criticising stylistic extravagances, archaisms of a not
+interesting order for us, yet there will be nothing said but the
+highest in praise of his genius. Excess of praise may be heaped upon
+him without cessation, and it may end in the few cool yet incisive
+words that fell from the lips of Meredith, with the violets from
+another's worshipped hands, "a true poet, one of a small band." Poets
+of this time will have much to gather from Thompson in point of
+sincerity. There is terrific mastery of words, which is like
+Shakespeare in felicity we do not encounter so often it seems to me.
+
+Thompson has scaled the white rainbow of the night, and sits in
+radiant company among the first planetary strummers of song. His
+diamond is pure, and the matrix that hid him so long from showing his
+glinted facets is chipped away of miseries carried down with death.
+They will soon be forgotten by the multitude as death itself made him
+forget them. We have his chants and his anthems and plainsongs to
+remind us of the one essential, of how lofty a singer passed down our
+highroad. "Dusty with tumbling about amid the stars!" That is what he
+is for us now, if he rolled in too much clay of earth. Shelley might
+have turned his own handsome phrase on him, for they both strode the
+morning of their bright minds like sun the sky, with much of the same
+solemn yet speedy gait. There are times when they are certainly of the
+one radiance, lyrical and poetical. Their consuming intellectual
+interests were vastly apart, as were their paths of spirit.
+
+I think we shall have no more "dread of height". Poetry has passed
+into scientific discovery. Intellectual passions are the vogue, earth
+is coming into its own, for there is no more heaven in the mind. We
+are showing our humanities now, and the soul must wait a little, and
+remain speechless in some dull corner of the universe. Thompson was
+the last to believe. We are learning to think now, so poetry has come
+to calculation. Rhapsody and passion are romantic, and we are not
+romantic. The last Rhapsodist was Francis Thompson, and in the sense
+of lyrical fervour, the last great poet was Francis Thompson.
+
+
+
+
+ERNEST DOWSON
+
+
+It is late to be telling of Dowson, with the eighteen-nineties nearly
+out of sight, and yet it is Dowson and Lionel Johnson that I know most
+of, from the last of this period. Poles apart these two poets are, the
+one so austere and almost collegiate in adherence to convention, the
+other too warm to let a coldness obsess his singing. There doesn't
+seem to be anything wonderful about Dowson, and yet you want to be
+saying a line of his every now and then, of him "that lived, and sang,
+and had a beating heart," ere he grew old, and he grew old so soon.
+"Worn out by what was really never life to him," is a prefatorial
+phrase I recall. There was a genuine music in Dowson, even if it was
+smothered in lilies and roses and wine of the now old way of saying
+things. "Come hither child, and rest--Behold the weary west," might
+have been the thing he was saying to himself, so much is this the
+essence of his lost cause.
+
+There is a languor and a lack of power to lift a hand toward the
+light, too much a trusting of the shadow. "I have flung roses, roses
+riotously with the throng, to put those pale lost lilies out of mind."
+Always verging on a poetic feeling not just like ourselves in these
+days, and yet Dowson was a poet. He caressed words until they sang for
+him the one plaint that he asked of them. That he was obsessed of the
+beauties and the intimations of Versailles, is seen in everything he
+did, or at least he imbibed this from Verlaine. He was himself a pale
+wanderer down soft green allées, he had a twilight mind struggling
+toward the sun, which was too bright for him, for the moon was his
+brightest light. Echoes of Verlaine linger through his verse and a
+strain of Poe is present, poet whom he with his French taste admired
+so much, two very typical idols for a young man with a sentimental
+journey to pursue. Lost Adelaides, to keep him steeped in the sorrow
+that he cherished, for he petted his miseries considerably; or was it
+that he was most at home when he was unhappy? He would rather have
+seen the light of day from a not quite clear window, for instead of a
+clear hill, he might see a vague castle of his fancy somewhere. He
+hadn't the sweep of a great poet, and yet somehow there was the linnet
+in him, there was the strain of the lute among the leaves, there was
+the rustle of a soft dress audible, and the passing of hands he could
+not ever hold.
+
+He was the poet of the lost treasure. "Studies in Sentiment" is, I
+think, the title of a small book of prose of his. He might have called
+his poems "Studies in sentimentality". And yet, for his time, how
+virile and vigorous he sounds beside "Posies out of Rings", of his
+friend Theodore Peters, of the renaissance cloak, the cherry coloured
+velvet cloak embroidered in green leaves and silver veinings, so full
+of the sky radiance of Dowson himself, this cloak. Cherry sounds red
+and passionate. But it was a cherry of olden time, with the bloom
+quite gone, the dust of the years permeating its silken warp. It
+reposes here in America, the property of an artist of that period.
+
+One likes Dowson because of his sincerity, and a clear beauty which,
+if not exactly startling, was in its way truly genuine. It was merely
+too late for Dowson, and it was probably too soon. Swinburne had
+strummed the skies with every kind of song, and Verlaine had whispered
+every secret of the senses there was, in the land of illusion and
+vaguery. Dowson was worshipper of them both, for it was sound first
+and last that he cared most for, the musical mastery of the one and
+the sentimentality of the other. He was far nearer Verlaine in type.
+He had but the one thing to tell of, and that was lost love, and he
+told it over and over in his book of verse. His Pierrot of the Minute
+was himself, and his Cynara was the ever vanishing vision of his own
+insecurity and incapability. He perished for the love of hands. He is
+so like someone one knows, whom one wants to talk to tenderly, touch
+in a friendly way, and say as little as possible. He comes to one
+humanly first, and asks you for your eye to his verse afterward,
+something of the "Little boy Lost", in his so ineffectual face, weak
+with sweetness and hidden in shyness, covered with irresponsibility,
+or lack of power to be responsible.
+
+He was a helpless one, that is certain. He resorted to the
+old-fashioned methods of the decadents for maintaining the certain
+requisite melancholy apparently necessary to sing a certain way. In
+the struggle of that period, he must have seemed like a very clear,
+though a very sad singer. There were no lilies or orchids in his
+buttonhole, and no strange jewels on his fingers, for you remember, it
+was the time of "Monsieur Phocas", and the art of Gustave Moreau. He
+was plain and sincere, and pathetic, old-fashioned too in that he was
+bohemian, or at least had acquired bohemianism, for I think no
+Englishman was ever really bohemian. Dieppe and the docks had gotten
+him, and took away the sense of mastery over things that a real poet
+of power must somehow have. He was essentially a giver-in. His
+neurasthenia was probably the reason for that. It was the age of
+absinthe and little taverns, for there was Verlaine and the inimitable
+Café d'Harcourt, which, as you saw it just before the war, had the
+very something that kept the Master at his drinks all day.
+
+Murger, Rimbaud, Verlaine had done the thing which has lasted so
+singularly until now, for there are still echoes of this in the air,
+even to the present day. Barmaids are memories, and roseleaves dried
+and set in urns, for that matter, too. How far away it all seems, and
+they were the substance of poetry then. Sounds were the important
+things for Dowson, which is essentially the Swinburne echo.
+Significant then, that he worshipped "the viol, the violet, and the
+vine" of Poe. There was little else but singing in his verse however.
+His love of Horace did less for him than the masters of sound,
+excepting that the vision comes in the name "Cynara". But it was all
+struggle for Dowson, a battle with the pale lily. It was for this he
+clung to cabmen's lounging places. He was looking for places to be out
+of the play in. He couldn't have survived for long, and yet there is a
+strain of genuine loveliness, the note of pure beauty in the verse of
+Dowson. He was poet, and kept to his creed with lover-like tenacity.
+
+He helped close a period that was distinguished all over the world,
+the period of the sunflower. Apart from its wildest and most
+spectacular genius, it has produced Lionel Johnson with his religious
+purity, and Aubrey Beardsley. It was the time of sad and delicate
+young men. They all died in boyhood really. These were, I think, with
+Dowson the best it offered. We never read Arthur Symons for his power
+in verse, he with so much of the rose-tinted afterglow in him, so much
+of the old feeling for stage doors and roses thrown from the boxes,
+and the dying scent of lingerie. His essays will be a far finer source
+of delight for a much longer time, for therein is the best poetry he
+had to offer.
+
+Dowson was, let us say not mockingly, the boyish whimperer in song. He
+was ineffectual, too much so, to take up the game of laughter for
+long. That would have been too strenuous for him, so he had to sit and
+weep tears of wordy rain. "Il pleut dans mon coeur" was the famous
+touch of his master, it was the loudest strain in him. That was the
+lover-strain, and Dowson was the lover dying of love, imaginary love
+probably, and saw everywhere something to remind him of what he had
+pathetically lost. If there had been a little savage in him, he would
+have walked away with what he wanted. He maybe did have a try or two,
+but they couldn't have endured, for he wasn't loving a particular
+Adelaide. That was the name he gave to love, for it was woman's lips,
+and eyes and hands that he cared most for, or at least seemed most to
+care.
+
+It was in the vision that crossed his ways in the dark and boisterous
+taverns where love finds strange ways for expression, that the
+singleness of feeling possessed him. It was among the rougher elements
+of dock life that his refinements found their level. Dowson sang and
+sang and sang, until he grew old at thirty-three, "worn out by what
+was never really life to him". Aged pierrot, gone home to his mother,
+the Moon, to bask forever in the twilight of his old and vague
+fancies. There might he strum his heart out in the old way, and the
+world would never hear, for it has lost the ear for this kind of song.
+Perhaps in two hundred years, in other "golden treasuries" there may
+appear the songs of Dowson as among the best of those early and late
+singers of the nineteenth century. We cannot say now, for it cloys a
+little with sweets for us at this time, though it was then the time of
+honey and jasmine, and the scent of far away flowers. Pierrot of the
+glass, with the hours dripping away in fine, gold rain. That was the
+genius of poets like Dowson, and pierrot was the master of them all.
+
+
+
+
+HENRY JAMES ON RUPERT BROOKE
+
+
+Henry James on Rupert Brooke! Here is certainly a very wide interval,
+separated, artist and subject, by the greatest divergence of power,
+and one may be even amazed at the contrast involved. He is surely,
+James, in all his elaborateness, trying to square the rose and compute
+the lily, algebraical advances upon a most simple thesis. Brooke--a
+nature so obvious, which had no measure at all for what the sum had
+done to him, and for all that about him, or for those stellar
+ecstasies which held him bound with fervour as poet, planetary
+swimmer, and gifted as well with a fine stroke for the sea, and runner
+of all the beautiful earth places about the great seas' edge.
+
+For me, there is heaviness and over-elaboration paramount in this
+preface to the Letters from America, excess of byword, a strained
+relationship with his subject, but that would of course be Jamesian,
+and very naturally, too. It is hardly, this preface, the tribute of
+the wise telling of beautiful and "blinding youth", surely more the
+treatise of the problemist forging his problem, as the sculptor might;
+something too much of metal or stone, too ponderous, too severe let
+one say, for its so gracing and brightening theme, something not
+springing into bloom, as does the person and personality of the young
+subject himself. Only upon occasion does he really come upon the young
+man, actual, forgetful of all but him.
+
+There is no question, if the word of those be true who had relation
+however slight or intimate with Brooke, that he was an engrossing
+theme, and for more than one greater than himself, as certainly he was
+for many much less significant than James. It is distinguished from
+the young poet's point of view that he was impressed, and that as
+person to person he really did see him in a convincing manner, as
+might one artist of great repute find himself uncommonly affected by
+the young and so living poet with more than a common gift for
+creation. It seems to me however that James is not over certain as to
+how poetic all things are in substance, yet all the while treating
+Brooke coolly and spaciously as an artist should.
+
+I did not know Brooke, and I know nothing of him beyond various photos
+showing him one way, quite manly and robust, and I feel sure he was
+so, and in another way as neither youth nor man, but something
+idyllic, separate and seraph-like, untouched mostly with earthly
+experience. These pictures do show that he was, unquestionably, a
+bright gust of England, with an almost audible splendour about even
+these poor replicas, which make it seem that he did perform the
+ascribed miracle, that England really had brought forth of her
+brightest and best, only to lay away her golden fruitage in dust upon
+the borders of a far and classical sea, with an acute untimeliness.
+But respectfully let me say, I think much in these hours of the
+incongruity and pathos of excessive celebration. There shall not be
+for long, singers enough to sing high songs commensurate with the
+delights of those numberless ones "who lived, and sang, and had a
+beating heart", those who have sped into the twilight too soon, having
+but a brief time to discover if years had bright secrets for them or
+clear perspective. There shall always lack the requisite word for them
+who have made many a dull morning splendid with faith, they who have
+been the human indication immeasurably of the sun's rising, and of the
+truth that vision is a thing of reason.
+
+Of Brooke and the other dead poets as well, there has, it seems to me,
+been too much of celebration. But of Brooke and his poetry, which is a
+far superior product to these really most ordinary "Letters", there is
+in these poetic pieces too much of what I want to call "University
+Cleavage", an excess of old school painting, too much usage of the
+warm image, which, though emotional, is not sensuous enough to express
+the real poetic sensuousness, to make the line or the word burn
+passionately, too much of the shades of Swinburne still upon the
+horizon. Rose and violet of the eighteen ninety hues have for long
+been dispensed with, as has the pierrot and his moon. We have in this
+time come to like hardier colourings, which are for us more
+satisfying, and more poetic. We hardly dare use the hot words of
+"Anactoria" in our day. To be sure rose is English, for it has been
+for long a very predominant shade on the young face of England, but in
+Brooke there is an old age to the fervour, and in spite of the
+brilliant youth of the poet, there is an old age in the substance and
+really in the treatment as well. We are wanting a fresher intonation
+to those images, and expect a new approach, and a newer aspect. It is
+not to adhere by means of criticism to the prevailing graveyard
+tendency, nor do we want so much of the easy and cheap journalistic
+element, as comes so often in the so named "free verse". What is
+really wanted is an individual consistency, and a brightness of
+imagery which shall be the poet's own by reason of his own personal
+attachment, and not simply the variance of the many-in-one poetry of
+the day.
+
+It is not enough to write passably, it is only enough when there are
+several, or even one, who will give their or his own peculiar contact
+with those agencies of the day, the hour, and the moment, who will
+find or invent a style best suited to themselves. Attempts at
+excessive individualism will never create true individualistic
+expression, no affected surprise in personal perversity of image or
+metaphor will make a real poet, or real poetry. There must be first
+and last of all, a sure ardour, the poet's very own, which will of
+itself support obvious, or even slightly detectable, influences. It is
+not enough to declaim oneself, or propose continually one's group. The
+single utterance is what is necessary, a real freshness of
+vocalization which is, so to speak, the singer's own throat. If he be
+original in his freshness, we shall be able to single him away from
+the sweeping movements of the hour by his very "specialness" in touch,
+that pressure of the mind and spirit upon the page, which is his.
+
+We shall translate a poet through his indications and intentions as
+well as through his arrivals, and we must condemn no one to fame
+beyond his capacity or deserts. We have never the need of extravagant
+laud. It is not enough to praise a poet for his personal charm, his
+beauty of body and of mind and soul, for these are but beautiful
+things at home in a beautiful house. In the case of Brooke, we have
+ringing up among hosts of others, James's voice that he was all of
+this, but I would not wish to think it was the wish of any real poet
+to be "condemned to sociability", merely because he was an eminently
+social being, or because he was the exceptionally handsome, among the
+many less so; or be condemned to overpraise for what is after all but
+an indication to poetic power. "If I should die", is of course a very
+lovely sonnet, and it is the true indication of what Brooke might have
+been, but it is not the reason to be doomed to find all things
+wonderful in him. For in the state of perfection, if one see always
+with a lancet eye, we really do accentuate the essence of beauty by a
+careful and very direct critical sense, which can and should, when
+honorably exercised, show up delicately, the sense of proportion.
+
+It is as much a part of the artist's equipment to find fault as it is
+to praise, for he wants by nature the true value with which he may
+relate himself to the sense of beauty. It seems, perhaps only to me,
+that in Brooke's poems there is but a vigorous indication to poetic
+expression, whereas doubtless the man himself was being excessively
+poetic, hour and moment together, and spent much energy of mind and
+body poetizing sensation. For me, there is a journalistic quality of
+phrasing and only very rarely the unusual image. As for the "Letters",
+they are loose and jotty in form, without distinction either in
+observation or in form, without real felicity or uniqueness. Art is
+nothing if it is not the object, or the idea, or experience seen in
+review, with clarity. In Brooke, I feel the superabundance of joy in
+the attractiveness of the world, but I do not feel the language of him
+commensurate or distinguished in the qualities of poetic or literary
+art. There seems to me to be too much of the blown lock and the
+wistful glance, too much of the attitudinized poet, lacking, I may
+even say, in true refinement, often.
+
+A too comfortable poet, and poetry of too much verve without incision,
+too much "gesturing", which is an easy thing for many talented people,
+and there is also missing for me the real grip of amazement. You will
+not find anything in the letters that could not have been done by the
+cub reporter, save possibly in the more charming of the letters with
+reference to swimming in the South Seas. Here you feel Brooke at home
+instantly, and the picturing is natural and easy. But other than this,
+you will find no phrasing to compare with passages of James's preface,
+such, for instance, as the "sky-clamour of more dollars", surely a
+vastly more incisive phrase regarding the frenzies of New York, than
+all that Brooke essays to tell of it. Brooke is distinctly "not there"
+too often in these so irregular letters of his. Letters are notably
+rare in these times anyhow, and so it is with the letters of Brooke.
+We look for distinction, and it is not to be found, they have but
+little of the intimacy with their subjects that one expects.
+
+As to his poetry, it seems to be a poetry rapidly approaching state
+approval, there is in it the flavour of the budding laureate, it seems
+to me to be poetry already "in orders". Brooke was certainly in danger
+of becoming a good poet, like the several other poets who perished in
+the throes of heroism. Like them, he would, had he lived, have had to
+save himself from the evils of prosperity, poetically speaking. He
+would have had to overcome his tendency toward what I want to call the
+old-fashioned "gold and velvet" of his words, a very definite haze
+hanging over them of the ill effect of the eighteen-ninety school,
+which produced a little excellent poetry and a lot of very tame
+production. Poetry is like all art, difficult even in its freest
+interval. Brooke must rest his claim to early distinction perhaps upon
+the "If I should die" sonnet alone, he would certainly have had to
+come up considerably, to have held the place his too numerous personal
+admirers were wont to thrust upon him. Unless one be the veritable
+genius, sudden laurels wither on the stem with too much of morning.
+
+This poet had no chance to prove what poetry of his would have endured
+the long day, and most of all he needed to be removed from too much
+love of everything. The best art cannot endure such promiscuity, not
+an art of specific individual worth. In the book which is called
+"Letters from America", the attraction lies in its preface, despite
+the so noticeable irrelevancy of style. It seems to me that James
+might for once have condescended to an equal footing with his theme,
+for the sake of the devoutness of his intention, and have come to us
+for the moment, the man talking of the youth. He might then have told
+us something really intimate of "Rupert", as he so frequently names
+him, for this would indicate some intimacy surely, unless perchance he
+was "Rupert" to the innumerables whom he met, and who were sure of his
+intimacy on the instant's introduction, which would indeed be
+"condemned to sociability".
+
+This book is in two pieces, preface and content, and we are conscious
+chiefly of the high style and interest of the preface, first of all,
+and the discrepancy inherent in the rest of the book accentuating the
+wide divergence between praiser and praised. It is James with
+reference to Brooke, it is not Henry James informing of the young and
+handsome Rupert Brooke. Apollo in the flesh must do some mighty
+singing. Brooke had not done much of this when they laid him by on the
+borders of that farther sea. He had more to prove the heritage laid so
+heavily upon him by the unending host of his admirers and lovers. He
+needed relief from the popular notion, and we must relieve ourselves
+from his excessive popularity if we are to enjoy him rightly, by being
+just with him. A little time, and we should have learned his real
+distinction. It is too soon for us, and too late for him. We must
+accept him more for his finer indications then, and less for his
+achievement in the sense of mastery.
+
+
+
+
+THE DEARTH OF CRITICS
+
+
+There is just cause for wonder at the noticeable absence of critics in
+the field of painting, of individuals who are capable of some serious
+approach to the current tendencies in art. We have witnessed a very
+general failure to rise above the common or high-class reportorial
+level in this particular sphere. Why do so many people who write
+specifically about painting say so little that really relates to it?
+It is because most of them are journalists or men of letters who have
+made emotional excursions into this field, which is in most instances
+foreign to them; well-known literary artists, occasionally, intent
+upon varying their subject matter.
+
+We read Meier-Graefe, for instance, on the development of modern art,
+and we find his analogies more or less stimulating, but taken as a
+whole his work is unsatisfactory from an artist's point of view; not
+much more than a sort of novel with art for its skeleton, or rather a
+handbook from which the untutored layman can gather superficial
+information about group and individual influences, a kind of verbal
+entertainment that is altogether wanting in true critical values. I
+have listened to lectures on art by people who were supposed to know
+about it, merely to see how much this type of critical study could
+satisfy the really artistic mind somewhat conversant with true
+relations, and I have found these lectures of but the slightest value,
+_resumés_ compounded of wearisome and inappropriate detail. There is
+always an extreme lack of true definition, of true information, there
+is always too much of the amateur spirit passing for popular knowledge
+among these individuals who might otherwise do so much to form public
+taste and appreciation. Thus we find that even the chatty Meier-Graefe
+stops without going any further than Cézanne. It is possible that
+after writing two very heavy volumes upon the development of modern
+art, he has to remain silent on modern art itself, that he really
+feels he is not qualified to speak upon Cézanne and his successors; or
+does he assume possibly that there is nothing this side of Cézanne?
+How many writer people are there who really do understand what has
+taken place since then?
+
+I have heard these characteristic remarks among the so-called art
+writers who write the regular notices for the daily journals--"You see
+I really don't know anything about the subject, but I have to write!"
+or--"I don't know anything about art, but I am reading up on it as
+much as possible so that I won't appear too stupid; for they send me
+out and I have to write something." Their attitude is the same as if
+their subject were a fire or a murder: but either of the latter would
+be much more in their line, calling for nothing but a registration of
+the simplest of facts. Just why these people have to write upon art
+will never be clear. But because of this altogether trivial
+relationship to the theme of painting we find it difficult to take
+seriously at all what we read in our dailies, in every case the barest
+notation with heavily worded comment, having little or no reference to
+what is important in the particular pictures themselves. How can
+anyone take these individuals seriously when they actually have no
+opinion to offer, and must rely either upon humor or indignation to
+inspire them?
+
+If we turn to the pundits of criticism we find statements like this of
+Ruskin on Giotto:--"For all his use of opalescent warm color, Giotto
+is exactly like Turner, as in his swift expressional power he is like
+Gainsborough!" Again, speaking of Turner's _Fighting Téméraire_, he
+says: "Of all pictures of subjects not visibly involving human pain,
+this is, I believe, the most pathetic that was ever painted--no ruin
+was ever so affecting as this gliding of the vessel to her grave."
+Journalism of the first class certainly, but at the farthest stretch
+of the imagination how can one possibly think of Gainsborough or
+Turner in connection with any special quality of Giotto? As for the
+pathos of an aged ship, that belongs to poetry, as Coleridge has
+shown; sentiment of this kind has never had any proper place in
+painting. A far worthier type of appreciation in words is to be
+found, of course, in Pater's passages on _La Gioconda_ and
+Botticelli's _Birth of Venus_. But these belong to a different realm,
+in which literature rises to a height independent of the pictures
+themselves by means of the suggestion that is in them, the power of
+suggestion being a finer alternative for crude and worthless
+description. We shall always dispute with the writer on art as to
+exactly what symbol is inherent in the presence of a rose in the hand
+or a tear upon the cheek, but we cannot quarrel when the matter is
+treated as sublimely as in the case of a literary artist like Pater.
+It is in the sphere of professed critical judgment that the literary
+authorities so often go astray.
+
+Thus between the entertaining type of writer like Meier-Graefe and the
+daily reporter there is no middle ground. The journalist is frank and
+says that he doesn't know but that he must write; the other writes
+books that are well suited for reference purposes, but have scant
+bearing upon the actual truth in relation to pictures. Are there any
+critics who attempt seriously to approach the modern theme, who find
+it worth their while to go into modern esthetics with anything like
+sincerity or real earnestness of attitude? Only two that I am aware
+of. There is the intelligent Leo Stein, who seldom appears in print,
+but who makes an art of conversation on the subject; and there is
+Willard Huntingdon Wright, who has appeared extensively and certainly
+with intelligence also, both of these critical writers being very
+much at variance in theory, but both full of discernment whatever one
+may think of their individual ideas. We are sure of both as being
+thoroughly inside the subject, this theme of modern art, for they are
+somehow painter people. I even suspect them both of having once, like
+George Moore, painted seriously themselves.
+
+Nevertheless there is a hopeful seriousness of interest developing in
+what is being done this side the sea, a rediscovery of native art of
+the sort that is occurring in all countries. The artist is being
+taught by means of war that there is no longer a conventional center
+of art, that the time-worn fetish of Paris as a necessity in his
+development has been dispensed with; and this is fortunate for the
+artist and for art in general. It is having its pronounced effect upon
+the creative powers of the individual in all countries, almost
+obliging him to create his own impulse upon his own soil; it is making
+the artist see that if he is really to create he must create
+irrespective of all that exists as convention in the mind.
+
+How will this affect the artist? He will learn first of all to be
+concerned with himself, and what he puts forth of personality and of
+personal research will receive its character from his strict adherence
+to this principle, whether he proceeds by means of prevailing theories
+or by departure from them. The public will thus have no choice but to
+rely upon what he produces seriously as coming clearly from himself,
+from his own desire and labor. He will realize that it is not a
+trick, not a habit, not a trade--this modernity--and that with
+fashions it has nothing to do; that it is explicitly a part of our
+modern urge toward expression quite as much as the art of Corot and
+Millet were of Barbizon, as the art of Titian, Giorgione and
+Michelangelo were of Italy; that he and his time bear the strictest
+relationship to one another and that through this relationship he can
+best build up his own original power. Unable to depend therefore upon
+the confessedly untutored lay writer or even the better class essayist
+to tell him his place, he will establish himself, and his place will
+be determined in the régime of his day by precisely those qualities
+which he contributes to it. He will not rely too insistently upon
+idiosyncrasy; the failure of this we have already seen, in the
+post-impressionists.
+
+The truth is that painters must sooner or later learn to express
+themselves in terms of pure language, they must learn that creation is
+the thing most expected of them, and, if possible, invention as well.
+Oddity in execution or idea is of the least importance. Artists have a
+more respectable service to perform than this dilettantist notion of
+beauty implies. Since the utter annihilation of sentimentality, of
+legend, of what we call poetry has taken place, a richer substance for
+expression has come to us by means of which the artist may express a
+larger, newer variety of matter, more relevant to our special need,
+our modernity.
+
+The war disintegrated the _art habit_ and in this fact lies the hope
+of art. Fads have lost what slight interest they possessed, the folly
+of imitation has been exposed. As a result of this, I like to think
+that we shall have a finer type of expression, a richer kind of
+personal quality. Every artist is his own maker, his own liberator; he
+it is that should be the first to criticise, destroy and reconstruct
+himself, he should find no mood convenient, no attitude comfortable.
+What the lay-writer says of him in praise or blame will not matter so
+much in the future; he will respect first and last only those who have
+found the time to share his theme, at least in mind, if not in
+experience, and the discerning public will free itself from the
+temporary influences of the confessedly untutored critic. The artist
+will gain its confidence by reason of his own sincerity and
+intelligence. It is probable, too, that in time criticism in the mode
+of Ruskin will utterly disappear and the Meier-Graefe type of critic
+will have found a fitter and true successor, someone who, when he
+calls himself a critic, will prove a fairly clear title to the
+distinction and will not have to apologize for himself or for his
+occupation.
+
+
+
+
+AFTERWORD
+
+
+
+
+THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING "DADA"
+
+
+We are indebted to Tristan Tzara and his followers for the newest and
+perhaps the most important doctrinary insistence as applied to art
+which has appeared in a long time. Dada-ism is the latest phase of
+modernism in painting as well as in literature, and carries with it
+all the passion for freedom of expression which Marinetti sponsored so
+loudly in his futuristic manifestoes. It adds likewise an exhilarating
+quality of nihilism, imbibed, as is said, directly from the author of
+Zarathustra. Reading a fragment of the documentary statement of
+Dada-ism, we find that the charm of the idea exists mainly in the fact
+that they wish all things levelled in the mind of man to the degree of
+commonplaceness which is typical of and peculiar to it.
+
+Nothing is greater than anything else, is what the Dada believes, and
+this is the first sign of hope the artist at least can discover in the
+meaningless importance which has been invested in the term ART. It
+shows best of all that art is to betake itself on its own way blandly,
+despite the wish of its so ardent supporters and suppressors. I am
+greatly relieved as artist, to find there is at least one tenet I can
+hold to in my experience as a useful or a useless human being. I have
+always said for myself, I have no office, no obligations, no other
+"mission", dread-fullest of all words, than to find out the quality of
+humor that exists in experience, or life as we think we are entitled
+to call it. I have always felt the underlying fatality of habit in
+appreciation, because I have felt, and now actually more than ever in
+my existence, the fatality of habit indulged in by the artist. The
+artist has made a kind of subtle crime of his habitual expression, his
+emotional monotonies, and his intellectual inabilities.
+
+If I announce on this bright morning that I am a "Dada-ist" it is not
+because I find the slightest need for, or importance in, a doctrine of
+any sort, it is only for convenience of myself and a few others that I
+take up the issue of adherence. An expressionist is one who expresses
+himself at all times in any way that is necessary and peculiar to him.
+A dada-ist is one who finds no one thing more important than any other
+one thing, and so I turn from my place in the scheme from
+expressionist to dada-ist with the easy grace that becomes any
+self-respecting humorist.
+
+Having fussed with average intelligence as well as with average
+stupidity over the various dogmatic aspects of human experience such
+as art, religion, philosophy, ethics, morals, with a kind of
+obligatory blindness, I am come to the clearest point of my vision,
+which is nothing more or less than the superbly enlightening discovery
+that life as we know it is an essentially comic issue and cannot be
+treated other than with the spirit of comedy in comprehension. It is
+cause for riotous and healthy laughter, and to laugh at oneself in
+conjunction with the rest of the world, at one's own tragic vagaries,
+concerning the things one cannot name or touch or comprehend, is the
+best anodyne I can conjure in my mind for the irrelevant pains we take
+to impress ourselves and the world with the importance of anything
+more than the brilliant excitation of the moment. It is thrilling,
+therefore, to realize there is a healthy way out of all this dilemma
+of habit for the artist. One of these ways is to reduce the size of
+the "A" in art, to meet the size of the rest of the letters in one's
+speech. Another way is to deliver art from the clutches of its
+worshippers, and by worshippers I mean the idolaters and the
+commercialists of art. By the idolaters I mean those whose reverence
+for art is beyond their knowledge of it. By the commercialists I mean
+those who prey upon the ignorance of the unsophisticated, with
+pictures created by the esthetic habit of, or better to say, through
+the banality of, "artistic" temperament. Art is at present a species
+of vice in America, and it sorely and conspicuously needs prohibition
+or interference.
+
+It is, I think, high time that those who have the artistic habit
+toward art should be apprised of the danger they are in in assuming of
+course that they hold vital interest in the development of
+intelligence. It is time therefore to interfere with stupidity in
+matters of taste and judgment. We learn little or nothing from habit
+excepting repetitive imitation. I should, for the benefit of you as
+reader, interpose here a little information from the mind of Francis
+Picabia, who was until the war conspicuous among the cubists, upon the
+subject of dada-ism.
+
+    "Dada smells of nothing, nothing, nothing.
+    It is like your hopes: nothing.
+    Like your paradise: nothing.
+    Like your idols: nothing.
+    Like your politicians: nothing.
+    Like your heroes: nothing.
+    Like your artists: nothing.
+    Like your religions: nothing."
+
+A litany like this coming from one of the most notable dada-ists of
+the day, is too edifying for proper expression. It is like a window
+opened upon a wide cool place where all parts of one's exhausted being
+may receive the kind of air that is imperative to it. For the present,
+we may say, a special part of one's being which needs the most and the
+freshest air is that chamber in the brain where art takes hold and
+flourishes like a bed of fungus in the dark.
+
+What is the use, then, of knowing anything about art until we know
+precisely what it is? If it is such an orchidaceous rarity as the
+world of worshippers would have us believe, then we know it must be
+the parasitic equivalent of our existence feeding upon the health of
+other functions and sensibilities in ourselves. The question comes why
+worship what we are not familiar with? The war has taught us that
+idolatry is a past virtue and can have no further place with
+intelligent people living in the present era, which is for us the only
+era worth consideration. I have a hobby-horse therefore--to ride away
+with, out into the world of intricate common experience; out into the
+arena with those who know what the element of life itself is, and that
+I have become an expression of the one issue in the mind worth the
+consideration of the artist, namely fluidic change. How can anything
+to which I am not related, have any bearing upon me as artist? I am
+only dada-ist because it is the nearest I have come to scientific
+principle in experience. What yesterday can mean is only what
+yesterday was, and tomorrow is something I cannot fathom until it
+occurs. I ride my own hobby-horse away from the dangers of art which
+is with us a modern vice at present, into the wide expanse of
+magnanimous diversion from which I may extract all the joyousness I am
+capable of, from the patterns I encounter.
+
+The same disgust which was manifested and certainly enjoyed by Duse,
+when she demanded that the stage be cleared of actors in order to save
+the creative life of the stage, is the same disgust that makes us
+yearn for wooden dolls to make abstract movements in order that we may
+release art from its infliction of the big "A", to take away from art
+its pricelessness and make of it a new and engaging diversion,
+pastime, even dissipation if you will; for all real expression is a
+phase of dissipation in itself: To release art from the disease of
+little theatre-ism, and from the mandibles of the octopus-like
+worshipper that eats everything, in the line of spurious estheticism
+within range, disgorging it without intelligence or comprehension upon
+the consciousness of the not at all stupid public, with a so obviously
+pernicious effect.
+
+"Dada is a fundamentally religious attitude, analogous to that of the
+scientist with his eyeglass glued to the microscope." Dada is
+irritated by those who write "Art, Beauty, Truth", with capital
+letters, and who make of them entities superior to man. "Dada scoffs
+at capital letters, atrociously." "Dada ruining the authority of
+constraints, tends to set free the natural play of our activities."
+"Dada therefore leads to amoralism and to the most spontaneous and
+consequently the least logical lyricism. This lyricism is expressed in
+a thousand ways of life." "Dada scrapes from us the thick layers of
+filth deposited on us by the last few centuries." "Dada destroys, and
+stops at that. Let Dada help us to make a complete clearance, then
+each of us rebuild a modern house with central heating, and everything
+to the drain, Dadas of 1920."
+
+Remembering always that Dada means hobby-horse, you have at last the
+invitation to make merry for once in our new and unprecedented
+experience over the subject of ART with its now reduced front letter.
+It is the newest and most admirable reclaimer of art in that it offers
+at last a release for the expression of natural sensibilities. We can
+ride away to the radiant region of "Joie de Vivre", and find that
+life and art are one and the same thing, resembling each other so
+closely in reality, that it is never a question of whether it shall or
+must be set down on paper or canvas, or given any greater degree of
+expression than we give to a morning walk or a pleasant bath, or an
+ordinary rest in the sunlight.
+
+Art is then a matter of how one is to take life now, and not by any
+means a matter of how the Greeks or the Egyptians or any other race
+has shown it to be for their own needs and satisfaction. If art was
+necessary to them, it is unnecessary to us now, therefore it is free
+to express itself as it will. You will find, therefore, that if you
+are aware of yourself, you will be your own perfect dada-ist, in that
+you are for the first time riding your own hobby-horse into infinity
+of sensation through experience, and that you are one more
+satisfactory vaudevillian among the multitudes of dancing legs and
+flying wits. You will learn after all that the bugaboo called LIFE is
+a matter of the tightrope and that the stars will shine their frisky
+approval as you glide, if you glide sensibly, with an eye on the fun
+in the performance. That is what art is to be, must come to in the
+consciousness of the artist most of all, he is perhaps the greatest
+offender in matters of judgment and taste; and the next greatest
+offender is the dreadful go-between or "middleman" esthete who so
+glibly contributes effete values to our present day conceptions.
+
+We must all learn what art really is, learn to relieve it from the
+surrounding stupidities and from the passionate and useless admiration
+of the horde of false idolaters, as well as the money changers in the
+temple of success. Dada-ism offers the first joyous dogma I have
+encountered which has been invented for the release and true freedom
+of art. It is therefore most welcome since it will put out of use all
+heavy hands and light fingers in the business of art and set them to
+playing a more honourable and sportsmanlike game. We shall learn
+through dada-ism that art is a witty and entertaining pastime, and not
+to be accepted as our ever present and stultifying affliction.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Adventures in the Arts, by Marsden Hartley
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Adventures in the Arts, by Marsden Hartley
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Adventures in the Arts
+       Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets
+
+Author: Marsden Hartley
+
+Release Date: March 28, 2007 [EBook #20921]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Clarke, Sankar Viswanathan, and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+(This file was produced from images generously made
+available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<h1>ADVENTURES<br />
+IN THE ARTS</h1>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h4>INFORMAL<br />
+CHAPTERS<br />
+ON PAINTERS<br />
+VAUDEVILLE<br />
+AND POETS</h4>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h2>MARSDEN HARTLEY</h2>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h3>BONI <span class="smcap">and</span> LIVERIGHT</h3>
+
+<h3>Publishers&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;New York</h3>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center f1"><span class="smcap">Copyright, 1921, By<br />
+Boni &amp; Liveright, Inc.</span>
+</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h2>PREFATORY NOTE</h2>
+<p>The papers in this book are not intended in any way to be professional
+treatises. They must be viewed in the light of entertaining
+conversations. Their possible value lies in their directness of
+impulse, and not in weight of argument. I could not wish to go into
+the qualities of art more deeply. A reaction, to be pleasant, must be
+simple. This is the apology I have to offer: Reactions, then, through
+direct impulse, and not essays by means of stiffened analysis.</p>
+
+<p class="sig"><span class="smcap">Marsden Hartley.</span> </p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Some of the papers included in this book have appeared in
+<i>Art and Archeology</i>, <i>The Seven Arts</i>, <i>The Dial</i>, <i>The
+Nation</i>, <i>The New Republic</i>, and <i>The Touchstone</i>. Thanks
+are due to the editors of these periodicals for permission
+to reprint. </p></div>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3>TO</h3>
+<h2>ALFRED STIEGLITZ </h2>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xi" id="Page_xi">[xi]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="INTRODUCTION" id="INTRODUCTION"></a>INTRODUCTION</h2>
+
+<h3>TO</h3>
+<h2>ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS</h2>
+<p>Perhaps the most important part of Criticism is the fact that it
+presents to the creator a problem which is never solved. Criticism is
+to him a perpetual Presence: or perhaps a ghost which he will not
+succeed in laying. If he could satisfy his mind that Criticism was a
+certain thing: a good thing or a bad, a proper presence or an
+irrelevant, he could psychologically dispose of it. But he can not.
+For Criticism is a configuration of responses and reactions so
+intricate, so kaleidoscopic, that it would be as simple to category
+Life itself.</p>
+
+<p>The artist remains the artist precisely in so far as he rejects the
+simplifying and reducing process of the average man who at an early
+age puts Life away into some snug conception of his mind and race.
+This one turns the key. He has released his will and love from the
+vast Ceremonial of wonder, from the deep Poem of Being, into some
+particular detail of life wherein he hopes to achieve comfort or at
+least shun pain. Not so, the artist. In the moment when he elects to
+avoid by whatever<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xii" id="Page_xii">[xii]</a></span> makeshift the raw agony of life, he ceases to be
+fit to create. He must face experience forever freshly: reduce life
+each day anew to chaos and remould it into order. He must be always a
+willing virgin, given up to life and so enlacing it. Thus only may he
+retain and record that pure surprise whose earliest voicing is the
+first cry of the infant.</p>
+
+<p>The unresolved expectancy of the creator toward Life should be his way
+toward Criticism also. He should hold it as part of his Adventure. He
+should understand in it, particularly when it is impertinent, stupid
+and cruel, the ponderable weight of Life itself, reacting upon his
+search for a fresh conquest over it. Though it persist unchanged in
+its r&ocirc;le of purveying misinformation and absurdity to the Public, he
+should know it for himself a blessed dispensation.</p>
+
+<p>With his maturity, the creator's work goes out into the world. And in
+this act, he puts the world away. For the artist's work defines: and
+definition means apartness: and the average man is undefined in the
+social body. Here is a danger for the artist within the very essence
+of his artistic virtue. During the years of his apprenticeship, he has
+struggled to create for himself an essential world out of experience.
+Now he begins to succeed: and he lives too fully in his own selection:
+he lives too simply in the effects of his effort. The gross and
+fumbling impact of experience is eased. The grind of ordinary
+intercourse is dimmed. The rawness of Fam<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xiii" id="Page_xiii">[xiii]</a></span>ily and Business is refined
+or removed. But now once more the world comes in to him, in the form
+of the Critic. Here again, in a sharp concentrated sense, the world
+moves on him: its complacency, its hysteria, its down-tending
+appetites and fond illusions, its pathetic worship of yesterdays and
+hatred of tomorrows, its fear-dogmas and its blood-avowals.</p>
+
+<p>The artist shall leave the world only to find it, hate it only because
+he loves, attack it only if he serves. At that epoch of his life when
+the world's gross sources may grow dim, Criticism brings them back.
+Wherefore, the function of the Critic is a blessing and a need.</p>
+
+<p>The creator's reception of this newly direct, intense, mundane
+intrusion is not always passive. If the artist is an intelligent man,
+he may respond to the intervening world on its own plane. He may turn
+critic himself.</p>
+
+<p>When the creator turns critic, we are in the presence of a
+consummation: we have a complete experience: we have a sort of
+sacrament. For to the intrusion of the world he interposes his own
+body. In his art, the creator's body would be itself intrusion. The
+artist is too humble and too sane to break the ecstatic flow of vision
+with his personal form. The true artist despises the personal as an
+end. He makes fluid, and distils his personal form. He channels it
+beyond himself to a Unity which of course contains it. But Criticism
+is nothing which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xiv" id="Page_xiv">[xiv]</a></span> is not the sheer projection of a body. The artist
+turns Self into a universal Form: but the critic reduces Form to Self.
+Criticism is to the artist the intrusion, in a form irreducible to
+art, of the body of the world. What can he do but interpose his own?</p>
+
+<p>This is the value of the creator's criticism. He gives to the world
+himself. And his self is a rich life.</p>
+
+<p>It includes for instance a direct experience of art, the which no
+professional critic may possess. And it includes as well a direct
+knowledge of life, sharpened in the retrospect of that devotion to the
+living which is peculiarly the artist's. For what is the critic after
+all, but an "artistic" individual somehow impeded from satisfying his
+esthetic emotion and his need of esthetic form in the gross and
+stubborn stuff of life itself: who therefore, since he is too
+intelligent for substitutes, resorts to the already digested matter of
+the hardier creators, takes their assimilated food and does with it
+what the athletic artist does with the meat and lymph and bone of God
+himself? The artist mines from the earth and smelts with his own fire.
+He is higher brother to the toilers of the soil. The critic takes the
+products of the creator, reforges, twists them, always in the cold.
+For if he had the fire to melt, he would not stay with metals already
+worked: when the earth's womb bursts with richer.</p>
+
+<p>When the creator turns critic, we are certain of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xv" id="Page_xv">[xv]</a></span> a feast. We have a
+fare that needs no metaphysical sauce (such as must transform the
+product of the Critic). Here is good food. Go to it and eat. The
+asides of a Baudelaire, a Goethe, a Da Vinci outweight a thousand
+tomes of the professional critics.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>I know of no American book like this one by Marsden Hartley. I do not
+believe American painting heretofore capable of so vital a response
+and of so athletic an appraisal. Albert Ryder barricaded himself from
+the world's intrusion. The American world was not intelligent enough
+in his days to touch him to an activer response. And Ryder, partaking
+of its feebleness, from his devotion to the pure subjective note
+became too exhausted for aught else. As a world we have advanced. We
+have a fully functioning Criticism ... swarms and schools of makers of
+the sonorous complacencies of Judgment. We have an integral body of
+creative-minded men and women interposing itself with valiance upon
+the antithesis of the social resistance to social growth. Hartley is
+in some ways a continuance of Ryder. One stage is Ryder, the solitary
+who remained one. A second stage is Hartley, the solitary who stands
+against the more aggressive, more interested Marketplace.</p>
+
+<p>You will find in this book the artist of a cultural epoch. This man
+has mastered the plastic mes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xvi" id="Page_xvi">[xvi]</a></span>sages of modern Europe: he has gone deep
+in the classic forms of the ancient Indian Dance. But he is, still,
+not very far from Ryder. He is always the child&mdash;whatever wise old
+worlds he contemplates&mdash;the child, wistful, poignant, trammeled, of
+New England.</p>
+
+<p>Hartley has adventured not alone deep but wide. He steps from New
+Mexico to Berlin, from the salons of the Paris of Marie Laurencin to
+the dust and tang of the American Circus. He is eclectic. But wherever
+he goes he chronicles not so much these actual worlds as his own
+pleasure of them. They are but mirrors, many-shaped and lighted, for
+his own delicate, incisive humor. For Hartley is an innocent and a
+<i>na&iuml;f</i>. At times he is profound. Always he is profoundly simple.</p>
+
+<p>Tragedy and Comedy are adult. The child's world is Tragicomic. So
+Marsden Hartley's. He is not deep enough&mdash;like most of our Moderns&mdash;in
+the pregnant chaos to be submerged in blackness by the hot struggle of
+the creative will. He may weep, but he can smile next moment at a
+pretty song. He may be hurt, but he gets up to dance.</p>
+
+<p>In this book&mdash;the autobiography of a creator&mdash;Marsden Hartley peers
+variously into the modern world: but it is in search of Fairies.</p>
+
+<p class="sig"><span class="smcap">Waldo Frank.</span></p>
+
+<p class="sig1"><i>Lisbon</i>, June, 1921.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<p>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[1]</a></span></p>
+
+<table summary="Contents">
+<tr><td></td><td></td><td class="tocpg f1">PAGE</td></tr>
+<tr><td></td><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#INTRODUCTION">Introduction by Waldo Frank</a></span></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_xi">xi</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch"><i><a href="#FOREWORD">Foreword</a></i></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td></td><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#FOREWORD">Concerning Fairy Tales and Me</a></span></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_3">3</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch"><i><a href="#PART_ONE">Part One</a></i></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">1.</td><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#THE_RED_MAN">The Red Man</a></span></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_13">13</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">2.</td><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#WHITMAN_AND_CEZANNE">Whitman and C&eacute;zanne</a></span></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_30">30</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">3.</td><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#ALBERT_P_RYDER">Ryder</a></span></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_37">37</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">4.</td><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#WINSLOW_HOMER">Winslow Homer</a></span></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_42">42</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">5.</td><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#AMERICAN_VALUES_IN_PAINTING">American Values in Painting</a></span></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_50">50</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">6.</td><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#MODERN_ART_IN_AMERICA">Modern Art in America</a></span></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_59">59</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">7.</td><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#OUR_IMAGINATIVES">Our Imaginatives</a></span></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_65">65</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">8.</td><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#OUR_IMPRESSIONISTS">Our Impressionists</a></span></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_74">74</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">9.</td><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#ARTHUR_B_DAVIES">Arthur B. Davies</a></span></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_80">80</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">10.</td><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#REX_SLINKARD">Rex Slinkard</a></span></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_87">87</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">11.</td><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#SOME_AMERICAN_WATER-COLORISTS">Some American Water-Colorists</a></span></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_96">96</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">12.</td><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#THE_APPEAL_OF_PHOTOGRAPHY">The Appeal of Photography</a></span></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_102">102</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">13.</td><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#SOME_WOMEN_ARTISTS_IN_MODERN_PAINTING">Some Women Artists</a></span></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_112">112</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">14.</td><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#REVALUATIONS_IN_IMPRESSIONISM">Revaluations in Impressionism</a></span></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_120">120</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">15.</td><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#ODILON_REDON">Odilon Redon</a></span></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_126">126</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">16.</td><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#THE_VIRTUES_OF_AMATEUR_PAINTING">The Virtues of Amateur Painting</a></span></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_134">134</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">17.</td><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#HENRI_ROUSSEAU">Henri Rousseau</a></span></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_144">144</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch"><i><a href="#PART_TWO">Part Two</a></i></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">18.</td><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#THE_TWILIGHT_OF_THE_ACROBAT">The Twilight of the Acrobat</a></span></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_155">155</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">19.</td><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#VAUDEVILLE">Vaudeville</a></span></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_162">162</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">20.</td><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#A_CHARMING_EQUESTRIENNE">A Charming Equestrienne</a></span></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_175">175</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">21.</td><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#JOHN_BARRYMORE_IN_PETER_IBBETSON">John Barrymore in Peter Ibbetson</a></span></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_182">182</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch"><i><a href="#PART_THREE">Part Three</a></i></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">22.</td><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#LA_CLOSERIE_DE_LILAS">La Closerie de Lilas</a></span></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_191">191</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">23.</td><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#EMILY_DICKINSON">Emily Dickinson</a></span></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_198">198</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">24.</td><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#ADELAIDE_CRAPSEY">Adelaide Crapsey</a></span></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_207">207</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">25.</td><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#FRANCIS_THOMPSON">Francis Thompson</a></span></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_215">215</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">26.</td><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#ERNEST_DOWSON">Ernest Dowson</a></span></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_221">221</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">27.</td><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#HENRY_JAMES_ON_RUPERT_BROOKE">Henry James on Rupert Brooke</a></span></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_228">228</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch">28.</td><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#THE_DEARTH_OF_CRITICS">The Dearth of Critics</a></span></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_237">237</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tocch"><i><a href="#AFTERWORD">Afterword</a></i></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td></td><td><span class="smcap"><a href="#THE_IMPORTANCE_OF_BEING_DADA">The Importance of Being "Dada"</a></span></td>
+<td class="tocpg"><a href="#Page_247">247</a></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[3]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="FOREWORD" id="FOREWORD"></a>FOREWORD </h2>
+
+<h3>CONCERNING FAIRY TALES AND ME</h3>
+<p>Sometimes I think myself one of the unique children among children. I
+never read a fairy story in my childhood. I always had the feeling as
+a child, that fairy stories were for grown-ups and were best
+understood by them, and for that reason I think it must have been that
+I postponed them. I found them, even at sixteen, too involved and
+mystifying to take them in with quite the simple gullibility that is
+necessary. But that was because I was left alone with the incredibly
+magical reality from morning until nightfall, and the nights meant
+nothing more remarkable to me than the days did, no more than they do
+now. I find moonlight merely another species of illumination by which
+one registers continuity of sensation. My nursery was always on the
+edge of the strangers' knee, wondering who they were, what they might
+even mean to those who were as is called "nearest" them.</p>
+
+<p>I had a childhood vast with terror and surprise. If it is true that
+one forgets what one wishes to forget, then I have reason for not
+remembering the major part of those days and hours that are supposed
+to introduce one graciously into the world and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[4]</a></span> offer one a clue to
+the experience that is sure to follow. Not that my childhood was so
+bitter, unless for childhood loneliness is bitterness, and without
+doubt it is the worst thing that can happen to one's childhood. Mine
+was merely a different childhood, and in this sense an original one. I
+was left with myself to discover myself amid the multitudinous other
+and far greater mysteries. I was never the victim of fear of goblins
+and ghosts because I was never taught them. I was merely taught by
+nature to follow, as if led by a rare and tender hand, the then almost
+unendurable beauty that lay on every side of me. It was pain then, to
+follow beauty, because I didn't understand beauty; it must always, I
+think, be distressing to follow anything one does not understand.</p>
+
+<p>I used to go, in my earliest school days, into a little strip of
+woodland not far from the great ominous red brick building in a small
+manufacturing town, on the edge of a wonderful great river in Maine,
+from which cool and quiet spot I could always hear the dominant clang
+of the bell, and there I could listen with all my very boyish
+simplicity to the running of the water over the stones, and watch&mdash;for
+it was spring, of course&mdash;the new leaves pushing up out of the mould,
+and see the light-hued blossoms swinging on the new breeze. I cared
+more for these in themselves than I did for any legendary presences
+sitting under them, shaking imperceptible fingers and waving invisible
+wands<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[5]</a></span> with regality in a world made only for them and for children
+who were taught mechanically to see them there.</p>
+
+<p>I was constantly confronted with the magic of reality itself,
+wondering why one thing was built of exquisite curves and another of
+harmonic angles. It was not a scientific passion in me, it was merely
+my sensing of the world of visible beauty around me, pressing in on me
+with the vehemence of splendor, on every side.</p>
+
+<p>I feel about the world now precisely as I did then, despite all the
+reasons that exist to encourage the change of attitude. I care for the
+magic of experience still, the magic that exists even in facts, though
+little or nothing for the objective material value.</p>
+
+<p>Life as an idea engrosses me with the same ardor as in the earlier
+boyish days, with the difference that there is much to admire and so
+much less to reverence and be afraid of. I harp always on the "idea"
+of life as I dwell perpetually on the existence of the moment.</p>
+
+<p>I might say, then, that my childhood was comparable, in its simplicity
+and extravagance of wonder, to the youth of Odilon Redon, that
+remarkable painter of the fantasy of existence, of which he speaks so
+delicately in letters to friends. His youth was apparently much like
+mine, not a youth of athleticism so much as a preoccupancy with wonder
+and the imminence of beauty surrounding all things.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[6]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I was preoccupied with the "being" of things. Things in themselves
+engrossed me more than the problem of experience. I was satisfied with
+the effect of things upon my senses, and cared nothing for their
+deeper values. The inherent magic in the appearance of the world about
+me, engrossed and amazed me. No cloud or blossom or bird or human ever
+escaped me, I think.</p>
+
+<p>I was not indifferent to anything that took shape before me, though
+when it came to people I was less credulous of their perfection
+because they pressed forward their not always certain credentials upon
+me. I reverenced them then too much for an imagined austerity as I
+admire them now perhaps not enough for their charm, for it is the
+charm of things and people only that engages and satisfies me. I have
+completed my philosophical equations, and have become enamored of
+people as having the same propensities as all other objects of nature.
+One need never question appearances. One accepts them for their face
+value, as the camera accepts them, without recommendation or
+specialized qualification. They are what they become to one. The
+capacity for legend comes out of the capacity for experience, and it
+is in this fashion that I hold such high respect for geniuses like
+Grimm and Andersen, but as I know their qualities I find myself
+leaning with more readiness toward Lewis Carroll's superb "Alice in
+Wonderland."</p>
+
+<p>I was, I suppose, born backward, physically<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[7]</a></span> speaking. I was
+confronted with the vastitude of the universe at once, without the
+ingratiating introduction of the fairy tale. I had early made the not
+so inane decision that I would not read a book until I really wanted
+to. One of the rarest women in the world, having listened to my
+remark, said she had a book she knew I would like because it was so
+different, and forthwith presented me with Emerson's Essays, the first
+book that I have any knowledge of reading, and it was in my eighteenth
+year. Until then I had been wholly absorbed with the terrors and the
+majestical inferences of the moment, the hour, and the day. I was
+alone with them, and they were wonderful and excessively baffling in
+their splendors; then, after filling my mind and soul with the
+legendary splendors of Friendship, and The Oversoul-Circles, and
+Compensation, each of these words of exciting largeness in themselves,
+I turned to the dramatic unrealities of Zarathustra, which, of course,
+was in no way to be believed because it did not exist. And then came
+expansion and release into the outer world again through
+interpretation of Plato, and of Leaves of Grass itself.</p>
+
+<p>I have saved myself from the disaster of beliefs through these magical
+books, and am free once more as in my early childhood to indulge
+myself in the iridescent idea of life, as Idea.</p>
+
+<p>But the fairy story is nothing after all but a means whereby we, as
+children, may arrive at some clue as to the significance of things
+around us, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[8]</a></span> it is through them the child finds his way out from
+incoherency toward comprehension. The universe is a vast place, as we
+all know who think we comprehend it in admiring it. The things we
+cannot know are in reality of no consequence, in comparison with the
+few we can know. I can know, for instance, that my morning is the new
+era of my existence, and that I shall never live through another like
+it, as I have never lived through the one I recall in my memory, which
+was Yesterday. Yesterday was my event in experience then, as it is my
+event in memory now. I am related to the world by the way I feel
+attached to the life of it as exemplified in the vividness of the
+moment. I am, by reason of my peculiar personal experience, enabled to
+extract the magic from the moment, discarding the material husk of it
+precisely as the squirrel does the shell of the nut.</p>
+
+<p>I am preoccupied with the business of transmutation&mdash;which is to say,
+the proper evaluation of life as idea, of experience as delectable
+diversion. It is necessary for everyone to poetize his sensations in
+order to comprehend them. Weakness in the direction of philosophy
+creates the quality of dogmatic interrogation. A preoccupancy with
+religious characteristics assists those who are interested in the
+problem of sublimation. The romanticist is a kind of scientific person
+engaged in the correct assembling of chemical constituents that will
+produce a formula by which he can live out every one of his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[9]</a></span> moments
+with a perfect comprehension of their charm and of their everlasting
+value to him. If the romanticist have the advantage of comprehension
+of the sense of beauty as related to art, then he may be said to be
+wholly equipped for the exquisite legend of life in which he takes his
+place, as factor in the perfected memory of existence, which becomes
+the real history of life, as an idea. The person of most power in life
+is he who becomes high magician with the engaging and elusive trick.</p>
+
+<p>It is a fairy-tale in itself if you will, and everyone is entitled to
+his or her own private splendor, which, of course, must be invented
+from intelligence for oneself.</p>
+
+<p>There will be no magic found away from life. It is what you do with
+the street-corner in your brain that shall determine your gift. It
+will not be found in the wilderness, and in one's toying with the
+magic of existence is the one gift for the management of experience.</p>
+
+<p>I hope one day, when life as an "idea" permits, and that I have
+figured will be somewhere around my ninetieth year, to take up books
+that absorb the brains of the intelligent. When I read a book, it is
+because it will somehow expose to me the magic of existence. My fairy
+tales of late have been "Wuthering Heights," and the work of the
+Brothers James, Will and Henry. I am not so sure but that I like
+William best, and I assure you that is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[10]</a></span> saying a great deal, but it is
+only because I think William is more like life as idea.</p>
+
+<p>I shall hope when it comes time to sit in a garden and fold one's
+hands gently, listening to the birds all over again, watching the
+blossoms swinging with a still acuter eye, to take up the books of
+Grimm and Andersen, for I have a feeling they will be the books that
+will best corroborate my comprehension of life as an idea. I think it
+will be the best time to read them then, to go out with a memory
+softened by the warm hues and touches of legend that rise out of the
+air surrounding life itself.</p>
+
+<p>There will be a richer comprehension of "once upon a time there was a
+princess"&mdash;who wore a great many jewelled rings on her fingers and
+whose eyes were like deep pools in the farthest fields of the sky&mdash;for
+that will be the lady who let me love in the ways I was made to
+forget; the lady whose hands I have touched as gently as possible and
+from whom I have exacted no wish save that I might always love someone
+or something that was so like herself as to make me think it was no
+other than herself. It is because I love the idea of life better than
+anything else that I believe most of all in the magic of existence,
+and in spite of much terrifying and disillusioning experience of late,
+I <i>believe</i>.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[12]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="PART_ONE" id="PART_ONE"></a>PART ONE </h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[13]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="THE_RED_MAN" id="THE_RED_MAN"></a>THE RED MAN</h2>
+
+
+<p>It is significant that all races, and primitive peoples especially,
+exhibit the wish somehow to inscribe their racial autograph before
+they depart. It is our redman who permits us to witness the signing of
+his autograph with the beautiful gesture of his body in the form of
+the symbolic dance which he and his forefathers have practiced through
+the centuries, making the name America something to be remembered
+among the great names of the world and of time. It is the redman who
+has written down our earliest known history, and it is of his symbolic
+and esthetic endeavors that we should be most reasonably proud. He is
+the one man who has shown us the significance of the poetic aspects of
+our original land. Without him we should still be unrepresented in the
+cultural development of the world. The wide discrepancies between our
+earliest history and our present make it an imperative issue for
+everyone loving the name America to cherish him while he remains among
+us as the only esthetic representative of our great country up to the
+present hour. He has indicated for all time the symbolic splendor of
+our plains, canyons, mountains, lakes, mesas and ravines, our forests
+and our native skies, with their animal<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[14]</a></span> inhabitants, the buffalo, the
+deer, the eagle and the various other living presences in their midst.
+He has learned throughout the centuries the nature of our soil and has
+symbolized for his own religious and esthetic satisfaction all the
+various forms that have become benefactors to him.</p>
+
+<p>Americans of this time and of time to come shall know little or
+nothing of their spacious land until they have sought some degree of
+intimacy with our first artistic relative. The redman is the one truly
+indigenous religionist and esthete of America. He knows every form of
+animal and vegetable life adhering to our earth, and has made for
+himself a series of striking pageantries in the form of stirring
+dances to celebrate them, and his relation to them. Throughout the
+various dances of the Pueblos of the Rio Grande those of San Felipe,
+Santo Domingo, San Ildefonso, Taos, Tesuque, and all the other tribes
+of the west and the southwest, the same unified sense of beauty
+prevails, and in some of the dances to a most remarkable degree. For
+instance, in a large pueblo like Santo Domingo, you have the dance
+composed of nearly three hundred people, two hundred of whom form the
+dance contingent, the other third a chorus, probably the largest
+singing chorus in the entire redman population of America. In a small
+pueblo like Tesuque, the theme is beautifully represented by from
+three to a dozen individuals, all of them excellent performers in
+various ways. The same quality and the same character,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[15]</a></span> the same sense
+of beauty, prevails in all of them.</p>
+
+<p>It is the little pueblo of Tesuque which has just finished its series
+of Christmas dances&mdash;a four-day festival celebrating with all but
+impeccable mastery the various identities which have meant so much to
+them both physically and spiritually&mdash;that I would here cite as an
+example. It is well known that once gesture is organized, it requires
+but a handful of people to represent multitude; and this lonely
+handful of redmen in the pueblo of Tesuque, numbering at most but
+seventy-five or eighty individuals, lessened, as is the case with all
+the pueblos of the country to a tragical degree by the recent
+invasions of the influenza epidemic, showed the interested observer,
+in groups of five or a dozen dancers and soloists including drummers,
+through the incomparable pageantry of the buffalo, the eagle, the
+snowbird, and other varying types of small dances, the mastery of the
+redman in the art of gesture, the art of symbolized pantomimic
+expression. It is the buffalo, the eagle, and the deer dances that
+show you their essential greatness as artists. You find a species of
+rhythm so perfected in its relation to racial interpretation as hardly
+to admit of witnessing ever again the copied varieties of dancing such
+as we whites of the present hour are familiar with. It is nothing
+short of captivating artistry of first excellence, and we are familiar
+with nothing that equals it outside the Negro syncopation which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[16]</a></span> we
+now know so well, and from which we have borrowed all we have of
+native expression.</p>
+
+<p>If we had the redman sense of time in our system, we would be better
+able to express ourselves. We are notoriously unorganized in esthetic
+conception, and what we appreciate most is merely the athletic phase
+of bodily expression, which is of course attractive enough, but is not
+in itself a formal mode of expression. The redman would teach us to be
+ourselves in a still greater degree, as his forefathers have taught
+him to be himself down the centuries, despite every obstacle. It is
+now as the last obstacle in the way of his racial expression that we
+as his host and guardian are pleasing ourselves to figure. It is as
+inhospitable host we are quietly urging denunciation of his pagan
+ceremonials. It is an inhospitable host that we are, and it is amazing
+enough, our wanting to suppress him. You will travel over many
+continents to find a more beautifully synthesized artistry than our
+redman offers. In times of peace we go about the world seeking out
+every species of life foreign to ourselves for our own esthetic or
+intellectual diversion, and yet we neglect on our very doorstep the
+perhaps most remarkable realization of beauty that can be found
+anywhere. It is of a perfect piece with the great artistry of all
+time. We have to go for what we know of these types of expression to
+books and to fragments of stone, to monuments and to the preserved
+bits of pottery we now may see under glass mostly, while<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[17]</a></span> there is the
+living remnant of a culture so fine in its appreciation of the beauty
+of things, under our own home eye, so near that we can not even see
+it.</p>
+
+<p>A glimpse of the buffalo dance alone will furnish proof sufficient to
+you of the sense of symbolic significances in the redman that is
+unsurpassed. The redman is a genius in his gift of masquerade alone.
+He is a genius in detail, and in ensemble, and the producer of today
+might learn far more from him than he can be aware of except by
+visiting his unique performances. The redman's notion of the theatric
+does not depend upon artificial appliances. He relies entirely upon
+the sun with its so clear light of the west and southwest to do his
+profiling and silhouetting for him, and he knows the sun will
+cooperate with every one of his intentions. He allows for the sense of
+mass and of detail with proper proportion, allows also for the
+interval of escape in mood, crediting the value of the pause with the
+ability to do its prescribed work for the eye and ear perfectly, and
+when he is finished he retires from the scene carefully to the beating
+of the drums, leaving the emotion to round itself out gradually until
+he disappears, and silence completes the picture for the eye and the
+brain. His staging is of the simplest, and therefore, the most
+natural. Since he is sure of his rhythms, in every other dancer as
+well as himself, he is certain of his ensemble, and is likewise sure
+there will be no dead spots either in the scenario or in the
+presentation. His production is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[18]</a></span> not a show for the amusement of the
+onlooker; it is a pageant for the edification of his own soul. Each
+man is therefore concerned with the staging of the idea, because it is
+his own spiritual drama in a state of enaction, and each is in his own
+way manager of the scene, and of the duos, trios, and ensembles, or
+whatever form the dances may require. It is therefore of a piece with
+his conception of nature and the struggle for realism is not
+necessary, since he is at all times the natural actor, the natural
+expresser of the indications and suggestions derived from the great
+theme of nature which occupies his mind, and body, and soul. His
+acting is invented by himself for purposes of his own, and it is
+nature that gives him the sign and symbol for the expression of life
+as a synthesis. He is a genius in plastic expression, and every
+movement of his is sure to register in the unity of the theme, because
+he himself is a powerful unit of the group in which he may be
+performing. He is esthetically a responsible factor, since it concerns
+him as part of the great idea. He is leading soloist and auxiliary in
+one. He is the significant instrument in the orchestration of the
+theme at hand, and knows his body will respond to every requirement of
+phrasing. You will find the infants, of two and three years of age
+even, responding in terms of play to the exacting rhythms of the
+dance, just as with orientals it was the children often who wove the
+loveliest patterns in their rugs.</p>
+
+<p>In the instance of the buffalo dance of the Tesuque<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[19]</a></span> Indians, contrary
+to what might be expected or would popularly be conceived, there is
+not riotry of color, but the costumes are toned rather in the sombre
+hues of the animal in question, and after the tone of the dark flanks
+of the mountains crested and avalanched with snows, looking more like
+buffaloes buried knee deep in white drifts than anything else one may
+think of. They bring you the sense of the power of the buffalo
+personality, the formidable beast that once stampeded the prairies
+around them, solemnized with austere gesturing, enveloping him with
+stateliness, and the silence of the winter that surrounds themselves.
+Three men, two of them impersonating the buffalo, the third with bow
+and arrow in hand, doubtless the hunter, and two women representing
+the mother buffalo, furnish the ensemble. Aside from an occasional
+note of red in girdles and minor trappings, with a softening touch of
+green in the pine branches in their hands, the adjustment of hue is
+essentially one of the black and white, one of the most difficult
+harmonies in esthetic scales the painter encounters in the making of a
+picture, the most difficult of all probably, by reason of its limited
+range and the economic severity of color. It calls for nothing short
+of the finest perception of nuance, and it is the redman of America
+who knows with an almost flawless eye the natural harmonies of the
+life that surrounds him. He has for so long decorated his body with
+the hues of the earth that he has grown to be a part of them.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[20]</a></span> He is a
+living embodiment in color of various tonal characteristics of the
+landscape around him. He knows the harmonic value of a bark or a hide,
+or a bit of broken earth, and of the natural unpolluted coloring to be
+drawn out of various types of vegetable matter at his disposal. Even
+if he resorts to our present-day store ribbons and cheap trinkets for
+accessories, he does it with a view to creating the appearance of
+racial ensemble. He is one of the essential decorators of the world. A
+look at the totem poles and the prayer robes of the Indians of Alaska
+will convince you of that.</p>
+
+<p>In the buffalo dance, then, you perceive the redman's fine knowledge
+of color relations, of the harmonizing of buffalo skins, of white
+buckskins painted with most expressively simple designs symbolizing
+the various earth identities, and the accompanying ornamentation of
+strings of shells and other odd bits having a black or a grey and
+white lustre. You get an adjusted relation of white which traverses
+the complete scale of color possibility in monochrome. The two men
+representing the buffalo, with buffalo heads covering their heads and
+faces from view, down to their breasts, their bodies to the waist
+painted black, no sign of pencillings visible to relieve the austerity
+of intention, legs painted black and white, with cuffs of skunk's fur
+round the ankles to represent the death mask symbol, relieving the
+edges of the buckskin moccasins&mdash;in all this you have the notes that
+are necessary for the color balance of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[21]</a></span> idea of solemnity
+presented to the eye. You find even the white starlike splashes here
+and there on backs, breasts and arms coinciding splendidly with the
+flecks of eagles-down that quiver in the wind down their black bodies,
+and the long black hair of the accompanying hunter, as flecks of foam
+would rise from waterfalls of dark mountain streams; and the feathers
+that float from the tips of the buffalo horns seem like young eaglets
+ready to leave the eyry, to swim for the first time the far fields of
+air above and below them, to traverse with skill the sunlit spaces
+their eyes have opened to with a fierce amazement. Even the clouds of
+frozen breath darting from the lips of the dancers served as an
+essential phase of the symbolic decoration, and the girdles of tiny
+conchlike shells rattling round their agile thighs made a music you
+were glad to hear. The sunshine fell from them, too, in scales of
+light, danced around the spaces enveloping them along with the flecks
+of eagle-down that floated away from their bodies with the vigors of
+the dance, floating away from their dark warm bodies, and their
+jet-blue hair. It is the incomparable understanding of their own
+inventive rhythms that inspire and impress you as spectator. It is the
+swift comprehension of change in rhythm given them by the drummers,
+the speedy response of their so living pulsating bodies, the
+irresistible rapport with the varying themes, that thrills and invites
+you to remain close to the picture. They know, as perfect artists
+would<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[22]</a></span> know, the essential value of the materials at their disposal,
+and the eye for harmonic relationships is as keen as the impeccable
+gift for rhythm which is theirs. The note of skill was again
+accentuated when, at the close of the season's ensemble with a
+repetition of the beautiful eagle dance, there appeared two
+grotesqueries in the form of charming devil spirits in the hues of
+animals also, again in startling arrangements of black and white, with
+the single hint of color in the red lips of the masks that covered
+their heads completely from view, and from which long tails of white
+horsehair fell down their grey white backs&mdash;completing the feeling
+once again of stout animal spirits roaming through dark forests in
+search of sad faces, or, it may even be, of evil doers.</p>
+
+<p>All these dances form the single spectacle surviving from a great race
+that no American can afford actually to miss, and certainly not to
+ignore. It is easy to conceive with what furore of amazement these
+spectacles would be received if they were brought for a single
+performance to our metropolitan stage. But they will never be seen
+away from the soil on which they have been conceived and perpetuated.
+It is with a simple cordiality the redman permits you to witness the
+esthetic survivals of his great race. It is the artist and the poet
+for whom they seem to be almost especially created, since these are
+probably nearest to understanding them from the point of view of
+finely organized<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[23]</a></span> expression; for it is by the artist and the poet of
+the first order that they have been invented and perfected. We as
+Americans of today would profit by assisting as much as possible in
+the continuance of these beautiful spectacles, rather than to assist
+in the calm dismissal and destruction of them. It is the gesture of a
+slowly but surely passing race which they themselves can not live
+without; just as we, if we but knew the ineffable beauty of them,
+would want at least to avail ourselves of a feast for the eye which no
+other country in existence can offer us, and which any other nation in
+the world would be only too proud to cherish and foster.</p>
+
+<p>We are not, I think, more than vaguely conscious of what we possess in
+these redman festivities, by way of esthetic prize. It is with pain
+that one hears rumors of official disapproval of these rare and
+invaluable ceremonials. Those familiar with human psychology
+understand perfectly that the one necessary element for individual
+growth is freedom to act according to personal needs. Once an
+opposition of any sort is interposed, you get a blocked aspect of
+evolution, you get a withered branch, and it may even be a dead root.
+All sorts of complexes and complexities occur. You get deformity, if
+not complete helplessness and annihilation. I can not imagine what
+would happen to the redman if his one racial gesture were denied him,
+if he were forbidden to perform his symbolic dances from season to
+season. It is a survival that is as spiritually<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[24]</a></span> imperative to him as
+it is physically and emotionally necessary. I can see a whole flood of
+exquisite inhibitions heaped up for burial and dry rot within the
+caverns and the interstices of his soul. He is a rapidly disappearing
+splendor, despite the possible encouragement of statistics. He needs
+the dance to make his body live out its natural existence, precisely
+as he needs the air for his lungs and blood for his veins. He needs to
+dance as we need to laugh to save ourselves from fixed stages of
+morbidity and disintegration. It is the laughter of his body that he
+insists upon, as well as depends upon. A redman deprived of his racial
+gesture is unthinkable. You would have him soon the bleached carcass
+in the desert out of which death moans, and from which the lizard
+crawls. It would be in the nature of direct race suicide. He needs
+protection therefore rather than disapproval. It is as if you clipped
+the wing of the eagle, and then asked him to soar to the sun, to cut a
+curve on the sky with the instrument dislodged; or as if you asked the
+deer to roam the wood with its cloven hoofs removed. You can not cut
+the main artery of the body and expect it to continue functioning.
