out of France. The most ambitious American student, dreaming in his
little atelier high up among the pigeons, over fifty centimes' worth of
roast rabbit from the rôtisserie and a glass of vin ordinaire, never has
dared even to dream of a first medal. A second has been the height of
his wildest hopes. Ten times only since the foundation of the Old Salon
has a second medal, of which more than one is given each year, been
awarded to an American. Sargent had one. Mary Green Blumenschein, H. O.
Tanner, Manuel Barthold, Robert Mac Cameron, Aston Knight, the son of
Ridgeway Knight, and Richard E. Miller are among the others so honored.
Gari Melchers and Frederick MacMonnies have had a third medal.
Now Lawton Parker has carried off the first! Even for a Frenchman this
is an extraordinary honor. It is kept for paintings of most unusual
merit, and often no work of the many thousands submitted is considered
worthy of the honor. At least four Salons have passed without the award
being made at all.
The painting with which Mr. Parker has enchanted Paris is called
Paresse, or Indolence. It is a picture of a nude model resting on a
couch. She lies perfectly relaxed, her body twisted a little and one arm
raised behind her head. The delicate flesh tones are outlined against
pale draperies, mauve, gray, and light yellow. The whole composition is
in a very high key, the red hair of the girl being the strongest note in
the picture.
But it is the lighting which seems most strongly to have impressed the
French critics. More than forty reviews in Europe have contained
favorable accounts of this painting, and they have been unanimous in
their praise of the effects of lighting. Indeed, they have almost
exhausted the vocabulary in their efforts to describe it. It is the
light of a gray day filtered through a Venetian blind, and the picture's
most puissant charm lies in the way Mr. Parker has caught the delicate
and subtle values of this lighting. "Delicate, nebulous, pale, sifted,
intimate, tender, harmonious"--these are some of the adjectives used by
the French reviewers to describe it.
All this is, however, built on a foundation of solid knowledge. Mr.
Parker is an excellent draughtsman and understands thoroughly the
possibilities and limitations of his medium. He has long been known
among the artists in the Quarter as the most scientific of them all. The
chemical composition of the colors, their action and interaction, and
the result of time on their brilliancy--these Mr. Parker has studied
minutely. It is a subject with which the old masters were thoroughly
familiar, but which painters of today too often neglect.
Sanity is one of the chief characteristics of Mr. Parker's work. This is
a day of extravagance, of cutting loose from all ties that bind us to
the past. In Paris the academies are virtually emptied of students, that
the young men may search for individuality in their own little ateliers.
The Cubists and the Futurists are the flowering of the tree of
experimentation that has thrust its roots even into the most academic of
sanctuaries. Many a promising young man has lost his head entirely. But
Lawton Parker has succeeded in keeping his.
He has gone forward with his day, but not blindly. He has carefully
tested each step as he came to it, and has stopped short where sanity
stopped. The old virtues of draughtsmanship, composition, and color he
has kept. But he has added thereto the modern discoveries in the
treatment of light.
He and his colleagues, the little group of painters called the Giverny
school, are already known as Luminists. Frederick C. Frieseke, Richard
E. Miller, and Karl Anderson belong to this group. During the summer
months they paint at the beautiful little village of Giverny. They
experiment with light in all its possible manifestations. Frieseke and
Parker have an open-air studio together, a "water-garden" traversed by a
little brook. Here on warm days they paint beautiful opalescent nudes in
the sunlight, among the shimmering greens of the leaves or beside the
luminous water surfaces. All who have followed the exhibitions in France
or even in America during the last few years are familiar with this
"nymph pasture," as it has been wittily called. It was here that the
prize picture was painted--but not on warm, sunny days. A year ago it
rained all summer, and in desperation Mr. Parker resorted to an indoor
canvas, executed in the house adjoining. It was painted with extreme
care. One comparatively unimportant part of the canvas, a bit of wall
space, he painted over twelve or fifteen times to get just the precise
shade he wanted. This painting is now on exhibition in this country.
