their way back to primal selves; this was a step toward new creation,
beginning over. The end of a cycle had come. New standards followed.
There was a _re_-valuation. The middle age of the modern man had
begun. The old tenements of the mind were being torn down and swept
away. When one reaches the top of the hill, there is nothing to
do except to find the path that leads down. This is not genius.
It does not deserve praise for perception or novelty. It has too
great resemblance to necessity. If change means destruction, it
likewise means growth, or the level upon which change is permitted to
begin, on the other, _the south side_, of the hill. But Dostoievsky
exclaimed when he was living in Germany: “_In der neuen Menschheit
ist also die æsthetische Idee volkommen betrübt_.” Dostoievsky was
not only an artist, but a sensitive one. He felt quickly the chill
breath of the new order.
New art comes closer to man than the old. We are better mental
tailors. In a _close-up_ we must remember figures loom large. We see
details we do not wish to see. We are getting a _close-up_ of life.
In addition, the old, carefully draped _toga_ is large.
Art being sensitive, heralded approach of the new cycle, and close
of the cycle passing. Disintegration of color, line, was not the
only change. The bonds that unite people in social intercourse,
friendship, family ties, weakened. This was followed by exploitation
of self, an increasingly shifting standard. The _ego_ became
diseased. In the critical faculty there was discernible a lessening
sense of values. The general reading public no longer knew good
from bad. There was, too, breaking down, decay, of sociological
tissues, just as bodily tissue breaks, with stress of years, or
warning of insidious disease. People who had reached forty when the
change began, awoke to find themselves in a world they did not know.
Everyone became Rip Van Winkle.
Like the trapeze performer, they had forsaken the safe ring, without
being sure of the next. New World art picks up and saves crumbs from
the wasteful banquet-table. It finds neglected things, minor things,
apparently insignificant things beautiful, and with demands, with
rights. It says so, if it does not believe it.
A new era is here. Educational ideals are overturned. Some things man
created he finds not good. As counterweight there is inclination not
to observe rules of the game, unless perchance some game be greater
than the rules. In this _counterweight_ there is inclination to
translate theorizing into action, and do it quickly. The new world
disregards the charm of idle thought. Sometimes it has bad taste
to do things not meant to be done, but merely to be talked about.
Occasionally it is dull, lacks perception. It has misunderstood the
poetry and politeness of the Arab host, who declares: _All I own is
yours_. With present dramatic seriousness and belief in the divine
right of _self_, lack of humor, we would move in, and show the Arab
the door.
The impulse back of living is changed. There is indication of a dying
in the human race of what was called divine. A red apple rotting at
the core!
New religions, moral ideals, are dawning which surprise in form, in
substance.
Living is less fine. It is a rush for self exploitation. It is
giving over rest, sunny leisure. The idea of work, of dispensing
energy for display, decoration of front elevation of Sunday papers,
is penetrating the upper classes. In being useful, they plan social
achievements. They have found a game in which to star.
The opening of the Twin Americas, Africa, meant, demanded, a
tremendous amount of practical work, exploiting; expanding technical
skill. Under progressive conquest of things material, increasing
manual dexterity, increasing technical achievement, the idealizing
spirit of a smaller world, content with fewer things for the few, was
in abeyance. Whatever happens or threatens to happen is not final. A
glimpse, if imperfect, beyond the age helps steady us. Time has no
model of perfection meant to be copied forever.
The more modern the unit of art, the more unrest, that nameless
something that disturbs. In activities of the rapid present, there
is not sufficient place for gentle things. Not all flowers bloom
best when the storms rage. But in a future, far perhaps, after the
material conquest has been carried through, there will come, I have
faith to believe, a nobler conquest, loftier. Now artists are merely
trying to explore, then map a new world. We can not travel always
upon mountains. Meadow lands have to be crossed. We can not sweep all
the new with vision at any one moment.
Wrapped in Christianity, which taught sacredness of the individual,
lay undeveloped seed of socialism, the French Revolution,
world-upheavals. At inception of new faith, no one can measure
expansion. Vast processes of change are in progress all about us
everywhere.
The restlessness in the United States has varied causes, one, the
possibility (soon to become desire) of individuals leaving the class
in which they were born. Restlessness welcomes change. Anything
different is good. It is not necessary it be better. Life is a game.