+Depriving the redman of his one enviable gesture would be cutting the
+artery of racial instinct, emptying the beautiful chamber of his soul
+of its enduring consciousness. The window would be opened and the bird
+flown to a dead sky. It is simply unthinkable. The redman is
+essentially a thankful and a religious being. He<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[25]</a></span> needs to celebrate
+the gifts his heaven pours upon him. Without them he would in short
+perish, and perish rapidly, having no breath to breathe, and no
+further need for survival. He is already in process of disappearance
+from our midst, with the attempts toward assimilation.</p>
+
+<p>Inasmuch as we have the evidence of a fine aristocracy among us still,
+it would seem as if it behooved us as a respectable host to let the
+redman guest entertain himself as he will, as he sublimely does, since
+as guardians of such exceptional charges we can not seem to entertain
+them. There is no logical reason why they should accept an inferior
+hospitality, other than with the idea of not inflicting themselves
+upon a strange host more than is necessary. The redman in the
+aggregate is an example of the peaceable and unobtrusive citizen; we
+would not presume to interfere with the play of children in the
+sunlight. They are among the beautiful children of the world in their
+harmlessness. They are among the aristocracy of the world in the
+matters of ethics, morals, and etiquette. We forget they are vastly
+older, and in symbolic ways infinitely more experienced than
+ourselves. They do not share in tailor-made customs. They do not need
+imposed culture, which is essentially inferior to their own. Soon we
+shall see them written on tablets of stone, along with the Egyptians
+and the others among the races that have perished. The esthetics of
+the redman have been too particular to permit<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[26]</a></span> of universal
+understanding, and of universal adaptation. It is the same with all
+primitives, who invent regimes and modes of expression for themselves
+according to their own specific psychological needs. We encourage
+every other sign and indication of beauty toward the progress of
+perfection. Why should not we encourage a race that is beautiful by
+the proof of centuries to remain the unoffensive guest of the sun and
+the moon and the stars while they may? As the infant prodigy among
+races, there is much that we could inherit from these people if we
+could prove ourselves more worthy and less egotistic.</p>
+
+<p>The artist and the poet of perception come forward with heartiest
+approval and it is the supplication of the poet and the artist which
+the redman needs most of all. Science looks upon him as a phenomenon;
+esthetics looks upon him as a giant of masterful expression in our
+midst. The redman is poet and artist of the very first order among the
+geniuses of time. We have nothing more native at our disposal than the
+beautiful creations of this people. It is singular enough that the as
+yet remote black man contributes the only native representation of
+rhythm and melody we possess. As an intelligent race, we are not even
+sure we want to welcome him as completely as we might, if his color
+were just a shade warmer, a shade nearer our own. We have no qualms
+about yellow and white and the oriental intermediate hues. We may
+therefore accept the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[27]</a></span> redman without any of the prejudices peculiar to
+other types of skin, and we may accept his contribution to our culture
+as a most significant and important one. We haven't even begun to make
+use of the beautiful hints in music alone which he has given to us. We
+need, and abjectly so I may say, an esthetic concept of our own. Other
+nations of the world have long since accepted Congo originality. The
+world has yet to learn of the originality of the redman, and we who
+have him as our guest, knowing little or nothing of his powers and the
+beauty he confers on us by his remarkable esthetic propensities,
+should be the first to welcome and to foster him. It is not enough to
+admit of archaeological curiosity. We need to admit, and speedily, the
+rare and excellent esthetics in our midst, a part of our own intimate
+scene. The redman is a spiritual expresser of very vital issues. If
+his pottery and his blankets offer the majority but little, his
+ceremonials do contribute to the comparative few who can perceive a
+spectacle we shall not see the equal of in history again. It would
+help at least a little toward proving to the world around us that we
+are not so young a country as we might seem, nor yet as diffident as
+our national attitude would seem to indicate. The smile alone of the
+redman is the light of our rivers, plains, canyons, and mountains. He
+has the calm of all our native earth. It is from the earth all things
+arise. It is our geography that makes us Americans of the present,
+chil<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[28]</a></span>dren. We are the product of a day. The redman is the product of
+withered ages. He has written and is still writing a very impressive
+autograph on the waste places of history. It would seem to me to be a
+sign of modernism in us to preserve the living esthetic splendors in
+our midst. Every other nation has preserved its inheritances. We need
+likewise to do the same. It is not enough to put the redman as a
+specimen under glass along with the auk and the dinosaur. He is still
+alive and longing to live. We have lost the buffalo and the beaver and
+we are losing the redman, also, and all these are fine symbols of our
+own native richness and austerity. The redman will perpetuate himself
+only by the survival of his own customs for he will never be able to
+accept customs that are as foreign to him as ours are and must always
+be; he will never be able to accept a culture which is inferior to his
+own.</p>
+
+<p>In the esthetic sense alone, then, we have the redman as a gift. As
+Americans we should accept the one American genius we possess, with
+genuine alacrity. We have upon our own soil something to show the
+world as our own, while it lives. To restrict the redman now would
+send him to an unrighteous oblivion. He has at least two contributions
+to confer, a very aristocratic notion of religion, and a superb gift
+for stylistic expression. He is the living artist in our midst, and we
+need not think of him as merely the anthropological variation or as an
+archaeological diversion merely. He proves the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[29]</a></span> importance of
+synthetic registration in peoples. He has created his system for
+himself, from substance on, through outline down to every convincing
+detail. We are in a position always of selecting details in the hope
+of constructing something usable for ourselves. It is the superficial
+approach. We are imitators because we have by nature or force of
+circumstance to follow, and improve upon, if we can. We merely
+"impose" something. We can not improve upon what the redman offers us
+in his own way. To "impose" something&mdash;that is the modern culture. The
+interval of imposition is our imaginary interval of creation. The
+primitives created a complete cosmos for themselves, an entire
+principle. I want merely, then, esthetic recognition in full of the
+contribution of the redman as artist, as one of the finest artists of
+time; the poetic redman ceremonialist, celebrant of the universe as he
+sees it, and master among masters of the art of symbolic gesture. It
+is pitiable to dismiss him from our midst. He needs rather royal
+invitation to remain and to persist, and he can persist only by
+expressing himself in his own natural and distinguished way, as is the
+case with all peoples, and all individuals, indeed.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[30]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="WHITMAN_AND_CEZANNE" id="WHITMAN_AND_CEZANNE"></a>WHITMAN AND C&Eacute;ZANNE</h2>
+
+
+<p>It is interesting to observe that in two fields of expression, those
+of painting and poetry, the two most notable innovators, Whitman and
+C&eacute;zanne bear a definite relationship in point of similarity of ideals
+and in their attitudes toward esthetic principles. Both of these men
+were so true to their respective ideals that they are worth
+considering at the same time in connection with each other: C&eacute;zanne
+with his desire to join the best that existed in the impressionistic
+principle with the classical arts of other times, or as he called it,
+to create an art like the Louvre out of impressionism. We shall find
+him striving always toward actualities, toward the realization of
+beauty as it is seen to exist in the real, in the object itself,
+whether it be mountain or apple or human, the entire series of living
+things in relation to one another.</p>
+
+<p>It is consistent that C&eacute;zanne, like all pioneers, was without
+prescribed means, that he had to spend his life inventing for himself
+those terms and methods which would best express his feelings about
+nature. It is natural that he admired the precision of Bouguereau, it
+is also quite natural that he should have worshipped in turn,
+Delacroix, Courbet, and without doubt, the mastery of Ingres, and it
+is in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[31]</a></span>dicative too that he felt the frank force of Manet. It was his
+special distinction to strive toward a simple presentation of simple
+things, to want to paint "that which existed between himself and the
+object," and to strive to solidify the impressionistic conception with
+a greater realization of form in space, the which they had so much
+ignored. That he achieved this in a satisfying manner may be observed
+in the best of his landscapes and still-lifes, and in some of the
+figure studies also. The endeavor to eliminate all aspects of
+extraneous conception by dismissing the quality of literature, of
+poetry and romance from painting, was the exact characteristic which
+made him what he is for us today, the pioneer in the field of modern
+art. It was significant enough when he once said to Renoir, that it
+took him twenty years to find out that painting was not sculpture.
+Those earlier and heavy impasto studies of his are the evidence of
+this worthy deduction. It was significant, too, when he said that
+Gaugin was but "a flea on his back," and that "he does nothing but
+paint Chinese images."</p>
+
+<p>The phrase that brings these two strikingly original personages in art
+together is the one of C&eacute;zanne: "I remain the primitive of the way I
+have discovered"; and that of Whitman, which comes if I am not
+mistaken from Democratic Vistas, though it may be from elsewhere in
+Whitman's prose, running chiefly: "I only wish to indicate the way for
+the innumerable poets that are to come after me," etc.,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[32]</a></span> and "I warn
+you this is not a book, this is a man." These two geniuses are both of
+one piece as to their esthetic intention, despite the great gulf that
+lies between their concepts of, and their attitudes toward life. For
+the one, life was a something to stay close to always, for the other,
+it was something to be afraid of to an almost abnormal degree; Whitman
+and his door never closed, C&eacute;zanne and his door seldom or never
+opened, indeed, were heavily padlocked against the intrusion of the
+imaginary outsider. These are the geniuses who have done most for
+these two arts of the present time, it is Whitman and C&eacute;zanne who have
+clarified the sleeping eye and withheld it from being totally blinded,
+from the onslaughts of jaded tradition.</p>
+
+<p>There were in C&eacute;zanne the requisite gifts for selection, and for
+discarding all useless encumbrances, there was in him the great desire
+for purification, or of seeing the superb fact in terms of itself,
+majestically; and if not always serenely, serenity was nevertheless
+his passionate longing. He saw what there was for him in those old and
+accepted masters who meant most to him, and he saw also what there was
+for him in that newest of old masters, which was also in its way the
+assumed discovery of our time, he saw the relativity of Greco's
+beautiful art to the art of his own making. He saw that here was a
+possible and applicable architectonic suited to the objects of his
+newly conceived principles, he felt in Greco the magnetic<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[33]</a></span> tendency of
+one thing toward another in nature, that trees and hills and valleys
+and people were not something sitting still for his special
+delectation, but that they were constantly aspiring to fruition,
+either physical, mental, or let us say, spiritual, even when the word
+is applied to the so-termed inanimate objects. He felt the
+"palpitancy," the breathing of all things, the urge outward of all
+life toward the light which helps it create and recreate itself. He
+felt this "movement" in and about things, and this it is that gives
+his pictures that sensitive life quality which lifts them beyond the
+aspect of picture-making or even mere representation. They are not
+cold studies of inanimate things, they are pulsing realizations of
+living substances striving toward each other, lending each other their
+individual activities until his canvases become, as one might name
+them, ensembles of animation, orchestrated life. We shall, I think,
+find this is what Greco did for C&eacute;zanne, and it is C&eacute;zanne who was
+among the first of moderns, if not the first, to appreciate that
+particular aspirational quality in the splendid pictures of Greco.
+They "move" toward their design, they were lifted by the quality of
+their organization into spaces in which they were free to carry on the
+fine illusion of life.</p>
+
+<p>Whitman has certainly aspired equally, but being more things in one
+than C&eacute;zanne, his task has been in some ways greater, more difficult,
+and may we say for humanistic reasons, loftier. Whitman's
+in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[34]</a></span>clusiveness was at one and the same time his virtue and his defect.
+For mystical reasons, it was imperative for him to include all things
+in himself, and so he set about enumerating all those elements which
+were in him, and of which he was so devoted and affectionate a part.
+That he could leave nothing out was, it may be said, his strongest
+esthetical defect, for it is by esthetical judgment that we choose and
+bring together those elements as we conceive it. It is the mark of
+good taste to reject that which is unessential, and the "tact of
+omission," well exemplified in C&eacute;zanne, has been found excellently
+axiomatic. So that it is the tendency in Whitman to catalogue in
+detail the entire obvious universe that makes many of his pages a
+strain on the mind as well as on the senses, and the eye especially.
+The absolute enforcement of this gift of omission in painting makes it
+easier for the artist, in that his mind is perforce engrossed with the
+idea of simplification, directness, and an easy relationship of the
+elements selected for presentation to each other.</p>
+
+<p>It is the quality of "living-ness" in C&eacute;zanne that sends his art to
+the heights of universality, which is another way of naming the
+classical vision, or the masterly conception, and brings him together
+with Whitman as much of the same piece. You get all this in all the
+great masters of painting and literature, Goethe, Shakespeare, Rubens,
+and the Greeks. It is the reaching out and the very mastering of life
+which makes all art great, and all artists<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[35]</a></span> into geniuses. It is the
+specializing on ideas which shuts the stream of its flow. I have felt
+the same gift for life in a still-life or a landscape of C&eacute;zanne's
+that I have felt in any of Whitman's best pieces. The element in
+common with these two exceptional creators is liberation. They have
+done more, these modern pioneers, for the liberation of the artist,
+and for the "freeing" of painting and poetry than any other men of
+modern time. Through them, painting and poetry have become literally
+free, and through them it is that the young painters and poets have
+sought new fields for self deliverance. Discipleship does not hold out
+long with the truly understanding. Those who really know what
+originality is are not long the slave of the power of imitation: it is
+the gifted assimilator that suffers most under the spell of mastery.
+Legitimate influence is a quality which all earnest creators learn to
+handle at once. Both poetry and painting are, or so it seems to me,
+revealing well the gift of understanding, and as a result we have a
+better variety of painting and of poetry than at the first outbreak of
+this so called modern esthetic epidemic.</p>
+
+<p>The real younger creators are learning the difference between surface
+and depth, between exterior semblances, and the underlying substances.
+Both Whitman and C&eacute;zanne stand together in the name of one common
+purpose, freedom from characteristics not one's own. They have taught
+the creators of this time to know what classicism really is, that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[36]</a></span> it
+is the outline of all things that endure. They have both shown that it
+is not idiosyncrasy alone which creates originality, that idiosyncrasy
+is but the husk of personal penetration, that it is in no way the
+constituent essential for genius. For genius is nothing but the name
+for higher perception, the greater degree of understanding. C&eacute;zanne's
+fine landscapes and still-lifes, and Whitman's majestic line with its
+gripping imagery are one and the same thing, for it reaches the same
+height in the mind. They walk together out of a vivid past, these two
+geniuses, opening the corridors to a possibly vivid future for the
+artists of now, and to come. They are the gateway for our modern
+esthetic development, the prophets of the new time. They are most of
+all, the primitives of the way they have begun, they have voiced most
+of all the imperative need of essential personalism, of direct
+expression out of direct experience, with an eye to nothing but
+quality and proportion as conceived by them. Their dogmas were both
+simple in the extreme, and of immense worth to us in their respective
+spheres. We may think of them as the giants of the beginning of the
+twentieth century, with the same burning desire to enlarge the general
+scope of vision, and the finer capacity for individual experience.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[37]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="ALBERT_P_RYDER" id="ALBERT_P_RYDER"></a>ALBERT P. RYDER</h2>
+
+
+<p>Albert P. Ryder possessed in a high degree that strict passivity of
+mental vision which calls into being the elusive yet fixed element the
+mystic Blake so ardently refers to and makes a principle of, that
+element outside the mind's jurisdiction. His work is of the essence of
+poetry; it is alien to the realm of esthetics pure, for it has very
+special spiritual histories to relate. His landscapes are somewhat
+akin to those of Michel and of Courbet. They suggest Michel's wide
+wastes of prodigal sky and duneland with their winding roads that have
+no end, his ever-shadowy stretches of cloud upon ever-shadowy
+stretches of land that go their austere way to the edges of some
+vacant sea. They suggest, too, those less remote but perhaps even more
+aloof spaces of solitude which were ever Courbet's theme in his deeper
+hours, that haunting sense of subtle habitation, that acute invasion
+of either wind or soft fleck of light or bright presence in a breadth
+of shadow, as if a breath of living essences always somehow pervaded
+those mystic woodland or still lowland scenes. But highly populate as
+these pictures of Courbet's are with the spirit of ever-passing feet
+that hover and hold converse in the remote wood, the remoter plain,
+they never quite surrender to that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[38]</a></span> ghostliness which possesses the
+pictures of our Ryder. At all times in his work one has the feeling of
+there having lately passed, if ever so fleetly, some bodily shape
+seeking a solitude of its own. I recall no other landscapes impressed
+with a more terrific austerity save Greco's incredible "Toledo," to my
+thinking a finality in landscape creation.</p>
+
+<p>There is quietude, solace, if you will, in Michel, in Courbet, but
+there is never a rest for the eye or the mind or the spirit in those
+most awesome of pictures which Ryder has presented to us, few as they
+are; for the Ryder legend is akin to the legend of Giorgione. There is
+always splendor in them but it is the splendor of the dream given over
+to a genius more powerful than the vision which has conjured them
+forth. It is distinctly a land of Luthany in which they have their
+being; he has inscribed for us that utter homelessness of the spirit
+in the far tracts that exist in the realm of the imagination; there is
+suffering in his pictures, that fainting of the spirit, that
+breathlessness which overtakes the soul in search of the consummation
+of beauty.</p>
+
+<p>Ryder is akin to Coleridge, too, for there is a direct visional
+analogy between "The Flying Dutchman" and the excessively pictorial
+stanzas of "The Ancient Mariner." Ryder has typified himself in this
+excellent portrayal of sea disaster, this profound spectacle of the
+soul's despair in conflict with wind and wave. Could any picture
+contain more of that remoteness of the world of our real heart as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[39]</a></span>
+well as our real eye, the artist's eye which visits that world in no
+official sense but only as a guest or a courtly spectator? No artist,
+I ought to say, was ever more master of his ideas and less master of
+the medium of painting than Ryder; there is in some of his finest
+canvases a most pitiable display of ignorance which will undoubtedly
+shorten their life by many years.</p>
+
+<p>I still retain the vivid impression that afflicted me when I saw my
+first Ryder, a marine of rarest grandeur and sublimity, incredibly
+small in size, incredibly large in its emotion&mdash;just a sky and a
+single vessel in sail across a conquering sea. Ryder is, I think, the
+special messenger of the sea's beauty, the confidant of its majesties,
+its hauteurs, its supremacies; for he was born within range of the sea
+and all its legends have hovered with him continually. Since that time
+I have seen a number of other pictures either in the artist's
+possession or elsewhere: "Death on the Racetrack," "Pegasus," canvases
+from The Tempest and Macbeth in that strange little world of chaos
+that was his home, his hermitage, so distraught with d&eacute;bris of the
+world for which he could seem to find no other place; I have spent
+some of the rare and lovelier moments of my experience with this
+gentlest and sweetest of other-world citizens; I have felt with
+ever-living delight the excessive loveliness of his glance and of his
+smile and heard that music of some far-away world which was his
+laughter; I have known that wisdom<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[40]</a></span> which is once and for all wisdom
+for the artist, that confidence and trust that for the real artist
+there is but one agency for the expression of self in terms of beauty,
+the eye of the imagination, that mystical third somewhere in the mind
+which transposes all that is legitimate to expression. To Ryder the
+imagination was the man; he was a poet painter, living ever outside
+the realm of theory.</p>
+
+<p>He was fond of Corot, and at moments I have thought of him as the heir
+and successor to some of Corot's haunting graces; but there was all
+the difference between them that there is between lyric pure and
+tragic pure. Ryder has for once transcribed all outer semblances by
+means of a personality unrelated to anything other than itself, an
+imagination belonging strictly to our soil and specifically to our
+Eastern geography. In his autographic quality he is certainly our
+finest genius, the most creative, the most racial. For our genius, at
+its best, is the genius of the evasive; we are born lovers of the
+secret element, the mystery in things.</p>
+
+<p>How many of our American painters have given real attention to Ryder?
+I find him so much the legend among professional artists, this master
+of arabesque, this first and foremost of our designers, this real
+creator of pattern, this first of all creators of tragic landscape,
+whose pictures are sacred to those that revere distinction and power
+in art. He had in him that finer kind of reverence for the element of
+beauty which finds all things somehow<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[41]</a></span> lovely. He understood best of
+all the meaning of the grandiose, of everything that is powerful; none
+of his associates in point of time rose to just that sublimated
+experience; not Fuller, not Martin, not Blakelock, though each of
+these was touched to a special expression. They are more derivative
+than Ryder, more the children of Barbizon.</p>
+
+<p>Ryder gave us first and last an incomparable sense of pattern and
+austerity of mood. He saw with an all too pitiless and pitiful eye the
+element of helplessness in things, the complete succumbing of things
+in nature to those elements greater than they that wield a fatal
+power. Ryder was the last of the romantics, the last of that great
+school of impressive artistry, as he was the first of our real
+painters and the greatest in vision. He was a still companion of Blake
+in that realm of the beyond, the first citizen of the land of Luthany.
+He knew the fine distinction between drama and tragedy, the tragedy
+which nature prevails upon the sensitive to accept. He was the painter
+poet of the immanent in things.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[42]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="WINSLOW_HOMER" id="WINSLOW_HOMER"></a>WINSLOW HOMER</h2>
+
+
+<p>In Winslow Homer we have yankeeism of the first order, turned to a
+creditable artistic account. With a fierce feeling for truth, a mania,
+almost, for actualities, there must have been somewhere in his make-up
+a gentleness, a tenderness and refinement which explain his fine
+appreciation of the genius of the place he had in mind to represent.
+There is not an atom of legend in Homer, it is always and always
+narrative of the obvious world. There is at once the essential
+dramatic import ruling the scene. With him it is nothing but dramatic
+relationship, the actionary tendency of the facts themselves, in
+nature. You are held by him constantly to the bold and naked theme,
+and you are left to wander in the imagination only among the
+essentials of simple and common realism.</p>
+
+<p>Narrative then, first and last with Homer, and the only creative
+aspect of his pictures is concealed in the technique. The only touch
+of invention in them is the desire to improve the language they speak.
+Dramatic always, I do not call them theatric excepting in the case of
+one picture that I know, called "Morro Castle" I think, now in the
+Metropolitan Museum, reminding me much of the commonplace, "Chateau de
+Chillon" of Courbet's,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[43]</a></span> neither of these pictures being of any value
+in the careers of their authors. But once you sat on the rocks of
+Maine, and watched the climbing of the surf up the morning sky after a
+heavy storm at sea, you realize the force of Homer's gift for the
+realities. His pictures are yankee in their indications, as a work of
+art could be, flinty and unyielding, resolute as is the yankee nature
+itself, or rather to say, the original yankee, which was pioneer then
+in a so rough yet resourceful country. It is the quality of Thoreau,
+but without the genius of Thoreau for the poetry of things.</p>
+
+<p>Homer's pictures give you nothing but the bare fact told in the better
+class terms of illustration, for he was illustrator, first of all.
+While the others were trying to make a little American Barbizon of
+their own, there were Homer, Ryder, Fuller, Martin, working alone for
+such vastly opposite ideas, and yet, of these men, four of them were
+expressing such highly imaginative ideas, and Homer was the
+unflinching realist among them. I do not know where Homer started, but
+I believe it was the sea at Prout's Neck that taught him most. I think
+that William Morris Hunt and Washington Allston must have seemed like
+infant Michelangelos then, for there is still about them a sturdiness
+which we see little of in the American art of that time, or even now
+for that matter. They had a certain massive substance, proving the
+force of mind and personality which was theirs, and while these men
+were prov<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[44]</a></span>ing the abundance and warmth of themselves, Homer was the
+frozen one among them. Nature was nature to him, and that alone he
+realized, and yet it was not precisely slavish imitation that impelled
+him.</p>
+
+<p>There was in him a very creditable sense of selection,&mdash;as will be
+seen especially in the water colours, so original with him, so gifted
+in their power of treatment&mdash;one of the few great masters of the
+medium the world has known. He knew the meaning of wash as few since
+have known it, he knew that it has scale and limitation of its own,
+and for all that, infinite suggestibility. Not Turner or Whistler have
+excelled him, and I do not know of anyone who has equalled him in
+understanding of this medium outside of Dodge Macknight and John
+Marin. It is in these so expressive paintings on paper that you feel
+the real esthetic longing as well as a certain contribution in Homer,
+the desire to realize himself and to release himself from too slavish
+imitation of nature and the too rigid consideration of truth. He was
+finer in technique than perhaps any that I have mentioned, though the
+two modern men have seconded him very closely, and in point of vision
+have, I am certain, surpassed him. Homer arrived because of his power
+to express what he wished to say, though his reach was far less lofty
+than theirs. He was essentially on the ground, and wanted to paint the
+very grip of his own feet on the rocks. He wanted the inevitability
+put down in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[45]</a></span> recognizable form. He had not feeling for the hint or the
+suggestion until he came to the water-color, which is of course most
+essentially that sort of medium. He knew its scope and its limitations
+and never stepped out of its boundaries, and he achieved a fine
+mastery in it. His imitators will never arrive at his severity because
+they are not flint yankee. They have not the hard head and snappy
+tongue. It was yankee crabbedness that gave Homer his grip on the idea
+he had in mind. Florida lent a softer tone to what Maine rocks could
+not give him. He is American from skin to skeleton, and a leader among
+yankee as well as American geniuses. He probably hated as much as
+Thoreau, and in his steely way admired as much. It was fire from the
+flintlock in them both, though nature had a far softer and loftier
+persuasion with the Concord philosopher and naturalist.</p>
+
+<p>Homer remains a figure in our American culture through his feeling for
+reality. He has learned through slavery to detail to put down the
+essential fact, however abundantly or however sparsely. He has a
+little of Courbet's sense of the real, and none whatever of his sense
+of the imaginative. It was enough for him to classicize the realistic
+incident. He impels me to praise through his yankee insistence upon
+integrity. Story is story with Homer and he leaves legend to itself.
+It is the narrative of the Whittier type, homely, genuine, and
+typical. He never stepped outside of his yankee determina<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[46]</a></span>tion. Homer
+has sent the art of water colour painting to a very high place in
+world consideration. He cannot be ignored as a master in this field.
+His paintings must be taken as they are, solid renderings of fact,
+dramatically considered. He offers nothing else. Once you have seen
+these realistic sea pictures, you may want to remember and you may
+want to forget, but they call for consideration. They are true in
+their living appreciation of reality.</p>
+
+<p>He knew the sea like the old salts that were his neighbors, and from
+accounts he was as full of the tang of the sea as they. He was a foe
+to compromise and a despiser of imposition. The best and most
+impersonal of him is in his work, for he never ventured to express
+philosophies, ethics, or morals in terms of picture-painting. That is
+to his credit at least. He was concerned with illustration first and
+last, as he was illustrator and nothing else. He taught the proceeding
+school of illustrators much in the significance of verity, and in the
+ways and means of expressing verity in terms of pigment. What the
+stiff pen and ink drawings and the cold engravings of his time taught
+him, he conferred upon the later men in terms of freedom of technique.
+And at the same time he rose a place, as painter and artist of no mean
+order, by a certain distinction inherent in him. He had little feeling
+for synthesis outside of the water-colours, and here it was necessary
+by virtue of the limitations of the medium.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[47]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Winslow Homer will not stimulate for all time only because his mind
+was too local. There is nothing of universal appeal in him. His
+realism will never reach the height even of the sea-pieces of Courbet,
+and I shall include Ryder as well. Courbet was a fine artist, and so
+was Ryder, and both had the advantage of exceptional imagination.
+Homer and Ryder are natives of the same coast and typify excellently
+the two poles in the New England temper, both in art and in life.
+Homer as realist, had the one idea in mind only, to illustrate realism
+as best he could in the most distinguished terms at the disposal of
+his personality. He succeeded admirably.</p>
+
+<p>Homer typifies a certain sturdiness in the American temper at least,
+and sends the lighter men away with his roughness, as doubtless he
+sent the curious away from his cliffs with the acidity of truth he
+poured upon them. He had lived so much in the close association of the
+roughest elements in existence, rocks and the madly swinging sea that
+glides over and above them defiantly, that he had without doubt taken
+on the character of them. The portrait of Homer gives him as one would
+expect him to look, and he looks like his pictures. His visage bore a
+ferocity that had to be met with a rocky certainty. It is evident
+there was no fooling him. He was filled with yankee tenacity and
+yankee courage. Homer is what you would expect to find if you were
+told to hunt up the natives of "Prout's Neck" or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[48]</a></span> "Perkins Cove," or
+any of the inlets of the Maine coast. These sea people live so much
+with the roughness of the sea, that if they are at all inclined to
+acidity, and the old fashioned yankee was sure to be, they take on the
+hard edges of a man's temper in accordance with the jaggedness of the
+shores on which they live. The man around the rocks looks so very like
+the profiles one sees in the rocks themselves. They have absorbed the
+energy of the dramatic elements they cope with, and you may be sure
+that life around the sea in New England is no easy existence; and they
+give out the same salty equivalent in human association.</p>
+
+<p>If you have lived by the sea, you have learned the significance of the
+bravery of sea people, and you learn to understand and excuse the
+sharpness of them which is given them from battle with the elemental
+facts they are confronted with at all times. That is the character of
+Homer, that is the quality of his painting. That is what makes him
+original in the American sense, and so recognizable in the New England
+sense. He is one of New England's strongest spokesmen, and takes his
+place by the side of Ryder, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Fuller, Whittier, and
+such representative temperaments, and it is this quality that
+distinguishes him from men like Inness, Wyant, and the less typical
+painters. It is obvious, too, that he never painted any other coast,
+excepting of course Florida, in the water colours.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[49]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It was Florida that produced the chef d'&oelig;uvre in him. It was Maine
+that taught him the force of the southern aspect. Romancer among the
+realistic facts of nature, he might be called, for he did not merely
+copy nature. He did invest things with their own suggestive reality,
+and he surmounted his earlier gifts for exact illustration by this
+other finer gift for romantic appreciation. Homer was an excellent
+narrator, as will be seen in the "Gulf Stream" picture in the
+Metropolitan Museum. It has the powers of Jack London and of Conrad in
+it. Homer was intense, vigorous, and masculine. If he was harsh in his
+characteristics, he was one who knew the worth of economy in emotion.
+He was one with his idea and his metier, and that is sufficient.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[50]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="AMERICAN_VALUES_IN_PAINTING" id="AMERICAN_VALUES_IN_PAINTING"></a>AMERICAN VALUES IN PAINTING</h2>
+
+
+<p>There are certain painters who join themselves together in a kind of
+grouping, which, whether they wish to think of themselves in this
+light or not, have become in the matter of American values in
+painting, a fixed associative aspect of painting in America. When we
+speak of American painting, the choice is small, but definite as to
+the number of artists, and the type of art they wished themselves to
+be considered for. From the Hudson River grouping, which up to Inness
+is not more marked than as a set of men copying nature with scrupulous
+fidelity to detail, rather than conveying any special feeling or
+notion of what a picture of, or the landscape itself, may convey; and
+leaving aside the American pupils of the Academy in Paris and Rome,
+most of whom returned with a rich sense of rhetorical
+conventionalities in art&mdash;men like William Morris Hunt and Washington
+Allston&mdash;we may turn to that other group of men as being far more
+typical of our soil and temper. I mean artists such as Homer Martin,
+Albert P. Ryder, George Fuller, and the later Winslow Homer who
+certainly did receive more recognition than any of them prior to his
+death.</p>
+
+<p>Martin, Ryder, and Fuller could not have enjoyed much in the way of
+appreciation outside of a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[51]</a></span> few artists of their time, and even now
+they may be said to be the artists for artists. It is reasonable to
+hope that they were not successful, since that which was &agrave; la mode in
+the expression of their time was essentially of the dry Academy. One
+would hardly think of Homer Martin's "Border of the Seine" landscape
+in the Metropolitan Museum, hardly more then than now, and it leaves
+many a painter flat in appreciation of its great dignity, austerity,
+reserve, and for the distinguished quality of its stylism. What Martin
+may have gotten, during his stay in Europe, which is called
+impressionism is, it must be said, a more aristocratic type of
+impressionism than issued from the Monet followers. Martin must then
+have been knowing something of the more dignified intellectualism of
+Pissarro and of Sisley, those men who have been the last to reach the
+degrees of appreciation due them in the proper exactitude.</p>
+
+<p>We cannot think of Martin as ever having carried off academic medals
+during his period. We cannot think of Martin as President of the
+Academy, which position was occupied by a far inferior artist who was
+likewise carried away by impressionism, namely Alden Weir. The actual
+attachment in characteristic of introspective temper in Alden Weir is
+not so removed from Martin, Fuller and Ryder as might be imagined; he
+is more like Martin perhaps though far less profound in his sense of
+mystery; Fuller being more the romanticist and Ryder in my esti<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[52]</a></span>mation
+the greatest romanticist, and artist as well, of all of these men. But
+Alden Weir failed to carry off any honor as to distinctive qualities
+and invention. A genial aristocrat if you will, but having for me no
+marked power outside of a Barbizonian interest in nature with a kind
+of mystical detachedness.</p>
+
+<p>But in the consideration of painters like Martin, Fuller and Ryder we
+are thinking chiefly of their relation to their time as well as their
+relation to what is to come in America. America has had as much
+painting considering its youth as could be expected of it and the best
+of it has been essentially native and indigenous. But in and out of
+the various influences and traditional tendencies, these several
+artists with fine imaginations, typical American imaginations, were
+proceeding with their own peculiarly original and significantly
+personal expressions. They represent up to their arrival, and long
+after as well, all there is of real originality in American painting,
+and they remain for all time as fine examples of artists with purely
+native imaginations, working out at great cost their own private
+salvations for public discovery at a later time.</p>
+
+<p>All these men were poor men with highly distinguished aristocratic
+natures and powerful physiques, as to appearances, with mentalities
+much beyond the average. When an exhibition of modern American
+painting is given, as it surely will and must be, these men and not
+the Barbizonian echoes as represented<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[53]</a></span> by Inness, Wyant &amp; Co., will
+represent for us the really great beginning of art in America. There
+will follow naturally artists like Twachtman and Robinson, as likewise
+Kenneth Hayes Miller and Arthur B. Davies for reasons that I think are
+rather obvious: both Hayes Miller and Arthur B. Davies having skipped
+over the direct influence of impressionism by reason of their
+attachment to Renaissance ideas; having joined themselves by
+conviction in perhaps slight degrees to aspects of modern painting.
+Miller is, one might say, too intellectually deliberate to allow for
+spontaneities which mere enthusiasms encourage. Miller is emotionally
+thrilled by Renoir but he is never quite swept. His essential
+conservatism hinders such violence. It would be happier for him
+possibly if the leaning were still more pronounced.</p>
+
+<p>The jump to modernism in Arthur B. Davies results in the same sort of
+way as admixture of influence though it is more directly appreciable
+in him. Davies is more willing, by reason of his elastic temper and
+intellectual vivacity, to stray into the field of new ideas with a
+simple though firm belief, that they are good while they last, no
+matter how long they last. Davies is almost a propagandist in his
+feeling for and admiration of the ultra-modern movement. Miller is a
+questioner and ponders long upon every point of consequence or
+inconsequence. He is a metaphysical analyst which is perhaps the
+extraneous element in his painting. In<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[54]</a></span> his etching, that is, the
+newest of it, one feels the sense of the classical and the modern
+joined together and by the classical I mean the quality of Ingres,
+Conjoined with modern as in Renoir, relieved of the influence of
+Italian Renaissance.</p>
+
+<p>But I do not wish to lose sight of these several forerunners in
+American art, Martin, Ryder and Fuller who, in their painting, may be
+linked not without relativity to our artists in literary imagination,
+Hawthorne and Poe. Fuller is conspicuously like Hawthorne, not by his
+appreciation of witchcraft merely, but by his feeling for those eery
+presences which determine the fates of men and women in their time.
+Martin is the purer artist for me since he seldom or never resorted to
+the literary emotion in the sense of drama or narrative, whereas in
+the instances of Ryder or Fuller they built up expression entirely
+from literary experience. Albert Ryder achieves most by reason of his
+vaster poetic sensibility&mdash;his Homeric instincts for the drama and by
+a very original power for arabesque. He is alone among the Americans
+in his unique gift for pattern. We can claim Albert Ryder as our most
+original painter as Poe takes his place as our most original poet who
+had of course one of the greatest and most perfect imaginations of his
+time and possibly of all time.</p>
+
+<p>But it is these several painters I speak of, Martin, Ryder, and
+Fuller, who figure for us as the originators of American indigenous
+painting. They<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[55]</a></span> will not be copied for they further nothing beyond
+themselves. No influence of these painters has been notable, excepting
+for a time in the early experience of one of the younger modernists
+who, by reason of definite associations of birthright and relativity
+of environment, essayed to claim Albert Ryder as a very definite
+influence; just as Courbet and Corot must in their ways have been
+powerful influences upon Ryder himself. Albert Ryder is too much of a
+figure to dismiss here with group-relationship, he must be treated of
+separately. So far then, there is no marked evidence that the
+influence of Fuller or Martin was powerful enough to carry beyond
+themselves. They had no tenets or theories other than those of
+personal clarification. All three remained the hermit radicals of
+life, as they remain isolated examples in American art; and all of
+them essentially of New England, in that they were conspicuously
+introspective, and shut in upon their own exclusive experience.</p>
+
+<p>But for all these variances, we shall find Homer Martin, George
+Fuller, and Albert Ryder forming the first nucleus for a definite
+value in strictly American painting. They were conscious of nothing
+really outside of native associations and native deductions. The
+temper of them is as essentially American as the quality of them is
+essentially Eastern in flavor. They seldom ventured beyond more than a
+home-spun richness of color, though in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[56]</a></span> Ryder's case Monticelli had
+assisted very definitely in his notion of the volume of tone. We find
+here then despite the impress of artists like William Morris Hunt,
+Washington Allston, and the later Inness with the still later Winslow
+Homer, that gripping and relentless realist who took hold of the newer
+school of painter-illustrators, that the artists treated of here may
+be considered as the most important phase of American painting in the
+larger sense of the term. If I were to assist in the arrangement of an
+all American exhibition to show the trend toward individualism I
+should begin with Martin, Fuller and Ryder. I should then proceed to
+Winslow Homer, John H. Twachtman, Theodore Robinson, Hayes Miller,
+Arthur B. Davies, Rockwell Kent, then to those who come under the
+eighteen-ninety tendency in painting, namely the
+Whistler-Goya-Velasquez influence.</p>
+
+<p>From this it will be found that an entirely new development had taken
+place among a fairly large group of younger men who came, and very
+earnestly, under the C&eacute;zannesque influence. It may be said that the
+choice of these men is a wise one for it is conspicuous among artists
+of today that since C&eacute;zanne art will never, cannot ever be the same,
+just as with Delacroix and Courbet a French art could never have
+remained the same. Impressionism will be found to have had a far
+greater value as a suggestive influence than as a creative one. It<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[57]</a></span>
+brought light in as a scientific aspect into modern painting and that
+is its valuable contribution. So it is that with C&eacute;zanne the world is
+conscious of a new power that will never be effectually shaken off,
+since the principles that are involved in the intention of C&eacute;zanne are
+of too vital importance to be treated with lightness of judgment. Such
+valuable ideas as C&eacute;zanne contributes must be accepted almost as
+dogma, albeit valuable dogma. Influence is a conscious and necessary
+factor in the development of all serious minded artists, as we have
+seen in the instances of all important ones.</p>
+
+<p>So it is I feel that the real art of America, and it can, I think,
+justly be said that there is such, will be headed by the imaginative
+artists I have named in point of their value as indigenous creators,
+having worked out their artistic destinies on home soil with all the
+virility of creators in the finer sense of the term. They have
+assisted in the establishment of a native tradition which without
+question has by this time a definite foundation. The public must be
+made aware of their contribution to a native production. It will no
+doubt be a matter for surprise to many people in the world today that
+art in general is more national or local than it has ever been, due
+mostly to the recent upheaval, which has been of great service to the
+re-establishment of art interest and art appreciation everywhere in
+the modern world. Art, like life, has had to begin all over<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[58]</a></span> again,
+for the very end of the world had been made visible at last. The
+artist may look safely over an utterly new horizon, which is the only
+encouragement the artist of today can hope for.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[59]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="MODERN_ART_IN_AMERICA" id="MODERN_ART_IN_AMERICA"></a>MODERN ART IN AMERICA</h2>
+
+
+<p>The question may be asked, what is the hope of modern art in America?
+The first reply would be that modern art will one day be realized in
+America if only from experience we learn that all things happen in
+America by means of the epidemical principle. It is of little visible
+use that single individuals, by sitting in the solitary confinement of
+their as yet little understood enthusiasms, shall hope to achieve what
+is necessary for the American idea, precisely as necessary for us here
+as for the peoples of Europe who have long since recognized that any
+movement toward expression is a movement of unquestionable importance.
+Until the moment when public sincerity and the public passion for
+excitement is stimulated, the vague art interests of America will go
+on in their dry and conventional manner. The very acute discernment of
+Maurice Vlaminck that "intelligence is international, stupidity is
+national, art is local" is a valuable deduction to make, and applies
+in the two latter instances as admirably to America as to any other
+country. Our national stupidity in matters of esthetic modernity is a
+matter for obvious acceptance, and not at all for amazement.</p>
+
+<p>That art is local is likewise just as true of America as of any other
+country, and despite the judgment<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</a></span> of stodgy minds, there is a
+definite product which is peculiar to our specific temper and
+localized sensibility as it is of any other country which is nameable.
+Despite the fact that impressionism is still exaggeration, and that
+large sums are still being paid for a "sheep-piece" of Charles Jacque,
+as likewise for a Ridgeway Knight, there is a well defined grouping of
+younger painters working for a definitely localized idea of modernism,
+just as in modern poetry there is a grouping of poets in America who
+are adding new values to the English language, as well as assisting in
+the realization of a freshly evolved localized personality in modern
+poetics.</p>
+
+<p>Art in America is like a patent medicine, or a vacuum cleaner. It can
+hope for no success until ninety million people know what it is. The
+spread of art as "culture" in America is from all appearances having
+little or no success because stupidity in such matters is so national.
+There is a very vague consideration of modern art among the directors
+of museums and among art dealers, but the comprehension is as vague as
+the interest. Outside of a Van Gogh exhibition, a few Matisses, now
+and then a C&eacute;zanne exhibited with great feeling of condescension,
+there is little to show the American public that art is as much a
+necessity as a substantial array of food is to an empty stomach. The
+public hunger cannot groan for what it does not recognize as real
+nourishment. There is no reason in the world why America does not have
+as many<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</a></span> chances to see modern art as Europe has, save for minor
+matters of distance. The peoples of the world are alike, sensibilities
+are of the same nature everywhere among the so-called civilized, and
+it must be remembered always that the so-called primitive races
+invented for their own racial salvation what was not to be found ready
+made for them. Modern art is just as much of a necessity to us as art
+was to the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Greeks. Those peoples have
+the advantage of us only because they were in a higher state of
+culture as a racial unit. They have no more of a monopoly upon the
+idea of rhythm and organization than we have, because that which was
+typical of the human consciousness then, is typical of it now. As a
+result of the war, there has been, it must be said, a heightening of
+national consciousness in all countries, because creative minds that
+were allowed to survive were sent home to struggle with the problem of
+their own soil.</p>
+
+<p>There is no reason whatever for believing that America cannot have as
+many good artists as any other country. It simply does not have them
+because the integrity of the artist is trifled with by the intriguing
+agencies of materialism. Painters find the struggle too keen and it is
+easy to become the advertising designer, or the merchant in painting,
+which is what many of our respectable artists have become. The lust
+for prosperity takes the place of artistic integrity and courage. But
+America need not be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[62]</a></span> surprised to find that it has a creditable
+grouping of artists sufficiently interested in the value of modern art
+as an expression of our time, men and possibly some women, who feel
+that art is a matter of private aristocratic satisfaction at least,
+until the public is awakened to the idea that art is an essentially
+local affair and the more local it becomes by means of comprehension
+of the international character, the truer it will be to the place in
+which it is produced.</p>
+
+<p>A catalogue of names will suffice to indicate the character and
+variation of the localized degree of expression we are free to call
+American in type: Morgan Russell, S. Macdonald Wright, Arthur G. Dove,
+William Yarrow, Dickinson, Thomas H. Benton, Abraham Walkowitz, Max
+Weber, Ben Benn, John Marin, Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler, Marsden
+Hartley, Andrew Dasburg, William McFee, Man Ray, Walt Kuhn, John
+Covert, Morton Schamberg, Georgia O'Keeffe, Stuart Davis, Rex
+Slinkard. Added to these, the three modern photographers Alfred
+Stieglitz, Charles Sheeler, and Paul Strand must be included. Besides
+these indigenous names, shall we place the foreign artists whose work
+falls into line in the movement toward modern art in America, Joseph
+Stella, Marcel Duchamp, Gaston Lachaise, Eli Nadelman. There may be no
+least questioning as to how much success all of these artists would
+have in their respective ways in the various groupings that prevail in
+Europe at this time. They would be recognized at once<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[63]</a></span> for the
+authenticity of their experience and for their integrity as artists
+gifted with international intelligence. There is no reason to feel
+that prevailing organizations like the Society of Independent Artists,
+Inc., and the Soci&eacute;t&eacute; Anonyme, Inc., will not bear a great increase of
+influence and power upon the public, as there is every reason to
+believe that at one time or another the public will realize what is
+being done for them by these societies, as well as what was done by
+the so famous "291" gallery.</p>
+
+<p>The effect however is not vast enough because the public finds no
+shock in the idea of art. It is not melodramatic enough and America
+must be appealed to through its essentially typical melodramatic
+instincts. There is always enough music, and there are some who
+certainly can say altogether too much of the kind there is in this
+country. The same thing can be said of painting. There is altogether
+too much of comfortable art, the art of the uplifted illustration. It
+is the reflex of the Anglo-Saxon passion for story-telling in pictures
+which should be relegated to the field of the magazines. Great art
+often tells a story but great art is always something plus the idea.
+Ordinary art does not rise above it.</p>
+
+<p>I often wonder why it is that America, which is essentially a country
+of sports and gamblers, has not the European courage as well as
+rapacity for fresh development in cultural matters. Can it be because
+America is not really intelligent? I should<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[64]</a></span> be embarrassed in
+thinking so. There is nevertheless an obvious lethargy in the
+appreciation of creative taste and a still lingering yet old-fashioned
+faith in the continual necessity for importation. America has a great
+body of assimilators, and out of this gift for uncreative assimilation
+has come the type of art we are supposed to accept as our own. It is
+not at all difficult to prove that America has now an encouraging and
+competent group of young and vigorous synthesists who are showing with
+intelligence what they have learned from the newest and most engaging
+development of art, which is to say&mdash;modern art. The names which have
+been inserted above are the definite indication, and one may go so far
+as to say proof, of this argument that modern art in America is
+rapidly becoming an intelligently localized realization.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[65]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="OUR_IMAGINATIVES" id="OUR_IMAGINATIVES"></a>OUR IMAGINATIVES</h2>
+
+
+<p>Is it vision that creates temperament or temperament that creates
+vision? Physical vision is responsible for nearly everything in art,
+not the power to see but the way to see. It is the eye perfect or the
+eye defective that determines the kind of thing seen and how one sees
+it. It was certainly a factor in the life of Lafcadio Hearn, for he
+was once named the poet of myopia. It was the acutely sensitive eye of
+C&eacute;zanne that taught him to register so ably the minor and major
+variations of his theme. Manet saw certainly far less colour than
+Renoir, for in the Renoir sense he was not a colourist at all. He
+himself said he painted only what he saw. Sight was almost science
+with C&eacute;zanne as it was passion.</p>
+
+<p>In artists like Homer Martin there is a something less than visual
+accuracy and something more than a gift of translation. There is a
+distinguished interpretation of mood coupled with an almost
+miniature-like sense of delicate gradation, and at the same time a
+something lacking as to a sense of physical form. In the few specimens
+of Martin to be seen there is, nevertheless, eminent distinction
+paramount. He was an artist of "oblique integrity": He saw
+unquestionably at an angle, but the angle was a beau<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[66]</a></span>tiful one, and
+while many of his associates were doing American Barbizon, he was
+giving forth a shy, yet rare kind of expression, always a little
+symbolic in tendency, with the mood far more predominant. In "The sand
+dunes of Ontario" there will be found at once a highly individualistic
+feeling for the waste places of the world. There is never so much as a
+hint of banality in his selection. He never resorts to stock rhetoric.</p>
+
+<p>Martin will be remembered for his singularly personal touch along with
+men like Fuller and Ryder. He is not as dramatic as either of these
+artists, but he has greater finesse in delicate sensibility. He was, I
+think, actually afraid of repetition, a characteristic very much in
+vogue in his time, either conscious or unconscious, in artists like
+Inness, Wyant, and Blakelock, with their so single note. There is
+exceptional mysticity hovering over his hills and stretches of dune
+and sky. It is not fog, or rain, or dew enveloping them. It is a
+certain veiled presence in nature that he sees and brings forward. His
+picture of peaks of the White Mountains, Jefferson and Madison, gives
+you no suggestion of the "Hudson River" emptiness. He was searching
+for profounder realities. He wanted the personality of his places, and
+he was successful, for all of his pictures I have seen display the
+magnetic touch. He "touched it off" vividly in all of them. They
+reveal their ideas poetically and esthetically and the method is
+personal and ample for presentation.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[67]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>With George Fuller it was vastly different. He seemed always to be
+halting in the shadow. You are conscious of a deep and ever so earnest
+nature in his pictures. He impressed himself on his canvases in spite
+of his so faulty expression. He had an understanding of depth but
+surface was strange to him. He garbled his sentences so to speak with
+excessive and useless wording. "The Octoroon" shows a fine feeling for
+romance as do all of the other pictures of Fuller that have been
+publicly visible, but it is romance obsessed with monotone. There is
+the evidence of extreme reticence and moodiness in Fuller always. I
+know little of him save that I believe he experienced a severity of
+domestic problems. Farmer I think he was, and painted at off hours all
+his life. It is the poetry of a quiet, almost sombre order, walking in
+the shadow on the edge, of a wood being almost too much of an
+appearance for him in the light of a busy world.</p>
+
+<p>Why is it I think of Hawthorne when I think of Fuller? Is there a
+relationship here, or is it only a similarity of eeriness in temper? I
+would suspect Fuller of having painted a Hester Prynne excepting that
+he could never have come to so much red in one place in his pictures.</p>
+
+<p>There was vigour in these strong, simple men, masculine in sensibility
+all of them, and a fine feeling for the poetic shades of existence.
+They were intensely serious men, and I think from their isolation<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[68]</a></span> in
+various ways, not popular in their time. Neither are they popular now.
+They will only be admired by artists of perception, and by laymen of
+keen sensibility. Whether their enforced isolations taught them to
+brood, or whether they were brooders by nature, it is difficult to
+say. I think they were all easterners, and this would explain away
+certain characteristic shynesses of temper and of expression in them.
+Ryder, as we know, was the typical recluse, Fuller in all likelihood
+also. Martin I know little of privately, but his portrait shows him to
+be a strong elemental nature, with little feeling for, or interest in,
+the superficialities either of life or of art. Of Blakelock I can say
+but little, for I do not know him beyond a few stylish canvases which
+seem to have more of Diaz and Rousseau in them than contributes to
+real originality, and he was one of the painters of repetition also. A
+single good Blakelock is beautiful, and I think he must be included
+among the American imaginatives, but I do not personally feel the
+force of him in several canvases together.</p>
+
+<p>All of these artists are singularly individual, dreamers like Mathew
+Maris and Mar&eacute;es of Europe. They all have something of Coleridge about
+them, something of Poe, something of the "Ancient Mariner" and the
+"Haunted Palace", sailors in the same ship, sleepers in the same
+house. All of these men were struggling at the same time, the painters
+I mean, the same hour it might be said,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[69]</a></span> in the midst of conventions
+of a severer type of rigidity than now, to preserve themselves from
+commonplace utterance. They were not affected by fashions. They had
+the one idea in mind, to express themselves in terms of themselves,
+and they were singularly successful in this despite the various
+difficulties of circumstance and of temper that attended them. They
+understood what this was better than anyone, and the results in
+varying degrees of genius attest to the quality of the American
+imagination at its best.</p>
+
+<p>I should like, for purposes of reference, to see a worthy exhibition
+of all of these men in one place. It would I am sure prove my
+statement that the eastern genius is naturally a tragic one, for all
+of these men have hardly once ventured into the clear sunlight of the
+world of every day. It would offset highly also, the superficial
+attitude that there is no imagination in American painting. We should
+not find so much of form or of colour in them in the stricter meaning
+of these ideas, as of mood. They might have set themselves to be
+disciples of William Blake's significant preachment, "put off
+intellect and put on imagination, the imagination is the man"; the
+intellect being the cultivated man, and the imagination being the
+natural man. There is imagination which by reason of its power and
+brilliance exceeds all intellectual effort, and effort at
+intellectualism is worse than a fine ignorance by far. Men who are
+highly imaginative, create by feeling what they do<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[70]</a></span> not or cannot
+know. It is the sixth sense of the creator.</p>
+
+<p>These artists were men alone, touched with the pristine significance
+of nature. It was pioneering of a difficult nature, precarious as all
+individual investigation of a spiritual or esthetic character is sure
+to be. Its first requisite is isolation, its last requisite is
+appreciation. All of these painters are gone over into that place they
+were so eager to investigate, illusion or reality. Their pictures are
+witness here to their seriousness. They testify to the bright
+everlastingness of beauty. If they have not swayed the world, they
+have left a dignified record in the art of a given time. Their
+contemporary value is at least inestimable. They are among the very
+first in the development of esthetics in America in point of merit.
+They made no compromise, and their record is clear.</p>
+
+<p>If one looks over the record of American art up to the period of
+ultra-modernism, it will be found that these men are the true
+originals among American painters. We shall find outside of them and a
+very few others, so much of sameness, a certain academic convention
+which, however pronounced or meagre the personalities are, leave those
+personalities in the category of "safe" painters. They do not disturb
+by an excessively intimate point of view toward art or toward nature.
+They come up to gallery requirements by their "pleasantness" or the
+inoffensiveness of their style. They offer little in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[71]</a></span> the way of
+interpretive power or synthetic understanding. It is the tendency to
+keep on the comfortable side in American art. Doubtless it is more
+practical as any innovator or investigator has learned for himself.
+Artists like Ryder and Martin and Fuller had nothing in common with
+market appreciations. They had ideas to express, and were sincere to
+the last in expressing them.</p>
+
+<p>You will find little trace of commercialism in these men, even when,
+as in the case of Martin and Ryder and I do not know whom else, they
+did panels for somebody-or-other's leather screen, of which
+"Smuggler's Cove" and the other long panel of Ryder's in the
+Metropolitan Museum are doubtless two. They were not successful in
+their time because they could not repeat their performances. We know
+the efforts that were once made to make Ryder comfortable in a
+conventional studio, which he is supposed to have looked into once;
+and then he disappeared, as it was altogether foreign to him. Each
+picture was a new event in the lives of these men, and had to be
+pondered over devoutly, and for long periods often, as in the case of
+Ryder. Work was for him nine-tenths reflection and meditation and
+poetic brooding, and he put down his sensations on canvas with great
+difficulty in the manner of a labourer. It seems obvious that his
+first drafts were always vivid with the life intended for them, but no
+one could possibly have suffered with the idea of how to complete a
+picture more than he. His lack<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[72]</a></span> of facility held him from spontaneity,
+as it is likewise somewhat evident in Martin, and still more in
+Fuller.</p>
+
+<p>They were artists in timidity, and had not the courage of physical
+force in painting. With them it was wholly a mental process. But we
+shall count them great for their purity of vision as well as for the
+sincerity and conviction that possessed them. Artistry of this sort
+will be welcomed anywhere, if only that we may take men seriously who
+profess seriousness. There is nothing really antiquated about
+sincerity, though I think conventional painters are not sure of that.
+It is not easy to think that men consent to repeat themselves from
+choice, and yet the passing exhibitions are proof of that. Martin and
+Ryder and Fuller refresh us with a poetic and artistic validity which
+places them out of association among men of their time or of today, in
+the field of objective and illustrative painters. We turn to them with
+pleasure after a journey through the museums, for their reticence let
+us say, and for the refinement of their vision, their beautiful gift
+of restraint. They emphasize the commonness of much that surrounds
+them, much that blatantly would obscure them if they were not
+pronouncedly superior. They would not be discounted to any
+considerable degree if they were placed among the known masters of
+landscape painters of all modern time. They would hold their own by
+the verity of feeling that is in them, and what they might lose in
+technical excellence, would be com<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[73]</a></span>pensated for in uniqueness of
+personality. I should like well to see them placed beside artists like
+Maris and Mar&eacute;es, and even Courbet. It would surprise the casual
+appreciator much, I believe.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[74]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="OUR_IMPRESSIONISTS" id="OUR_IMPRESSIONISTS"></a>OUR IMPRESSIONISTS</h2>
+
+
+<p>I have for purely personal reasons chosen the two painters who
+formulate for me the conviction that there have been and are but two
+consistently convincing American impressionists. These gentlemen are
+John H. Twachtman and Theodore Robinson. I cannot say precisely in
+what year Twachtman died but for purposes intended here this data is
+of no paramount consequence, save that it is always a matter of query
+as to just how long an artist must live, or have been dead, to be
+discovered in what is really his own time.</p>
+
+<p>John H. Twachtman as artist is difficult to know even by artists; for
+his work is made difficult to see either by its scarcity as determined
+for himself or by the exclusiveness of the owners of his pictures. It
+requires, however, but two or three of them to convince one that
+Twachtman has a something "plus" to contribute to his excursions into
+impressionism. One feels that after a Duesseldorf blackness which
+permeates his earlier work his conversion to impressionism was as
+fortunate as it was sincere. Twachtman knew, as is evidenced
+everywhere in his work, what he wished to essay and he proceeded with
+poetic reticence to give it forth. With a lyricism that is as
+convincing as it is authentic, you feel that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[75]</a></span> there is a certain
+underlying spirit of resignation. He surely knew that a love of
+sunlight would save any man from pondering on the inflated importance
+of world issues.</p>
+
+<p>Having seen Twachtman but once my memory of his face recalls this
+admixture of emotion. He cared too much for the essential beauties to
+involve them with analyses extraneous to the meaning of beauty. That
+the Japanese did more for him than any other Orientals of whom he
+might have been thinking, is evident. For all that, his own personal
+lyricism surmounts his interest in outer interpretations of light and
+movement, and he leaves you with his own notion of a private and
+distinguished appreciation of nature. In this sense he leads one to
+Renoir's way of considering nature which was the pleasure in nature
+for itself. It was all too fine an adventure to quibble about.</p>
+
+<p>Twachtman's natural reticence and, I could also believe, natural
+skepticism kept him from swinging wildly over to the then new
+theories, a gesture typical of less intelligent natures. He had the
+good sense to feel out for himself just where the new theories related
+to himself and set about producing flat simplicity of planes of color
+to produce a very distinguished notion of light. He dispensed with the
+photographic attitude toward objectivity and yet at the same time held
+to the pleasing rhythmical shapes in nature. He did not resort to
+divisionalism or to ultra-violence of relationship. The pictures that
+I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[76]</a></span> have seen such as "February", for instance, in the Boston Museum,
+present for me the sensation of a man of great private spiritual and
+intellectual means, having the wish to express tactfully and
+convincingly his personal conclusions and reactions, leaning always
+toward the side of iridescent illusiveness rather than emotional
+blatancy and irrelevant extravagance. His nuances are perhaps too
+finely adjusted to give forth the sense of overwhelming magic either
+in intention or of execution. It is lyrical idea with Twachtman with
+seldom or never a dramatic gesture. He is as illusive as a phrase of
+Mallarm&eacute; and it will be remembered that he is of the period more or
+less of the rose and the lily and the lost idea in poetry. He does
+recall in essence at least the quality of pastels in prose, though the
+art intention is a sturdier one. It is enough that Twachtman did find
+his relationship to impressionism, and that he did not evolve a system
+of repetition which marks the failure of all influence.</p>
+
+<p>Twachtman remains an artist of super-fine sensibility and distinction,
+and whatever he may have poured into the ears of students as an
+instructor left no visible haggard traces on his own production other
+than perhaps limiting that production. But we know that while the
+quality is valuable in respect of power it has no other precise value.
+We remember that Giorgione perished likewise with an uncertain product
+to his credit, as to numbers, but he did leave his immemorial
+impression. So it is with John<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[77]</a></span> H. Twachtman. He leaves his indelible
+influence among Americans as a fine artist, and he may be said to be
+among the few artists who, having taken up the impressionistic
+principle, found a way to express his personal ideas with a true
+degree of personal force. He is a beautifully sincere product and that
+is going far. Those pictures I have seen contain no taint of the
+market or clamoring for praise even. They were done because their
+author had an unobtrusive yet very aristocratic word to say, and the
+word was spoken with authority. John H. Twachtman must be counted as
+one of the genuine American artists, as well as among the most genuine
+artists of the world. If his pictures do not torment one with
+problematic intellectualism, they do hold one with their inherent
+refinement of taste and a degree of aristocratic approach which his
+true intelligence implies.</p>
+
+<p>With the work of Theodore Robinson, there comes a wide divergence of
+feeling that is perhaps a greater comprehension of the principles of
+impressionism as applied to the realities involved in the academic
+principle. One is reminded of Bastien Le Page and L&eacute;on L'Hermitte, in
+the paintings of Robinson, as to their type of subject and the
+conception of them also. That he lived not far from Giverney is
+likewise evident. Being of New England yankee extraction, a Vermonter
+I believe, he must have essayed always a sense of economy in emotion.
+No one could have gone so far as the then incredible Monet, whose
+pictures wear us to indifference with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[78]</a></span> vapid and unprofitable
+thinking. What Monet did was to encourage a new type of audacity and a
+brand-new type in truth, when no one had up to then attempted to see
+nature as prismatical under the direct influence of the solar rays.
+All this has since been worked out with greater exactitude by the
+later theorists in modernism.</p>
+
+<p>While Van Gogh was slowly perishing of a mad ecstasy for light,
+covering up a natural Dutch realism with fierce attempts at prismatic
+relationship, always with the rhythms in a state of ecstatic
+ascendency; and Seurat had come upon the more satisfying pointillism
+as developed by himself; somewhere in amid all these extravagances men
+like Robinson were trying to combine orthodoxy of heritage and
+radicalist conversion with the new and very noble idea of
+impressionism. That Robinson succeeded in a not startling but
+nevertheless honorable and respectable fashion, must be conceded him.
+I sometimes think that Vignon, a seemingly obscure associate of the
+impressionists, with a similar impassioned feeling of realism, outdid
+him and approached closer to the principles as understood by Pissarro:
+probably better by a great deal than Monet himself, who is accredited
+with the honor of setting the theme moving in a modern line of that
+day. And Pissarro must have been a man to have so impressed all the
+men young and old of his time. After seeing a great number of Monet's
+one turns to any simple Pissarro for relief. And then there was also
+Sisley.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[79]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But the talk is of Theodore Robinson. He holds his place as a realist
+with hardly more than a realist's conception, subjoined to a really
+pleasing appreciation of the principles of impressionism as imbibed by
+him from the source direct. Here are, then, the two true American
+impressionists, who, as far as I am aware, never slipped into the
+banalities of reiteration and marketable self-copy. They seem to have
+far more interest in private intellectual success than in a practical
+public one. It is this which helped them both, as it helps all serious
+artists, to keep their ideas clean of outward taint. This is one of
+the most important factors, which gives a man a place in the art he
+essays to achieve. When the day of his work is at an end it will be
+seen by everyone precisely what the influences were that prompted his
+effort toward deliverance through creation. It is for the sake of this
+alone that sincere artists keep to certain principles, and with
+genuine sacrifice often, as was certainly the case with Twachtman. And
+after all, how can a real artist be concerned as to just how salable
+his product is to be? Certainly not while he is working, if he be
+decent toward himself. This is of course heresy, with Wall Street so
+near.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[80]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="ARTHUR_B_DAVIES" id="ARTHUR_B_DAVIES"></a>ARTHUR B. DAVIES</h2>
+
+
+<p>If Arthur B. Davies had found it necessary, as in the modern time it
+has been found necessary to separate literature from painting, we
+should doubtless have had a very delicate and sensitive lyric poetry
+in book form. Titles for pictures like "Mirrored Dreaming,"
+"Sicily-Flowering Isle," "Shell of Gold," "A Portal of the Night,"
+"Mystic Dalliance," are all of them creations of an essentially poetic
+and literary mind. They are all splendid titles for a real book of
+legendary experience. The poet will be first to feel the accuracy of
+lyrical emotion in these titles. The paintings lead one away entirely
+into the land of legend, into the iridescent splendor of reflection.
+They take one out of a world of didactic monotone, as to their
+artistic significance. They are essentially pictures created for the
+purpose of transportation.</p>
+
+<p>From the earlier days in that underground gallery on Fifth Avenue near
+Twenty-seventh Street to the present time, there has been a constantly
+flowing production of lyrical simplicity and purification. One can
+never think of Davies as one thinks of Courbet and of C&eacute;zanne, where
+the intention is first and last a technically esthetic one; especially
+in C&eacute;zanne, whose object was the removal of all significance from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[81]</a></span>
+painting other than that of painting for itself. With C&eacute;zanne it was
+problem. One might even say it was the removal of personality. With
+Davies you are aware that it is an entirely intimate personal life he
+is presenting; a life entirely away from discussion, from all sense of
+problem; they are not problematic at all, his pictures; they have
+lyrical serenity as a basis, chiefly. Often you have the sensation of
+looking through a Renaissance window upon a Greek world&mdash;a world of
+Platonic verities in calm relation with each other. It is essentially
+an art created from the principle of the harmonic law in nature,
+things in juxtaposition, cooperating with the sole idea of a poetic
+existence. The titles cover the subjects, as I have suggested. Arthur
+B. Davies is a lyric poet with a decidedly Celtic tendency. It is the
+smile of a radiant twilight in his brain. It is a country of green
+moon whispers and of shadowed movement. Imagination illuminating the
+moment of fancy with rhythmic persuasiveness. It is the Pandaean
+mystery unfolded with symphonic accompaniment. You have in these
+pictures the romances of the human mind made irresistible with melodic
+certainty. They are <i>chansons sans paroles</i>, sung to the syrinx in
+Sicilian glades.</p>
+
+<p>I feel that it is our own romantic land transposed into terms of
+classical metre. The color is mostly Greek, and the line is Greek. You
+could just as well hear Gl&uuml;ck as Keats; you could just as well see the
+world by the light of the virgin lamp, and watch<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[82]</a></span> the smoke of old
+altars coiling among the cypress boughs. The redwoods of the West
+become columns of Doric eloquence and simplicity. The mountains and
+lakes of the West have become settings for the reading of the
+"Centaur" of Maurice de Guerin. You see the reason for the titles
+chosen because you feel that the poetry of line and the harmonic
+accompaniment of color is the primal essential. They are not so
+dynamic as suggestive in their quality of finality. The way is left
+open, in other words, for you yourself to wander, if you will, and
+possess the requisite instincts for poetry.</p>
+
+<p>The presence of Arthur B. Davies, and conversation with him convince
+one that poetry and art are in no sense a diversion or a delusion
+even. They are an occupation, a real business for intelligent men and
+women. He is occupied with the essential qualities of poetry and
+painting. He is eclectic by instinct. Spiritually he arrives at his
+conviction through these unquestionable states of lyrical existence.
+He is there when they happen. That is authenticity sufficient. They
+are not wandering moods. They are organized conditions and attitudes,
+intellectually appreciated and understood. He is a mystic only in the
+sense that perhaps all lyrical poetry is mystic, since it strives for
+union with the universal soul in things.</p>
+
+<p>It is perfectly autobiographical, the work of Arthur B. Davies, and
+that is so with all genuine expression. You find this gift for
+conviction in power<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[83]</a></span>ful painter types, like Courbet and Delacroix, who
+are almost propagandic in their fiercely defined insistence upon the
+chosen esthetic principle. Whatever emanation, illusion, or "aura,"
+dreadful word that it is, springing from the work of Davies, is only
+typical of what comes from all magical intentions, the magic of the
+world of not-being, made real through the operation of true fancy.
+Davies' pictures are works of fancy, then, in contradistinction to the
+essays of the imagination such as those of William Blake. Poets like
+Davies are lookers-in. Poets like Blake are the austere residents of
+the country they wander in. The lookers-in are no less genuine. They
+merely "make" their world. It might be said they make the prosaic
+world over again, transform it by a system of prescribed magic. This
+work, then, becomes states of fancy dramatized in lyric metre. Davies
+feels the visionary life of facts as a scientist would feel them
+actually. He has the wish for absolute order and consistency. There is
+nothing vague or disconcerting in his work, no lapses of rhetoric. It
+is, in its way, complete, one may say, since it is the intelligently
+contrived purpose of this poet to arrive at a scheme of absolute
+spiritual harmony.</p>
+
+<p>He is first of all the poet-painter in the sense that Albert Ryder is
+a painter for those with a fine comprehension of the imagination.
+Precisely as Redon is an artist for artists, though not always their
+artist in convincing esthetics, he too, satisfies the instinct<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[84]</a></span> for
+legend, for transformation. Painters like Davies, Redon, Rops, Moreau,
+and the other mystical natures, give us rather the spiritual trend of
+their own lives. In Redon and in Davies the vision is untouched by the
+foul breath of the world around them. In Rops and Moreau you feel the
+imagination hurrying to the arms and breasts of vice for their sense
+of home. The pathos of deliverance is urgent in them. In the work of
+Davies, and of Redon, there is the splendid silence of a world created
+by themselves, a world for the reflection of self. There is even a
+kind of narcissian arrogance, the enchantment of the illumined fact.</p>
+
+<p>Beauty recognizing herself with satisfaction&mdash;that seems to be the
+purpose of the work of Arthur B. Davies. It is so much outside the
+realm of scientific esthetics as hardly to have been more than
+overheard. These pictures are efficiently exemplary of the axiom that
+"all art aspires to the condition of music." I could almost hear
+Davies saying that, as if Pater had never so much as thought of it.
+They literally soothe with a rare poetry painted for the eye. They are
+illuminations for the manuscripts of the ascetic soul. They are
+windows for houses in which men and women may withdraw, and be
+reconciled to the doom of isolation.</p>
+
+<p>With the arrival of Cubism into the modern esthetic scene, there
+appeared a change in the manner of creation, though the same methods
+of invention remained chiefly without change. The result seems<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[85]</a></span> more
+in the nature of kaleidoscopic variance, a perhaps more acutely
+realized sense of opposites, than in the former mode. They register
+less completely, it seems to me, because the departure is too sudden
+in the rhythmus of the artist. The art of Davies is the art of a
+melodious curved line. Therefore the sudden angularity is abrupt to an
+appreciative eye.</p>
+
+<p>It is the poetry of Arthur B. Davies that comes to the fore in one's
+appreciation. He has the almost impeccable gift for lyrical truth, and
+the music of motion is crystallized in his imagination to a masterful
+degree. He is the highly sensitized illustrator appointed by the
+states of his soul to picture forth the pauses of the journey through
+the realm of fancy. It has in it the passion of violet and silver
+dreaming, the hue of an endless dawn before the day descends upon the
+world. You expect the lute to regain its jaded tune there. You expect
+the harp to reverberate once again with the old fervors. You expect
+the syrinx to unfold the story of the reed in light song. It contains
+the history of all the hushed horizons that can be found over the
+edges of a world of materiality. It holds in it always the warm soul
+of every digit of the moon. Human passion is for once removed, unless
+it be that the mere humanism of motion excites the sense of passion.
+You are made to feel the non-essentiality of the stress of the flesh
+in the true places of spiritual existence. The life of moments is
+carried over and made permanent in fancy, and they endure by the
+purity of their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[86]</a></span> presence alone. There is no violence in the work of
+Davies. It is the appreciable relation of harmony and counterpoint in
+the human heart and mind. It is the logic of rhythmical equation felt
+there, almost exclusively. It is the condition of music that art in
+the lyrical state has seemed to suggest.</p>
+
+<p>The artistic versatility of Davies is too familiar to comment upon. He
+has no distress with mediums. His exceptional sensitivity to substance
+and texture gives him the requisite rapport with all species of
+mediums to which the artist has access. One might be inclined to think
+of him as a virtuoso in pastel possibly, and his paintings in the
+medium of oil suggest this sort of richness. He is nevertheless at
+home in all ways. All these are issues waved away to my mind, in view
+of his acute leaning to the poet that leads the artist away from
+problems other than that of Greek rhythmical perfection. It is
+essentially a Platonic expression, the desire of the perfect union of
+one thing with another. That is its final consummation, so it seems to
+me.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[87]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="REX_SLINKARD" id="REX_SLINKARD"></a>REX SLINKARD</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"<i>I doubt not that the passionately wept deaths of
+young men <br /> are provided for.</i>"&mdash;<span class="smcap">Walt Whitman</span>. </p></div>
+
+
+<p>We have had our time for regretting the loss of men of genius during
+the war. We know the significance of the names of Rupert Brooke,
+Edward Thomas, Elroy Flecker on the other side of the sea, to the hope
+of England. And on this side of the sea the names of Joyce Kilmer,
+Alan Seeger and Victor Chapman have been called out to us for the
+poetic spell they cast upon America. All of them in their manful,
+poetic way. They were all of them poets in words; all but Victor
+Chapman were professional poets, and he, even if he himself was not
+aware, gave us some rare bits of loveliness in his letters. There are
+others almost nameless among soldier-hero people who gave us likewise
+real bits of unsuspected beauty in their unpretentious letters.</p>
+
+<p>Rex Slinkard was a soldier, poet-painter by inclination, and ranchman
+as to specific occupation. Rex has gone from us, too. How many are
+there who know, or could have known, the magic of this unassuming
+visionary person. Only a few of us who understand the meaning of magic
+and the meaning of everlasting silences. It is the fortune of America
+that there remain with us numbers of highly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[88]</a></span> indicative drawings and a
+group of rare canvases, the quality of which painters will at once
+acclaim, and poets will at once verify the lyric perfection of,
+paintings and drawings among the loveliest we have in point of purity
+of conception and feeling for the subtle shades of existence, those
+rare states of life which, when they arrive, are called perfect
+moments in the poetic experience of men and women.</p>
+
+<p>There will be no argument to offer or to maintain regarding the work
+of Rex Slinkard. It is what it is, the perfect evidence that one of
+the finest lyric talents to be found among the young creators of
+America has been deprived of its chance to bloom as it would like to
+have done, as it so eagerly and surely was already doing. Rex Slinkard
+was a genius of first quality. The word genius may be used these days
+without fear of the little banalities, since anyone who has evolved
+for himself a clear vision of life may be said to possess the quality
+of genius.</p>
+
+<p>"The day's work done and the supper past. I walk through the horse-lot
+and to my shack. Inside I light the lantern, and then the fire, and
+sitting, I think of the inhabitants of the earth, and of the world, my
+home."</p>
+
+<p>These sentences, out of a letter to a near friend, and the marginalia
+written upon the edges of many of his drawings, show the varying
+degrees of delicacy Rex was eager to register and make permanent for
+his own realization. His thought was once and for all upon the
+realities, that is, those substances<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[89]</a></span> that are or can be realities
+only to the artist, the poet, and the true dreamer, and Rex Slinkard
+was all of these. His observation of himself, and his understanding of
+himself, were uncommonly genuine in this young and so poetic painter.
+He had learned early for so young a man what were his special
+idealistic fervors. He had the true romanticist's gift for
+refinements, and was working continually toward the rarer states of
+being out from the emotional into the intellectual, through spiritual
+application into the proper and requisite calm. He lived in a
+thoroughly ordered world of specified experience which is typified in
+his predilection for the superiority of Chinese notions of beauty over
+the more sentimental rhythms of the Greeks. He had found the proper
+shade of intellectuality he cared for in this type of Oriental
+expression. It was the Buddhistic feeling of reality that gave him
+more than the platonic. He was searching for a majesty beyond
+sensuousness, by which sensuous experience is transformed into greater
+and more enduring shades of beauty. He wanted the very life of beauty
+to take the place of sensuous suggestion. Realities in place of
+semblances, then, he was eager for, but the true visionary realities
+as far finer than the materialistic reality.</p>
+
+<p>He had learned early that he was not, and never would be, the
+fantasist that some of his earlier canvases indicate. Even his essays
+in portraiture, verging on the realistic, leaned nevertheless more
+toward the imaginative reality always. He knew, also, with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[90]</a></span> clarity,
+the fine line of decision between imagination and vision, between the
+dramatic and the lyric, and had realized completely the supremacy of
+the lyric in himself. He was a young boy of light walking on a man's
+strong feet upon real earth over which there was no shadow for him. He
+walked straightforwardly toward the elysium of his own very personal
+organized fancies. His irrigation ditches were "young rivers" for him,
+rivers of being, across which white youths upon white horses, and
+white fawns were gliding to the measure of their own delights. He had,
+this young boy of light, the perfect measure of poetic accuracy
+coupled with a man's fine simplicity in him. He had the priceless calm
+for the understanding of his own poetic ecstasies. They acted upon him
+gently with their own bright pressure. He let them thrive according to
+their own relationships to himself. Nothing was forced in the mind and
+soul of Rex Slinkard. He was in quest of the modern rapture for
+permanent things such as is to be found in "L'apr&egrave;s midi d'un Faun" of
+Mallarm&eacute; and Debussy for instance, in quest of those rare, whiter
+proportions of experience. It was radiance and simplicity immingled in
+his sense of things.</p>
+
+<p>He would have served his country well as one of its clearest and best
+citizens, far more impressively by the growth and expansion of his
+soul in his own manly vision, than by the questionable value of his
+labors in the military service. He did what he could, gladly and
+heroically, but he had become too weak<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[91]</a></span>ened by the siege of physical
+reverses that pursued his otherwise strong body to endure the strain
+of labor he performed, or wanted to accomplish. He knew long before he
+entered service the significance of discipline from very profound
+experience with life from childhood onward. Life had come to him
+voluminously because he was one who attracted life to him,
+electrically. He did not "whine" or "postpone," for he was in all of
+his hours at least mentally and spiritually equal to the world in all
+of its aspects. He was physically not there for the thing he
+volunteered to do, despite the appearance of manly strength in him, or
+thought he would be able to do. He hoped strongly to serve. None knew
+his secret so well as himself, and he kept his own secret royally and
+amicably.</p>
+
+<p>Exceptional maturity of understanding of life, of nature, and all the
+little mysteries that are the shape of human moments, was
+conspicuously evidenced for as long as his intimates remember. The
+extraordinary measure of calm contained in his last pictures and in so
+many of the drawings done in moments of rest in camp is evidence of
+all this. He had a boy's brightness and certainty of the fairness of
+things, joined with a man's mastery of the simple problem. He was a
+true executive in material affairs and his vision was another part of
+the business of existence.</p>
+
+<p>As I have said, Rex Slinkard had the priceless poise of the true lyric
+poet, and it was the ordered<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[92]</a></span> system in his vision that proved him. He
+knew the value of his attitudes and he was certain that perfection is
+imperishable, and strove with a poet's calm intensity toward that. He
+had found his Egypt, his Assyria, his Greece, and his own specific
+Nirvana at his feet everywhere.</p>
+
+<p>As he stood attending to the duties of irrigation and the ripening of
+the alfalfa crops, he spent the moments otherwise lost in carving
+pebbles he found about him with rare gestures and profiles, either of
+his own face or body which he knew well, or the grace of other bodies
+and faces he had seen. He was always the young eye on things, an avid
+eye sure of the wonder about to escape from every living thing where
+light or shadow fell upon them gently. He was a sure, unquestionable,
+and in this sense a perfect poet, and possessed the undeniable
+painter's gift for presentation.</p>
+
+<p>He was of the company of Odilon Redon, of whom he had never heard, in
+his feeling for the almost occult presence emanating from everything
+he encountered everywhere, and his simple letters to his friends hold
+touches of the same beauty his drawings and paintings and carvings on
+pebbles contain.</p>
+
+<p>A born mystic and visionary as to the state of his soul, a boy of
+light in quest of the real wisdom that is necessary for the lyrical
+embodiment, this was Rex Slinkard, the western ranchman and
+poet-painter. "I think of the inhabitants of the earth<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[93]</a></span> and of the
+world, my home." This might have been a marginal note from the Book of
+Thel, or it might have been a line from some new songs of innocence
+and experience. It might have been spoken from out of one of the oaks
+of William Blake. It must have been heard from among the live oaks of
+Saugus. It was the simple speech of a ranchman of California, a real
+boy-man who loved everything with a poet's love because everything
+that lived, lived for him.</p>
+
+<p>Such were the qualities of Rex Slinkard, who would like to have
+remained in the presence of his friends, the inhabitants of the earth,
+to have lived long in the world, his home.</p>
+
+<p>It is all a fine clear testimony to the certainty of youth, perhaps
+the only certainty there can be. He was the calm declaimer of the life
+of everlasting beauty. He saw with a glad eye the "something" that is
+everywhere at all times, and in all places, for the poet's and the
+visionary's eye at least. He was sure of what he saw; his paintings
+and drawings are a firm conviction of that. Like all who express
+themselves clearly, he wanted to say all he had to say. At thirty he
+had achieved expression remarkably. He had found the way out, and the
+way out was toward and into the light. He was clear, and entirely
+unshadowed.</p>
+
+<p>This is Rex Slinkard, ranchman, poet-painter, and man of the living
+world. Since he could not remain, he has left us a carte visite of
+rarest clarity and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[94]</a></span> beauty. We who care, among the few, for things in
+relation to essences, are glad Rex Slinkard lived and laughed and
+wondered, and remained the little while. The new silence is but a
+phase of the same living one he covered all things with. He was glad
+he was here. He was another angle of light on the poetic world around
+us, another unsuspected facet of the bright surface of the world.