Lawton Parker's canvases in his Giverny style are interesting
technically. On a foundation of very careful drawing they are handled
with great freedom of execution. The brush work is loose and vigorous,
the paint being laid on thickly, especially in the background. The flesh
is painted more closely, always with great subtlety in the values. A
nude body in the shade flecked with spots of brilliant sunlight is a
favorite and very difficult subject, in which this subtlety is well
shown. The color is excellent, at times, as in the prize picture, very
delicate and carefully harmonized; at times dealing successfully with
great splashes of autumn leaves or the vivid green of spring foliage.
The composition is pleasing.
Mr. Parker is not by any means limited to this style. Indeed, it is in
another and quite different character that he is best known in this
country. As a portrait painter his work has for a number of years been
gaining steadily in popularity. Many prominent people have sat for him,
including President Harry Pratt Judson, Judge Peter S. Grosscup, Martin
Ryerson, Mrs. Leonard Wood, and Mrs. N. W. Harris.
This portrait style of Mr. Parker's is very different from his Giverny
style. He developed it much earlier in his career, but still uses it on
occasion. The difference is one of psychological viewpoint rather than
of technic. A portrait, he feels, should be a livable presentation of
the subject. It is not a picture to be looked at casually and passed by,
but a work to be lived with intimately for long spaces of time. The
exceptions are, of course, those portraits of well-known men and women
which are to hang in public places. Generally speaking, he paints his
portraits in color schemes that will wear well, in a rather low key,
with neutral backgrounds. These likenesses are solid, dignified, and
simple. To catch the individuality of the sitter is of more importance
to him than to paint a striking canvas. That his portraits are
successful technically is proved by the fact that he has taken a number
of prizes with them, both here and abroad.
Lawton Parker was born at Fairfield, Michigan, in 1868, but spent his
early youth in Kearney, Nebraska. When he took up seriously the study of
painting he moved to Chicago, which has since remained his pied-à-terre
in this country. He studied and taught at the Art Institute there. Later
he went to New York, where, in 1897, he took the "Paris Prize" founded
by John Armstrong Chaloner: a five years' scholarship abroad. In Paris
he studied under Gerome, Whistler, and Jean Paul Laurens. In 1899 he
took the "Prix d'atelier" at the Beaux Arts. In 1900 he received
honorable mention at the Old Salon with a nude; in 1902 a third medal,
on a portrait. Four years ago he missed by three votes a second medal,
which was fortunate for him, since the first cannot be awarded a painter
who has received a second.
He has also received medals from the Chicago Society of Artists, the St.
Louis Exposition, and the International Exhibition in Munich in 1905.
All lovers of art in this country, as well as the painters themselves,
should thank Mr. Parker for having opened the way in Paris for so
unprecedented an honor.
It is rhythm that makes music, that makes poetry, that makes
pictures; what we are all after is rhythm, and the whole of the
young man's life is going to a tune as he walks home, to the same
tune as the stars are going over his head. All things are singing
together.--George Moore in Memoirs of My Dead Self.
New York Letter
GEORGE SOULE
Pavlowa and her Russian dancers have just finished their tour here in a
high tide of enthusiasm,--and financial success, which is worth
mentioning because it means other tours next year. There is a whisper
that we shall see a ballet still more important which hasn't hitherto
been coaxed west of London and Paris. Only a little of the new art-form
now being developed by Fokine, Diaghilev, Bakst, Rimski-Korsakoff, and
the rest of the great Russian romanticists of the stage, has come to us.
But the important fact is that America, as always behind Europe in
seeing new ideas that are not mechanical, is at last waking up to the
dance as an art on equal terms with the greatest.
It is curious, but not comforting, to know that in this case the
original inspiration came from Illinois. My authority is Troy Kinney,
who is, without question, our best-informed critic of dancing outside of
the performers and choregraphers themselves. Mr. Kinney tells me that
after Isadora Duncan failed to arouse much interest in America she went
to Europe, leaving a trail of heated discussion there. When she reached
St. Petersburg the head of the imperial academy, Fokine, saw the vision
of a renaissance of the dance from its classic sterility. He gathered
about him the group of dancers whose names are now known around the
world, and persuaded them to desert the imperial academy, which clung to
the formalism of the old French and Italian ballet. Artists and
musicians were attracted to the movement. This proceeding was quite as
daring as it would have been for the superintendent of the United States
Naval Academy to desert with part of his faculty and the best of the
middies. But Diaghilev espoused their cause and persuaded the government
not to punish them, but to let them work out their ideas and then make
themselves useful politically by showing western Europe that Russia was
not as barbarous as was generally supposed. They are now fully
recognized in St. Petersburg and Fokine is again head of the academy.
