when he is engaged in the practice of his profession, go to the nearest
zoo and watch a chimpanzee at the wearying and hopeless job of chasing
fleas. Both suffer damnably and neither can win.” The “fleas” in this
case, you realize, are truth, the absolute, any ultimate concept of the
real world, any distinction at all between reality and appearance.
Elsewhere, in the same lofty Menckenian column, the same matter is
called “bunk.” “For the absolute, of course,” he absolutely assures us,
“is a mere banshee. No such thing exists. Philosophy in the narrow
technical sense”—read, in the sense of the whole silly lineage from
Pythagoras to Whitehead—“is largely moonshine and wind music.”
At last I know, from Mr. Mencken’s rigorous definitions, what is his
secret desire: the unsated hunger which all his literary work has
struggled to fulfill. Since, to his mind, philosophy is bunk and wind
and moonshine, is it not clear that Mr. Mencken looks upon himself as a
writer of philosophy? And if he strives to sharpshoot all the other
philosophical fellows off the field, who can blame him, since he knows
that his own particular brand of brass fanfare is the best for us?
Let us therefore take him as a philosopher: take him seriously, I mean,
of course. And consider the matter of this “bunk” of metaphysics. A
moment’s inquiry should make clear that if the philosophical
“woolgathering” of man is to be judged merely by practical results—by
results in the way man has lived; in contrast with the metaphysicians,
the builders of temples were builders in sand, the makers of empires
were but furious blowers of bubbles.
Of course, the findings of metaphysics—the logic of reality, and of
epistemology—the logic of knowledge, are disputed, disputable, relative,
impermanent. What is not? Even the term “eternal” is a pitiful,
anthropomorphic thing, having no life and no sense save in the mouth of
the evanescent creature who knows himself for mortal. If you will have
nothing less than the eternal, what will you do with language, music,
economics? what with religions, empires, arts? Do these outlast
philosophy? On the contrary, they rest and have ever rested upon it.
Take the age of the Upanishads, nearly thirty centuries behind us. Do we
speak the language of that day? We speak its philosophical thought. Do
we live by its arts, its customs, its gods, its laws? Yet its
metaphysics is a cogent factor in modern psychology, in modern letters.
The era of the Upanishads is living for us, solely through its
professional philosophers—those “idle” _sitters-about_ who spent their
days spinning webs about Absolute and Will—webs so marvelously strong
that they have outlasted cities and cultures.
What exists now of the Greece and Magna Græcia of the sixth century
before Christ? Chiefly Pythagoras: and through him a good deal of
history, ancient and modern, of science, ancient and modern, of
mathematics, of physics, of religious doctrine. From his philosophy of
number came the science of numbers: came Euclid: came the whole forever
adumbrating realm of physics and mechanics, the modern mathematics of
analysis, the modern critical realism (via other philosophers, of
course, like Descartes and Leibnitz) which in men like Mach, Einstein,
Russell, Whitehead, is once again transfiguring the world. From the
abstractions of these technical philosophers of preclassic Greece came
Plato (even as Aeschylus and Tragedy came from the Eleusinians): came
Aristotle, came Plotinus: came at last such fairly practicable
structures as the whole civilization of Christian Europe. From the
moonshine of such men as Pythagoras, Protagoras, Plato, Heraclitus,
Democritus and Zeno, tough-minded men managed to build states, churches,
sciences, atomic theories, machines. Similarly, the prophets of Israel,
the wise men of India and North Africa—questers of that Absolute which,
in their ignorance they called God or Atman, whereas Mr. Mencken in his
more modern language calls it bunk or fleas—gave to man a concept so
very real that he has dwelt in it, builded from it his art, his ethics
and his state, for many thousand years.
Mr. Mencken probably forgets that Bacon’s preparation for modern science
was possible to him only because he rested wholly on a metaphysical
faith: the assumption of an absolute Order without which, as Hume points
out, there could be no science, because there could be no deduction from
particular to general, from appearance to Law, from passing effect to
eternal Cause. So Newton, also, rose from an intricate, profound,
world-satisfying structure of metaphysical faith which a whole lineage
of “professional flea-chasers” from Plato to Aquinas had molded at last
into the Christian Cosmos.