+Surfaces were for him, too, something to be "deepened" with a fresh
+vividness. He had the irresistible impulse to decorate and to decorate
+consistently. His sense of decoration was fluid and had no hint of the
+rhetorical in it. He felt everything joined together, shape to shape,
+by the harmonic insistence in life and in nature. A flower held a
+face, and a face held a flowery substance for him. Bodies were young
+trees in bloom, and trees were lines of human loveliness. The body of
+the man, the body of the woman, beautiful male and female bodies, the
+ideal forms of everyone and everything he encountered, he understood
+and made his own. They were all living radiances against the dropped
+curtain of the world. He loved the light on flesh, and the shadows on
+strong arms, legs, and breasts. He avoided theory, either philosophic
+or esthetic. He had traveled through the ages of culture in his
+imagination, and was convinced that nothing was new and nothing was
+old. It was all living and eternal when it was genuine. He stepped out
+of the world of visible realities but seldom, and so it was, books and
+methods of in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[95]</a></span>terpretation held little for him. He didn't need them,
+for he held the whole world in his arms through the power of dream and
+vision. He touched life everywhere, touched it with himself.</p>
+
+<p>Rex Slinkard went away into a celestial calm October 18, 1918, in St.
+Vincent's Hospital, New York City. It is the few among those of us who
+knew him as poet and visionary and man, who wish earnestly that Rex
+might have remained. He gave much that many wanted, or would have
+wanted if they had had the opportunity of knowing him. The pictures
+and drawings that remain are the testimony of his splendid poetic
+talents. He was a lyrical painter of the first order. He is something
+that we miss mightily, and shall miss for long.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[96]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="SOME_AMERICAN_WATER-COLORISTS" id="SOME_AMERICAN_WATER-COLORISTS"></a>SOME AMERICAN WATER-COLORISTS</h2>
+
+
+<p>With the arrival of C&eacute;zanne into the field of water-color painting,
+this medium suffers a new and drastic instance for comparison. It is
+not technical audacity alone, of course, that confronts us in these
+brilliantly achieved performances, so rich in form as well as radiant
+with light. It is not the kind of virility for its own sake that is
+typical of our own American artists so gifted in this special medium,
+like Whistler, Sargent, Winslow Homer, Dodge Macknight, John Marin,
+and Charles Demuth. With C&eacute;zanne it was merely a new instrument to
+employ for the realization of finer plastic relations. The medium of
+water-color has been ably employed by the English and the Dutch
+painters, but it seems as if the artists of both these countries
+succeeded in removing all the brilliance and charm as well as the
+freshness which is peculiar to it; few outside of C&eacute;zanne have, I
+think, done more with water-color than the above named American
+artists, none who have kept more closely and consistently within the
+confines and peculiarities of this medium.</p>
+
+<p>In the consideration of the American water-color artists it will be
+found that Sargent and Homer tend always toward the graphic aspect of
+a pictorial idea, yet it is Homer who relieves his pictures of this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[97]</a></span>
+obsession by a brilliant appreciation of the medium for its own sake.
+Homer steps out of the dry conventionalism of the English style of
+painting, which Sargent does not do. Much of that metallic harshness
+which is found in the oil pictures of Homer is relieved in the
+water-colors and there is added to this their extreme virtuosity, and
+a great distinction to be discovered in their sense of light and life,
+the sense of the object illumined with a wealth of vibrancy that is
+peculiar to its environment, particularly noticeable in the Florida
+series.</p>
+
+<p>Dodge Macknight has seen with a keen eye the importance of this
+virility of technique to be found in Homer, and has added to this a
+passion for impressionistic veracity which heightens his own work to a
+point distinctly above that of Sargent, and one might almost say above
+Winslow Homer. Macknight really did authenticate for himself the
+efficacy of impression with almost incredible feats of visual bravery.
+There is no array of pigment sufficient to satisfy him as for what
+heat and cold do to his sensibility, as experienced by the opposite
+poles of a New England winter and a tropical Mexican landscape. He is
+always in search of the highest height in contrasts, all this joined
+by what his sense of fierceness of light could bring to the fantastic
+dune stretches of Cape Cod in fiery autumn. His work in water-color
+has the convincing charm of almost fanaticism for itself; and we find
+this medium progressing still further with the fearlessness of John
+Marin in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[98]</a></span> absolute at-home-ness which he displays on all occasions
+in his audacious water-color pictures.</p>
+
+<p>Marin brings you to the feeling that digression is for him imperative
+only as affording him relief from the tradition of his medium. John
+Marin employs all the restrictions of water-color with the wisdom that
+is necessary in the case. He says that paper plus water, plus emotion
+will give a result in themselves and proceeds with the idea at hand in
+what may without the least temerity be called a masterly fashion; he
+has run the gamut of experience with his materials from the earliest
+Turner tonalities, through Whisterian vagaries on to American
+definiteness, and has incidentally noted that the Chinese have been
+probably the only supreme masters of the wash in the history of
+water-color painting. I can say for myself that Marin produces the
+liveliest, handsomest wash that is producible or that has ever been
+accomplished in the field of water-color painting. Perhaps many of the
+pictures of John Marin were not always satisfying in the tactile sense
+because many of them are taken up with an inevitable passion for
+technical virtuosity, which is no mean distinction in itself but we
+are not satisfied as once we were with this passion for audacity and
+virtuosity. We have learned that spatial existence and spatial
+relationships are the important essentials in any work of art. The
+precise ratio of thought accompanied by exactitude of emotion for the
+given idea is a matter of serious consideration with the modern
+artists of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[99]</a></span> today. That is the special value of modern painting to the
+development of art.</p>
+
+<p>The Chinese really knew just what a wash was capable of, and confined
+themselves to the majesty of the limitations at hand. John Marin has
+been wise in this also though he is not precisely fanatical, which may
+be his chief defect, and it is probably true that the greatest
+experimenters have shown fanatical tendency, which is only the
+accentuated spirit of obsession for an idea. How else does one hold a
+vision? It is the only way for an artist to produce plastic exactitude
+between two planes of sensation or thought. The parts must be as
+perfect as the whole and in the best art this is so. There must be the
+sense of "existence" everywhere and it might even be said that the
+cool hue of the intellect is the first premise in a true work of art.
+Virtuosity is a state of expression but it is not the final state. One
+must search for as well as find the sequential quality which is
+necessitated for the safe arrival of a work of art into the sphere of
+esthetic existence.</p>
+
+<p>The water-colors of John Marin are restless with energy, which is in
+its way a real virtue. They do, I think, require, at times at least,
+more of the calm of research and less of the excitement of it. All
+true artistry is self-contained and never relies upon outer physical
+stimulus or inward extravagance of phantasy, or of idiosyncrasy. A
+work of art is never peculiar, it is always a natural thing. In this
+sense<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[100]</a></span> John Marin approaches real art because he is probably the most
+natural water-colorist in existence.</p>
+
+<p>With Charles Demuth water-color painting steps up into the true
+condition of ideas followed by experience. He has joined with
+modernism most consistently, having arrived at this state of
+progression by the process of investigation. The tradition of
+water-color painting takes a jump into the new field of modernism, and
+Demuth has given us his knowledge of the difference between
+illustration, depiction, and the plastic realization of fact. Probably
+no young artist has accomplished a finer degree of artistic finesse in
+illustration than has Charles Demuth in his series of illustrations
+for "The Two Magics" of Henry James, or more explicitly to say "The
+Turn of the Screw". These pictures are to the true observer all that
+could be hoped for in imaginative sincerity as well as in technical
+elusiveness. Demuth has since that time stepped out of the confinement
+of water-color pure, over into the field of tempera, which brings it
+nearer to the sturdier mediums employed in the making of pictures
+evolving a greater severity of form and a commendable rigidity of
+line. He has learned like so many moderns that the ruled line offers
+greater advantages in pictorial structure. You shall find his approach
+to the spirit of Christopher Wren is as clear and direct as his
+feeling for the vastiness of New England speechlessness. He has come
+up beyond the dramatisation of emotion to the point of expression for
+its own sake. But he is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[101]</a></span> nevertheless to be included among the arrived
+water-colorists, because his gifts for expression have been evolved
+almost entirely through this medium. There is then a fine American
+achievement in the art of water-color painting which may safely be
+called at this time a localized tradition. It has become an American
+realization.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[102]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="THE_APPEAL_OF_PHOTOGRAPHY" id="THE_APPEAL_OF_PHOTOGRAPHY"></a>THE APPEAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY</h2>
+
+
+<p>Photography is an undeniable esthetic problem upon our modern artistic
+horizon. The idea of photography as an art has been discussed no doubt
+ever since the invention of the pinhole. In the main, I have always
+said for myself that the kodak offers me the best substitute for the
+picture of life, that I have found. I find the snapshot, almost
+without exception, holding my interest for what it contains of simple
+registration of and adherence to facts for themselves. I have had a
+very definite and plausible aversion to the "artistic" photograph, and
+we have had more than a surfeit of this sort of production for the
+past ten or fifteen years. I have referred frequently in my mind to
+the convincing portraits by David Octavius Hill as being among the
+first examples of photographic portraiture to hold my own private
+interest as clear and unmanipulated expressions of reality; and it is
+a definite as well as irresistible quality that pervades these
+mechanical productions, the charm of the object for its own sake.</p>
+
+<p>It was the irrelevant "artistic" period in photography that did so
+much to destroy the vital significance of photography as a type of
+expression which may be classed as among the real arts of today. And
+it was a movement that failed because it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[103]</a></span> added nothing to the idea
+save a distressing superficiality. It introduced a fog on the brain,
+that was as senseless as it was embarrassing to the eye caring
+intensely for precision of form and accuracy of presentation.
+Photography was in this sense unfortunate in that it fell into the
+hands of adepts at the brush who sought to introduce technical
+variations which had nothing in reality to do with it and with which
+it never could have anything in common. All this sort of thing was
+produced in the age of the famous men and women, the period of
+eighteen ninety-five to nineteen hundred and ten say, for it was the
+age when the smart young photographer was frantic to produce famous
+sitters like Shaw and Rodin. We do not care anything about such things
+in our time because we now know that anybody well photographed
+according to the scope as well as the restrictions of the medium at
+hand could be, as has been proven, an interesting subject.</p>
+
+<p>It has been seen, as Alfred Stieglitz has so clearly shown, that an
+eyebrow, a leg, a tree trunk, a body, a breast, a hand, any part being
+equal to the whole in its power to tell the story, could be made as
+interesting, more so indeed than all the famous people in existence.
+It doesn't matter to us in the least that Morgan and Richard Strauss
+helped fill a folio alongside of Maeterlinck and such like persons.
+All this was, of course, in keeping with the theatricism of the period
+in which it was produced, which is one of the best things to be said
+of it. But we do<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[104]</a></span> know that Whistler helped ruin photography along
+with Wilde who helped ruin esthetics. Everyone has his office
+nevertheless. As a consequence, Alfred Stieglitz was told by the
+prevailing geniuses of that time that he was a back number because of
+his strict adherence to the scientific nature of the medium, because
+he didn't manipulate his plate beyond the strictly technical
+advantages it offered, and it was not therefore a fashionable addition
+to the kind of thing that was being done by the assuming ones at that
+time. The exhibition of the life-work of Alfred Stieglitz in March,
+1921, at the Anderson Galleries, New York, was a huge revelation even
+to those of us who along with our own ultra modern interests had found
+a place for good unadulterated photography in the scheme of our
+appreciation of the art production of this time.</p>
+
+<p>I can say without a qualm that photography has always been a real
+stimulus to me in all the years I have been personally associated with
+it through the various exhibitions held along with those of modern
+painting at the gallery of the Photo-Secession, or more intimately
+understood as "291". Photography was an interesting foil to the kind
+of veracity that painting is supposed to express, or rather to say,
+was then supposed to express; for painting like all other ideas has
+changed vastly in the last ten years, and even very much since the
+interval created by the war. I might have learned this anywhere else,
+but I did get it from the Stieglitz camera realizations with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[105]</a></span> more
+than perhaps the expected frequency, and I am willing to assert now
+that there are no portraits in existence, not in all the history of
+portrait realization either by the camera or in painting, which so
+definitely present, and in many instances with an almost haunting
+clairvoyance, the actualities existing in the sitter's mind and body
+and soul. These portraits are for me without parallel therefore in
+this particular. And I make bold with another assertion, that from our
+modern point of view the Stieglitz photographs are undeniable works of
+art, as are also the fine photographs of the younger men like Charles
+Sheeler and Paul Strand. Sheeler, being also one of our best modern
+painters, has probably added to his photographic work a different type
+of sensibility by reason of his experience in the so-called creative
+medium of painting. It is, as we know, brain matter that counts in a
+work of art, and we have dispensed once and for all with the silly
+notion that a work of art is made by hand. Art is first and last of
+all, a product of the intelligence.</p>
+
+<p>I think the photographers must at least have been a trifle upset with
+this Stieglitz Exhibition. I know that many of the painters of the day
+were noticeably impressed. There was much to concern everyone there,
+in any degree that can be put upon us as interested spectators. For
+myself, I care nothing for the gift of interpretation, and far less
+for that dreadful type of effete facility which produces a kind of
+hocus-pocus technical brilliancy which fuddles<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[106]</a></span> the eye with a
+trickery, and produces upon the untrained and uncritical mind a kind
+of unintelligent hypnotism. Art these days is a matter of scientific
+comprehension of reality, not a trick of the hand or the old-fashioned
+manipulation of a brush or a tool. I am interested in presentation
+pure and simple. All things that are living are expression and
+therefore part of the inherent symbology of life. Art, therefore, that
+is encumbered with excessive symbolism is extraneous, and from my
+point of view, useless art. Anyone who understands life needs no
+handbook of poetry or philosophy to tell him what it is. When a
+picture looks like the life of the world, it is apt to be a fair
+picture or a good one, but a bad picture is nothing but a bad picture
+and it is bound to become worse as we think of it. And so for my own
+pleasure I have consulted the kodak as furnishing me with a better
+picture of life than many pictures I have seen by many of the
+so-called very good artists, and I have always delighted in the
+rotograph series of the Sunday papers because they are as close to
+life as any superficial representation can hope to be.</p>
+
+<p>It was obvious then that many of those who saw the Stieglitz
+photographs, and there were large crowds of them, were non-plussed by
+the unmistakable authenticity of experience contained in them. If you
+stopped there you were of course mystified, but there is no mystery
+whatever in these productions, for they are as clear and I shall even
+go so far<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[107]</a></span> as to say as objective as the daylight which produced them,
+and aside from certain intimate issues they are impersonal as it is
+possible for an artist to be. It is this quality in them which makes
+them live for me as realities in the art world of modern time. All art
+calls for one variety of audacity or another and so these photographs
+unfold one type of audacity which is not common among works of art,
+excepting of course in highly accentuated instances of autographic
+revelation. It is the intellectual sympathy with all the subjects on
+exhibition which is revealed in these photographs: A kind of spiritual
+diagnosis which is seldom or never to be found among the photographers
+and almost never among the painters of the conventional portrait. This
+ability, talent, virtue, or genius, whatever you may wish to name it,
+is without theatricism and therefore without spectacular demonstration
+either of the sitter or the method employed in rendering them.</p>
+
+<p>It is never a matter of arranging cheap and practically unrelated
+externals with Alfred Stieglitz. I am confident it can be said that he
+has never in his life made a spectacular photograph. His intensity
+runs in quite another channel altogether. It is far closer to the
+clairvoyant exposure of the psychic aspects of the moment, as
+contained in either the persons or the objects treated of. With these
+essays in character of Alfred Stieglitz, you have a series of types
+who had but one object in mind, to lend themselves for the use of the
+machine in order that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[108]</a></span> a certain problem might be accurately rendered
+with the scientific end of the process in view, and the given
+actuality brought to the surface when possible. I see nothing in these
+portraits beyond this. I understand them technically very little only
+that I am aware that I have not for long, and perhaps never, seen
+plates that hold such depths of tonal value and structural
+relationship of light and shade as are contained in the hundred and
+fifty prints on exhibition in the Anderson Galleries. Art is a vastly
+new problem and this is the first thing which must be learned.
+Precisely as we learn that a certain type of painting ended in the
+history of the world with C&eacute;zanne.</p>
+
+<p>There is an impulse now in painting toward photographic veracity of
+experience as is so much in evidence in the work of an artist of such
+fine perceptions as Ingres, with a brushing aside of all old-fashioned
+notions of what constitutes artistic experience. There is a deliberate
+revolt, and photography as we know it in the work of Alfred Stieglitz
+and the few younger men like Strand and Sheeler is part of the new
+esthetic anarchism which we as younger painters must expect to make
+ourselves responsible for. It must be remembered you know, that there
+has been a war, and art is in a condition of encouraging and
+stimulating renascence, and we may even go so far as to say that it is
+a greater world issue than it was previous to the great catastrophe.
+And also, it must be heralded that as far as art is concerned<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[109]</a></span> the end
+of the world has been seen. The true artist, if he is intelligent, is
+witness of this most stimulating truth that confronts us. We cannot
+hope to function esthetically as we did before all this happened,
+because we are not the same beings intellectually. This does not mean
+in relation to photography that all straight photography is good. It
+merely means that the kind of photography I must name "Fifth Avenue"
+art, is a conspicuous species of artistic bunkum, and must be
+recognized as such.</p>
+
+<p>Photographers must know that fogging and blurring the image is
+curtailing the experience of it. It is a foolish notion that
+mystification is of any value. Flattery is one of the false elements
+that enter into the making of a work of art among the artists of
+doubtful integrity, but this is often if not always the commercial
+element that enters into it. There is a vast difference between this
+sort of representation and that which is to be found in Greek
+sculpture which is nothing short of conscious plastic organization.
+These figures were set up in terms of the prevailing systems of
+proportion. Portraits were likewise "arranged" through the artistry of
+the painter in matters of decoration for the great halls of the
+periods in which they were hung. They were studies on a large scale of
+ornamentation. Their beauty lies chiefly in the gift of execution. In
+these modern photographs of Stieglitz and his followers there is an
+engaging directness which cannot be and must not be ignored. They do
+for once<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[110]</a></span> give in the case of the portraits, and I mean chiefly of
+course the Stieglitz portraits, the actuality of the sitter without
+pose or theatricism of any sort, a rather rare thing to be said of the
+modern photograph.</p>
+
+<p>Stieglitz, therefore, despite his thirty or more years of
+experimentation comes up among the moderns by virtue of his own
+personal attitude toward photography, and toward his, as well as its,
+relation to the subject. His creative power lies in his ability to
+diagnose the character and quality of the sitter as being peculiar to
+itself, as a being in relation to itself seen by his own clarifying
+insight into general and well as special character and characteristic.
+It need hardly be said that he knows his business technically for he
+has been acclaimed sufficiently all over the world by a series of
+almost irrelevant medals and honours without end. The Stieglitz
+exhibition is one that should have been seen by everyone regardless of
+any peculiar and special predilection for art. These photos will have
+opened the eye and the mind of many a sleeping one as to what can be
+done by way of mechanical device to approach the direct charm of life
+in nature.</p>
+
+<p>The moderns have long since congratulated Alfred Stieglitz for his
+originality in the special field of his own creative endeavor. It will
+matter little whether the ancients do or not. His product is a fine
+testimonial to his time and therefore this is his contribution to his
+time. He finds himself, and perhaps<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[111]</a></span> to his own embarrassment even,
+among the best modern artists; for Stieglitz as I understand him cares
+little for anything beyond the rendering of the problem involved which
+makes him of course scientific first and whatever else afterward,
+which is the hope of the modern artists of all movements, regardless.
+Incidentally it may be confided he is an artistic idol of the Dadaists
+which is at least a happy indication of his modernism. If he were to
+shift his activities to Paris, he would be taken up at once for his
+actual value as modern artist expressing present day notions of actual
+things. Perhaps he will not care to be called Dada, but it is
+nevertheless true. He has ridden his own vivacious hobby-horse with as
+much liberty, and one may even say license, as is possible for one
+intelligent human being. There is no space to tell casually of his
+various aspects such as champion billiard player, racehorse
+enthusiast, etcetera. This information would please his dadaistic
+confr&egrave;res, if no one else shows signs of interest.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[112]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="SOME_WOMEN_ARTISTS_IN_MODERN_PAINTING" id="SOME_WOMEN_ARTISTS_IN_MODERN_PAINTING"></a>SOME WOMEN ARTISTS IN MODERN PAINTING</h2>
+
+
+<p>It is for the purpose of specialization that the term woman is
+herewith applied to the idea of art in painting. Art is for anyone
+naturally who can show degree of mastery in it. There have been a
+great many women poets and musicians as well as actors, though
+singularly enough the women painters of history have been few, and for
+that matter in question of proportion remain so. Whatever the wish may
+be in point of dismissing the idea of sex in painting, there has so
+often been felt among many women engaging to express themselves in it,
+the need to shake off marked signs of masculinity, and even
+brutishness of attack, as denoting, and it must be said here, a
+factitious notion of power. Power in painting does not come from
+muscularity of arm; it comes naturally from the intellect. There are a
+great many male painters showing too many signs of femininity in their
+appreciation and the conception of art in painting. Art is neither
+male nor female. Nevertheless, it is pleasing to find women artists
+such as I wish to take up here, keeping to the charm of their own
+feminine perceptions and feminine powers of expression. It is their
+very femininity which makes them distinctive in these in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[113]</a></span>stances. This
+does not imply lady-like approach or womanly attitude of moral. It
+merely means that their quality is a feminine quality.</p>
+
+<p>In the work of Madame Delaunay Terck, who is the wife of Delaunay, the
+French Orphiste, which I have not seen since the war came on, one can
+say that she was then running her husband a very close second for
+distinction in painting and intelligence of expression. When two
+people work so closely in harmony with each other, it is and will
+always remain a matter of difficulty in knowing just who is the real
+expressor of an idea. Whatever there is of originality in the idea of
+Orphisme shall be credited to Delaunay as the inventor, but whether
+his own examples are more replete than those of Mme. Delaunay Terck is
+not easy of statement. There was at that time a marked increase of
+virility in production over those of Delaunay himself, but these are
+matters of private personal attack. Her Russian temper was probably
+responsible for this, at least no doubt, assisted considerably. There
+was nevertheless at that time marked evidence that she was in mastery
+of the idea of Orphisme both as to conception and execution. She
+showed greater signs of virility in her approach than did Delaunay
+himself. There was in his work a deal of what Gertrude Stein then
+called "white wind", a kind of thin escaping in the method. The
+designs did not lock so keenly. His work had always typical charm if
+it had not always satisfying vigor. His "Tour Eiffel" and a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[114]</a></span> canvas
+called "Rugby" I think, I remember as having more grace than depth,
+but one may say nevertheless, real distinction.</p>
+
+<p>In the exchanging of ideas so intimately as has happened splendidly
+between Picasso and Braque, which is in the nature of professional
+dignity among artists, there is bound to be more or less confusion
+even to the highly perceptive artist and this must therefore confuse
+the casual observer and layman. So it is, or was at that time with the
+painting of Robert Delaunay and Mme. Delaunay Terck; what you learned
+in this instance was that the more vigorous of the pictures were hers.
+She showed the same strength and style in her work as in her
+interesting personality which was convincing without being too
+strained or forced; she was most probably an average Russian woman
+which as one knows means a great deal as to intelligence and personal
+power.</p>
+
+
+<h3>MARIE LAURENCIN</h3>
+<p>With Marie Laurencin there was a greater sense of personal and
+individual creation. One can never quite think of anyone in connection
+with her pictures other than the happy reminiscence of Watteau. With
+her work comes charm in the highest, finest sense; there is nothing
+trivial about her pictures, yet they abound in all the graces of the
+18th Century. Her drawings and paintings with spread fans and now and
+then a greyhound or a gazelle opposed against them in design, hold
+grace and elegance of feeling<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[115]</a></span> that Watteau would certainly have
+sanctioned. She brings up the same sense of exquisite gesture and
+simplicity of movement with a feeling for the romantic aspect of
+virginal life which exists nowhere else in modern painting. She
+eliminates all severities of intellect, and super-imposes wistful
+charm of idea upon a pattern of the most delicate beauty. She is
+essentially an original which means that she invents her own
+experience in art.</p>
+
+<p>Marie Laurencin concerns herself chiefly with the idea of girlish
+youth, young girls gazing toward each other with fans spread or
+folded, and fine braids of hair tied gently with pale cerise or pale
+blue ribbon, and a pearl-like hush of quietude hovers over them. She
+arrests the attention by her fine reticence and holds one's interest
+by the veracity of esthetic experience she evinces in her least or
+greatest painting or drawing. She paints with miniature sensibility
+and knows best of all what to leave out. She is eminently devoid of
+excessiveness either in pose or in treatment, with the result that
+your eye is refreshingly cooled with the delicate process.</p>
+
+<p>That Marie Laurencin keeps in the grace of French children is in no
+way surprising if you know the incomparable loveliness of them. Apart
+from her modernistic excellence as artist, she conveys a poetry so
+essentially French in quality that you wish always for more and more
+of it. It is the light breath of the Luxembourg gardens and the
+gardens of the Tuilleries coming over you once more and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[116]</a></span> the same
+grace in child-life as existed in the costly games at Versailles among
+the grown-ups depicted so superbly by Watteau and his most worthy
+followers, Lancret and Pater, in whom touch is more breath than
+movement. It is a sensitive and gracefully aristocratic creation Marie
+Laurencin produces for us, one that makes the eye avid of more
+experience and the mind of more of its subtlety. It is an essentially
+beautiful and satisfying contribution to modern painting, this
+nacreous cubism of Marie Laurencin.</p>
+
+
+<h3>GEORGIA O'KEEFFE<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></h3>
+<p>With Georgia O'Keeffe one takes a far jump into volcanic crateral
+ethers, and sees the world of a woman turned inside out and gaping
+with deep open eyes and fixed mouth at the rather trivial world of
+living people. "I wish people were all trees and I think I could enjoy
+them then," says Georgia O'Keeffe. Georgia O'Keeffe has had her feet
+scorched in the laval effusiveness of terrible experience; she has
+walked on fire and listened to the hissing of vapors round her person.
+The pictures of O'Keeffe, the name by which she is mostly known, are
+probably as living and shameless private documents as exist, in
+painting certainly, and probably in any other art. By shamelessness I
+mean unqualified nakedness of statement. Her pictures are essential
+abstractions as all her sensations have been tempered to abstraction
+by the too vicarious experience <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[117]</a></span>with actual life. She had seen hell,
+one might say, and is the Sphynxian sniffer at the value of a secret.
+She looks as if she had ridden the millions of miles of her every
+known imaginary horizon, and has left all her horses lying dead in
+their tracks. All in quest of greater knowledge and the greater sense
+of truth. What these quests for truth are worth no one can precisely
+say, but the tendency would be to say at least by one who has gone far
+to find them out that they are not worthy of the earth or sky they are
+written on. Truth has soiled many an avenue, it has left many a
+drawing room window open. It has left the confession box filled with
+bones. However, Georgia O'Keeffe pictures are essays in experience
+that neither Rops nor Moreau nor Baudelaire could have smiled away.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> American.&mdash;Ed.</p></div>
+
+<p>She is far nearer to St. Theresa's version of life as experience than
+she could ever be to that of Catherine the Great or Lucrezia Borgia.
+Georgia O'Keeffe wears no poisoned emeralds. She wears too much white;
+she is impaled with a white consciousness. It is not without
+significance that she wishes to paint red in white and still have it
+look like red. She thinks it can be done and yet there is more red in
+her pictures than any other color at present; though they do, it must
+be said, run to rose from ashy white with oppositions of blue to keep
+them companionable and calm. The work of Georgia O'Keeffe startles by
+its actual experience in life. This does not imply street life or sky
+life or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[118]</a></span> drawing room life, but life in all its huge abstraction of
+pain and misery and its huge propensity for silencing the spirit of
+adventure. These pictures might also be called expositions of psychism
+in color and movement.</p>
+
+<p>Without some one to steady her, I think O'Keeffe would not wish the
+company of more tangible things than trees. She knows why she despises
+existence, and it comes from facing the acute dilemma with more
+acuteness than it could comprehend. She is vastly over-size as to
+experience in the spiritual geometric of the world. All this gives her
+painting as clean an appearance as it is possible to imagine in
+painting. She soils nothing with cheap indulgence of wishing
+commonplace things. She has wished too large and finds the world
+altogether too small in comparison.</p>
+
+<p>What the future holds for Georgia O'Keeffe as artist depends upon
+herself. She is modern by instinct and therefore cannot avoid
+modernity of expression. It is not willed, it is inevitable. When she
+looks at a person or a thing she senses the effluvia that radiate from
+them and it is by this that she gauges her loves and hates or her
+tolerance of them. It is enough that her pictures arrive with a
+strange incongruous beauty which, though metaphysically an import,
+does not disconcert by this insistence. She knows the psychism of
+patterns and evolves them with strict regard for the pictural aspects
+in them which save them from banality as ideas. She has<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[119]</a></span> no preachment
+to offer and utters no rubbish on the subject of life and the problem.
+She is one of the exceptional girls of the world both in art and in
+life. As artist she is as pure and free from affectation as in life
+she is relieved from the necessity of it.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>If there are other significant women in modern art I am not as yet
+familiarized with them. These foregoing women take their place
+definitely as artists within the circle of women painters like Le
+Brun, Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, and are in advance of them by
+being closer to the true appreciation of esthetics in inventing them
+for themselves.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[120]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="REVALUATIONS_IN_IMPRESSIONISM" id="REVALUATIONS_IN_IMPRESSIONISM"></a>REVALUATIONS IN IMPRESSIONISM</h2>
+
+
+<p>In the consideration of the real factors in the impressionistic
+movement, we learn that it is not Monet and the younger crew such as
+Moret, Maufra, George d'Espagnat and Guillaumin who give us the real
+weight of this esthetic argument. We find Monet going in for
+hyper-sentimentalized iridiscences which culminate or seem to
+culminate in the "Lily" series until we are forced to say he has let
+us out, once and for all, as far as any further interest in the theory
+with which he was concerned. We are no longer held by these artificial
+and overstrained hues, and we find the younger followers offering
+little or nothing to us save an obvious integrity of purpose. These
+younger men had apparently miscomprehended idiosyncrasies for ideas
+and that, save for a certain cleanness of intention, they were
+offering scarcely anything of what is to be found by way of
+realization in the pictures of a really great colorist like Renoir.</p>
+
+<p>The two artists who give the true thrill of this phase of the modern
+movement are without question Pissarro and Sisley. It is the belief of
+these two artists in the appearance of things for themselves, under
+the influence of the light problem, which gives them a strength not
+always visible at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[121]</a></span> first by reason of a greater simplicity of effect
+which dominates all of their pictures. We see in both these men a real
+and impressive desire for a more exacting scientific relation as
+discovered by intellectual consideration, than is to be found in the
+emotional outcry predominating in most of the pictures of Monet. These
+do not hold for us in this day as solidly as they were expected to.
+There is a kind of superficiality and consequent dissatisfaction in
+the conspicuous aspiration toward the first flush, one may call it, of
+enthusiasm for impressionistic experience. There comes to one who is
+really concerned, the ever increasing desire to turn toward Pissarro
+and Sisley and to quietly dispense with many or most of Monet's
+pictures, not to speak of a legitimate haste to pass over the
+phlegmatic enthusiasms of the younger followers.</p>
+
+<p>One feels that Pissarro must have been a great man among men not so
+great. One feels likewise that the stately reticence of a man like
+Sisley is worth far more to us now, if only because we find in his
+works as they hang one beside another in numbers, a soberer and more
+cautious approach to the theme engrossing him and the other artists of
+the movement of that time. In the pictures of Sisley there is the
+charm of the fact for itself, the delight of the problem of placing
+the object in relation to the luminous atmosphere which covers it.</p>
+
+<p>Men like Pissarro and Sisley were not forgetting Courbet and his
+admirable knowledge of reality.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[122]</a></span> They were not concerned with the
+spectacular aspect of the impressionistic principle, not nearly so
+much as with the satisfying realization of the object under the
+influence of the new scientific problem in esthetics with which they
+were concerned. For myself I am out of touch with Monet as a creator
+and I find myself extracting far more satisfaction and belief from
+Pissarro and Sisley, who deal with the problem of nature plus idea,
+with a much greater degree of let me even say sincerity, by reason of
+one fact and perhaps the most important one: they were not dramatizing
+the idea in hand. They were not creating a furor with pink and
+lavender haystacks. They were satisfied that there was still something
+to be found in the old arrangement of negative and positive tones as
+they were understood before the application of the spectrum turned the
+brains and sensibilities of men. In other words Courbet survived while
+the Barbizonians perished. There was an undeniable realization of fact
+still there, clamoring for consideration. There was the reality then
+even as now, as always. With Pissarro and Sisley there appeared the
+true separation of tone, making itself felt most intelligently in the
+work of these men from whom the real separatists Seurat, Signac, and
+Cross were to realize their principle of pointilism, of which
+principle Seurat was to prove himself the most satisfactory creative
+exponent.</p>
+
+<p>The world of art lost a very great deal in the untimely death of
+Seurat; he was a young man of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[123]</a></span> great artistic and intellectual gifts.
+There was an artist by the name of Vignon who came in for his share
+during the impressionistic period, probably not with any more dramatic
+glamour than he achieves now by his very simple and unpretentious
+pictures. I am sorry for my own pleasure that I have not been able to
+see more of this artist's pictures from whom I think our own Theodore
+Robinson must have gained a deal of strength for his own bridge
+building between Bastien Le Page and the Monet "eccentricity," so to
+call it.</p>
+
+<p>There is always a reason for reticence, and it is usually apt to come
+from thinking. Sisley and Pissarro, Vignon, Seurat, and Robinson were
+thinking out a way to legitimize the new fantastic craze for prismatic
+violence, and they found it in the direct consideration for the fact.
+They knew that without objects light would have nowhere to fall, that
+the earth confronted them with indispensable phenomena each one of
+which had its reason for being. They were finding instead of losing
+their heads, which is always a matter of praise. I could stay with
+almost any Pissarro or Sisley I have ever seen, as I could always want
+any Seurat near me, just as I could wish almost any Monet out of sight
+because I find it submerged with emotional extravagance, too much
+enthusiasm for his new pet idea.</p>
+
+<p>Scientific appreciation had not come with scientific intentions. Like
+most movements, it was left to other than the accredited innovators
+for its com<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[124]</a></span>pletion and perfection. That is why we find C&eacute;zanne
+working incessantly to create an art which would achieve a union of
+impressionism and an art like the Louvre, as he is said to have
+characterized it for himself. We know now how much C&eacute;zanne cared for
+Chardin as well as for Courbet, and Greco. There is a reason why he
+must have respected Pissarro, far more than he did at any time such
+men as Gaugin, the "flea on his back" as he so vividly and perhaps
+justly named him. There was far more hope for a possible great art to
+come out of Van Gogh, who, in his brief seven years had experimented
+with every aspect of impressionism that had then been divulged. He too
+was in search of a passionate realization of the object. His method of
+heavy stitching in bright hues was not a perfected style. It was an
+extravagant hope toward a personal rhythm. He was an "upwardly"
+aspiring artist by reason of his hyper-accentuated religious fervours.
+All these extraneous and one might even say irrelevant attempts toward
+speedy arrivism are set aside in the presence of the almost solemn
+severity of minds like Pissarro and Sisley, and of C&eacute;zanne, who
+extracted for himself all that was valuable in the passing idea of
+impressionism. The picture which lasts is never the entirely
+idiosyncratic one. It is that picture which strives toward realization
+of ideas through a given principle with which it is involved.</p>
+
+<p>So it seems then, that if Monet invented the principle of
+impressionism as applied to painting, Pis<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[125]</a></span>sarro and Sisley assisted
+greatly in the creative idea for our lasting use and pleasure by the
+consideration of the intellect which they applied to it; just as
+Seurat has given us a far greater realization than either Signac or
+Cross have offered us in the principle of pointillism.</p>
+
+<p>The "test of endurance" in the impressionistic movement is borne out;
+the strength of realization is to be found in Pissarro and Sisley and
+not in the vapid niceties of Monet, whose work became thinner and
+thinner by habitual repetitive painting, and by a possible false sense
+of security in his argument. Monet had become the habitual
+impressionist, and the habitual in art is its most conspicuous
+fatality. The art of Monet grew weaker throughout the various stages
+of Waterloo, Venice, Rouen, Giverney, and the Water Lilies which
+formed periods of expression, at least to the mind of the observer.
+Monet's production had become a kind of mercerized production, and a
+kind of spurious radiance invested them, in the end. It remained for
+Pissarro, Sisley, C&eacute;zanne, and Seurat to stabilize the new discovery,
+and to give it the stamina it was meant to contain, as a scientific
+idea, scientifically applied.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[126]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="ODILON_REDON" id="ODILON_REDON"></a>ODILON REDON</h2>
+
+
+<p>With the passing of this rare artist during the late summer months,<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a>
+we are conscious of the silencing of one of the foremost lyricists in
+painting, one of the most delicate spirits among those who have
+painted pictures so thoroughly replete with charm, pictures of such
+real distinction and merit. For of true charm, of true grace, of true
+melodic, Redon was certainly the master. I think no one has coveted
+the vision so much as, certainly no more than, has this artist,
+possessed of the love of all that is dream-like and fleeting in the
+more transitory aspect of earthly things. No one has ever felt more
+that fleeting treasure abiding in the moment, no one has been more
+jealous of the bounty contained in the single glancing of the eye
+upward to infinity or downward among the minuter fragments at his
+feet.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> Of 1917.&mdash;Ed.</p></div>
+
+<p>It would seem as if Redon had surely walked amid gardens, so much of
+the morning is in each of his fragile works. There seems always to be
+hovering in them the breath of those recently spent dawns of which he
+was the eager spectator, never quite the full sunlight of the later
+day. Essentially he was the worshipper of the lip of flower, of dust
+upon the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[127]</a></span>moth wing, of the throat of young girl, or brow of young
+boy, of the sudden flight of bird, the soft going of light clouds in a
+windless sky. These were the gentle stimulants to his most virile
+expression. Nor did his pictures ever contain more; they never
+struggled beyond the quality of legend, at least as I know them. He
+knew the loveliness in a profile, he saw always the evanescences of
+light upon light and purposeless things. The action or incident in his
+pictures was never more than the touch of some fair hand gently and
+exquisitely brushing some swinging flower. He desired implicitly to
+believe in the immortality of beauty, that things or entities once
+they were beautiful could never die, at least for him. I followed
+faithfully for a time these fine fragments in those corners of Paris
+where they could be found, and there was always sure to be in them,
+always and ever that perfect sense of all that is melodic in the
+universe.</p>
+
+<p>I do not know much of his early career as an artist. I have read
+passages from letters which he wrote not so long ago, in which he
+recounts with tenderness the dream life of his childhood, how he used
+to stand in the field for hours or lie quietly upon some cool hill
+shaded with young leaves, watching the clouds transforming themselves
+into wing shapes and flower shapes, staining his fancy with the magic
+of their delicate color and form&mdash;indeed, it would seem as if all
+things had for him been born somewhere in the clouds and had
+condescended to an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[128]</a></span> earthward existence for a brief space, the better
+to show their rarity of grace for the interval. Although obviously
+rendered from the object, they were still-lifes which seemed to take
+on a kind of cloud life during the very process of his creation. They
+paid tribute to that simple and unaffected statement of his&mdash;"I have
+fashioned an art after myself." Neither do I know just how long he was
+the engraver and just how long he was the painter&mdash;it is evident
+everywhere that his line is the line of the fastidious artist on steel
+and stone.</p>
+
+<p>Beyond these excessively frail renderings of his, whether in oil or in
+pastel, I do not know him, but I am thinking always in the presence of
+them that he listened very attentively and with more than a common ear
+to the great masters in music, absorbing at every chance all that was
+in them for him. He had in his spirit the classical outline of music,
+with nothing directly revolutionary, no sign of what we call revolt
+other than the strict adherence to personal relationship, no other
+prejudice than the artist's reaction against all that is not really
+refined to art, with but one consuming ardor, and that to render with
+extreme tranquillity everything delicate and lovely in passing things.
+There is never anything in his pictures outside the conventional logic
+of beauty, and if they are at all times ineffably sweet, it is only
+because Redon himself was like them, joyfully living out the days
+because they were for him ineffably sweet, too. Most of all it is
+Redon who<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[129]</a></span> has rendered with exceptional elegance and extreme
+artistry, the fragment.</p>
+
+<p>It is in his pictures, replete with exquisiteness, that one finds the
+true analogy to lyric poetry. This lyricism makes them seem mostly
+Greek&mdash;often I have thought them Persian, sometimes again, Indian;
+certainly he learned something from the Chinese in their porcelains
+and in their embroidery. I am sure he has been fond of these outer
+influences, these Oriental suggestions which were for him the
+spiritual equivalent from the past for his spontaneous ideas, for he,
+too, had much of all this magic, as he had much of the hypnotic
+quality of jewelry and precious stones in all his so delicate
+pictures, firelike in their subtle brilliancy. They have always seemed
+to contain this suggestion for me: flowers that seemed to be much more
+the embodiment of jades, rubies, emeralds, and ambers, than just
+flowers from the common garden. His flamelike touches have always held
+this preciousness: notations rather for the courtly robe or diadem
+than just drawings. All this gift of goldsmithery comes as one would
+expect, quite naturally, from his powers as an engraver, in which art
+he held a first place in his time and was the master of the younger
+school, especially in Belgium and Germany. Of all the painters of this
+time it is certain he was first among them essaying to picture the
+jewelled loveliness of nature; it is most evident in La Touche who was
+in no way averse to Renoir either, but Redon has<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[130]</a></span> created this touch
+for himself and it is the touch of the virtuoso. Perhaps it would have
+been well if Moreau, who had a sicker love of this type of expression,
+had followed Redon more closely, as he might then have added a little
+more lustre to these very dead literary failures of his.</p>
+
+<p>I cannot now say who else beside Ferdinand Khnopff has been influenced
+greatly by him, but I do know that he was beloved by the more modern
+men, that he was revered by all regardless of theories or tenets, for
+there is in existence somewhere in Paris a volume of letters and
+testimonials celebrating some anniversary of Redon in proof of it. And
+I think that&mdash;regardless of ideas&mdash;the artist must always find him
+sympathetic, if for no other reason than that he was the essence of
+refinement, of delicacy, and of taste. When I think of Redon I think
+of Shelley a little, "he is dusty with tumbling about among the
+stars," and I think somewhat, too, of some phrases in Debussy and his
+unearthly school of musicians, for if we are among those who admire
+sturdier things in art we can still love the fine gift of purity. And
+of all gifts Redon has that, certainly.</p>
+
+<p>His art holds, too, something of that breathlessness among the trees
+one finds in Watteau and in Lancret, maybe more akin to Lancret, for
+he, also, was more a depicter of the ephemeral. We think of Redon as
+among those who transvaluate all earthly sensations in terms of a
+purer element. We<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[131]</a></span> think of him as living with his head among the
+mists, alert for all those sudden bursts of light which fleck here and
+there forgotten or unseen places, making them live with a new
+resplendency, full of new revealment, perfect with wonder. Happily we
+find in him a hatred of description and of illustration, we find these
+pictures to be illuminations from rich pages not observed by the
+common eye, decorations out of a world the like of which has been but
+too seldom seen by those who aspire to vision. <i>Chansons sans paroles</i>
+are they, ringing clearly and flawlessly to the eye as do those songs
+of Verlaine (with whom he has also some relationship) to the
+well-attuned ear.</p>
+
+<p>He was the master of the nuance, and the nuance was his lyricism, his
+special gift, his genius. He knew perfectly the true vibration of note
+to note, and how few are they whose esthetic emotions are built upon
+the strictly poetic basis, who escape the world-old pull towards
+description and illustration. How few, indeed, among those of the
+materialistic vision escape this. But for Redon there was but one
+world, and that a world of imperceptible light on all things visible,
+with always a kind of song of adoration upon his lips, as it were,
+obsessed with reverence and child wonder toward every least and
+greatest thing, and it was in these portrayals of least things that he
+exposed their naked loveliness as among the greatest. Never did Redon
+seek for the miniature; he knew merely that the part is the
+representation of the whole, that the perfect frag<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[132]</a></span>ment is a true
+representative of beauty, and that the vision of some fair hand or
+some fair eye is sure to be the epitome of all that is lovely in the
+individual.</p>
+
+<p>We have as a result of this almost religious devotion of Redon's, the
+fairest type of the expression of that element which is the eye's
+equivalent for melodious sound. In his pictures he perpetuated his
+belief in the unfailing harmony in things. Either all things were
+lovely in his eye, or they are made beautiful by thinking beautifully
+of them. That was the only logic in Redon's painting. He questioned
+nothing; he saw the spiritual import of every object on which his eye
+rested. No one shall go to Redon for any kind of intellectual
+departure or for any highly specialized theory&mdash;it is only too evident
+from his work that he had none in mind. He had, I think, a definite
+belief in the theosophic principle of aura, in that element of
+emanation which would seem sometimes to surround delicate objects
+touched with the suffusion of soft light. For him all things seemed
+"possessed" by some colorful presence which they themselves could in
+no way be conscious of, somewhat the same sort of radiance which
+floods the features of some beauteous person and creates a presence
+there which the person is not even conscious of, the imaginative
+reality, in other words, existing either within or without everything
+the eye beholds. For him the very air which hovered about all things
+seemed to have, as well, the presence of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[133]</a></span> color not usually seen of
+men, and it was this emanation or presence which formed the living
+quality of his backgrounds in which those wondrous flowery heads and
+hands and wings had their being, through which those dusty wings of
+most unearthly butterflies or moths hurry so feverishly. He has given
+us a happy suggestion of the reality of spiritual spaces and the way
+that these fluttering bodies which are little more than spirit
+themselves have enjoyed a beauteous life. He was Keats-like in his
+appreciation of perfect loveliness, like Shelley in his passionate
+desire to transform all local beauty into universal terms.</p>
+
+<p>No one will quarrel with Redon on account of what is not in him. What
+we do find in him is the poetry of a quiet, sweet nature in quest
+always of perfect beauty, longing to make permanent by means of a rare
+and graceful art some of those fragments which have given him his
+private and personal clue to the wonders of the moment, creating a
+personal art by being himself a rare and lovely person. He remains for
+us one of the finest of artists, who has reverted those whisperings
+from the great world of visual melody in which he lived. It was with
+these exquisite fragments that he adorned the states of his own soul
+in order that he might present them as artist in tangible art form. We
+are grateful for his lyricism and for his exquisite goldsmithery.
+After viewing his delicately beautiful pictures, objects take on a new
+poetic wonder.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[134]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="THE_VIRTUES_OF_AMATEUR_PAINTING" id="THE_VIRTUES_OF_AMATEUR_PAINTING"></a>THE VIRTUES OF AMATEUR PAINTING</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">With Special Praises for Jennie Vanvleet Cowdery</span></h3>
+<p>Some of the finest instances of pure painting will be found, not as
+might be imagined by the layman, among the professional artists, but
+among those amateurs whose chief occupation is amusing themselves
+first of all. If you who read will make close reference to those rich
+examples of the mid-Victorian period, when it was more or less
+distinguished to take up painting along with the other
+accomplishments, you will find that the much tabooed antimacassar
+period produced a species of painting that was as indicative of
+personal style and research as it was fresh in its elemental approach.
+The perfect instance in modern art of this sort of original painting
+raised to the highest excellence is that of Henri Rousseau, the true
+primitive of our so eclectic modern period. No one can have seen a
+picture of this most talented douanier without being convinced that
+technique for purely private personal needs has been beautified to an
+extraordinary degree.</p>
+
+<p>Rousseau stands among the very best tonalists as well as among the
+best designers of modern time, and his pictures hold a quality so
+related to the experience contained in their subjects, as to seem
+like<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[135]</a></span> the essence of the thing itself. You feel that unquestionably
+Rousseau's Paris is Paris, and you are made to feel likewise that his
+jungle scenes are at very least his own experiences of his earlier
+life in Mexico. Rousseau convinces by his unquestionable sensitivity
+and integrity of approach. He was not fabricating an art, he was
+endeavoring to create a real picture for his own private satisfaction,
+and his numerous successes are both convincing and admirable.</p>
+
+<p>As I have said, if you have access to a variety of amateur pictures
+created during the mid-Victorian era, of whatever style or subject,
+you will find in them the most admirably sincere qualities of painting
+as well as singularly enchanting gifts for simplication and the always
+engaging respect for the fact itself out of which these painted
+romanzas are created. There was the type of memorial picture for
+instance, with its proverbial tombstone, its weeping willow tree, and
+its mourner leaning with one elbow, usually on the cornice above,
+where the name of the beloved deceased is engraved; below it the
+appropriate motto and its added wealth of ornamentation in the way of
+landscape, with houses, hills, winding roads, with maybe an animal or
+two grazing in the field, and beyond all this vista, an ocean with
+pretty vessels passing on their unmindful way, and more often than
+not, many species of bright flowers in the foreground to heighten the
+richness<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[136]</a></span> of memory and the sentimental aspects of bereavement.</p>
+
+<p>I wish I could take you to two perfect examples of this sort of
+amateur painting which I have in mind, now in the possession of the
+Maine Historical Society, of Portland, Maine, as well as one other
+superb and still more perfect example of this sort of luxuriously
+painted memory of life, in the collection of a noted collector of
+mid-Victorian splendours, near Boston. It is sensation at first hand
+with these charmingly impressive amateur artists. They have been
+hampered in no way with the banality of school technique learned in
+the manner of the ever-present and unoriginal copyist. They literally
+invent expression out of a personally accumulated passion for beauty
+and they have become aware of it through their own intensely
+personalised contact with life. The marine painters of this period,
+and earlier, of which there have been almost numberless instances, and
+of whose fine performances there are large numbers on view in the
+Marine Museum in Salem, Mass., offer further authentication of private
+experience with phases of life that men of the sea are sure to know,
+the technical beauty alone of which furnishes the spectator with many
+surprises and fascinations in the line of simplicity and directness of
+expression.</p>
+
+<p>Many of these amateur painters were no longer young in point of actual
+years. Henri Rousseau was as we know past forty when he was finally
+driven<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[137]</a></span> to painting in order to establish his own psychic entity. And
+so it is with all of them, for there comes a certain need somewhere in
+the consciousness of everyone, to offset the tedium of common
+experience with some degree of poetic sublimation. With the result
+that many of them find their way out by taking to paints and brushes
+and canvas, astonishing many a real painter, if not the untutored
+layman, who probably expects to be mystified in one way or another by
+something which he thinks he does not understand. It is of the
+charming pictures of Jennie Vanvleet Cowdery that I wish to speak
+here.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Cowdery is a southern lady, and of this fact you become aware
+instantly you find yourself in conversation with her. She evidences
+all the traits and characteristics of a lady of her period, which is
+to say the late mid-Victorian, for she must have been a graceful young
+woman herself at the close of this fascinating period. And you find,
+therefore, in her quaint and convincingly original pictures, the
+passion for the charms and graces that were consistent with the period
+in which she spent her girlhood, and which has left upon her
+consciousness so dominant a trace. The pictures of Mrs. Cowdery,
+despite their remoteness of surrounding&mdash;for she always places her
+graceful figures, which are no less than the embodiments of her own
+graceful states of being, in a dense woodland scene&mdash;bring up to the
+senses all the fragrances of that past time, the redolence of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[138]</a></span> the
+oleander by the wall, of the camelia in the shadow, and of the pansy
+by the hedge. You expect these ladies to shake gently upon the air,
+like flowers in the morning, their own fascinating perfumes, as you
+expect them to recite in the quietude of the wood in which they are
+walking those sentiments which are appropriate to the season and of
+other soft remembrances.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Cowdery might have taken to needlework, and sat like many another
+young woman of that time by the window with the sunlight streaming in
+upon the coloured stitches of her work, or she might perhaps more
+strictly have taken to miniature painting, the quality of which style
+is so much in evidence in these pleasant pictures of hers. The
+pictures of Mrs. Cowdery will not stimulate the spectator to reflect
+with gravity upon the size of the universe, but they dwell entirely
+upon the intimate charm of it, the charm that rises out of breeding
+and cultivation, and a feeling for the finer graces of the body and
+sweet purities of mind. Mrs. Cowdery is essentially a breather and a
+bringer of peace. There is no purpose in these gracious and
+entertaining pictures, for they are invented solely to recall and make
+permanent, for this lady's own delight, those moments of joy of which
+there must have been many if the gentleness and the clear quality of
+revery in them is to be taken; and these pictures are to be taken
+first and last as genuine works of art in their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[139]</a></span> own way, which is the
+only way that true works of art can be taken seriously.</p>
+
+<p>The most conspicuous virtue of these quaintly engaging pictures of
+Mrs. Cowdery is the certainty you find in them of the lack of
+struggle. Their author is, without doubt, at peace with the world, for
+the world is without significance in the deeper sense to all really
+serious artists, those who have vital information to convey. Mrs.
+Cowdery's career as a painter is of short and impressive duration,
+barely four years she confides, and she has been an engaging feature
+of the Society of Independent Artists for at least three of these
+years, I believe. It is her picture which she names "1869" which has
+called most attention to her charming talents, and which created so
+convincing an impression among the artists for its originality and its
+insistence upon the rendering of beautified personal experience.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Cowdery must have loved her earliest girlish hours with excessive
+delight, and perhaps it is the garish contrast of the youth of the
+young women of this time, energetic and, from the mid-Victorian
+standpoint certainly, so unwomanly, that prompts this gentle and
+refined woman to people her gracious solitudes of spirit with those
+still more gracious lady-like beings which she employs. For her
+pictures, that is her most typical ones, contain always these
+groupings of figures in crinoline-like gowns with perhaps more of the
+touch of eighteen-eighty than of seventy in them, so given to flounces
+and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[140]</a></span> cascades of lace with picture hats to shade the eyes, and
+streamers of velvet ribbon to give attenuated sensations of grace to
+their quietly sweeping figures that seem to be always in a state of
+harmless gossip among themselves. One never knows whether it is to be
+quite morning or afternoon for there is seldom or never present the
+quality of direct sunlight; but as ladies and gentlemen usually walk
+in the afternoon even now, if there are still such virtuous entities
+as ladies and gentlemen, we may presume that these are afternoon
+seances, poetically inscribed, which Mrs. Cowdery wishes to convey to
+us. That Mrs. Cowdery has a well adjusted feeling for the harmony of
+hues is evident in her production as well as in the outline of her
+simple and engaging conversation.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the lady lives, in a world gently fervorous with lyric
+delicacies, and her own almost girlish laughter is like a kind of
+gracious music for the scenes she wishes to portray. I am reminded in
+this instance to compare her gentle voice with the almost inaudible
+one of Albert Ryder, that greatest of visionaries which America has so
+far produced. It is probable that all mystical types have voices
+softened to whispers by the vastness of the experience which they have
+endured. These gentle souls survive the period they were born in, and
+it is their clean and unspoiled vision that brings them over to us in
+this hectic and metallic era of ours. They come, it must be
+remembered, from the era of Jenny<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[141]</a></span> Lind and Castle Garden, though of
+course in Mrs. Cowdery's case she is too young actually to have
+survived that period literally. It is the grace of that period,
+however, to which she has become heir and all her efforts have been
+exercised in rendering of the graces of this playful and pretty hour
+of human life.</p>
+
+<p>We are reminded, for the moment only, of Monticelli, chiefly through
+similarity of subject, for he also was fond of the silent park
+inhabited with gracious beings in various states of spiritual ecstasy
+and satisfaction. In the pictures of Mrs. Cowdery there is doubtless
+greater intimacy of feeling, because it is a private and very personal
+issue with her own happy soul. She has come out on the other edge of
+the horizon of the world of humans, and finds the looking backward so
+imperatively exquisite as to make it necessary for her to paint them
+with innocent fidelity; and so she has set about, without any previous
+experience in the handling of homely materials, to make them tell in
+quaint and gracious accents the pretty story of the life of her
+revivified imagination. In these ways she becomes a kind of
+revivification of the spirit of Watteau, who has made perfect, for us
+all, what is perfect in the classicized ideality of experience.</p>
+
+<p>I think of Mrs. Cowdery's pictures as mid-Victorian fans, for they
+seem more like these frail shapes to be wafted by frail and slender
+hands; I seem to feel the quiet glitter of prisms hanging from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[142]</a></span> huge
+chandeliers in a ball-room, as I look at them; for they become, if you
+do not scrutinize them too closely as works of art, rather as
+prismatic memories bathed in the light of that other time, when men
+and women now grandfathers and grandmothers were young and handsome
+boys and girls, seeking each other out in the fashion of polite beaus
+and belles, a period that will never come again, it is certain. Mrs.
+Cowdery need not be alarmed that modern painters wish to offer plain
+homage to her fresh and engaging talents. It is an object lesson, if
+such is necessary, to all men and women past fifty: that there is
+still something for each of them to do in a creative way; and I can
+think of no more engaging way for them than to recite the romantic
+history of their youthful longings and realizations to a world that
+has little time for making history so romantically inoffensive.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Cowdery may be complimented therefore that she has followed her
+professional daughter's advice to take up painting as a pastime, and
+she has already shown in these brief four years, with all the
+intermissions that are natural to any ordinary life, that she is a
+fine type of amateur artist with all the world of rediscovery at her
+disposal. She will be hampered in no way with the banalities of
+instruction offered her by the assuming ones. She is beyond the need
+of anything but self-invention, and this will be her own unique and
+satisfying pleasure. It is in no way amiss, then, to congratulate<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[143]</a></span>
+Mrs. Cowdery upon her new and vital artistic career. That she will
+have further success is proven by the few pictures already created by
+her. They show the unmistakable signs of taste and artistic
+comprehension as applied to her own spiritual vision. No intervention
+will be of any avail, save perhaps the permissible intervention of
+praise and congratulations.</p>
+
+<p>Incidentally, I would recommend to those artists who are long since
+jaded with repetition and success, and there are many of them, to
+refresh their eyes and their senses with the work of these outwardly
+unassuming but thoroughly convincing amateurs, like Henri Rousseau,
+Mrs. Cowdery and the many others whose names do not appear on their
+handsome works of art. There is such freshness of vision and true art
+experience contained in them. They rely upon the imagination entirely
+for their revelations, and there is always present in these
+unprofessional works of art acute observation of fact and fine gifts
+for true fancy. These amateurs are never troubled with the "how" of
+mediocre painting; neither are they troubled with the wiles of the
+outer world. They remain always charming painters of personal
+visionary experience, and as such are entitled to praise for their
+genuine gifts in rendering, as well as for a natural genius for
+interpretation.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[144]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="HENRI_ROUSSEAU" id="HENRI_ROUSSEAU"></a>HENRI ROUSSEAU</h2>
+
+
+<p>Not long since, we heard much of na&iuml;vet&eacute;&mdash;it was the fashion among the
+schools and the lesser individuals to use this term in describing the
+work of anyone who sought to distinguish himself by eccentricity of
+means. It was often the term applied to bizarrerie&mdash;it was fashionable
+to draw na&iuml;vely, as it was called. We were expected to believe in a
+highly developed and overstrained simplicity, it was the resort of a
+certain number who wanted to realize speedy results among the
+unintelligent. It was a pose which lasted not long because it was
+obviously a pose, and a pose not well carried, it had not the
+prescribed ease about it and showed signs of labor. It had, for a
+time, its effect upon really intelligent artists with often
+respectable results, as it drew the tendency away from too highly
+involved sophistication. It added a fresh temper in many ways, and
+helped men to a franker type of self-expression; and was, as we may
+expect, something apart from the keen need of obliviousness in the
+great modern individualists, those who were seeking direct contact
+with subject.</p>
+
+<p>We have learned in a short space of time that whatever was exceptional
+in the ideas and attitudes of the greater ones, as we know them, was
+not at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[145]</a></span> all the outcome of the struggle toward an affected na&iuml;vet&eacute;
+such as we have heard so much about, but was, on another hand, a real
+phase of their originality, the other swing of the pendulum, so to
+call it. It was the "accent" of their minds and tempers, it was a true
+part of their personal gesture, and was something they could not, and
+need not, do anything about, as if it were the normal tendency in them
+in their several ways. We all of us know that modern art is not
+haphazard, it is not hit or miss in its intention at least, certainly
+not the outcome of oddity, of whim, or of eccentricity, for these
+traits belong to the superficial and cultivated. We have found that
+with the best moderns there has been and is inherent in them the same
+sincerity of feeling, the same spirit directing their research. The
+single peculiarity of modern art therefore, if such there be, is its
+special relationship to the time in which it is being produced,
+explicitly of this age.</p>
+
+<p>What we know of the men, much or little, proves that they are, and
+have all been, simple earnest men, intelligent, following nowise
+blindly in pursuit of fresh sensation, excitement, a mere phantasy, or
+freak of the mind. It was, and is, the product of a logic essentially
+of themselves, and of the period they represent; and because this
+period is not the period of sentimentality in art, but a period
+striving toward a more vigorous type of values&mdash;something as beautiful
+as the machinery of our time&mdash;it is not as yet to any great degree
+cared for, understood nor,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[146]</a></span> up to very recently, even trusted. It has
+destroyed old fashioned romance, and the common eye has ceased to
+focus, or rather, does not wish to concentrate on things which do not
+visualize the literary sensation. In the midst of all this struggle
+was Henri Rousseau, the real and only naif of this time, and certainly
+among the truest of all times. As much as a man can remain child,
+Rousseau remained the child, and as much as a man could be na&iuml;ve and
+childlike, certainly it was this simple artist who remained so.</p>
+
+<p>If report has the truth correctly, Rousseau began his career as
+painter at the age of forty, though it is quite possible and probable
+that he was painting whenever he could, in his untutored fashion, in
+all of his spare intervals, and with but one object in view apparent:
+to give forth in terms of painting those phases of his own personal
+life which remained indelibly impressed upon his memory, pictorially
+always vivid to him, as in his pictures they are seen to be the scenes
+or incidents of loveliness to his fine imagination. We find them
+covering a rather wide range of experience, apparently in two places,
+somewhere in the tropics of Mexico, and Paris; the former, experiences
+of youth in some sort of governmental service I believe, and the
+latter, the more intimate phases of life about him in Paris, of Paris
+herself and of those people who created for him the intimacy of his
+home life, and the life which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[147]</a></span> centered about the charming rue de
+Perelle where he lived.</p>
+
+<p>In Rousseau then, we have one of the finest individual expressions of
+the amateur spirit in painting, taking actually a place among the
+examples of paintings, such as those of the Kwakiutl Indians, or the
+sculpture of the Congo people, partaking of the very same quality of
+directness and simplicity, and of contact with the prevailing image
+chosen for representation. He was too evidently the product of
+himself, he was not hybrid, nor was he in any sense something strange
+springing up out of the soil in the dark of night, he was not
+mushroom. He did not know the meaning of affectation, and I doubt if
+he even knew what was meant by simplicity, so much was he that element
+himself.</p>
+
+<p>It is with fascination that we think of him as living his life out
+after his discharge for incompetency from the customs service outside
+the fortifications of Paris, and doubtless with the strain of poverty
+upon him also, within a ten minutes' walk from the world famous
+quartiers, and almost certainly knowing nothing of them. That there
+was a Julian's or a Colarossi's anywhere about, it is not likely that
+he knew, or if he knew, not more than vaguely. He drew his quaint
+inspirations directly from the sources of nature and some pencil
+drawings I have seen prove the high respect and admiration, amounting
+to love and worship, which he had for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[148]</a></span> nature and the phenomena of
+her, to be disclosed at every hedge.</p>
+
+<p>If he was no success as a douanier, he was learning a great deal,
+meanwhiles, about those delicate and radiant skies which cover Paris
+at all times, charming always for their lightness and delicacy,
+pearl-like in their quiet splendour; and it was during this service of
+his at the city's gates that he learned his lovely sense of blacks and
+greys and silvers, of which Paris offers so much always, and which
+predominate in his canvases. Even his tropical scenes strive in no way
+toward artificiality of effect, but give rather the sense of their
+profundity than of oddity, of their depth and mystery than of
+peculiarity. He gives us the sense of having been at home in them in
+his imagination, being so well at home in those scenes of Paris which
+were daily life to him. We find in Rousseau true na&iuml;vet&eacute;, without
+struggle, real child-likeness of attitude and of emotion, following
+diligently with mind and with spirit the forms of those stored images
+that have registered themselves with directness upon the area of his
+imagination, never to be forgotten, rendered with perfect simplicity
+for us in these quaint pictures of his, superb in the richness of
+quality which makes of them, what they are to the eye that is
+sympathetic to them, pictures out of a life undisturbed by all the
+machinations and intrigues of the outer world, a life intimate with
+itself, remote from all agencies having no direct association with it,
+living with a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[149]</a></span> sweet gift of enchantment with the day's disclosures,
+occupied apparently with nothing beyond the loveliness contained in
+them.</p>
+
+<p>There is not once, anywhere, a striving of the mind in the work of
+this simple man. It was a wealth of innocence that tinged all his
+methods, and his pictures are as simple in their appeal as are the
+declarations of Jacob Boehme&mdash;they are the songs of innocence and
+experience of a nature for whom all the world was beautiful, and have
+about them the element of song itself, a poetry that has not yet
+reached the shaping of words. Who looks at the pictures of this true
+and charming naif, will find nothing to wonder at beyond this extreme
+simplicity, he had no prescribed attitude, no fixity of image that
+characterizes every touch of school. He was taught only by nature and
+consulted only her relationships and tendencies. There is never a
+mistaking of that. Nature was his influence, and he saw with an
+untrammelled eye the elemental shape of all things, and affixed no
+falsity of feeling, or anything, to his forms which might have
+detracted from their extreme simplicity. He had "first sight," first
+contact with the image, and sought nothing else beyond this, and a
+very direct correspondence with memories dictated all his efforts.</p>
+
+<p>That Rousseau was musical, is shown in the natural grace of his
+compositions, and his ideas were simple as the early songs of France
+are simple, speaking of everyday things with simple heart and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[150]</a></span> voice,
+and he painted frankly what he saw in precisely the way he saw it. We,
+who love richness and sobriety of tone, will never tire of Rousseau's
+beautiful blacks and greys, and probably no one has excelled them for
+delicacy of appreciation, and perfection of gradation. It will be long
+before the landscapes will be forgotten, it will be long before the
+exquisite portrait of the "Child with the Harlequin" will fade from
+remembrance, we shall remember them all for their loveliness in
+design, a gift which never failed him, no matter what the subject.
+Simple arabesque, it was the jungle that taught him this, and therein
+lay his special power, a genuine feeling for the richness of laces and
+brocades in full and subdued tones, such as one would find in the
+elaborate intricacies of tropical foliage, strange leaves intermingled
+with parrots, monkeys, strange white lilies on high stalks, tigers
+peering through highly ornate foliage and branches intertwined, all
+excellently suggestive of that foreign land in which the mind wanders
+and finds itself so much at home.</p>
+
+<p>"Le Charmeur," "Jadwigha," in these are concentrated all that is
+lovely in the land of legend; and, like all places of legend, replete
+with imaginative beauty, the places where loveliness and beauty of
+form congregate, after they have passed through the sensuous spaces of
+the eye travelling somewhere to an abode where all those things are
+that are perfect, they live forever. Rousseau was a charming<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[151]</a></span> and
+lovable child, whether he was painting or whether he was conducting
+his own little orchestra, composed of those people who kept shop
+around his home, and it is as the child of his time that he must be
+considered, child in verity among the sophisticated moderns who
+believed and believe more in intellect than in anything else, many of
+whom paid tribute to him, and reverenced him, either in terms of
+sincere friendship, or by occasional visit. The various anecdotes,
+touching enough, are but further proof of the innocence of this so
+simple and untutored person.</p>
+
+<p>The real amateur spirit has, we like to think, much in its favor, if
+only for its freshness, its spontaneity, and a very gratifying
+naturalness. Rousseau was all of this, and lived in a world untouched,
+he wove about himself, like other visionaries, a soft veil hiding all
+that was grossly unreal to him from all that was real, and for
+Rousseau, those things and places he expressed existed vividly for
+him, and out of them his pictures became true creations. He was the
+real naif, because he was the real child, unaffected and unspoiled,
+and painting was for him but the key of heaven that he might open
+another door for the world's weary eye.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[154]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="PART_TWO" id="PART_TWO"></a>PART TWO </h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[155]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="THE_TWILIGHT_OF_THE_ACROBAT" id="THE_TWILIGHT_OF_THE_ACROBAT"></a>THE TWILIGHT OF THE ACROBAT</h2>
+
+
+<p>Where is our once charming acrobat&mdash;our minstrel of muscular music?
+What has become of these groups of fascinating people gotten up in
+silk and spangle? Who may the evil genius be who has taken them and
+their fascinating art from our stage, who the ogre of taste that has
+dispensed with them and their charm? How seldom it is in these times
+that one encounters them, as formerly when they were so much the
+charming part of our lighter entertainment. What are they doing since
+popular and fickle notions have removed them from our midst?</p>
+
+<p>It is two years since I have seen the American stage. I used to say to
+myself in other countries, at least America is the home of real
+variety and the real lover of the acrobat. But I hear no one saying
+much for him these days, and for his charming type of art.</p>
+
+<p>What has become of them all, the graceful little lady of the slack
+wire, those charming and lovely figures that undulate upon the air by
+means of the simple trapeze, those fascinating ensembles and all the
+various types of melodic muscular virtuosity?</p>
+
+<p>We have been given much, of late, of that virtuosity of foot and leg
+which is usually called danc<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[156]</a></span>ing; and that is excellent among us here,
+quite the contribution of the American, so singularly the product of
+this special physique. Sometimes I think there are no other dancers
+but Americans. It used to be so delightful a diversion watching our
+acrobat and his group with their strong and graceful bodies writhing
+with rhythmical certitude over a bar or upon a trapeze against a
+happily colored space. Now we get little more in the field of
+acrobatics beyond a varied buck and wing; everything seems tuxedoed
+for drawing room purposes. We get no more than a decent handspring or
+two, an over-elaborated form of split. It all seems to be over with
+our once so fashionable acrobat. There is no end of good stepping, as
+witness the Cohan Revue, a dancing team in Robinson Crusoe, Jr., and
+"Archie and Bertie" (I think they call themselves). This in itself
+might be called the modern American school: the elongated and elastic
+gentleman who finds his co-operator among the thin ones of his race,
+artistically speaking. I did not get to the circus this year, much to
+my regret; perhaps I would have found my lost genius there, among the
+animals disporting themselves in less charitable places. But we cannot
+follow the circus naturally, and these minstrel folk are disappearing
+rapidly. Variety seems quite to have given them up and replaced them
+with often very tiresome and mediocre acts of singing.</p>
+
+<p>How can one forget, for instance, the Famille Bouvier who used to
+appear regularly at the f&ecirc;tes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[157]</a></span> in the streets of Paris in the summer
+season, living all of them in a roving gipsy wagon as is the custom of
+these f&ecirc;te people. What a charming moment it was always to see the
+simple but well built Mlle. Jeanne of twenty-two pick up her stalwart
+and beautifully proportioned brother of nineteen, a strong,
+broad-shouldered, manly chap, and balance him on one hand upright in
+the air. It was a classic moment in the art of the acrobat,
+interesting to watch the father of them all training the fragile
+bodies of the younger boys and girls to the systematic movement of the
+business while the mother sat in the doorway of the caravan nursing
+the youngest at the breast, no doubt the perfect future acrobat. And
+how charming it was to look in at the doors of these little houses on
+wheels and note the excellent domestic order of them, most always with
+a canary or a linnet at the curtained window and at least one cat or
+dog or maybe both. This type is the progenitor of our stage acrobat,
+it is the primitive stage of these old-time troubadours, and it is
+still prevalent in times of peace in France. The strong man gotten in
+tawdry pink tights and much worn black velvet with his very elaborate
+and drawn out speeches, in delicate French, concerning the marvels of
+his art and the long wait for the stipulated number of <i>dix centimes</i>
+pieces before his marvellous demonstration could begin. This is, so to
+say, the vagabond element of our type of entertainment, the wandering
+minstrel who keeps generation after generation to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[158]</a></span> the art of his
+forefathers, this fine old art of the pavement and the open country
+road. But we look for our artist in vain these days, those groups
+whose one art is the exquisite rhythmical display of the human body,
+concerted muscular melody. We cannot find him on the street in the
+shade of a stately chestnut tree as once in Paris we found him at
+least twice a year, and we seek him in vain in our modern music hall.</p>
+
+<p>Is our acrobatic artist really gone to his esthetic death; has he
+given his place permanently to the ever present singing lady who is
+always telling you who her modiste is, sings a sentimental song or two
+and then disappears; to the sleek little gentleman who dances off a
+moment or two to the tune of his doll-like partner whose voice is
+usually littler than his own? Perhaps our acrobat is still the delight
+of those more characteristic audiences of the road whose taste is less
+fickle, less blas&eacute;. This is so much the case with the arts in
+America&mdash;the fashions change with the season's end and there is never
+enough of novelty; dancing is already dying out, skating will not
+prevail for long among the idle; what shall we predict for our variety
+which is in its last stages of boredom for us?</p>
+
+<p>I suspect the so-called politeness of vaudeville of the elimination of
+our once revered acrobats. The circus notion has been replaced by the
+parlor entertainment notion. Who shall revive them for us, who admire
+their simple and unpretentious art; why<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[159]</a></span> is there not someone among
+the designers with sufficient interest in this type of beauty to make
+attractive settings for them, so that we may be able to enjoy them at
+their best, which in the theater we have never quite been able to
+do&mdash;designs that will in some way add luster to an already bright and
+pleasing show of talents.</p>
+
+<p>I can see, for instance, a young and attractive girl bareback rider on
+a cantering white horse inscribing wondrous circles upon a stage
+exquisitely in harmony with herself and her white or black horse as
+the case might be; a rich cloth of gold backdrop carefully suffused
+with rose. There could be nothing handsomer, for example, than young
+and graceful trapezists swinging melodically in turquoise blue
+doublets against a fine peacock background or it might be a rich pale
+coral&mdash;all the artificial and spectacular ornament dispensed with. We
+are expected to get an exceptional thrill when some dull person
+appears before a worn velvet curtain to expatiate with inappropriate
+gesture upon a theme of Chopin or of Beethoven, ideas and attitudes
+that have nothing whatsoever to do with the musical intention; yet our
+acrobat whose expression is certainly as attractive, if not much more
+so generally, has always to perform amid fatigued settings of the
+worst sort against red velvet of the most depraved shade possible. We
+are tired of the elaborately costumed person whose charms are trivial
+and insignificant, we are well tired also of the ordinary gentleman<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[160]</a></span>
+dancer and of the songwriter, we are bored to extinction by the
+perfectly dull type of playlet which features some well known
+legitimate star for illegitimate reasons. Our plea is for the
+re-creation of variety into something more conducive to light pleasure
+for the eye, something more conducive to pleasing and stimulating
+enjoyment. Perhaps the reinstatement of the acrobat, this revival of a
+really worthy kind of expression, would effect the change, relieve the
+monotony. The argument is not too trivial to present, since the
+spectator is that one for whom the diversion is provided.</p>
+
+<p>I hear cries all about from people who once were fond of theater and
+music hall that there is an inconceivable dullness pervading the
+stage; the habitual patron can no longer endure the offerings of the
+present time with a degree of pleasure, much less with ease. It has
+ceased to be what it once was, what its name implies. If the old
+school inclined toward the rough too much, then certainly the new
+inclines distressingly toward the refined&mdash;the stage that once was so
+full of knockabout is now so full of stand-still; variety that was
+once a joy is now a bore. Just some uninteresting songs at the piano
+before a giddy drop is not enough these days; and there are too many
+of such. There is need of a greater activity for the eye. The return
+of the acrobat in a more modern dress would be the appropriate
+acquisition, for we still have appreciation<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[161]</a></span> for all those charming
+geometrics of the trapeze, the bar, and the wire.</p>
+
+<p>It is to be hoped that these men will return to us, stimulating anew
+their delightful kind of poetry of the body and saving our variety
+performances from the prevailing plague of monotone.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[162]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="VAUDEVILLE" id="VAUDEVILLE"></a>VAUDEVILLE</h2>
+
+
+<p>I have but recently returned from the vaudeville of the centuries.