Concept is cheapened. Every small boy is given one ideal; namely, to
get out of the class in which he was born and become President. It is
like considering life as being poised upon the crest of excitement.
The object of life should be to widen the horizon of intelligence,
preserve kindness in the heart, and keep a margin of security for
comfortable living. He lives most who thinks best, not he who has the
largest accumulation of dollars, and moves about upon wheels in the
air.
The Great War was the demolishing blow to the vast, antique
structure, the marble columns of whose first falling echoed
thunderously in May, 1787, in France.
In the West there exists dramatic, political idealism; inexperience,
youth, together with lack of international outlook. In the West
there is still youth, its desire, its progress, a dream suitable
for a rich, young, unexploited country permitted for a century to
develop undisturbed. Wealth has too often become end, instead of aid
to larger living. It has habit of shrinking the horizon of the one
who possesses it. It might provide broad spaces of leisure, instead
of a mad, noisy movie program, which resembles destructive fury of
the mastodons, the monsters, when they dashed ahead to escape the
approaching ice cap. The ideal, however unrealizable, is not wasted
because it forms compensating pendant to the practical.
When, in America, the poor become rich too speedily, the perspective
of living is changed over night, there is boiling, seething. The new
rich can not enjoy what money buys. In fact, they are still poor.
True-judging, poised living, is not easy.
It is too bad a race should get so it can not support a moment
without amusement. We have much to learn from the European emigrant.
Civilization, what we agree to call by that name, becomes disease.
The hardy, patient fibre disappears. The newspaper helps. It
sets ideal of greed, haste. It preaches ambition, conquest. This
destroys stable social basis. Each individual longs to grow to size
of a monstrous cabbage in overstimulated soil. There was always
inclination in the Saxon to stubborn independence. Too quick material
advancement is balanced by moral letting down. It is a pity modernity
should be afraid of plain spaces. It is too bad every State has not
a Vachel Lindsay to preach the religion of beauty. May his tribe
increase!
We have applied _Kultur_ to money-getting. In doing it we were
copying Germany. It was Germany that discovered the modern world and
no one was at fault for the War. Its cause was cosmic; biological,
an impulse of world-growth not to be turned aside. Cosmic impulses
lift nations like waves, hurl them against other nations, lightly
as helpless fish, and tangled sea-weeds, shells, in season of tides
and storms. It was merely a mighty migration of peoples. It was dumb
forces turning over races, with results we can not know.
The world felt the cataclysm coming. This is proven by the many
writing nervously about _spirit of the times_. The increase, too, in
knowledge, wealth, material power, knowledge poured into the human
mind too swiftly and in quantities too great for assimilation. Lack
of balance resulted. There was top-heavy overturning. Re-adjustments
had to be made too soon. A different basis of morals became effective
without being recognized _in mind_. Things merely fine began to be
looked down upon as superfluities. The changing _moral self_ began to
wear a new garment, which was ill-fitting.
_De Hoc—Cubism of the Spirit._
I trust there will not be silence eternal when the Troubadours are no
more.
In reading many years in many languages, merely for pleasure, a
peculiar unmentioned fact has come to notice. Most creative artists
in whom imagination plays predominant part, (writers, musicians,
painters), are born in the months of the fall and winter. It is true
of all ages and nations. To prove conclusively the statement would be
to fill pages with lists of names.
This occurred to me when I was studying Russian, reading Russian
poets. There the list born in fall and winter is astonishing:
Chemnitzer, Kapnist, Neledinski-Meletzki, Karamsin, Krylov,
Schukowski, Ryleiev, Griboiedow, Baratinsky, Kolzow, Lermontov,
Countess Rostoptchchin, Tjutchew, Benedikkow, Schevtschenko, Nikitin,
Nekrassow, Turgenev, Aksakow, Pleschtschejow, Polonsky, Minajew. To
be sure the greatest Russian writers are the exception that prove
the rule, Puschkin and Gogol. In other countries I recall just at
this moment, Rimbaud, Racine, Heine, Poe, Alexander Petofi, the
fluent lyric poet of the Magyar race, Bobby Burns, Cervantes, Milton,
André Chenier, Flaubert, Kolomon Mikszáth, the Hungarian of ironical
fantastic prose and José Asuncion Silvá and Blanco-Fombona, born in
grey November. Unexplored scientific fact underlies this. January and
December claim those of maddest mind. And March has been the birth
month of the greatest number of murderers.