Perhaps Mr. Mencken does not know that Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare,
Goethe, had their metaphysics—had, above all, their masters, technical
and abstruse, in metaphysics. Has not his careful study of the
philosophical classics, which he assures us he “rereads every year when
the weather is too hot for serious mental work,” revealed to him that
his favorites, Conrad and Nietzsche, are romantic versions of
Schopenhauer who, in turn, rests upon Kant and the philosophers of
India? If he has no use for Kant, his disgust with the post-Kantian
idealists (Hegel, for instance) is utterly beneath words. Yet, from
these sources come psychoanalysis, Marxism, the Nietzschean
anti-Marxism: come the non-Euclidean and _n_-dimensional geometers
(Gauss, Riemann, Lobachevski, Minkowski), who in their turn nourished
Lorentz, Einstein, the critical realists—makers of the modern world. And
straight from Hegel is derived the impressionistic style in criticism
which Mr. Mencken so adorns—since it is, indeed, his own.
It is one of the burdens of philosophy that lesser men turn its noble
doubts into dogmatic denials: chip from its high structure of critique
little stones to fling against it. In all ages, heedless people accept
what the great past bequeaths them, live by it, and betray it. The man
who is most proud of his Buick is most contemptuous of the thinker whose
intricate thought made his car possible. The man most at ease in his
Zion sneers most at the makers of the concepts which built his state and
his morals.
_1926_
3. PSEUDO LITERATURE
The term, I believe, is Schopenhauer’s. He declared that there are two
streams of writing, for the most part indistinguishably merged save for
a very few. One of these, the effect of creative thought and of creative
vision, he called literature; and all the rest, however pleasant and
respectable, he outlawed. To go back to any flourishing epoch is to be
convinced that Schopenhauer was right and that our present status is not
essentially unique. The modish ladies of Weimar forsook Goethe for the
“more modern” Kotzebue. Pradon and Quinault outbid Racine for favor.
Alexandria, Rome, Athens, Jerusalem, had swarms of writers who were so
close to the contemporary clamor that they have died with it into as
whole a silence. The printing press and the mock crowning of demos have
merely aggravated an immemorial condition. Where only a minority could
read, only a minority could be idle readers. Now that everyone is forced
to read, the flood of words without creative source is stintless, and
there are organized for it great armies of “distributing agents,” of
which an unconsciously servile group call themselves reviewers—even
critics! The swollen plethora of pseudo literature has perhaps lowered
the visibility of the real through its sheer mass. But if this be argued
an increased deterrent to the life and health of literature it is more
than overcome by the increasing of the potential public for what is
good. The more persons who can read at all, the more may read what is
authentic.
There is then no good ground for the friend and writer of literature to
complain. He has traditionally addressed a minority in a minority; and
it exists for him today. The new presence of hawkers and bawlers
purveying printed goods to the mob has not altered his position any more
than has the deformation of the democratic doctrine into the myth that
everybody is as good as everybody else. If the writer hungers after
enormous sales, he is the victim of confusion: unconsciously, he desires
to leave his true domain. If he feels that he is entitled to the
royalties of a Michael Arlen or to the popularity of a Fannie Hurst, the
urgence of his vision must be very weak. For it is the glorious
compensation of the wooers of beauty and of truth that all other of
life’s guerdons are by contrast dull. To have heard clear, even once,
the word of God is to hear it forever in all the calls of life.