+Watching the kick and the glide of very ancient performers. I have
+spent a year and a half down in the wonderful desert country of the
+Southwest. I have wearied, however, of the ancient caprice, and turn
+with great delight to my old passion, vaudeville. I return with glee
+to the ladies and gentlemen and pet animals of the stage, including
+the acrobats. Is there one who cares for these artists and for their
+rhythmical gesture more than myself? I cannot think so. I have wished
+with a real desire to create new sets for them, to establish an
+altogether new tradition as regards the background of these charming
+artists. If that were the chosen field for my esthetic activities, I
+should be famous by now for the creation of sets and drops by which
+these exceptional artists might make a far more significant impression
+upon the type of public they essay to interest and amuse.</p>
+
+<p>I would begin first of all by severing them from the frayed traditions
+of worn plush and sequin, rid them of the so inadequate back drop such
+as is given them, the scene of Vesuvius in eruption, or the walk in
+the park at Versailles. They need first of all large plain spaces upon
+which to perform, and enjoy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[163]</a></span> their own remarkably devised patterns of
+body. I speak of the acrobats, the animals, the single and double
+dancers who perform "down in one" more especially. The so called
+headliners have their plush parlours with the inevitable purple or
+rose lamp, and the very much worn property piano just barely in tune.
+Only the dressmaker and the interior decorator can do things for them,
+as we see in the case of Kitty Gordon. It is to be hoped that a
+Beardsley of the stage will one day appear and really do something for
+the dainty type of person or the superbly theatric artist such as Miss
+Gordon, Valeska Suratt, and the few other remarkable women of the
+vaudeville stage.</p>
+
+<p>I am more concerned with the less appreciated artists. I would see
+that they glitter by their own brilliance. Why, for instance, should a
+fine act like the Four Danubes and others of their quality be tagged
+on to the end of a bill, at which time the unmannerly public decides
+to go home or hurry to some roof or other, or dining place?</p>
+
+<p>I should like seeing the Brothers Rath likewise, perhaps as refined
+acrobatic artists as have been seen on our stage for some time, in a
+set that would show them to better advantage, and give the public a
+greater intimacy with the beauty of their act than can be had beyond
+the first six rows of the Winter Garden. They are interposed there as
+a break between burlesques, which is not the place for them. I would
+"give" them the stage while they are on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[164]</a></span> it. Theirs is a muscular
+beauty which has not been excelled. I have no doubt that if I
+attempted to establish these ideas with the artists whom I spend so
+much time in championing, they would no doubt turn aside with the word
+"highbrow" on their lips. They would have to be shown that they need
+these things, that they need the old-fashioned ideas removed, and
+fresher ones put in their place. I have expressed this intention once
+before in print, perhaps not so vehemently. I should like to
+elaborate. I want a Metropolitan Opera for my project. An orchestra of
+that size for the larger concerted groups, numbers of stringed
+instruments for the wirewalkers and jugglers, a series of balanced
+woodwinds for others, and so on down the line, according to the
+quality of the performer. There should be a large stage for many
+elephants, ponies, dogs, tigers, seals. The stage should then be made
+more intimate for the solos, duets, trios, and quartets among the
+acrobats. I think a larger public should be made aware of the beauty
+and skill of these people, who spend their lives in perfecting grace
+and power of body, creating the always fascinating pattern and form,
+orchestration if you will, the orchestration of the muscles into a
+complete whole. You will of course say, go to the circus, and get it
+all at once. The circus is one of the most charming places in
+existence, because it is one of the last words in orchestrated
+physical splendour. But the circus is too diffused, too enormous in
+this country to per<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[165]</a></span>mit of concentrated interest, attention, or
+pleasure. One goes away with many little bits. It is because the
+background is made up of restless nervous dots, all anxious to get the
+combined quota which they have paid for, when in reality they do not
+even get any one thing. It is the alert eye which can go over three
+rings and two stages at once and enjoy the pattern of each of them. It
+is a physical impossibility really.</p>
+
+<p>I think we should be made aware in finer ways of the artists who open
+and close our bills. Why must the headliner always be a talking or a
+singing person who tells you how much money he needs, or how much she
+is getting? There is more than one type of artistic personality for
+those who care for vaudeville. Why doesn't a team like the Rath
+Brothers, for example, find itself the feature attraction? Must there
+always be the string of unnecessary little men and women who have such
+a time trying to fill up their twenty-two minutes or their fourteen?
+Why listen forever to puppy-like song writers when one can hear and
+watch a great artist like Ella Shields? My third visit to Ella Shields
+convinces me that she is one of the finest artists I have ever heard,
+certainly as fine in her way as Guilbert and Chevalier were. It is a
+rare privilege to be able to enjoy artists like Grock&mdash;Mark
+Sheridan&mdash;who is now dead, I am told. Mark, with his "They all walk
+the wibbly-wobbly walk, they all wear the wibbly-wobbly ties," and so
+on.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[166]</a></span> Mark is certainly being missed by a great many who care for the
+pleasure of the moment. When I look at and listen to the aristocratic
+artist Ella Shields, I feel a quality in her of the impeccable Mrs.
+Fiske. And then I am thinking of another great woman, Fay Templeton.
+What a pity we must lose them either by death or by decisions in life.
+Ella Shields with her charming typification of "Burlington Bertie from
+Bow."</p>
+
+<p>The other evening as I listened to Irene Franklin, I heard for certain
+what I had always thought were notes from the magic voice of dear old
+Fay. Unforgettable Fay. How can one ever say enough about her? I think
+of Fay along with my single glimpses of Duse, Ada Rehan, Coquelin. You
+see how I love her, then. Irene Franklin has the quality of imitation
+of the great Fay without, I think, the real magic. Nevertheless I
+enjoy her, and I am certain she has never been finer than now. She has
+enriched herself greatly by her experiences the last two years, and
+seems at the height of her power. It was good to get, once again,
+little glimpses of her Childs waitress and the chambermaid. It seemed
+to me that there was a richer quality of atmosphere in the little
+Jewish girl with the ring curls and the red mittens, as also in her
+French girl with, by the way, a beautiful gown of rich yellow silk
+Frenchily trimmed in vermilion or orange, I couldn't make out which.
+The amusing French girl, who having picked up many fag-ends of English
+from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[167]</a></span> her experience with the <i>soldats Am&eacute;ricains</i>&mdash;got her "animals"
+mixed&mdash;"you have my goat, I have your goat, et&mdash;tie ze bull outside,"
+and so on. I am crossing Irene and Fay here because I think them
+similar, only I must say I think the magic was greater in Fay, because
+possibly Fay was the greater student of emotion. Fay had the
+undercurrent, and Irene has perfected the surface. If Irene did study
+Fay at any time, and I say this respectfully, she perhaps knows that
+Fay went many times to Paris to study Rejane. The light entertainer
+is, as we know, very often a person of real intellect.</p>
+
+<p>If you want distinction, then, you will get it in the presence of Ella
+Shields. Her "Burlington Bertie" is nothing less than a chef
+d'&oelig;uvre; "Tom Lipton, he's got lots of 'oof&mdash;he sleeps on the roof,
+and I sleep in the room over him." Bertie, who, having been slapped on
+the back by the Prince of Wales (and some others) and asked why he
+didn't go and dine with "Mother," replied&mdash;"I can't, for I've just had
+a banana with Lady Diana.... I'm Burlington Bertie from Bow." Miss
+Shields shows also that she can sing a sentimental song without
+slushing it all over with saccharine. She has mastered the droll
+English quality of wit with real perfection. I regret I never saw
+Vesta Tilley, with whom the old tops compare her so favourably. Superb
+girls all these, Fay, Ella, Cissie, Vesta, as well as Marie Lloyd, and
+the other inimitable Vesta&mdash;Victoria.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[168]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Among the "coming soon," we have Miss Juliet, whom I recall with so
+much pleasure from the last immemorable Cohan Revue. I wait for her. I
+consider myself fortunate to be let in on James Watts. We thought our
+Eddy Foy a comic one. He was, for I remember the Gibson girl with the
+black velvet gown and the red flannel undershirt. I swing my swagger
+stick in the presence of Mr. Watts by way of applause. His art is very
+delicately understood and brought out. It has a fine quality of broad
+caricature with a real knowledge of economy such as Grock is master
+of. The three episodes are certainly funny enough. I find myself
+caring more for the first, called "June Day," since he reminds me so
+strongly in make-up of the French caricaturists in drawing, Rouveyre
+and Toulouse-Lautrec. Mr. Watts's feeling for satirical make-up is a
+fine shade of artistry in itself. He has excellent feeling for the
+broad contrast and for fierce insinuation at the same time. If you
+want real unalloyed fun, Mr. Watts will supply you. Nor will Grock
+disappoint you. Quite on the contrary, no matter what you are
+expecting.</p>
+
+<p>I do not know why I think of vaudeville as I think of a collection of
+good drawings. Unless it is because the sense of form is the same in
+all of the arts. The acrobat certainly has line and mass to think of,
+even if that isn't his primal concern. He knows how he decorates the
+space on which he operates. To make another comparison, then, Grock is
+the Forain<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[169]</a></span> of vaudeville. He achieves great plastic beauty with
+distinguished economy of means. He dispenses with all superfluous
+gesture, as does the great French illustrator. Grock is entirely right
+about clownery. You are either funny or you are not. No amount of
+study will produce the gift for humour. It is there, or it isn't.
+Grock's gift for musicianship is a singular combination to find with
+the rest of his artistry. It goes with the remarkably refined look in
+his face, however, as he sits upon the back of the seatless chair, and
+plays the little concertina with superb execution. There are no
+"jumps" in Grock's performance. His moods flow from one into another
+with a masterly smoothness, and you are aware when he is finished that
+you have never seen that sort of foolery before. Not just that sort.
+It is the good mind that satisfies, as in the case of James Watts, and
+Miss Shields.</p>
+
+<p>From elephants carrying in their trunks chatelaines of Shetland
+ponies, curtseying at the close of the charming act like a pretty miss
+at her first coming out, to such work as the Four Danubes give you as
+the closing number, with Irene as a lead, you are, to say the least,
+carried over the dreadful spots, such as the young man who sways out
+like a burlesque queen and tells you whom he was with before Keith got
+him. His name should be "Pusher," "Advance Man," or something of that
+sort, and not artist. What he gives you, you could find just as well
+if not better done on Fourteenth Street. He has a rib<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[170]</a></span>bon-counter,
+adenoid voice production that no really fine artist could afford. He
+will "get by," because anything does, apparently.</p>
+
+<p>One turns to the big artist for relief, even though minor artists like
+The Brown Sisters charm so surely with their ivory and silver
+diamond-studded accordions, giving very pleasing transitions from
+grave to gay in arias and tunes we know. Accordions and concertinas
+are very beautiful to me, when played by artists like these girls, and
+by such as Joe Cawthorne, and Grock.</p>
+
+<p>There are more dancing men of quality this season, it seems to me, who
+are obscured by dancing ladies of fame, and not such warrantable
+artistry. Perhaps it is because male anatomy allows of greater
+eccentricity and playfulness. There are no girls who have just such
+laughing legs as the inimitable Frances White. It is the long-legged
+American boy who beats the world in this sort of thing.</p>
+
+<p>The lovely bit of hockey which James Barton gives is for me far more
+distinguished than all the rest of his work in the Winter Garden
+Revue. He is a real artist, but it is work that one sees rather a deal
+of this season, whereas the hockey dance is like nothing else to be
+found. A lovely moment of rhythmic leg work. We are now thoroughly
+familiar with the stage drunk, as we have long been familiarized by
+Weber and Fields with the stage Jew, which is fortunately passing out
+for lack of artist to present it. L&eacute;on Errol is good for once,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[171]</a></span> even
+twice. He is quite alone in his very witty falls and runs. They are
+full of the struggle of the drunk to regain his character and manhood.
+The act lives on a very flat plane otherwise. It has no roundness.</p>
+
+<p>I have come on my list to Mijares and Co., in "Monkey Business." We
+have the exquisite criterion always for the wire, in the perfect Bird
+Millman. "Monkey Business" is a very good act, and both men do
+excellent work on the taut and slack wire. "Monkey," in this case
+being a man, does as beautiful a piece of work as I know of. I have
+never seen a back somersault upon a high wire. I have never heard of
+it before. There may be whole generations of artists gifted in this
+particular stunt. You have here, nevertheless, a moment of very great
+beauty in the cleanness of this man's surprising agility and sureness.
+The monkey costume hinders the beauty of the thing. It should be done
+with pale blue silk tights against a cherry velvet drop, or else in
+deep ultramarine on an old gold background.</p>
+
+<p>The acrobatic novelty called "The Legrohs" relies chiefly on its most
+exceptional member, who would be complete without the other two. He is
+most decidedly a virtuoso in vaudeville. Very gifted, certainly, if at
+moments a little disconcerting in the flexibility and the seemingly
+uncertain turns of his body. It is the old-fashioned contortionism
+saved by charming acrobatic variations. This "Legroh" knows how to
+make a superb pattern with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[172]</a></span> his body, and the things he does with it
+are done with such ease and skill as to make you forget the actual
+physical effort and you are lost for the time being in the beauty of
+this muscular kaleidoscopic brilliancy. You feel it is like
+"puzzle&mdash;find the man" for a time, but then you follow his exquisite
+changes from one design into another with genuine delight, and
+appreciate his excessive grace and easy rapidity. He gives you chiefly
+the impression of a dragon-fly blown in the wind of a brisk morning
+over cool stretches of water. You would expect him to land on a
+lily-pad any moment and smooth his wings with his needle-like legs.</p>
+
+<p>So it is the men and women of vaudeville transform themselves into
+lovely flower and animal forms, and the animals take on semblances of
+human sensibility in vaudeville. It is the superb arabesque of the
+beautiful human body that I care for most, and get the most from in
+these cameo-like bits of beauty and art. So brief they are, and like
+the wonders of sea gardens as you look through the glass bottoms of
+the little boats. So like the wonders of the microscopic, full of
+surprising novelties of colour and form. So like the kaleidoscope in
+the ever changing, ever shifting bits of colour reflecting each other,
+falling into new patterns with each twist of the toy. If you care for
+the iridescence of the moment you will trust vaudeville as you are not
+able to trust any other sort of a performance. You have no chance for
+the fatigue of problem. You<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[173]</a></span> are at rest as far as thinking is
+concerned. It is something for the eye first and last. It is something
+for the ear now and then, only very seldomly, however. For me, they
+are the saviours of the dullest art in existence, the art of the
+stage. Duse was quite right about it. The stage should be swept of
+actors. It is not a place for imitation and photography. It is a place
+for the laughter of the senses, for the laughter of the body. It is a
+place for the tumbling blocks of the brain to fall in heaps. I give
+first place to the acrobat and his associates because it is the art
+where the human mind is for once relieved of its stupidity. The
+acrobat is master of his body and he lets his brain go a-roving upon
+other matters, if he has one. He is expected to be silent. He would
+agree with William James, transposing "music prevents thinking" into
+"talking prevents silence." In so many instances, it prevents
+conversation. That is why I like tea chitchat. Words are never meant
+to mean anything then. They are simply given legs and wings, and they
+jump and fly. They land where they can, and fall flat if they must.
+The audience that patronizes vaudeville would do well to be present at
+most first numbers, and remain for most or many of the closing ones. A
+number, I repeat, like the Four Danubes, should not be snubbed by any
+one.</p>
+
+<p>I have seen recently, then, by way of summary, four fine bits of
+artistry in vaudeville&mdash;Ella Shields, James Watts, the Brothers Rath,
+and the Four Dan<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[174]</a></span>ubes. I shall speak again of these people. They are
+well worth it. They turn pastime into perfect memory. They are,
+therefore, among the great artists.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[175]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="A_CHARMING_EQUESTRIENNE" id="A_CHARMING_EQUESTRIENNE"></a>A CHARMING EQUESTRIENNE</h2>
+
+
+<p>I am impelled to portray, at this time, my devotion to the little
+equestrienne, by the presence of a traveling circus in these lofty
+altitudes in which I am now living, seven thousand feet above the sea,
+in our great southwest. The mere sight of this master of the miniature
+ring, with all the atmosphere of the tent about him, after almost
+insurmountable difficulties crossing the mountains, over through the
+canyons of this expansive country, delivering an address in
+excellently chosen English, while poised at a considerable height on
+the wire, to the multitude on the ground below him, during which time
+he is to give what is known as the "free exhibit" as a high wire
+artist&mdash;all this turns me once more to the ever charming theme of
+acrobatics in general and equestrianism in particular, and it is of a
+special genius in this field that I wish to speak.</p>
+
+<p>I have always been a lover of these artists of bodily vigour, of
+muscular melody, as I like to call it. As I watched this ringmaster of
+the little traveling circus, this master mountebank of the sturdy
+figure, ably poised upon his head on the high wire, outlined against
+the body of the high mountain in the near distance, about which the
+thunder clouds were huddling, and in and out of which the light<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[176]</a></span>ning
+was sharply playing, it all formed for me another of those perfect
+sensations from that phase of art expression known as the circus. My
+happiest memories in this field are from the streets of Paris before
+the war, the incomparably lovely f&ecirc;tes. Only the sun knows where these
+dear artists may be now.</p>
+
+<p>But I am wanting to tell of the little equestrienne, whose work has
+for the past five years been a source of genuine delight to me,
+charming little May Wirth, of Australian origin, with her lovely dark
+eyes, and captivating English accent. If you have a genuine sympathy
+for this sort of expression, it is but natural that you want to get
+inside the ring, and smell the turf with them, and so it was the
+representative of this gifted little woman who brought us together. It
+is, in the first place, a pity that there is so little written of the
+history of these people, so little material from which to gather the
+development of the idea of acrobatics in general, or of any one phase
+in particular. It would be impossible to learn who was the first
+aerial trapezist, for instance, or where high wire performing was
+brought from, just when the trick of adjusting the body to these
+difficult and strenuous rhythms was originated. They cannot tell you
+themselves. Only if there happens to be more than two generations in
+existence can you trace the development of this form of athletic
+entertainment. It may have begun with the Egyptians, it may have begun
+with the first gypsies.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[177]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>These people do not write their history, they simply make it among
+themselves, and it is handed down through the generations. When I
+asked May Wirth for information, she said she knew of none on the
+subject, save that she herself sprang from five generations of
+acrobats and equestrians, and that it is terrifically hard labour from
+beginning to end, equestrianism in particular, since it requires a
+knowledge of several if not all the other physical arts combined, such
+as high wire walking, handspring and somersault, trapeze work, bars,
+ballet dancing, etc.; that she herself had begun as a child, and had
+run the entire gamut of these requirements, coming out the finished
+product, so to speak, in all but ballet dancing, which she disliked,
+and wept always when the time came for her lesson in this department.</p>
+
+<p>When one sees the incomparable brilliancy of this little woman of the
+horse, watching her marvellous ground work, which is in itself an
+example of virtuosity, one realizes what accomplishment alone can do,
+for she is not yet twenty-five, and the art is already in the
+condition of genius with her. Five handsome side-wheels round the
+ring, and a flying jump on the horse, then several complete
+somersaults on the horse's back while he is in movement round the
+ring, is not to be slighted for consideration, and if, as I have said,
+you have a love or even a fancy for this sort of entertainment, you
+all but worship the little lady for the thrill she gives you through
+this consummate mastery of hers.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[178]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I always wanted to do what the boys could do, and I was never
+satisfied until I had accomplished it." This was the strongest
+assertion the little lady of the horse was moved to make while in
+conversation, and that the ring is more beautiful to work in than on a
+mat upon a stage, for it is in the ring that the horse is most at
+home, it is easier for him, and gives him greater muscular freedom,
+with the result naturally, that it is easier on the muscles of the
+human body while in action. I have never tired of this species of
+entertainment. It has always impressed me as being the most natural
+form of transposed physical culture, esthetically speaking. It does
+for the eye, if you are sensitive, what music does for the ear. It
+gives the body a chance to show its exquisite rhythmic beauty, as no
+other form of athletics can, for it is the beautiful plastic of the
+body, harmonically arranged for personal delight.</p>
+
+<p>It is something for so young a woman to have walked away with first
+honours in her chosen field, yet like the true artist that she is, she
+is thinking always of how she can beautify her accomplishment to a
+still greater degree. She is mistress of a very difficult art, and yet
+the brilliancy of her performance makes it seem as if it were but the
+experiment of an afternoon, in the out-of-doors. Like all fine
+artists, she has brushed away from sight all aspects of labour, and
+presents you, with astounding ease, the apparent easiness of the
+thing. She is powerfully built, and her muscles are master of
+coordina<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[179]</a></span>tion, such as would be the envy of multitudes of men, and
+with all this power, she is as simple in her manner and appearance as
+is the young debutante at her coming out function. You are impressed
+with her sweetness and refinement, first of all, and the utter lack of
+show about her, as also with her brother who is a dapper young man of
+the very English type, who works with her, and acts as the
+dress-suited gentleman in this acrobatic ringplay of theirs. Three
+other members of her family take part also with her, the
+ring-mistress, a woman of possibly forty, acting as host, looking
+exceptionally well, handsome indeed, in grey and silver evening dress,
+with fine dark eyes and an older sister who opens the performance with
+some good work. This seems to me to be the modern touch, for there was
+a time when it was always the very well groomed ringmaster, with top
+hat and monocle, who acted as host of the ring.</p>
+
+<p>It will likewise be remembered by those who saw the Hannafords at the
+circus, that they were also possessed of a very handsome
+ring-mistress, elegantly gowned, both of these older ladies lending
+great distinction, by their presence, to already brilliant
+performances. I would be very pleased to make myself historian for
+these fine artists, these esthetes of muscular melody. I should like
+very much to be spokesman for them, and point out to an enforcedly
+ignorant public, the beauties of this line of artistic expression, and
+to give historical ac<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[180]</a></span>count of the development of these various
+picturesque athletic arts. Alas, that is not possible, for it must
+remain forever in the limbo of tradition.</p>
+
+<p>We shall have to be grateful beyond expression for the beautiful art
+of May Wirth, and devote less enthusiasm to asking of when and how it
+came about. To have established one's art at the perfect point in
+one's girlhood, is it not achievement, is it not genius itself?
+Charming little May Wirth, first equestrienne of the world, I
+congratulate you for your beautiful presentation, for the excellence
+of its technique, and for the grace and fascination contained therein.
+Triumph in youth, victory in the heroic period of life, that surely is
+sufficient. Let the bays fall upon her young head gleefully, for she
+earned them with patience, devotion, intelligence, and very hard
+labours. Salutations, little lady of the white horse! How charming,
+how simple she was, the little equestrienne as she rode away from the
+door of the huge theatre, in her pale blue touring car. "I love the
+audiences here in this great theatre, but O, I love the circus so much
+more!" These were the sentiments of the little performer as she rode
+away. She is now touring, performing under the huge canvases in the
+open areas of the middle West, and the little traveling circus is on
+its way over the mountains. Fascinating people, and a fascinating life
+for whom there is not, and probably never will be, a written history;
+the story of whose origin lies almost as buried as that of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[181]</a></span>
+primitive peoples. Charming rovers, content with life near to the
+bright sky, charming people, for whom life is but one long day in
+which to make beautiful their bodies, and make joyful the eyes of
+those who love to look at them!</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[182]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="JOHN_BARRYMORE_IN_PETER_IBBETSON" id="JOHN_BARRYMORE_IN_PETER_IBBETSON"></a>JOHN BARRYMORE IN PETER IBBETSON</h2>
+
+
+<p>The vicissitudes of the young boy along the vague, precarious way, the
+longing to find the reality of the dream&mdash;the heart that knew him
+best&mdash;a study in sentimentality, the pathetic wanderings of a "little
+boy lost" in the dream of childhood, and the "little boy found" in the
+arms of his loved mother, with all those touches that are painful and
+all that are exquisite and poignant in their beauty&mdash;such is the
+picture presented by John Barrymore, as nearly perfect as any artist
+can be, in "Peter Ibbetson." Certainly it is as finished a creation in
+its sense of form, and of color, replete with a finesse of rare
+loveliness, as gratifying a performance, to my notion, as has been
+seen on our stage for many years. Perhaps if the author, recalling
+vain pasts, could realize the scum of saccharinity in which the play
+is utterly submerged, and that it struggles with great difficulty to
+survive the nesselrodelike sweetness with which it is surfeited, he
+would recognize the real distinction that Barrymore lends to a r&ocirc;le so
+clogged by the honeyed sentimentality covering most of the scenes.
+Barrymore gives us that "quickened sense" of the life of the young
+man, a portrayal which takes the eye by "its fine edge of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[183]</a></span> light," a
+portrayal clear and cool, elevated to a fine loftiness in his
+rendering.</p>
+
+<p>The actor has accomplished this by means of a nice knowledge of what
+symbolic expression means to the art of the stage. He is certainly a
+painter of pictures and moods, the idea and his image perfectly
+commingled, endowing this mediocre play with true charm by the
+distinction he lends it, by sheer discretion, and by a power of
+selection. All this he brings to a play which, if it had been written
+nowadays, would certainly have convicted its author, and justly too,
+of having written to stimulate the lachrymal effusions of the
+shop-girl, a play about which she might telephone her girl friend, at
+which she might eat bon bons, and powder her nose again for the
+street. No artist, no accepted artist, has given a more suggestive
+rendering than has Barrymore here. It would be difficult to say where
+he is at his best, except that the first half of the play counts for
+most in point of strength and opportunity.</p>
+
+<p>A tall frail young man, we find him, blanched with wonder and with awe
+at the perplexity of life, seeking a solution of things by means of
+the dream, as only the dreamer and the visionary can, lost from first
+to last, seemingly unloved in the ways boys think they want to be
+loved; that is, the shy longing boy, afraid of all things, and mostly
+of himself, in the period just this side of sex revelation. He is the
+neophyte&mdash;the homeless, pathetic Peter, perplexed with the strangeness
+of things real and tem<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[184]</a></span>poral&mdash;vision and memory counting for all there
+is of reality to him, with life itself a thing as yet untasted. Who
+shall forget (who has a love for real expression) the entrance of
+Peter into the drawing-room of Mrs. Deane, the pale flowery wisp of a
+boy walking as it were into a garden of pungent spices and herbs, and
+of actions so alien to his own? We are given at this moment the
+keynote of mastery in delicate suggestion, which never fails
+throughout the play, tedious as it is, overdrawn on the side of
+symbolism and mystical insinuation.</p>
+
+<p>One sits with difficulty through many of the moments, the literary
+quality of them is so wretched. They cloy the ear, and the mind that
+has been made sensitive, desiring something of a finer type of
+stimulation. Barrymore has evoked, so we may call it, a cold
+method&mdash;against a background of what could have been overheated acting
+or at least a superabundance of physical attack&mdash;the warmth of the
+play's tender sentimentalities; yet he covers them with a still
+spiritual ardor which is their very essence, extracting all the
+delicate nuances and arranging them with a fine sense of proportion.
+It is as difficult an accomplishment for a man as one can imagine. For
+it is not given to many to act with this degree of whiteness, devoid
+of off colorings or alien tones. This performance of Barrymore in its
+spiritual richness, its elegance, finesse, and intelligence, has not
+been equaled for me since<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[185]</a></span> I saw the great geniuses Paul Orleneff and
+Eleonora Duse.</p>
+
+<p>It is to be at once observed that here is a keen pictorial mind, a
+mind which visualizes perfectly for itself the chiaroscuro aspects of
+the emotion, as well as the spiritual, for Barrymore gives them with
+an almost unerring felicity, and rounds out the portrayal which in any
+other hands would suffer, but Barrymore has the special power to feel
+the value of reticence in all good art, the need for complete
+subjection of personal enthusiasm to the force of ideas. His art is
+akin to the art of silver-point, which, as is known, is an art of
+directness of touch, and final in the instant of execution, leaving no
+room whatever for accident or untoward excitement of nerve.</p>
+
+<p>We shall wait long for the silver suggestiveness such as Barrymore
+gives us when Peter gets his first glimpse of Mary, Duchess of Towers.
+Who else could convey his realization of her beauty, and the quality
+of reminiscence that lingers about her, of the rapt amaze as he stands
+by the mantel-piece looking through the door into the space where he
+sees her in the midst of dancers under a crystal chandelier somewhere
+not very distant? Or the moment when he finds her bouquet neglected on
+the table in the drawing-room, with her lace shawl not far from his
+hands? Or when he finds himself alone, pressing his lips into the
+depth of the flowers as the curtain gives the finale to the scene with
+the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[186]</a></span> whispered "l'amour"! These are moments of a real lyrist, and
+would match any line of Banville, of Ronsard, or of Austin Dobson for
+delicacy of touch and feeling, for freshness, and for the precise
+spiritual gesture, the "intonation" of action requisite to relieve the
+moments from what might otherwise revert to commonplace
+sentimentality.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever the prejudice may be against all these emotions glac&eacute; with
+sugary frosting, we feel that his art has brought them into being with
+an unmistakable gift of refinement coupled with superb style. How an
+artist like Beardsley would have revelled in these moments is easy to
+conjecture. For here is the quintessence of intellectualized
+aquarelle, and these touches would surely have brought into being
+another "Pierrot of the Minute"&mdash;a new line drawing out of a period he
+knew and loved well. These touches would have been graced by the hand
+of that artist, or by another of equal delicacy of appreciation,
+Charles Conder&mdash;unforgettable spaces replete with the essence of
+fancy, of dream, of those farther recesses of the imagination.</p>
+
+<p>Although technically and historically Barrymore has the advantage of
+excellent traditions, he nevertheless rests entirely upon his own
+achievements, separate and individual in his understanding of what
+constitutes plastic power in art. He has a peculiar and most sensitive
+temper, which can arrange points of relation in juxtaposition with a
+keen sense of form as well as of substance. He is, one might say, a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[187]</a></span>
+masterly draftsman with a rich cool sense of color, whose work has
+something of the still force of a drawing of Ingres with, as well, the
+sensitive detail one finds in a Redon, like a beautiful drawing on
+stone. An excellent knowledge of dramatic contrasts is displayed by
+the brothers Barrymore, John and Lionel, in the murder scene, one of
+the finest we have seen for many years, technically even, splendid,
+and direct, concise in movement. Every superfluous gesture has been
+eliminated. From the moment of Peter's locking the door upon his uncle
+the scene is wrapped in the very coils of catastrophe, almost
+Euripedean in its inevitability. All of this episode is kept strictly
+within the realm of the imagination. It is an episode of hatred, of
+which there is sure to be at least one in the life of every young
+sensitive, when every boy wants, at any rate somewhere in his mind, to
+destroy some influence or other which is alien or hateful to him. The
+scene emphasizes once again the beauty of technical power for its own
+sake, the thrill of discarding all that is not immediately essential
+to simple and direct realization.</p>
+
+<p>Little can be said of the play beyond this point, for it dwindles off
+into sentimental mystification which cannot be enjoyed by anyone under
+fifty, or appreciated by anyone under eighteen. It gives opportunity
+merely for settings and some rare moments of costuming, the lady with
+the battledore reminding one a deal of a good Manet. This and,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[188]</a></span> of
+course, the splendid appearance of the Duchess of Towers in the first
+act&mdash;all these touches furnish more than a satisfying background for
+the very shy and frail Peter.</p>
+
+<p>This performance of Barrymore holds for me the first and last
+requisite of organized conception in art&mdash;poise, clarity, and perfect
+suggestibility. Its intellectual soundness rules the emotional
+extravagance, giving form to what&mdash;for lack of form&mdash;so often perishes
+under an excess of energy, which the ignorant actor substitutes for
+the plastic element in all art. It has the attitude, this performance,
+almost of diffidence to one's subject-matter, except as the intellect
+judges clearly and coolly. Thus, in the sense of esthetic reality, are
+all aspects clarified and made real. From the outward inward, or from
+the inward outward, surface to depth or depth to surface&mdash;it is
+difficult to say which is the precise method of approach. John
+Barrymore has mastered the evasive subtlety therein, which makes him
+one of our greatest artists. The future will surely wait for his riper
+contributions, and we may think of him as one of our foremost artists,
+among the few, "one of a small band," as the great novelist once said
+of the great poet.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[190]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="PART_THREE" id="PART_THREE"></a>PART THREE </h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[191]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="LA_CLOSERIE_DE_LILAS" id="LA_CLOSERIE_DE_LILAS"></a>LA CLOSERIE DE LILAS</h2>
+
+
+<p>Divine Tuesday! I had wondered if those remarkable evenings of
+conversation in the rue de Rome with Mallarm&eacute; as host, and Henri de
+Regnier as guest, among many others, had been the inspiration of the
+evenings at the Closerie de Lilas, where I so often sat of an evening,
+watching the numbers of esthetes gather, filling the entire caf&eacute;, rain
+or shine, waiting unquestionably, for it pervaded the air always, the
+feeling of suspense, of a dinner without host, of a wedding without
+bridegroom, in any event waiting for the real genius of the evening,
+le grand maitre prince de po&egrave;tes, Paul Fort. The interesting book of
+Amy Lowell's, "Six French Poets," recalls these Tuesday evenings
+vividly to my mind, and a number of episodes in connection with the
+idea of poetry in Paris.</p>
+
+<p>Poetry an event? A rather remarkable notion it would seem, and yet
+this was always so, it was a constituent of the day's passing, there
+was never a part of the day in this arrondissement, when you would not
+find here, there, everywhere, from the Boul-Mich up, down Montparnasse
+to Lavenue's, and back to the Closerie, groups of a few or of many,
+obviously the artist or poet type, sometimes very nattily dressed,
+often the reverse, but you found<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[192]</a></span> them talking upon one theme, art,
+meaning either poetry or painting, cubistes, futuristes, orphistes and
+doubtless every "iste" in poetry from the symboliste period up to the
+"unanimistes" of the present time, or the then present time nearly two
+years before the war. It was a bit novel, even for a sensitive
+American, sitting there, realizing that it was all in the name of art,
+and for the heralding of genius&mdash;a kind of sublimated recruiting
+meeting for the enlistment in the army of expression of personality,
+or for the saving of the soul of poetry.</p>
+
+<p>It was a spectacle, edifying in its purport, or even a little
+distressing if one had no belief in a sense of humour, for there were
+moments of absurdity about it as there is sure to be in a room filled
+with any type of concerted egotism. But you did not forget the raison
+d'etre of it all, you did not forget that when the "prince" arrived
+there was the spirit of true celebration about it, the celebration not
+only of an arrived artist, but of an idea close to the hearts and
+minds of those present, and you had a sense, too, of what it must have
+been like in that circle of, no doubt, a higher average of adherents,
+in the drawing room of the genius Mallarm&eacute;, who, from all accounts,
+was as perfected in the art of conversation, as he was in expression
+in art. When I read Miss Lowell's chapter on Henri de Regnier, I find
+myself before the door of the Mallarm&eacute; house in the rue de Rome,
+probably the only American guest, on that Sunday morning in June, just
+one given a privilege<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[193]</a></span> that could not mean as much as if I had been
+more conversant with the delicacies of the language.</p>
+
+<p>It was the occasion of the placing of a tablet of homage to the great
+poet, at which ceremony Henri de Regnier himself was the chief
+speaker: a tall, very aristocratic, very elegant looking Frenchman,
+not any more to be called young, nor yet to be called old, but
+conspicuously simple, dignified, dressed in a manner of a gentleman of
+the first order, standing upon a chair, speaking, as one would
+imagine, with a flow of words which were the epitome of music itself
+to the ear. I had been invited by a poet well known in Paris, with
+several volumes to his credit and by a young literary woman, both of
+whom spoke English very creditably. After the ceremonies, which were
+very brief, and at which Madame Mallarm&eacute; herself was present, standing
+near the speaker, de Regnier, the entire company repaired to a
+restaurant near the Place Clichy, if I remember rightly. My hostess
+named for me the various guests as they appeared, Madame Rachilde,
+Reynaldo Hahn, Andr&eacute; Gide, and a dozen other names less conspicuous,
+perhaps, excepting one, L&eacute;on Dierx, who was an old man, and whose
+death was announced about the city some days later. It was, needless
+to say, a conspicuous company and the dinner went off very quietly,
+allowing of course for the always feverish sound of the conversation
+of many people talking in a not very large room.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[194]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But all these suggestions recall for me once more what such things
+mean to a people like the French, or, let one say, Europeans as well.
+I wonder what poetry or even painting will do, if they shall rise to
+such a state in this country that we shall find our masters of
+literature holding audience with this degree of interest like Fort, or
+as did all the great masters of literature in Paris, hold forth in the
+name of art, a divine Tuesday set apart for the admirable worship of
+poetry, or of things esthetic. I can imagine Amy Lowell doing
+something of this sort after the custom of those masters she so
+admires, with her seemingly quenchless enthusiasms for all that is
+modern in poetry. I think we shall wait long for that, for the time
+when we shall have our best esthetics over the coffee, at the curbside
+under the trees with the sun shining upon it, or the shadow of the
+evening lending its sanction, under the magnetic influence of such a
+one as Paul Fort or Francis Jammes, or Emile Verhaeren&mdash;as it was once
+to be had among such as Verlaine, Baudelaire and that high company of
+distinguished painters who are now famous among us.</p>
+
+<p>The studio of Gertude Stein, that quiet yet always lively place in the
+rue de Fleurus, is the only room I have ever been in where this spirit
+was organized to a similar degree, for here you had the sense of the
+real importance of painting, as it used to be thought of in the days
+of Pissarro, Manet, Degas, and the others, and you had much, in all
+human ways,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[195]</a></span> out of an evening there, and, most of all, you had a fund
+of good humour thrust at you, and the conversation took on, not the
+quality of poetic prose spoken, as you had the quality of yourself and
+others, a kind of William James intimacy, which, as everyone knows, is
+style bringing the universe of ideas to your door in terms of your own
+sensations. There may have been a touch of all this at the once famed
+Brook Farm, but I fancy it was rather chill in its severity.</p>
+
+<p>There is something of charm in the French idea of taking their
+discussions to the sunlight or the shadow under the stars, either
+within or outside the caf&eacute;, where you feel the passing of the world,
+and the poetry is of one piece with life itself, not the result of
+stuffy studios, and excessively ornate library corners, where books
+crowd out the quality of people and things. You felt that the caf&eacute; was
+the place for it, and if the acrobat came and sang, it was all of one
+fabric and it was as good for the poetry, as it was for the eye and
+the ear that absorbed it. Despite the different phases of the
+spectacle of Tuesday, at the Closerie de Lilas, you had the feeling of
+its splendour, its excellence, and, most of all, of its reality, its
+relationship to every other phase of life, and not of the
+hypersensitivity of the thing as we still consider it among ourselves
+in general; and if you heard the name of Paul Fort, or Francis Jammes,
+it was a definite issue in daily life, equal with the name of the
+great statesmen in importance,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[196]</a></span> you were being introduced into a
+sphere of activities of the utmost importance, <i>that</i> poetry was
+something to be reckoned with.</p>
+
+<p>It was not merely to hear oneself talk that artists like Mallarm&eacute; held
+forth with distinction, that artists like de Regnier and Fort devote
+themselves, however secretly, or however openly to the sacred theme.
+They had but one intention, and that to arrive at, and assist in the
+realization of the best state of poetry, that shall have carried the
+art further on its way logically, and in accordance with the
+principles which they have created for their time; endeavoring always
+to create fresh values, new points of contact with the prevailing as
+well as with the older outlines of the classics. It was, then, a
+spectacle, from our removed point of view, the gathering of the poetic
+multitude around the caf&eacute; tables, over the Dubonnet, the grenadines,
+and the caf&eacute; noir, of a Tuesday evening. It gave one a sense of
+perpetuity, of the indestructibility of art, in spite of the obstacles
+encountered in the run of the day, that the artist has the advantage
+over the layman in being qualified to set down, in shapes
+imperishable, those states of his imagination which are the shapes of
+life and of nature.</p>
+
+<p>We may be grateful to Amy Lowell for having assembled for our
+consummation, in a world where poetry is not as yet the sublime issue
+as it was to be felt at every street corner, much of the spirit of the
+rue de Rome, the Caf&eacute; Novelles D'Ath&egrave;nes, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[197]</a></span> the Closerie de Lilas,
+as well as the once famed corner of the Caf&eacute; D'Harcourt where the
+absinthe flowed so continuously, and from which some very exquisite
+poetry has emanated for all time. It is the first intimation we have
+of what our best English poetry has done for the best French poets of
+the present, and what our first free verse poet has done for the
+general liberation of emotions and for freedom of form in all
+countries. He has indicated the poets that are to follow him. He would
+be the first to sanction all this poetic discussive intensity at the
+curbside, the liberty and freedom of the caf&eacute;, the excellence of a
+divine Tuesday evening.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[198]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="EMILY_DICKINSON" id="EMILY_DICKINSON"></a>EMILY DICKINSON</h2>
+
+
+<p>If I want to take up poetry in its most delightful and playful mood, I
+take up the verses of that remarkable girl of the sixties and
+seventies, Emily Dickinson, she who was writing her little worthless
+poetic nothings, or so she was wont to think of them, at a time when
+the now classical New England group was flourishing around Concord,
+when Hawthorne was burrowing into the soul of things, Thoreau was
+refusing to make more pencils and took to sounding lake bottoms and
+holding converse with all kinds of fish and other water life, and
+Emerson was standing high upon his pedestal preaching of
+compensations, of friendship, society and the oversoul, leaving a
+mighty impress upon his New England and the world at large as well.</p>
+
+<p>I find when I take up Emily Dickinson, that I am sort of sunning
+myself in the discal radiance of a bright, vivid, and really new type
+of poet, for she is by no means worn of her freshness for us, she
+wears with one as would an old fashioned pearl set in gold and dark
+enamels. She offsets the smugness of the time in which she lived with
+her cheery impertinence, and startles the present with her uncommon
+gifts. Those who know the irresistible<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[199]</a></span> charm of this girl&mdash;who gave
+so charming a portrait of herself to the stranger friend who inquired
+for a photograph: "I had no portrait now, but am small like the wren,
+and my hair is bold like the chestnut burr, and my eyes like the
+sherry in the glass that the guest leaves," this written in July,
+1862&mdash;shall be of course familiar with the undeniable originality of
+her personality, the grace and special beauty of her mind, charm
+unique in itself, not like any other genius then or now, or in the
+time before her, having perhaps a little of relationship to the
+crystal clearness of Crashaw, like Vaughan and Donne maybe, in respect
+of their lyrical fervour and moral earnestness, yet nevertheless
+appearing to us freshly with as separate a spirit in her verse
+creations as she herself was separated from the world around her by
+the amplitude of garden which was her universe. Emily Dickinson
+confronts you at once with an instinct for poetry, to be envied by the
+more ordinary and perhaps more finished poets. Ordinary she never was,
+common she never could have been, for she was first and last
+aristocrat in sensibility, rare and untouchable if you will, vague and
+mystical often enough, unapproachable and often distinctly aloof, as
+undoubtedly she herself was in her personal life. Those with a
+fondness for intimacy will find her, like all recluses, forbidding and
+difficult, if not altogether terrifying the mind with her vagueries
+and peculiarities.</p>
+
+<p>Here was New England at its sharpest, brightest,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[200]</a></span> wittiest, most
+fantastic, most wilful, most devout, saint and imp sported in one,
+toying with the tricks of the Deity, taking them now with extreme
+profundity, then tossing them about like irresistible toys with an
+incomparable triviality. She has traced upon the page and with
+celestial indelibility that fine line from her soul which is like a
+fine prismatic light, separating one bright sphere from another, one
+planet from another planet, and the edge of separation is but faintly
+perceptible. She has left us this bright folio of her "lightning and
+fragrance in one," scintillant with stardust as perhaps no other
+before her, certainly not in this country, none with just her
+celestial attachedness, or must we call it detachedness, and withal
+also a sublime, impertinent playfulness which makes her images dance
+before one like offspring of the great round sun, fooling zealously
+with the universes at her feet, and just beyond her eye, with a
+loftiness of spirit and of exquisite trivialness seconded by none. Who
+has not read these flippant renderings, holding always some touch of
+austerity and gravity of mood, or the still more perfect "letters" to
+her friends, will, I think, have missed a new kind of poetic
+diversion, a new loveliness, evasive, alert, pronounced in every
+interval and serious, modestly so, and at a bound leaping as it were
+like some sky child pranking with the clouds, and the hills and the
+valleys beneath them, child as she surely was always, playing in some
+celestial garden space in her mind, where every species of tether<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[201]</a></span> was
+unendurable, where freedom for this childish sport was the one thing
+necessary to her ever young and incessantly capering mind&mdash;"hail to
+thee, blithe spirit, bird thou ever wert"!</p>
+
+<p>It must be said in all justice, then, that "fascination was her
+element," everything to her was wondrous, sublimely magical, awsomely
+inspiring and thrilling. It was the event of many moons to have
+someone she liked say so much as good morning to her in human tongue,
+it was the event of every instant to have the flowers and birds call
+her by name, and hear the clouds exult at her approach. She was the
+brightest young sister of fancy, as she was the gifted young daughter
+of the ancient imagination. One feels everywhere in her verse and in
+her so splendid and stylish letters an unexcelled freshness,
+brightness of metaphor and of imagery, a gift of a peculiarity that
+could have come only from this part of our country, this part of the
+world, this very spot which has bred so many intellectual and
+spiritual entities wrapped in the garments of isolation, robed with
+questioning. Her genius is in this sense essentially local, as much
+the voice of the spirit of New England as it is possible for one to
+hold. If ever wanderer hitched vehicle to the comet's tail, it was the
+poetic, sprite woman, no one ever rode the sky and the earth as she
+did in this radiant and skybright mind of her.</p>
+
+<p>She loved all things because all things were in one way or in another
+way bright for her, and of a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[202]</a></span> blinding brightness from which she often
+had to hide her face. She embroidered all her thoughts with starry
+intricacies, and gave them the splendour of frosty traceries upon the
+windowpane in a frigid time, and of the raindrop in the sun, and
+summered them with fragrancing of the many early and late flowers of
+her own fanciful conjuring. They are glittering garlands of her clear,
+cool fancies, these poems, fraught in some instances, as are certain
+finely cut stones, with an exceptional mingling of lights coursing
+swiftly through them. She was avid of starlight and of sunlight alike,
+and of that light by which all things are illumined with a splendour
+not their own merely, but lent them by shafts from that radiant sphere
+which she leaned from, looking out gleefully upon them from the window
+of that high place in her mind.</p>
+
+<p>To think of this poet is to think of crystal, for she lived in a
+radianced world of innumerable facets, and the common instances were
+chariots upon which to ride widely over the edges of infinity. She is
+alive for us now in those rare fancies of hers, with no other wish in
+them save as memorandum for her own eyes, and when they were finished
+to send them spinning across the wide garden, many of them to her
+favorite sister who lived far, far away, over beyond the hedge. You
+shall find in her all that is winsome, strange, fanciful, fantastic
+and irresistible in the eastern character and characteristic. She is
+first and best in lightsomeness of temper, for the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[203]</a></span> eastern is known
+as essentially a tragic genius. She is perhaps the single exponent of
+modern times of the quality of true celestial frivolity. Scintillant
+was she then, and like dew she was and the soft summer rain, and the
+light upon the lips of flowers of which she loved to sing. Her mind
+and her spirit were one, soul and sense inseparable, little sister of
+Shelley certainly she was, and the more playful relative of Francis
+Thompson.</p>
+
+<p>She had about her the imperishable quality that hovers about all
+things young and strong and beautiful, she was the sense of beauty
+ungovernable. What there are of tendencies religious and moral disturb
+in nowise those who love and have appreciation for true poetic
+essences. She had in her brain the inevitable buzzing of the bee in
+the belly of the bloom, she had in her eyes the climbing lances of the
+sun, she had in her heart love and pity for the innumerable pitiful
+and pitiable things. She was a quenchless mother in her gift for
+solace and she was lover to the immeasurable love. Like all
+aristocrats she hated mediocrity, and like all first rate jewels, she
+had no rift to hide. She was not a maker of poetry, she was a thinker
+of poetry. She was not a conjurer of words so much as a magician in
+sensibility. She has only to see and feel and hear to be in touch with
+all things with a name or with things that must be forever nameless.
+If she loved people, she loved them for what they were, if she
+despised them she despised them for what they did,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[204]</a></span> or for lack of
+power to feel they could not do. Silence under a tree was a far more
+talkative experience with her than converse with one or a thousand
+dull minds. Her throng was the air, and her wings were the multitude
+of flying movements in her brain. She had only to think and she was
+amid numberless minarets and golden domes, she had only to think and
+the mountain cleft its shadow in her heart.</p>
+
+<p>Emily Dickinson is in no sense toil for the mind accustomed to the
+labours of reading, she is too fanciful and delicious ever to make
+heavy the head, she sets you to laughter and draws a smile across your
+face for pity, and lets you loose again amid the measureless pleasing
+little humanities. I shall always want to read Emily Dickinson, for
+she points her finger at all tiresome scholasticism, and takes a
+chance with the universe about her and the first rate poetry it offers
+at every hand within the eye's easy glancing. She has made poetry
+memorable as a pastime for the mind, and sent the heavier ministerial
+tendencies flying to a speedy oblivion. What a child she was, child
+impertinent, with a heavenly rippling in her brain!</p>
+
+<p>These random passages out of her writings will show at once the rarity
+of her tastes and the originality of her phrasing. "February passed
+like a kate, and I know March. Here is the light the stranger said was
+not on sea or land&mdash;myself could arrest it, but will not chagrin
+him"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[205]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"The wind blows gay today, and the jays bark like blue terriers."</p>
+
+<p>"Friday I tasted life, it was a vast morsel. A circus passed the
+house&mdash;still I feel the red in my mind though the drums are out."</p>
+
+<p>"The lawn is full of south and the odors tangle, and I hear today for
+the first the river in the tree."</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The zeros taught us phosphorus<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We learned to like the fire<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By playing glaciers when a boy<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And tinder guessed by power<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Of opposite to balance odd<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">If white a red must be!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Paralysis, our primer dumb<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Unto vitality."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Then comes the "crowning extravaganza.... If I read a book, and it
+makes my whole body so cold no fire will ever warm me, I know that is
+poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off,
+I know that is poetry. Is there any other way? These are the only ways
+I know it."</p>
+
+<p>No one but a New England yankee mind could concoct such humours and
+fascinatingly pert phrases as are found here. They are like the
+chatterings of the interrupted squirrel in the tree-hole at nut-time.
+There is so much of high gossip in these poetic turns of hers, and so,
+throughout her books, one finds a multitude of playful tricks for the
+pleased mind to run with. She was an intoxicated being, drunken with
+the little tipsy joys of the simplest form, shaped as they were to
+elude always her evasive imagination into thinking that nothing she
+could think or feel but was extraordinary and remarkable.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[206]</a></span> "Your
+letter gave no drunkenness because I tasted rum before&mdash;Domingo comes
+but once," etc., she wrote to Col. Higginson, a pretty conceit, surely
+to offer a loved friend. The passages offered will give the unfamiliar
+reader a taste of the sparkle of this poet's hurrying fancy and set
+her before the willing mind entrancingly, it seems to me. She will
+always delight those who find it in their way to love her elfish,
+evasive genius, and those who care for the vivid and living element in
+words will find her, to say the least, among the masters in her
+feeling for their strange shapes and the fresh significance contained
+in them. A born thinker of poetry, and in a great measure a gifted
+writer of it, refreshing many a heavy moment made dull with the
+weightiness of books, or of burdensome thinking. This poet-sprite sets
+scurrying all weariness of the brain, and they shall have an hour of
+sheer delight who invite poetic converse with Emily Dickinson. She
+will repay with funds of rich celestial coin from her rare and
+precious fancyings. She had that "oblique integrity" which she
+celebrates in one of her poems.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[207]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="ADELAIDE_CRAPSEY" id="ADELAIDE_CRAPSEY"></a>ADELAIDE CRAPSEY</h2>
+
+
+<p>One more satellite hurried away too soon! High hints at least, of the
+young meteor finding its way through space. Here was another of those,
+with a vast fund of wishing in her brain, and the briefest of hours in
+which to set them roaming. Brevities that whirl through the mind as
+you read those cinquains of Adelaide Crapsey, like white birds through
+the dark woodlands of the night. Cameos or castles, what is size? Is
+it not the same if they are of one perfection of feeling? Such a
+little book of Adelaide Crapsey, surely like cameos cut on shell, so
+clear in outline, so rich in form, so brave in indications, so much of
+singing, so much of poetry, of courage.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Just now,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Out of the strange<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Still dusk&mdash;as strange, as still,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A white moth flew; Why am I grown<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So cold?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Isn't the evidence sufficient here of first rate poetic gifts,
+sensibility of an exceptional order? Contrast in so many ways with
+that perhaps more radiant and certainly more whimsical girl, with her
+rarest of flavours, she with her "whip of diamond, riding to meet the
+Earl"! I think geniuses like Keats<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[208]</a></span> or Shelley would have said "how do
+you do, poet?" to Adelaide Crapsey and her verse, lamenting also that
+she flew over the rainbowed edge of the dusk too soon, like the very
+moth over the garden wall, early in the evening. It is sure that had
+this poet been allowed her full quota of days, she would have left
+some handsome folios bright enough for any one caring for verse at its
+purest. Pity there was not time for another book at least, of her
+verses, to verify the great distinction conferred. She might have
+walked still more largely away with the wreaths of recognition. Not
+time for more books, instead of so much eternity at her bedside. She
+would surely have sent more words singing to their high places and
+have impressed the abundant output of the day with its superficiality
+by her seriousness. There is no trifling in these poetic things of
+hers. Trivial might some say who hanker after giantesque composition.
+Fragile are they only in the sense of size, only in this way are they
+small.</p>
+
+<p>Those who know the difficulties of writing poetic composition are
+aware of the task involved in creating such packed brevities. Emily
+Dickinson knew this power. "H. D." is another woman who understands
+the beauty of compactness. Superb sense of economy, of terseness the
+art calls for, excessive pruning and clipping. Singular that these
+three artists, so gifted in brevity were women. There is little, after
+all, in existence that warrants lengthy dissertation. Life itself is
+epigrammatic and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[209]</a></span> brief enough. No volumes needed by way of
+explanation. The fascinating enigma diverts and perplexes everyone
+alike. The simple understand it best, or at least they seem to do so.
+Segregation, aloofness, spiritual imprisonment, which is another name
+for introspection, the looking out from bars of the caged house, all
+this discovers something through penetration. Walking with life is
+most natural, grazing its warm shoulder. There is little room for
+inquiry if one have the real feeling of life itself. Poetry is that
+which gleans most by keeping nearest to life. Books and firesides
+avail but little. Secretaries for the baggage of erudition do not
+enhance poetic values, they encumber them. Poetry is not declamation,
+it is not propaganda, it is breathing natural breaths. There is
+nothing mechanical about poetry excepting the affectation of forms.
+Poetry is the world's, it is everybody's. You count poetry by its
+essence, and no amount of studied effect, or bulging erudition will
+create that which is necessary, that which makes poetry what it is.
+The one essential is power to sing, and the intelligence to get it
+down with degrees of mastery or naturalness, which is one and the same
+thing.</p>
+
+<p>Real singing is unusual as real singers are rare. Adelaide Crapsey
+shows that she was a real singer, essentially poet, excellent among
+those of our time. She impresses her uncommon qualities upon you, in
+the cinquains of hers, with genuinely incisive force. She has so much
+of definiteness, so much of tech<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[210]</a></span>nical beauty, economy, all very
+valuable assets for a true poet. She had never been touched with the
+mania for journalistic profusion. She cared too much for language to
+ride it. She cared too much for words to want to whip them into
+slavery. She was outside of them, looking on, as it might be, through
+crystal, at their freshness. She did not take them for granted. They
+were new to her and she wanted the proper familiarity. She worked upon
+a spiritual geometric all her own. She did not run to the dictionary
+for eccentricities, she did not hunt words out of countenance. They
+were natural to her. She wanted most their simple beauty, and she
+succeeded. She had dignity, a rare gift in these times. She raises
+herself above the many by her fine feeling for the precision. That is
+her artistry, the word, the thing of beauty and the joy forever with
+her.</p>
+
+<p>It is to be regretted that Adelaide Crapsey had no more time for the
+miniature microscopic equations, the little thing seen large, the
+large thing seen vividly. She might have spent more hours with them
+and less with her so persistent guest, this second self at her side;
+ironic presence, when she most would have strode with the brighter
+companion, her first and natural choice. Her contribution is
+conspicuous among us for its balance and its intellectualism tempered
+with fine emotions. She had so much to settle for herself, so much
+bargaining for the little escapes in which to register herself
+con<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[211]</a></span>sistently, so much of consultation for her body's sake, that her
+mind flew the dark spaces about her bed with consistent feverishness.</p>
+
+<p>Reckoning is not the genius of life. It is the painful, residual
+element of reflection. One must give, one must pay. It is not
+inspiring to beg for breath, yet this has come to many a fine artist,
+many a fine soul whose genius was far more of the ability for living,
+with so little of the ability for dying. You cannot think along with
+clarity, with the doom of dark recognition nudging your shoulder every
+instant. There must be somehow apertures of peace for production.
+Adelaide Crapsey's chief visitant was doom. She saw the days
+vanishing, and the inevitable years lengthening over her. No wonder
+she could write brevities, she whose existence was brevity itself. The
+very flicker of the lamp was among the last events. What, then, was
+the fluttering of the moth but a monstrous intimation. If her work was
+chilled with severity, it was because she herself was covered with the
+cool branches of decision. Nature was cold with her, hence there is
+the ring of ice in these little pieces of hers. They are veiled with
+the grey of many a sunless morning.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"These be<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Three silent things;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The falling snow,&mdash;the hour<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Before the dawn,&mdash;the mouth of one<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Just dead."<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[212]</a></span></div></div>
+
+<p>Here you have the intensity once more of Adelaide Crapsey. It haunts
+you like the something on the dark stairway as you pass, just as when,
+on the roadway in the dead of night, the twig grazing one's cheek
+would seem like the springing panther at one's throat. Dramatic
+vividness is certainly her chief distinction. No playfulness here, but
+a stout reckoning with austere beauty. The wish to record the element
+at its best that played so fierce a r&ocirc;le in her life. She writes her
+own death hymn, lays her own shroud out, spaces her own epilogue as if
+to give the engraver, who sets white words on white stone, the clue,
+stones the years stare on, leaving the sunlight to streak the old
+pathos there, and then settles herself to the long way of lying, to
+the sure sleep that glassed her keen eyes, shutting them down too soon
+on a world that held so much poetry for her.</p>
+
+<p>The titles of her cinquains, such as "November night", "The guarded
+wound", "The warning", "Fate defied", and the final touch of
+inevitability in "The Lonely Death", so full of the intensity of last
+moments, intimate the resolute presence of the grey companion of the
+covering mists. It must be said hurriedly that Adelaide Crapsey was
+not all doom. By no means. The longer pieces in her tiny book attest
+to her feeling for riches, and the lyrical wonders of the hour. Her
+fervour is the artist's fervour, the longing, coming really to
+passion, to hold and fix forever the shapes that were loveliest to
+her.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[213]</a></span> That is the poet's existence, that is the poet's labour, and his
+last distress. No one wants to give in to a commonplace world when the
+light that falls on it is lovelier than the place it falls on. If you
+cannot transpose the object, transport it, however simply, however
+ornately, then of what use is poetry? It is transport!</p>
+
+<p>Adelaide Crapsey was efficient in her knowledge of what poetry is, as
+she was certainly proficient as workman. She was lapidary more than
+painter or sculptor. It was a beautiful cutting away, and a sweeping
+aside of the rifts and flaws. That is to say, she wanted that. She
+wanted the white light of the perfect gem, and she could not have been
+content with just matrix, with here and there embedded chips. She was
+a washer of gold, and spared no labours for the bright nuggets she
+might get, and the percentage of her panning was high. But the cloud
+hung on the mountain she clomb, and her way was dimmed.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"In the cold I will rise, I will bathe<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In the waters of ice; Myself<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Will shiver, and will shrive myself<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Alone in the dawn, and anoint<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Forehead and feet and hands;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I will shutter the windows from light,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I will place in their sockets the four<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Tall candles and set them a-flame<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In the grey of the dawn; And myself<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Will lay myself straight in my bed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And draw the sheet under my chin."<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[214]</a></span></div></div>
+
+<p>There could be no more of resolute finality in this chill epilogue.
+There is the cold of a thousand years shuddering out of this scene, it
+is the passing, the last of this delicate and gifted poet, Adelaide
+Crapsey. If she has written more than her book prints, these must
+surely be of her best. She took the shape of that which she made so
+visible, so cold, so beautiful. With her white wings she has skirted
+the edge of the dusk with an incredible calm. No whimpering here. Too
+much artistry for that; too much of eye to let heart rule. The gifts
+of Adelaide Crapsey were high ones, and that she left so little of
+song is regrettable, even though she left us a legacy of some of the
+best singing of the day. It is enough to call her poet, for she was
+among the first of this hour and time. She had no affectations, no
+fashionable theories and ambitions. She simply wrote excellent verse.
+That is her beautiful gift to us.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[215]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="FRANCIS_THOMPSON" id="FRANCIS_THOMPSON"></a>FRANCIS THOMPSON</h2>
+
+
+<p>If ever a meteor fell to earth it was Francis Thompson. If ever a star
+ascended to that high place in the sky where sit the loftier planets
+in pleasant company, it was this splendid poet. Stalking through the
+shadows of the Thames Embankment to find his clear place in the milky
+way, is hardly the easiest road for so exceptional a celebrity. It is
+but another instance of the odd tradition perpetuating itself, that
+some geniuses must creep hand and knee through mire, heart pierced
+with the bramble of experience, up over the jagged pathways to that
+still place where skies are clear at last. Thompson is the last among
+the great ones to have known the dire vicissitude, direst, if legends
+are true, that can befall a human being. We have the silence of his
+saviour friends, the Meynells, saying so much more than their few
+public words, tender but so careful. What they knew, and what the
+walls of the monastery of Storrington must have heard in that so
+pained stillness, there, is probably beyond repetition for pathos. De
+Quincey had taught him much in the knowledge of hardship. Whether it
+is just similarity of experience or a kind of imitation in nature, is
+not easy to say. It was hardly the example to repeat. It is singular
+enough also, that De Quin<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[216]</a></span>cey's "Ann" should have become so vivid a
+repetition to Thompson, in just the same terms.</p>
+
+<p>London has no feeling for the peace of poets. They are the little
+things in the confused maelstrom of human endeavor. Poets are taught
+with the whip. They must bleed for their divine idea, or so it was
+then. Sometimes it seems as if a change had come, for so many poets
+sit in chairs of ease these days. Science produces other kinds of
+discomfort, and covers the old misery with a new tapestry of
+contrasts. I doubt if many poets are selling matches these days,
+living on eleven pence a day. There is still the poet who knows his
+cheap lodging. There seems enough of them still for high minds to
+crawl into, and yet there is another face to the misery.</p>
+
+<p>Thompson was seraph from the first. You see the very doom burning out
+of his boy's eyes in the youthful portrait, and you see the logical
+end in that desperate and pitiful mask, the drawing of the last period
+in the Meynell Book. His was certainly the severed head, and his feet
+were pathetically far away, down on a stony earth. That he should have
+forfeited the ordinary ways of ease, is as consistent with his
+appearance, as it was necessary to his nature. That he should find
+himself on the long march past the stations of the cross, to the very
+tree itself, for his poetic purpose, if it is in keeping with
+tradition, is not precisely the most inspiring aspect of human
+experiences. Human he was not, as we like to think<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[217]</a></span> of human, for he
+was too early in his career marked for martyr. There is the note of
+cricket-time in his earlier life, and how long this attached to the
+physical delights of his being cannot be told here. His eyes were
+lodged too far in heaven to have kept the delights for long, to have
+comprehended all that clogged his impatiently mercurial feet.</p>
+
+<p>"The abashless inquisition of each star" was the scrutiny that
+obsessed his ways, the impertinence that he suffered most; for he had
+the magnitude of soul that hungered for placement, and the plague of
+two masters was on him. Huntress and "Hound" he had to choose between,
+beauty and the insatiable Prince; harsh and determined lovers, both of
+them, too much craving altogether for an artistic nature. The earth
+had no room for him and he did not want heaven so soon. He was not
+saint, even though his name followed him even, for recognition.</p>
+
+<p>"Stood bound and helplessly, for Time to shoot his barbed minutes at
+me, suffered the trampling hoof of every hour," etc., all this
+confided to some childish innocent in "The child's kiss". Whom else
+should he tell but a child? Where is the man or woman with
+understanding but has the "child" lodged somewhere for sympathy, for
+recognition? The clearest listener he could find, and the least
+commiserative, happily. "The heart of childhood, so divine for me", is
+but typical of a being so dragged, and emaciate with the tortures of
+the body,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[218]</a></span> in earth places where no soul like his could ever be at
+home. What was Preston, or Ashton-under-Lyne to him, more than Kensall
+Green is to him now? What is such dust in his sky but some blinding
+and blowing thing? What is there for singer to do but sing until the
+throat cracks? Even the larks and the thrushes do that. They end their
+morning and evening with a song. He was brother to these birds in that
+loftiness. He sang, and sang, and sang, while flesh fainted from
+hunger and weakness.</p>
+
+<p>Had not Storrington come to him in the dark places of London, we
+should have had no "Hound of Heaven", and without that masterpiece
+what would modern poetry do? He sang to cover up his wounds with
+climbing music. That was his sense of beauty. He filled his hollowing
+cheek with finer things than moaning. He might have wept, but they
+were words instead of drops.</p>
+
+<p>It will be difficult to find loftier song as to essences. We shall
+have room for criticising stylistic extravagances, archaisms of a not
+interesting order for us, yet there will be nothing said but the
+highest in praise of his genius. Excess of praise may be heaped upon
+him without cessation, and it may end in the few cool yet incisive
+words that fell from the lips of Meredith, with the violets from
+another's worshipped hands, "a true poet, one of a small band." Poets
+of this time will have much to gather from Thompson in point of
+sincerity. There is terrific<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[219]</a></span> mastery of words, which is like
+Shakespeare in felicity we do not encounter so often it seems to me.</p>
+
+<p>Thompson has scaled the white rainbow of the night, and sits in
+radiant company among the first planetary strummers of song. His
+diamond is pure, and the matrix that hid him so long from showing his
+glinted facets is chipped away of miseries carried down with death.
+They will soon be forgotten by the multitude as death itself made him
+forget them. We have his chants and his anthems and plainsongs to
+remind us of the one essential, of how lofty a singer passed down our
+highroad. "Dusty with tumbling about amid the stars!" That is what he
+is for us now, if he rolled in too much clay of earth. Shelley might
+have turned his own handsome phrase on him, for they both strode the
+morning of their bright minds like sun the sky, with much of the same
+solemn yet speedy gait. There are times when they are certainly of the
+one radiance, lyrical and poetical. Their consuming intellectual
+interests were vastly apart, as were their paths of spirit.</p>
+
+<p>I think we shall have no more "dread of height". Poetry has passed
+into scientific discovery. Intellectual passions are the vogue, earth
+is coming into its own, for there is no more heaven in the mind. We
+are showing our humanities now, and the soul must wait a little, and
+remain speechless in some dull corner of the universe. Thompson was
+the last to believe. We are learning to think now, so poetry<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[220]</a></span> has come
+to calculation. Rhapsody and passion are romantic, and we are not
+romantic. The last Rhapsodist was Francis Thompson, and in the sense
+of lyrical fervour, the last great poet was Francis Thompson.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[221]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="ERNEST_DOWSON" id="ERNEST_DOWSON"></a>ERNEST DOWSON</h2>
+
+
+<p>It is late to be telling of Dowson, with the eighteen-nineties nearly
+out of sight, and yet it is Dowson and Lionel Johnson that I know most
+of, from the last of this period. Poles apart these two poets are, the
+one so austere and almost collegiate in adherence to convention, the
+other too warm to let a coldness obsess his singing. There doesn't
+seem to be anything wonderful about Dowson, and yet you want to be
+saying a line of his every now and then, of him "that lived, and sang,
+and had a beating heart," ere he grew old, and he grew old so soon.
+"Worn out by what was really never life to him," is a prefatorial
+phrase I recall. There was a genuine music in Dowson, even if it was
+smothered in lilies and roses and wine of the now old way of saying
+things. "Come hither child, and rest&mdash;Behold the weary west," might
+have been the thing he was saying to himself, so much is this the
+essence of his lost cause.</p>
+
+<p>There is a languor and a lack of power to lift a hand toward the
+light, too much a trusting of the shadow. "I have flung roses, roses
+riotously with the throng, to put those pale lost lilies out of mind."
+Always verging on a poetic feeling not just like our<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[222]</a></span>selves in these
+days, and yet Dowson was a poet. He caressed words until they sang for
+him the one plaint that he asked of them. That he was obsessed of the
+beauties and the intimations of Versailles, is seen in everything he
+did, or at least he imbibed this from Verlaine. He was himself a pale
+wanderer down soft green all&eacute;es, he had a twilight mind struggling
+toward the sun, which was too bright for him, for the moon was his
+brightest light. Echoes of Verlaine linger through his verse and a
+strain of Poe is present, poet whom he with his French taste admired
+so much, two very typical idols for a young man with a sentimental
+journey to pursue. Lost Adelaides, to keep him steeped in the sorrow
+that he cherished, for he petted his miseries considerably; or was it
+that he was most at home when he was unhappy? He would rather have
+seen the light of day from a not quite clear window, for instead of a
+clear hill, he might see a vague castle of his fancy somewhere. He
+hadn't the sweep of a great poet, and yet somehow there was the linnet
+in him, there was the strain of the lute among the leaves, there was
+the rustle of a soft dress audible, and the passing of hands he could
+not ever hold.</p>
+
+<p>He was the poet of the lost treasure. "Studies in Sentiment" is, I
+think, the title of a small book of prose of his. He might have called
+his poems "Studies in sentimentality". And yet, for his time, how
+virile and vigorous he sounds beside "Posies<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[223]</a></span> out of Rings", of his
+friend Theodore Peters, of the renaissance cloak, the cherry coloured
+velvet cloak embroidered in green leaves and silver veinings, so full
+of the sky radiance of Dowson himself, this cloak. Cherry sounds red
+and passionate. But it was a cherry of olden time, with the bloom
+quite gone, the dust of the years permeating its silken warp. It
+reposes here in America, the property of an artist of that period.</p>
+
+<p>One likes Dowson because of his sincerity, and a clear beauty which,
+if not exactly startling, was in its way truly genuine. It was merely
+too late for Dowson, and it was probably too soon. Swinburne had
+strummed the skies with every kind of song, and Verlaine had whispered
+every secret of the senses there was, in the land of illusion and
+vaguery. Dowson was worshipper of them both, for it was sound first
+and last that he cared most for, the musical mastery of the one and
+the sentimentality of the other. He was far nearer Verlaine in type.
+He had but the one thing to tell of, and that was lost love, and he
+told it over and over in his book of verse. His Pierrot of the Minute
+was himself, and his Cynara was the ever vanishing vision of his own
+insecurity and incapability. He perished for the love of hands. He is
+so like someone one knows, whom one wants to talk to tenderly, touch
+in a friendly way, and say as little as possible. He comes to one
+humanly first, and asks you for your eye to his verse afterward,
+something of the "Little boy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[224]</a></span> Lost", in his so ineffectual face, weak
+with sweetness and hidden in shyness, covered with irresponsibility,
+or lack of power to be responsible.</p>
+
+<p>He was a helpless one, that is certain. He resorted to the
+old-fashioned methods of the decadents for maintaining the certain
+requisite melancholy apparently necessary to sing a certain way. In
+the struggle of that period, he must have seemed like a very clear,
+though a very sad singer. There were no lilies or orchids in his
+buttonhole, and no strange jewels on his fingers, for you remember, it
+was the time of "Monsieur Phocas", and the art of Gustave Moreau. He
+was plain and sincere, and pathetic, old-fashioned too in that he was
+bohemian, or at least had acquired bohemianism, for I think no
+Englishman was ever really bohemian. Dieppe and the docks had gotten
+him, and took away the sense of mastery over things that a real poet
+of power must somehow have. He was essentially a giver-in. His
+neurasthenia was probably the reason for that. It was the age of
+absinthe and little taverns, for there was Verlaine and the inimitable
+Caf&eacute; d'Harcourt, which, as you saw it just before the war, had the
+very something that kept the Master at his drinks all day.</p>
+
+<p>Murger, Rimbaud, Verlaine had done the thing which has lasted so
+singularly until now, for there are still echoes of this in the air,
+even to the present day. Barmaids are memories, and roseleaves dried
+and set in urns, for that matter, too. How far away<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[225]</a></span> it all seems, and
+they were the substance of poetry then. Sounds were the important
+things for Dowson, which is essentially the Swinburne echo.
+Significant then, that he worshipped "the viol, the violet, and the
+vine" of Poe. There was little else but singing in his verse however.
+His love of Horace did less for him than the masters of sound,
+excepting that the vision comes in the name "Cynara". But it was all
+struggle for Dowson, a battle with the pale lily. It was for this he
+clung to cabmen's lounging places. He was looking for places to be out
+of the play in. He couldn't have survived for long, and yet there is a
+strain of genuine loveliness, the note of pure beauty in the verse of
+Dowson. He was poet, and kept to his creed with lover-like tenacity.</p>
+
+<p>He helped close a period that was distinguished all over the world,
+the period of the sunflower. Apart from its wildest and most
+spectacular genius, it has produced Lionel Johnson with his religious
+purity, and Aubrey Beardsley. It was the time of sad and delicate
+young men. They all died in boyhood really. These were, I think, with
+Dowson the best it offered. We never read Arthur Symons for his power
+in verse, he with so much of the rose-tinted afterglow in him, so much
+of the old feeling for stage doors and roses thrown from the boxes,
+and the dying scent of lingerie. His essays will be a far finer source
+of delight for a much longer time, for therein is the best poetry he
+had to offer.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[226]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Dowson was, let us say not mockingly, the boyish whimperer in song. He
+was ineffectual, too much so, to take up the game of laughter for
+long. That would have been too strenuous for him, so he had to sit and
+weep tears of wordy rain. "Il pleut dans mon c&oelig;ur" was the famous
+touch of his master, it was the loudest strain in him. That was the
+lover-strain, and Dowson was the lover dying of love, imaginary love
+probably, and saw everywhere something to remind him of what he had
+pathetically lost. If there had been a little savage in him, he would
+have walked away with what he wanted. He maybe did have a try or two,
+but they couldn't have endured, for he wasn't loving a particular
+Adelaide. That was the name he gave to love, for it was woman's lips,
+and eyes and hands that he cared most for, or at least seemed most to
+care.</p>
+
+<p>It was in the vision that crossed his ways in the dark and boisterous
+taverns where love finds strange ways for expression, that the
+singleness of feeling possessed him. It was among the rougher elements
+of dock life that his refinements found their level. Dowson sang and
+sang and sang, until he grew old at thirty-three, "worn out by what
+was never really life to him". Aged pierrot, gone home to his mother,
+the Moon, to bask forever in the twilight of his old and vague
+fancies. There might he strum his heart out in the old way, and the
+world would never hear, for it has lost the ear for this kind of song.
+Perhaps in two hundred years, in other<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[227]</a></span> "golden treasuries" there may
+appear the songs of Dowson as among the best of those early and late
+singers of the nineteenth century. We cannot say now, for it cloys a
+little with sweets for us at this time, though it was then the time of
+honey and jasmine, and the scent of far away flowers. Pierrot of the
+glass, with the hours dripping away in fine, gold rain. That was the
+genius of poets like Dowson, and pierrot was the master of them all.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[228]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="HENRY_JAMES_ON_RUPERT_BROOKE" id="HENRY_JAMES_ON_RUPERT_BROOKE"></a>HENRY JAMES ON RUPERT BROOKE</h2>
+
+
+<p>Henry James on Rupert Brooke! Here is certainly a very wide interval,
+separated, artist and subject, by the greatest divergence of power,
+and one may be even amazed at the contrast involved. He is surely,
+James, in all his elaborateness, trying to square the rose and compute
+the lily, algebraical advances upon a most simple thesis. Brooke&mdash;a
+nature so obvious, which had no measure at all for what the sum had
+done to him, and for all that about him, or for those stellar
+ecstasies which held him bound with fervour as poet, planetary
+swimmer, and gifted as well with a fine stroke for the sea, and runner
+of all the beautiful earth places about the great seas' edge.</p>
+
+<p>For me, there is heaviness and over-elaboration paramount in this
+preface to the Letters from America, excess of byword, a strained
+relationship with his subject, but that would of course be Jamesian,
+and very naturally, too. It is hardly, this preface, the tribute of
+the wise telling of beautiful and "blinding youth", surely more the
+treatise of the problemist forging his problem, as the sculptor might;
+something too much of metal or stone, too ponderous, too severe let
+one say, for its so gracing and brightening theme, something not
+springing into bloom, as does<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[229]</a></span> the person and personality of the young
+subject himself. Only upon occasion does he really come upon the young
+man, actual, forgetful of all but him.</p>
+
+<p>There is no question, if the word of those be true who had relation
+however slight or intimate with Brooke, that he was an engrossing
+theme, and for more than one greater than himself, as certainly he was
+for many much less significant than James. It is distinguished from
+the young poet's point of view that he was impressed, and that as
+person to person he really did see him in a convincing manner, as
+might one artist of great repute find himself uncommonly affected by
+the young and so living poet with more than a common gift for
+creation. It seems to me however that James is not over certain as to
+how poetic all things are in substance, yet all the while treating
+Brooke coolly and spaciously as an artist should.</p>
+
+<p>I did not know Brooke, and I know nothing of him beyond various photos
+showing him one way, quite manly and robust, and I feel sure he was
+so, and in another way as neither youth nor man, but something
+idyllic, separate and seraph-like, untouched mostly with earthly
+experience. These pictures do show that he was, unquestionably, a
+bright gust of England, with an almost audible splendour about even
+these poor replicas, which make it seem that he did perform the
+ascribed miracle, that England really had brought forth of her
+brightest and best, only to lay away her golden fruitage in dust upon
+the bor<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[230]</a></span>ders of a far and classical sea, with an acute untimeliness.