The more I read Goethe the more conscious I am of the depth of
untapped power he held in reserve. He was never written out.
Today the period of a writer’s productivity is brief. Life saps him.
Its interests are too complex. Kipling has been written out for
years. I could name others. Goethe was last of the great. After him
there are no monumental figures.
He worked, off and on, at his _Faust_ for sixty years. The general
reading public has no comprehension of what a unique, powerful,
creation of the mind that is, nor what unplumbed depth is in it.
Byron, in his _Manfred_, had it in mind. _Manfred_ is a copy. So is
the Russian Lermontov’s _Demon_, which is superior, considered as
poetry, to _Manfred_.
Someone accused Byron of imitating _Faust_. His reply was: “I did not
follow Goethe, but both Goethe and I followed the Book of Job.” It is
about the same resemblance as that which exists between passages of
the New Testament and Epictetus. Not personal but merely expressive
of the distributed thought of a period, a kind of thought, (in case
of Goethe), following in the wake of the French Revolution. It
was a fashion people had of wearing minds, in disturbing days of
reconstruction. Stillings declared that Goethe’s heart, which few
knew, was as great as his mind, which all knew.
The time will come when the insistence of the East, written in the
most ancient documents known, that _life is one_, will be proven. The
deep heart-dream, the poetic fancy, of one age becomes the fact of
another, and the cheap commonplace of a third. We shall find that the
despised weed of the garden, the bullfrog in the pool, and Napoleon
on the throne of France, are _one_ manifestation of life. The most
interesting thing the world has done, or will do, is slow turning of
the ponderous pages of science, each leaf of which represents an age.
One of my regrets is that I can not watch the turning leaves of all
the future.
Sanskrit teaches that in the tree and in man dwell the same spirit.
What a thing it was to do, to be able, by abstract thought, to reach
that conclusion! An ancient Vedic hymn sings of Aranyani, spirit of
the trees. Some of the words I have forgotten. These I recall:
_Desire then at the first arose within it,
Desire which is the earliest seed of spirit,
The Lord of Being, in non-being ages._
The Rig Veda describes how offerings were made to plants because
they were _powers of life_. The plant that has climbed nearest to
human life, shown best what possibilities are there, and sometime
probably will reward the observations of scientists, is the orchid.
The only thing Darwin had interest in, he who was eager to solve the
mystery of man, was that other mystery, _life of the orchid_. Lao
Tzu, the Chinese philosopher, declared: _The tree is thy brother!_ It
was while standing under a palm tree, in the garden of Padua, that
the idea of metamorphosis of plants came to Goethe. Perhaps Goethe
thought noble palms above his head were exclamation points of wisdom!
I am not sure he did not say something like that. Linnæus insisted
that _luxuriant flowers are none natural but all monsters_.
Modern scientists tell us that when biologists write of the principle
of life, they find illustrations among plants as often as among
animals. The germ from which a human being is evolved differs in no
wise from germ from which a plant is evolved.
What is life? Schelling, Comte, Lamarck, De Blainville, Spencer, have
tried in vain to define it. Is it easy to know the exact difference
between animal and vegetable protoplasm? In both are life. Life means
progress, change. It is not impossible that the fragile lines marking
a flower carry sensation. A nerve is protoplasm.
Nerve sensation is a line of molecules conducting impression. It is
contraction and expansion. Evolution is the changing distribution of
matter and motion, extending through periods of time.
We ourselves, once, were little more than dull, outspread
leaf-surfaces. Sensation is not unthinkable development of plants.
From sensation, the step to active mind is not impossible, nor out of
range of seeing. Mind may not be anything but some form of matter.
Matter is a witch wearing masks. It may be accumulated expression of
force, reflected from matter.
The cells of plants focus light like eyes. A scientist in Europe has
taken pictures with them. Cell-eyes may know love and hate. Without
weariness, for measureless time, what have they not reflected?
Poised upon the edge of tremendous heights, they survey chasms of
transformation. They survey the circle of created things. Who knows
what they have seen which the human eye may not record? There may
be an amazing new botany awaiting us some day. It will not be bare
mathematical computation. It will not drily number petals, stamens.
