me, in its perception of the special characterizations of Mr. Wells's
thoughtful pages, and in its counsel to the artist depicting an
alien topic to insert extraneous and unrelated views in his
landscape--proceeds from a certain strange and ridiculous conception of
truth peculiar to many persons engaged in the great fields of our
literary criticism and of our publishing and political activities.
This is a conception of truth not at all as something capable of
irradiating any scene on the globe, like light; but as some very
definite and limited force, driving a band-wagon. People who possess
this conception of truth seem to argue very reasonably that if Mr. Wells
is "in" it, so to speak, with truth, and is saying "the thing" to say
about sex or about the liberal party, then the intelligent author
anywhere who desires to be "in" it with truth will surely get into this
band-wagon of Mr. Wells's and stand on the very planks he has placed in
the platform of its particular wagonbed. It is an ironical, if tragic,
comment on the intelligence of American reading that the driver I have
chanced to see most frequently urged for authors here should be Mr. H.
G. Wells, who has done probably more than any other living writer of
English to encourage varied specialistic and non-partisan expression.
We have said that to tell his own truth the American writer will have to
sit longer before his subject and will have more to do to express it,
than if he chose it from a country of more ancient practices in art, and
of longer ancestral sojourns. We have said that he will be urged not to
tell his own truth considerably more than an English or German or French
writer would be. These authors are at least not advised to imitate
American expression, and they live in countries where the habit of
copying the work of other artists is much less widely regarded as an
evidence of sophistication than it is here.
The American writer must also face a marked historical peculiarity of
our national letters. The publishing centres of England and of Germany
and of France are in the midst of these nations. Outside the daily
press, the greater part of the publishing business of our own country is
in New York--situated in the northeast corner, nearly a continent away
from many of our national interests and from many millions of our
population. By an odd coincidence, outside the daily press, the field of
our national letters in magazine and book publication seems to be
occupied not at all with individual impressions of truth from over the
whole country, but with what may be called the New York truth.
The young American author in the Klondike or in San Francisco who
desires to sit long before his subject and to reveal its hitherto
unrecorded aspect must do so with the clear knowledge that the field of
publication for him in the East is already filled by our old friend the
New York Klondike, scarcely changed by the disappearance of one dog or
sweater from the early days of the gold discoveries; and that no
earthquake has shaken the New York San Francisco.
Of course we know, because she almost annually reassures the country on
these points, that New York instantly welcomes all original and fresh
writing arising from the remotest borders of the nation; and that in all
these matters she is not and never possibly could be dull. Yet one can
understand how the Klondike author, interested, as Mr. Galsworthy
advises, in seeing an object in "the way that he alone can see it" and
"with the part of him which makes him This man and not That," might feel
a trifle dashed by New York's way of showing her love of originality in
spending nearly all the money and energy her publishers and reviewers
have in advertising and in praising authors as the sixteenth Kipling of
the Klondike or the thirtieth O. Henry, of California. This is apt to be
bewildering, too, for the readers of Mr. Kipling and O. Henry, who have
enjoyed in the tales of each of these men the truth told "with the part
of him which makes him This man and not That." It is possible to
understand, too, how the young author in San Francisco may feel that
since New York's consciousness of his city has remained virtually
untouched for eight years by the greatest cataclysm of nature on our
continent, perhaps she overrates the extreme swiftness and sensitiveness
of her reaction to novel impression from without; and might conceivably
not hear a story of heretofore unexpressed aspects of San Francisco told
by the truthful voice of one young writer.
These are some of my own guesses as to why individual impressions of our
national life are few and why they are not greatly in vogue in America.
Whether they be poor or good guesses they represent one Middle Western
reader's observation of some of the actual difficulties that will have
to be faced in America by the writer who by temperament desires to
follow that golden and beautiful way of Flaubert's, which Mr. Galsworthy
has mentioned.