+But respectfully let me say, I think much in these hours of the
+incongruity and pathos of excessive celebration. There shall not be
+for long, singers enough to sing high songs commensurate with the
+delights of those numberless ones "who lived, and sang, and had a
+beating heart", those who have sped into the twilight too soon, having
+but a brief time to discover if years had bright secrets for them or
+clear perspective. There shall always lack the requisite word for them
+who have made many a dull morning splendid with faith, they who have
+been the human indication immeasurably of the sun's rising, and of the
+truth that vision is a thing of reason.</p>
+
+<p>Of Brooke and the other dead poets as well, there has, it seems to me,
+been too much of celebration. But of Brooke and his poetry, which is a
+far superior product to these really most ordinary "Letters", there is
+in these poetic pieces too much of what I want to call "University
+Cleavage", an excess of old school painting, too much usage of the
+warm image, which, though emotional, is not sensuous enough to express
+the real poetic sensuousness, to make the line or the word burn
+passionately, too much of the shades of Swinburne still upon the
+horizon. Rose and violet of the eighteen ninety hues have for long
+been dispensed with, as has the pierrot and his moon. We have in this
+time come to like hardier colourings, which are for us more
+satisfying, and more poetic. We hardly dare use the hot words of
+"Anactoria" in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[231]</a></span> our day. To be sure rose is English, for it has been
+for long a very predominant shade on the young face of England, but in
+Brooke there is an old age to the fervour, and in spite of the
+brilliant youth of the poet, there is an old age in the substance and
+really in the treatment as well. We are wanting a fresher intonation
+to those images, and expect a new approach, and a newer aspect. It is
+not to adhere by means of criticism to the prevailing graveyard
+tendency, nor do we want so much of the easy and cheap journalistic
+element, as comes so often in the so named "free verse". What is
+really wanted is an individual consistency, and a brightness of
+imagery which shall be the poet's own by reason of his own personal
+attachment, and not simply the variance of the many-in-one poetry of
+the day.</p>
+
+<p>It is not enough to write passably, it is only enough when there are
+several, or even one, who will give their or his own peculiar contact
+with those agencies of the day, the hour, and the moment, who will
+find or invent a style best suited to themselves. Attempts at
+excessive individualism will never create true individualistic
+expression, no affected surprise in personal perversity of image or
+metaphor will make a real poet, or real poetry. There must be first
+and last of all, a sure ardour, the poet's very own, which will of
+itself support obvious, or even slightly detectable, influences. It is
+not enough to declaim oneself, or propose continually one's group. The
+single utterance is what is necessary, a real fresh<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[232]</a></span>ness of
+vocalization which is, so to speak, the singer's own throat. If he be
+original in his freshness, we shall be able to single him away from
+the sweeping movements of the hour by his very "specialness" in touch,
+that pressure of the mind and spirit upon the page, which is his.</p>
+
+<p>We shall translate a poet through his indications and intentions as
+well as through his arrivals, and we must condemn no one to fame
+beyond his capacity or deserts. We have never the need of extravagant
+laud. It is not enough to praise a poet for his personal charm, his
+beauty of body and of mind and soul, for these are but beautiful
+things at home in a beautiful house. In the case of Brooke, we have
+ringing up among hosts of others, James's voice that he was all of
+this, but I would not wish to think it was the wish of any real poet
+to be "condemned to sociability", merely because he was an eminently
+social being, or because he was the exceptionally handsome, among the
+many less so; or be condemned to overpraise for what is after all but
+an indication to poetic power. "If I should die", is of course a very
+lovely sonnet, and it is the true indication of what Brooke might have
+been, but it is not the reason to be doomed to find all things
+wonderful in him. For in the state of perfection, if one see always
+with a lancet eye, we really do accentuate the essence of beauty by a
+careful and very direct critical sense, which can and should, when
+honorably exercised, show up delicately, the sense of proportion.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[233]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It is as much a part of the artist's equipment to find fault as it is
+to praise, for he wants by nature the true value with which he may
+relate himself to the sense of beauty. It seems, perhaps only to me,
+that in Brooke's poems there is but a vigorous indication to poetic
+expression, whereas doubtless the man himself was being excessively
+poetic, hour and moment together, and spent much energy of mind and
+body poetizing sensation. For me, there is a journalistic quality of
+phrasing and only very rarely the unusual image. As for the "Letters",
+they are loose and jotty in form, without distinction either in
+observation or in form, without real felicity or uniqueness. Art is
+nothing if it is not the object, or the idea, or experience seen in
+review, with clarity. In Brooke, I feel the superabundance of joy in
+the attractiveness of the world, but I do not feel the language of him
+commensurate or distinguished in the qualities of poetic or literary
+art. There seems to me to be too much of the blown lock and the
+wistful glance, too much of the attitudinized poet, lacking, I may
+even say, in true refinement, often.</p>
+
+<p>A too comfortable poet, and poetry of too much verve without incision,
+too much "gesturing", which is an easy thing for many talented people,
+and there is also missing for me the real grip of amazement. You will
+not find anything in the letters that could not have been done by the
+cub reporter, save possibly in the more charming of the letters with
+reference to swimming in the South Seas. Here you feel Brooke<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[234]</a></span> at home
+instantly, and the picturing is natural and easy. But other than this,
+you will find no phrasing to compare with passages of James's preface,
+such, for instance, as the "sky-clamour of more dollars", surely a
+vastly more incisive phrase regarding the frenzies of New York, than
+all that Brooke essays to tell of it. Brooke is distinctly "not there"
+too often in these so irregular letters of his. Letters are notably
+rare in these times anyhow, and so it is with the letters of Brooke.
+We look for distinction, and it is not to be found, they have but
+little of the intimacy with their subjects that one expects.</p>
+
+<p>As to his poetry, it seems to be a poetry rapidly approaching state
+approval, there is in it the flavour of the budding laureate, it seems
+to me to be poetry already "in orders". Brooke was certainly in danger
+of becoming a good poet, like the several other poets who perished in
+the throes of heroism. Like them, he would, had he lived, have had to
+save himself from the evils of prosperity, poetically speaking. He
+would have had to overcome his tendency toward what I want to call the
+old-fashioned "gold and velvet" of his words, a very definite haze
+hanging over them of the ill effect of the eighteen-ninety school,
+which produced a little excellent poetry and a lot of very tame
+production. Poetry is like all art, difficult even in its freest
+interval. Brooke must rest his claim to early distinction perhaps upon
+the "If I should die" sonnet alone, he would certainly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[235]</a></span> have had to
+come up considerably, to have held the place his too numerous personal
+admirers were wont to thrust upon him. Unless one be the veritable
+genius, sudden laurels wither on the stem with too much of morning.</p>
+
+<p>This poet had no chance to prove what poetry of his would have endured
+the long day, and most of all he needed to be removed from too much
+love of everything. The best art cannot endure such promiscuity, not
+an art of specific individual worth. In the book which is called
+"Letters from America", the attraction lies in its preface, despite
+the so noticeable irrelevancy of style. It seems to me that James
+might for once have condescended to an equal footing with his theme,
+for the sake of the devoutness of his intention, and have come to us
+for the moment, the man talking of the youth. He might then have told
+us something really intimate of "Rupert", as he so frequently names
+him, for this would indicate some intimacy surely, unless perchance he
+was "Rupert" to the innumerables whom he met, and who were sure of his
+intimacy on the instant's introduction, which would indeed be
+"condemned to sociability".</p>
+
+<p>This book is in two pieces, preface and content, and we are conscious
+chiefly of the high style and interest of the preface, first of all,
+and the discrepancy inherent in the rest of the book accentuating the
+wide divergence between praiser and praised. It is James with
+reference to Brooke, it is not Henry<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[236]</a></span> James informing of the young and
+handsome Rupert Brooke. Apollo in the flesh must do some mighty
+singing. Brooke had not done much of this when they laid him by on the
+borders of that farther sea. He had more to prove the heritage laid so
+heavily upon him by the unending host of his admirers and lovers. He
+needed relief from the popular notion, and we must relieve ourselves
+from his excessive popularity if we are to enjoy him rightly, by being
+just with him. A little time, and we should have learned his real
+distinction. It is too soon for us, and too late for him. We must
+accept him more for his finer indications then, and less for his
+achievement in the sense of mastery.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[237]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="THE_DEARTH_OF_CRITICS" id="THE_DEARTH_OF_CRITICS"></a>THE DEARTH OF CRITICS</h2>
+
+
+<p>There is just cause for wonder at the noticeable absence of critics in
+the field of painting, of individuals who are capable of some serious
+approach to the current tendencies in art. We have witnessed a very
+general failure to rise above the common or high-class reportorial
+level in this particular sphere. Why do so many people who write
+specifically about painting say so little that really relates to it?
+It is because most of them are journalists or men of letters who have
+made emotional excursions into this field, which is in most instances
+foreign to them; well-known literary artists, occasionally, intent
+upon varying their subject matter.</p>
+
+<p>We read Meier-Graefe, for instance, on the development of modern art,
+and we find his analogies more or less stimulating, but taken as a
+whole his work is unsatisfactory from an artist's point of view; not
+much more than a sort of novel with art for its skeleton, or rather a
+handbook from which the untutored layman can gather superficial
+information about group and individual influences, a kind of verbal
+entertainment that is altogether wanting in true critical values. I
+have listened to lectures on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[238]</a></span> art by people who were supposed to know
+about it, merely to see how much this type of critical study could
+satisfy the really artistic mind somewhat conversant with true
+relations, and I have found these lectures of but the slightest value,
+<i>resum&eacute;s</i> compounded of wearisome and inappropriate detail. There is
+always an extreme lack of true definition, of true information, there
+is always too much of the amateur spirit passing for popular knowledge
+among these individuals who might otherwise do so much to form public
+taste and appreciation. Thus we find that even the chatty Meier-Graefe
+stops without going any further than C&eacute;zanne. It is possible that
+after writing two very heavy volumes upon the development of modern
+art, he has to remain silent on modern art itself, that he really
+feels he is not qualified to speak upon C&eacute;zanne and his successors; or
+does he assume possibly that there is nothing this side of C&eacute;zanne?
+How many writer people are there who really do understand what has
+taken place since then?</p>
+
+<p>I have heard these characteristic remarks among the so-called art
+writers who write the regular notices for the daily journals&mdash;"You see
+I really don't know anything about the subject, but I have to write!"
+or&mdash;"I don't know anything about art, but I am reading up on it as
+much as possible so that I won't appear too stupid; for they send me
+out and I have to write something." Their attitude is the same as if
+their subject were a fire or a murder: but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[239]</a></span> either of the latter would
+be much more in their line, calling for nothing but a registration of
+the simplest of facts. Just why these people have to write upon art
+will never be clear. But because of this altogether trivial
+relationship to the theme of painting we find it difficult to take
+seriously at all what we read in our dailies, in every case the barest
+notation with heavily worded comment, having little or no reference to
+what is important in the particular pictures themselves. How can
+anyone take these individuals seriously when they actually have no
+opinion to offer, and must rely either upon humor or indignation to
+inspire them?</p>
+
+<p>If we turn to the pundits of criticism we find statements like this of
+Ruskin on Giotto:&mdash;"For all his use of opalescent warm color, Giotto
+is exactly like Turner, as in his swift expressional power he is like
+Gainsborough!" Again, speaking of Turner's <i>Fighting T&eacute;m&eacute;raire</i>, he
+says: "Of all pictures of subjects not visibly involving human pain,
+this is, I believe, the most pathetic that was ever painted&mdash;no ruin
+was ever so affecting as this gliding of the vessel to her grave."
+Journalism of the first class certainly, but at the farthest stretch
+of the imagination how can one possibly think of Gainsborough or
+Turner in connection with any special quality of Giotto? As for the
+pathos of an aged ship, that belongs to poetry, as Coleridge has
+shown; sentiment of this kind has never had any proper place in
+painting. A far worthier type of appreciation in words is to be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[240]</a></span>
+found, of course, in Pater's passages on <i>La Gioconda</i> and
+Botticelli's <i>Birth of Venus</i>. But these belong to a different realm,
+in which literature rises to a height independent of the pictures
+themselves by means of the suggestion that is in them, the power of
+suggestion being a finer alternative for crude and worthless
+description. We shall always dispute with the writer on art as to
+exactly what symbol is inherent in the presence of a rose in the hand
+or a tear upon the cheek, but we cannot quarrel when the matter is
+treated as sublimely as in the case of a literary artist like Pater.
+It is in the sphere of professed critical judgment that the literary
+authorities so often go astray.</p>
+
+<p>Thus between the entertaining type of writer like Meier-Graefe and the
+daily reporter there is no middle ground. The journalist is frank and
+says that he doesn't know but that he must write; the other writes
+books that are well suited for reference purposes, but have scant
+bearing upon the actual truth in relation to pictures. Are there any
+critics who attempt seriously to approach the modern theme, who find
+it worth their while to go into modern esthetics with anything like
+sincerity or real earnestness of attitude? Only two that I am aware
+of. There is the intelligent Leo Stein, who seldom appears in print,
+but who makes an art of conversation on the subject; and there is
+Willard Huntingdon Wright, who has appeared extensively and certainly
+with intelligence also, both of these critical writers<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[241]</a></span> being very
+much at variance in theory, but both full of discernment whatever one
+may think of their individual ideas. We are sure of both as being
+thoroughly inside the subject, this theme of modern art, for they are
+somehow painter people. I even suspect them both of having once, like
+George Moore, painted seriously themselves.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless there is a hopeful seriousness of interest developing in
+what is being done this side the sea, a rediscovery of native art of
+the sort that is occurring in all countries. The artist is being
+taught by means of war that there is no longer a conventional center
+of art, that the time-worn fetish of Paris as a necessity in his
+development has been dispensed with; and this is fortunate for the
+artist and for art in general. It is having its pronounced effect upon
+the creative powers of the individual in all countries, almost
+obliging him to create his own impulse upon his own soil; it is making
+the artist see that if he is really to create he must create
+irrespective of all that exists as convention in the mind.</p>
+
+<p>How will this affect the artist? He will learn first of all to be
+concerned with himself, and what he puts forth of personality and of
+personal research will receive its character from his strict adherence
+to this principle, whether he proceeds by means of prevailing theories
+or by departure from them. The public will thus have no choice but to
+rely upon what he produces seriously as coming clearly from himself,
+from his own desire and labor. He will realize<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[242]</a></span> that it is not a
+trick, not a habit, not a trade&mdash;this modernity&mdash;and that with
+fashions it has nothing to do; that it is explicitly a part of our
+modern urge toward expression quite as much as the art of Corot and
+Millet were of Barbizon, as the art of Titian, Giorgione and
+Michelangelo were of Italy; that he and his time bear the strictest
+relationship to one another and that through this relationship he can
+best build up his own original power. Unable to depend therefore upon
+the confessedly untutored lay writer or even the better class essayist
+to tell him his place, he will establish himself, and his place will
+be determined in the r&eacute;gime of his day by precisely those qualities
+which he contributes to it. He will not rely too insistently upon
+idiosyncrasy; the failure of this we have already seen, in the
+post-impressionists.</p>
+
+<p>The truth is that painters must sooner or later learn to express
+themselves in terms of pure language, they must learn that creation is
+the thing most expected of them, and, if possible, invention as well.
+Oddity in execution or idea is of the least importance. Artists have a
+more respectable service to perform than this dilettantist notion of
+beauty implies. Since the utter annihilation of sentimentality, of
+legend, of what we call poetry has taken place, a richer substance for
+expression has come to us by means of which the artist may express a
+larger, newer variety of matter, more relevant to our special need,
+our modernity.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[243]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The war disintegrated the <i>art habit</i> and in this fact lies the hope
+of art. Fads have lost what slight interest they possessed, the folly
+of imitation has been exposed. As a result of this, I like to think
+that we shall have a finer type of expression, a richer kind of
+personal quality. Every artist is his own maker, his own liberator; he
+it is that should be the first to criticise, destroy and reconstruct
+himself, he should find no mood convenient, no attitude comfortable.
+What the lay-writer says of him in praise or blame will not matter so
+much in the future; he will respect first and last only those who have
+found the time to share his theme, at least in mind, if not in
+experience, and the discerning public will free itself from the
+temporary influences of the confessedly untutored critic. The artist
+will gain its confidence by reason of his own sincerity and
+intelligence. It is probable, too, that in time criticism in the mode
+of Ruskin will utterly disappear and the Meier-Graefe type of critic
+will have found a fitter and true successor, someone who, when he
+calls himself a critic, will prove a fairly clear title to the
+distinction and will not have to apologize for himself or for his
+occupation.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[246]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="AFTERWORD" id="AFTERWORD"></a>AFTERWORD </h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[247]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="THE_IMPORTANCE_OF_BEING_DADA" id="THE_IMPORTANCE_OF_BEING_DADA"></a>THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING "DADA"</h2>
+
+
+<p>We are indebted to Tristan Tzara and his followers for the newest and
+perhaps the most important doctrinary insistence as applied to art
+which has appeared in a long time. Dada-ism is the latest phase of
+modernism in painting as well as in literature, and carries with it
+all the passion for freedom of expression which Marinetti sponsored so
+loudly in his futuristic manifestoes. It adds likewise an exhilarating
+quality of nihilism, imbibed, as is said, directly from the author of
+Zarathustra. Reading a fragment of the documentary statement of
+Dada-ism, we find that the charm of the idea exists mainly in the fact
+that they wish all things levelled in the mind of man to the degree of
+commonplaceness which is typical of and peculiar to it.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing is greater than anything else, is what the Dada believes, and
+this is the first sign of hope the artist at least can discover in the
+meaningless importance which has been invested in the term ART. It
+shows best of all that art is to betake itself on its own way blandly,
+despite the wish of its so ardent supporters and suppressors. I am
+greatly relieved as artist, to find there is at least one tenet I can
+hold to in my experience as a useful or a useless human being. I have
+always said for myself, I have no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[248]</a></span> office, no obligations, no other
+"mission", dread-fullest of all words, than to find out the quality of
+humor that exists in experience, or life as we think we are entitled
+to call it. I have always felt the underlying fatality of habit in
+appreciation, because I have felt, and now actually more than ever in
+my existence, the fatality of habit indulged in by the artist. The
+artist has made a kind of subtle crime of his habitual expression, his
+emotional monotonies, and his intellectual inabilities.</p>
+
+<p>If I announce on this bright morning that I am a "Dada-ist" it is not
+because I find the slightest need for, or importance in, a doctrine of
+any sort, it is only for convenience of myself and a few others that I
+take up the issue of adherence. An expressionist is one who expresses
+himself at all times in any way that is necessary and peculiar to him.
+A dada-ist is one who finds no one thing more important than any other
+one thing, and so I turn from my place in the scheme from
+expressionist to dada-ist with the easy grace that becomes any
+self-respecting humorist.</p>
+
+<p>Having fussed with average intelligence as well as with average
+stupidity over the various dogmatic aspects of human experience such
+as art, religion, philosophy, ethics, morals, with a kind of
+obligatory blindness, I am come to the clearest point of my vision,
+which is nothing more or less than the superbly enlightening discovery
+that life as we know it is an essentially comic issue and cannot be
+treated other than with the spirit of comedy in compre<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[249]</a></span>hension. It is
+cause for riotous and healthy laughter, and to laugh at oneself in
+conjunction with the rest of the world, at one's own tragic vagaries,
+concerning the things one cannot name or touch or comprehend, is the
+best anodyne I can conjure in my mind for the irrelevant pains we take
+to impress ourselves and the world with the importance of anything
+more than the brilliant excitation of the moment. It is thrilling,
+therefore, to realize there is a healthy way out of all this dilemma
+of habit for the artist. One of these ways is to reduce the size of
+the "A" in art, to meet the size of the rest of the letters in one's
+speech. Another way is to deliver art from the clutches of its
+worshippers, and by worshippers I mean the idolaters and the
+commercialists of art. By the idolaters I mean those whose reverence
+for art is beyond their knowledge of it. By the commercialists I mean
+those who prey upon the ignorance of the unsophisticated, with
+pictures created by the esthetic habit of, or better to say, through
+the banality of, "artistic" temperament. Art is at present a species
+of vice in America, and it sorely and conspicuously needs prohibition
+or interference.</p>
+
+<p>It is, I think, high time that those who have the artistic habit
+toward art should be apprised of the danger they are in in assuming of
+course that they hold vital interest in the development of
+intelligence. It is time therefore to interfere with stupidity in
+matters of taste and judgment. We learn little or nothing from habit
+excepting repetitive imitation. I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[250]</a></span> should, for the benefit of you as
+reader, interpose here a little information from the mind of Francis
+Picabia, who was until the war conspicuous among the cubists, upon the
+subject of dada-ism.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Dada smells of nothing, nothing, nothing.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">It is like your hopes: nothing.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Like your paradise: nothing.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Like your idols: nothing.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Like your politicians: nothing.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Like your heroes: nothing.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Like your artists: nothing.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Like your religions: nothing."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>A litany like this coming from one of the most notable dada-ists of
+the day, is too edifying for proper expression. It is like a window
+opened upon a wide cool place where all parts of one's exhausted being
+may receive the kind of air that is imperative to it. For the present,
+we may say, a special part of one's being which needs the most and the
+freshest air is that chamber in the brain where art takes hold and
+flourishes like a bed of fungus in the dark.</p>
+
+<p>What is the use, then, of knowing anything about art until we know
+precisely what it is? If it is such an orchidaceous rarity as the
+world of worshippers would have us believe, then we know it must be
+the parasitic equivalent of our existence feeding upon the health of
+other functions and sensibilities in ourselves. The question comes why
+worship what we are not familiar with? The war has taught us that
+idolatry is a past virtue and can have no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[251]</a></span> further place with
+intelligent people living in the present era, which is for us the only
+era worth consideration. I have a hobby-horse therefore&mdash;to ride away
+with, out into the world of intricate common experience; out into the
+arena with those who know what the element of life itself is, and that
+I have become an expression of the one issue in the mind worth the
+consideration of the artist, namely fluidic change. How can anything
+to which I am not related, have any bearing upon me as artist? I am
+only dada-ist because it is the nearest I have come to scientific
+principle in experience. What yesterday can mean is only what
+yesterday was, and tomorrow is something I cannot fathom until it
+occurs. I ride my own hobby-horse away from the dangers of art which
+is with us a modern vice at present, into the wide expanse of
+magnanimous diversion from which I may extract all the joyousness I am
+capable of, from the patterns I encounter.</p>
+
+<p>The same disgust which was manifested and certainly enjoyed by Duse,
+when she demanded that the stage be cleared of actors in order to save
+the creative life of the stage, is the same disgust that makes us
+yearn for wooden dolls to make abstract movements in order that we may
+release art from its infliction of the big "A", to take away from art
+its pricelessness and make of it a new and engaging diversion,
+pastime, even dissipation if you will; for all real expression is a
+phase of dissipation in itself: To release art from the disease of
+little theatre-ism,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[252]</a></span> and from the mandibles of the octopus-like
+worshipper that eats everything, in the line of spurious estheticism
+within range, disgorging it without intelligence or comprehension upon
+the consciousness of the not at all stupid public, with a so obviously
+pernicious effect.</p>
+
+<p>"Dada is a fundamentally religious attitude, analogous to that of the
+scientist with his eyeglass glued to the microscope." Dada is
+irritated by those who write "Art, Beauty, Truth", with capital
+letters, and who make of them entities superior to man. "Dada scoffs
+at capital letters, atrociously." "Dada ruining the authority of
+constraints, tends to set free the natural play of our activities."
+"Dada therefore leads to amoralism and to the most spontaneous and
+consequently the least logical lyricism. This lyricism is expressed in
+a thousand ways of life." "Dada scrapes from us the thick layers of
+filth deposited on us by the last few centuries." "Dada destroys, and
+stops at that. Let Dada help us to make a complete clearance, then
+each of us rebuild a modern house with central heating, and everything
+to the drain, Dadas of 1920."</p>
+
+<p>Remembering always that Dada means hobby-horse, you have at last the
+invitation to make merry for once in our new and unprecedented
+experience over the subject of ART with its now reduced front letter.
+It is the newest and most admirable reclaimer of art in that it offers
+at last a release for the expression of natural sensibilities. We can
+ride away<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[253]</a></span> to the radiant region of "Joie de Vivre", and find that
+life and art are one and the same thing, resembling each other so
+closely in reality, that it is never a question of whether it shall or
+must be set down on paper or canvas, or given any greater degree of
+expression than we give to a morning walk or a pleasant bath, or an
+ordinary rest in the sunlight.</p>
+
+<p>Art is then a matter of how one is to take life now, and not by any
+means a matter of how the Greeks or the Egyptians or any other race
+has shown it to be for their own needs and satisfaction. If art was
+necessary to them, it is unnecessary to us now, therefore it is free
+to express itself as it will. You will find, therefore, that if you
+are aware of yourself, you will be your own perfect dada-ist, in that
+you are for the first time riding your own hobby-horse into infinity
+of sensation through experience, and that you are one more
+satisfactory vaudevillian among the multitudes of dancing legs and
+flying wits. You will learn after all that the bugaboo called LIFE is
+a matter of the tightrope and that the stars will shine their frisky
+approval as you glide, if you glide sensibly, with an eye on the fun
+in the performance. That is what art is to be, must come to in the
+consciousness of the artist most of all, he is perhaps the greatest
+offender in matters of judgment and taste; and the next greatest
+offender is the dreadful go-between or "middleman" esthete who so
+glibly contributes effete values to our present day conceptions.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[254]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We must all learn what art really is, learn to relieve it from the
+surrounding stupidities and from the passionate and useless admiration
+of the horde of false idolaters, as well as the money changers in the
+temple of success. Dada-ism offers the first joyous dogma I have
+encountered which has been invented for the release and true freedom
+of art. It is therefore most welcome since it will put out of use all
+heavy hands and light fingers in the business of art and set them to
+playing a more honourable and sportsmanlike game. We shall learn
+through dada-ism that art is a witty and entertaining pastime, and not
+to be accepted as our ever present and stultifying affliction.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Adventures in the Arts, by Marsden Hartley
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Adventures in the Arts, by Marsden Hartley
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Adventures in the Arts
+       Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets
+
+Author: Marsden Hartley
+
+Release Date: March 28, 2007 [EBook #20921]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Clarke, Sankar Viswanathan, and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+(This file was produced from images generously made
+available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                              ADVENTURES
+
+                             IN THE ARTS
+
+
+
+                               INFORMAL
+
+                               CHAPTERS
+
+                             ON PAINTERS
+
+                              VAUDEVILLE
+
+                              AND POETS
+
+
+
+                                  BY
+
+                           MARSDEN HARTLEY
+
+
+
+
+                          BONI AND LIVERIGHT
+
+                      Publishers        New York
+
+
+
+
+                         COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
+
+                        BONI & LIVERIGHT, INC.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+PREFATORY NOTE
+
+
+The papers in this book are not intended in any way to be professional
+treatises. They must be viewed in the light of entertaining
+conversations. Their possible value lies in their directness of
+impulse, and not in weight of argument. I could not wish to go into
+the qualities of art more deeply. A reaction, to be pleasant, must be
+simple. This is the apology I have to offer: Reactions, then, through
+direct impulse, and not essays by means of stiffened analysis.
+
+MARSDEN HARTLEY.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+     Some of the papers included in this book have appeared in
+     _Art and Archeology_, _The Seven Arts_, _The Dial_, _The
+     Nation_, _The New Republic_, and _The Touchstone_. Thanks
+     are due to the editors of these periodicals for permission
+     to reprint.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+TO
+
+ALFRED STIEGLITZ
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+TO
+
+ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS
+
+
+Perhaps the most important part of Criticism is the fact that it
+presents to the creator a problem which is never solved. Criticism is
+to him a perpetual Presence: or perhaps a ghost which he will not
+succeed in laying. If he could satisfy his mind that Criticism was a
+certain thing: a good thing or a bad, a proper presence or an
+irrelevant, he could psychologically dispose of it. But he can not.
+For Criticism is a configuration of responses and reactions so
+intricate, so kaleidoscopic, that it would be as simple to category
+Life itself.
+
+The artist remains the artist precisely in so far as he rejects the
+simplifying and reducing process of the average man who at an early
+age puts Life away into some snug conception of his mind and race.
+This one turns the key. He has released his will and love from the
+vast Ceremonial of wonder, from the deep Poem of Being, into some
+particular detail of life wherein he hopes to achieve comfort or at
+least shun pain. Not so, the artist. In the moment when he elects to
+avoid by whatever makeshift the raw agony of life, he ceases to be
+fit to create. He must face experience forever freshly: reduce life
+each day anew to chaos and remould it into order. He must be always a
+willing virgin, given up to life and so enlacing it. Thus only may he
+retain and record that pure surprise whose earliest voicing is the
+first cry of the infant.
+
+The unresolved expectancy of the creator toward Life should be his way
+toward Criticism also. He should hold it as part of his Adventure. He
+should understand in it, particularly when it is impertinent, stupid
+and cruel, the ponderable weight of Life itself, reacting upon his
+search for a fresh conquest over it. Though it persist unchanged in
+its role of purveying misinformation and absurdity to the Public, he
+should know it for himself a blessed dispensation.
+
+With his maturity, the creator's work goes out into the world. And in
+this act, he puts the world away. For the artist's work defines: and
+definition means apartness: and the average man is undefined in the
+social body. Here is a danger for the artist within the very essence
+of his artistic virtue. During the years of his apprenticeship, he has
+struggled to create for himself an essential world out of experience.
+Now he begins to succeed: and he lives too fully in his own selection:
+he lives too simply in the effects of his effort. The gross and
+fumbling impact of experience is eased. The grind of ordinary
+intercourse is dimmed. The rawness of Family and Business is refined
+or removed. But now once more the world comes in to him, in the form
+of the Critic. Here again, in a sharp concentrated sense, the world
+moves on him: its complacency, its hysteria, its down-tending
+appetites and fond illusions, its pathetic worship of yesterdays and
+hatred of tomorrows, its fear-dogmas and its blood-avowals.
+
+The artist shall leave the world only to find it, hate it only because
+he loves, attack it only if he serves. At that epoch of his life when
+the world's gross sources may grow dim, Criticism brings them back.
+Wherefore, the function of the Critic is a blessing and a need.
+
+The creator's reception of this newly direct, intense, mundane
+intrusion is not always passive. If the artist is an intelligent man,
+he may respond to the intervening world on its own plane. He may turn
+critic himself.
+
+When the creator turns critic, we are in the presence of a
+consummation: we have a complete experience: we have a sort of
+sacrament. For to the intrusion of the world he interposes his own
+body. In his art, the creator's body would be itself intrusion. The
+artist is too humble and too sane to break the ecstatic flow of vision
+with his personal form. The true artist despises the personal as an
+end. He makes fluid, and distils his personal form. He channels it
+beyond himself to a Unity which of course contains it. But Criticism
+is nothing which is not the sheer projection of a body. The artist
+turns Self into a universal Form: but the critic reduces Form to Self.
+Criticism is to the artist the intrusion, in a form irreducible to
+art, of the body of the world. What can he do but interpose his own?
+
+This is the value of the creator's criticism. He gives to the world
+himself. And his self is a rich life.
+
+It includes for instance a direct experience of art, the which no
+professional critic may possess. And it includes as well a direct
+knowledge of life, sharpened in the retrospect of that devotion to the
+living which is peculiarly the artist's. For what is the critic after
+all, but an "artistic" individual somehow impeded from satisfying his
+esthetic emotion and his need of esthetic form in the gross and
+stubborn stuff of life itself: who therefore, since he is too
+intelligent for substitutes, resorts to the already digested matter of
+the hardier creators, takes their assimilated food and does with it
+what the athletic artist does with the meat and lymph and bone of God
+himself? The artist mines from the earth and smelts with his own fire.
+He is higher brother to the toilers of the soil. The critic takes the
+products of the creator, reforges, twists them, always in the cold.
+For if he had the fire to melt, he would not stay with metals already
+worked: when the earth's womb bursts with richer.
+
+When the creator turns critic, we are certain of a feast. We have a
+fare that needs no metaphysical sauce (such as must transform the
+product of the Critic). Here is good food. Go to it and eat. The
+asides of a Baudelaire, a Goethe, a Da Vinci outweight a thousand
+tomes of the professional critics.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I know of no American book like this one by Marsden Hartley. I do not
+believe American painting heretofore capable of so vital a response
+and of so athletic an appraisal. Albert Ryder barricaded himself from
+the world's intrusion. The American world was not intelligent enough
+in his days to touch him to an activer response. And Ryder, partaking
+of its feebleness, from his devotion to the pure subjective note
+became too exhausted for aught else. As a world we have advanced. We
+have a fully functioning Criticism ... swarms and schools of makers of
+the sonorous complacencies of Judgment. We have an integral body of
+creative-minded men and women interposing itself with valiance upon
+the antithesis of the social resistance to social growth. Hartley is
+in some ways a continuance of Ryder. One stage is Ryder, the solitary
+who remained one. A second stage is Hartley, the solitary who stands
+against the more aggressive, more interested Marketplace.
+
+You will find in this book the artist of a cultural epoch. This man
+has mastered the plastic messages of modern Europe: he has gone deep
+in the classic forms of the ancient Indian Dance. But he is, still,
+not very far from Ryder. He is always the child--whatever wise old
+worlds he contemplates--the child, wistful, poignant, trammeled, of
+New England.
+
+Hartley has adventured not alone deep but wide. He steps from New
+Mexico to Berlin, from the salons of the Paris of Marie Laurencin to
+the dust and tang of the American Circus. He is eclectic. But wherever
+he goes he chronicles not so much these actual worlds as his own
+pleasure of them. They are but mirrors, many-shaped and lighted, for
+his own delicate, incisive humor. For Hartley is an innocent and a
+_naif_. At times he is profound. Always he is profoundly simple.
+
+Tragedy and Comedy are adult. The child's world is Tragicomic. So
+Marsden Hartley's. He is not deep enough--like most of our Moderns--in
+the pregnant chaos to be submerged in blackness by the hot struggle of
+the creative will. He may weep, but he can smile next moment at a
+pretty song. He may be hurt, but he gets up to dance.
+
+In this book--the autobiography of a creator--Marsden Hartley peers
+variously into the modern world: but it is in search of Fairies.
+
+WALDO FRANK.
+
+_Lisbon_, June, 1921.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+     INTRODUCTION BY WALDO FRANK
+
+_Foreword_
+
+     CONCERNING FAIRY TALES AND ME
+
+_Part One_
+
+1.   THE RED MAN
+
+2.   WHITMAN AND CEZANNE
+
+3.   RYDER
+
+4.   WINSLOW HOMER
+
+5.   AMERICAN VALUES IN PAINTING
+
+6.   MODERN ART IN AMERICA
+
+7.   OUR IMAGINATIVES
+
+8.   OUR IMPRESSIONISTS
+
+9.   ARTHUR B. DAVIES
+
+10.  REX SLINKARD
+
+11.  SOME AMERICAN WATER-COLORISTS
+
+12.  THE APPEAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY
+
+13.  SOME WOMEN ARTISTS
+
+14.  REVALUATIONS IN IMPRESSIONISM
+
+15.  ODILON REDON
+
+16.  THE VIRTUES OF AMATEUR PAINTING
+
+17.  HENRI ROUSSEAU
+
+_Part Two_
+
+18.  THE TWILIGHT OF THE ACROBAT
+
+19.  VAUDEVILLE
+
+20.  A CHARMING EQUESTRIENNE
+
+21.  JOHN BARRYMORE IN PETER IBBETSON
+
+_Part Three_
+
+22.  LA CLOSERIE DE LILAS
+
+23.  EMILY DICKINSON
+
+24.  ADELAIDE CRAPSEY
+
+25.  FRANCIS THOMPSON
+
+26.  ERNEST DOWSON
+
+27.  HENRY JAMES ON RUPERT BROOKE
+
+28.  THE DEARTH OF CRITICS
+
+_Afterword_
+
+     THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING "DADA"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+FOREWORD
+
+CONCERNING FAIRY TALES AND ME
+
+
+Sometimes I think myself one of the unique children among children. I
+never read a fairy story in my childhood. I always had the feeling as
+a child, that fairy stories were for grown-ups and were best
+understood by them, and for that reason I think it must have been that
+I postponed them. I found them, even at sixteen, too involved and
+mystifying to take them in with quite the simple gullibility that is
+necessary. But that was because I was left alone with the incredibly
+magical reality from morning until nightfall, and the nights meant
+nothing more remarkable to me than the days did, no more than they do
+now. I find moonlight merely another species of illumination by which
+one registers continuity of sensation. My nursery was always on the
+edge of the strangers' knee, wondering who they were, what they might
+even mean to those who were as is called "nearest" them.
+
+I had a childhood vast with terror and surprise. If it is true that
+one forgets what one wishes to forget, then I have reason for not
+remembering the major part of those days and hours that are supposed
+to introduce one graciously into the world and offer one a clue to
+the experience that is sure to follow. Not that my childhood was so
+bitter, unless for childhood loneliness is bitterness, and without
+doubt it is the worst thing that can happen to one's childhood. Mine
+was merely a different childhood, and in this sense an original one. I
+was left with myself to discover myself amid the multitudinous other
+and far greater mysteries. I was never the victim of fear of goblins
+and ghosts because I was never taught them. I was merely taught by
+nature to follow, as if led by a rare and tender hand, the then almost
+unendurable beauty that lay on every side of me. It was pain then, to
+follow beauty, because I didn't understand beauty; it must always, I
+think, be distressing to follow anything one does not understand.
+
+I used to go, in my earliest school days, into a little strip of
+woodland not far from the great ominous red brick building in a small
+manufacturing town, on the edge of a wonderful great river in Maine,
+from which cool and quiet spot I could always hear the dominant clang
+of the bell, and there I could listen with all my very boyish
+simplicity to the running of the water over the stones, and watch--for
+it was spring, of course--the new leaves pushing up out of the mould,
+and see the light-hued blossoms swinging on the new breeze. I cared
+more for these in themselves than I did for any legendary presences
+sitting under them, shaking imperceptible fingers and waving invisible
+wands with regality in a world made only for them and for children
+who were taught mechanically to see them there.
+
+I was constantly confronted with the magic of reality itself,
+wondering why one thing was built of exquisite curves and another of
+harmonic angles. It was not a scientific passion in me, it was merely
+my sensing of the world of visible beauty around me, pressing in on me
+with the vehemence of splendor, on every side.
+
+I feel about the world now precisely as I did then, despite all the
+reasons that exist to encourage the change of attitude. I care for the
+magic of experience still, the magic that exists even in facts, though
+little or nothing for the objective material value.
+
+Life as an idea engrosses me with the same ardor as in the earlier
+boyish days, with the difference that there is much to admire and so
+much less to reverence and be afraid of. I harp always on the "idea"
+of life as I dwell perpetually on the existence of the moment.
+
+I might say, then, that my childhood was comparable, in its simplicity
+and extravagance of wonder, to the youth of Odilon Redon, that
+remarkable painter of the fantasy of existence, of which he speaks so
+delicately in letters to friends. His youth was apparently much like
+mine, not a youth of athleticism so much as a preoccupancy with wonder
+and the imminence of beauty surrounding all things.
+
+I was preoccupied with the "being" of things. Things in themselves
+engrossed me more than the problem of experience. I was satisfied with
+the effect of things upon my senses, and cared nothing for their
+deeper values. The inherent magic in the appearance of the world about
+me, engrossed and amazed me. No cloud or blossom or bird or human ever
+escaped me, I think.
+
+I was not indifferent to anything that took shape before me, though
+when it came to people I was less credulous of their perfection
+because they pressed forward their not always certain credentials upon
+me. I reverenced them then too much for an imagined austerity as I
+admire them now perhaps not enough for their charm, for it is the
+charm of things and people only that engages and satisfies me. I have
+completed my philosophical equations, and have become enamored of
+people as having the same propensities as all other objects of nature.
+One need never question appearances. One accepts them for their face
+value, as the camera accepts them, without recommendation or
+specialized qualification. They are what they become to one. The
+capacity for legend comes out of the capacity for experience, and it
+is in this fashion that I hold such high respect for geniuses like
+Grimm and Andersen, but as I know their qualities I find myself
+leaning with more readiness toward Lewis Carroll's superb "Alice in
+Wonderland."
+
+I was, I suppose, born backward, physically speaking. I was
+confronted with the vastitude of the universe at once, without the
+ingratiating introduction of the fairy tale. I had early made the not
+so inane decision that I would not read a book until I really wanted
+to. One of the rarest women in the world, having listened to my
+remark, said she had a book she knew I would like because it was so
+different, and forthwith presented me with Emerson's Essays, the first
+book that I have any knowledge of reading, and it was in my eighteenth
+year. Until then I had been wholly absorbed with the terrors and the
+majestical inferences of the moment, the hour, and the day. I was
+alone with them, and they were wonderful and excessively baffling in
+their splendors; then, after filling my mind and soul with the
+legendary splendors of Friendship, and The Oversoul-Circles, and
+Compensation, each of these words of exciting largeness in themselves,
+I turned to the dramatic unrealities of Zarathustra, which, of course,
+was in no way to be believed because it did not exist. And then came
+expansion and release into the outer world again through
+interpretation of Plato, and of Leaves of Grass itself.
+
+I have saved myself from the disaster of beliefs through these magical
+books, and am free once more as in my early childhood to indulge
+myself in the iridescent idea of life, as Idea.
+
+But the fairy story is nothing after all but a means whereby we, as
+children, may arrive at some clue as to the significance of things
+around us, and it is through them the child finds his way out from
+incoherency toward comprehension. The universe is a vast place, as we
+all know who think we comprehend it in admiring it. The things we
+cannot know are in reality of no consequence, in comparison with the
+few we can know. I can know, for instance, that my morning is the new
+era of my existence, and that I shall never live through another like
+it, as I have never lived through the one I recall in my memory, which
+was Yesterday. Yesterday was my event in experience then, as it is my
+event in memory now. I am related to the world by the way I feel
+attached to the life of it as exemplified in the vividness of the
+moment. I am, by reason of my peculiar personal experience, enabled to
+extract the magic from the moment, discarding the material husk of it
+precisely as the squirrel does the shell of the nut.
+
+I am preoccupied with the business of transmutation--which is to say,
+the proper evaluation of life as idea, of experience as delectable
+diversion. It is necessary for everyone to poetize his sensations in
+order to comprehend them. Weakness in the direction of philosophy
+creates the quality of dogmatic interrogation. A preoccupancy with
+religious characteristics assists those who are interested in the
+problem of sublimation. The romanticist is a kind of scientific person
+engaged in the correct assembling of chemical constituents that will
+produce a formula by which he can live out every one of his moments
+with a perfect comprehension of their charm and of their everlasting
+value to him. If the romanticist have the advantage of comprehension
+of the sense of beauty as related to art, then he may be said to be
+wholly equipped for the exquisite legend of life in which he takes his
+place, as factor in the perfected memory of existence, which becomes
+the real history of life, as an idea. The person of most power in life
+is he who becomes high magician with the engaging and elusive trick.
+
+It is a fairy-tale in itself if you will, and everyone is entitled to
+his or her own private splendor, which, of course, must be invented
+from intelligence for oneself.
+
+There will be no magic found away from life. It is what you do with
+the street-corner in your brain that shall determine your gift. It
+will not be found in the wilderness, and in one's toying with the
+magic of existence is the one gift for the management of experience.
+
+I hope one day, when life as an "idea" permits, and that I have
+figured will be somewhere around my ninetieth year, to take up books
+that absorb the brains of the intelligent. When I read a book, it is
+because it will somehow expose to me the magic of existence. My fairy
+tales of late have been "Wuthering Heights," and the work of the
+Brothers James, Will and Henry. I am not so sure but that I like
+William best, and I assure you that is saying a great deal, but it is
+only because I think William is more like life as idea.
+
+I shall hope when it comes time to sit in a garden and fold one's
+hands gently, listening to the birds all over again, watching the
+blossoms swinging with a still acuter eye, to take up the books of
+Grimm and Andersen, for I have a feeling they will be the books that
+will best corroborate my comprehension of life as an idea. I think it
+will be the best time to read them then, to go out with a memory
+softened by the warm hues and touches of legend that rise out of the
+air surrounding life itself.
+
+There will be a richer comprehension of "once upon a time there was a
+princess"--who wore a great many jewelled rings on her fingers and
+whose eyes were like deep pools in the farthest fields of the sky--for
+that will be the lady who let me love in the ways I was made to
+forget; the lady whose hands I have touched as gently as possible and
+from whom I have exacted no wish save that I might always love someone
+or something that was so like herself as to make me think it was no
+other than herself. It is because I love the idea of life better than
+anything else that I believe most of all in the magic of existence,
+and in spite of much terrifying and disillusioning experience of late,
+I _believe_.
+
+
+
+
+PART ONE
+
+
+
+
+THE RED MAN
+
+
+It is significant that all races, and primitive peoples especially,
+exhibit the wish somehow to inscribe their racial autograph before
+they depart. It is our redman who permits us to witness the signing of
+his autograph with the beautiful gesture of his body in the form of
+the symbolic dance which he and his forefathers have practiced through
+the centuries, making the name America something to be remembered
+among the great names of the world and of time. It is the redman who
+has written down our earliest known history, and it is of his symbolic
+and esthetic endeavors that we should be most reasonably proud. He is
+the one man who has shown us the significance of the poetic aspects of
+our original land. Without him we should still be unrepresented in the
+cultural development of the world. The wide discrepancies between our
+earliest history and our present make it an imperative issue for
+everyone loving the name America to cherish him while he remains among
+us as the only esthetic representative of our great country up to the
+present hour. He has indicated for all time the symbolic splendor of
+our plains, canyons, mountains, lakes, mesas and ravines, our forests
+and our native skies, with their animal inhabitants, the buffalo, the
+deer, the eagle and the various other living presences in their midst.
+He has learned throughout the centuries the nature of our soil and has
+symbolized for his own religious and esthetic satisfaction all the
+various forms that have become benefactors to him.
+
+Americans of this time and of time to come shall know little or
+nothing of their spacious land until they have sought some degree of
+intimacy with our first artistic relative. The redman is the one truly
+indigenous religionist and esthete of America. He knows every form of
+animal and vegetable life adhering to our earth, and has made for
+himself a series of striking pageantries in the form of stirring
+dances to celebrate them, and his relation to them. Throughout the
+various dances of the Pueblos of the Rio Grande those of San Felipe,
+Santo Domingo, San Ildefonso, Taos, Tesuque, and all the other tribes
+of the west and the southwest, the same unified sense of beauty
+prevails, and in some of the dances to a most remarkable degree. For
+instance, in a large pueblo like Santo Domingo, you have the dance
+composed of nearly three hundred people, two hundred of whom form the
+dance contingent, the other third a chorus, probably the largest
+singing chorus in the entire redman population of America. In a small
+pueblo like Tesuque, the theme is beautifully represented by from
+three to a dozen individuals, all of them excellent performers in
+various ways. The same quality and the same character, the same sense
+of beauty, prevails in all of them.
+
+It is the little pueblo of Tesuque which has just finished its series
+of Christmas dances--a four-day festival celebrating with all but
+impeccable mastery the various identities which have meant so much to
+them both physically and spiritually--that I would here cite as an
+example. It is well known that once gesture is organized, it requires
+but a handful of people to represent multitude; and this lonely
+handful of redmen in the pueblo of Tesuque, numbering at most but
+seventy-five or eighty individuals, lessened, as is the case with all
+the pueblos of the country to a tragical degree by the recent
+invasions of the influenza epidemic, showed the interested observer,
+in groups of five or a dozen dancers and soloists including drummers,
+through the incomparable pageantry of the buffalo, the eagle, the
+snowbird, and other varying types of small dances, the mastery of the
+redman in the art of gesture, the art of symbolized pantomimic
+expression. It is the buffalo, the eagle, and the deer dances that
+show you their essential greatness as artists. You find a species of
+rhythm so perfected in its relation to racial interpretation as hardly
+to admit of witnessing ever again the copied varieties of dancing such
+as we whites of the present hour are familiar with. It is nothing
+short of captivating artistry of first excellence, and we are familiar
+with nothing that equals it outside the Negro syncopation which we
+now know so well, and from which we have borrowed all we have of
+native expression.
+
+If we had the redman sense of time in our system, we would be better
+able to express ourselves. We are notoriously unorganized in esthetic
+conception, and what we appreciate most is merely the athletic phase
+of bodily expression, which is of course attractive enough, but is not
+in itself a formal mode of expression. The redman would teach us to be
+ourselves in a still greater degree, as his forefathers have taught
+him to be himself down the centuries, despite every obstacle. It is
+now as the last obstacle in the way of his racial expression that we
+as his host and guardian are pleasing ourselves to figure. It is as
+inhospitable host we are quietly urging denunciation of his pagan
+ceremonials. It is an inhospitable host that we are, and it is amazing
+enough, our wanting to suppress him. You will travel over many
+continents to find a more beautifully synthesized artistry than our
+redman offers. In times of peace we go about the world seeking out
+every species of life foreign to ourselves for our own esthetic or
+intellectual diversion, and yet we neglect on our very doorstep the
+perhaps most remarkable realization of beauty that can be found
+anywhere. It is of a perfect piece with the great artistry of all
+time. We have to go for what we know of these types of expression to
+books and to fragments of stone, to monuments and to the preserved
+bits of pottery we now may see under glass mostly, while there is the
+living remnant of a culture so fine in its appreciation of the beauty
+of things, under our own home eye, so near that we can not even see
+it.
+
+A glimpse of the buffalo dance alone will furnish proof sufficient to
+you of the sense of symbolic significances in the redman that is
+unsurpassed. The redman is a genius in his gift of masquerade alone.
+He is a genius in detail, and in ensemble, and the producer of today
+might learn far more from him than he can be aware of except by
+visiting his unique performances. The redman's notion of the theatric
+does not depend upon artificial appliances. He relies entirely upon
+the sun with its so clear light of the west and southwest to do his
+profiling and silhouetting for him, and he knows the sun will
+cooperate with every one of his intentions. He allows for the sense of
+mass and of detail with proper proportion, allows also for the
+interval of escape in mood, crediting the value of the pause with the
+ability to do its prescribed work for the eye and ear perfectly, and
+when he is finished he retires from the scene carefully to the beating
+of the drums, leaving the emotion to round itself out gradually until
+he disappears, and silence completes the picture for the eye and the
+brain. His staging is of the simplest, and therefore, the most
+natural. Since he is sure of his rhythms, in every other dancer as
+well as himself, he is certain of his ensemble, and is likewise sure
+there will be no dead spots either in the scenario or in the
+presentation. His production is not a show for the amusement of the
+onlooker; it is a pageant for the edification of his own soul. Each
+man is therefore concerned with the staging of the idea, because it is
+his own spiritual drama in a state of enaction, and each is in his own
+way manager of the scene, and of the duos, trios, and ensembles, or
+whatever form the dances may require. It is therefore of a piece with
+his conception of nature and the struggle for realism is not
+necessary, since he is at all times the natural actor, the natural
+expresser of the indications and suggestions derived from the great
+theme of nature which occupies his mind, and body, and soul. His
+acting is invented by himself for purposes of his own, and it is
+nature that gives him the sign and symbol for the expression of life
+as a synthesis. He is a genius in plastic expression, and every
+movement of his is sure to register in the unity of the theme, because
+he himself is a powerful unit of the group in which he may be
+performing. He is esthetically a responsible factor, since it concerns
+him as part of the great idea. He is leading soloist and auxiliary in
+one. He is the significant instrument in the orchestration of the
+theme at hand, and knows his body will respond to every requirement of
+phrasing. You will find the infants, of two and three years of age
+even, responding in terms of play to the exacting rhythms of the
+dance, just as with orientals it was the children often who wove the
+loveliest patterns in their rugs.
+
+In the instance of the buffalo dance of the Tesuque Indians, contrary
+to what might be expected or would popularly be conceived, there is
+not riotry of color, but the costumes are toned rather in the sombre
+hues of the animal in question, and after the tone of the dark flanks
+of the mountains crested and avalanched with snows, looking more like
+buffaloes buried knee deep in white drifts than anything else one may
+think of. They bring you the sense of the power of the buffalo
+personality, the formidable beast that once stampeded the prairies
+around them, solemnized with austere gesturing, enveloping him with
+stateliness, and the silence of the winter that surrounds themselves.
+Three men, two of them impersonating the buffalo, the third with bow
+and arrow in hand, doubtless the hunter, and two women representing
+the mother buffalo, furnish the ensemble. Aside from an occasional
+note of red in girdles and minor trappings, with a softening touch of
+green in the pine branches in their hands, the adjustment of hue is
+essentially one of the black and white, one of the most difficult
+harmonies in esthetic scales the painter encounters in the making of a
+picture, the most difficult of all probably, by reason of its limited
+range and the economic severity of color. It calls for nothing short
+of the finest perception of nuance, and it is the redman of America
+who knows with an almost flawless eye the natural harmonies of the
+life that surrounds him. He has for so long decorated his body with
+the hues of the earth that he has grown to be a part of them. He is a
+living embodiment in color of various tonal characteristics of the
+landscape around him. He knows the harmonic value of a bark or a hide,
+or a bit of broken earth, and of the natural unpolluted coloring to be
+drawn out of various types of vegetable matter at his disposal. Even
+if he resorts to our present-day store ribbons and cheap trinkets for
+accessories, he does it with a view to creating the appearance of
+racial ensemble. He is one of the essential decorators of the world. A
+look at the totem poles and the prayer robes of the Indians of Alaska
+will convince you of that.
+
+In the buffalo dance, then, you perceive the redman's fine knowledge
+of color relations, of the harmonizing of buffalo skins, of white
+buckskins painted with most expressively simple designs symbolizing
+the various earth identities, and the accompanying ornamentation of
+strings of shells and other odd bits having a black or a grey and
+white lustre. You get an adjusted relation of white which traverses
+the complete scale of color possibility in monochrome. The two men
+representing the buffalo, with buffalo heads covering their heads and
+faces from view, down to their breasts, their bodies to the waist
+painted black, no sign of pencillings visible to relieve the austerity
+of intention, legs painted black and white, with cuffs of skunk's fur
+round the ankles to represent the death mask symbol, relieving the
+edges of the buckskin moccasins--in all this you have the notes that
+are necessary for the color balance of the idea of solemnity
+presented to the eye. You find even the white starlike splashes here
+and there on backs, breasts and arms coinciding splendidly with the
+flecks of eagles-down that quiver in the wind down their black bodies,
+and the long black hair of the accompanying hunter, as flecks of foam
+would rise from waterfalls of dark mountain streams; and the feathers
+that float from the tips of the buffalo horns seem like young eaglets
+ready to leave the eyry, to swim for the first time the far fields of
+air above and below them, to traverse with skill the sunlit spaces
+their eyes have opened to with a fierce amazement. Even the clouds of
+frozen breath darting from the lips of the dancers served as an
+essential phase of the symbolic decoration, and the girdles of tiny
+conchlike shells rattling round their agile thighs made a music you
+were glad to hear. The sunshine fell from them, too, in scales of
+light, danced around the spaces enveloping them along with the flecks
+of eagle-down that floated away from their bodies with the vigors of
+the dance, floating away from their dark warm bodies, and their
+jet-blue hair. It is the incomparable understanding of their own
+inventive rhythms that inspire and impress you as spectator. It is the
+swift comprehension of change in rhythm given them by the drummers,
+the speedy response of their so living pulsating bodies, the
+irresistible rapport with the varying themes, that thrills and invites
+you to remain close to the picture. They know, as perfect artists
+would know, the essential value of the materials at their disposal,
+and the eye for harmonic relationships is as keen as the impeccable
+gift for rhythm which is theirs. The note of skill was again
+accentuated when, at the close of the season's ensemble with a
+repetition of the beautiful eagle dance, there appeared two
+grotesqueries in the form of charming devil spirits in the hues of
+animals also, again in startling arrangements of black and white, with
+the single hint of color in the red lips of the masks that covered
+their heads completely from view, and from which long tails of white
+horsehair fell down their grey white backs--completing the feeling
+once again of stout animal spirits roaming through dark forests in
+search of sad faces, or, it may even be, of evil doers.
+
+All these dances form the single spectacle surviving from a great race
+that no American can afford actually to miss, and certainly not to
+ignore. It is easy to conceive with what furore of amazement these
+spectacles would be received if they were brought for a single
+performance to our metropolitan stage. But they will never be seen
+away from the soil on which they have been conceived and perpetuated.
+It is with a simple cordiality the redman permits you to witness the
+esthetic survivals of his great race. It is the artist and the poet
+for whom they seem to be almost especially created, since these are
+probably nearest to understanding them from the point of view of
+finely organized expression; for it is by the artist and the poet of
+the first order that they have been invented and perfected. We as
+Americans of today would profit by assisting as much as possible in
+the continuance of these beautiful spectacles, rather than to assist
+in the calm dismissal and destruction of them. It is the gesture of a
+slowly but surely passing race which they themselves can not live
+without; just as we, if we but knew the ineffable beauty of them,
+would want at least to avail ourselves of a feast for the eye which no
+other country in existence can offer us, and which any other nation in
+the world would be only too proud to cherish and foster.
+
+We are not, I think, more than vaguely conscious of what we possess in
+these redman festivities, by way of esthetic prize. It is with pain
+that one hears rumors of official disapproval of these rare and
+invaluable ceremonials. Those familiar with human psychology
+understand perfectly that the one necessary element for individual
+growth is freedom to act according to personal needs. Once an
+opposition of any sort is interposed, you get a blocked aspect of
+evolution, you get a withered branch, and it may even be a dead root.
+All sorts of complexes and complexities occur. You get deformity, if
+not complete helplessness and annihilation. I can not imagine what
+would happen to the redman if his one racial gesture were denied him,
+if he were forbidden to perform his symbolic dances from season to
+season. It is a survival that is as spiritually imperative to him as
+it is physically and emotionally necessary. I can see a whole flood of
+exquisite inhibitions heaped up for burial and dry rot within the
+caverns and the interstices of his soul. He is a rapidly disappearing
+splendor, despite the possible encouragement of statistics. He needs
+the dance to make his body live out its natural existence, precisely
+as he needs the air for his lungs and blood for his veins. He needs to
+dance as we need to laugh to save ourselves from fixed stages of
+morbidity and disintegration. It is the laughter of his body that he
+insists upon, as well as depends upon. A redman deprived of his racial
+gesture is unthinkable. You would have him soon the bleached carcass
+in the desert out of which death moans, and from which the lizard
+crawls. It would be in the nature of direct race suicide. He needs
+protection therefore rather than disapproval. It is as if you clipped
+the wing of the eagle, and then asked him to soar to the sun, to cut a
+curve on the sky with the instrument dislodged; or as if you asked the
+deer to roam the wood with its cloven hoofs removed. You can not cut
+the main artery of the body and expect it to continue functioning.
+Depriving the redman of his one enviable gesture would be cutting the
+artery of racial instinct, emptying the beautiful chamber of his soul
+of its enduring consciousness. The window would be opened and the bird
+flown to a dead sky. It is simply unthinkable. The redman is
+essentially a thankful and a religious being. He needs to celebrate
+the gifts his heaven pours upon him. Without them he would in short
+perish, and perish rapidly, having no breath to breathe, and no
+further need for survival. He is already in process of disappearance
+from our midst, with the attempts toward assimilation.
+
+Inasmuch as we have the evidence of a fine aristocracy among us still,
+it would seem as if it behooved us as a respectable host to let the
+redman guest entertain himself as he will, as he sublimely does, since
+as guardians of such exceptional charges we can not seem to entertain
+them. There is no logical reason why they should accept an inferior
+hospitality, other than with the idea of not inflicting themselves
+upon a strange host more than is necessary. The redman in the
+aggregate is an example of the peaceable and unobtrusive citizen; we
+would not presume to interfere with the play of children in the
+sunlight. They are among the beautiful children of the world in their
+harmlessness. They are among the aristocracy of the world in the
+matters of ethics, morals, and etiquette. We forget they are vastly
+older, and in symbolic ways infinitely more experienced than
+ourselves. They do not share in tailor-made customs. They do not need
+imposed culture, which is essentially inferior to their own. Soon we
+shall see them written on tablets of stone, along with the Egyptians
+and the others among the races that have perished. The esthetics of
+the redman have been too particular to permit of universal
+understanding, and of universal adaptation. It is the same with all
+primitives, who invent regimes and modes of expression for themselves
+according to their own specific psychological needs. We encourage
+every other sign and indication of beauty toward the progress of
+perfection. Why should not we encourage a race that is beautiful by
+the proof of centuries to remain the unoffensive guest of the sun and
+the moon and the stars while they may? As the infant prodigy among
+races, there is much that we could inherit from these people if we
+could prove ourselves more worthy and less egotistic.
+
+The artist and the poet of perception come forward with heartiest
+approval and it is the supplication of the poet and the artist which
+the redman needs most of all. Science looks upon him as a phenomenon;
+esthetics looks upon him as a giant of masterful expression in our
+midst. The redman is poet and artist of the very first order among the
+geniuses of time. We have nothing more native at our disposal than the
+beautiful creations of this people. It is singular enough that the as
+yet remote black man contributes the only native representation of
+rhythm and melody we possess. As an intelligent race, we are not even
+sure we want to welcome him as completely as we might, if his color
+were just a shade warmer, a shade nearer our own. We have no qualms
+about yellow and white and the oriental intermediate hues. We may
+therefore accept the redman without any of the prejudices peculiar to
+other types of skin, and we may accept his contribution to our culture
+as a most significant and important one. We haven't even begun to make
+use of the beautiful hints in music alone which he has given to us. We
+need, and abjectly so I may say, an esthetic concept of our own. Other
+nations of the world have long since accepted Congo originality. The
+world has yet to learn of the originality of the redman, and we who
+have him as our guest, knowing little or nothing of his powers and the
+beauty he confers on us by his remarkable esthetic propensities,
+should be the first to welcome and to foster him. It is not enough to
+admit of archaeological curiosity. We need to admit, and speedily, the
+rare and excellent esthetics in our midst, a part of our own intimate
+scene. The redman is a spiritual expresser of very vital issues. If
+his pottery and his blankets offer the majority but little, his
+ceremonials do contribute to the comparative few who can perceive a
+spectacle we shall not see the equal of in history again. It would
+help at least a little toward proving to the world around us that we
+are not so young a country as we might seem, nor yet as diffident as
+our national attitude would seem to indicate. The smile alone of the
+redman is the light of our rivers, plains, canyons, and mountains. He
+has the calm of all our native earth. It is from the earth all things
+arise. It is our geography that makes us Americans of the present,
+children. We are the product of a day. The redman is the product of
+withered ages. He has written and is still writing a very impressive
+autograph on the waste places of history. It would seem to me to be a
+sign of modernism in us to preserve the living esthetic splendors in
+our midst. Every other nation has preserved its inheritances. We need
+likewise to do the same. It is not enough to put the redman as a
+specimen under glass along with the auk and the dinosaur. He is still
+alive and longing to live. We have lost the buffalo and the beaver and
+we are losing the redman, also, and all these are fine symbols of our
+own native richness and austerity. The redman will perpetuate himself
+only by the survival of his own customs for he will never be able to
+accept customs that are as foreign to him as ours are and must always
+be; he will never be able to accept a culture which is inferior to his
+own.
+
+In the esthetic sense alone, then, we have the redman as a gift. As
+Americans we should accept the one American genius we possess, with
+genuine alacrity. We have upon our own soil something to show the
+world as our own, while it lives. To restrict the redman now would
+send him to an unrighteous oblivion. He has at least two contributions
+to confer, a very aristocratic notion of religion, and a superb gift
+for stylistic expression. He is the living artist in our midst, and we
+need not think of him as merely the anthropological variation or as an
+archaeological diversion merely. He proves the importance of
+synthetic registration in peoples. He has created his system for
+himself, from substance on, through outline down to every convincing
+detail. We are in a position always of selecting details in the hope
+of constructing something usable for ourselves. It is the superficial
+approach. We are imitators because we have by nature or force of
+circumstance to follow, and improve upon, if we can. We merely
+"impose" something. We can not improve upon what the redman offers us
+in his own way. To "impose" something--that is the modern culture. The
+interval of imposition is our imaginary interval of creation. The
+primitives created a complete cosmos for themselves, an entire
+principle. I want merely, then, esthetic recognition in full of the
+contribution of the redman as artist, as one of the finest artists of
+time; the poetic redman ceremonialist, celebrant of the universe as he
+sees it, and master among masters of the art of symbolic gesture. It
+is pitiable to dismiss him from our midst. He needs rather royal
+invitation to remain and to persist, and he can persist only by
+expressing himself in his own natural and distinguished way, as is the
+case with all peoples, and all individuals, indeed.
+
+
+
+
+WHITMAN AND CEZANNE
+
+
+It is interesting to observe that in two fields of expression, those
+of painting and poetry, the two most notable innovators, Whitman and
+Cezanne bear a definite relationship in point of similarity of ideals
+and in their attitudes toward esthetic principles. Both of these men
+were so true to their respective ideals that they are worth
+considering at the same time in connection with each other: Cezanne
+with his desire to join the best that existed in the impressionistic
+principle with the classical arts of other times, or as he called it,
+to create an art like the Louvre out of impressionism. We shall find
+him striving always toward actualities, toward the realization of
+beauty as it is seen to exist in the real, in the object itself,
+whether it be mountain or apple or human, the entire series of living
+things in relation to one another.
+
+It is consistent that Cezanne, like all pioneers, was without
+prescribed means, that he had to spend his life inventing for himself
+those terms and methods which would best express his feelings about
+nature. It is natural that he admired the precision of Bouguereau, it
+is also quite natural that he should have worshipped in turn,
+Delacroix, Courbet, and without doubt, the mastery of Ingres, and it
+is indicative too that he felt the frank force of Manet. It was his
+special distinction to strive toward a simple presentation of simple
+things, to want to paint "that which existed between himself and the
+object," and to strive to solidify the impressionistic conception with
+a greater realization of form in space, the which they had so much
+ignored. That he achieved this in a satisfying manner may be observed
+in the best of his landscapes and still-lifes, and in some of the
+figure studies also. The endeavor to eliminate all aspects of
+extraneous conception by dismissing the quality of literature, of
+poetry and romance from painting, was the exact characteristic which
+made him what he is for us today, the pioneer in the field of modern
+art. It was significant enough when he once said to Renoir, that it
+took him twenty years to find out that painting was not sculpture.
+Those earlier and heavy impasto studies of his are the evidence of
+this worthy deduction. It was significant, too, when he said that
+Gaugin was but "a flea on his back," and that "he does nothing but
+paint Chinese images."
+
+The phrase that brings these two strikingly original personages in art
+together is the one of Cezanne: "I remain the primitive of the way I
+have discovered"; and that of Whitman, which comes if I am not
+mistaken from Democratic Vistas, though it may be from elsewhere in
+Whitman's prose, running chiefly: "I only wish to indicate the way for
+the innumerable poets that are to come after me," etc., and "I warn
+you this is not a book, this is a man." These two geniuses are both of
+one piece as to their esthetic intention, despite the great gulf that
+lies between their concepts of, and their attitudes toward life. For
+the one, life was a something to stay close to always, for the other,
+it was something to be afraid of to an almost abnormal degree; Whitman
+and his door never closed, Cezanne and his door seldom or never
+opened, indeed, were heavily padlocked against the intrusion of the
+imaginary outsider. These are the geniuses who have done most for
+these two arts of the present time, it is Whitman and Cezanne who have
+clarified the sleeping eye and withheld it from being totally blinded,
+from the onslaughts of jaded tradition.
+
+There were in Cezanne the requisite gifts for selection, and for
+discarding all useless encumbrances, there was in him the great desire
+for purification, or of seeing the superb fact in terms of itself,
+majestically; and if not always serenely, serenity was nevertheless
+his passionate longing. He saw what there was for him in those old and
+accepted masters who meant most to him, and he saw also what there was
+for him in that newest of old masters, which was also in its way the
+assumed discovery of our time, he saw the relativity of Greco's
+beautiful art to the art of his own making. He saw that here was a
+possible and applicable architectonic suited to the objects of his
+newly conceived principles, he felt in Greco the magnetic tendency of
+one thing toward another in nature, that trees and hills and valleys
+and people were not something sitting still for his special
+delectation, but that they were constantly aspiring to fruition,
+either physical, mental, or let us say, spiritual, even when the word
+is applied to the so-termed inanimate objects. He felt the
+"palpitancy," the breathing of all things, the urge outward of all
+life toward the light which helps it create and recreate itself. He
+felt this "movement" in and about things, and this it is that gives
+his pictures that sensitive life quality which lifts them beyond the
+aspect of picture-making or even mere representation. They are not
+cold studies of inanimate things, they are pulsing realizations of
+living substances striving toward each other, lending each other their
+individual activities until his canvases become, as one might name
+them, ensembles of animation, orchestrated life. We shall, I think,
+find this is what Greco did for Cezanne, and it is Cezanne who was
+among the first of moderns, if not the first, to appreciate that
+particular aspirational quality in the splendid pictures of Greco.
+They "move" toward their design, they were lifted by the quality of
+their organization into spaces in which they were free to carry on the
+fine illusion of life.
+
+Whitman has certainly aspired equally, but being more things in one
+than Cezanne, his task has been in some ways greater, more difficult,
+and may we say for humanistic reasons, loftier. Whitman's
+inclusiveness was at one and the same time his virtue and his defect.
+For mystical reasons, it was imperative for him to include all things
+in himself, and so he set about enumerating all those elements which
+were in him, and of which he was so devoted and affectionate a part.
+That he could leave nothing out was, it may be said, his strongest
+esthetical defect, for it is by esthetical judgment that we choose and
+bring together those elements as we conceive it. It is the mark of
+good taste to reject that which is unessential, and the "tact of
+omission," well exemplified in Cezanne, has been found excellently
+axiomatic. So that it is the tendency in Whitman to catalogue in
+detail the entire obvious universe that makes many of his pages a
+strain on the mind as well as on the senses, and the eye especially.
+The absolute enforcement of this gift of omission in painting makes it
+easier for the artist, in that his mind is perforce engrossed with the
+idea of simplification, directness, and an easy relationship of the
+elements selected for presentation to each other.
+
+It is the quality of "living-ness" in Cezanne that sends his art to
+the heights of universality, which is another way of naming the
+classical vision, or the masterly conception, and brings him together
+with Whitman as much of the same piece. You get all this in all the
+great masters of painting and literature, Goethe, Shakespeare, Rubens,
+and the Greeks. It is the reaching out and the very mastering of life
+which makes all art great, and all artists into geniuses. It is the
+specializing on ideas which shuts the stream of its flow. I have felt
+the same gift for life in a still-life or a landscape of Cezanne's
+that I have felt in any of Whitman's best pieces. The element in
+common with these two exceptional creators is liberation. They have
+done more, these modern pioneers, for the liberation of the artist,
+and for the "freeing" of painting and poetry than any other men of
+modern time. Through them, painting and poetry have become literally
+free, and through them it is that the young painters and poets have
+sought new fields for self deliverance. Discipleship does not hold out
+long with the truly understanding. Those who really know what
+originality is are not long the slave of the power of imitation: it is
+the gifted assimilator that suffers most under the spell of mastery.
+Legitimate influence is a quality which all earnest creators learn to
+handle at once. Both poetry and painting are, or so it seems to me,
+revealing well the gift of understanding, and as a result we have a
+better variety of painting and of poetry than at the first outbreak of
+this so called modern esthetic epidemic.
+
+The real younger creators are learning the difference between surface
+and depth, between exterior semblances, and the underlying substances.
+Both Whitman and Cezanne stand together in the name of one common
+purpose, freedom from characteristics not one's own. They have taught
+the creators of this time to know what classicism really is, that it
+is the outline of all things that endure. They have both shown that it
+is not idiosyncrasy alone which creates originality, that idiosyncrasy
+is but the husk of personal penetration, that it is in no way the
+constituent essential for genius. For genius is nothing but the name
+for higher perception, the greater degree of understanding. Cezanne's
+fine landscapes and still-lifes, and Whitman's majestic line with its
+gripping imagery are one and the same thing, for it reaches the same
+height in the mind. They walk together out of a vivid past, these two
+geniuses, opening the corridors to a possibly vivid future for the
+artists of now, and to come. They are the gateway for our modern
+esthetic development, the prophets of the new time. They are most of
+all, the primitives of the way they have begun, they have voiced most
+of all the imperative need of essential personalism, of direct
+expression out of direct experience, with an eye to nothing but
+quality and proportion as conceived by them. Their dogmas were both
+simple in the extreme, and of immense worth to us in their respective
+spheres. We may think of them as the giants of the beginning of the
+twentieth century, with the same burning desire to enlarge the general
+scope of vision, and the finer capacity for individual experience.
+
+
+
+
+ALBERT P. RYDER
+
+
+Albert P. Ryder possessed in a high degree that strict passivity of
+mental vision which calls into being the elusive yet fixed element the
+mystic Blake so ardently refers to and makes a principle of, that
+element outside the mind's jurisdiction. His work is of the essence of
+poetry; it is alien to the realm of esthetics pure, for it has very
+special spiritual histories to relate. His landscapes are somewhat
+akin to those of Michel and of Courbet. They suggest Michel's wide
+wastes of prodigal sky and duneland with their winding roads that have
+no end, his ever-shadowy stretches of cloud upon ever-shadowy
+stretches of land that go their austere way to the edges of some
+vacant sea. They suggest, too, those less remote but perhaps even more
+aloof spaces of solitude which were ever Courbet's theme in his deeper
+hours, that haunting sense of subtle habitation, that acute invasion
+of either wind or soft fleck of light or bright presence in a breadth
+of shadow, as if a breath of living essences always somehow pervaded
+those mystic woodland or still lowland scenes. But highly populate as
+these pictures of Courbet's are with the spirit of ever-passing feet
+that hover and hold converse in the remote wood, the remoter plain,
+they never quite surrender to that ghostliness which possesses the
+pictures of our Ryder. At all times in his work one has the feeling of
+there having lately passed, if ever so fleetly, some bodily shape
+seeking a solitude of its own. I recall no other landscapes impressed
+with a more terrific austerity save Greco's incredible "Toledo," to my
+thinking a finality in landscape creation.
+
+There is quietude, solace, if you will, in Michel, in Courbet, but
+there is never a rest for the eye or the mind or the spirit in those
+most awesome of pictures which Ryder has presented to us, few as they
+are; for the Ryder legend is akin to the legend of Giorgione. There is
+always splendor in them but it is the splendor of the dream given over
+to a genius more powerful than the vision which has conjured them
+forth. It is distinctly a land of Luthany in which they have their
+being; he has inscribed for us that utter homelessness of the spirit
+in the far tracts that exist in the realm of the imagination; there is
+suffering in his pictures, that fainting of the spirit, that
+breathlessness which overtakes the soul in search of the consummation
+of beauty.
+
+Ryder is akin to Coleridge, too, for there is a direct visional
+analogy between "The Flying Dutchman" and the excessively pictorial
+stanzas of "The Ancient Mariner." Ryder has typified himself in this
+excellent portrayal of sea disaster, this profound spectacle of the
+soul's despair in conflict with wind and wave. Could any picture
+contain more of that remoteness of the world of our real heart as
+well as our real eye, the artist's eye which visits that world in no
+official sense but only as a guest or a courtly spectator? No artist,
+I ought to say, was ever more master of his ideas and less master of
+the medium of painting than Ryder; there is in some of his finest
+canvases a most pitiable display of ignorance which will undoubtedly
+shorten their life by many years.
+
+I still retain the vivid impression that afflicted me when I saw my
+first Ryder, a marine of rarest grandeur and sublimity, incredibly
+small in size, incredibly large in its emotion--just a sky and a
+single vessel in sail across a conquering sea. Ryder is, I think, the
+special messenger of the sea's beauty, the confidant of its majesties,
+its hauteurs, its supremacies; for he was born within range of the sea
+and all its legends have hovered with him continually. Since that time
+I have seen a number of other pictures either in the artist's
+possession or elsewhere: "Death on the Racetrack," "Pegasus," canvases
+from The Tempest and Macbeth in that strange little world of chaos
+that was his home, his hermitage, so distraught with debris of the
+world for which he could seem to find no other place; I have spent
+some of the rare and lovelier moments of my experience with this
+gentlest and sweetest of other-world citizens; I have felt with
+ever-living delight the excessive loveliness of his glance and of his
+smile and heard that music of some far-away world which was his
+laughter; I have known that wisdom which is once and for all wisdom
+for the artist, that confidence and trust that for the real artist
+there is but one agency for the expression of self in terms of beauty,
+the eye of the imagination, that mystical third somewhere in the mind
+which transposes all that is legitimate to expression. To Ryder the
+imagination was the man; he was a poet painter, living ever outside
+the realm of theory.