On the basis of the old formal steps and positions Fokine built a freer
structure of movement whose chief aim is not virtuosity or pure beauty
of line, but expression. In this new style more modern music was not
only possible, but necessary. Meanwhile, setting and costume of the most
imaginative type--often futuristic--had to be developed. They all set to
work with an ardor possible only to tradition-breakers and are producing
an art which is likely to achieve the supreme place first dreamed of by
the inventors of modern opera.
Here is another keenly interesting relation brought to light by Mr.
Kinney. Everybody knows, of course, that opera was begun during the
Renaissance as an attempt to revive the Greek drama. It now appears that
in our present Renaissance the revived ballet is probably much nearer
the highest form of Greek drama than opera or anything else ever has
been. The early drama of Athens, according to Mme. Nelidoff of Moscow,
consisted largely of pantomime, dance, and chorus. Words were introduced
for the literal-minded. As the size of theatres increased, the actors
came to use megaphones, to conceal which the mask was invented. The
masks were made larger and heavier to add to the height. With this
handicap to dancing, the actor had to depend more on his voice and
stature; and the elaborate dialogue, combined with the high heels of the
cothurnus, gave dancing its final blow. This kind of drama, says Mme.
Nelidoff, appealed largely to the less imaginative and uncultivated, on
account of their desire to know in detail what was going on. The other
kind, however, continued being developed for smaller audiences, and
retained its purer beauty of form in space, sound, and thought. We have
little record of it outside of sculpture simply because there were few
words, and a choregraphic vocabulary had not been invented. We have
almost no record of Greek music, either. It is a bit shocking to think
that Aeschylus and Sophocles were, perhaps, contributors to an inferior
art, but there seem to be grounds for the ingenious theory.
Everyone who has been to a "movie show" knows how effective even crude
pantomime can be. But make your pantomime a portrayal of moods and
emotions rather than of events, give it visual beauty which will
occasionally wring tears from anyone sensitive to line, and accompany it
with music whose most complex rhythm and harmonic color are intensified
by the stage picture, and you have an expression on a plane of the
imagination where the introduction of a spoken word is like the creak of
a piano pedal. If we can't lead the people back from the movies to
"plays," can't we give them the modern ballet?
That is exactly what Kinney proposes. He wants a National Academy for
America, with resources equal to the backing of the Metropolitan Opera
House. Big managers and opera authorities have already admitted that
such an undertaking would, if properly managed, be successful. Compared
with the present interest in good ballet the interest in good music with
which Theodore Thomas started, was nothing. But it is a miracle if
America does a thing like that in the right way. Our princes have, as a
rule, neither good taste nor much public spirit. Our race of
artists--thinkers--mental heroes--is small and largely uncourageous. Our
government accurately represents the most of our people, who still
regard art either as immoral or entertaining and hence not worth the
attention of sensible people.
How bitterly we need missionaries like THE LITTLE REVIEW and the people
who feel the same spirit! But our case is far from hopeless. The good
fighters among us are glad there is a lot still to do. Such visions give
strength to our hewing arms as we cry room for our new images.
The men who are cursed with the gift of the literal mind are the
unfortunate ones who are always busy with their nets and neglect
the fishing.--Rabindranath Tagore in Sadhana.
Union vs. Union Privileges
HENRY BLACKMAN SELL
"We have granted the miners every union demand," benevolently asserts
the remarkable J. D. R., Jr., "but we will not recognize their
organization"--and here is the hitch. The average lay observer of the
fearful struggle raging in Colorado tosses aside his paper after reading
this, and possibly comments that he can't see what the miners want, if
all the union privileges have been granted.
That was my first thought, but I felt that there must be something
behind the trouble; so I hunted out my old friend Tony Exposito, a
walking delegate for Chicago's pick-and-shovel men, and asked him to
explain.