This writer will doubtless get from these difficulties far more fun than
he ever could have had without them. They are suggested here in the
pages of THE LITTLE REVIEW, not at all with the idea of discouraging a
single traveler from setting out on that splendid road, but rather as a
step towards the beginning of that true and long comradeship with effort
that is worth befriending which our felicitous English well-wisher hopes
may be THE LITTLE REVIEW'S abiding purpose.
"Henceforth I ask not Good Fortune: I, myself, am Good Fortune."
Impression
GEORGE SOULE
Her life was late a new-built house--
Empty, with shining window panes,
Where neither sorrow nor carouse
Had left red stains.
A passing vagrant, least of men,
Entered and used; her hearth-fire shone.
She mellowed, he grew restless then--
Left her alone.
Now she is vacant as before,
Desolate through the weary whiles;
Yet play about the darkened door
Shadows of smiles.
Art and Life
GEORGE BURMAN FOSTER
Odium theologicum--it is a deadly thing. But the ridicule and obloquy,
formerly characteristic of credal fanaticism, seem to have passed over
in recent years into the camp of art connoisseurs. No denying it, it was
a Homeric warfare that reverberated up and down the earth from land to
land, and from century to century, between what was ever the "old" faith
and the "new." In this year of grace, however, it is the disciples of
"classic" art--aureoled with the sanctity of some antiquity or
idealism--and "modern" art--in whatever nuance or novelty of most
disapproved and screaming modernity--who hereticize each other, who even
deny each other right of domicile, save, perhaps, in the unvisited
solitudes of interstellar spaces. To be sure, those august and frozen
solitudes of the everlasting nothing may be conceivably preferable to
the theological Inferno, though probably this question has not yet
received the attention from critics and philanthropists that its
importance would seem to merit.
At the outset it seemed as if the religious warfare had a certain
advantage over the esthetic--it agitated more people, and seized men in
their idiomatic and innermost interests, while, on the other side, but
small and select circles participated in partisan questions and
controversies respecting art. But it looks now as if it would soon be
the other way around. The people face religious problems with less and
less sympathy and understanding. But art, art of some kind and some
degree, they are keenly alive as to that, and quick to appraise or to
argue. The churches are ever emptier; the theatres, concert halls,
museums, "movies," ever fuller. A religious book--short of
epoch-making--finds, at best, only a reluctant and panicky publisher; a
new play, a new novel, see how many editions it passes through, how hard
it is to draw at the libraries, even after the staff and all their
friends and sweethearts have courteously had first chance at it!
Now, it is of no use to quarrel with this turn matters have taken. And
we miss the mark if we say that it is all bad. Off moments come to the
best of us when we grow a bit tired of being "uplifted" and "reformed."
Humanity has turned to art and, in doing so, has, on some side of its
life, moved forward apace, mounted to higher modes of existence, and,
whether the church knows it or not, along the steeps of Parnassus and in
the home of the muses has heard some music and caught some glimpses of
the not too distant fatherland of the divine and the eternal.
First-rate spirits of light and leading have pointed the way to a new
esthetic culture--prophetic spirits who in blackest night when deep
sleep had fallen upon most men saw the rosy-fingered dawn of our new
day. It was to be a day when beauty should be bidden to lead the dance
at the ball of life. There were serious philosophers--there was Kant,
who contemplated art as the keystone in the sublime structure which
modern knowledge and moral will should be summoned to erect in life.
There was Schopenhauer, to whom art was the unveiling of the riddle of
the world, the most intimate revelation of the divine mystery of life.
There was the hero of Baireuth, who, in his artistic creations, summed
up all the spiritual and moral forces of humanity, and made them
fruitful for the rebirth and fruition of our modern day.