More serious and more concerning is another phase of this mutual
attraction between the real with its rigorous solitude and the false
with its populous cordialities. The purveyors of pseudo literature are
so many that they fall into classes. They have their snobs, too, their
social climbers. And there is among their readers an ample group
sufficiently emerged from the rest to desire “culture” even at the cost
of thrills. These persons are aware of the term “literature” and want
their share in it. Their conception, of course, is derived from shallow
study of the past. Incapable of recognizing the essence of an art, they
dwell on its external traits and manners. And the contemporary writers
who most flatter them are the emulators of these imitable parts. Such
authors are competent in style, they are elegant, they reproduce in
terms of up-to-dateness the forms and virtues of previous pioneers. Most
of them will be novelists, dramatists, even poets. But they must have
their critics. And to them falls the dangerous task of establishing a
rationale for their kind; an aggressive apologia for all their sterile
wares.
The creative, the heroic, the religious spirit of true literature is by
such critics utterly ignored; and by repeated omission comes to be
regarded as nonexistent. The novel which flows well, the tale which is
pleasing, the construction which reflects current thought or current
passion is hailed as _good_, and the more reflective, hence passive, it
is, the higher is rated its importance. Unconsciously, it is assumed
that literature has no independent body: that its real substance is the
public taste. From this fallacy it follows that criticism becomes a
solemn discussion of secondary traits—timeliness, grace and color. The
primary creative stuff of literature without which these secondary
qualities can have no true existence is forgotten. The terms of what is
genuine are borrowed for what is false. And the confusion grows.
What hungry common reader could dream, from contemporary criticisms of
Mr. Hergesheimer, of Mr. Cabell, of Miss Cather—supply your own names
from the current columns—that these are makers of books with an
essential lack: a lack as crucial as that which parts organic death from
life? The books of such novelists are competent in so far as they are
elegant reflections of styles in form and thought and language. As
contributions to the creative life of the mind and of the spirit, they
are inept. Their source is neither a luminous vision nor an authentic
knowledge; but rather the shrewd perusal of past masters and present
moods. Neither their purpose nor their substance adds one iota to the
experience of man. To call them literature is to degrade the name.
And it is precisely urgent that the name “literature” be not degraded.
For there is much in a name: much directing of intelligence, much
shaping of powers. And we possess an age in which intelligence is not
small, but confused, in which powers are lavish, but debauched. A critic
of our day as aware as were Abélard and Anselm, would be as concerned as
they were with the pragmatic virtues of the Name. He would know, as they
did, that a confusion in words is the symbol of confusion in continents
and souls. Much of the dangerous condition of our time springs from the
fact that in the readjustment of social and spiritual forms, names have
become the prostituted playthings of any fool or knave who wishes to
mouth them.
Thus, the gigantic reaches of pseudo literature from the Hearst papers
to Harold Bell Wright, being allotted their proper place, do no great
harm. They touch only the senses they appeal to; they convince only
minds incapable of conviction; there is no formidable claque to name
them other than they are. Far more pernicious is the snob class of
pseudo literature; for it sails under false colors and of late it
proceeds almost unchallenged.
The challenge of other days was a competent tradition. Pseudo literature
has always thrived on pretension. But an audience to whom the classics,
holy or profane, were valid had an incessant standard to protect it. If
a French academician extolled Quinault, there was Euripides to answer.
If an Alexandrian put out a bad pseudepigraphia of Ezra, the Chronicles
could face him. Our situation is more arduous. In the general
liquidation of old forms, the esthetic tradition has dissolved. We must
build up a new critical standard not only within, but from the current
chaos.
_1925_
4. “UTILITARIAN ART”
It is revealing that the notion of “art for art’s sake,” of art sprung
from itself and for itself, arose with the utilitarianism of the
nineteenth century. If you will read the conversations of Goethe, the
prefaces of Racine, the notebooks of Leonardo, the prose works of Dante,
and finally trace back to Aristotle and to Plato, you may marvel (if you
are a “modern”) at the ethical bias in all our classic art. Not alone
Milton believed that he was writing “to justify the ways of God to men.”