Now Tony never took a degree, and his English is reminiscent of sunny
Italy, but he knows just what the trouble is in Colorado.
"Eh? You wanta know what ees matta downa there? Eh? Meester Rokefella
say he geeve union preeveleg to all da men? Eh? Meester Rokefella say
begess shara men no wanta strike? Eh? He geeve many thengs to da men?
Sure! Sure! He geeve many thengs! He geeve many preeveleg! Sure! He
geeve! Das justa trubble! Das why da men go strike! No wanta thengs be
geeva to them. Santa Maria! when a man breaka hees back en wear da skeen
off hees hans wet da pick en da shovel, hasn' he gotta right to da money
he gets? Eh? Now, w'at you theenka dat? Eh?"
"Well, Tony," I answered, "I never thought of it that way. It does seem
as though a man might have what he earns without its being handed to him
as if it were a charity."
"Sure! Sure!" cut in the impetuous Tony. "Sure! das da theng--charety!
Meester Rokefella, he say, 'Coma here, leetle slave, nica leetle slave,
coma here;' en he patta on da head en say, 'You donna have to work so
meny hours; I geeve you tena cents more pay!' Eh? en then what? Eh? He
calla all the newsapaper up en tella dem, 'I maka mucha mon; I geeve
some to my workaman.' Then all the peeple say, 'Whata fuss about?' Eh? I
tella you: Workaman want to sell hees labor justa lika Meester Rokefella
buy hees beega machenes. Notheng extra to nobody. Eh?"
"But, Tony," I interrupted, "they say that only a few of the men want
the union recognized. What about that?"
"Sure! Das true! Sure! Das jus da fac. When deesa beeg, granda countree
fighta Eengeland, deed all the men wanta fight? Eh? Tell me! Eh? No, et
was justa few et ferst, dena more, dena more, teel everyone wanta to be
free. Sure! Das da way. Poor nuts, dea don'a know whata rights dea
shoulda have, en dea musta be ah--educate to steek togeater."
And I wondered how many of my highly educated friends realized so well
as Tony Exposito how frightfully devitalizing gratuities are, and what
it means to be able to take a week's pay with the feeling not of
accepting a charity, but of receiving an honest wage for honest work;
what it means to teach mentally stunned and browbeaten laborers that
they have certain definite rights of life and happiness, and that they
must earn them; that when they have earned those rights, it is no favor
given or received.
Book Discussion
Mr. Chesterton's Prejudices
The Flying Inn, by G. K. Chesterton. [John Lane Company, New
York.]
G. K. Chesterton really possesses a philosophy, but it is a question
whether he has ever shown a clear intellectual title to it. His method
of asserting ownership is to abuse those who question either his right
to possess it or the desirability of the philosophy itself.
In The Flying Inn Mr. Chesterton does two things. He writes a most
amusing criticism of modern tendencies the while he is defending his
philosophy of Augustinian Christianity.
It may be news to some of Mr. Chesterton's readers that he is a
symbolist with a profound philosophy to expound, and I would never have
guessed from his latest work that he was fighting over again the battle
of St. Augustine against the Pelagians. But this book recently fell into
the hands of a more than usually industrious and erudite critic, Mr.
Israel Solon, and in a recent issue of The Friday Literary Review of The
Chicago Evening Post, Mr. Solon took the trouble to explain some of Mr.
Chesterton's symbolism. The general reader, however,--and what a good
thing it is--does not care a red cent about the triumph of Augustinian
Christianity, while the unbiased student of religion knows that
Pelagianism, a healthy-minded British heresy of about 400 A. D., which
denied original sin, was a more reasonable proposition than the
Christianity which it tried to displace.
The only real interest of Mr. Chesterton's latest book, then, is in his
criticisms of life, and that interest arises from their humor rather
than from their worth.
Mr. Chesterton's theory of criticism is very simple. Poke fun at
everything you do not like. If it is difficult to poke fun at it on
account of its worth or dignity then misrepresent it first.