+
+He was fond of Corot, and at moments I have thought of him as the heir
+and successor to some of Corot's haunting graces; but there was all
+the difference between them that there is between lyric pure and
+tragic pure. Ryder has for once transcribed all outer semblances by
+means of a personality unrelated to anything other than itself, an
+imagination belonging strictly to our soil and specifically to our
+Eastern geography. In his autographic quality he is certainly our
+finest genius, the most creative, the most racial. For our genius, at
+its best, is the genius of the evasive; we are born lovers of the
+secret element, the mystery in things.
+
+How many of our American painters have given real attention to Ryder?
+I find him so much the legend among professional artists, this master
+of arabesque, this first and foremost of our designers, this real
+creator of pattern, this first of all creators of tragic landscape,
+whose pictures are sacred to those that revere distinction and power
+in art. He had in him that finer kind of reverence for the element of
+beauty which finds all things somehow lovely. He understood best of
+all the meaning of the grandiose, of everything that is powerful; none
+of his associates in point of time rose to just that sublimated
+experience; not Fuller, not Martin, not Blakelock, though each of
+these was touched to a special expression. They are more derivative
+than Ryder, more the children of Barbizon.
+
+Ryder gave us first and last an incomparable sense of pattern and
+austerity of mood. He saw with an all too pitiless and pitiful eye the
+element of helplessness in things, the complete succumbing of things
+in nature to those elements greater than they that wield a fatal
+power. Ryder was the last of the romantics, the last of that great
+school of impressive artistry, as he was the first of our real
+painters and the greatest in vision. He was a still companion of Blake
+in that realm of the beyond, the first citizen of the land of Luthany.
+He knew the fine distinction between drama and tragedy, the tragedy
+which nature prevails upon the sensitive to accept. He was the painter
+poet of the immanent in things.
+
+
+
+
+WINSLOW HOMER
+
+
+In Winslow Homer we have yankeeism of the first order, turned to a
+creditable artistic account. With a fierce feeling for truth, a mania,
+almost, for actualities, there must have been somewhere in his make-up
+a gentleness, a tenderness and refinement which explain his fine
+appreciation of the genius of the place he had in mind to represent.
+There is not an atom of legend in Homer, it is always and always
+narrative of the obvious world. There is at once the essential
+dramatic import ruling the scene. With him it is nothing but dramatic
+relationship, the actionary tendency of the facts themselves, in
+nature. You are held by him constantly to the bold and naked theme,
+and you are left to wander in the imagination only among the
+essentials of simple and common realism.
+
+Narrative then, first and last with Homer, and the only creative
+aspect of his pictures is concealed in the technique. The only touch
+of invention in them is the desire to improve the language they speak.
+Dramatic always, I do not call them theatric excepting in the case of
+one picture that I know, called "Morro Castle" I think, now in the
+Metropolitan Museum, reminding me much of the commonplace, "Chateau de
+Chillon" of Courbet's, neither of these pictures being of any value
+in the careers of their authors. But once you sat on the rocks of
+Maine, and watched the climbing of the surf up the morning sky after a
+heavy storm at sea, you realize the force of Homer's gift for the
+realities. His pictures are yankee in their indications, as a work of
+art could be, flinty and unyielding, resolute as is the yankee nature
+itself, or rather to say, the original yankee, which was pioneer then
+in a so rough yet resourceful country. It is the quality of Thoreau,
+but without the genius of Thoreau for the poetry of things.
+
+Homer's pictures give you nothing but the bare fact told in the better
+class terms of illustration, for he was illustrator, first of all.
+While the others were trying to make a little American Barbizon of
+their own, there were Homer, Ryder, Fuller, Martin, working alone for
+such vastly opposite ideas, and yet, of these men, four of them were
+expressing such highly imaginative ideas, and Homer was the
+unflinching realist among them. I do not know where Homer started, but
+I believe it was the sea at Prout's Neck that taught him most. I think
+that William Morris Hunt and Washington Allston must have seemed like
+infant Michelangelos then, for there is still about them a sturdiness
+which we see little of in the American art of that time, or even now
+for that matter. They had a certain massive substance, proving the
+force of mind and personality which was theirs, and while these men
+were proving the abundance and warmth of themselves, Homer was the
+frozen one among them. Nature was nature to him, and that alone he
+realized, and yet it was not precisely slavish imitation that impelled
+him.
+
+There was in him a very creditable sense of selection,--as will be
+seen especially in the water colours, so original with him, so gifted
+in their power of treatment--one of the few great masters of the
+medium the world has known. He knew the meaning of wash as few since
+have known it, he knew that it has scale and limitation of its own,
+and for all that, infinite suggestibility. Not Turner or Whistler have
+excelled him, and I do not know of anyone who has equalled him in
+understanding of this medium outside of Dodge Macknight and John
+Marin. It is in these so expressive paintings on paper that you feel
+the real esthetic longing as well as a certain contribution in Homer,
+the desire to realize himself and to release himself from too slavish
+imitation of nature and the too rigid consideration of truth. He was
+finer in technique than perhaps any that I have mentioned, though the
+two modern men have seconded him very closely, and in point of vision
+have, I am certain, surpassed him. Homer arrived because of his power
+to express what he wished to say, though his reach was far less lofty
+than theirs. He was essentially on the ground, and wanted to paint the
+very grip of his own feet on the rocks. He wanted the inevitability
+put down in recognizable form. He had not feeling for the hint or the
+suggestion until he came to the water-color, which is of course most
+essentially that sort of medium. He knew its scope and its limitations
+and never stepped out of its boundaries, and he achieved a fine
+mastery in it. His imitators will never arrive at his severity because
+they are not flint yankee. They have not the hard head and snappy
+tongue. It was yankee crabbedness that gave Homer his grip on the idea
+he had in mind. Florida lent a softer tone to what Maine rocks could
+not give him. He is American from skin to skeleton, and a leader among
+yankee as well as American geniuses. He probably hated as much as
+Thoreau, and in his steely way admired as much. It was fire from the
+flintlock in them both, though nature had a far softer and loftier
+persuasion with the Concord philosopher and naturalist.
+
+Homer remains a figure in our American culture through his feeling for
+reality. He has learned through slavery to detail to put down the
+essential fact, however abundantly or however sparsely. He has a
+little of Courbet's sense of the real, and none whatever of his sense
+of the imaginative. It was enough for him to classicize the realistic
+incident. He impels me to praise through his yankee insistence upon
+integrity. Story is story with Homer and he leaves legend to itself.
+It is the narrative of the Whittier type, homely, genuine, and
+typical. He never stepped outside of his yankee determination. Homer
+has sent the art of water colour painting to a very high place in
+world consideration. He cannot be ignored as a master in this field.
+His paintings must be taken as they are, solid renderings of fact,
+dramatically considered. He offers nothing else. Once you have seen
+these realistic sea pictures, you may want to remember and you may
+want to forget, but they call for consideration. They are true in
+their living appreciation of reality.
+
+He knew the sea like the old salts that were his neighbors, and from
+accounts he was as full of the tang of the sea as they. He was a foe
+to compromise and a despiser of imposition. The best and most
+impersonal of him is in his work, for he never ventured to express
+philosophies, ethics, or morals in terms of picture-painting. That is
+to his credit at least. He was concerned with illustration first and
+last, as he was illustrator and nothing else. He taught the proceeding
+school of illustrators much in the significance of verity, and in the
+ways and means of expressing verity in terms of pigment. What the
+stiff pen and ink drawings and the cold engravings of his time taught
+him, he conferred upon the later men in terms of freedom of technique.
+And at the same time he rose a place, as painter and artist of no mean
+order, by a certain distinction inherent in him. He had little feeling
+for synthesis outside of the water-colours, and here it was necessary
+by virtue of the limitations of the medium.
+
+Winslow Homer will not stimulate for all time only because his mind
+was too local. There is nothing of universal appeal in him. His
+realism will never reach the height even of the sea-pieces of Courbet,
+and I shall include Ryder as well. Courbet was a fine artist, and so
+was Ryder, and both had the advantage of exceptional imagination.
+Homer and Ryder are natives of the same coast and typify excellently
+the two poles in the New England temper, both in art and in life.
+Homer as realist, had the one idea in mind only, to illustrate realism
+as best he could in the most distinguished terms at the disposal of
+his personality. He succeeded admirably.
+
+Homer typifies a certain sturdiness in the American temper at least,
+and sends the lighter men away with his roughness, as doubtless he
+sent the curious away from his cliffs with the acidity of truth he
+poured upon them. He had lived so much in the close association of the
+roughest elements in existence, rocks and the madly swinging sea that
+glides over and above them defiantly, that he had without doubt taken
+on the character of them. The portrait of Homer gives him as one would
+expect him to look, and he looks like his pictures. His visage bore a
+ferocity that had to be met with a rocky certainty. It is evident
+there was no fooling him. He was filled with yankee tenacity and
+yankee courage. Homer is what you would expect to find if you were
+told to hunt up the natives of "Prout's Neck" or "Perkins Cove," or
+any of the inlets of the Maine coast. These sea people live so much
+with the roughness of the sea, that if they are at all inclined to
+acidity, and the old fashioned yankee was sure to be, they take on the
+hard edges of a man's temper in accordance with the jaggedness of the
+shores on which they live. The man around the rocks looks so very like
+the profiles one sees in the rocks themselves. They have absorbed the
+energy of the dramatic elements they cope with, and you may be sure
+that life around the sea in New England is no easy existence; and they
+give out the same salty equivalent in human association.
+
+If you have lived by the sea, you have learned the significance of the
+bravery of sea people, and you learn to understand and excuse the
+sharpness of them which is given them from battle with the elemental
+facts they are confronted with at all times. That is the character of
+Homer, that is the quality of his painting. That is what makes him
+original in the American sense, and so recognizable in the New England
+sense. He is one of New England's strongest spokesmen, and takes his
+place by the side of Ryder, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Fuller, Whittier, and
+such representative temperaments, and it is this quality that
+distinguishes him from men like Inness, Wyant, and the less typical
+painters. It is obvious, too, that he never painted any other coast,
+excepting of course Florida, in the water colours.
+
+It was Florida that produced the chef d'oeuvre in him. It was Maine
+that taught him the force of the southern aspect. Romancer among the
+realistic facts of nature, he might be called, for he did not merely
+copy nature. He did invest things with their own suggestive reality,
+and he surmounted his earlier gifts for exact illustration by this
+other finer gift for romantic appreciation. Homer was an excellent
+narrator, as will be seen in the "Gulf Stream" picture in the
+Metropolitan Museum. It has the powers of Jack London and of Conrad in
+it. Homer was intense, vigorous, and masculine. If he was harsh in his
+characteristics, he was one who knew the worth of economy in emotion.
+He was one with his idea and his metier, and that is sufficient.
+
+
+
+
+AMERICAN VALUES IN PAINTING
+
+
+There are certain painters who join themselves together in a kind of
+grouping, which, whether they wish to think of themselves in this light
+or not, have become in the matter of American values in painting, a
+fixed associative aspect of painting in America. When we speak of
+American painting, the choice is small, but definite as to the number of
+artists, and the type of art they wished themselves to be considered
+for. From the Hudson River grouping, which up to Inness is not more
+marked than as a set of men copying nature with scrupulous fidelity to
+detail, rather than conveying any special feeling or notion of what a
+picture of, or the landscape itself, may convey; and leaving aside the
+American pupils of the Academy in Paris and Rome, most of whom returned
+with a rich sense of rhetorical conventionalities in art--men like
+William Morris Hunt and Washington Allston--we may turn to that other
+group of men as being far more typical of our soil and temper. I mean
+artists such as Homer Martin, Albert P. Ryder, George Fuller, and the
+later Winslow Homer who certainly did receive more recognition than any
+of them prior to his death.
+
+Martin, Ryder, and Fuller could not have enjoyed much in the way of
+appreciation outside of a few artists of their time, and even now
+they may be said to be the artists for artists. It is reasonable to
+hope that they were not successful, since that which was a la mode in
+the expression of their time was essentially of the dry Academy. One
+would hardly think of Homer Martin's "Border of the Seine" landscape
+in the Metropolitan Museum, hardly more then than now, and it leaves
+many a painter flat in appreciation of its great dignity, austerity,
+reserve, and for the distinguished quality of its stylism. What Martin
+may have gotten, during his stay in Europe, which is called
+impressionism is, it must be said, a more aristocratic type of
+impressionism than issued from the Monet followers. Martin must then
+have been knowing something of the more dignified intellectualism of
+Pissarro and of Sisley, those men who have been the last to reach the
+degrees of appreciation due them in the proper exactitude.
+
+We cannot think of Martin as ever having carried off academic medals
+during his period. We cannot think of Martin as President of the
+Academy, which position was occupied by a far inferior artist who was
+likewise carried away by impressionism, namely Alden Weir. The actual
+attachment in characteristic of introspective temper in Alden Weir is
+not so removed from Martin, Fuller and Ryder as might be imagined; he
+is more like Martin perhaps though far less profound in his sense of
+mystery; Fuller being more the romanticist and Ryder in my estimation
+the greatest romanticist, and artist as well, of all of these men. But
+Alden Weir failed to carry off any honor as to distinctive qualities
+and invention. A genial aristocrat if you will, but having for me no
+marked power outside of a Barbizonian interest in nature with a kind
+of mystical detachedness.
+
+But in the consideration of painters like Martin, Fuller and Ryder we
+are thinking chiefly of their relation to their time as well as their
+relation to what is to come in America. America has had as much
+painting considering its youth as could be expected of it and the best
+of it has been essentially native and indigenous. But in and out of
+the various influences and traditional tendencies, these several
+artists with fine imaginations, typical American imaginations, were
+proceeding with their own peculiarly original and significantly
+personal expressions. They represent up to their arrival, and long
+after as well, all there is of real originality in American painting,
+and they remain for all time as fine examples of artists with purely
+native imaginations, working out at great cost their own private
+salvations for public discovery at a later time.
+
+All these men were poor men with highly distinguished aristocratic
+natures and powerful physiques, as to appearances, with mentalities
+much beyond the average. When an exhibition of modern American
+painting is given, as it surely will and must be, these men and not
+the Barbizonian echoes as represented by Inness, Wyant & Co., will
+represent for us the really great beginning of art in America. There
+will follow naturally artists like Twachtman and Robinson, as likewise
+Kenneth Hayes Miller and Arthur B. Davies for reasons that I think are
+rather obvious: both Hayes Miller and Arthur B. Davies having skipped
+over the direct influence of impressionism by reason of their
+attachment to Renaissance ideas; having joined themselves by
+conviction in perhaps slight degrees to aspects of modern painting.
+Miller is, one might say, too intellectually deliberate to allow for
+spontaneities which mere enthusiasms encourage. Miller is emotionally
+thrilled by Renoir but he is never quite swept. His essential
+conservatism hinders such violence. It would be happier for him
+possibly if the leaning were still more pronounced.
+
+The jump to modernism in Arthur B. Davies results in the same sort of
+way as admixture of influence though it is more directly appreciable
+in him. Davies is more willing, by reason of his elastic temper and
+intellectual vivacity, to stray into the field of new ideas with a
+simple though firm belief, that they are good while they last, no
+matter how long they last. Davies is almost a propagandist in his
+feeling for and admiration of the ultra-modern movement. Miller is a
+questioner and ponders long upon every point of consequence or
+inconsequence. He is a metaphysical analyst which is perhaps the
+extraneous element in his painting. In his etching, that is, the
+newest of it, one feels the sense of the classical and the modern
+joined together and by the classical I mean the quality of Ingres,
+Conjoined with modern as in Renoir, relieved of the influence of
+Italian Renaissance.
+
+But I do not wish to lose sight of these several forerunners in
+American art, Martin, Ryder and Fuller who, in their painting, may be
+linked not without relativity to our artists in literary imagination,
+Hawthorne and Poe. Fuller is conspicuously like Hawthorne, not by his
+appreciation of witchcraft merely, but by his feeling for those eery
+presences which determine the fates of men and women in their time.
+Martin is the purer artist for me since he seldom or never resorted to
+the literary emotion in the sense of drama or narrative, whereas in
+the instances of Ryder or Fuller they built up expression entirely
+from literary experience. Albert Ryder achieves most by reason of his
+vaster poetic sensibility--his Homeric instincts for the drama and by
+a very original power for arabesque. He is alone among the Americans
+in his unique gift for pattern. We can claim Albert Ryder as our most
+original painter as Poe takes his place as our most original poet who
+had of course one of the greatest and most perfect imaginations of his
+time and possibly of all time.
+
+But it is these several painters I speak of, Martin, Ryder, and
+Fuller, who figure for us as the originators of American indigenous
+painting. They will not be copied for they further nothing beyond
+themselves. No influence of these painters has been notable, excepting
+for a time in the early experience of one of the younger modernists
+who, by reason of definite associations of birthright and relativity
+of environment, essayed to claim Albert Ryder as a very definite
+influence; just as Courbet and Corot must in their ways have been
+powerful influences upon Ryder himself. Albert Ryder is too much of a
+figure to dismiss here with group-relationship, he must be treated of
+separately. So far then, there is no marked evidence that the
+influence of Fuller or Martin was powerful enough to carry beyond
+themselves. They had no tenets or theories other than those of
+personal clarification. All three remained the hermit radicals of
+life, as they remain isolated examples in American art; and all of
+them essentially of New England, in that they were conspicuously
+introspective, and shut in upon their own exclusive experience.
+
+But for all these variances, we shall find Homer Martin, George Fuller,
+and Albert Ryder forming the first nucleus for a definite value in
+strictly American painting. They were conscious of nothing really
+outside of native associations and native deductions. The temper of them
+is as essentially American as the quality of them is essentially Eastern
+in flavor. They seldom ventured beyond more than a home-spun richness of
+color, though in Ryder's case Monticelli had assisted very definitely
+in his notion of the volume of tone. We find here then despite the
+impress of artists like William Morris Hunt, Washington Allston, and the
+later Inness with the still later Winslow Homer, that gripping and
+relentless realist who took hold of the newer school of
+painter-illustrators, that the artists treated of here may be considered
+as the most important phase of American painting in the larger sense of
+the term. If I were to assist in the arrangement of an all American
+exhibition to show the trend toward individualism I should begin with
+Martin, Fuller and Ryder. I should then proceed to Winslow Homer, John
+H. Twachtman, Theodore Robinson, Hayes Miller, Arthur B. Davies,
+Rockwell Kent, then to those who come under the eighteen-ninety tendency
+in painting, namely the Whistler-Goya-Velasquez influence.
+
+From this it will be found that an entirely new development had taken
+place among a fairly large group of younger men who came, and very
+earnestly, under the Cezannesque influence. It may be said that the
+choice of these men is a wise one for it is conspicuous among artists
+of today that since Cezanne art will never, cannot ever be the same,
+just as with Delacroix and Courbet a French art could never have
+remained the same. Impressionism will be found to have had a far
+greater value as a suggestive influence than as a creative one. It
+brought light in as a scientific aspect into modern painting and that
+is its valuable contribution. So it is that with Cezanne the world is
+conscious of a new power that will never be effectually shaken off,
+since the principles that are involved in the intention of Cezanne are
+of too vital importance to be treated with lightness of judgment. Such
+valuable ideas as Cezanne contributes must be accepted almost as
+dogma, albeit valuable dogma. Influence is a conscious and necessary
+factor in the development of all serious minded artists, as we have
+seen in the instances of all important ones.
+
+So it is I feel that the real art of America, and it can, I think,
+justly be said that there is such, will be headed by the imaginative
+artists I have named in point of their value as indigenous creators,
+having worked out their artistic destinies on home soil with all the
+virility of creators in the finer sense of the term. They have
+assisted in the establishment of a native tradition which without
+question has by this time a definite foundation. The public must be
+made aware of their contribution to a native production. It will no
+doubt be a matter for surprise to many people in the world today that
+art in general is more national or local than it has ever been, due
+mostly to the recent upheaval, which has been of great service to the
+re-establishment of art interest and art appreciation everywhere in
+the modern world. Art, like life, has had to begin all over again,
+for the very end of the world had been made visible at last. The
+artist may look safely over an utterly new horizon, which is the only
+encouragement the artist of today can hope for.
+
+
+
+
+MODERN ART IN AMERICA
+
+
+The question may be asked, what is the hope of modern art in America?
+The first reply would be that modern art will one day be realized in
+America if only from experience we learn that all things happen in
+America by means of the epidemical principle. It is of little visible
+use that single individuals, by sitting in the solitary confinement of
+their as yet little understood enthusiasms, shall hope to achieve what
+is necessary for the American idea, precisely as necessary for us here
+as for the peoples of Europe who have long since recognized that any
+movement toward expression is a movement of unquestionable importance.
+Until the moment when public sincerity and the public passion for
+excitement is stimulated, the vague art interests of America will go
+on in their dry and conventional manner. The very acute discernment of
+Maurice Vlaminck that "intelligence is international, stupidity is
+national, art is local" is a valuable deduction to make, and applies
+in the two latter instances as admirably to America as to any other
+country. Our national stupidity in matters of esthetic modernity is a
+matter for obvious acceptance, and not at all for amazement.
+
+That art is local is likewise just as true of America as of any other
+country, and despite the judgment of stodgy minds, there is a
+definite product which is peculiar to our specific temper and
+localized sensibility as it is of any other country which is nameable.
+Despite the fact that impressionism is still exaggeration, and that
+large sums are still being paid for a "sheep-piece" of Charles Jacque,
+as likewise for a Ridgeway Knight, there is a well defined grouping of
+younger painters working for a definitely localized idea of modernism,
+just as in modern poetry there is a grouping of poets in America who
+are adding new values to the English language, as well as assisting in
+the realization of a freshly evolved localized personality in modern
+poetics.
+
+Art in America is like a patent medicine, or a vacuum cleaner. It can
+hope for no success until ninety million people know what it is. The
+spread of art as "culture" in America is from all appearances having
+little or no success because stupidity in such matters is so national.
+There is a very vague consideration of modern art among the directors
+of museums and among art dealers, but the comprehension is as vague as
+the interest. Outside of a Van Gogh exhibition, a few Matisses, now
+and then a Cezanne exhibited with great feeling of condescension,
+there is little to show the American public that art is as much a
+necessity as a substantial array of food is to an empty stomach. The
+public hunger cannot groan for what it does not recognize as real
+nourishment. There is no reason in the world why America does not have
+as many chances to see modern art as Europe has, save for minor
+matters of distance. The peoples of the world are alike, sensibilities
+are of the same nature everywhere among the so-called civilized, and
+it must be remembered always that the so-called primitive races
+invented for their own racial salvation what was not to be found ready
+made for them. Modern art is just as much of a necessity to us as art
+was to the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Greeks. Those peoples have
+the advantage of us only because they were in a higher state of
+culture as a racial unit. They have no more of a monopoly upon the
+idea of rhythm and organization than we have, because that which was
+typical of the human consciousness then, is typical of it now. As a
+result of the war, there has been, it must be said, a heightening of
+national consciousness in all countries, because creative minds that
+were allowed to survive were sent home to struggle with the problem of
+their own soil.
+
+There is no reason whatever for believing that America cannot have as
+many good artists as any other country. It simply does not have them
+because the integrity of the artist is trifled with by the intriguing
+agencies of materialism. Painters find the struggle too keen and it is
+easy to become the advertising designer, or the merchant in painting,
+which is what many of our respectable artists have become. The lust
+for prosperity takes the place of artistic integrity and courage. But
+America need not be surprised to find that it has a creditable
+grouping of artists sufficiently interested in the value of modern art
+as an expression of our time, men and possibly some women, who feel
+that art is a matter of private aristocratic satisfaction at least,
+until the public is awakened to the idea that art is an essentially
+local affair and the more local it becomes by means of comprehension
+of the international character, the truer it will be to the place in
+which it is produced.
+
+A catalogue of names will suffice to indicate the character and
+variation of the localized degree of expression we are free to call
+American in type: Morgan Russell, S. Macdonald Wright, Arthur G. Dove,
+William Yarrow, Dickinson, Thomas H. Benton, Abraham Walkowitz, Max
+Weber, Ben Benn, John Marin, Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler, Marsden
+Hartley, Andrew Dasburg, William McFee, Man Ray, Walt Kuhn, John
+Covert, Morton Schamberg, Georgia O'Keeffe, Stuart Davis, Rex
+Slinkard. Added to these, the three modern photographers Alfred
+Stieglitz, Charles Sheeler, and Paul Strand must be included. Besides
+these indigenous names, shall we place the foreign artists whose work
+falls into line in the movement toward modern art in America, Joseph
+Stella, Marcel Duchamp, Gaston Lachaise, Eli Nadelman. There may be no
+least questioning as to how much success all of these artists would
+have in their respective ways in the various groupings that prevail in
+Europe at this time. They would be recognized at once for the
+authenticity of their experience and for their integrity as artists
+gifted with international intelligence. There is no reason to feel
+that prevailing organizations like the Society of Independent Artists,
+Inc., and the Societe Anonyme, Inc., will not bear a great increase of
+influence and power upon the public, as there is every reason to
+believe that at one time or another the public will realize what is
+being done for them by these societies, as well as what was done by
+the so famous "291" gallery.
+
+The effect however is not vast enough because the public finds no
+shock in the idea of art. It is not melodramatic enough and America
+must be appealed to through its essentially typical melodramatic
+instincts. There is always enough music, and there are some who
+certainly can say altogether too much of the kind there is in this
+country. The same thing can be said of painting. There is altogether
+too much of comfortable art, the art of the uplifted illustration. It
+is the reflex of the Anglo-Saxon passion for story-telling in pictures
+which should be relegated to the field of the magazines. Great art
+often tells a story but great art is always something plus the idea.
+Ordinary art does not rise above it.
+
+I often wonder why it is that America, which is essentially a country
+of sports and gamblers, has not the European courage as well as
+rapacity for fresh development in cultural matters. Can it be because
+America is not really intelligent? I should be embarrassed in
+thinking so. There is nevertheless an obvious lethargy in the
+appreciation of creative taste and a still lingering yet old-fashioned
+faith in the continual necessity for importation. America has a great
+body of assimilators, and out of this gift for uncreative assimilation
+has come the type of art we are supposed to accept as our own. It is
+not at all difficult to prove that America has now an encouraging and
+competent group of young and vigorous synthesists who are showing with
+intelligence what they have learned from the newest and most engaging
+development of art, which is to say--modern art. The names which have
+been inserted above are the definite indication, and one may go so far
+as to say proof, of this argument that modern art in America is
+rapidly becoming an intelligently localized realization.
+
+
+
+
+OUR IMAGINATIVES
+
+
+Is it vision that creates temperament or temperament that creates
+vision? Physical vision is responsible for nearly everything in art,
+not the power to see but the way to see. It is the eye perfect or the
+eye defective that determines the kind of thing seen and how one sees
+it. It was certainly a factor in the life of Lafcadio Hearn, for he
+was once named the poet of myopia. It was the acutely sensitive eye of
+Cezanne that taught him to register so ably the minor and major
+variations of his theme. Manet saw certainly far less colour than
+Renoir, for in the Renoir sense he was not a colourist at all. He
+himself said he painted only what he saw. Sight was almost science
+with Cezanne as it was passion.
+
+In artists like Homer Martin there is a something less than visual
+accuracy and something more than a gift of translation. There is a
+distinguished interpretation of mood coupled with an almost
+miniature-like sense of delicate gradation, and at the same time a
+something lacking as to a sense of physical form. In the few specimens
+of Martin to be seen there is, nevertheless, eminent distinction
+paramount. He was an artist of "oblique integrity": He saw
+unquestionably at an angle, but the angle was a beautiful one, and
+while many of his associates were doing American Barbizon, he was
+giving forth a shy, yet rare kind of expression, always a little
+symbolic in tendency, with the mood far more predominant. In "The sand
+dunes of Ontario" there will be found at once a highly individualistic
+feeling for the waste places of the world. There is never so much as a
+hint of banality in his selection. He never resorts to stock rhetoric.
+
+Martin will be remembered for his singularly personal touch along with
+men like Fuller and Ryder. He is not as dramatic as either of these
+artists, but he has greater finesse in delicate sensibility. He was, I
+think, actually afraid of repetition, a characteristic very much in
+vogue in his time, either conscious or unconscious, in artists like
+Inness, Wyant, and Blakelock, with their so single note. There is
+exceptional mysticity hovering over his hills and stretches of dune
+and sky. It is not fog, or rain, or dew enveloping them. It is a
+certain veiled presence in nature that he sees and brings forward. His
+picture of peaks of the White Mountains, Jefferson and Madison, gives
+you no suggestion of the "Hudson River" emptiness. He was searching
+for profounder realities. He wanted the personality of his places, and
+he was successful, for all of his pictures I have seen display the
+magnetic touch. He "touched it off" vividly in all of them. They
+reveal their ideas poetically and esthetically and the method is
+personal and ample for presentation.
+
+With George Fuller it was vastly different. He seemed always to be
+halting in the shadow. You are conscious of a deep and ever so earnest
+nature in his pictures. He impressed himself on his canvases in spite
+of his so faulty expression. He had an understanding of depth but
+surface was strange to him. He garbled his sentences so to speak with
+excessive and useless wording. "The Octoroon" shows a fine feeling for
+romance as do all of the other pictures of Fuller that have been
+publicly visible, but it is romance obsessed with monotone. There is
+the evidence of extreme reticence and moodiness in Fuller always. I
+know little of him save that I believe he experienced a severity of
+domestic problems. Farmer I think he was, and painted at off hours all
+his life. It is the poetry of a quiet, almost sombre order, walking in
+the shadow on the edge, of a wood being almost too much of an
+appearance for him in the light of a busy world.
+
+Why is it I think of Hawthorne when I think of Fuller? Is there a
+relationship here, or is it only a similarity of eeriness in temper? I
+would suspect Fuller of having painted a Hester Prynne excepting that
+he could never have come to so much red in one place in his pictures.
+
+There was vigour in these strong, simple men, masculine in sensibility
+all of them, and a fine feeling for the poetic shades of existence.
+They were intensely serious men, and I think from their isolation in
+various ways, not popular in their time. Neither are they popular now.
+They will only be admired by artists of perception, and by laymen of
+keen sensibility. Whether their enforced isolations taught them to
+brood, or whether they were brooders by nature, it is difficult to
+say. I think they were all easterners, and this would explain away
+certain characteristic shynesses of temper and of expression in them.
+Ryder, as we know, was the typical recluse, Fuller in all likelihood
+also. Martin I know little of privately, but his portrait shows him to
+be a strong elemental nature, with little feeling for, or interest in,
+the superficialities either of life or of art. Of Blakelock I can say
+but little, for I do not know him beyond a few stylish canvases which
+seem to have more of Diaz and Rousseau in them than contributes to
+real originality, and he was one of the painters of repetition also. A
+single good Blakelock is beautiful, and I think he must be included
+among the American imaginatives, but I do not personally feel the
+force of him in several canvases together.
+
+All of these artists are singularly individual, dreamers like Mathew
+Maris and Marees of Europe. They all have something of Coleridge about
+them, something of Poe, something of the "Ancient Mariner" and the
+"Haunted Palace", sailors in the same ship, sleepers in the same
+house. All of these men were struggling at the same time, the painters
+I mean, the same hour it might be said, in the midst of conventions
+of a severer type of rigidity than now, to preserve themselves from
+commonplace utterance. They were not affected by fashions. They had
+the one idea in mind, to express themselves in terms of themselves,
+and they were singularly successful in this despite the various
+difficulties of circumstance and of temper that attended them. They
+understood what this was better than anyone, and the results in
+varying degrees of genius attest to the quality of the American
+imagination at its best.
+
+I should like, for purposes of reference, to see a worthy exhibition
+of all of these men in one place. It would I am sure prove my
+statement that the eastern genius is naturally a tragic one, for all
+of these men have hardly once ventured into the clear sunlight of the
+world of every day. It would offset highly also, the superficial
+attitude that there is no imagination in American painting. We should
+not find so much of form or of colour in them in the stricter meaning
+of these ideas, as of mood. They might have set themselves to be
+disciples of William Blake's significant preachment, "put off
+intellect and put on imagination, the imagination is the man"; the
+intellect being the cultivated man, and the imagination being the
+natural man. There is imagination which by reason of its power and
+brilliance exceeds all intellectual effort, and effort at
+intellectualism is worse than a fine ignorance by far. Men who are
+highly imaginative, create by feeling what they do not or cannot
+know. It is the sixth sense of the creator.
+
+These artists were men alone, touched with the pristine significance
+of nature. It was pioneering of a difficult nature, precarious as all
+individual investigation of a spiritual or esthetic character is sure
+to be. Its first requisite is isolation, its last requisite is
+appreciation. All of these painters are gone over into that place they
+were so eager to investigate, illusion or reality. Their pictures are
+witness here to their seriousness. They testify to the bright
+everlastingness of beauty. If they have not swayed the world, they
+have left a dignified record in the art of a given time. Their
+contemporary value is at least inestimable. They are among the very
+first in the development of esthetics in America in point of merit.
+They made no compromise, and their record is clear.
+
+If one looks over the record of American art up to the period of
+ultra-modernism, it will be found that these men are the true
+originals among American painters. We shall find outside of them and a
+very few others, so much of sameness, a certain academic convention
+which, however pronounced or meagre the personalities are, leave those
+personalities in the category of "safe" painters. They do not disturb
+by an excessively intimate point of view toward art or toward nature.
+They come up to gallery requirements by their "pleasantness" or the
+inoffensiveness of their style. They offer little in the way of
+interpretive power or synthetic understanding. It is the tendency to
+keep on the comfortable side in American art. Doubtless it is more
+practical as any innovator or investigator has learned for himself.
+Artists like Ryder and Martin and Fuller had nothing in common with
+market appreciations. They had ideas to express, and were sincere to
+the last in expressing them.
+
+You will find little trace of commercialism in these men, even when,
+as in the case of Martin and Ryder and I do not know whom else, they
+did panels for somebody-or-other's leather screen, of which
+"Smuggler's Cove" and the other long panel of Ryder's in the
+Metropolitan Museum are doubtless two. They were not successful in
+their time because they could not repeat their performances. We know
+the efforts that were once made to make Ryder comfortable in a
+conventional studio, which he is supposed to have looked into once;
+and then he disappeared, as it was altogether foreign to him. Each
+picture was a new event in the lives of these men, and had to be
+pondered over devoutly, and for long periods often, as in the case of
+Ryder. Work was for him nine-tenths reflection and meditation and
+poetic brooding, and he put down his sensations on canvas with great
+difficulty in the manner of a labourer. It seems obvious that his
+first drafts were always vivid with the life intended for them, but no
+one could possibly have suffered with the idea of how to complete a
+picture more than he. His lack of facility held him from spontaneity,
+as it is likewise somewhat evident in Martin, and still more in
+Fuller.
+
+They were artists in timidity, and had not the courage of physical
+force in painting. With them it was wholly a mental process. But we
+shall count them great for their purity of vision as well as for the
+sincerity and conviction that possessed them. Artistry of this sort
+will be welcomed anywhere, if only that we may take men seriously who
+profess seriousness. There is nothing really antiquated about
+sincerity, though I think conventional painters are not sure of that.
+It is not easy to think that men consent to repeat themselves from
+choice, and yet the passing exhibitions are proof of that. Martin and
+Ryder and Fuller refresh us with a poetic and artistic validity which
+places them out of association among men of their time or of today, in
+the field of objective and illustrative painters. We turn to them with
+pleasure after a journey through the museums, for their reticence let
+us say, and for the refinement of their vision, their beautiful gift
+of restraint. They emphasize the commonness of much that surrounds
+them, much that blatantly would obscure them if they were not
+pronouncedly superior. They would not be discounted to any
+considerable degree if they were placed among the known masters of
+landscape painters of all modern time. They would hold their own by
+the verity of feeling that is in them, and what they might lose in
+technical excellence, would be compensated for in uniqueness of
+personality. I should like well to see them placed beside artists like
+Maris and Marees, and even Courbet. It would surprise the casual
+appreciator much, I believe.
+
+
+
+
+OUR IMPRESSIONISTS
+
+
+I have for purely personal reasons chosen the two painters who
+formulate for me the conviction that there have been and are but two
+consistently convincing American impressionists. These gentlemen are
+John H. Twachtman and Theodore Robinson. I cannot say precisely in
+what year Twachtman died but for purposes intended here this data is
+of no paramount consequence, save that it is always a matter of query
+as to just how long an artist must live, or have been dead, to be
+discovered in what is really his own time.
+
+John H. Twachtman as artist is difficult to know even by artists; for
+his work is made difficult to see either by its scarcity as determined
+for himself or by the exclusiveness of the owners of his pictures. It
+requires, however, but two or three of them to convince one that
+Twachtman has a something "plus" to contribute to his excursions into
+impressionism. One feels that after a Duesseldorf blackness which
+permeates his earlier work his conversion to impressionism was as
+fortunate as it was sincere. Twachtman knew, as is evidenced
+everywhere in his work, what he wished to essay and he proceeded with
+poetic reticence to give it forth. With a lyricism that is as
+convincing as it is authentic, you feel that there is a certain
+underlying spirit of resignation. He surely knew that a love of
+sunlight would save any man from pondering on the inflated importance
+of world issues.
+
+Having seen Twachtman but once my memory of his face recalls this
+admixture of emotion. He cared too much for the essential beauties to
+involve them with analyses extraneous to the meaning of beauty. That
+the Japanese did more for him than any other Orientals of whom he
+might have been thinking, is evident. For all that, his own personal
+lyricism surmounts his interest in outer interpretations of light and
+movement, and he leaves you with his own notion of a private and
+distinguished appreciation of nature. In this sense he leads one to
+Renoir's way of considering nature which was the pleasure in nature
+for itself. It was all too fine an adventure to quibble about.
+
+Twachtman's natural reticence and, I could also believe, natural
+skepticism kept him from swinging wildly over to the then new
+theories, a gesture typical of less intelligent natures. He had the
+good sense to feel out for himself just where the new theories related
+to himself and set about producing flat simplicity of planes of color
+to produce a very distinguished notion of light. He dispensed with the
+photographic attitude toward objectivity and yet at the same time held
+to the pleasing rhythmical shapes in nature. He did not resort to
+divisionalism or to ultra-violence of relationship. The pictures that
+I have seen such as "February", for instance, in the Boston Museum,
+present for me the sensation of a man of great private spiritual and
+intellectual means, having the wish to express tactfully and
+convincingly his personal conclusions and reactions, leaning always
+toward the side of iridescent illusiveness rather than emotional
+blatancy and irrelevant extravagance. His nuances are perhaps too
+finely adjusted to give forth the sense of overwhelming magic either
+in intention or of execution. It is lyrical idea with Twachtman with
+seldom or never a dramatic gesture. He is as illusive as a phrase of
+Mallarme and it will be remembered that he is of the period more or
+less of the rose and the lily and the lost idea in poetry. He does
+recall in essence at least the quality of pastels in prose, though the
+art intention is a sturdier one. It is enough that Twachtman did find
+his relationship to impressionism, and that he did not evolve a system
+of repetition which marks the failure of all influence.
+
+Twachtman remains an artist of super-fine sensibility and distinction,
+and whatever he may have poured into the ears of students as an
+instructor left no visible haggard traces on his own production other
+than perhaps limiting that production. But we know that while the
+quality is valuable in respect of power it has no other precise value.
+We remember that Giorgione perished likewise with an uncertain product
+to his credit, as to numbers, but he did leave his immemorial
+impression. So it is with John H. Twachtman. He leaves his indelible
+influence among Americans as a fine artist, and he may be said to be
+among the few artists who, having taken up the impressionistic
+principle, found a way to express his personal ideas with a true
+degree of personal force. He is a beautifully sincere product and that
+is going far. Those pictures I have seen contain no taint of the
+market or clamoring for praise even. They were done because their
+author had an unobtrusive yet very aristocratic word to say, and the
+word was spoken with authority. John H. Twachtman must be counted as
+one of the genuine American artists, as well as among the most genuine
+artists of the world. If his pictures do not torment one with
+problematic intellectualism, they do hold one with their inherent
+refinement of taste and a degree of aristocratic approach which his
+true intelligence implies.
+
+With the work of Theodore Robinson, there comes a wide divergence of
+feeling that is perhaps a greater comprehension of the principles of
+impressionism as applied to the realities involved in the academic
+principle. One is reminded of Bastien Le Page and Leon L'Hermitte, in
+the paintings of Robinson, as to their type of subject and the
+conception of them also. That he lived not far from Giverney is
+likewise evident. Being of New England yankee extraction, a Vermonter
+I believe, he must have essayed always a sense of economy in emotion.
+No one could have gone so far as the then incredible Monet, whose
+pictures wear us to indifference with vapid and unprofitable
+thinking. What Monet did was to encourage a new type of audacity and a
+brand-new type in truth, when no one had up to then attempted to see
+nature as prismatical under the direct influence of the solar rays.
+All this has since been worked out with greater exactitude by the
+later theorists in modernism.
+
+While Van Gogh was slowly perishing of a mad ecstasy for light,
+covering up a natural Dutch realism with fierce attempts at prismatic
+relationship, always with the rhythms in a state of ecstatic
+ascendency; and Seurat had come upon the more satisfying pointillism
+as developed by himself; somewhere in amid all these extravagances men
+like Robinson were trying to combine orthodoxy of heritage and
+radicalist conversion with the new and very noble idea of
+impressionism. That Robinson succeeded in a not startling but
+nevertheless honorable and respectable fashion, must be conceded him.
+I sometimes think that Vignon, a seemingly obscure associate of the
+impressionists, with a similar impassioned feeling of realism, outdid
+him and approached closer to the principles as understood by Pissarro:
+probably better by a great deal than Monet himself, who is accredited
+with the honor of setting the theme moving in a modern line of that
+day. And Pissarro must have been a man to have so impressed all the
+men young and old of his time. After seeing a great number of Monet's
+one turns to any simple Pissarro for relief. And then there was also
+Sisley.
+
+But the talk is of Theodore Robinson. He holds his place as a realist
+with hardly more than a realist's conception, subjoined to a really
+pleasing appreciation of the principles of impressionism as imbibed by
+him from the source direct. Here are, then, the two true American
+impressionists, who, as far as I am aware, never slipped into the
+banalities of reiteration and marketable self-copy. They seem to have
+far more interest in private intellectual success than in a practical
+public one. It is this which helped them both, as it helps all serious
+artists, to keep their ideas clean of outward taint. This is one of
+the most important factors, which gives a man a place in the art he
+essays to achieve. When the day of his work is at an end it will be
+seen by everyone precisely what the influences were that prompted his
+effort toward deliverance through creation. It is for the sake of this
+alone that sincere artists keep to certain principles, and with
+genuine sacrifice often, as was certainly the case with Twachtman. And
+after all, how can a real artist be concerned as to just how salable
+his product is to be? Certainly not while he is working, if he be
+decent toward himself. This is of course heresy, with Wall Street so
+near.
+
+
+
+
+ARTHUR B. DAVIES
+
+
+If Arthur B. Davies had found it necessary, as in the modern time it
+has been found necessary to separate literature from painting, we
+should doubtless have had a very delicate and sensitive lyric poetry
+in book form. Titles for pictures like "Mirrored Dreaming,"
+"Sicily-Flowering Isle," "Shell of Gold," "A Portal of the Night,"
+"Mystic Dalliance," are all of them creations of an essentially poetic
+and literary mind. They are all splendid titles for a real book of
+legendary experience. The poet will be first to feel the accuracy of
+lyrical emotion in these titles. The paintings lead one away entirely
+into the land of legend, into the iridescent splendor of reflection.
+They take one out of a world of didactic monotone, as to their
+artistic significance. They are essentially pictures created for the
+purpose of transportation.
+
+From the earlier days in that underground gallery on Fifth Avenue near
+Twenty-seventh Street to the present time, there has been a constantly
+flowing production of lyrical simplicity and purification. One can
+never think of Davies as one thinks of Courbet and of Cezanne, where
+the intention is first and last a technically esthetic one; especially
+in Cezanne, whose object was the removal of all significance from
+painting other than that of painting for itself. With Cezanne it was
+problem. One might even say it was the removal of personality. With
+Davies you are aware that it is an entirely intimate personal life he
+is presenting; a life entirely away from discussion, from all sense of
+problem; they are not problematic at all, his pictures; they have
+lyrical serenity as a basis, chiefly. Often you have the sensation of
+looking through a Renaissance window upon a Greek world--a world of
+Platonic verities in calm relation with each other. It is essentially
+an art created from the principle of the harmonic law in nature,
+things in juxtaposition, cooperating with the sole idea of a poetic
+existence. The titles cover the subjects, as I have suggested. Arthur
+B. Davies is a lyric poet with a decidedly Celtic tendency. It is the
+smile of a radiant twilight in his brain. It is a country of green
+moon whispers and of shadowed movement. Imagination illuminating the
+moment of fancy with rhythmic persuasiveness. It is the Pandaean
+mystery unfolded with symphonic accompaniment. You have in these
+pictures the romances of the human mind made irresistible with melodic
+certainty. They are _chansons sans paroles_, sung to the syrinx in
+Sicilian glades.
+
+I feel that it is our own romantic land transposed into terms of
+classical metre. The color is mostly Greek, and the line is Greek. You
+could just as well hear Glueck as Keats; you could just as well see the
+world by the light of the virgin lamp, and watch the smoke of old
+altars coiling among the cypress boughs. The redwoods of the West
+become columns of Doric eloquence and simplicity. The mountains and
+lakes of the West have become settings for the reading of the
+"Centaur" of Maurice de Guerin. You see the reason for the titles
+chosen because you feel that the poetry of line and the harmonic
+accompaniment of color is the primal essential. They are not so
+dynamic as suggestive in their quality of finality. The way is left
+open, in other words, for you yourself to wander, if you will, and
+possess the requisite instincts for poetry.
+
+The presence of Arthur B. Davies, and conversation with him convince
+one that poetry and art are in no sense a diversion or a delusion
+even. They are an occupation, a real business for intelligent men and
+women. He is occupied with the essential qualities of poetry and
+painting. He is eclectic by instinct. Spiritually he arrives at his
+conviction through these unquestionable states of lyrical existence.
+He is there when they happen. That is authenticity sufficient. They
+are not wandering moods. They are organized conditions and attitudes,
+intellectually appreciated and understood. He is a mystic only in the
+sense that perhaps all lyrical poetry is mystic, since it strives for
+union with the universal soul in things.
+
+It is perfectly autobiographical, the work of Arthur B. Davies, and
+that is so with all genuine expression. You find this gift for
+conviction in powerful painter types, like Courbet and Delacroix, who
+are almost propagandic in their fiercely defined insistence upon the
+chosen esthetic principle. Whatever emanation, illusion, or "aura,"
+dreadful word that it is, springing from the work of Davies, is only
+typical of what comes from all magical intentions, the magic of the
+world of not-being, made real through the operation of true fancy.
+Davies' pictures are works of fancy, then, in contradistinction to the
+essays of the imagination such as those of William Blake. Poets like
+Davies are lookers-in. Poets like Blake are the austere residents of
+the country they wander in. The lookers-in are no less genuine. They
+merely "make" their world. It might be said they make the prosaic
+world over again, transform it by a system of prescribed magic. This
+work, then, becomes states of fancy dramatized in lyric metre. Davies
+feels the visionary life of facts as a scientist would feel them
+actually. He has the wish for absolute order and consistency. There is
+nothing vague or disconcerting in his work, no lapses of rhetoric. It
+is, in its way, complete, one may say, since it is the intelligently
+contrived purpose of this poet to arrive at a scheme of absolute
+spiritual harmony.
+
+He is first of all the poet-painter in the sense that Albert Ryder is
+a painter for those with a fine comprehension of the imagination.
+Precisely as Redon is an artist for artists, though not always their
+artist in convincing esthetics, he too, satisfies the instinct for
+legend, for transformation. Painters like Davies, Redon, Rops, Moreau,
+and the other mystical natures, give us rather the spiritual trend of
+their own lives. In Redon and in Davies the vision is untouched by the
+foul breath of the world around them. In Rops and Moreau you feel the
+imagination hurrying to the arms and breasts of vice for their sense
+of home. The pathos of deliverance is urgent in them. In the work of
+Davies, and of Redon, there is the splendid silence of a world created
+by themselves, a world for the reflection of self. There is even a
+kind of narcissian arrogance, the enchantment of the illumined fact.
+
+Beauty recognizing herself with satisfaction--that seems to be the
+purpose of the work of Arthur B. Davies. It is so much outside the
+realm of scientific esthetics as hardly to have been more than
+overheard. These pictures are efficiently exemplary of the axiom that
+"all art aspires to the condition of music." I could almost hear
+Davies saying that, as if Pater had never so much as thought of it.
+They literally soothe with a rare poetry painted for the eye. They are
+illuminations for the manuscripts of the ascetic soul. They are
+windows for houses in which men and women may withdraw, and be
+reconciled to the doom of isolation.
+
+With the arrival of Cubism into the modern esthetic scene, there
+appeared a change in the manner of creation, though the same methods
+of invention remained chiefly without change. The result seems more
+in the nature of kaleidoscopic variance, a perhaps more acutely
+realized sense of opposites, than in the former mode. They register
+less completely, it seems to me, because the departure is too sudden
+in the rhythmus of the artist. The art of Davies is the art of a
+melodious curved line. Therefore the sudden angularity is abrupt to an
+appreciative eye.
+
+It is the poetry of Arthur B. Davies that comes to the fore in one's
+appreciation. He has the almost impeccable gift for lyrical truth, and
+the music of motion is crystallized in his imagination to a masterful
+degree. He is the highly sensitized illustrator appointed by the
+states of his soul to picture forth the pauses of the journey through
+the realm of fancy. It has in it the passion of violet and silver
+dreaming, the hue of an endless dawn before the day descends upon the
+world. You expect the lute to regain its jaded tune there. You expect
+the harp to reverberate once again with the old fervors. You expect
+the syrinx to unfold the story of the reed in light song. It contains
+the history of all the hushed horizons that can be found over the
+edges of a world of materiality. It holds in it always the warm soul
+of every digit of the moon. Human passion is for once removed, unless
+it be that the mere humanism of motion excites the sense of passion.
+You are made to feel the non-essentiality of the stress of the flesh
+in the true places of spiritual existence. The life of moments is
+carried over and made permanent in fancy, and they endure by the
+purity of their presence alone. There is no violence in the work of
+Davies. It is the appreciable relation of harmony and counterpoint in
+the human heart and mind. It is the logic of rhythmical equation felt
+there, almost exclusively. It is the condition of music that art in
+the lyrical state has seemed to suggest.
+
+The artistic versatility of Davies is too familiar to comment upon. He
+has no distress with mediums. His exceptional sensitivity to substance
+and texture gives him the requisite rapport with all species of
+mediums to which the artist has access. One might be inclined to think
+of him as a virtuoso in pastel possibly, and his paintings in the
+medium of oil suggest this sort of richness. He is nevertheless at
+home in all ways. All these are issues waved away to my mind, in view
+of his acute leaning to the poet that leads the artist away from
+problems other than that of Greek rhythmical perfection. It is
+essentially a Platonic expression, the desire of the perfect union of
+one thing with another. That is its final consummation, so it seems to
+me.
+
+
+
+
+REX SLINKARD
+
+     "_I doubt not that the passionately wept deaths of young men
+     are provided for._"--WALT WHITMAN.
+
+
+We have had our time for regretting the loss of men of genius during
+the war. We know the significance of the names of Rupert Brooke,
+Edward Thomas, Elroy Flecker on the other side of the sea, to the hope
+of England. And on this side of the sea the names of Joyce Kilmer,
+Alan Seeger and Victor Chapman have been called out to us for the
+poetic spell they cast upon America. All of them in their manful,
+poetic way. They were all of them poets in words; all but Victor
+Chapman were professional poets, and he, even if he himself was not
+aware, gave us some rare bits of loveliness in his letters. There are
+others almost nameless among soldier-hero people who gave us likewise
+real bits of unsuspected beauty in their unpretentious letters.
+
+Rex Slinkard was a soldier, poet-painter by inclination, and ranchman
+as to specific occupation. Rex has gone from us, too. How many are
+there who know, or could have known, the magic of this unassuming
+visionary person. Only a few of us who understand the meaning of magic
+and the meaning of everlasting silences. It is the fortune of America
+that there remain with us numbers of highly indicative drawings and a
+group of rare canvases, the quality of which painters will at once
+acclaim, and poets will at once verify the lyric perfection of,
+paintings and drawings among the loveliest we have in point of purity
+of conception and feeling for the subtle shades of existence, those
+rare states of life which, when they arrive, are called perfect
+moments in the poetic experience of men and women.
+
+There will be no argument to offer or to maintain regarding the work
+of Rex Slinkard. It is what it is, the perfect evidence that one of
+the finest lyric talents to be found among the young creators of
+America has been deprived of its chance to bloom as it would like to
+have done, as it so eagerly and surely was already doing. Rex Slinkard
+was a genius of first quality. The word genius may be used these days
+without fear of the little banalities, since anyone who has evolved
+for himself a clear vision of life may be said to possess the quality
+of genius.
+
+"The day's work done and the supper past. I walk through the horse-lot
+and to my shack. Inside I light the lantern, and then the fire, and
+sitting, I think of the inhabitants of the earth, and of the world, my
+home."
+
+These sentences, out of a letter to a near friend, and the marginalia
+written upon the edges of many of his drawings, show the varying
+degrees of delicacy Rex was eager to register and make permanent for
+his own realization. His thought was once and for all upon the
+realities, that is, those substances that are or can be realities
+only to the artist, the poet, and the true dreamer, and Rex Slinkard
+was all of these. His observation of himself, and his understanding of
+himself, were uncommonly genuine in this young and so poetic painter.
+He had learned early for so young a man what were his special
+idealistic fervors. He had the true romanticist's gift for
+refinements, and was working continually toward the rarer states of
+being out from the emotional into the intellectual, through spiritual
+application into the proper and requisite calm. He lived in a
+thoroughly ordered world of specified experience which is typified in
+his predilection for the superiority of Chinese notions of beauty over
+the more sentimental rhythms of the Greeks. He had found the proper
+shade of intellectuality he cared for in this type of Oriental
+expression. It was the Buddhistic feeling of reality that gave him
+more than the platonic. He was searching for a majesty beyond
+sensuousness, by which sensuous experience is transformed into greater
+and more enduring shades of beauty. He wanted the very life of beauty
+to take the place of sensuous suggestion. Realities in place of
+semblances, then, he was eager for, but the true visionary realities
+as far finer than the materialistic reality.
+
+He had learned early that he was not, and never would be, the
+fantasist that some of his earlier canvases indicate. Even his essays
+in portraiture, verging on the realistic, leaned nevertheless more
+toward the imaginative reality always. He knew, also, with clarity,
+the fine line of decision between imagination and vision, between the
+dramatic and the lyric, and had realized completely the supremacy of
+the lyric in himself. He was a young boy of light walking on a man's
+strong feet upon real earth over which there was no shadow for him. He
+walked straightforwardly toward the elysium of his own very personal
+organized fancies. His irrigation ditches were "young rivers" for him,
+rivers of being, across which white youths upon white horses, and
+white fawns were gliding to the measure of their own delights. He had,
+this young boy of light, the perfect measure of poetic accuracy
+coupled with a man's fine simplicity in him. He had the priceless calm
+for the understanding of his own poetic ecstasies. They acted upon him
+gently with their own bright pressure. He let them thrive according to
+their own relationships to himself. Nothing was forced in the mind and
+soul of Rex Slinkard. He was in quest of the modern rapture for
+permanent things such as is to be found in "L'apres midi d'un Faun" of
+Mallarme and Debussy for instance, in quest of those rare, whiter
+proportions of experience. It was radiance and simplicity immingled in
+his sense of things.
+
+He would have served his country well as one of its clearest and best
+citizens, far more impressively by the growth and expansion of his
+soul in his own manly vision, than by the questionable value of his
+labors in the military service. He did what he could, gladly and
+heroically, but he had become too weakened by the siege of physical
+reverses that pursued his otherwise strong body to endure the strain
+of labor he performed, or wanted to accomplish. He knew long before he
+entered service the significance of discipline from very profound
+experience with life from childhood onward. Life had come to him
+voluminously because he was one who attracted life to him,
+electrically. He did not "whine" or "postpone," for he was in all of
+his hours at least mentally and spiritually equal to the world in all
+of its aspects. He was physically not there for the thing he
+volunteered to do, despite the appearance of manly strength in him, or
+thought he would be able to do. He hoped strongly to serve. None knew
+his secret so well as himself, and he kept his own secret royally and
+amicably.
+
+Exceptional maturity of understanding of life, of nature, and all the
+little mysteries that are the shape of human moments, was
+conspicuously evidenced for as long as his intimates remember. The
+extraordinary measure of calm contained in his last pictures and in so
+many of the drawings done in moments of rest in camp is evidence of
+all this. He had a boy's brightness and certainty of the fairness of
+things, joined with a man's mastery of the simple problem. He was a
+true executive in material affairs and his vision was another part of
+the business of existence.
+
+As I have said, Rex Slinkard had the priceless poise of the true lyric
+poet, and it was the ordered system in his vision that proved him. He
+knew the value of his attitudes and he was certain that perfection is
+imperishable, and strove with a poet's calm intensity toward that. He
+had found his Egypt, his Assyria, his Greece, and his own specific
+Nirvana at his feet everywhere.
+
+As he stood attending to the duties of irrigation and the ripening of
+the alfalfa crops, he spent the moments otherwise lost in carving
+pebbles he found about him with rare gestures and profiles, either of
+his own face or body which he knew well, or the grace of other bodies
+and faces he had seen. He was always the young eye on things, an avid
+eye sure of the wonder about to escape from every living thing where
+light or shadow fell upon them gently. He was a sure, unquestionable,
+and in this sense a perfect poet, and possessed the undeniable
+painter's gift for presentation.
+
+He was of the company of Odilon Redon, of whom he had never heard, in
+his feeling for the almost occult presence emanating from everything
+he encountered everywhere, and his simple letters to his friends hold
+touches of the same beauty his drawings and paintings and carvings on
+pebbles contain.
+
+A born mystic and visionary as to the state of his soul, a boy of
+light in quest of the real wisdom that is necessary for the lyrical
+embodiment, this was Rex Slinkard, the western ranchman and
+poet-painter. "I think of the inhabitants of the earth and of the
+world, my home." This might have been a marginal note from the Book of
+Thel, or it might have been a line from some new songs of innocence
+and experience. It might have been spoken from out of one of the oaks
+of William Blake. It must have been heard from among the live oaks of
+Saugus. It was the simple speech of a ranchman of California, a real
+boy-man who loved everything with a poet's love because everything
+that lived, lived for him.
+
+Such were the qualities of Rex Slinkard, who would like to have
+remained in the presence of his friends, the inhabitants of the earth,
+to have lived long in the world, his home.
+
+It is all a fine clear testimony to the certainty of youth, perhaps
+the only certainty there can be. He was the calm declaimer of the life
+of everlasting beauty. He saw with a glad eye the "something" that is
+everywhere at all times, and in all places, for the poet's and the
+visionary's eye at least. He was sure of what he saw; his paintings
+and drawings are a firm conviction of that. Like all who express
+themselves clearly, he wanted to say all he had to say. At thirty he
+had achieved expression remarkably. He had found the way out, and the
+way out was toward and into the light. He was clear, and entirely
+unshadowed.
+
+This is Rex Slinkard, ranchman, poet-painter, and man of the living
+world. Since he could not remain, he has left us a carte visite of
+rarest clarity and beauty. We who care, among the few, for things in
+relation to essences, are glad Rex Slinkard lived and laughed and
+wondered, and remained the little while. The new silence is but a
+phase of the same living one he covered all things with. He was glad
+he was here. He was another angle of light on the poetic world around
+us, another unsuspected facet of the bright surface of the world.
+Surfaces were for him, too, something to be "deepened" with a fresh
+vividness. He had the irresistible impulse to decorate and to decorate
+consistently. His sense of decoration was fluid and had no hint of the
+rhetorical in it. He felt everything joined together, shape to shape,
+by the harmonic insistence in life and in nature. A flower held a
+face, and a face held a flowery substance for him. Bodies were young
+trees in bloom, and trees were lines of human loveliness. The body of
+the man, the body of the woman, beautiful male and female bodies, the
+ideal forms of everyone and everything he encountered, he understood
+and made his own. They were all living radiances against the dropped
+curtain of the world. He loved the light on flesh, and the shadows on
+strong arms, legs, and breasts. He avoided theory, either philosophic
+or esthetic. He had traveled through the ages of culture in his
+imagination, and was convinced that nothing was new and nothing was
+old. It was all living and eternal when it was genuine. He stepped out
+of the world of visible realities but seldom, and so it was, books and
+methods of interpretation held little for him. He didn't need them,
+for he held the whole world in his arms through the power of dream and
+vision. He touched life everywhere, touched it with himself.
+
+Rex Slinkard went away into a celestial calm October 18, 1918, in St.
+Vincent's Hospital, New York City. It is the few among those of us who
+knew him as poet and visionary and man, who wish earnestly that Rex
+might have remained. He gave much that many wanted, or would have
+wanted if they had had the opportunity of knowing him. The pictures
+and drawings that remain are the testimony of his splendid poetic
+talents. He was a lyrical painter of the first order. He is something
+that we miss mightily, and shall miss for long.
+
+
+
+
+SOME AMERICAN WATER-COLORISTS
+
+
+With the arrival of Cezanne into the field of water-color painting,
+this medium suffers a new and drastic instance for comparison. It is
+not technical audacity alone, of course, that confronts us in these
+brilliantly achieved performances, so rich in form as well as radiant
+with light. It is not the kind of virility for its own sake that is
+typical of our own American artists so gifted in this special medium,
+like Whistler, Sargent, Winslow Homer, Dodge Macknight, John Marin,
+and Charles Demuth. With Cezanne it was merely a new instrument to
+employ for the realization of finer plastic relations. The medium of
+water-color has been ably employed by the English and the Dutch
+painters, but it seems as if the artists of both these countries
+succeeded in removing all the brilliance and charm as well as the
+freshness which is peculiar to it; few outside of Cezanne have, I
+think, done more with water-color than the above named American
+artists, none who have kept more closely and consistently within the
+confines and peculiarities of this medium.
+
+In the consideration of the American water-color artists it will be
+found that Sargent and Homer tend always toward the graphic aspect of
+a pictorial idea, yet it is Homer who relieves his pictures of this
+obsession by a brilliant appreciation of the medium for its own sake.
+Homer steps out of the dry conventionalism of the English style of
+painting, which Sargent does not do. Much of that metallic harshness
+which is found in the oil pictures of Homer is relieved in the
+water-colors and there is added to this their extreme virtuosity, and
+a great distinction to be discovered in their sense of light and life,
+the sense of the object illumined with a wealth of vibrancy that is
+peculiar to its environment, particularly noticeable in the Florida
+series.
+
+Dodge Macknight has seen with a keen eye the importance of this
+virility of technique to be found in Homer, and has added to this a
+passion for impressionistic veracity which heightens his own work to a
+point distinctly above that of Sargent, and one might almost say above
+Winslow Homer. Macknight really did authenticate for himself the
+efficacy of impression with almost incredible feats of visual bravery.
+There is no array of pigment sufficient to satisfy him as for what
+heat and cold do to his sensibility, as experienced by the opposite
+poles of a New England winter and a tropical Mexican landscape. He is
+always in search of the highest height in contrasts, all this joined
+by what his sense of fierceness of light could bring to the fantastic
+dune stretches of Cape Cod in fiery autumn. His work in water-color
+has the convincing charm of almost fanaticism for itself; and we find
+this medium progressing still further with the fearlessness of John
+Marin in the absolute at-home-ness which he displays on all occasions
+in his audacious water-color pictures.
+
+Marin brings you to the feeling that digression is for him imperative
+only as affording him relief from the tradition of his medium. John
+Marin employs all the restrictions of water-color with the wisdom that
+is necessary in the case. He says that paper plus water, plus emotion
+will give a result in themselves and proceeds with the idea at hand in
+what may without the least temerity be called a masterly fashion; he
+has run the gamut of experience with his materials from the earliest
+Turner tonalities, through Whisterian vagaries on to American
+definiteness, and has incidentally noted that the Chinese have been
+probably the only supreme masters of the wash in the history of
+water-color painting. I can say for myself that Marin produces the
+liveliest, handsomest wash that is producible or that has ever been
+accomplished in the field of water-color painting. Perhaps many of the
+pictures of John Marin were not always satisfying in the tactile sense
+because many of them are taken up with an inevitable passion for
+technical virtuosity, which is no mean distinction in itself but we
+are not satisfied as once we were with this passion for audacity and
+virtuosity. We have learned that spatial existence and spatial
+relationships are the important essentials in any work of art. The
+precise ratio of thought accompanied by exactitude of emotion for the
+given idea is a matter of serious consideration with the modern
+artists of today. That is the special value of modern painting to the
+development of art.
+
+The Chinese really knew just what a wash was capable of, and confined
+themselves to the majesty of the limitations at hand. John Marin has
+been wise in this also though he is not precisely fanatical, which may
+be his chief defect, and it is probably true that the greatest
+experimenters have shown fanatical tendency, which is only the
+accentuated spirit of obsession for an idea. How else does one hold a
+vision? It is the only way for an artist to produce plastic exactitude
+between two planes of sensation or thought. The parts must be as
+perfect as the whole and in the best art this is so. There must be the
+sense of "existence" everywhere and it might even be said that the
+cool hue of the intellect is the first premise in a true work of art.
+Virtuosity is a state of expression but it is not the final state. One
+must search for as well as find the sequential quality which is
+necessitated for the safe arrival of a work of art into the sphere of
+esthetic existence.
+
+The water-colors of John Marin are restless with energy, which is in
+its way a real virtue. They do, I think, require, at times at least,
+more of the calm of research and less of the excitement of it. All
+true artistry is self-contained and never relies upon outer physical
+stimulus or inward extravagance of phantasy, or of idiosyncrasy. A
+work of art is never peculiar, it is always a natural thing. In this
+sense John Marin approaches real art because he is probably the most
+natural water-colorist in existence.
+
+With Charles Demuth water-color painting steps up into the true
+condition of ideas followed by experience. He has joined with
+modernism most consistently, having arrived at this state of
+progression by the process of investigation. The tradition of
+water-color painting takes a jump into the new field of modernism, and
+Demuth has given us his knowledge of the difference between
+illustration, depiction, and the plastic realization of fact. Probably
+no young artist has accomplished a finer degree of artistic finesse in
+illustration than has Charles Demuth in his series of illustrations
+for "The Two Magics" of Henry James, or more explicitly to say "The
+Turn of the Screw". These pictures are to the true observer all that
+could be hoped for in imaginative sincerity as well as in technical
+elusiveness. Demuth has since that time stepped out of the confinement
+of water-color pure, over into the field of tempera, which brings it
+nearer to the sturdier mediums employed in the making of pictures
+evolving a greater severity of form and a commendable rigidity of
+line. He has learned like so many moderns that the ruled line offers
+greater advantages in pictorial structure. You shall find his approach
+to the spirit of Christopher Wren is as clear and direct as his
+feeling for the vastiness of New England speechlessness. He has come
+up beyond the dramatisation of emotion to the point of expression for
+its own sake. But he is nevertheless to be included among the arrived
+water-colorists, because his gifts for expression have been evolved
+almost entirely through this medium. There is then a fine American
+achievement in the art of water-color painting which may safely be
+called at this time a localized tradition. It has become an American
+realization.
+
+
+
+
+THE APPEAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY
+
+
+Photography is an undeniable esthetic problem upon our modern artistic
+horizon. The idea of photography as an art has been discussed no doubt
+ever since the invention of the pinhole. In the main, I have always
+said for myself that the kodak offers me the best substitute for the
+picture of life, that I have found. I find the snapshot, almost
+without exception, holding my interest for what it contains of simple
+registration of and adherence to facts for themselves. I have had a
+very definite and plausible aversion to the "artistic" photograph, and
+we have had more than a surfeit of this sort of production for the
+past ten or fifteen years. I have referred frequently in my mind to
+the convincing portraits by David Octavius Hill as being among the
+first examples of photographic portraiture to hold my own private
+interest as clear and unmanipulated expressions of reality; and it is
+a definite as well as irresistible quality that pervades these
+mechanical productions, the charm of the object for its own sake.
+
+It was the irrelevant "artistic" period in photography that did so
+much to destroy the vital significance of photography as a type of
+expression which may be classed as among the real arts of today. And
+it was a movement that failed because it added nothing to the idea
+save a distressing superficiality. It introduced a fog on the brain,
+that was as senseless as it was embarrassing to the eye caring
+intensely for precision of form and accuracy of presentation.
+Photography was in this sense unfortunate in that it fell into the
+hands of adepts at the brush who sought to introduce technical
+variations which had nothing in reality to do with it and with which
+it never could have anything in common. All this sort of thing was
+produced in the age of the famous men and women, the period of
+eighteen ninety-five to nineteen hundred and ten say, for it was the
+age when the smart young photographer was frantic to produce famous
+sitters like Shaw and Rodin. We do not care anything about such things
+in our time because we now know that anybody well photographed
+according to the scope as well as the restrictions of the medium at
+hand could be, as has been proven, an interesting subject.
+
+It has been seen, as Alfred Stieglitz has so clearly shown, that an
+eyebrow, a leg, a tree trunk, a body, a breast, a hand, any part being
+equal to the whole in its power to tell the story, could be made as
+interesting, more so indeed than all the famous people in existence.
+It doesn't matter to us in the least that Morgan and Richard Strauss
+helped fill a folio alongside of Maeterlinck and such like persons.
+All this was, of course, in keeping with the theatricism of the period
+in which it was produced, which is one of the best things to be said
+of it. But we do know that Whistler helped ruin photography along
+with Wilde who helped ruin esthetics. Everyone has his office
+nevertheless. As a consequence, Alfred Stieglitz was told by the
+prevailing geniuses of that time that he was a back number because of
+his strict adherence to the scientific nature of the medium, because
+he didn't manipulate his plate beyond the strictly technical
+advantages it offered, and it was not therefore a fashionable addition
+to the kind of thing that was being done by the assuming ones at that
+time. The exhibition of the life-work of Alfred Stieglitz in March,
+1921, at the Anderson Galleries, New York, was a huge revelation even
+to those of us who along with our own ultra modern interests had found
+a place for good unadulterated photography in the scheme of our
+appreciation of the art production of this time.
+
+I can say without a qualm that photography has always been a real
+stimulus to me in all the years I have been personally associated with
+it through the various exhibitions held along with those of modern
+painting at the gallery of the Photo-Secession, or more intimately
+understood as "291". Photography was an interesting foil to the kind
+of veracity that painting is supposed to express, or rather to say,
+was then supposed to express; for painting like all other ideas has
+changed vastly in the last ten years, and even very much since the
+interval created by the war. I might have learned this anywhere else,
+but I did get it from the Stieglitz camera realizations with more
+than perhaps the expected frequency, and I am willing to assert now
+that there are no portraits in existence, not in all the history of
+portrait realization either by the camera or in painting, which so
+definitely present, and in many instances with an almost haunting
+clairvoyance, the actualities existing in the sitter's mind and body
+and soul. These portraits are for me without parallel therefore in
+this particular. And I make bold with another assertion, that from our
+modern point of view the Stieglitz photographs are undeniable works of
+art, as are also the fine photographs of the younger men like Charles
+Sheeler and Paul Strand. Sheeler, being also one of our best modern
+painters, has probably added to his photographic work a different type
+of sensibility by reason of his experience in the so-called creative
+medium of painting. It is, as we know, brain matter that counts in a
+work of art, and we have dispensed once and for all with the silly
+notion that a work of art is made by hand. Art is first and last of
+all, a product of the intelligence.
+
+I think the photographers must at least have been a trifle upset with
+this Stieglitz Exhibition. I know that many of the painters of the day
+were noticeably impressed. There was much to concern everyone there,
+in any degree that can be put upon us as interested spectators. For
+myself, I care nothing for the gift of interpretation, and far less
+for that dreadful type of effete facility which produces a kind of
+hocus-pocus technical brilliancy which fuddles the eye with a
+trickery, and produces upon the untrained and uncritical mind a kind
+of unintelligent hypnotism. Art these days is a matter of scientific
+comprehension of reality, not a trick of the hand or the old-fashioned
+manipulation of a brush or a tool. I am interested in presentation
+pure and simple. All things that are living are expression and
+therefore part of the inherent symbology of life. Art, therefore, that
+is encumbered with excessive symbolism is extraneous, and from my
+point of view, useless art. Anyone who understands life needs no
+handbook of poetry or philosophy to tell him what it is. When a
+picture looks like the life of the world, it is apt to be a fair
+picture or a good one, but a bad picture is nothing but a bad picture
+and it is bound to become worse as we think of it. And so for my own
+pleasure I have consulted the kodak as furnishing me with a better
+picture of life than many pictures I have seen by many of the
+so-called very good artists, and I have always delighted in the
+rotograph series of the Sunday papers because they are as close to
+life as any superficial representation can hope to be.
+
+It was obvious then that many of those who saw the Stieglitz
+photographs, and there were large crowds of them, were non-plussed by
+the unmistakable authenticity of experience contained in them. If you
+stopped there you were of course mystified, but there is no mystery
+whatever in these productions, for they are as clear and I shall even
+go so far as to say as objective as the daylight which produced them,
+and aside from certain intimate issues they are impersonal as it is
+possible for an artist to be. It is this quality in them which makes
+them live for me as realities in the art world of modern time. All art
+calls for one variety of audacity or another and so these photographs
+unfold one type of audacity which is not common among works of art,
+excepting of course in highly accentuated instances of autographic
+revelation. It is the intellectual sympathy with all the subjects on
+exhibition which is revealed in these photographs: A kind of spiritual
+diagnosis which is seldom or never to be found among the photographers
+and almost never among the painters of the conventional portrait. This
+ability, talent, virtue, or genius, whatever you may wish to name it,
+is without theatricism and therefore without spectacular demonstration
+either of the sitter or the method employed in rendering them.
+
+It is never a matter of arranging cheap and practically unrelated
+externals with Alfred Stieglitz. I am confident it can be said that he
+has never in his life made a spectacular photograph. His intensity
+runs in quite another channel altogether. It is far closer to the
+clairvoyant exposure of the psychic aspects of the moment, as
+contained in either the persons or the objects treated of. With these
+essays in character of Alfred Stieglitz, you have a series of types
+who had but one object in mind, to lend themselves for the use of the
+machine in order that a certain problem might be accurately rendered
+with the scientific end of the process in view, and the given
+actuality brought to the surface when possible. I see nothing in these
+portraits beyond this. I understand them technically very little only
+that I am aware that I have not for long, and perhaps never, seen
+plates that hold such depths of tonal value and structural
+relationship of light and shade as are contained in the hundred and
+fifty prints on exhibition in the Anderson Galleries. Art is a vastly
+new problem and this is the first thing which must be learned.
+Precisely as we learn that a certain type of painting ended in the
+history of the world with Cezanne.
+
+There is an impulse now in painting toward photographic veracity of
+experience as is so much in evidence in the work of an artist of such
+fine perceptions as Ingres, with a brushing aside of all old-fashioned
+notions of what constitutes artistic experience. There is a deliberate
+revolt, and photography as we know it in the work of Alfred Stieglitz
+and the few younger men like Strand and Sheeler is part of the new
+esthetic anarchism which we as younger painters must expect to make
+ourselves responsible for. It must be remembered you know, that there
+has been a war, and art is in a condition of encouraging and
+stimulating renascence, and we may even go so far as to say that it is
+a greater world issue than it was previous to the great catastrophe.
+And also, it must be heralded that as far as art is concerned the end
+of the world has been seen. The true artist, if he is intelligent, is
+witness of this most stimulating truth that confronts us. We cannot
+hope to function esthetically as we did before all this happened,
+because we are not the same beings intellectually. This does not mean
+in relation to photography that all straight photography is good. It
+merely means that the kind of photography I must name "Fifth Avenue"
+art, is a conspicuous species of artistic bunkum, and must be
+recognized as such.
+
+Photographers must know that fogging and blurring the image is
+curtailing the experience of it. It is a foolish notion that
+mystification is of any value. Flattery is one of the false elements
+that enter into the making of a work of art among the artists of
+doubtful integrity, but this is often if not always the commercial
+element that enters into it. There is a vast difference between this
+sort of representation and that which is to be found in Greek
+sculpture which is nothing short of conscious plastic organization.
+These figures were set up in terms of the prevailing systems of
+proportion. Portraits were likewise "arranged" through the artistry of
+the painter in matters of decoration for the great halls of the
+periods in which they were hung. They were studies on a large scale of
+ornamentation. Their beauty lies chiefly in the gift of execution. In
+these modern photographs of Stieglitz and his followers there is an
+engaging directness which cannot be and must not be ignored. They do
+for once give in the case of the portraits, and I mean chiefly of
+course the Stieglitz portraits, the actuality of the sitter without
+pose or theatricism of any sort, a rather rare thing to be said of the
+modern photograph.