It is safe to say that if a respectable goldsmith of the Renaissance had
been cornered for a “reason” for his work, he would have professed some
moral or some religious purpose not too remote from that which moved the
Alexandrians and the prophets. While theology was hale, esthetics was
its handmaid. Later, art went into the service of the God of Reason; and
later still, took on the harness of metaphysics when that logic had
assumed the imperatives of revealed religion. Only when modern man has
debauched the ideal of spiritual progress—old as the Hindus and the
Hebrews—to a bare functional or mechanistic pattern do we come upon art
so divinely considered that it may have no “purpose.”
The reason for this is not far to seek. While man’s fate was still
linked with gods or with godlike values, the arts could honorably serve.
When that fate was mechanized into some economic or utilitarian or
biological “design,” art rebelled and set up a church of its own. The
dogma of “pure poetry” and of “art for art’s sake” is a reaction from
the dogma of vulgar materialism and of “man for his belly’s sake.” Being
a reaction, it partakes of the nature of the source whence, however
obscurely, it has risen.
The doctrine of utilitarianism had two esthetic offspring. One is
obvious: it is the art which in devious ways aims to “get results” in
actual life. The debased condition of such art is coming to be suspected
even by the bourgeoisie. The other offspring is the art of the Ivory
Tower—the art of “esthetics”—the art of “purposelessness” and of
aloofness. And I wish to make clear that these two are radically one.
However they may differ in the intelligence that makes them, they are
both utilitarian: they are both debased from art’s full function.
The philosophy of utilitarian materialism defined life in terms of the
pursuit of specific material values. (I speak of it in the past, for it
still lingers only in the minds of tyros.) It committed the fallacy of
taking some “end” or process _within_ life—economic or sexual, personal
or biological—and setting it up as the Cause. Like all geneticisms, it
was illogical and was, indeed, refuted in the texts of the very
philosophers whose shallow disciples had invented it. Now, the same
point may, of course, be raised against the nugatory notion of
“utilitarian art.” Whereas art in its full sense is an organic event of
life, sensorily formed, autonomous and yet contingent, like any
individual, on its living context, utilitarian art disavows this
individual organism of art, and aims to reduce art’s essence to some
specific effect within the world of men.
Examples of this class of instrumental or utilitarian art are everywhere
about us. Such is the “art” of advertisement, of exhortation: such is
the play “with a thesis,” the fiction of reformers like Upton Sinclair
or H. G. Wells. Such, too, are the industrial “arts” whose purpose is to
turn out _salable_ machines, rather than _livable_ ones, as was the
purpose of the ancient craftsmen who worked for an intimate, spiritually
harmonious client. The arts of the popular magazines are no less
utilitarian. A story which strives simply to amuse is kin to the story
which endeavors to reform. The novel that “cleaned up” the Chicago
Packingtown may have been more laudable, it was not more utilitarian
than the tale that aims merely at killing a few hours’ boredom. In both
instances, you have that organic life process called art narrowed and
debased to meet some specific sensory demand. Whether the demand be for
clean meat or a vicarious amour, esthetically your books are of one
class.
And as “utilitarian art” must be grouped—and condemned also—the current
works of the esthetes. Mr. Cabell’s fancies may be more refined than Mr.
Sinclair’s: they are as remote from the whole province of art which can
“help” in life by no less fact than that it _is_ life. Mr. Cabell,
engineering an escape from life, is not in the lineage of the masters:
he is an epigone of the materialists who lowered the whole life process
into a “struggle” for comfort or for survival. I see no essential
esthetic difference between the schools of Mr. Cabell and Mr. Aldous
Huxley, and that of Pollyanna. In the latter case, you get sugar instead
of a whole experience of life; in the former, you get some acrid opiate.
If this is in any way the revelation of a superior taste, then the jaded
adult who adores rotted cheese is superior in taste to the child who
calls for candy.
The organism of art is, of course, constructed of physical materials
with sensory and ideological associations, even as is the individual
life made up of physical substances. In life, these materials—chemical,
mineral, vegetable—are mysteriously organized into the unitary,
indivisible _living organism_. And in true art, the same holds. The
sensory appeals—to eye, ear, appetite, memory, emotion—are the materials
which the artist has composed into the organic whole called art: which
differs from its elements, even as life from its ingredients. A
utilitarian philosophy of life might be called one in which some group
of these materials in life is made more causative than the whole. A
utilitarian art, by analogue, is one in which the main matter (instead
of the means) is some appeal to the senses.