Among these prophets of a new esthetic culture, Friedrich Nietzsche
occupies a quite special place, and influences the course of coming
events. As a most enthusiastic apostle of the gospel of a
world-redeeming art he first flung his fire-brand into the land, but
only to scorn and blaspheme soon thereafter the very gods he had
formerly so passionately worshipped; now degrading them to idols. His
faith in art, not this art or that, but in all art, in art as such,
pathetically wavered. Still the artist in him himself did not die; its
eye was undimmed and its bow abode in strength. And though he later
confronted every work of art with a malevolent and exasperating
interrogation, all this was only his pure and pellucid soul wrestling
for better and surer values, for new and nobler revelations, of the
artistic genius. Indeed, it was precisely in these interrogations that
he was at once our liberator and our leader--our liberator from the
frenzy into which the overfoaming enthusiasm as regards art had
transported men; our leader to a livelier, loftier beauty summoned to
the creation of the humanest, divinest robes for the adornment of
humanity as a whole.
The great movement and seething in the artistic life of our age
signifies at the same time a turning point in our entire cultural life.
This turning point discloses new perspective into vast illimitable
distances where new victories are to be achieved by new struggles. The
great diremption in our present world, making men sick and weak, calling
for relaxation and convalescence, appears at a definite stage as the
opposition between life and art. Life is serious, art is gay--so were we
taught. Seriousness and gaiety--it was the fatality of our time that
these could not be combined. So art and life were torn asunder. Art was
no serious matter, no vital matter, satisfying a true and necessary
human requirement. Art was a luxury, a sport, and since but few men were
in a position to avail themselves of such luxury, art came to be the
prerogative of a few rich people. Down at the bottom, in homes of want
and misery, life's tragedies were real and fearful; life was real,
indeed, life was earnest, indeed; at the top, however, pleasures claimed
the senses and thoughts of men; so much so, that even tragedies served
but to amuse; tragedies were an illusion of the senses, not realities of
life and pain. What God had joined together man had put asunder--and
there was art without life, life without art, and both art and life
suffering from ailments which neither understood.
There was a time when men worked, too, but it was a beautiful halcyon
time, when pleasure and joy throbbed in the very heart of the work
itself; when a sunny serenity suffused life's profoundest seriousness.
Art pervaded all life, active in all man's activities, present in every
nook and corner whither his vagrant feet wandered. Indeed, art was the
very life of man, revealing his strength, his freedom, his creativeness,
with which he fashioned things after his own image and according to his
own likeness. Every craftsman was an artist, every peasant a poet. Man
put his soul into all that he said and did, all that he lived; his work
was a work of art, his speech a song, his life beauty. No man lived by
bread alone; everyone heard and had a word that was the True Bread. His
cathedrals--domes of many-colored glass--preached it to him; his actors
sang it to him; even his priests were artists. With a sort of divine
humor, man thus subjected to himself all the anxiety and need of life.
Then, later, man came to think that he could live by bread alone. Even
the True Bread came to be mere bread--public influence; political power.
And then man's poor soul hungered. And when he longed for a Living Word
that was not mere bread, he was given printer's ink and the "sacred
letter" of the Bible. But this--ah, this was no soul's food. So the soul
lost its soul. Then, as man had no soul to work with, he had to work
with his head, his arms, his feet. Man ceased to be an artist who
breathes his living soul into his life, an artist who illumined all the
seriousness of life with the sunshine of his living love. Would he art,
he could not make it, he had to buy it. Could he not buy it, he had to
do without it. Thus, life became as jejune and rational as a Protestant
service, where, to be sure, there was no priest more, but also no
artist, only scribe and theologian--where religion became dogmatics,
faith a sum in arithmetic, Christianity a documentarily deposited
judicial process between God and man. To be sure, under certain
circumstances, decoration and color, even pomp and magnificence, may be
found in this church, but no living connection between the outward
appearance of these churches and their inner and peculiar service. Thus,
too, our private dwellings have lost living union between their
appointments and their inmates. What all are curious to know about these
houses is whether the men who dwell in them are rich or poor, not
whether they have souls, and what lives in their souls, should they have
any.
And because art had no soul of its own more, it became patronizing and
mendicant--coquetting for the favors of the rich and powerful, sitting
at their tables, perhaps even picking up the crumbs that fall beneath
the tables. Art, ah, art sought bread--mere bread--and adopted the sorry
principle that to get bread was the sacredest of all duties.