In unthinkable distances of time, apparently dull, yet sleepless
cell-eyes will be photographed. Upon these photographs there will be
found the strangest, most astonishing moving-picture, the unfolding
history of the world. The triumph, the tragedy, of cell-progress,
throughout the measureless black night of time, will become
possession of all. There we shall read the past. There we shall read
the passions, adventures of the orchid, in its long climb upward,
toward more powerfully sentient life.
Thinking does not necessarily wear _one_ fashion of flesh. All things
can not be seen from one view point. This is true of planes of life,
which are an endless spiral, filling heights of years. There are
planes seen only with the brain, when it brings to action high powers
of thought-projection.
Pan and the nymphs symbolized Greek belief in the life-spirit of
trees. In pagan days the names given to the orchid signified life.
They were names of lovely women: _Alba_, _Rosa_, _Aurea_. Within
this nomenclature of the ancients, it may be a scientific fact lies
hidden. Facts are felt dimly by many before they are stated broadly
by one.
The orchid expresses intensity. The modern world has loved it,
because it is restless, perplexing, like the modern soul. The pagan
world preferred calmer flowers. It was satisfied with the rose. The
rose is an early Victorian.
Plants are not different from people. There are plant-villages that
lead a busy life. There are plant-colonies that hate the invader.
They protect themselves against him. There are vagabond-plants that
run away, impelled to wander.
The orchid is an adventuress, reaching out greedily between planes
of existence. It has become most superb in strength wherever there
have been perished civilizations, wherever an unknown past has been
prodigious.
In the land where the Inca ruled they riot. They thrive in Mexico, in
steaming valleys the Aztecs knew. In Central America, Guatamala in
particular, they mark effectively the disappearing outline of Mayan
temples. Where the world was earliest populated, we find them. In
Ceylon, on the ruins of Anuradapura, where palaces towered at a date
when European man was living in holes in the ground like an hairy
animal, they throng like flocked phantoms of delight. The forests of
Siam and Cambodia know them, and overflowing rivers which wash dead
marble-cities, such as Angor, whose ruins of a perished civilization
fascinate me. There, orchids flash like flame. They light the night
wherever the dim, sluggish, tropic rivers swing. In deserted,
rose-hued, marble cities such as Amber upon the Highlands of India,
where man comes no more, where no more there is pageant, peacock, nor
king, savage orchids cling. They cling wildly; _life_, which refuses
death. They are lured by lands where memories are many, where there
is the dust of millenniums and ruins of the fabulous mansions of men.
It is appropriate that the man who has arisen to prove capability of
plants for sensation, to prove they feel fear, suffer agony, should
come from India, (Bose), where the idea was projected. And now we are
on the threshold of truth that lies ahead.
The romances of the future will be more thrilling than the old
commonplace of a man falling in love with a woman, or _vice versa_.
The romances of the future, when the novel as we know it now must
disappear, will be written by that sleepless, fiery-eyed Demon,
Science. How tame, silly, will the old novels, plays, seem of
Priscilla, (say), meeting Paul in the garden! What a ridiculous thing
in which to be interested!
In this period of fashion not reason, which is to aim one’s heavy
cannons, one’s best made spit balls, at the gods of yesteryear, it
is well to read books of criticism for novelty, pleasure of mental
exercise, and not trouble about believing what they say. Look upon it
as a mental stunt! I have read recently that Flaubert was mediocre,
and could not write, that Balzac had no ability of any kind,
Maupassant lacked the short-story sense, and Shakespeare should be
done over by someone who knows his rich Elizabethan England better
than he did.
Very likely the age we are living in is sterile save scientific mind.
How can it go on, when it can not see the road? Probably little, or
nothing, being written in this feverish period, will last. It is the
bridge that leads from one shore to another. We may find pleasure in
the shores, but the bridge will be forgotten.
An impulse to besmirch what no one dared to besmirch is not
genius. Its fineness, originality, value as attitude of mind, are
questionable. Yet I can not dispute the fact that a large spot of
black shows on a white surface. It can be observed at a distance.
People see it. A thing that is new is not necessarily better, not to
mention best.
I am thinking, among other things, of critical discoveries of Croce.
Sometimes his discoveries are like the originality of finding how
much more comfortable to live in is a house without a roof than one
with a roof. Here is hoping Signor Croce always had his umbrella or
lived in a land where rain did not fall!