+
+Stieglitz, therefore, despite his thirty or more years of
+experimentation comes up among the moderns by virtue of his own
+personal attitude toward photography, and toward his, as well as its,
+relation to the subject. His creative power lies in his ability to
+diagnose the character and quality of the sitter as being peculiar to
+itself, as a being in relation to itself seen by his own clarifying
+insight into general and well as special character and characteristic.
+It need hardly be said that he knows his business technically for he
+has been acclaimed sufficiently all over the world by a series of
+almost irrelevant medals and honours without end. The Stieglitz
+exhibition is one that should have been seen by everyone regardless of
+any peculiar and special predilection for art. These photos will have
+opened the eye and the mind of many a sleeping one as to what can be
+done by way of mechanical device to approach the direct charm of life
+in nature.
+
+The moderns have long since congratulated Alfred Stieglitz for his
+originality in the special field of his own creative endeavor. It will
+matter little whether the ancients do or not. His product is a fine
+testimonial to his time and therefore this is his contribution to his
+time. He finds himself, and perhaps to his own embarrassment even,
+among the best modern artists; for Stieglitz as I understand him cares
+little for anything beyond the rendering of the problem involved which
+makes him of course scientific first and whatever else afterward,
+which is the hope of the modern artists of all movements, regardless.
+Incidentally it may be confided he is an artistic idol of the Dadaists
+which is at least a happy indication of his modernism. If he were to
+shift his activities to Paris, he would be taken up at once for his
+actual value as modern artist expressing present day notions of actual
+things. Perhaps he will not care to be called Dada, but it is
+nevertheless true. He has ridden his own vivacious hobby-horse with as
+much liberty, and one may even say license, as is possible for one
+intelligent human being. There is no space to tell casually of his
+various aspects such as champion billiard player, racehorse
+enthusiast, etcetera. This information would please his dadaistic
+confreres, if no one else shows signs of interest.
+
+
+
+
+SOME WOMEN ARTISTS IN MODERN PAINTING
+
+
+It is for the purpose of specialization that the term woman is
+herewith applied to the idea of art in painting. Art is for anyone
+naturally who can show degree of mastery in it. There have been a
+great many women poets and musicians as well as actors, though
+singularly enough the women painters of history have been few, and for
+that matter in question of proportion remain so. Whatever the wish may
+be in point of dismissing the idea of sex in painting, there has so
+often been felt among many women engaging to express themselves in it,
+the need to shake off marked signs of masculinity, and even
+brutishness of attack, as denoting, and it must be said here, a
+factitious notion of power. Power in painting does not come from
+muscularity of arm; it comes naturally from the intellect. There are a
+great many male painters showing too many signs of femininity in their
+appreciation and the conception of art in painting. Art is neither
+male nor female. Nevertheless, it is pleasing to find women artists
+such as I wish to take up here, keeping to the charm of their own
+feminine perceptions and feminine powers of expression. It is their
+very femininity which makes them distinctive in these instances. This
+does not imply lady-like approach or womanly attitude of moral. It
+merely means that their quality is a feminine quality.
+
+In the work of Madame Delaunay Terck, who is the wife of Delaunay, the
+French Orphiste, which I have not seen since the war came on, one can
+say that she was then running her husband a very close second for
+distinction in painting and intelligence of expression. When two
+people work so closely in harmony with each other, it is and will
+always remain a matter of difficulty in knowing just who is the real
+expressor of an idea. Whatever there is of originality in the idea of
+Orphisme shall be credited to Delaunay as the inventor, but whether
+his own examples are more replete than those of Mme. Delaunay Terck is
+not easy of statement. There was at that time a marked increase of
+virility in production over those of Delaunay himself, but these are
+matters of private personal attack. Her Russian temper was probably
+responsible for this, at least no doubt, assisted considerably. There
+was nevertheless at that time marked evidence that she was in mastery
+of the idea of Orphisme both as to conception and execution. She
+showed greater signs of virility in her approach than did Delaunay
+himself. There was in his work a deal of what Gertrude Stein then
+called "white wind", a kind of thin escaping in the method. The
+designs did not lock so keenly. His work had always typical charm if
+it had not always satisfying vigor. His "Tour Eiffel" and a canvas
+called "Rugby" I think, I remember as having more grace than depth,
+but one may say nevertheless, real distinction.
+
+In the exchanging of ideas so intimately as has happened splendidly
+between Picasso and Braque, which is in the nature of professional
+dignity among artists, there is bound to be more or less confusion
+even to the highly perceptive artist and this must therefore confuse
+the casual observer and layman. So it is, or was at that time with the
+painting of Robert Delaunay and Mme. Delaunay Terck; what you learned
+in this instance was that the more vigorous of the pictures were hers.
+She showed the same strength and style in her work as in her
+interesting personality which was convincing without being too
+strained or forced; she was most probably an average Russian woman
+which as one knows means a great deal as to intelligence and personal
+power.
+
+
+MARIE LAURENCIN
+
+With Marie Laurencin there was a greater sense of personal and
+individual creation. One can never quite think of anyone in connection
+with her pictures other than the happy reminiscence of Watteau. With
+her work comes charm in the highest, finest sense; there is nothing
+trivial about her pictures, yet they abound in all the graces of the
+18th Century. Her drawings and paintings with spread fans and now and
+then a greyhound or a gazelle opposed against them in design, hold
+grace and elegance of feeling that Watteau would certainly have
+sanctioned. She brings up the same sense of exquisite gesture and
+simplicity of movement with a feeling for the romantic aspect of
+virginal life which exists nowhere else in modern painting. She
+eliminates all severities of intellect, and super-imposes wistful
+charm of idea upon a pattern of the most delicate beauty. She is
+essentially an original which means that she invents her own
+experience in art.
+
+Marie Laurencin concerns herself chiefly with the idea of girlish
+youth, young girls gazing toward each other with fans spread or
+folded, and fine braids of hair tied gently with pale cerise or pale
+blue ribbon, and a pearl-like hush of quietude hovers over them. She
+arrests the attention by her fine reticence and holds one's interest
+by the veracity of esthetic experience she evinces in her least or
+greatest painting or drawing. She paints with miniature sensibility
+and knows best of all what to leave out. She is eminently devoid of
+excessiveness either in pose or in treatment, with the result that
+your eye is refreshingly cooled with the delicate process.
+
+That Marie Laurencin keeps in the grace of French children is in no
+way surprising if you know the incomparable loveliness of them. Apart
+from her modernistic excellence as artist, she conveys a poetry so
+essentially French in quality that you wish always for more and more
+of it. It is the light breath of the Luxembourg gardens and the
+gardens of the Tuilleries coming over you once more and the same
+grace in child-life as existed in the costly games at Versailles among
+the grown-ups depicted so superbly by Watteau and his most worthy
+followers, Lancret and Pater, in whom touch is more breath than
+movement. It is a sensitive and gracefully aristocratic creation Marie
+Laurencin produces for us, one that makes the eye avid of more
+experience and the mind of more of its subtlety. It is an essentially
+beautiful and satisfying contribution to modern painting, this
+nacreous cubism of Marie Laurencin.
+
+
+GEORGIA O'KEEFFE[1]
+
+With Georgia O'Keeffe one takes a far jump into volcanic crateral
+ethers, and sees the world of a woman turned inside out and gaping
+with deep open eyes and fixed mouth at the rather trivial world of
+living people. "I wish people were all trees and I think I could enjoy
+them then," says Georgia O'Keeffe. Georgia O'Keeffe has had her feet
+scorched in the laval effusiveness of terrible experience; she has
+walked on fire and listened to the hissing of vapors round her person.
+The pictures of O'Keeffe, the name by which she is mostly known, are
+probably as living and shameless private documents as exist, in
+painting certainly, and probably in any other art. By shamelessness I
+mean unqualified nakedness of statement. Her pictures are essential
+abstractions as all her sensations have been tempered to abstraction
+by the too vicarious experience with actual life. She had seen hell,
+one might say, and is the Sphynxian sniffer at the value of a secret.
+She looks as if she had ridden the millions of miles of her every
+known imaginary horizon, and has left all her horses lying dead in
+their tracks. All in quest of greater knowledge and the greater sense
+of truth. What these quests for truth are worth no one can precisely
+say, but the tendency would be to say at least by one who has gone far
+to find them out that they are not worthy of the earth or sky they are
+written on. Truth has soiled many an avenue, it has left many a
+drawing room window open. It has left the confession box filled with
+bones. However, Georgia O'Keeffe pictures are essays in experience
+that neither Rops nor Moreau nor Baudelaire could have smiled away.
+
+[Footnote 1: American.--Ed.]
+
+She is far nearer to St. Theresa's version of life as experience than
+she could ever be to that of Catherine the Great or Lucrezia Borgia.
+Georgia O'Keeffe wears no poisoned emeralds. She wears too much white;
+she is impaled with a white consciousness. It is not without
+significance that she wishes to paint red in white and still have it
+look like red. She thinks it can be done and yet there is more red in
+her pictures than any other color at present; though they do, it must
+be said, run to rose from ashy white with oppositions of blue to keep
+them companionable and calm. The work of Georgia O'Keeffe startles by
+its actual experience in life. This does not imply street life or sky
+life or drawing room life, but life in all its huge abstraction of
+pain and misery and its huge propensity for silencing the spirit of
+adventure. These pictures might also be called expositions of psychism
+in color and movement.
+
+Without some one to steady her, I think O'Keeffe would not wish the
+company of more tangible things than trees. She knows why she despises
+existence, and it comes from facing the acute dilemma with more
+acuteness than it could comprehend. She is vastly over-size as to
+experience in the spiritual geometric of the world. All this gives her
+painting as clean an appearance as it is possible to imagine in
+painting. She soils nothing with cheap indulgence of wishing
+commonplace things. She has wished too large and finds the world
+altogether too small in comparison.
+
+What the future holds for Georgia O'Keeffe as artist depends upon
+herself. She is modern by instinct and therefore cannot avoid
+modernity of expression. It is not willed, it is inevitable. When she
+looks at a person or a thing she senses the effluvia that radiate from
+them and it is by this that she gauges her loves and hates or her
+tolerance of them. It is enough that her pictures arrive with a
+strange incongruous beauty which, though metaphysically an import,
+does not disconcert by this insistence. She knows the psychism of
+patterns and evolves them with strict regard for the pictural aspects
+in them which save them from banality as ideas. She has no preachment
+to offer and utters no rubbish on the subject of life and the problem.
+She is one of the exceptional girls of the world both in art and in
+life. As artist she is as pure and free from affectation as in life
+she is relieved from the necessity of it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If there are other significant women in modern art I am not as yet
+familiarized with them. These foregoing women take their place
+definitely as artists within the circle of women painters like Le
+Brun, Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, and are in advance of them by
+being closer to the true appreciation of esthetics in inventing them
+for themselves.
+
+
+
+
+REVALUATIONS IN IMPRESSIONISM
+
+
+In the consideration of the real factors in the impressionistic
+movement, we learn that it is not Monet and the younger crew such as
+Moret, Maufra, George d'Espagnat and Guillaumin who give us the real
+weight of this esthetic argument. We find Monet going in for
+hyper-sentimentalized iridiscences which culminate or seem to
+culminate in the "Lily" series until we are forced to say he has let
+us out, once and for all, as far as any further interest in the theory
+with which he was concerned. We are no longer held by these artificial
+and overstrained hues, and we find the younger followers offering
+little or nothing to us save an obvious integrity of purpose. These
+younger men had apparently miscomprehended idiosyncrasies for ideas
+and that, save for a certain cleanness of intention, they were
+offering scarcely anything of what is to be found by way of
+realization in the pictures of a really great colorist like Renoir.
+
+The two artists who give the true thrill of this phase of the modern
+movement are without question Pissarro and Sisley. It is the belief of
+these two artists in the appearance of things for themselves, under
+the influence of the light problem, which gives them a strength not
+always visible at first by reason of a greater simplicity of effect
+which dominates all of their pictures. We see in both these men a real
+and impressive desire for a more exacting scientific relation as
+discovered by intellectual consideration, than is to be found in the
+emotional outcry predominating in most of the pictures of Monet. These
+do not hold for us in this day as solidly as they were expected to.
+There is a kind of superficiality and consequent dissatisfaction in
+the conspicuous aspiration toward the first flush, one may call it, of
+enthusiasm for impressionistic experience. There comes to one who is
+really concerned, the ever increasing desire to turn toward Pissarro
+and Sisley and to quietly dispense with many or most of Monet's
+pictures, not to speak of a legitimate haste to pass over the
+phlegmatic enthusiasms of the younger followers.
+
+One feels that Pissarro must have been a great man among men not so
+great. One feels likewise that the stately reticence of a man like
+Sisley is worth far more to us now, if only because we find in his
+works as they hang one beside another in numbers, a soberer and more
+cautious approach to the theme engrossing him and the other artists of
+the movement of that time. In the pictures of Sisley there is the
+charm of the fact for itself, the delight of the problem of placing
+the object in relation to the luminous atmosphere which covers it.
+
+Men like Pissarro and Sisley were not forgetting Courbet and his
+admirable knowledge of reality. They were not concerned with the
+spectacular aspect of the impressionistic principle, not nearly so
+much as with the satisfying realization of the object under the
+influence of the new scientific problem in esthetics with which they
+were concerned. For myself I am out of touch with Monet as a creator
+and I find myself extracting far more satisfaction and belief from
+Pissarro and Sisley, who deal with the problem of nature plus idea,
+with a much greater degree of let me even say sincerity, by reason of
+one fact and perhaps the most important one: they were not dramatizing
+the idea in hand. They were not creating a furor with pink and
+lavender haystacks. They were satisfied that there was still something
+to be found in the old arrangement of negative and positive tones as
+they were understood before the application of the spectrum turned the
+brains and sensibilities of men. In other words Courbet survived while
+the Barbizonians perished. There was an undeniable realization of fact
+still there, clamoring for consideration. There was the reality then
+even as now, as always. With Pissarro and Sisley there appeared the
+true separation of tone, making itself felt most intelligently in the
+work of these men from whom the real separatists Seurat, Signac, and
+Cross were to realize their principle of pointilism, of which
+principle Seurat was to prove himself the most satisfactory creative
+exponent.
+
+The world of art lost a very great deal in the untimely death of
+Seurat; he was a young man of great artistic and intellectual gifts.
+There was an artist by the name of Vignon who came in for his share
+during the impressionistic period, probably not with any more dramatic
+glamour than he achieves now by his very simple and unpretentious
+pictures. I am sorry for my own pleasure that I have not been able to
+see more of this artist's pictures from whom I think our own Theodore
+Robinson must have gained a deal of strength for his own bridge
+building between Bastien Le Page and the Monet "eccentricity," so to
+call it.
+
+There is always a reason for reticence, and it is usually apt to come
+from thinking. Sisley and Pissarro, Vignon, Seurat, and Robinson were
+thinking out a way to legitimize the new fantastic craze for prismatic
+violence, and they found it in the direct consideration for the fact.
+They knew that without objects light would have nowhere to fall, that
+the earth confronted them with indispensable phenomena each one of
+which had its reason for being. They were finding instead of losing
+their heads, which is always a matter of praise. I could stay with
+almost any Pissarro or Sisley I have ever seen, as I could always want
+any Seurat near me, just as I could wish almost any Monet out of sight
+because I find it submerged with emotional extravagance, too much
+enthusiasm for his new pet idea.
+
+Scientific appreciation had not come with scientific intentions. Like
+most movements, it was left to other than the accredited innovators
+for its completion and perfection. That is why we find Cezanne
+working incessantly to create an art which would achieve a union of
+impressionism and an art like the Louvre, as he is said to have
+characterized it for himself. We know now how much Cezanne cared for
+Chardin as well as for Courbet, and Greco. There is a reason why he
+must have respected Pissarro, far more than he did at any time such
+men as Gaugin, the "flea on his back" as he so vividly and perhaps
+justly named him. There was far more hope for a possible great art to
+come out of Van Gogh, who, in his brief seven years had experimented
+with every aspect of impressionism that had then been divulged. He too
+was in search of a passionate realization of the object. His method of
+heavy stitching in bright hues was not a perfected style. It was an
+extravagant hope toward a personal rhythm. He was an "upwardly"
+aspiring artist by reason of his hyper-accentuated religious fervours.
+All these extraneous and one might even say irrelevant attempts toward
+speedy arrivism are set aside in the presence of the almost solemn
+severity of minds like Pissarro and Sisley, and of Cezanne, who
+extracted for himself all that was valuable in the passing idea of
+impressionism. The picture which lasts is never the entirely
+idiosyncratic one. It is that picture which strives toward realization
+of ideas through a given principle with which it is involved.
+
+So it seems then, that if Monet invented the principle of
+impressionism as applied to painting, Pissarro and Sisley assisted
+greatly in the creative idea for our lasting use and pleasure by the
+consideration of the intellect which they applied to it; just as
+Seurat has given us a far greater realization than either Signac or
+Cross have offered us in the principle of pointillism.
+
+The "test of endurance" in the impressionistic movement is borne out;
+the strength of realization is to be found in Pissarro and Sisley and
+not in the vapid niceties of Monet, whose work became thinner and
+thinner by habitual repetitive painting, and by a possible false sense
+of security in his argument. Monet had become the habitual
+impressionist, and the habitual in art is its most conspicuous
+fatality. The art of Monet grew weaker throughout the various stages
+of Waterloo, Venice, Rouen, Giverney, and the Water Lilies which
+formed periods of expression, at least to the mind of the observer.
+Monet's production had become a kind of mercerized production, and a
+kind of spurious radiance invested them, in the end. It remained for
+Pissarro, Sisley, Cezanne, and Seurat to stabilize the new discovery,
+and to give it the stamina it was meant to contain, as a scientific
+idea, scientifically applied.
+
+
+
+
+ODILON REDON
+
+
+With the passing of this rare artist during the late summer months,[2]
+we are conscious of the silencing of one of the foremost lyricists in
+painting, one of the most delicate spirits among those who have
+painted pictures so thoroughly replete with charm, pictures of such
+real distinction and merit. For of true charm, of true grace, of true
+melodic, Redon was certainly the master. I think no one has coveted
+the vision so much as, certainly no more than, has this artist,
+possessed of the love of all that is dream-like and fleeting in the
+more transitory aspect of earthly things. No one has ever felt more
+that fleeting treasure abiding in the moment, no one has been more
+jealous of the bounty contained in the single glancing of the eye
+upward to infinity or downward among the minuter fragments at his
+feet.
+
+[Footnote 2: Of 1917.--Ed.]
+
+It would seem as if Redon had surely walked amid gardens, so much of
+the morning is in each of his fragile works. There seems always to be
+hovering in them the breath of those recently spent dawns of which he
+was the eager spectator, never quite the full sunlight of the later
+day. Essentially he was the worshipper of the lip of flower, of dust
+upon the moth wing, of the throat of young girl, or brow of young
+boy, of the sudden flight of bird, the soft going of light clouds in a
+windless sky. These were the gentle stimulants to his most virile
+expression. Nor did his pictures ever contain more; they never
+struggled beyond the quality of legend, at least as I know them. He
+knew the loveliness in a profile, he saw always the evanescences of
+light upon light and purposeless things. The action or incident in his
+pictures was never more than the touch of some fair hand gently and
+exquisitely brushing some swinging flower. He desired implicitly to
+believe in the immortality of beauty, that things or entities once
+they were beautiful could never die, at least for him. I followed
+faithfully for a time these fine fragments in those corners of Paris
+where they could be found, and there was always sure to be in them,
+always and ever that perfect sense of all that is melodic in the
+universe.
+
+I do not know much of his early career as an artist. I have read
+passages from letters which he wrote not so long ago, in which he
+recounts with tenderness the dream life of his childhood, how he used
+to stand in the field for hours or lie quietly upon some cool hill
+shaded with young leaves, watching the clouds transforming themselves
+into wing shapes and flower shapes, staining his fancy with the magic
+of their delicate color and form--indeed, it would seem as if all
+things had for him been born somewhere in the clouds and had
+condescended to an earthward existence for a brief space, the better
+to show their rarity of grace for the interval. Although obviously
+rendered from the object, they were still-lifes which seemed to take
+on a kind of cloud life during the very process of his creation. They
+paid tribute to that simple and unaffected statement of his--"I have
+fashioned an art after myself." Neither do I know just how long he was
+the engraver and just how long he was the painter--it is evident
+everywhere that his line is the line of the fastidious artist on steel
+and stone.
+
+Beyond these excessively frail renderings of his, whether in oil or in
+pastel, I do not know him, but I am thinking always in the presence of
+them that he listened very attentively and with more than a common ear
+to the great masters in music, absorbing at every chance all that was
+in them for him. He had in his spirit the classical outline of music,
+with nothing directly revolutionary, no sign of what we call revolt
+other than the strict adherence to personal relationship, no other
+prejudice than the artist's reaction against all that is not really
+refined to art, with but one consuming ardor, and that to render with
+extreme tranquillity everything delicate and lovely in passing things.
+There is never anything in his pictures outside the conventional logic
+of beauty, and if they are at all times ineffably sweet, it is only
+because Redon himself was like them, joyfully living out the days
+because they were for him ineffably sweet, too. Most of all it is
+Redon who has rendered with exceptional elegance and extreme
+artistry, the fragment.
+
+It is in his pictures, replete with exquisiteness, that one finds the
+true analogy to lyric poetry. This lyricism makes them seem mostly
+Greek--often I have thought them Persian, sometimes again, Indian;
+certainly he learned something from the Chinese in their porcelains
+and in their embroidery. I am sure he has been fond of these outer
+influences, these Oriental suggestions which were for him the
+spiritual equivalent from the past for his spontaneous ideas, for he,
+too, had much of all this magic, as he had much of the hypnotic
+quality of jewelry and precious stones in all his so delicate
+pictures, firelike in their subtle brilliancy. They have always seemed
+to contain this suggestion for me: flowers that seemed to be much more
+the embodiment of jades, rubies, emeralds, and ambers, than just
+flowers from the common garden. His flamelike touches have always held
+this preciousness: notations rather for the courtly robe or diadem
+than just drawings. All this gift of goldsmithery comes as one would
+expect, quite naturally, from his powers as an engraver, in which art
+he held a first place in his time and was the master of the younger
+school, especially in Belgium and Germany. Of all the painters of this
+time it is certain he was first among them essaying to picture the
+jewelled loveliness of nature; it is most evident in La Touche who was
+in no way averse to Renoir either, but Redon has created this touch
+for himself and it is the touch of the virtuoso. Perhaps it would have
+been well if Moreau, who had a sicker love of this type of expression,
+had followed Redon more closely, as he might then have added a little
+more lustre to these very dead literary failures of his.
+
+I cannot now say who else beside Ferdinand Khnopff has been influenced
+greatly by him, but I do know that he was beloved by the more modern
+men, that he was revered by all regardless of theories or tenets, for
+there is in existence somewhere in Paris a volume of letters and
+testimonials celebrating some anniversary of Redon in proof of it. And
+I think that--regardless of ideas--the artist must always find him
+sympathetic, if for no other reason than that he was the essence of
+refinement, of delicacy, and of taste. When I think of Redon I think
+of Shelley a little, "he is dusty with tumbling about among the
+stars," and I think somewhat, too, of some phrases in Debussy and his
+unearthly school of musicians, for if we are among those who admire
+sturdier things in art we can still love the fine gift of purity. And
+of all gifts Redon has that, certainly.
+
+His art holds, too, something of that breathlessness among the trees
+one finds in Watteau and in Lancret, maybe more akin to Lancret, for
+he, also, was more a depicter of the ephemeral. We think of Redon as
+among those who transvaluate all earthly sensations in terms of a
+purer element. We think of him as living with his head among the
+mists, alert for all those sudden bursts of light which fleck here and
+there forgotten or unseen places, making them live with a new
+resplendency, full of new revealment, perfect with wonder. Happily we
+find in him a hatred of description and of illustration, we find these
+pictures to be illuminations from rich pages not observed by the
+common eye, decorations out of a world the like of which has been but
+too seldom seen by those who aspire to vision. _Chansons sans paroles_
+are they, ringing clearly and flawlessly to the eye as do those songs
+of Verlaine (with whom he has also some relationship) to the
+well-attuned ear.
+
+He was the master of the nuance, and the nuance was his lyricism, his
+special gift, his genius. He knew perfectly the true vibration of note
+to note, and how few are they whose esthetic emotions are built upon
+the strictly poetic basis, who escape the world-old pull towards
+description and illustration. How few, indeed, among those of the
+materialistic vision escape this. But for Redon there was but one
+world, and that a world of imperceptible light on all things visible,
+with always a kind of song of adoration upon his lips, as it were,
+obsessed with reverence and child wonder toward every least and
+greatest thing, and it was in these portrayals of least things that he
+exposed their naked loveliness as among the greatest. Never did Redon
+seek for the miniature; he knew merely that the part is the
+representation of the whole, that the perfect fragment is a true
+representative of beauty, and that the vision of some fair hand or
+some fair eye is sure to be the epitome of all that is lovely in the
+individual.
+
+We have as a result of this almost religious devotion of Redon's, the
+fairest type of the expression of that element which is the eye's
+equivalent for melodious sound. In his pictures he perpetuated his
+belief in the unfailing harmony in things. Either all things were
+lovely in his eye, or they are made beautiful by thinking beautifully
+of them. That was the only logic in Redon's painting. He questioned
+nothing; he saw the spiritual import of every object on which his eye
+rested. No one shall go to Redon for any kind of intellectual
+departure or for any highly specialized theory--it is only too evident
+from his work that he had none in mind. He had, I think, a definite
+belief in the theosophic principle of aura, in that element of
+emanation which would seem sometimes to surround delicate objects
+touched with the suffusion of soft light. For him all things seemed
+"possessed" by some colorful presence which they themselves could in
+no way be conscious of, somewhat the same sort of radiance which
+floods the features of some beauteous person and creates a presence
+there which the person is not even conscious of, the imaginative
+reality, in other words, existing either within or without everything
+the eye beholds. For him the very air which hovered about all things
+seemed to have, as well, the presence of color not usually seen of
+men, and it was this emanation or presence which formed the living
+quality of his backgrounds in which those wondrous flowery heads and
+hands and wings had their being, through which those dusty wings of
+most unearthly butterflies or moths hurry so feverishly. He has given
+us a happy suggestion of the reality of spiritual spaces and the way
+that these fluttering bodies which are little more than spirit
+themselves have enjoyed a beauteous life. He was Keats-like in his
+appreciation of perfect loveliness, like Shelley in his passionate
+desire to transform all local beauty into universal terms.
+
+No one will quarrel with Redon on account of what is not in him. What
+we do find in him is the poetry of a quiet, sweet nature in quest
+always of perfect beauty, longing to make permanent by means of a rare
+and graceful art some of those fragments which have given him his
+private and personal clue to the wonders of the moment, creating a
+personal art by being himself a rare and lovely person. He remains for
+us one of the finest of artists, who has reverted those whisperings
+from the great world of visual melody in which he lived. It was with
+these exquisite fragments that he adorned the states of his own soul
+in order that he might present them as artist in tangible art form. We
+are grateful for his lyricism and for his exquisite goldsmithery.
+After viewing his delicately beautiful pictures, objects take on a new
+poetic wonder.
+
+
+
+
+THE VIRTUES OF AMATEUR PAINTING
+
+WITH SPECIAL PRAISES FOR JENNIE VANVLEET COWDERY
+
+
+Some of the finest instances of pure painting will be found, not as
+might be imagined by the layman, among the professional artists, but
+among those amateurs whose chief occupation is amusing themselves first
+of all. If you who read will make close reference to those rich examples
+of the mid-Victorian period, when it was more or less distinguished to
+take up painting along with the other accomplishments, you will find
+that the much tabooed antimacassar period produced a species of painting
+that was as indicative of personal style and research as it was fresh in
+its elemental approach. The perfect instance in modern art of this sort
+of original painting raised to the highest excellence is that of Henri
+Rousseau, the true primitive of our so eclectic modern period. No one
+can have seen a picture of this most talented douanier without being
+convinced that technique for purely private personal needs has been
+beautified to an extraordinary degree.
+
+Rousseau stands among the very best tonalists as well as among the
+best designers of modern time, and his pictures hold a quality so
+related to the experience contained in their subjects, as to seem
+like the essence of the thing itself. You feel that unquestionably
+Rousseau's Paris is Paris, and you are made to feel likewise that his
+jungle scenes are at very least his own experiences of his earlier
+life in Mexico. Rousseau convinces by his unquestionable sensitivity
+and integrity of approach. He was not fabricating an art, he was
+endeavoring to create a real picture for his own private satisfaction,
+and his numerous successes are both convincing and admirable.
+
+As I have said, if you have access to a variety of amateur pictures
+created during the mid-Victorian era, of whatever style or subject,
+you will find in them the most admirably sincere qualities of painting
+as well as singularly enchanting gifts for simplication and the always
+engaging respect for the fact itself out of which these painted
+romanzas are created. There was the type of memorial picture for
+instance, with its proverbial tombstone, its weeping willow tree, and
+its mourner leaning with one elbow, usually on the cornice above,
+where the name of the beloved deceased is engraved; below it the
+appropriate motto and its added wealth of ornamentation in the way of
+landscape, with houses, hills, winding roads, with maybe an animal or
+two grazing in the field, and beyond all this vista, an ocean with
+pretty vessels passing on their unmindful way, and more often than
+not, many species of bright flowers in the foreground to heighten the
+richness of memory and the sentimental aspects of bereavement.
+
+I wish I could take you to two perfect examples of this sort of
+amateur painting which I have in mind, now in the possession of the
+Maine Historical Society, of Portland, Maine, as well as one other
+superb and still more perfect example of this sort of luxuriously
+painted memory of life, in the collection of a noted collector of
+mid-Victorian splendours, near Boston. It is sensation at first hand
+with these charmingly impressive amateur artists. They have been
+hampered in no way with the banality of school technique learned in
+the manner of the ever-present and unoriginal copyist. They literally
+invent expression out of a personally accumulated passion for beauty
+and they have become aware of it through their own intensely
+personalised contact with life. The marine painters of this period,
+and earlier, of which there have been almost numberless instances, and
+of whose fine performances there are large numbers on view in the
+Marine Museum in Salem, Mass., offer further authentication of private
+experience with phases of life that men of the sea are sure to know,
+the technical beauty alone of which furnishes the spectator with many
+surprises and fascinations in the line of simplicity and directness of
+expression.
+
+Many of these amateur painters were no longer young in point of actual
+years. Henri Rousseau was as we know past forty when he was finally
+driven to painting in order to establish his own psychic entity. And
+so it is with all of them, for there comes a certain need somewhere in
+the consciousness of everyone, to offset the tedium of common
+experience with some degree of poetic sublimation. With the result
+that many of them find their way out by taking to paints and brushes
+and canvas, astonishing many a real painter, if not the untutored
+layman, who probably expects to be mystified in one way or another by
+something which he thinks he does not understand. It is of the
+charming pictures of Jennie Vanvleet Cowdery that I wish to speak
+here.
+
+Mrs. Cowdery is a southern lady, and of this fact you become aware
+instantly you find yourself in conversation with her. She evidences
+all the traits and characteristics of a lady of her period, which is
+to say the late mid-Victorian, for she must have been a graceful young
+woman herself at the close of this fascinating period. And you find,
+therefore, in her quaint and convincingly original pictures, the
+passion for the charms and graces that were consistent with the period
+in which she spent her girlhood, and which has left upon her
+consciousness so dominant a trace. The pictures of Mrs. Cowdery,
+despite their remoteness of surrounding--for she always places her
+graceful figures, which are no less than the embodiments of her own
+graceful states of being, in a dense woodland scene--bring up to the
+senses all the fragrances of that past time, the redolence of the
+oleander by the wall, of the camelia in the shadow, and of the pansy
+by the hedge. You expect these ladies to shake gently upon the air,
+like flowers in the morning, their own fascinating perfumes, as you
+expect them to recite in the quietude of the wood in which they are
+walking those sentiments which are appropriate to the season and of
+other soft remembrances.
+
+Mrs. Cowdery might have taken to needlework, and sat like many another
+young woman of that time by the window with the sunlight streaming in
+upon the coloured stitches of her work, or she might perhaps more
+strictly have taken to miniature painting, the quality of which style
+is so much in evidence in these pleasant pictures of hers. The
+pictures of Mrs. Cowdery will not stimulate the spectator to reflect
+with gravity upon the size of the universe, but they dwell entirely
+upon the intimate charm of it, the charm that rises out of breeding
+and cultivation, and a feeling for the finer graces of the body and
+sweet purities of mind. Mrs. Cowdery is essentially a breather and a
+bringer of peace. There is no purpose in these gracious and
+entertaining pictures, for they are invented solely to recall and make
+permanent, for this lady's own delight, those moments of joy of which
+there must have been many if the gentleness and the clear quality of
+revery in them is to be taken; and these pictures are to be taken
+first and last as genuine works of art in their own way, which is the
+only way that true works of art can be taken seriously.
+
+The most conspicuous virtue of these quaintly engaging pictures of
+Mrs. Cowdery is the certainty you find in them of the lack of
+struggle. Their author is, without doubt, at peace with the world, for
+the world is without significance in the deeper sense to all really
+serious artists, those who have vital information to convey. Mrs.
+Cowdery's career as a painter is of short and impressive duration,
+barely four years she confides, and she has been an engaging feature
+of the Society of Independent Artists for at least three of these
+years, I believe. It is her picture which she names "1869" which has
+called most attention to her charming talents, and which created so
+convincing an impression among the artists for its originality and its
+insistence upon the rendering of beautified personal experience.
+
+Mrs. Cowdery must have loved her earliest girlish hours with excessive
+delight, and perhaps it is the garish contrast of the youth of the
+young women of this time, energetic and, from the mid-Victorian
+standpoint certainly, so unwomanly, that prompts this gentle and
+refined woman to people her gracious solitudes of spirit with those
+still more gracious lady-like beings which she employs. For her
+pictures, that is her most typical ones, contain always these
+groupings of figures in crinoline-like gowns with perhaps more of the
+touch of eighteen-eighty than of seventy in them, so given to flounces
+and cascades of lace with picture hats to shade the eyes, and
+streamers of velvet ribbon to give attenuated sensations of grace to
+their quietly sweeping figures that seem to be always in a state of
+harmless gossip among themselves. One never knows whether it is to be
+quite morning or afternoon for there is seldom or never present the
+quality of direct sunlight; but as ladies and gentlemen usually walk
+in the afternoon even now, if there are still such virtuous entities
+as ladies and gentlemen, we may presume that these are afternoon
+seances, poetically inscribed, which Mrs. Cowdery wishes to convey to
+us. That Mrs. Cowdery has a well adjusted feeling for the harmony of
+hues is evident in her production as well as in the outline of her
+simple and engaging conversation.
+
+Thus the lady lives, in a world gently fervorous with lyric
+delicacies, and her own almost girlish laughter is like a kind of
+gracious music for the scenes she wishes to portray. I am reminded in
+this instance to compare her gentle voice with the almost inaudible
+one of Albert Ryder, that greatest of visionaries which America has so
+far produced. It is probable that all mystical types have voices
+softened to whispers by the vastness of the experience which they have
+endured. These gentle souls survive the period they were born in, and
+it is their clean and unspoiled vision that brings them over to us in
+this hectic and metallic era of ours. They come, it must be
+remembered, from the era of Jenny Lind and Castle Garden, though of
+course in Mrs. Cowdery's case she is too young actually to have
+survived that period literally. It is the grace of that period,
+however, to which she has become heir and all her efforts have been
+exercised in rendering of the graces of this playful and pretty hour
+of human life.
+
+We are reminded, for the moment only, of Monticelli, chiefly through
+similarity of subject, for he also was fond of the silent park
+inhabited with gracious beings in various states of spiritual ecstasy
+and satisfaction. In the pictures of Mrs. Cowdery there is doubtless
+greater intimacy of feeling, because it is a private and very personal
+issue with her own happy soul. She has come out on the other edge of
+the horizon of the world of humans, and finds the looking backward so
+imperatively exquisite as to make it necessary for her to paint them
+with innocent fidelity; and so she has set about, without any previous
+experience in the handling of homely materials, to make them tell in
+quaint and gracious accents the pretty story of the life of her
+revivified imagination. In these ways she becomes a kind of
+revivification of the spirit of Watteau, who has made perfect, for us
+all, what is perfect in the classicized ideality of experience.
+
+I think of Mrs. Cowdery's pictures as mid-Victorian fans, for they
+seem more like these frail shapes to be wafted by frail and slender
+hands; I seem to feel the quiet glitter of prisms hanging from huge
+chandeliers in a ball-room, as I look at them; for they become, if you
+do not scrutinize them too closely as works of art, rather as
+prismatic memories bathed in the light of that other time, when men
+and women now grandfathers and grandmothers were young and handsome
+boys and girls, seeking each other out in the fashion of polite beaus
+and belles, a period that will never come again, it is certain. Mrs.
+Cowdery need not be alarmed that modern painters wish to offer plain
+homage to her fresh and engaging talents. It is an object lesson, if
+such is necessary, to all men and women past fifty: that there is
+still something for each of them to do in a creative way; and I can
+think of no more engaging way for them than to recite the romantic
+history of their youthful longings and realizations to a world that
+has little time for making history so romantically inoffensive.
+
+Mrs. Cowdery may be complimented therefore that she has followed her
+professional daughter's advice to take up painting as a pastime, and
+she has already shown in these brief four years, with all the
+intermissions that are natural to any ordinary life, that she is a
+fine type of amateur artist with all the world of rediscovery at her
+disposal. She will be hampered in no way with the banalities of
+instruction offered her by the assuming ones. She is beyond the need
+of anything but self-invention, and this will be her own unique and
+satisfying pleasure. It is in no way amiss, then, to congratulate
+Mrs. Cowdery upon her new and vital artistic career. That she will
+have further success is proven by the few pictures already created by
+her. They show the unmistakable signs of taste and artistic
+comprehension as applied to her own spiritual vision. No intervention
+will be of any avail, save perhaps the permissible intervention of
+praise and congratulations.
+
+Incidentally, I would recommend to those artists who are long since
+jaded with repetition and success, and there are many of them, to
+refresh their eyes and their senses with the work of these outwardly
+unassuming but thoroughly convincing amateurs, like Henri Rousseau,
+Mrs. Cowdery and the many others whose names do not appear on their
+handsome works of art. There is such freshness of vision and true art
+experience contained in them. They rely upon the imagination entirely
+for their revelations, and there is always present in these
+unprofessional works of art acute observation of fact and fine gifts
+for true fancy. These amateurs are never troubled with the "how" of
+mediocre painting; neither are they troubled with the wiles of the
+outer world. They remain always charming painters of personal
+visionary experience, and as such are entitled to praise for their
+genuine gifts in rendering, as well as for a natural genius for
+interpretation.
+
+
+
+
+HENRI ROUSSEAU
+
+
+Not long since, we heard much of naivete--it was the fashion among the
+schools and the lesser individuals to use this term in describing the
+work of anyone who sought to distinguish himself by eccentricity of
+means. It was often the term applied to bizarrerie--it was fashionable
+to draw naively, as it was called. We were expected to believe in a
+highly developed and overstrained simplicity, it was the resort of a
+certain number who wanted to realize speedy results among the
+unintelligent. It was a pose which lasted not long because it was
+obviously a pose, and a pose not well carried, it had not the
+prescribed ease about it and showed signs of labor. It had, for a
+time, its effect upon really intelligent artists with often
+respectable results, as it drew the tendency away from too highly
+involved sophistication. It added a fresh temper in many ways, and
+helped men to a franker type of self-expression; and was, as we may
+expect, something apart from the keen need of obliviousness in the
+great modern individualists, those who were seeking direct contact
+with subject.
+
+We have learned in a short space of time that whatever was exceptional
+in the ideas and attitudes of the greater ones, as we know them, was
+not at all the outcome of the struggle toward an affected naivete
+such as we have heard so much about, but was, on another hand, a real
+phase of their originality, the other swing of the pendulum, so to
+call it. It was the "accent" of their minds and tempers, it was a true
+part of their personal gesture, and was something they could not, and
+need not, do anything about, as if it were the normal tendency in them
+in their several ways. We all of us know that modern art is not
+haphazard, it is not hit or miss in its intention at least, certainly
+not the outcome of oddity, of whim, or of eccentricity, for these
+traits belong to the superficial and cultivated. We have found that
+with the best moderns there has been and is inherent in them the same
+sincerity of feeling, the same spirit directing their research. The
+single peculiarity of modern art therefore, if such there be, is its
+special relationship to the time in which it is being produced,
+explicitly of this age.
+
+What we know of the men, much or little, proves that they are, and
+have all been, simple earnest men, intelligent, following nowise
+blindly in pursuit of fresh sensation, excitement, a mere phantasy, or
+freak of the mind. It was, and is, the product of a logic essentially
+of themselves, and of the period they represent; and because this
+period is not the period of sentimentality in art, but a period
+striving toward a more vigorous type of values--something as beautiful
+as the machinery of our time--it is not as yet to any great degree
+cared for, understood nor, up to very recently, even trusted. It has
+destroyed old fashioned romance, and the common eye has ceased to
+focus, or rather, does not wish to concentrate on things which do not
+visualize the literary sensation. In the midst of all this struggle
+was Henri Rousseau, the real and only naif of this time, and certainly
+among the truest of all times. As much as a man can remain child,
+Rousseau remained the child, and as much as a man could be naive and
+childlike, certainly it was this simple artist who remained so.
+
+If report has the truth correctly, Rousseau began his career as
+painter at the age of forty, though it is quite possible and probable
+that he was painting whenever he could, in his untutored fashion, in
+all of his spare intervals, and with but one object in view apparent:
+to give forth in terms of painting those phases of his own personal
+life which remained indelibly impressed upon his memory, pictorially
+always vivid to him, as in his pictures they are seen to be the scenes
+or incidents of loveliness to his fine imagination. We find them
+covering a rather wide range of experience, apparently in two places,
+somewhere in the tropics of Mexico, and Paris; the former, experiences
+of youth in some sort of governmental service I believe, and the
+latter, the more intimate phases of life about him in Paris, of Paris
+herself and of those people who created for him the intimacy of his
+home life, and the life which centered about the charming rue de
+Perelle where he lived.
+
+In Rousseau then, we have one of the finest individual expressions of
+the amateur spirit in painting, taking actually a place among the
+examples of paintings, such as those of the Kwakiutl Indians, or the
+sculpture of the Congo people, partaking of the very same quality of
+directness and simplicity, and of contact with the prevailing image
+chosen for representation. He was too evidently the product of
+himself, he was not hybrid, nor was he in any sense something strange
+springing up out of the soil in the dark of night, he was not
+mushroom. He did not know the meaning of affectation, and I doubt if
+he even knew what was meant by simplicity, so much was he that element
+himself.
+
+It is with fascination that we think of him as living his life out
+after his discharge for incompetency from the customs service outside
+the fortifications of Paris, and doubtless with the strain of poverty
+upon him also, within a ten minutes' walk from the world famous
+quartiers, and almost certainly knowing nothing of them. That there
+was a Julian's or a Colarossi's anywhere about, it is not likely that
+he knew, or if he knew, not more than vaguely. He drew his quaint
+inspirations directly from the sources of nature and some pencil
+drawings I have seen prove the high respect and admiration, amounting
+to love and worship, which he had for nature and the phenomena of
+her, to be disclosed at every hedge.
+
+If he was no success as a douanier, he was learning a great deal,
+meanwhiles, about those delicate and radiant skies which cover Paris
+at all times, charming always for their lightness and delicacy,
+pearl-like in their quiet splendour; and it was during this service of
+his at the city's gates that he learned his lovely sense of blacks and
+greys and silvers, of which Paris offers so much always, and which
+predominate in his canvases. Even his tropical scenes strive in no way
+toward artificiality of effect, but give rather the sense of their
+profundity than of oddity, of their depth and mystery than of
+peculiarity. He gives us the sense of having been at home in them in
+his imagination, being so well at home in those scenes of Paris which
+were daily life to him. We find in Rousseau true naivete, without
+struggle, real child-likeness of attitude and of emotion, following
+diligently with mind and with spirit the forms of those stored images
+that have registered themselves with directness upon the area of his
+imagination, never to be forgotten, rendered with perfect simplicity
+for us in these quaint pictures of his, superb in the richness of
+quality which makes of them, what they are to the eye that is
+sympathetic to them, pictures out of a life undisturbed by all the
+machinations and intrigues of the outer world, a life intimate with
+itself, remote from all agencies having no direct association with it,
+living with a sweet gift of enchantment with the day's disclosures,
+occupied apparently with nothing beyond the loveliness contained in
+them.
+
+There is not once, anywhere, a striving of the mind in the work of
+this simple man. It was a wealth of innocence that tinged all his
+methods, and his pictures are as simple in their appeal as are the
+declarations of Jacob Boehme--they are the songs of innocence and
+experience of a nature for whom all the world was beautiful, and have
+about them the element of song itself, a poetry that has not yet
+reached the shaping of words. Who looks at the pictures of this true
+and charming naif, will find nothing to wonder at beyond this extreme
+simplicity, he had no prescribed attitude, no fixity of image that
+characterizes every touch of school. He was taught only by nature and
+consulted only her relationships and tendencies. There is never a
+mistaking of that. Nature was his influence, and he saw with an
+untrammelled eye the elemental shape of all things, and affixed no
+falsity of feeling, or anything, to his forms which might have
+detracted from their extreme simplicity. He had "first sight," first
+contact with the image, and sought nothing else beyond this, and a
+very direct correspondence with memories dictated all his efforts.
+
+That Rousseau was musical, is shown in the natural grace of his
+compositions, and his ideas were simple as the early songs of France
+are simple, speaking of everyday things with simple heart and voice,
+and he painted frankly what he saw in precisely the way he saw it. We,
+who love richness and sobriety of tone, will never tire of Rousseau's
+beautiful blacks and greys, and probably no one has excelled them for
+delicacy of appreciation, and perfection of gradation. It will be long
+before the landscapes will be forgotten, it will be long before the
+exquisite portrait of the "Child with the Harlequin" will fade from
+remembrance, we shall remember them all for their loveliness in
+design, a gift which never failed him, no matter what the subject.
+Simple arabesque, it was the jungle that taught him this, and therein
+lay his special power, a genuine feeling for the richness of laces and
+brocades in full and subdued tones, such as one would find in the
+elaborate intricacies of tropical foliage, strange leaves intermingled
+with parrots, monkeys, strange white lilies on high stalks, tigers
+peering through highly ornate foliage and branches intertwined, all
+excellently suggestive of that foreign land in which the mind wanders
+and finds itself so much at home.
+
+"Le Charmeur," "Jadwigha," in these are concentrated all that is
+lovely in the land of legend; and, like all places of legend, replete
+with imaginative beauty, the places where loveliness and beauty of
+form congregate, after they have passed through the sensuous spaces of
+the eye travelling somewhere to an abode where all those things are
+that are perfect, they live forever. Rousseau was a charming and
+lovable child, whether he was painting or whether he was conducting
+his own little orchestra, composed of those people who kept shop
+around his home, and it is as the child of his time that he must be
+considered, child in verity among the sophisticated moderns who
+believed and believe more in intellect than in anything else, many of
+whom paid tribute to him, and reverenced him, either in terms of
+sincere friendship, or by occasional visit. The various anecdotes,
+touching enough, are but further proof of the innocence of this so
+simple and untutored person.
+
+The real amateur spirit has, we like to think, much in its favor, if
+only for its freshness, its spontaneity, and a very gratifying
+naturalness. Rousseau was all of this, and lived in a world untouched,
+he wove about himself, like other visionaries, a soft veil hiding all
+that was grossly unreal to him from all that was real, and for
+Rousseau, those things and places he expressed existed vividly for
+him, and out of them his pictures became true creations. He was the
+real naif, because he was the real child, unaffected and unspoiled,
+and painting was for him but the key of heaven that he might open
+another door for the world's weary eye.
+
+
+
+
+PART TWO
+
+
+
+
+THE TWILIGHT OF THE ACROBAT
+
+
+Where is our once charming acrobat--our minstrel of muscular music?
+What has become of these groups of fascinating people gotten up in
+silk and spangle? Who may the evil genius be who has taken them and
+their fascinating art from our stage, who the ogre of taste that has
+dispensed with them and their charm? How seldom it is in these times
+that one encounters them, as formerly when they were so much the
+charming part of our lighter entertainment. What are they doing since
+popular and fickle notions have removed them from our midst?
+
+It is two years since I have seen the American stage. I used to say to
+myself in other countries, at least America is the home of real
+variety and the real lover of the acrobat. But I hear no one saying
+much for him these days, and for his charming type of art.
+
+What has become of them all, the graceful little lady of the slack
+wire, those charming and lovely figures that undulate upon the air by
+means of the simple trapeze, those fascinating ensembles and all the
+various types of melodic muscular virtuosity?
+
+We have been given much, of late, of that virtuosity of foot and leg
+which is usually called dancing; and that is excellent among us here,
+quite the contribution of the American, so singularly the product of
+this special physique. Sometimes I think there are no other dancers
+but Americans. It used to be so delightful a diversion watching our
+acrobat and his group with their strong and graceful bodies writhing
+with rhythmical certitude over a bar or upon a trapeze against a
+happily colored space. Now we get little more in the field of
+acrobatics beyond a varied buck and wing; everything seems tuxedoed
+for drawing room purposes. We get no more than a decent handspring or
+two, an over-elaborated form of split. It all seems to be over with
+our once so fashionable acrobat. There is no end of good stepping, as
+witness the Cohan Revue, a dancing team in Robinson Crusoe, Jr., and
+"Archie and Bertie" (I think they call themselves). This in itself
+might be called the modern American school: the elongated and elastic
+gentleman who finds his co-operator among the thin ones of his race,
+artistically speaking. I did not get to the circus this year, much to
+my regret; perhaps I would have found my lost genius there, among the
+animals disporting themselves in less charitable places. But we cannot
+follow the circus naturally, and these minstrel folk are disappearing
+rapidly. Variety seems quite to have given them up and replaced them
+with often very tiresome and mediocre acts of singing.
+
+How can one forget, for instance, the Famille Bouvier who used to
+appear regularly at the fetes in the streets of Paris in the summer
+season, living all of them in a roving gipsy wagon as is the custom of
+these fete people. What a charming moment it was always to see the
+simple but well built Mlle. Jeanne of twenty-two pick up her stalwart
+and beautifully proportioned brother of nineteen, a strong,
+broad-shouldered, manly chap, and balance him on one hand upright in
+the air. It was a classic moment in the art of the acrobat,
+interesting to watch the father of them all training the fragile
+bodies of the younger boys and girls to the systematic movement of the
+business while the mother sat in the doorway of the caravan nursing
+the youngest at the breast, no doubt the perfect future acrobat. And
+how charming it was to look in at the doors of these little houses on
+wheels and note the excellent domestic order of them, most always with
+a canary or a linnet at the curtained window and at least one cat or
+dog or maybe both. This type is the progenitor of our stage acrobat,
+it is the primitive stage of these old-time troubadours, and it is
+still prevalent in times of peace in France. The strong man gotten in
+tawdry pink tights and much worn black velvet with his very elaborate
+and drawn out speeches, in delicate French, concerning the marvels of
+his art and the long wait for the stipulated number of _dix centimes_
+pieces before his marvellous demonstration could begin. This is, so to
+say, the vagabond element of our type of entertainment, the wandering
+minstrel who keeps generation after generation to the art of his
+forefathers, this fine old art of the pavement and the open country
+road. But we look for our artist in vain these days, those groups
+whose one art is the exquisite rhythmical display of the human body,
+concerted muscular melody. We cannot find him on the street in the
+shade of a stately chestnut tree as once in Paris we found him at
+least twice a year, and we seek him in vain in our modern music hall.
+
+Is our acrobatic artist really gone to his esthetic death; has he
+given his place permanently to the ever present singing lady who is
+always telling you who her modiste is, sings a sentimental song or two
+and then disappears; to the sleek little gentleman who dances off a
+moment or two to the tune of his doll-like partner whose voice is
+usually littler than his own? Perhaps our acrobat is still the delight
+of those more characteristic audiences of the road whose taste is less
+fickle, less blase. This is so much the case with the arts in
+America--the fashions change with the season's end and there is never
+enough of novelty; dancing is already dying out, skating will not
+prevail for long among the idle; what shall we predict for our variety
+which is in its last stages of boredom for us?
+
+I suspect the so-called politeness of vaudeville of the elimination of
+our once revered acrobats. The circus notion has been replaced by the
+parlor entertainment notion. Who shall revive them for us, who admire
+their simple and unpretentious art; why is there not someone among
+the designers with sufficient interest in this type of beauty to make
+attractive settings for them, so that we may be able to enjoy them at
+their best, which in the theater we have never quite been able to
+do--designs that will in some way add luster to an already bright and
+pleasing show of talents.
+
+I can see, for instance, a young and attractive girl bareback rider on
+a cantering white horse inscribing wondrous circles upon a stage
+exquisitely in harmony with herself and her white or black horse as
+the case might be; a rich cloth of gold backdrop carefully suffused
+with rose. There could be nothing handsomer, for example, than young
+and graceful trapezists swinging melodically in turquoise blue
+doublets against a fine peacock background or it might be a rich pale
+coral--all the artificial and spectacular ornament dispensed with. We
+are expected to get an exceptional thrill when some dull person
+appears before a worn velvet curtain to expatiate with inappropriate
+gesture upon a theme of Chopin or of Beethoven, ideas and attitudes
+that have nothing whatsoever to do with the musical intention; yet our
+acrobat whose expression is certainly as attractive, if not much more
+so generally, has always to perform amid fatigued settings of the
+worst sort against red velvet of the most depraved shade possible. We
+are tired of the elaborately costumed person whose charms are trivial
+and insignificant, we are well tired also of the ordinary gentleman
+dancer and of the songwriter, we are bored to extinction by the
+perfectly dull type of playlet which features some well known
+legitimate star for illegitimate reasons. Our plea is for the
+re-creation of variety into something more conducive to light pleasure
+for the eye, something more conducive to pleasing and stimulating
+enjoyment. Perhaps the reinstatement of the acrobat, this revival of a
+really worthy kind of expression, would effect the change, relieve the
+monotony. The argument is not too trivial to present, since the
+spectator is that one for whom the diversion is provided.
+
+I hear cries all about from people who once were fond of theater and
+music hall that there is an inconceivable dullness pervading the
+stage; the habitual patron can no longer endure the offerings of the
+present time with a degree of pleasure, much less with ease. It has
+ceased to be what it once was, what its name implies. If the old
+school inclined toward the rough too much, then certainly the new
+inclines distressingly toward the refined--the stage that once was so
+full of knockabout is now so full of stand-still; variety that was
+once a joy is now a bore. Just some uninteresting songs at the piano
+before a giddy drop is not enough these days; and there are too many
+of such. There is need of a greater activity for the eye. The return
+of the acrobat in a more modern dress would be the appropriate
+acquisition, for we still have appreciation for all those charming
+geometrics of the trapeze, the bar, and the wire.
+
+It is to be hoped that these men will return to us, stimulating anew
+their delightful kind of poetry of the body and saving our variety
+performances from the prevailing plague of monotone.
+
+
+
+
+VAUDEVILLE
+
+
+I have but recently returned from the vaudeville of the centuries.
+Watching the kick and the glide of very ancient performers. I have
+spent a year and a half down in the wonderful desert country of the
+Southwest. I have wearied, however, of the ancient caprice, and turn
+with great delight to my old passion, vaudeville. I return with glee
+to the ladies and gentlemen and pet animals of the stage, including
+the acrobats. Is there one who cares for these artists and for their
+rhythmical gesture more than myself? I cannot think so. I have wished
+with a real desire to create new sets for them, to establish an
+altogether new tradition as regards the background of these charming
+artists. If that were the chosen field for my esthetic activities, I
+should be famous by now for the creation of sets and drops by which
+these exceptional artists might make a far more significant impression
+upon the type of public they essay to interest and amuse.
+
+I would begin first of all by severing them from the frayed traditions
+of worn plush and sequin, rid them of the so inadequate back drop such
+as is given them, the scene of Vesuvius in eruption, or the walk in
+the park at Versailles. They need first of all large plain spaces upon
+which to perform, and enjoy their own remarkably devised patterns of
+body. I speak of the acrobats, the animals, the single and double
+dancers who perform "down in one" more especially. The so called
+headliners have their plush parlours with the inevitable purple or
+rose lamp, and the very much worn property piano just barely in tune.
+Only the dressmaker and the interior decorator can do things for them,
+as we see in the case of Kitty Gordon. It is to be hoped that a
+Beardsley of the stage will one day appear and really do something for
+the dainty type of person or the superbly theatric artist such as Miss
+Gordon, Valeska Suratt, and the few other remarkable women of the
+vaudeville stage.
+
+I am more concerned with the less appreciated artists. I would see
+that they glitter by their own brilliance. Why, for instance, should a
+fine act like the Four Danubes and others of their quality be tagged
+on to the end of a bill, at which time the unmannerly public decides
+to go home or hurry to some roof or other, or dining place?
+
+I should like seeing the Brothers Rath likewise, perhaps as refined
+acrobatic artists as have been seen on our stage for some time, in a
+set that would show them to better advantage, and give the public a
+greater intimacy with the beauty of their act than can be had beyond
+the first six rows of the Winter Garden. They are interposed there as
+a break between burlesques, which is not the place for them. I would
+"give" them the stage while they are on it. Theirs is a muscular
+beauty which has not been excelled. I have no doubt that if I
+attempted to establish these ideas with the artists whom I spend so
+much time in championing, they would no doubt turn aside with the word
+"highbrow" on their lips. They would have to be shown that they need
+these things, that they need the old-fashioned ideas removed, and
+fresher ones put in their place. I have expressed this intention once
+before in print, perhaps not so vehemently. I should like to
+elaborate. I want a Metropolitan Opera for my project. An orchestra of
+that size for the larger concerted groups, numbers of stringed
+instruments for the wirewalkers and jugglers, a series of balanced
+woodwinds for others, and so on down the line, according to the
+quality of the performer. There should be a large stage for many
+elephants, ponies, dogs, tigers, seals. The stage should then be made
+more intimate for the solos, duets, trios, and quartets among the
+acrobats. I think a larger public should be made aware of the beauty
+and skill of these people, who spend their lives in perfecting grace
+and power of body, creating the always fascinating pattern and form,
+orchestration if you will, the orchestration of the muscles into a
+complete whole. You will of course say, go to the circus, and get it
+all at once. The circus is one of the most charming places in
+existence, because it is one of the last words in orchestrated
+physical splendour. But the circus is too diffused, too enormous in
+this country to permit of concentrated interest, attention, or
+pleasure. One goes away with many little bits. It is because the
+background is made up of restless nervous dots, all anxious to get the
+combined quota which they have paid for, when in reality they do not
+even get any one thing. It is the alert eye which can go over three
+rings and two stages at once and enjoy the pattern of each of them. It
+is a physical impossibility really.
+
+I think we should be made aware in finer ways of the artists who open
+and close our bills. Why must the headliner always be a talking or a
+singing person who tells you how much money he needs, or how much she
+is getting? There is more than one type of artistic personality for
+those who care for vaudeville. Why doesn't a team like the Rath
+Brothers, for example, find itself the feature attraction? Must there
+always be the string of unnecessary little men and women who have such
+a time trying to fill up their twenty-two minutes or their fourteen?
+Why listen forever to puppy-like song writers when one can hear and
+watch a great artist like Ella Shields? My third visit to Ella Shields
+convinces me that she is one of the finest artists I have ever heard,
+certainly as fine in her way as Guilbert and Chevalier were. It is a
+rare privilege to be able to enjoy artists like Grock--Mark
+Sheridan--who is now dead, I am told. Mark, with his "They all walk
+the wibbly-wobbly walk, they all wear the wibbly-wobbly ties," and so
+on. Mark is certainly being missed by a great many who care for the
+pleasure of the moment. When I look at and listen to the aristocratic
+artist Ella Shields, I feel a quality in her of the impeccable Mrs.
+Fiske. And then I am thinking of another great woman, Fay Templeton.
+What a pity we must lose them either by death or by decisions in life.
+Ella Shields with her charming typification of "Burlington Bertie from
+Bow."
+
+The other evening as I listened to Irene Franklin, I heard for certain
+what I had always thought were notes from the magic voice of dear old
+Fay. Unforgettable Fay. How can one ever say enough about her? I think
+of Fay along with my single glimpses of Duse, Ada Rehan, Coquelin. You
+see how I love her, then. Irene Franklin has the quality of imitation
+of the great Fay without, I think, the real magic. Nevertheless I
+enjoy her, and I am certain she has never been finer than now. She has
+enriched herself greatly by her experiences the last two years, and
+seems at the height of her power. It was good to get, once again,
+little glimpses of her Childs waitress and the chambermaid. It seemed
+to me that there was a richer quality of atmosphere in the little
+Jewish girl with the ring curls and the red mittens, as also in her
+French girl with, by the way, a beautiful gown of rich yellow silk
+Frenchily trimmed in vermilion or orange, I couldn't make out which.
+The amusing French girl, who having picked up many fag-ends of English
+from her experience with the _soldats Americains_--got her "animals"
+mixed--"you have my goat, I have your goat, et--tie ze bull outside,"
+and so on. I am crossing Irene and Fay here because I think them
+similar, only I must say I think the magic was greater in Fay, because
+possibly Fay was the greater student of emotion. Fay had the
+undercurrent, and Irene has perfected the surface. If Irene did study
+Fay at any time, and I say this respectfully, she perhaps knows that
+Fay went many times to Paris to study Rejane. The light entertainer
+is, as we know, very often a person of real intellect.
+
+If you want distinction, then, you will get it in the presence of Ella
+Shields. Her "Burlington Bertie" is nothing less than a chef
+d'oeuvre; "Tom Lipton, he's got lots of 'oof--he sleeps on the roof,
+and I sleep in the room over him." Bertie, who, having been slapped on
+the back by the Prince of Wales (and some others) and asked why he
+didn't go and dine with "Mother," replied--"I can't, for I've just had
+a banana with Lady Diana.... I'm Burlington Bertie from Bow." Miss
+Shields shows also that she can sing a sentimental song without
+slushing it all over with saccharine. She has mastered the droll
+English quality of wit with real perfection. I regret I never saw
+Vesta Tilley, with whom the old tops compare her so favourably. Superb
+girls all these, Fay, Ella, Cissie, Vesta, as well as Marie Lloyd, and
+the other inimitable Vesta--Victoria.
+
+Among the "coming soon," we have Miss Juliet, whom I recall with so
+much pleasure from the last immemorable Cohan Revue. I wait for her. I
+consider myself fortunate to be let in on James Watts. We thought our
+Eddy Foy a comic one. He was, for I remember the Gibson girl with the
+black velvet gown and the red flannel undershirt. I swing my swagger
+stick in the presence of Mr. Watts by way of applause. His art is very
+delicately understood and brought out. It has a fine quality of broad
+caricature with a real knowledge of economy such as Grock is master
+of. The three episodes are certainly funny enough. I find myself
+caring more for the first, called "June Day," since he reminds me so
+strongly in make-up of the French caricaturists in drawing, Rouveyre
+and Toulouse-Lautrec. Mr. Watts's feeling for satirical make-up is a
+fine shade of artistry in itself. He has excellent feeling for the
+broad contrast and for fierce insinuation at the same time. If you
+want real unalloyed fun, Mr. Watts will supply you. Nor will Grock
+disappoint you. Quite on the contrary, no matter what you are
+expecting.
+
+I do not know why I think of vaudeville as I think of a collection of
+good drawings. Unless it is because the sense of form is the same in
+all of the arts. The acrobat certainly has line and mass to think of,
+even if that isn't his primal concern. He knows how he decorates the
+space on which he operates. To make another comparison, then, Grock is
+the Forain of vaudeville. He achieves great plastic beauty with
+distinguished economy of means. He dispenses with all superfluous
+gesture, as does the great French illustrator. Grock is entirely right
+about clownery. You are either funny or you are not. No amount of
+study will produce the gift for humour. It is there, or it isn't.
+Grock's gift for musicianship is a singular combination to find with
+the rest of his artistry. It goes with the remarkably refined look in
+his face, however, as he sits upon the back of the seatless chair, and
+plays the little concertina with superb execution. There are no
+"jumps" in Grock's performance. His moods flow from one into another
+with a masterly smoothness, and you are aware when he is finished that
+you have never seen that sort of foolery before. Not just that sort.
+It is the good mind that satisfies, as in the case of James Watts, and
+Miss Shields.
+
+From elephants carrying in their trunks chatelaines of Shetland
+ponies, curtseying at the close of the charming act like a pretty miss
+at her first coming out, to such work as the Four Danubes give you as
+the closing number, with Irene as a lead, you are, to say the least,
+carried over the dreadful spots, such as the young man who sways out
+like a burlesque queen and tells you whom he was with before Keith got
+him. His name should be "Pusher," "Advance Man," or something of that
+sort, and not artist. What he gives you, you could find just as well
+if not better done on Fourteenth Street. He has a ribbon-counter,
+adenoid voice production that no really fine artist could afford. He
+will "get by," because anything does, apparently.
+
+One turns to the big artist for relief, even though minor artists like
+The Brown Sisters charm so surely with their ivory and silver
+diamond-studded accordions, giving very pleasing transitions from
+grave to gay in arias and tunes we know. Accordions and concertinas
+are very beautiful to me, when played by artists like these girls, and
+by such as Joe Cawthorne, and Grock.
+
+There are more dancing men of quality this season, it seems to me, who
+are obscured by dancing ladies of fame, and not such warrantable
+artistry. Perhaps it is because male anatomy allows of greater
+eccentricity and playfulness. There are no girls who have just such
+laughing legs as the inimitable Frances White. It is the long-legged
+American boy who beats the world in this sort of thing.
+
+The lovely bit of hockey which James Barton gives is for me far more
+distinguished than all the rest of his work in the Winter Garden
+Revue. He is a real artist, but it is work that one sees rather a deal
+of this season, whereas the hockey dance is like nothing else to be
+found. A lovely moment of rhythmic leg work. We are now thoroughly
+familiar with the stage drunk, as we have long been familiarized by
+Weber and Fields with the stage Jew, which is fortunately passing out
+for lack of artist to present it. Leon Errol is good for once, even
+twice. He is quite alone in his very witty falls and runs. They are
+full of the struggle of the drunk to regain his character and manhood.
+The act lives on a very flat plane otherwise. It has no roundness.
+
+I have come on my list to Mijares and Co., in "Monkey Business." We
+have the exquisite criterion always for the wire, in the perfect Bird
+Millman. "Monkey Business" is a very good act, and both men do
+excellent work on the taut and slack wire. "Monkey," in this case
+being a man, does as beautiful a piece of work as I know of. I have
+never seen a back somersault upon a high wire. I have never heard of
+it before. There may be whole generations of artists gifted in this
+particular stunt. You have here, nevertheless, a moment of very great
+beauty in the cleanness of this man's surprising agility and sureness.
+The monkey costume hinders the beauty of the thing. It should be done
+with pale blue silk tights against a cherry velvet drop, or else in
+deep ultramarine on an old gold background.
+
+The acrobatic novelty called "The Legrohs" relies chiefly on its most
+exceptional member, who would be complete without the other two. He is
+most decidedly a virtuoso in vaudeville. Very gifted, certainly, if at
+moments a little disconcerting in the flexibility and the seemingly
+uncertain turns of his body. It is the old-fashioned contortionism
+saved by charming acrobatic variations. This "Legroh" knows how to
+make a superb pattern with his body, and the things he does with it
+are done with such ease and skill as to make you forget the actual
+physical effort and you are lost for the time being in the beauty of
+this muscular kaleidoscopic brilliancy. You feel it is like
+"puzzle--find the man" for a time, but then you follow his exquisite
+changes from one design into another with genuine delight, and
+appreciate his excessive grace and easy rapidity. He gives you chiefly
+the impression of a dragon-fly blown in the wind of a brisk morning
+over cool stretches of water. You would expect him to land on a
+lily-pad any moment and smooth his wings with his needle-like legs.
+
+So it is the men and women of vaudeville transform themselves into
+lovely flower and animal forms, and the animals take on semblances of
+human sensibility in vaudeville. It is the superb arabesque of the
+beautiful human body that I care for most, and get the most from in
+these cameo-like bits of beauty and art. So brief they are, and like
+the wonders of sea gardens as you look through the glass bottoms of
+the little boats. So like the wonders of the microscopic, full of
+surprising novelties of colour and form. So like the kaleidoscope in
+the ever changing, ever shifting bits of colour reflecting each other,
+falling into new patterns with each twist of the toy. If you care for
+the iridescence of the moment you will trust vaudeville as you are not
+able to trust any other sort of a performance. You have no chance for
+the fatigue of problem. You are at rest as far as thinking is
+concerned. It is something for the eye first and last. It is something
+for the ear now and then, only very seldomly, however. For me, they
+are the saviours of the dullest art in existence, the art of the
+stage. Duse was quite right about it. The stage should be swept of
+actors. It is not a place for imitation and photography. It is a place
+for the laughter of the senses, for the laughter of the body. It is a
+place for the tumbling blocks of the brain to fall in heaps. I give
+first place to the acrobat and his associates because it is the art
+where the human mind is for once relieved of its stupidity. The
+acrobat is master of his body and he lets his brain go a-roving upon
+other matters, if he has one. He is expected to be silent. He would
+agree with William James, transposing "music prevents thinking" into
+"talking prevents silence." In so many instances, it prevents
+conversation. That is why I like tea chitchat. Words are never meant
+to mean anything then. They are simply given legs and wings, and they
+jump and fly. They land where they can, and fall flat if they must.
+The audience that patronizes vaudeville would do well to be present at
+most first numbers, and remain for most or many of the closing ones. A
+number, I repeat, like the Four Danubes, should not be snubbed by any
+one.
+
+I have seen recently, then, by way of summary, four fine bits of
+artistry in vaudeville--Ella Shields, James Watts, the Brothers Rath,
+and the Four Danubes. I shall speak again of these people. They are
+well worth it. They turn pastime into perfect memory. They are,
+therefore, among the great artists.
+
+
+
+
+A CHARMING EQUESTRIENNE
+
+
+I am impelled to portray, at this time, my devotion to the little
+equestrienne, by the presence of a traveling circus in these lofty
+altitudes in which I am now living, seven thousand feet above the sea,
+in our great southwest. The mere sight of this master of the miniature
+ring, with all the atmosphere of the tent about him, after almost
+insurmountable difficulties crossing the mountains, over through the
+canyons of this expansive country, delivering an address in
+excellently chosen English, while poised at a considerable height on
+the wire, to the multitude on the ground below him, during which time
+he is to give what is known as the "free exhibit" as a high wire
+artist--all this turns me once more to the ever charming theme of
+acrobatics in general and equestrianism in particular, and it is of a
+special genius in this field that I wish to speak.
+
+I have always been a lover of these artists of bodily vigour, of
+muscular melody, as I like to call it. As I watched this ringmaster of
+the little traveling circus, this master mountebank of the sturdy
+figure, ably poised upon his head on the high wire, outlined against
+the body of the high mountain in the near distance, about which the
+thunder clouds were huddling, and in and out of which the lightning
+was sharply playing, it all formed for me another of those perfect
+sensations from that phase of art expression known as the circus. My
+happiest memories in this field are from the streets of Paris before
+the war, the incomparably lovely fetes. Only the sun knows where these
+dear artists may be now.
+
+But I am wanting to tell of the little equestrienne, whose work has
+for the past five years been a source of genuine delight to me,
+charming little May Wirth, of Australian origin, with her lovely dark
+eyes, and captivating English accent. If you have a genuine sympathy
+for this sort of expression, it is but natural that you want to get
+inside the ring, and smell the turf with them, and so it was the
+representative of this gifted little woman who brought us together. It
+is, in the first place, a pity that there is so little written of the
+history of these people, so little material from which to gather the
+development of the idea of acrobatics in general, or of any one phase
+in particular. It would be impossible to learn who was the first
+aerial trapezist, for instance, or where high wire performing was
+brought from, just when the trick of adjusting the body to these
+difficult and strenuous rhythms was originated. They cannot tell you
+themselves. Only if there happens to be more than two generations in
+existence can you trace the development of this form of athletic
+entertainment. It may have begun with the Egyptians, it may have begun
+with the first gypsies.
+
+These people do not write their history, they simply make it among
+themselves, and it is handed down through the generations. When I
+asked May Wirth for information, she said she knew of none on the
+subject, save that she herself sprang from five generations of
+acrobats and equestrians, and that it is terrifically hard labour from
+beginning to end, equestrianism in particular, since it requires a
+knowledge of several if not all the other physical arts combined, such
+as high wire walking, handspring and somersault, trapeze work, bars,
+ballet dancing, etc.; that she herself had begun as a child, and had
+run the entire gamut of these requirements, coming out the finished
+product, so to speak, in all but ballet dancing, which she disliked,
+and wept always when the time came for her lesson in this department.
+
+When one sees the incomparable brilliancy of this little woman of the
+horse, watching her marvellous ground work, which is in itself an
+example of virtuosity, one realizes what accomplishment alone can do,
+for she is not yet twenty-five, and the art is already in the
+condition of genius with her. Five handsome side-wheels round the
+ring, and a flying jump on the horse, then several complete
+somersaults on the horse's back while he is in movement round the
+ring, is not to be slighted for consideration, and if, as I have said,
+you have a love or even a fancy for this sort of entertainment, you
+all but worship the little lady for the thrill she gives you through
+this consummate mastery of hers.
+
+"I always wanted to do what the boys could do, and I was never
+satisfied until I had accomplished it." This was the strongest
+assertion the little lady of the horse was moved to make while in
+conversation, and that the ring is more beautiful to work in than on a
+mat upon a stage, for it is in the ring that the horse is most at
+home, it is easier for him, and gives him greater muscular freedom,
+with the result naturally, that it is easier on the muscles of the
+human body while in action. I have never tired of this species of
+entertainment. It has always impressed me as being the most natural
+form of transposed physical culture, esthetically speaking. It does
+for the eye, if you are sensitive, what music does for the ear. It
+gives the body a chance to show its exquisite rhythmic beauty, as no
+other form of athletics can, for it is the beautiful plastic of the
+body, harmonically arranged for personal delight.
+
+It is something for so young a woman to have walked away with first
+honours in her chosen field, yet like the true artist that she is, she
+is thinking always of how she can beautify her accomplishment to a
+still greater degree. She is mistress of a very difficult art, and yet
+the brilliancy of her performance makes it seem as if it were but the
+experiment of an afternoon, in the out-of-doors. Like all fine
+artists, she has brushed away from sight all aspects of labour, and
+presents you, with astounding ease, the apparent easiness of the
+thing. She is powerfully built, and her muscles are master of
+coordination, such as would be the envy of multitudes of men, and
+with all this power, she is as simple in her manner and appearance as
+is the young debutante at her coming out function. You are impressed
+with her sweetness and refinement, first of all, and the utter lack of
+show about her, as also with her brother who is a dapper young man of
+the very English type, who works with her, and acts as the
+dress-suited gentleman in this acrobatic ringplay of theirs. Three
+other members of her family take part also with her, the
+ring-mistress, a woman of possibly forty, acting as host, looking
+exceptionally well, handsome indeed, in grey and silver evening dress,
+with fine dark eyes and an older sister who opens the performance with
+some good work. This seems to me to be the modern touch, for there was
+a time when it was always the very well groomed ringmaster, with top
+hat and monocle, who acted as host of the ring.
+
+It will likewise be remembered by those who saw the Hannafords at the
+circus, that they were also possessed of a very handsome
+ring-mistress, elegantly gowned, both of these older ladies lending
+great distinction, by their presence, to already brilliant
+performances. I would be very pleased to make myself historian for
+these fine artists, these esthetes of muscular melody. I should like
+very much to be spokesman for them, and point out to an enforcedly
+ignorant public, the beauties of this line of artistic expression, and
+to give historical account of the development of these various
+picturesque athletic arts. Alas, that is not possible, for it must
+remain forever in the limbo of tradition.
+
+We shall have to be grateful beyond expression for the beautiful art
+of May Wirth, and devote less enthusiasm to asking of when and how it
+came about. To have established one's art at the perfect point in
+one's girlhood, is it not achievement, is it not genius itself?
+Charming little May Wirth, first equestrienne of the world, I
+congratulate you for your beautiful presentation, for the excellence
+of its technique, and for the grace and fascination contained therein.
+Triumph in youth, victory in the heroic period of life, that surely is
+sufficient. Let the bays fall upon her young head gleefully, for she
+earned them with patience, devotion, intelligence, and very hard
+labours. Salutations, little lady of the white horse! How charming,
+how simple she was, the little equestrienne as she rode away from the
+door of the huge theatre, in her pale blue touring car. "I love the
+audiences here in this great theatre, but O, I love the circus so much
+more!" These were the sentiments of the little performer as she rode
+away. She is now touring, performing under the huge canvases in the
+open areas of the middle West, and the little traveling circus is on
+its way over the mountains. Fascinating people, and a fascinating life
+for whom there is not, and probably never will be, a written history;
+the story of whose origin lies almost as buried as that of the
+primitive peoples. Charming rovers, content with life near to the
+bright sky, charming people, for whom life is but one long day in
+which to make beautiful their bodies, and make joyful the eyes of
+those who love to look at them!