The present story, for instance, covers the adventures of an Irishman
who left the British navy and became a soldier of fortune, and an
innkeeper whose inn is closed by a fanatical temperance advocate holding
office under a very fussy pseudo-liberal government. This personage, who
is an amateur of religions and wishes to combine Mahomedanism and
Christianity, drives the innkeeper into vagabondage. The Irishman
accompanies him, and they carry the old inn sign and a keg of rum and a
round cheese with them. They buy a donkey and cart, and travel the
neighborhood breaking up meetings in favor of temperance, vegetarianism,
polygamy, and other absurdities advocated by the teetotal aristocrat.
Most of the fooling is excellent, but some of it is very childish. It
shows Mr. Chesterton at his most characteristic. He dislikes all
liberalism, so the efforts of the present British government toward
various forms of amelioration of bonds--ecclesiastical, puritanic, and
economic--are satirized by the implication that the aristocrats of this
story wish to re-establish the Eastern vices of polygamy and abstinence
from wine. He dislikes the Ethical Societies, so he represents them as
meeting in little tin halls and listening to fakers from the East
preaching strange exotic doctrines in return for large fees. He dislikes
the Jews, and so a particularly mean and futile character is painted
very carefully as a Jew who mixes in British politics--a thing which Mr.
Chesterton and his political allies seem to think should be forbidden by
statute.
If we discount all this, however, we shall be able to derive a lot of
enjoyment from Mr. Chesterton. In particular we shall enjoy his songs
against temperance. One of them concerns Noah's views on drinking:
Old Noah, he had an ostrich farm, and fowls on the greatest
scale;
He ate his egg with a ladle in an egg-cup big as a pail,
And the soup he took was Elephant Soup and the fish he took was
Whale;
But they all were small to the cellar he took when he set out to
sail;
And Noah, he often said to his wife when he sat down to dine,
"I don't care where the water goes if it doesn't get into the wine."
The cataract of the cliff of heaven fell blinding off the
brink,
As if it would wash the stars away as suds go down a sink;
The seven heavens came roaring down for the throats of hell to drink,
And Noah, he cocked his eye and said: "It looks like rain, I think."
The water has drowned the Matterhorn as deep as a Mendip mine,
But I don't care where the water goes if it doesn't get into the
wine.
And for other drinks than those of orthodox alcoholic content he has
nothing but contempt. Witness the following remarks:
Tea is like the East he grows in,
A great yellow Mandarin,
With urbanity of manner,
And unconsciousness of sin;
All the women, like a harem,
At his pig-tail troop along,
And, like all the East he grows in,
He is Poison when he's strong.
Tea, although an Oriental,
Is a gentleman at least;
Cocoa is a cad and coward,
Cocoa is a vulgar beast,
Cocoa is a dull, disloyal,
Lying, crawling, cad and clown
And may very well be grateful
To the fool that takes him down.
As for all the windy waters,
They were rained like trumpets down,
When good drink had been dishonored
By the tipplers of the town.
When red wine had brought red ruin,
And the death-dance of our times,
Heaven sent us Soda Water
As a torment for our crimes.
To the American cocoa debauchee--if there be any--it should be intimated
that in all probability Mr. Chesterton's turn for symbolism is at work
in the second of the stanzas quoted above. The English cocoa interests
are very powerful and very much interested in the progress of the
present liberal government. In England not cocoa drinkers but certain
liberal politicians will wince with pained appreciation of that
particular stanza.
Such is the method of attack with which Mr. Chesterton goes after
liberal Christianity, the Ethical Movement, temperance legislation,
futurist art, and--for some insane reason--the Mechnikoff lactic acid
bacillus treatment. As we have said, it is, except in spots, most
interesting and most amusing, but, except in spots, it is not
significant.
LLEWELLYN JONES.
Dr. Flexner on Prostitution
Prostitution in Europe, by Abraham Flexner. [The Century Company,
New York.]
There can be no doubt whatever in the mind of any student of the
evolution of "civic conscience" that the prominence now being given to
the subject of prostitution is one of the most promising signs of our
day. It is inevitable in the first uncovering of what has been hidden
for many generations that this prominence should be marred by much that
is to be regretted, by much wild hysteria, and much morbid dwelling on
erstwhile forbidden topics. But in the main the knowledge by the people
at large of the cess-pools that lie below our civilization is the only
starting-point from which to set about the draining and cleaning up of
these cess-pools.