Art without life, life without art! Then came that mighty movement of
spirits to bring art and life together again, to reconquer and recreate
and reestablish a view of life in which man should learn to see and
achieve beauty once yet again. Of that movement, Friedrich Nietzsche was
the purest and intensest herald. Bold, fiery spirit, with words that
burn, he uttered what had been for a long time a soul-burden of all
deeper spirits. This burden of souls was that an art creation should go
on in every human life as its highest and holiest calling; that, without
the living effectuation of the artistic power of the human soul, all
human culture would serve but beastliness and barbarity.
To this end our poet-philosopher returns to the Urgrund, the abyss of
nature's life, from whose mysterious deep all tempestuous, wild impulses
tumble forth and struggle for form and expression in man. It is life
which seeks death in order to renew itself in the painful pleasure of
its destruction, perceived but then by man in the thrill of delight
which prepares the way for his most original eternal revelation. To
breed pleasure from pain; to suck forces of life from the most shocking
tragedies; to eavesdrop on the brink of the abysmal so as to fashion
sweet phantoms in the divine intoxication of the soul,--this is music,
this is art, in this, man struggles beyond and above his whole
contradictory nature, transfigures death, creates forms and figures in
which he celebrates his self-redemption from seriousness, from the curse
of existence. Here, at last, art is no sport, no fiddle-faddle, but at
once highest and gayest seriousness. It returns from the service of
death which it has performed, to its life, which it receives from "every
word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." Herein lies the
over-powering, the prophetic, in this Nietzschean preaching of art. It
tells us that we are very far from comprehending life when we have but
measured its length and breadth with yardstick and square; that nature
is far different from what scholars have figured it out to be, or from
what investigators have seen of it with telescope and microscope. It
teaches us to listen to the old eternal murmurs of the spirit, whose
sigh we hear indeed, but whence it comes and whither it goes we never
know--murmurs and sighs which bring forth the elementary forces,
instincts, passions, and friendships in man, which men fashion and
shape, regulate and direct indeed, but whose coming and going, whose
ebbing and flowing, is not within their power. Inspiration, divine
in-breathing--a dead concept as applied by theologians to their
Bible--comes into its own again in human nature as a whole, it is the
true element in man's life, by virtue of which the soul feels within
itself a creative life--its own proof that its dependence is no
slave-service, but freedom; that its deepest suffering of pain is itself
creative life, creative pleasure.
Is it, now, the tragic fatality of a sick soul, is it the demoniac play
of a spirit of negation when precisely the very preacher of this
grandiose art-prophecy goes astray in his own preaching, when he finally
thrusts it from him, with shrill laughter? The poet-philosopher begins
to think concerning his preaching! Art makes the thinker's heart heavy!
Art ever speaks a language which thought cannot express. Art strikes
chords in the human heart, and there are at once intimations of a Beyond
of all thought. And the thinker of today has bidden good-bye to every
Beyond of his thought. Nothing unthinkable was to be left for the
feelings. So the thinker felt a stab in every art for his thinker's
heart, a doubt whether he should hold fast to the incomprehensible or
sell himself to the devil of the universally comprehensible. And this
doubt becomes an open confession of sin in the Zarathustra poesy:
poets--and Zarathustra himself was a poet--lie too much! It is
adulterated wine which they set before the thirsty. They muddy all their
streams so that they shall appear deep. Into the kingdom of clouds they
go, and build their air-castles on all too airy foundations. Thus,
Zarathustra, poet, grows weary of their lies; he is a bit tired even of
himself. And so, now, this doubt-respecting art slips into the soul of
even its most enthusiastic prophets--nor are they the worst artists at
whose souls these doubts gnaw! To create a beautiful culture in which
man shall receive a higher revelation of life, and mount to a higher
stage of his development, to this, art which receives its consecration
in dizziness and dream, is not yet called. In fact, these artists do lie
too much! They seek life indeed, they hunger for life; but, because life
is too living to them, too natural, they create an artificial glow in
whose heat they think they first have life. Thus, the second deception
becomes worse than the first. The devil of matter-of-fact prose is
driven out by the beelzebub of over-stimulated nerves, and men flee from
the monotony of every-day life to the refinement of sensibility, which
art shall superinduce. Poets do lie too much, not because they tell us
fairy tales--fairy tales could be the beautifulest, holiest truths! But
because they simulate feelings they do not have--feelings which arise in
them not naturally but narcotically! Sculptors, painters, do lie too
much, not because they create forms and colors which no man's eyes have
ever seen, but because they create their own selves unfaithfully--an
alien life which they have somewhere inoculated themselves with and
given out as their own. Even architects lie too much, because they
compel their works to speak a foreign language, as if stone should be
ashamed to speak as stone, wood as wood, iron as iron!