Marsden Hartley is a poet. He is sometimes prosy with his brush, but
when he takes to pen and ink, he blossoms. There is the making of a
charming stylist in Hartley, which is just what he would like to have
us believe he disdains.
Among his pictures, I have liked his tragic New England farms, black
with accumulated terrors of puritan winters. I have liked his slender
vases of crystal, holding a flower visioned to disappearing outline,
where loveliness alone remains. This is gold. But gold circulates, is
most useful, with admixture of alloy.
Art is stenographic mind-reading of the trembling soul. It is the
truth which living obscures, or makes us unable to see, because we
are insensitive. One who has gentleness, sensitiveness, which are
other names for fineness, feels and responds. It is not dependent
upon intellect, sharpness of wit. It has to do with nobility. It is
this critics neglect. It does not need book-learning. It needs the
fine human instrument.
This is about what Tolstoi meant when he declared it was for the
people. Tolstoi spoke at a good time. It will not be long before all
things will be for the people. The future belongs to them. There will
no more be walled gardens.
The idea for Rostand’s _Chanticleer_ was inspired largely by _The
Birds_ of Aristophanes. Rostand was a borrower. Likewise from the
same comedy, Leopardi, incomparable Greek scholar, took the idea for
his essay on birds, in which he tries to fancy theirs the ideal life.
The Greeks knew how to set words so they glow. Every time I re-read
him I am surer there is nothing new. In _The Frogs_, in the journey
of disguised Bacchus across Land of the Dead, we find initial idea
of Dante’s Inferno; to be exact the _Pilgrimage Through Purgatory_.
It is the same only under guise of another religion. There are a few
books in which most printed art has its roots. Solomon was right.
There is nothing new. There are only a few Homeric laughers.
The exotic grace, the honeyed charm of Swinburne, came from Greek and
French poets. No wonder the perfection of Swinburne made would-be
poets take to new verse. It was hopeless to contend with him. When
you reach the top of the hill there is nothing to do but go down.
Swinburne reached the top of the mountain.
_The long winged dapple swallows_, (Aristophanes), is a Swinburnian
phrase. From the choruses of Euripides, he learned music,
swift-swinging resonant movement. That breathless on-rushing, which
no poet of today has, came from here. They are astonishingly alike in
sound-quality. A poet is like what he admires. Love is a magnet in
the world of mind.
Maeterlinck, in his book about bees, borrowed from Fabre. In
philosophical articles he has shown indebtedness to India. I recall
a series of these articles in which he uses the words, _the unknown
guest_, literally translated from Sanskrit. He has been praised
for the phrase. It is a fine phrase. But it does not belong to
Maeterlinck.
Alfred Noyes, in _Drake_, leaned lightly upon a narrative poem by
Spencer, describing South America.
An Arabic poet, on his way to exile in Africa, sang sadly:
_It’s a long white road to Mekinez!_
That was before the days of _Tipperary_.
There are writers, (ideas) whose attraction, influence, has been for
people of distant races, who have leaped across national boundaries.
Song, like the wind, keeps a way of its own.
English Byron’s influence was greatest in Russia. There it moulded a
race of poets. It set seal upon a movement in letters. Both Puschkin
and Lermontov, the two most gifted poets of the country, have been
nicknamed _The Russian Byron_. In Germany, on the contrary, Byron’s
influence was slight, just as the influence of the French Revolution
was slight there, and spread out helplessly, like sea water across
marsh-land.
The romantic movement, whatever and whenever may have been its
origin, reached height, became rotten, over-ripe, in Poland, in
Hungary, in prose and verse. No poets have so gone the limit in
creation of romantic verse as Slowacki, Mickiewicz, and Krasinski,
in Poland. And no romantic prose, (I mean in realm of the story),
can equal that of Paul Gyulai, the Hungarian, as reliable as he was
in criticism, and less romantic, although still tainted with it, the
novels of Csiky, likewise of Hungary.
The character of Merlin, and the Forest of Broceliande, has had
fascination for French mind. French poets refer to it often. They try
to re-create its appeal in their tongue.
Apollinaire wrote a book about it, a book magnificently illustrated
with wood-cuts by Derain. He called it _L’Enchanteur Pourrissant_.
The subject allured that delightful poet, Paul Fort. His book, part
of which sings the song of the misty north over again, is called _Les
Enchanteurs_.