+
+
+
+
+JOHN BARRYMORE IN PETER IBBETSON
+
+
+The vicissitudes of the young boy along the vague, precarious way, the
+longing to find the reality of the dream--the heart that knew him
+best--a study in sentimentality, the pathetic wanderings of a "little
+boy lost" in the dream of childhood, and the "little boy found" in the
+arms of his loved mother, with all those touches that are painful and
+all that are exquisite and poignant in their beauty--such is the
+picture presented by John Barrymore, as nearly perfect as any artist
+can be, in "Peter Ibbetson." Certainly it is as finished a creation in
+its sense of form, and of color, replete with a finesse of rare
+loveliness, as gratifying a performance, to my notion, as has been
+seen on our stage for many years. Perhaps if the author, recalling
+vain pasts, could realize the scum of saccharinity in which the play
+is utterly submerged, and that it struggles with great difficulty to
+survive the nesselrodelike sweetness with which it is surfeited, he
+would recognize the real distinction that Barrymore lends to a role so
+clogged by the honeyed sentimentality covering most of the scenes.
+Barrymore gives us that "quickened sense" of the life of the young
+man, a portrayal which takes the eye by "its fine edge of light," a
+portrayal clear and cool, elevated to a fine loftiness in his
+rendering.
+
+The actor has accomplished this by means of a nice knowledge of what
+symbolic expression means to the art of the stage. He is certainly a
+painter of pictures and moods, the idea and his image perfectly
+commingled, endowing this mediocre play with true charm by the
+distinction he lends it, by sheer discretion, and by a power of
+selection. All this he brings to a play which, if it had been written
+nowadays, would certainly have convicted its author, and justly too,
+of having written to stimulate the lachrymal effusions of the
+shop-girl, a play about which she might telephone her girl friend, at
+which she might eat bon bons, and powder her nose again for the
+street. No artist, no accepted artist, has given a more suggestive
+rendering than has Barrymore here. It would be difficult to say where
+he is at his best, except that the first half of the play counts for
+most in point of strength and opportunity.
+
+A tall frail young man, we find him, blanched with wonder and with awe
+at the perplexity of life, seeking a solution of things by means of
+the dream, as only the dreamer and the visionary can, lost from first
+to last, seemingly unloved in the ways boys think they want to be
+loved; that is, the shy longing boy, afraid of all things, and mostly
+of himself, in the period just this side of sex revelation. He is the
+neophyte--the homeless, pathetic Peter, perplexed with the strangeness
+of things real and temporal--vision and memory counting for all there
+is of reality to him, with life itself a thing as yet untasted. Who
+shall forget (who has a love for real expression) the entrance of
+Peter into the drawing-room of Mrs. Deane, the pale flowery wisp of a
+boy walking as it were into a garden of pungent spices and herbs, and
+of actions so alien to his own? We are given at this moment the
+keynote of mastery in delicate suggestion, which never fails
+throughout the play, tedious as it is, overdrawn on the side of
+symbolism and mystical insinuation.
+
+One sits with difficulty through many of the moments, the literary
+quality of them is so wretched. They cloy the ear, and the mind that
+has been made sensitive, desiring something of a finer type of
+stimulation. Barrymore has evoked, so we may call it, a cold
+method--against a background of what could have been overheated acting
+or at least a superabundance of physical attack--the warmth of the
+play's tender sentimentalities; yet he covers them with a still
+spiritual ardor which is their very essence, extracting all the
+delicate nuances and arranging them with a fine sense of proportion.
+It is as difficult an accomplishment for a man as one can imagine. For
+it is not given to many to act with this degree of whiteness, devoid
+of off colorings or alien tones. This performance of Barrymore in its
+spiritual richness, its elegance, finesse, and intelligence, has not
+been equaled for me since I saw the great geniuses Paul Orleneff and
+Eleonora Duse.
+
+It is to be at once observed that here is a keen pictorial mind, a
+mind which visualizes perfectly for itself the chiaroscuro aspects of
+the emotion, as well as the spiritual, for Barrymore gives them with
+an almost unerring felicity, and rounds out the portrayal which in any
+other hands would suffer, but Barrymore has the special power to feel
+the value of reticence in all good art, the need for complete
+subjection of personal enthusiasm to the force of ideas. His art is
+akin to the art of silver-point, which, as is known, is an art of
+directness of touch, and final in the instant of execution, leaving no
+room whatever for accident or untoward excitement of nerve.
+
+We shall wait long for the silver suggestiveness such as Barrymore
+gives us when Peter gets his first glimpse of Mary, Duchess of Towers.
+Who else could convey his realization of her beauty, and the quality
+of reminiscence that lingers about her, of the rapt amaze as he stands
+by the mantel-piece looking through the door into the space where he
+sees her in the midst of dancers under a crystal chandelier somewhere
+not very distant? Or the moment when he finds her bouquet neglected on
+the table in the drawing-room, with her lace shawl not far from his
+hands? Or when he finds himself alone, pressing his lips into the
+depth of the flowers as the curtain gives the finale to the scene with
+the whispered "l'amour"! These are moments of a real lyrist, and
+would match any line of Banville, of Ronsard, or of Austin Dobson for
+delicacy of touch and feeling, for freshness, and for the precise
+spiritual gesture, the "intonation" of action requisite to relieve the
+moments from what might otherwise revert to commonplace
+sentimentality.
+
+Whatever the prejudice may be against all these emotions glace with
+sugary frosting, we feel that his art has brought them into being with
+an unmistakable gift of refinement coupled with superb style. How an
+artist like Beardsley would have revelled in these moments is easy to
+conjecture. For here is the quintessence of intellectualized
+aquarelle, and these touches would surely have brought into being
+another "Pierrot of the Minute"--a new line drawing out of a period he
+knew and loved well. These touches would have been graced by the hand
+of that artist, or by another of equal delicacy of appreciation,
+Charles Conder--unforgettable spaces replete with the essence of
+fancy, of dream, of those farther recesses of the imagination.
+
+Although technically and historically Barrymore has the advantage of
+excellent traditions, he nevertheless rests entirely upon his own
+achievements, separate and individual in his understanding of what
+constitutes plastic power in art. He has a peculiar and most sensitive
+temper, which can arrange points of relation in juxtaposition with a
+keen sense of form as well as of substance. He is, one might say, a
+masterly draftsman with a rich cool sense of color, whose work has
+something of the still force of a drawing of Ingres with, as well, the
+sensitive detail one finds in a Redon, like a beautiful drawing on
+stone. An excellent knowledge of dramatic contrasts is displayed by
+the brothers Barrymore, John and Lionel, in the murder scene, one of
+the finest we have seen for many years, technically even, splendid,
+and direct, concise in movement. Every superfluous gesture has been
+eliminated. From the moment of Peter's locking the door upon his uncle
+the scene is wrapped in the very coils of catastrophe, almost
+Euripedean in its inevitability. All of this episode is kept strictly
+within the realm of the imagination. It is an episode of hatred, of
+which there is sure to be at least one in the life of every young
+sensitive, when every boy wants, at any rate somewhere in his mind, to
+destroy some influence or other which is alien or hateful to him. The
+scene emphasizes once again the beauty of technical power for its own
+sake, the thrill of discarding all that is not immediately essential
+to simple and direct realization.
+
+Little can be said of the play beyond this point, for it dwindles off
+into sentimental mystification which cannot be enjoyed by anyone under
+fifty, or appreciated by anyone under eighteen. It gives opportunity
+merely for settings and some rare moments of costuming, the lady with
+the battledore reminding one a deal of a good Manet. This and, of
+course, the splendid appearance of the Duchess of Towers in the first
+act--all these touches furnish more than a satisfying background for
+the very shy and frail Peter.
+
+This performance of Barrymore holds for me the first and last
+requisite of organized conception in art--poise, clarity, and perfect
+suggestibility. Its intellectual soundness rules the emotional
+extravagance, giving form to what--for lack of form--so often perishes
+under an excess of energy, which the ignorant actor substitutes for
+the plastic element in all art. It has the attitude, this performance,
+almost of diffidence to one's subject-matter, except as the intellect
+judges clearly and coolly. Thus, in the sense of esthetic reality, are
+all aspects clarified and made real. From the outward inward, or from
+the inward outward, surface to depth or depth to surface--it is
+difficult to say which is the precise method of approach. John
+Barrymore has mastered the evasive subtlety therein, which makes him
+one of our greatest artists. The future will surely wait for his riper
+contributions, and we may think of him as one of our foremost artists,
+among the few, "one of a small band," as the great novelist once said
+of the great poet.
+
+
+
+
+PART THREE
+
+
+
+
+LA CLOSERIE DE LILAS
+
+
+Divine Tuesday! I had wondered if those remarkable evenings of
+conversation in the rue de Rome with Mallarme as host, and Henri de
+Regnier as guest, among many others, had been the inspiration of the
+evenings at the Closerie de Lilas, where I so often sat of an evening,
+watching the numbers of esthetes gather, filling the entire cafe, rain
+or shine, waiting unquestionably, for it pervaded the air always, the
+feeling of suspense, of a dinner without host, of a wedding without
+bridegroom, in any event waiting for the real genius of the evening,
+le grand maitre prince de poetes, Paul Fort. The interesting book of
+Amy Lowell's, "Six French Poets," recalls these Tuesday evenings
+vividly to my mind, and a number of episodes in connection with the
+idea of poetry in Paris.
+
+Poetry an event? A rather remarkable notion it would seem, and yet
+this was always so, it was a constituent of the day's passing, there
+was never a part of the day in this arrondissement, when you would not
+find here, there, everywhere, from the Boul-Mich up, down Montparnasse
+to Lavenue's, and back to the Closerie, groups of a few or of many,
+obviously the artist or poet type, sometimes very nattily dressed,
+often the reverse, but you found them talking upon one theme, art,
+meaning either poetry or painting, cubistes, futuristes, orphistes and
+doubtless every "iste" in poetry from the symboliste period up to the
+"unanimistes" of the present time, or the then present time nearly two
+years before the war. It was a bit novel, even for a sensitive
+American, sitting there, realizing that it was all in the name of art,
+and for the heralding of genius--a kind of sublimated recruiting
+meeting for the enlistment in the army of expression of personality,
+or for the saving of the soul of poetry.
+
+It was a spectacle, edifying in its purport, or even a little
+distressing if one had no belief in a sense of humour, for there were
+moments of absurdity about it as there is sure to be in a room filled
+with any type of concerted egotism. But you did not forget the raison
+d'etre of it all, you did not forget that when the "prince" arrived
+there was the spirit of true celebration about it, the celebration not
+only of an arrived artist, but of an idea close to the hearts and
+minds of those present, and you had a sense, too, of what it must have
+been like in that circle of, no doubt, a higher average of adherents,
+in the drawing room of the genius Mallarme, who, from all accounts,
+was as perfected in the art of conversation, as he was in expression
+in art. When I read Miss Lowell's chapter on Henri de Regnier, I find
+myself before the door of the Mallarme house in the rue de Rome,
+probably the only American guest, on that Sunday morning in June, just
+one given a privilege that could not mean as much as if I had been
+more conversant with the delicacies of the language.
+
+It was the occasion of the placing of a tablet of homage to the great
+poet, at which ceremony Henri de Regnier himself was the chief
+speaker: a tall, very aristocratic, very elegant looking Frenchman,
+not any more to be called young, nor yet to be called old, but
+conspicuously simple, dignified, dressed in a manner of a gentleman of
+the first order, standing upon a chair, speaking, as one would
+imagine, with a flow of words which were the epitome of music itself
+to the ear. I had been invited by a poet well known in Paris, with
+several volumes to his credit and by a young literary woman, both of
+whom spoke English very creditably. After the ceremonies, which were
+very brief, and at which Madame Mallarme herself was present, standing
+near the speaker, de Regnier, the entire company repaired to a
+restaurant near the Place Clichy, if I remember rightly. My hostess
+named for me the various guests as they appeared, Madame Rachilde,
+Reynaldo Hahn, Andre Gide, and a dozen other names less conspicuous,
+perhaps, excepting one, Leon Dierx, who was an old man, and whose
+death was announced about the city some days later. It was, needless
+to say, a conspicuous company and the dinner went off very quietly,
+allowing of course for the always feverish sound of the conversation
+of many people talking in a not very large room.
+
+But all these suggestions recall for me once more what such things
+mean to a people like the French, or, let one say, Europeans as well.
+I wonder what poetry or even painting will do, if they shall rise to
+such a state in this country that we shall find our masters of
+literature holding audience with this degree of interest like Fort, or
+as did all the great masters of literature in Paris, hold forth in the
+name of art, a divine Tuesday set apart for the admirable worship of
+poetry, or of things esthetic. I can imagine Amy Lowell doing
+something of this sort after the custom of those masters she so
+admires, with her seemingly quenchless enthusiasms for all that is
+modern in poetry. I think we shall wait long for that, for the time
+when we shall have our best esthetics over the coffee, at the curbside
+under the trees with the sun shining upon it, or the shadow of the
+evening lending its sanction, under the magnetic influence of such a
+one as Paul Fort or Francis Jammes, or Emile Verhaeren--as it was once
+to be had among such as Verlaine, Baudelaire and that high company of
+distinguished painters who are now famous among us.
+
+The studio of Gertude Stein, that quiet yet always lively place in the
+rue de Fleurus, is the only room I have ever been in where this spirit
+was organized to a similar degree, for here you had the sense of the
+real importance of painting, as it used to be thought of in the days
+of Pissarro, Manet, Degas, and the others, and you had much, in all
+human ways, out of an evening there, and, most of all, you had a fund
+of good humour thrust at you, and the conversation took on, not the
+quality of poetic prose spoken, as you had the quality of yourself and
+others, a kind of William James intimacy, which, as everyone knows, is
+style bringing the universe of ideas to your door in terms of your own
+sensations. There may have been a touch of all this at the once famed
+Brook Farm, but I fancy it was rather chill in its severity.
+
+There is something of charm in the French idea of taking their
+discussions to the sunlight or the shadow under the stars, either
+within or outside the cafe, where you feel the passing of the world,
+and the poetry is of one piece with life itself, not the result of
+stuffy studios, and excessively ornate library corners, where books
+crowd out the quality of people and things. You felt that the cafe was
+the place for it, and if the acrobat came and sang, it was all of one
+fabric and it was as good for the poetry, as it was for the eye and
+the ear that absorbed it. Despite the different phases of the
+spectacle of Tuesday, at the Closerie de Lilas, you had the feeling of
+its splendour, its excellence, and, most of all, of its reality, its
+relationship to every other phase of life, and not of the
+hypersensitivity of the thing as we still consider it among ourselves
+in general; and if you heard the name of Paul Fort, or Francis Jammes,
+it was a definite issue in daily life, equal with the name of the
+great statesmen in importance, you were being introduced into a
+sphere of activities of the utmost importance, _that_ poetry was
+something to be reckoned with.
+
+It was not merely to hear oneself talk that artists like Mallarme held
+forth with distinction, that artists like de Regnier and Fort devote
+themselves, however secretly, or however openly to the sacred theme.
+They had but one intention, and that to arrive at, and assist in the
+realization of the best state of poetry, that shall have carried the
+art further on its way logically, and in accordance with the
+principles which they have created for their time; endeavoring always
+to create fresh values, new points of contact with the prevailing as
+well as with the older outlines of the classics. It was, then, a
+spectacle, from our removed point of view, the gathering of the poetic
+multitude around the cafe tables, over the Dubonnet, the grenadines,
+and the cafe noir, of a Tuesday evening. It gave one a sense of
+perpetuity, of the indestructibility of art, in spite of the obstacles
+encountered in the run of the day, that the artist has the advantage
+over the layman in being qualified to set down, in shapes
+imperishable, those states of his imagination which are the shapes of
+life and of nature.
+
+We may be grateful to Amy Lowell for having assembled for our
+consummation, in a world where poetry is not as yet the sublime issue
+as it was to be felt at every street corner, much of the spirit of the
+rue de Rome, the Cafe Novelles D'Athenes, and the Closerie de Lilas,
+as well as the once famed corner of the Cafe D'Harcourt where the
+absinthe flowed so continuously, and from which some very exquisite
+poetry has emanated for all time. It is the first intimation we have
+of what our best English poetry has done for the best French poets of
+the present, and what our first free verse poet has done for the
+general liberation of emotions and for freedom of form in all
+countries. He has indicated the poets that are to follow him. He would
+be the first to sanction all this poetic discussive intensity at the
+curbside, the liberty and freedom of the cafe, the excellence of a
+divine Tuesday evening.
+
+
+
+
+EMILY DICKINSON
+
+
+If I want to take up poetry in its most delightful and playful mood, I
+take up the verses of that remarkable girl of the sixties and
+seventies, Emily Dickinson, she who was writing her little worthless
+poetic nothings, or so she was wont to think of them, at a time when
+the now classical New England group was flourishing around Concord,
+when Hawthorne was burrowing into the soul of things, Thoreau was
+refusing to make more pencils and took to sounding lake bottoms and
+holding converse with all kinds of fish and other water life, and
+Emerson was standing high upon his pedestal preaching of
+compensations, of friendship, society and the oversoul, leaving a
+mighty impress upon his New England and the world at large as well.
+
+I find when I take up Emily Dickinson, that I am sort of sunning
+myself in the discal radiance of a bright, vivid, and really new type
+of poet, for she is by no means worn of her freshness for us, she
+wears with one as would an old fashioned pearl set in gold and dark
+enamels. She offsets the smugness of the time in which she lived with
+her cheery impertinence, and startles the present with her uncommon
+gifts. Those who know the irresistible charm of this girl--who gave
+so charming a portrait of herself to the stranger friend who inquired
+for a photograph: "I had no portrait now, but am small like the wren,
+and my hair is bold like the chestnut burr, and my eyes like the
+sherry in the glass that the guest leaves," this written in July,
+1862--shall be of course familiar with the undeniable originality of
+her personality, the grace and special beauty of her mind, charm
+unique in itself, not like any other genius then or now, or in the
+time before her, having perhaps a little of relationship to the
+crystal clearness of Crashaw, like Vaughan and Donne maybe, in respect
+of their lyrical fervour and moral earnestness, yet nevertheless
+appearing to us freshly with as separate a spirit in her verse
+creations as she herself was separated from the world around her by
+the amplitude of garden which was her universe. Emily Dickinson
+confronts you at once with an instinct for poetry, to be envied by the
+more ordinary and perhaps more finished poets. Ordinary she never was,
+common she never could have been, for she was first and last
+aristocrat in sensibility, rare and untouchable if you will, vague and
+mystical often enough, unapproachable and often distinctly aloof, as
+undoubtedly she herself was in her personal life. Those with a
+fondness for intimacy will find her, like all recluses, forbidding and
+difficult, if not altogether terrifying the mind with her vagueries
+and peculiarities.
+
+Here was New England at its sharpest, brightest, wittiest, most
+fantastic, most wilful, most devout, saint and imp sported in one,
+toying with the tricks of the Deity, taking them now with extreme
+profundity, then tossing them about like irresistible toys with an
+incomparable triviality. She has traced upon the page and with
+celestial indelibility that fine line from her soul which is like a
+fine prismatic light, separating one bright sphere from another, one
+planet from another planet, and the edge of separation is but faintly
+perceptible. She has left us this bright folio of her "lightning and
+fragrance in one," scintillant with stardust as perhaps no other
+before her, certainly not in this country, none with just her
+celestial attachedness, or must we call it detachedness, and withal
+also a sublime, impertinent playfulness which makes her images dance
+before one like offspring of the great round sun, fooling zealously
+with the universes at her feet, and just beyond her eye, with a
+loftiness of spirit and of exquisite trivialness seconded by none. Who
+has not read these flippant renderings, holding always some touch of
+austerity and gravity of mood, or the still more perfect "letters" to
+her friends, will, I think, have missed a new kind of poetic
+diversion, a new loveliness, evasive, alert, pronounced in every
+interval and serious, modestly so, and at a bound leaping as it were
+like some sky child pranking with the clouds, and the hills and the
+valleys beneath them, child as she surely was always, playing in some
+celestial garden space in her mind, where every species of tether was
+unendurable, where freedom for this childish sport was the one thing
+necessary to her ever young and incessantly capering mind--"hail to
+thee, blithe spirit, bird thou ever wert"!
+
+It must be said in all justice, then, that "fascination was her
+element," everything to her was wondrous, sublimely magical, awsomely
+inspiring and thrilling. It was the event of many moons to have
+someone she liked say so much as good morning to her in human tongue,
+it was the event of every instant to have the flowers and birds call
+her by name, and hear the clouds exult at her approach. She was the
+brightest young sister of fancy, as she was the gifted young daughter
+of the ancient imagination. One feels everywhere in her verse and in
+her so splendid and stylish letters an unexcelled freshness,
+brightness of metaphor and of imagery, a gift of a peculiarity that
+could have come only from this part of our country, this part of the
+world, this very spot which has bred so many intellectual and
+spiritual entities wrapped in the garments of isolation, robed with
+questioning. Her genius is in this sense essentially local, as much
+the voice of the spirit of New England as it is possible for one to
+hold. If ever wanderer hitched vehicle to the comet's tail, it was the
+poetic, sprite woman, no one ever rode the sky and the earth as she
+did in this radiant and skybright mind of her.
+
+She loved all things because all things were in one way or in another
+way bright for her, and of a blinding brightness from which she often
+had to hide her face. She embroidered all her thoughts with starry
+intricacies, and gave them the splendour of frosty traceries upon the
+windowpane in a frigid time, and of the raindrop in the sun, and
+summered them with fragrancing of the many early and late flowers of
+her own fanciful conjuring. They are glittering garlands of her clear,
+cool fancies, these poems, fraught in some instances, as are certain
+finely cut stones, with an exceptional mingling of lights coursing
+swiftly through them. She was avid of starlight and of sunlight alike,
+and of that light by which all things are illumined with a splendour
+not their own merely, but lent them by shafts from that radiant sphere
+which she leaned from, looking out gleefully upon them from the window
+of that high place in her mind.
+
+To think of this poet is to think of crystal, for she lived in a
+radianced world of innumerable facets, and the common instances were
+chariots upon which to ride widely over the edges of infinity. She is
+alive for us now in those rare fancies of hers, with no other wish in
+them save as memorandum for her own eyes, and when they were finished
+to send them spinning across the wide garden, many of them to her
+favorite sister who lived far, far away, over beyond the hedge. You
+shall find in her all that is winsome, strange, fanciful, fantastic
+and irresistible in the eastern character and characteristic. She is
+first and best in lightsomeness of temper, for the eastern is known
+as essentially a tragic genius. She is perhaps the single exponent of
+modern times of the quality of true celestial frivolity. Scintillant
+was she then, and like dew she was and the soft summer rain, and the
+light upon the lips of flowers of which she loved to sing. Her mind
+and her spirit were one, soul and sense inseparable, little sister of
+Shelley certainly she was, and the more playful relative of Francis
+Thompson.
+
+She had about her the imperishable quality that hovers about all
+things young and strong and beautiful, she was the sense of beauty
+ungovernable. What there are of tendencies religious and moral disturb
+in nowise those who love and have appreciation for true poetic
+essences. She had in her brain the inevitable buzzing of the bee in
+the belly of the bloom, she had in her eyes the climbing lances of the
+sun, she had in her heart love and pity for the innumerable pitiful
+and pitiable things. She was a quenchless mother in her gift for
+solace and she was lover to the immeasurable love. Like all
+aristocrats she hated mediocrity, and like all first rate jewels, she
+had no rift to hide. She was not a maker of poetry, she was a thinker
+of poetry. She was not a conjurer of words so much as a magician in
+sensibility. She has only to see and feel and hear to be in touch with
+all things with a name or with things that must be forever nameless.
+If she loved people, she loved them for what they were, if she
+despised them she despised them for what they did, or for lack of
+power to feel they could not do. Silence under a tree was a far more
+talkative experience with her than converse with one or a thousand
+dull minds. Her throng was the air, and her wings were the multitude
+of flying movements in her brain. She had only to think and she was
+amid numberless minarets and golden domes, she had only to think and
+the mountain cleft its shadow in her heart.
+
+Emily Dickinson is in no sense toil for the mind accustomed to the
+labours of reading, she is too fanciful and delicious ever to make
+heavy the head, she sets you to laughter and draws a smile across your
+face for pity, and lets you loose again amid the measureless pleasing
+little humanities. I shall always want to read Emily Dickinson, for
+she points her finger at all tiresome scholasticism, and takes a
+chance with the universe about her and the first rate poetry it offers
+at every hand within the eye's easy glancing. She has made poetry
+memorable as a pastime for the mind, and sent the heavier ministerial
+tendencies flying to a speedy oblivion. What a child she was, child
+impertinent, with a heavenly rippling in her brain!
+
+These random passages out of her writings will show at once the rarity
+of her tastes and the originality of her phrasing. "February passed
+like a kate, and I know March. Here is the light the stranger said was
+not on sea or land--myself could arrest it, but will not chagrin
+him"--
+
+"The wind blows gay today, and the jays bark like blue terriers."
+
+"Friday I tasted life, it was a vast morsel. A circus passed the
+house--still I feel the red in my mind though the drums are out."
+
+"The lawn is full of south and the odors tangle, and I hear today for
+the first the river in the tree."
+
+    "The zeros taught us phosphorus
+    We learned to like the fire
+    By playing glaciers when a boy
+    And tinder guessed by power
+
+    "Of opposite to balance odd
+    If white a red must be!
+    Paralysis, our primer dumb
+    Unto vitality."
+
+Then comes the "crowning extravaganza.... If I read a book, and it
+makes my whole body so cold no fire will ever warm me, I know that is
+poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off,
+I know that is poetry. Is there any other way? These are the only ways
+I know it."
+
+No one but a New England yankee mind could concoct such humours and
+fascinatingly pert phrases as are found here. They are like the
+chatterings of the interrupted squirrel in the tree-hole at nut-time.
+There is so much of high gossip in these poetic turns of hers, and so,
+throughout her books, one finds a multitude of playful tricks for the
+pleased mind to run with. She was an intoxicated being, drunken with
+the little tipsy joys of the simplest form, shaped as they were to
+elude always her evasive imagination into thinking that nothing she
+could think or feel but was extraordinary and remarkable. "Your
+letter gave no drunkenness because I tasted rum before--Domingo comes
+but once," etc., she wrote to Col. Higginson, a pretty conceit, surely
+to offer a loved friend. The passages offered will give the unfamiliar
+reader a taste of the sparkle of this poet's hurrying fancy and set
+her before the willing mind entrancingly, it seems to me. She will
+always delight those who find it in their way to love her elfish,
+evasive genius, and those who care for the vivid and living element in
+words will find her, to say the least, among the masters in her
+feeling for their strange shapes and the fresh significance contained
+in them. A born thinker of poetry, and in a great measure a gifted
+writer of it, refreshing many a heavy moment made dull with the
+weightiness of books, or of burdensome thinking. This poet-sprite sets
+scurrying all weariness of the brain, and they shall have an hour of
+sheer delight who invite poetic converse with Emily Dickinson. She
+will repay with funds of rich celestial coin from her rare and
+precious fancyings. She had that "oblique integrity" which she
+celebrates in one of her poems.
+
+
+
+
+ADELAIDE CRAPSEY
+
+
+One more satellite hurried away too soon! High hints at least, of the
+young meteor finding its way through space. Here was another of those,
+with a vast fund of wishing in her brain, and the briefest of hours in
+which to set them roaming. Brevities that whirl through the mind as
+you read those cinquains of Adelaide Crapsey, like white birds through
+the dark woodlands of the night. Cameos or castles, what is size? Is
+it not the same if they are of one perfection of feeling? Such a
+little book of Adelaide Crapsey, surely like cameos cut on shell, so
+clear in outline, so rich in form, so brave in indications, so much of
+singing, so much of poetry, of courage.
+
+    "Just now,
+    Out of the strange
+    Still dusk--as strange, as still,
+    A white moth flew; Why am I grown
+    So cold?"
+
+Isn't the evidence sufficient here of first rate poetic gifts,
+sensibility of an exceptional order? Contrast in so many ways with
+that perhaps more radiant and certainly more whimsical girl, with her
+rarest of flavours, she with her "whip of diamond, riding to meet the
+Earl"! I think geniuses like Keats or Shelley would have said "how do
+you do, poet?" to Adelaide Crapsey and her verse, lamenting also that
+she flew over the rainbowed edge of the dusk too soon, like the very
+moth over the garden wall, early in the evening. It is sure that had
+this poet been allowed her full quota of days, she would have left
+some handsome folios bright enough for any one caring for verse at its
+purest. Pity there was not time for another book at least, of her
+verses, to verify the great distinction conferred. She might have
+walked still more largely away with the wreaths of recognition. Not
+time for more books, instead of so much eternity at her bedside. She
+would surely have sent more words singing to their high places and
+have impressed the abundant output of the day with its superficiality
+by her seriousness. There is no trifling in these poetic things of
+hers. Trivial might some say who hanker after giantesque composition.
+Fragile are they only in the sense of size, only in this way are they
+small.
+
+Those who know the difficulties of writing poetic composition are
+aware of the task involved in creating such packed brevities. Emily
+Dickinson knew this power. "H. D." is another woman who understands
+the beauty of compactness. Superb sense of economy, of terseness the
+art calls for, excessive pruning and clipping. Singular that these
+three artists, so gifted in brevity were women. There is little, after
+all, in existence that warrants lengthy dissertation. Life itself is
+epigrammatic and brief enough. No volumes needed by way of
+explanation. The fascinating enigma diverts and perplexes everyone
+alike. The simple understand it best, or at least they seem to do so.
+Segregation, aloofness, spiritual imprisonment, which is another name
+for introspection, the looking out from bars of the caged house, all
+this discovers something through penetration. Walking with life is
+most natural, grazing its warm shoulder. There is little room for
+inquiry if one have the real feeling of life itself. Poetry is that
+which gleans most by keeping nearest to life. Books and firesides
+avail but little. Secretaries for the baggage of erudition do not
+enhance poetic values, they encumber them. Poetry is not declamation,
+it is not propaganda, it is breathing natural breaths. There is
+nothing mechanical about poetry excepting the affectation of forms.
+Poetry is the world's, it is everybody's. You count poetry by its
+essence, and no amount of studied effect, or bulging erudition will
+create that which is necessary, that which makes poetry what it is.
+The one essential is power to sing, and the intelligence to get it
+down with degrees of mastery or naturalness, which is one and the same
+thing.
+
+Real singing is unusual as real singers are rare. Adelaide Crapsey
+shows that she was a real singer, essentially poet, excellent among
+those of our time. She impresses her uncommon qualities upon you, in
+the cinquains of hers, with genuinely incisive force. She has so much
+of definiteness, so much of technical beauty, economy, all very
+valuable assets for a true poet. She had never been touched with the
+mania for journalistic profusion. She cared too much for language to
+ride it. She cared too much for words to want to whip them into
+slavery. She was outside of them, looking on, as it might be, through
+crystal, at their freshness. She did not take them for granted. They
+were new to her and she wanted the proper familiarity. She worked upon
+a spiritual geometric all her own. She did not run to the dictionary
+for eccentricities, she did not hunt words out of countenance. They
+were natural to her. She wanted most their simple beauty, and she
+succeeded. She had dignity, a rare gift in these times. She raises
+herself above the many by her fine feeling for the precision. That is
+her artistry, the word, the thing of beauty and the joy forever with
+her.
+
+It is to be regretted that Adelaide Crapsey had no more time for the
+miniature microscopic equations, the little thing seen large, the
+large thing seen vividly. She might have spent more hours with them
+and less with her so persistent guest, this second self at her side;
+ironic presence, when she most would have strode with the brighter
+companion, her first and natural choice. Her contribution is
+conspicuous among us for its balance and its intellectualism tempered
+with fine emotions. She had so much to settle for herself, so much
+bargaining for the little escapes in which to register herself
+consistently, so much of consultation for her body's sake, that her
+mind flew the dark spaces about her bed with consistent feverishness.
+
+Reckoning is not the genius of life. It is the painful, residual
+element of reflection. One must give, one must pay. It is not
+inspiring to beg for breath, yet this has come to many a fine artist,
+many a fine soul whose genius was far more of the ability for living,
+with so little of the ability for dying. You cannot think along with
+clarity, with the doom of dark recognition nudging your shoulder every
+instant. There must be somehow apertures of peace for production.
+Adelaide Crapsey's chief visitant was doom. She saw the days
+vanishing, and the inevitable years lengthening over her. No wonder
+she could write brevities, she whose existence was brevity itself. The
+very flicker of the lamp was among the last events. What, then, was
+the fluttering of the moth but a monstrous intimation. If her work was
+chilled with severity, it was because she herself was covered with the
+cool branches of decision. Nature was cold with her, hence there is
+the ring of ice in these little pieces of hers. They are veiled with
+the grey of many a sunless morning.
+
+    "These be
+    Three silent things;
+    The falling snow,--the hour
+    Before the dawn,--the mouth of one
+    Just dead."
+
+Here you have the intensity once more of Adelaide Crapsey. It haunts
+you like the something on the dark stairway as you pass, just as when,
+on the roadway in the dead of night, the twig grazing one's cheek
+would seem like the springing panther at one's throat. Dramatic
+vividness is certainly her chief distinction. No playfulness here, but
+a stout reckoning with austere beauty. The wish to record the element
+at its best that played so fierce a role in her life. She writes her
+own death hymn, lays her own shroud out, spaces her own epilogue as if
+to give the engraver, who sets white words on white stone, the clue,
+stones the years stare on, leaving the sunlight to streak the old
+pathos there, and then settles herself to the long way of lying, to
+the sure sleep that glassed her keen eyes, shutting them down too soon
+on a world that held so much poetry for her.
+
+The titles of her cinquains, such as "November night", "The guarded
+wound", "The warning", "Fate defied", and the final touch of
+inevitability in "The Lonely Death", so full of the intensity of last
+moments, intimate the resolute presence of the grey companion of the
+covering mists. It must be said hurriedly that Adelaide Crapsey was
+not all doom. By no means. The longer pieces in her tiny book attest
+to her feeling for riches, and the lyrical wonders of the hour. Her
+fervour is the artist's fervour, the longing, coming really to
+passion, to hold and fix forever the shapes that were loveliest to
+her. That is the poet's existence, that is the poet's labour, and his
+last distress. No one wants to give in to a commonplace world when the
+light that falls on it is lovelier than the place it falls on. If you
+cannot transpose the object, transport it, however simply, however
+ornately, then of what use is poetry? It is transport!
+
+Adelaide Crapsey was efficient in her knowledge of what poetry is, as
+she was certainly proficient as workman. She was lapidary more than
+painter or sculptor. It was a beautiful cutting away, and a sweeping
+aside of the rifts and flaws. That is to say, she wanted that. She
+wanted the white light of the perfect gem, and she could not have been
+content with just matrix, with here and there embedded chips. She was
+a washer of gold, and spared no labours for the bright nuggets she
+might get, and the percentage of her panning was high. But the cloud
+hung on the mountain she clomb, and her way was dimmed.
+
+    "In the cold I will rise, I will bathe
+    In the waters of ice; Myself
+    Will shiver, and will shrive myself
+    Alone in the dawn, and anoint
+    Forehead and feet and hands;
+    I will shutter the windows from light,
+    I will place in their sockets the four
+    Tall candles and set them a-flame
+    In the grey of the dawn; And myself
+    Will lay myself straight in my bed,
+    And draw the sheet under my chin."
+
+There could be no more of resolute finality in this chill epilogue.
+There is the cold of a thousand years shuddering out of this scene, it
+is the passing, the last of this delicate and gifted poet, Adelaide
+Crapsey. If she has written more than her book prints, these must
+surely be of her best. She took the shape of that which she made so
+visible, so cold, so beautiful. With her white wings she has skirted
+the edge of the dusk with an incredible calm. No whimpering here. Too
+much artistry for that; too much of eye to let heart rule. The gifts
+of Adelaide Crapsey were high ones, and that she left so little of
+song is regrettable, even though she left us a legacy of some of the
+best singing of the day. It is enough to call her poet, for she was
+among the first of this hour and time. She had no affectations, no
+fashionable theories and ambitions. She simply wrote excellent verse.
+That is her beautiful gift to us.
+
+
+
+
+FRANCIS THOMPSON
+
+
+If ever a meteor fell to earth it was Francis Thompson. If ever a star
+ascended to that high place in the sky where sit the loftier planets
+in pleasant company, it was this splendid poet. Stalking through the
+shadows of the Thames Embankment to find his clear place in the milky
+way, is hardly the easiest road for so exceptional a celebrity. It is
+but another instance of the odd tradition perpetuating itself, that
+some geniuses must creep hand and knee through mire, heart pierced
+with the bramble of experience, up over the jagged pathways to that
+still place where skies are clear at last. Thompson is the last among
+the great ones to have known the dire vicissitude, direst, if legends
+are true, that can befall a human being. We have the silence of his
+saviour friends, the Meynells, saying so much more than their few
+public words, tender but so careful. What they knew, and what the
+walls of the monastery of Storrington must have heard in that so
+pained stillness, there, is probably beyond repetition for pathos. De
+Quincey had taught him much in the knowledge of hardship. Whether it
+is just similarity of experience or a kind of imitation in nature, is
+not easy to say. It was hardly the example to repeat. It is singular
+enough also, that De Quincey's "Ann" should have become so vivid a
+repetition to Thompson, in just the same terms.
+
+London has no feeling for the peace of poets. They are the little
+things in the confused maelstrom of human endeavor. Poets are taught
+with the whip. They must bleed for their divine idea, or so it was
+then. Sometimes it seems as if a change had come, for so many poets
+sit in chairs of ease these days. Science produces other kinds of
+discomfort, and covers the old misery with a new tapestry of
+contrasts. I doubt if many poets are selling matches these days,
+living on eleven pence a day. There is still the poet who knows his
+cheap lodging. There seems enough of them still for high minds to
+crawl into, and yet there is another face to the misery.
+
+Thompson was seraph from the first. You see the very doom burning out
+of his boy's eyes in the youthful portrait, and you see the logical
+end in that desperate and pitiful mask, the drawing of the last period
+in the Meynell Book. His was certainly the severed head, and his feet
+were pathetically far away, down on a stony earth. That he should have
+forfeited the ordinary ways of ease, is as consistent with his
+appearance, as it was necessary to his nature. That he should find
+himself on the long march past the stations of the cross, to the very
+tree itself, for his poetic purpose, if it is in keeping with
+tradition, is not precisely the most inspiring aspect of human
+experiences. Human he was not, as we like to think of human, for he
+was too early in his career marked for martyr. There is the note of
+cricket-time in his earlier life, and how long this attached to the
+physical delights of his being cannot be told here. His eyes were
+lodged too far in heaven to have kept the delights for long, to have
+comprehended all that clogged his impatiently mercurial feet.
+
+"The abashless inquisition of each star" was the scrutiny that
+obsessed his ways, the impertinence that he suffered most; for he had
+the magnitude of soul that hungered for placement, and the plague of
+two masters was on him. Huntress and "Hound" he had to choose between,
+beauty and the insatiable Prince; harsh and determined lovers, both of
+them, too much craving altogether for an artistic nature. The earth
+had no room for him and he did not want heaven so soon. He was not
+saint, even though his name followed him even, for recognition.
+
+"Stood bound and helplessly, for Time to shoot his barbed minutes at
+me, suffered the trampling hoof of every hour," etc., all this
+confided to some childish innocent in "The child's kiss". Whom else
+should he tell but a child? Where is the man or woman with
+understanding but has the "child" lodged somewhere for sympathy, for
+recognition? The clearest listener he could find, and the least
+commiserative, happily. "The heart of childhood, so divine for me", is
+but typical of a being so dragged, and emaciate with the tortures of
+the body, in earth places where no soul like his could ever be at
+home. What was Preston, or Ashton-under-Lyne to him, more than Kensall
+Green is to him now? What is such dust in his sky but some blinding
+and blowing thing? What is there for singer to do but sing until the
+throat cracks? Even the larks and the thrushes do that. They end their
+morning and evening with a song. He was brother to these birds in that
+loftiness. He sang, and sang, and sang, while flesh fainted from
+hunger and weakness.
+
+Had not Storrington come to him in the dark places of London, we
+should have had no "Hound of Heaven", and without that masterpiece
+what would modern poetry do? He sang to cover up his wounds with
+climbing music. That was his sense of beauty. He filled his hollowing
+cheek with finer things than moaning. He might have wept, but they
+were words instead of drops.
+
+It will be difficult to find loftier song as to essences. We shall
+have room for criticising stylistic extravagances, archaisms of a not
+interesting order for us, yet there will be nothing said but the
+highest in praise of his genius. Excess of praise may be heaped upon
+him without cessation, and it may end in the few cool yet incisive
+words that fell from the lips of Meredith, with the violets from
+another's worshipped hands, "a true poet, one of a small band." Poets
+of this time will have much to gather from Thompson in point of
+sincerity. There is terrific mastery of words, which is like
+Shakespeare in felicity we do not encounter so often it seems to me.
+
+Thompson has scaled the white rainbow of the night, and sits in
+radiant company among the first planetary strummers of song. His
+diamond is pure, and the matrix that hid him so long from showing his
+glinted facets is chipped away of miseries carried down with death.
+They will soon be forgotten by the multitude as death itself made him
+forget them. We have his chants and his anthems and plainsongs to
+remind us of the one essential, of how lofty a singer passed down our
+highroad. "Dusty with tumbling about amid the stars!" That is what he
+is for us now, if he rolled in too much clay of earth. Shelley might
+have turned his own handsome phrase on him, for they both strode the
+morning of their bright minds like sun the sky, with much of the same
+solemn yet speedy gait. There are times when they are certainly of the
+one radiance, lyrical and poetical. Their consuming intellectual
+interests were vastly apart, as were their paths of spirit.
+
+I think we shall have no more "dread of height". Poetry has passed
+into scientific discovery. Intellectual passions are the vogue, earth
+is coming into its own, for there is no more heaven in the mind. We
+are showing our humanities now, and the soul must wait a little, and
+remain speechless in some dull corner of the universe. Thompson was
+the last to believe. We are learning to think now, so poetry has come
+to calculation. Rhapsody and passion are romantic, and we are not
+romantic. The last Rhapsodist was Francis Thompson, and in the sense
+of lyrical fervour, the last great poet was Francis Thompson.
+
+
+
+
+ERNEST DOWSON
+
+
+It is late to be telling of Dowson, with the eighteen-nineties nearly
+out of sight, and yet it is Dowson and Lionel Johnson that I know most
+of, from the last of this period. Poles apart these two poets are, the
+one so austere and almost collegiate in adherence to convention, the
+other too warm to let a coldness obsess his singing. There doesn't
+seem to be anything wonderful about Dowson, and yet you want to be
+saying a line of his every now and then, of him "that lived, and sang,
+and had a beating heart," ere he grew old, and he grew old so soon.
+"Worn out by what was really never life to him," is a prefatorial
+phrase I recall. There was a genuine music in Dowson, even if it was
+smothered in lilies and roses and wine of the now old way of saying
+things. "Come hither child, and rest--Behold the weary west," might
+have been the thing he was saying to himself, so much is this the
+essence of his lost cause.
+
+There is a languor and a lack of power to lift a hand toward the
+light, too much a trusting of the shadow. "I have flung roses, roses
+riotously with the throng, to put those pale lost lilies out of mind."
+Always verging on a poetic feeling not just like ourselves in these
+days, and yet Dowson was a poet. He caressed words until they sang for
+him the one plaint that he asked of them. That he was obsessed of the
+beauties and the intimations of Versailles, is seen in everything he
+did, or at least he imbibed this from Verlaine. He was himself a pale
+wanderer down soft green allees, he had a twilight mind struggling
+toward the sun, which was too bright for him, for the moon was his
+brightest light. Echoes of Verlaine linger through his verse and a
+strain of Poe is present, poet whom he with his French taste admired
+so much, two very typical idols for a young man with a sentimental
+journey to pursue. Lost Adelaides, to keep him steeped in the sorrow
+that he cherished, for he petted his miseries considerably; or was it
+that he was most at home when he was unhappy? He would rather have
+seen the light of day from a not quite clear window, for instead of a
+clear hill, he might see a vague castle of his fancy somewhere. He
+hadn't the sweep of a great poet, and yet somehow there was the linnet
+in him, there was the strain of the lute among the leaves, there was
+the rustle of a soft dress audible, and the passing of hands he could
+not ever hold.
+
+He was the poet of the lost treasure. "Studies in Sentiment" is, I
+think, the title of a small book of prose of his. He might have called
+his poems "Studies in sentimentality". And yet, for his time, how
+virile and vigorous he sounds beside "Posies out of Rings", of his
+friend Theodore Peters, of the renaissance cloak, the cherry coloured
+velvet cloak embroidered in green leaves and silver veinings, so full
+of the sky radiance of Dowson himself, this cloak. Cherry sounds red
+and passionate. But it was a cherry of olden time, with the bloom
+quite gone, the dust of the years permeating its silken warp. It
+reposes here in America, the property of an artist of that period.
+
+One likes Dowson because of his sincerity, and a clear beauty which,
+if not exactly startling, was in its way truly genuine. It was merely
+too late for Dowson, and it was probably too soon. Swinburne had
+strummed the skies with every kind of song, and Verlaine had whispered
+every secret of the senses there was, in the land of illusion and
+vaguery. Dowson was worshipper of them both, for it was sound first
+and last that he cared most for, the musical mastery of the one and
+the sentimentality of the other. He was far nearer Verlaine in type.
+He had but the one thing to tell of, and that was lost love, and he
+told it over and over in his book of verse. His Pierrot of the Minute
+was himself, and his Cynara was the ever vanishing vision of his own
+insecurity and incapability. He perished for the love of hands. He is
+so like someone one knows, whom one wants to talk to tenderly, touch
+in a friendly way, and say as little as possible. He comes to one
+humanly first, and asks you for your eye to his verse afterward,
+something of the "Little boy Lost", in his so ineffectual face, weak
+with sweetness and hidden in shyness, covered with irresponsibility,
+or lack of power to be responsible.
+
+He was a helpless one, that is certain. He resorted to the
+old-fashioned methods of the decadents for maintaining the certain
+requisite melancholy apparently necessary to sing a certain way. In
+the struggle of that period, he must have seemed like a very clear,
+though a very sad singer. There were no lilies or orchids in his
+buttonhole, and no strange jewels on his fingers, for you remember, it
+was the time of "Monsieur Phocas", and the art of Gustave Moreau. He
+was plain and sincere, and pathetic, old-fashioned too in that he was
+bohemian, or at least had acquired bohemianism, for I think no
+Englishman was ever really bohemian. Dieppe and the docks had gotten
+him, and took away the sense of mastery over things that a real poet
+of power must somehow have. He was essentially a giver-in. His
+neurasthenia was probably the reason for that. It was the age of
+absinthe and little taverns, for there was Verlaine and the inimitable
+Cafe d'Harcourt, which, as you saw it just before the war, had the
+very something that kept the Master at his drinks all day.
+
+Murger, Rimbaud, Verlaine had done the thing which has lasted so
+singularly until now, for there are still echoes of this in the air,
+even to the present day. Barmaids are memories, and roseleaves dried
+and set in urns, for that matter, too. How far away it all seems, and
+they were the substance of poetry then. Sounds were the important
+things for Dowson, which is essentially the Swinburne echo.
+Significant then, that he worshipped "the viol, the violet, and the
+vine" of Poe. There was little else but singing in his verse however.
+His love of Horace did less for him than the masters of sound,
+excepting that the vision comes in the name "Cynara". But it was all
+struggle for Dowson, a battle with the pale lily. It was for this he
+clung to cabmen's lounging places. He was looking for places to be out
+of the play in. He couldn't have survived for long, and yet there is a
+strain of genuine loveliness, the note of pure beauty in the verse of
+Dowson. He was poet, and kept to his creed with lover-like tenacity.
+
+He helped close a period that was distinguished all over the world,
+the period of the sunflower. Apart from its wildest and most
+spectacular genius, it has produced Lionel Johnson with his religious
+purity, and Aubrey Beardsley. It was the time of sad and delicate
+young men. They all died in boyhood really. These were, I think, with
+Dowson the best it offered. We never read Arthur Symons for his power
+in verse, he with so much of the rose-tinted afterglow in him, so much
+of the old feeling for stage doors and roses thrown from the boxes,
+and the dying scent of lingerie. His essays will be a far finer source
+of delight for a much longer time, for therein is the best poetry he
+had to offer.
+
+Dowson was, let us say not mockingly, the boyish whimperer in song. He
+was ineffectual, too much so, to take up the game of laughter for
+long. That would have been too strenuous for him, so he had to sit and
+weep tears of wordy rain. "Il pleut dans mon coeur" was the famous
+touch of his master, it was the loudest strain in him. That was the
+lover-strain, and Dowson was the lover dying of love, imaginary love
+probably, and saw everywhere something to remind him of what he had
+pathetically lost. If there had been a little savage in him, he would
+have walked away with what he wanted. He maybe did have a try or two,
+but they couldn't have endured, for he wasn't loving a particular
+Adelaide. That was the name he gave to love, for it was woman's lips,
+and eyes and hands that he cared most for, or at least seemed most to
+care.
+
+It was in the vision that crossed his ways in the dark and boisterous
+taverns where love finds strange ways for expression, that the
+singleness of feeling possessed him. It was among the rougher elements
+of dock life that his refinements found their level. Dowson sang and
+sang and sang, until he grew old at thirty-three, "worn out by what
+was never really life to him". Aged pierrot, gone home to his mother,
+the Moon, to bask forever in the twilight of his old and vague
+fancies. There might he strum his heart out in the old way, and the
+world would never hear, for it has lost the ear for this kind of song.
+Perhaps in two hundred years, in other "golden treasuries" there may
+appear the songs of Dowson as among the best of those early and late
+singers of the nineteenth century. We cannot say now, for it cloys a
+little with sweets for us at this time, though it was then the time of
+honey and jasmine, and the scent of far away flowers. Pierrot of the
+glass, with the hours dripping away in fine, gold rain. That was the
+genius of poets like Dowson, and pierrot was the master of them all.
+
+
+
+
+HENRY JAMES ON RUPERT BROOKE
+
+
+Henry James on Rupert Brooke! Here is certainly a very wide interval,
+separated, artist and subject, by the greatest divergence of power,
+and one may be even amazed at the contrast involved. He is surely,
+James, in all his elaborateness, trying to square the rose and compute
+the lily, algebraical advances upon a most simple thesis. Brooke--a
+nature so obvious, which had no measure at all for what the sum had
+done to him, and for all that about him, or for those stellar
+ecstasies which held him bound with fervour as poet, planetary
+swimmer, and gifted as well with a fine stroke for the sea, and runner
+of all the beautiful earth places about the great seas' edge.
+
+For me, there is heaviness and over-elaboration paramount in this
+preface to the Letters from America, excess of byword, a strained
+relationship with his subject, but that would of course be Jamesian,
+and very naturally, too. It is hardly, this preface, the tribute of
+the wise telling of beautiful and "blinding youth", surely more the
+treatise of the problemist forging his problem, as the sculptor might;
+something too much of metal or stone, too ponderous, too severe let
+one say, for its so gracing and brightening theme, something not
+springing into bloom, as does the person and personality of the young
+subject himself. Only upon occasion does he really come upon the young
+man, actual, forgetful of all but him.
+
+There is no question, if the word of those be true who had relation
+however slight or intimate with Brooke, that he was an engrossing
+theme, and for more than one greater than himself, as certainly he was
+for many much less significant than James. It is distinguished from
+the young poet's point of view that he was impressed, and that as
+person to person he really did see him in a convincing manner, as
+might one artist of great repute find himself uncommonly affected by
+the young and so living poet with more than a common gift for
+creation. It seems to me however that James is not over certain as to
+how poetic all things are in substance, yet all the while treating
+Brooke coolly and spaciously as an artist should.
+
+I did not know Brooke, and I know nothing of him beyond various photos
+showing him one way, quite manly and robust, and I feel sure he was
+so, and in another way as neither youth nor man, but something
+idyllic, separate and seraph-like, untouched mostly with earthly
+experience. These pictures do show that he was, unquestionably, a
+bright gust of England, with an almost audible splendour about even
+these poor replicas, which make it seem that he did perform the
+ascribed miracle, that England really had brought forth of her
+brightest and best, only to lay away her golden fruitage in dust upon
+the borders of a far and classical sea, with an acute untimeliness.
+But respectfully let me say, I think much in these hours of the
+incongruity and pathos of excessive celebration. There shall not be
+for long, singers enough to sing high songs commensurate with the
+delights of those numberless ones "who lived, and sang, and had a
+beating heart", those who have sped into the twilight too soon, having
+but a brief time to discover if years had bright secrets for them or
+clear perspective. There shall always lack the requisite word for them
+who have made many a dull morning splendid with faith, they who have
+been the human indication immeasurably of the sun's rising, and of the
+truth that vision is a thing of reason.
+
+Of Brooke and the other dead poets as well, there has, it seems to me,
+been too much of celebration. But of Brooke and his poetry, which is a
+far superior product to these really most ordinary "Letters", there is
+in these poetic pieces too much of what I want to call "University
+Cleavage", an excess of old school painting, too much usage of the
+warm image, which, though emotional, is not sensuous enough to express
+the real poetic sensuousness, to make the line or the word burn
+passionately, too much of the shades of Swinburne still upon the
+horizon. Rose and violet of the eighteen ninety hues have for long
+been dispensed with, as has the pierrot and his moon. We have in this
+time come to like hardier colourings, which are for us more
+satisfying, and more poetic. We hardly dare use the hot words of
+"Anactoria" in our day. To be sure rose is English, for it has been
+for long a very predominant shade on the young face of England, but in
+Brooke there is an old age to the fervour, and in spite of the
+brilliant youth of the poet, there is an old age in the substance and
+really in the treatment as well. We are wanting a fresher intonation
+to those images, and expect a new approach, and a newer aspect. It is
+not to adhere by means of criticism to the prevailing graveyard
+tendency, nor do we want so much of the easy and cheap journalistic
+element, as comes so often in the so named "free verse". What is
+really wanted is an individual consistency, and a brightness of
+imagery which shall be the poet's own by reason of his own personal
+attachment, and not simply the variance of the many-in-one poetry of
+the day.
+
+It is not enough to write passably, it is only enough when there are
+several, or even one, who will give their or his own peculiar contact
+with those agencies of the day, the hour, and the moment, who will
+find or invent a style best suited to themselves. Attempts at
+excessive individualism will never create true individualistic
+expression, no affected surprise in personal perversity of image or
+metaphor will make a real poet, or real poetry. There must be first
+and last of all, a sure ardour, the poet's very own, which will of
+itself support obvious, or even slightly detectable, influences. It is
+not enough to declaim oneself, or propose continually one's group. The
+single utterance is what is necessary, a real freshness of
+vocalization which is, so to speak, the singer's own throat. If he be
+original in his freshness, we shall be able to single him away from
+the sweeping movements of the hour by his very "specialness" in touch,
+that pressure of the mind and spirit upon the page, which is his.
+
+We shall translate a poet through his indications and intentions as
+well as through his arrivals, and we must condemn no one to fame
+beyond his capacity or deserts. We have never the need of extravagant
+laud. It is not enough to praise a poet for his personal charm, his
+beauty of body and of mind and soul, for these are but beautiful
+things at home in a beautiful house. In the case of Brooke, we have
+ringing up among hosts of others, James's voice that he was all of
+this, but I would not wish to think it was the wish of any real poet
+to be "condemned to sociability", merely because he was an eminently
+social being, or because he was the exceptionally handsome, among the
+many less so; or be condemned to overpraise for what is after all but
+an indication to poetic power. "If I should die", is of course a very
+lovely sonnet, and it is the true indication of what Brooke might have
+been, but it is not the reason to be doomed to find all things
+wonderful in him. For in the state of perfection, if one see always
+with a lancet eye, we really do accentuate the essence of beauty by a
+careful and very direct critical sense, which can and should, when
+honorably exercised, show up delicately, the sense of proportion.
+
+It is as much a part of the artist's equipment to find fault as it is
+to praise, for he wants by nature the true value with which he may
+relate himself to the sense of beauty. It seems, perhaps only to me,
+that in Brooke's poems there is but a vigorous indication to poetic
+expression, whereas doubtless the man himself was being excessively
+poetic, hour and moment together, and spent much energy of mind and
+body poetizing sensation. For me, there is a journalistic quality of
+phrasing and only very rarely the unusual image. As for the "Letters",
+they are loose and jotty in form, without distinction either in
+observation or in form, without real felicity or uniqueness. Art is
+nothing if it is not the object, or the idea, or experience seen in
+review, with clarity. In Brooke, I feel the superabundance of joy in
+the attractiveness of the world, but I do not feel the language of him
+commensurate or distinguished in the qualities of poetic or literary
+art. There seems to me to be too much of the blown lock and the
+wistful glance, too much of the attitudinized poet, lacking, I may
+even say, in true refinement, often.
+
+A too comfortable poet, and poetry of too much verve without incision,
+too much "gesturing", which is an easy thing for many talented people,
+and there is also missing for me the real grip of amazement. You will
+not find anything in the letters that could not have been done by the
+cub reporter, save possibly in the more charming of the letters with
+reference to swimming in the South Seas. Here you feel Brooke at home
+instantly, and the picturing is natural and easy. But other than this,
+you will find no phrasing to compare with passages of James's preface,
+such, for instance, as the "sky-clamour of more dollars", surely a
+vastly more incisive phrase regarding the frenzies of New York, than
+all that Brooke essays to tell of it. Brooke is distinctly "not there"
+too often in these so irregular letters of his. Letters are notably
+rare in these times anyhow, and so it is with the letters of Brooke.
+We look for distinction, and it is not to be found, they have but
+little of the intimacy with their subjects that one expects.
+
+As to his poetry, it seems to be a poetry rapidly approaching state
+approval, there is in it the flavour of the budding laureate, it seems
+to me to be poetry already "in orders". Brooke was certainly in danger
+of becoming a good poet, like the several other poets who perished in
+the throes of heroism. Like them, he would, had he lived, have had to
+save himself from the evils of prosperity, poetically speaking. He
+would have had to overcome his tendency toward what I want to call the
+old-fashioned "gold and velvet" of his words, a very definite haze
+hanging over them of the ill effect of the eighteen-ninety school,
+which produced a little excellent poetry and a lot of very tame
+production. Poetry is like all art, difficult even in its freest
+interval. Brooke must rest his claim to early distinction perhaps upon
+the "If I should die" sonnet alone, he would certainly have had to
+come up considerably, to have held the place his too numerous personal
+admirers were wont to thrust upon him. Unless one be the veritable
+genius, sudden laurels wither on the stem with too much of morning.
+
+This poet had no chance to prove what poetry of his would have endured
+the long day, and most of all he needed to be removed from too much
+love of everything. The best art cannot endure such promiscuity, not
+an art of specific individual worth. In the book which is called
+"Letters from America", the attraction lies in its preface, despite
+the so noticeable irrelevancy of style. It seems to me that James
+might for once have condescended to an equal footing with his theme,
+for the sake of the devoutness of his intention, and have come to us
+for the moment, the man talking of the youth. He might then have told
+us something really intimate of "Rupert", as he so frequently names
+him, for this would indicate some intimacy surely, unless perchance he
+was "Rupert" to the innumerables whom he met, and who were sure of his
+intimacy on the instant's introduction, which would indeed be
+"condemned to sociability".
+
+This book is in two pieces, preface and content, and we are conscious
+chiefly of the high style and interest of the preface, first of all,
+and the discrepancy inherent in the rest of the book accentuating the
+wide divergence between praiser and praised. It is James with
+reference to Brooke, it is not Henry James informing of the young and
+handsome Rupert Brooke. Apollo in the flesh must do some mighty
+singing. Brooke had not done much of this when they laid him by on the
+borders of that farther sea. He had more to prove the heritage laid so
+heavily upon him by the unending host of his admirers and lovers. He
+needed relief from the popular notion, and we must relieve ourselves
+from his excessive popularity if we are to enjoy him rightly, by being
+just with him. A little time, and we should have learned his real
+distinction. It is too soon for us, and too late for him. We must
+accept him more for his finer indications then, and less for his
+achievement in the sense of mastery.
+
+
+
+
+THE DEARTH OF CRITICS
+
+
+There is just cause for wonder at the noticeable absence of critics in
+the field of painting, of individuals who are capable of some serious
+approach to the current tendencies in art. We have witnessed a very
+general failure to rise above the common or high-class reportorial
+level in this particular sphere. Why do so many people who write
+specifically about painting say so little that really relates to it?
+It is because most of them are journalists or men of letters who have
+made emotional excursions into this field, which is in most instances
+foreign to them; well-known literary artists, occasionally, intent
+upon varying their subject matter.
+
+We read Meier-Graefe, for instance, on the development of modern art,
+and we find his analogies more or less stimulating, but taken as a
+whole his work is unsatisfactory from an artist's point of view; not
+much more than a sort of novel with art for its skeleton, or rather a
+handbook from which the untutored layman can gather superficial
+information about group and individual influences, a kind of verbal
+entertainment that is altogether wanting in true critical values. I
+have listened to lectures on art by people who were supposed to know
+about it, merely to see how much this type of critical study could
+satisfy the really artistic mind somewhat conversant with true
+relations, and I have found these lectures of but the slightest value,
+_resumes_ compounded of wearisome and inappropriate detail. There is
+always an extreme lack of true definition, of true information, there
+is always too much of the amateur spirit passing for popular knowledge
+among these individuals who might otherwise do so much to form public
+taste and appreciation. Thus we find that even the chatty Meier-Graefe
+stops without going any further than Cezanne. It is possible that
+after writing two very heavy volumes upon the development of modern
+art, he has to remain silent on modern art itself, that he really
+feels he is not qualified to speak upon Cezanne and his successors; or
+does he assume possibly that there is nothing this side of Cezanne?
+How many writer people are there who really do understand what has
+taken place since then?
+
+I have heard these characteristic remarks among the so-called art
+writers who write the regular notices for the daily journals--"You see
+I really don't know anything about the subject, but I have to write!"
+or--"I don't know anything about art, but I am reading up on it as
+much as possible so that I won't appear too stupid; for they send me
+out and I have to write something." Their attitude is the same as if
+their subject were a fire or a murder: but either of the latter would
+be much more in their line, calling for nothing but a registration of
+the simplest of facts. Just why these people have to write upon art
+will never be clear. But because of this altogether trivial
+relationship to the theme of painting we find it difficult to take
+seriously at all what we read in our dailies, in every case the barest
+notation with heavily worded comment, having little or no reference to
+what is important in the particular pictures themselves. How can
+anyone take these individuals seriously when they actually have no
+opinion to offer, and must rely either upon humor or indignation to
+inspire them?
+
+If we turn to the pundits of criticism we find statements like this of
+Ruskin on Giotto:--"For all his use of opalescent warm color, Giotto
+is exactly like Turner, as in his swift expressional power he is like
+Gainsborough!" Again, speaking of Turner's _Fighting Temeraire_, he
+says: "Of all pictures of subjects not visibly involving human pain,
+this is, I believe, the most pathetic that was ever painted--no ruin
+was ever so affecting as this gliding of the vessel to her grave."
+Journalism of the first class certainly, but at the farthest stretch
+of the imagination how can one possibly think of Gainsborough or
+Turner in connection with any special quality of Giotto? As for the
+pathos of an aged ship, that belongs to poetry, as Coleridge has
+shown; sentiment of this kind has never had any proper place in
+painting. A far worthier type of appreciation in words is to be
+found, of course, in Pater's passages on _La Gioconda_ and
+Botticelli's _Birth of Venus_. But these belong to a different realm,
+in which literature rises to a height independent of the pictures
+themselves by means of the suggestion that is in them, the power of
+suggestion being a finer alternative for crude and worthless
+description. We shall always dispute with the writer on art as to
+exactly what symbol is inherent in the presence of a rose in the hand
+or a tear upon the cheek, but we cannot quarrel when the matter is
+treated as sublimely as in the case of a literary artist like Pater.
+It is in the sphere of professed critical judgment that the literary
+authorities so often go astray.
+
+Thus between the entertaining type of writer like Meier-Graefe and the
+daily reporter there is no middle ground. The journalist is frank and
+says that he doesn't know but that he must write; the other writes
+books that are well suited for reference purposes, but have scant
+bearing upon the actual truth in relation to pictures. Are there any
+critics who attempt seriously to approach the modern theme, who find
+it worth their while to go into modern esthetics with anything like
+sincerity or real earnestness of attitude? Only two that I am aware
+of. There is the intelligent Leo Stein, who seldom appears in print,
+but who makes an art of conversation on the subject; and there is
+Willard Huntingdon Wright, who has appeared extensively and certainly
+with intelligence also, both of these critical writers being very
+much at variance in theory, but both full of discernment whatever one
+may think of their individual ideas. We are sure of both as being
+thoroughly inside the subject, this theme of modern art, for they are
+somehow painter people. I even suspect them both of having once, like
+George Moore, painted seriously themselves.
+
+Nevertheless there is a hopeful seriousness of interest developing in
+what is being done this side the sea, a rediscovery of native art of
+the sort that is occurring in all countries. The artist is being
+taught by means of war that there is no longer a conventional center
+of art, that the time-worn fetish of Paris as a necessity in his
+development has been dispensed with; and this is fortunate for the
+artist and for art in general. It is having its pronounced effect upon
+the creative powers of the individual in all countries, almost
+obliging him to create his own impulse upon his own soil; it is making
+the artist see that if he is really to create he must create
+irrespective of all that exists as convention in the mind.
+
+How will this affect the artist? He will learn first of all to be
+concerned with himself, and what he puts forth of personality and of
+personal research will receive its character from his strict adherence
+to this principle, whether he proceeds by means of prevailing theories
+or by departure from them. The public will thus have no choice but to
+rely upon what he produces seriously as coming clearly from himself,
+from his own desire and labor. He will realize that it is not a
+trick, not a habit, not a trade--this modernity--and that with
+fashions it has nothing to do; that it is explicitly a part of our
+modern urge toward expression quite as much as the art of Corot and
+Millet were of Barbizon, as the art of Titian, Giorgione and
+Michelangelo were of Italy; that he and his time bear the strictest
+relationship to one another and that through this relationship he can
+best build up his own original power. Unable to depend therefore upon
+the confessedly untutored lay writer or even the better class essayist
+to tell him his place, he will establish himself, and his place will
+be determined in the regime of his day by precisely those qualities
+which he contributes to it. He will not rely too insistently upon
+idiosyncrasy; the failure of this we have already seen, in the
+post-impressionists.
+
+The truth is that painters must sooner or later learn to express
+themselves in terms of pure language, they must learn that creation is
+the thing most expected of them, and, if possible, invention as well.
+Oddity in execution or idea is of the least importance. Artists have a
+more respectable service to perform than this dilettantist notion of
+beauty implies. Since the utter annihilation of sentimentality, of
+legend, of what we call poetry has taken place, a richer substance for
+expression has come to us by means of which the artist may express a
+larger, newer variety of matter, more relevant to our special need,
+our modernity.
+
+The war disintegrated the _art habit_ and in this fact lies the hope
+of art. Fads have lost what slight interest they possessed, the folly
+of imitation has been exposed. As a result of this, I like to think
+that we shall have a finer type of expression, a richer kind of
+personal quality. Every artist is his own maker, his own liberator; he
+it is that should be the first to criticise, destroy and reconstruct
+himself, he should find no mood convenient, no attitude comfortable.
+What the lay-writer says of him in praise or blame will not matter so
+much in the future; he will respect first and last only those who have
+found the time to share his theme, at least in mind, if not in
+experience, and the discerning public will free itself from the
+temporary influences of the confessedly untutored critic. The artist
+will gain its confidence by reason of his own sincerity and
+intelligence. It is probable, too, that in time criticism in the mode
+of Ruskin will utterly disappear and the Meier-Graefe type of critic
+will have found a fitter and true successor, someone who, when he
+calls himself a critic, will prove a fairly clear title to the
+distinction and will not have to apologize for himself or for his
+occupation.
+
+
+
+
+AFTERWORD
+
+
+
+
+THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING "DADA"
+
+
+We are indebted to Tristan Tzara and his followers for the newest and
+perhaps the most important doctrinary insistence as applied to art
+which has appeared in a long time. Dada-ism is the latest phase of
+modernism in painting as well as in literature, and carries with it
+all the passion for freedom of expression which Marinetti sponsored so
+loudly in his futuristic manifestoes. It adds likewise an exhilarating
+quality of nihilism, imbibed, as is said, directly from the author of
+Zarathustra. Reading a fragment of the documentary statement of
+Dada-ism, we find that the charm of the idea exists mainly in the fact
+that they wish all things levelled in the mind of man to the degree of
+commonplaceness which is typical of and peculiar to it.
+
+Nothing is greater than anything else, is what the Dada believes, and
+this is the first sign of hope the artist at least can discover in the
+meaningless importance which has been invested in the term ART. It
+shows best of all that art is to betake itself on its own way blandly,
+despite the wish of its so ardent supporters and suppressors. I am
+greatly relieved as artist, to find there is at least one tenet I can
+hold to in my experience as a useful or a useless human being. I have
+always said for myself, I have no office, no obligations, no other
+"mission", dread-fullest of all words, than to find out the quality of
+humor that exists in experience, or life as we think we are entitled
+to call it. I have always felt the underlying fatality of habit in
+appreciation, because I have felt, and now actually more than ever in
+my existence, the fatality of habit indulged in by the artist. The
+artist has made a kind of subtle crime of his habitual expression, his
+emotional monotonies, and his intellectual inabilities.
+
+If I announce on this bright morning that I am a "Dada-ist" it is not
+because I find the slightest need for, or importance in, a doctrine of
+any sort, it is only for convenience of myself and a few others that I
+take up the issue of adherence. An expressionist is one who expresses
+himself at all times in any way that is necessary and peculiar to him.
+A dada-ist is one who finds no one thing more important than any other
+one thing, and so I turn from my place in the scheme from
+expressionist to dada-ist with the easy grace that becomes any
+self-respecting humorist.
+
+Having fussed with average intelligence as well as with average
+stupidity over the various dogmatic aspects of human experience such
+as art, religion, philosophy, ethics, morals, with a kind of
+obligatory blindness, I am come to the clearest point of my vision,
+which is nothing more or less than the superbly enlightening discovery
+that life as we know it is an essentially comic issue and cannot be
+treated other than with the spirit of comedy in comprehension. It is
+cause for riotous and healthy laughter, and to laugh at oneself in
+conjunction with the rest of the world, at one's own tragic vagaries,
+concerning the things one cannot name or touch or comprehend, is the
+best anodyne I can conjure in my mind for the irrelevant pains we take
+to impress ourselves and the world with the importance of anything
+more than the brilliant excitation of the moment. It is thrilling,
+therefore, to realize there is a healthy way out of all this dilemma
+of habit for the artist. One of these ways is to reduce the size of
+the "A" in art, to meet the size of the rest of the letters in one's
+speech. Another way is to deliver art from the clutches of its
+worshippers, and by worshippers I mean the idolaters and the
+commercialists of art. By the idolaters I mean those whose reverence
+for art is beyond their knowledge of it. By the commercialists I mean
+those who prey upon the ignorance of the unsophisticated, with
+pictures created by the esthetic habit of, or better to say, through
+the banality of, "artistic" temperament. Art is at present a species
+of vice in America, and it sorely and conspicuously needs prohibition
+or interference.
+
+It is, I think, high time that those who have the artistic habit
+toward art should be apprised of the danger they are in in assuming of
+course that they hold vital interest in the development of
+intelligence. It is time therefore to interfere with stupidity in
+matters of taste and judgment. We learn little or nothing from habit
+excepting repetitive imitation. I should, for the benefit of you as
+reader, interpose here a little information from the mind of Francis
+Picabia, who was until the war conspicuous among the cubists, upon the
+subject of dada-ism.
+
+    "Dada smells of nothing, nothing, nothing.
+    It is like your hopes: nothing.
+    Like your paradise: nothing.
+    Like your idols: nothing.
+    Like your politicians: nothing.
+    Like your heroes: nothing.
+    Like your artists: nothing.
+    Like your religions: nothing."
+
+A litany like this coming from one of the most notable dada-ists of
+the day, is too edifying for proper expression. It is like a window
+opened upon a wide cool place where all parts of one's exhausted being
+may receive the kind of air that is imperative to it. For the present,
+we may say, a special part of one's being which needs the most and the
+freshest air is that chamber in the brain where art takes hold and
+flourishes like a bed of fungus in the dark.
+
+What is the use, then, of knowing anything about art until we know
+precisely what it is? If it is such an orchidaceous rarity as the
+world of worshippers would have us believe, then we know it must be
+the parasitic equivalent of our existence feeding upon the health of
+other functions and sensibilities in ourselves. The question comes why
+worship what we are not familiar with? The war has taught us that
+idolatry is a past virtue and can have no further place with
+intelligent people living in the present era, which is for us the only
+era worth consideration. I have a hobby-horse therefore--to ride away
+with, out into the world of intricate common experience; out into the
+arena with those who know what the element of life itself is, and that
+I have become an expression of the one issue in the mind worth the
+consideration of the artist, namely fluidic change. How can anything
+to which I am not related, have any bearing upon me as artist? I am
+only dada-ist because it is the nearest I have come to scientific
+principle in experience. What yesterday can mean is only what
+yesterday was, and tomorrow is something I cannot fathom until it
+occurs. I ride my own hobby-horse away from the dangers of art which
+is with us a modern vice at present, into the wide expanse of
+magnanimous diversion from which I may extract all the joyousness I am
+capable of, from the patterns I encounter.
+
+The same disgust which was manifested and certainly enjoyed by Duse,
+when she demanded that the stage be cleared of actors in order to save
+the creative life of the stage, is the same disgust that makes us
+yearn for wooden dolls to make abstract movements in order that we may
+release art from its infliction of the big "A", to take away from art
+its pricelessness and make of it a new and engaging diversion,
+pastime, even dissipation if you will; for all real expression is a
+phase of dissipation in itself: To release art from the disease of
+little theatre-ism, and from the mandibles of the octopus-like
+worshipper that eats everything, in the line of spurious estheticism
+within range, disgorging it without intelligence or comprehension upon
+the consciousness of the not at all stupid public, with a so obviously
+pernicious effect.
+
+"Dada is a fundamentally religious attitude, analogous to that of the
+scientist with his eyeglass glued to the microscope." Dada is
+irritated by those who write "Art, Beauty, Truth", with capital
+letters, and who make of them entities superior to man. "Dada scoffs
+at capital letters, atrociously." "Dada ruining the authority of
+constraints, tends to set free the natural play of our activities."
+"Dada therefore leads to amoralism and to the most spontaneous and
+consequently the least logical lyricism. This lyricism is expressed in
+a thousand ways of life." "Dada scrapes from us the thick layers of
+filth deposited on us by the last few centuries." "Dada destroys, and
+stops at that. Let Dada help us to make a complete clearance, then
+each of us rebuild a modern house with central heating, and everything
+to the drain, Dadas of 1920."
+
+Remembering always that Dada means hobby-horse, you have at last the
+invitation to make merry for once in our new and unprecedented
+experience over the subject of ART with its now reduced front letter.
+It is the newest and most admirable reclaimer of art in that it offers
+at last a release for the expression of natural sensibilities. We can
+ride away to the radiant region of "Joie de Vivre", and find that
+life and art are one and the same thing, resembling each other so
+closely in reality, that it is never a question of whether it shall or
+must be set down on paper or canvas, or given any greater degree of
+expression than we give to a morning walk or a pleasant bath, or an
+ordinary rest in the sunlight.
+
+Art is then a matter of how one is to take life now, and not by any
+means a matter of how the Greeks or the Egyptians or any other race
+has shown it to be for their own needs and satisfaction. If art was
+necessary to them, it is unnecessary to us now, therefore it is free
+to express itself as it will. You will find, therefore, that if you
+are aware of yourself, you will be your own perfect dada-ist, in that
+you are for the first time riding your own hobby-horse into infinity
+of sensation through experience, and that you are one more
+satisfactory vaudevillian among the multitudes of dancing legs and
+flying wits. You will learn after all that the bugaboo called LIFE is
+a matter of the tightrope and that the stars will shine their frisky
+approval as you glide, if you glide sensibly, with an eye on the fun
+in the performance. That is what art is to be, must come to in the
+consciousness of the artist most of all, he is perhaps the greatest
+offender in matters of judgment and taste; and the next greatest
+offender is the dreadful go-between or "middleman" esthete who so
+glibly contributes effete values to our present day conceptions.
+
+We must all learn what art really is, learn to relieve it from the
+surrounding stupidities and from the passionate and useless admiration
+of the horde of false idolaters, as well as the money changers in the
+temple of success. Dada-ism offers the first joyous dogma I have
+encountered which has been invented for the release and true freedom
+of art. It is therefore most welcome since it will put out of use all
+heavy hands and light fingers in the business of art and set them to
+playing a more honourable and sportsmanlike game. We shall learn
+through dada-ism that art is a witty and entertaining pastime, and not
+to be accepted as our ever present and stultifying affliction.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Adventures in the Arts, by Marsden Hartley
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