The Nietzschean doubt respecting art--today this has become a demand for
truth in art and for truthfulness in the artist! And from these a
third--the demand for simplicity! And all this is of a piece with the
purpose to live a simple life.
Man does not live by bread alone. It is a living question for the sake
of future humanity that our art shall give the True Bread to the heart
of man, so that we may form a life in us and around us, a life whereon
shall not repose the dead weight of a culture artificially burdened with
a thousand anxieties and cares, but a life wherein man shall breathe
freer, because he breathes the fresh free air of life itself. Beautiful
life, artistic culture; this means the opposite of what many mean by it
today--it means, not upholstered chairs, not more cushions and carpets,
not motlier pictures on the walls, and not a pleroma of all varieties of
ornaments overloading stands and tables, but it means a life full of
soul, warm with the sunshine of love, it means that all man does, all
that environs him, shall find through eye and ear the mystic pathway to
the heart, to bear witness there of a joy and an ardor, of a freedom and
a truth, inspiring men to cry: It is good to be here, let us build
tabernacles! For such beautiful life, so little is required, yet so
much! So little sumptuousness, so much soul! So little money, so much
man!
Patriots
ON THE "7:50"
PARKE FARLEY
As you go in and out upon the train,
You're always reading poetry?
... Yes.
At first it slightly did embarrass me
To have the people stare,
Like you, over my shoulder,
Catching, as it were, a sudden flashing thigh,
Or gleam of sunlight on a truth laid bare,
Then sizing me up from the tail of the eye.
I used to shield the books, and myself, too,
But now I have grown bolder--I don't care ...
They say this morning train from Lake Forest to Chicago
Carries more money, more living money
Than any train of its length and size in the world.
There's the Club car, for Bridge, and then the Smoker,
And four or five other coaches.
It makes one feel rich merely to ride upon it ...
No, it's not Keats or Shelley--yes, well enough,
But these are living.
I like them young and strenuous,
And when I find one that has done with lies,
I send a word ...
"Change" at the Fine Arts Theatre
DEWITT C. WING
Your enthusiastic welcome of Change, published in the April number of
THE LITTLE REVIEW, compelled me to see the play, and I hasten to report
a memorable evening. Have you ever heard the hard, sharp, battering,
hammering of an electric riveter used on a steel bridge? Change has a
punch like that, and every punch is a puncture. No kind of orthodoxy can
resist it.
I have never spent a dozy moment in the Fine Arts Theatre. I shall never
forget Candida, Hindle Wakes, Miles Dixon, Prunella, Change, and other
dramas and tragedies that I have witnessed there. I shall not even
forget Cowards. Chicago some day will reproduce and expand the truth
which a dozen plays have driven into the souls of people who have sat in
that beautiful little room. Whatever the commercial outcome of an
attempt to present beauty and truth as expressions of life, the
management has already achieved a noble success. Hundreds of men and
women will always remember the Fine Arts Theatre as an inner shrine of
authentic art, where the furthermost reaches of the human spirit in the
fiction of plays have touched and quickened the heart of reality.