Purposely, my definition lumps with the commercial, the pornographic,
the dully sensational artists, a whole school of haughty favorites: for
instance, Virginia Woolf. Analyze “Jacob’s Room,” and what do you
discover? A sensitive woman (the authoress) with deft hands picks to
pieces the banal story of an English boy. Upon her nerves, its fragments
register sensations. She is not, like James Joyce or D. H. Lawrence,
composing these sensations into organic life. _They_ are her end and she
is using them for a personal sensory delectation which her reader may
share. She is not creating at all: she is transposing.
You may apply, for yourself, the same criterion to our music or our
painting. Is the composer building the sensory ingredients of his music
into an organic life which transcends bare sense, as life transcends
inorganic matter? or is he _using_ his theme—transposing it perhaps from
a well-known tonal to a striking dissonance—in order to get a sensory
appeal? If this is his end, even though his name be thrice Russian, he
is as completely a utilitarian artist as the man who writes a Buick
advertisement.
_1927_
5. ART IN OUR JUNGLE
When you have done with the latest work on relativity or the theory of
quanta, and the once so solid universe has melted into a mere congeries
of spaceless, timeless, substanceless vibrations, go to some modern art
gallery and bask in the certainties of our painters. For the best of
these are men who hold to a reality or are resolved to re-establish it.
From Picasso to Weber, from Marin to Orozco, it is amazing how
harmonious most of these painters and sculptors are, in their formal
purpose, even in their formal use of color. They are builders of
_structure_. Not of architectures or machines: not even, for the most
part, of such designs as the fugue or the canon. The structure which
they seek to produce is the answer to the chaos which they find about
them. It is as if they were plunging through a liquidated world; and as
they fall they build—in order to cease falling.
The best of them are workers in a crisis. Confusion of fundamentals is
our atmosphere. Emergency in danger is their temper. Their response to
the carpers who expect them to be pretty and pleasant is: “We need
ground to stand on!” Would you criticize the manners of the man who
rescued you at sea? or judge by metropolitan standard the costume of the
fireman who led you from a blazing building? If not—and only then—are
you in the proper mood to appreciate the contemporary artist.
Let us hope that the modern gallery director has interspersed a number
of pretty or “academic” paintings among the works of the creators and of
the seekers of form. They establish a curious dissonance. Who shall
quarrel with dainty ladies flimsily attired and dancing to a rose? or
with excellent gentlemen silk-hatted and promenading with a spaniel? But
what if you find them at their peaceful antics on the walls of an
embattled city? In some such way are men like Charles W. Hawthorne,
Childe Hassam, Henri Martin, most of the British, out of place in a
serious exhibition.
The capacity of any generation for misunderstanding its art is not
mysterious: it is equal to, for it is the same thing as, each man’s
capacity for ignoring the essence of his soul. How long is it, since you
last heard the usual Wise Word about the whole esthetic movement since
Cézanne? “Oh, ho—a Saturnalia of decay! These wistful little artists, so
out of touch with the great world; reflecting their defeat, their
impotence, their despair. These inadequate anarchists glorifying their
own chaos! How lucky it is that we have Solid Science!” Well, your
too-solid scientific world has melted. Gone is the atom, gone is ether,
gone is the whole Mechanism in which, from Aristotle to Newton, man
dwelt irrelevant and complacent. The conclusions of our physicists hurl
us back, through three thousand years of certainties, to the “vagary” of
the Upanishad: our universe is but the Breath of Brahma.
Relation, Vibration, entity of Movement, conformity of impalpable
motions into a dream called substance—these are the lean relics of our
centuries of science. And these are the precise materials with which the
contemporary artist is creating truth and beauty!