judgments that are surely and permanently valid. The most it can do,
at its best, is to pronounce verdicts that are valid here and now, in
the light of living knowledge and prejudice. As the background shifts
the verdict changes. The best critic is not that fool who tries to
resist the process--by setting up artificial standards, by prattling
of laws and principles that do not exist, by going into the dead
past for criteria of the present--, but that more prudent fellow who
submits himself frankly to the flow of his time, and rejoices in its
aliveness. Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve was a good critic, for he saw
everything as a Frenchman of the Second Empire, and if his judgments
must be revised to-day it still remains true that they were honest
and intelligent when he formulated them. Professor Balderdash is a
bad critic, for he judges what is done in the American Empire of 1926
in the light of what was held to be gospel in the pastoral Republic
of a century ago. For the rest, the critic survives, when he survives
at all, mainly as artist. His judgments, in the long run, become
archaic, and may be disregarded. But if, in stating them, he has
incidentally produced a work of art on his own account, then he is read
long after they are rejected, and it may be plausibly argued that he
has contributed something to the glory of letters. No one takes much
stock in Macaulay’s notions to-day. He is, in fact, fair game for any
college tutor who has majored in what is called history. He fell into
many gross errors, and sometimes, it is probable, he fell into them
more or less deliberately. But his criticism is still read--that is, as
much as any criticism is read. It holds all its old charm and address.
For Macaulay, when he sat himself down to be critical, did not try
fatuously to produce a scientific treatise. What he tried to do was to
produce a work of art.
7
_Painting and its Critics_
Having emerged lately from a diligent course of reading in so-called
art criticism, and especially in that variety of it which is concerned
with the painters since Cézanne, I can only report that I find it windy
stuff, and sadly lacking in clarity and sense. The new critics, indeed,
seem to me to be quite as vague and absurd as some of the new painters
they celebrate. The more they explain and expound the thing they
profess to admire, the more unintelligible it becomes. Criticism, in
their hands, turns into a sort of cabbalism. One must prepare for it,
as one prepares for the literature of Service or of the New Thought, by
acquiring a wholly new vocabulary, and a new system of logic.
I do not argue here that the new painting, in itself, is always absurd.
On the contrary, it must be manifest to anyone with eyes that some
of its inventions are bold and interesting, and that now and then it
achieves a sort of beauty. What I argue is simply that the criticism it
has bred does not adequately account for it--that no man of ordinary
sense, seeking to find out just what it is about, will get any light
from what is currently written about it. All he will get will be a bath
of metaphysics, heated with indignation. Polemics take the place of
exposition. One comes away with a guilty feeling that one is somehow
grossly ignorant and bounderish, but unable to make out why. The same
phenomenon is occasionally witnessed in other fields. I have mentioned
the cases of Service and the New Thought. There was, a generation
ago, the case of Ibsen and the symbolists. These imbeciles read such
extravagant meanings into the old man’s plays that he was moved,
finally, to violent protests. He was not trying to compose cryptograms,
he said; he was simply trying to write stage plays. In much the same
way Cézanne protested against the balderdash of his earliest disciples
and interpreters. He was no messiah, he said; he was only a painter
who tried to reduce what he saw in the world to canvas. The Ibsen
symbolists eventually subsided into Freudism and other such rubbish,
but the Cézannists continue to spoil paper with their highfalutin and
occult tosh. I have read nearly all of them, and I denounce all that I
have read as quacks.
This tendency to degenerate into a mere mouthing of meaningless words
seems to be peculiar to so-called art criticism. There has never been,
so far as I know, a critic of painting who wrote about it simply and
clearly, as Sainte-Beuve, say, wrote about books, or Schumann and
Berlioz about music. Even the most orthodox of the brethren, when he
finds himself before a canvas that genuinely moves him, takes refuge
in esoteric winks and grimaces and mysterious gurgles and belches. He
can never put his feelings into plain English. Always, before he is
done, he is sweating metaphysics, which is to say, nonsense. Painters
themselves, when they discuss their art, commonly go the same route.
Every time a new revolutionist gives a show he issues a manifesto
explaining his aims and achievements, and in every such manifesto there
is the same blowsy rodomontadizing that one finds in the texts of the
critics. The thing, it appears, is very profound. Something new has
been discovered. Rembrandt, poor old boy, lived and died in ignorance
of it. Turner, had he heard of it, would have yelled for the police.
Even Gaugin barely glimpsed it. One can’t make out what this new
arcanum is, but one takes it on faith and goes to the show. What one
finds there is a series of canvases that appear to have been painted
with asphalt and mayonnaise, and by a man afflicted with binocular
diplopic strabismus. Is this sound drawing? Is this a new vision of
color? Then so is your grandmother left-fielder of the Giants. The
exceptions are very few. I have read, I suppose, at least two hundred
such manifestos during the past twenty years; at one time I even
started out to collect them, as odd literary delicatessen. I can’t
recall a single one that embodied a plain statement of an intelligible
idea--that is, intelligible to a man of ordinary information and
sanity. It always took a special talent to comprehend them, as it took
a special talent to paint the fantastic pictures they discussed.
Two reasons, I believe, combine to make the pronunciamentos of painters
so bombastic and flatulent. One lies in the plain fact that painting
is a relatively simple and transparent art, and that nothing much of
consequence is thus to be said about it. All that is remarkable in even
the most profound painting may be grasped by an educated spectator in a
few minutes. If he lingers longer he is simply seeing again what he has
seen before. His essential experience, in other words, is short-lived.
It is not like getting shaved, coming down with the cholera morbus,
or going to the wars; it is like jumping out of the way of a taxicab
or getting kissed. Consider, now, the position of a critic condemned
to stretch this experience into material for a column article or for
a whole chapter in a book. Obviously, he soon finds it insufficient
for this purpose. What, then, is he to do? Tell the truth, and then
shut up? This, alas, is not the way of critics. When their objective
facts run out they always turn to subjective facts, of which the supply
is unlimited. Thus the art critic begins to roll his eyes inward. He
begins to poetize and philosophize his experience. He indulges himself
in dark hints and innuendos. Putting words together aimlessly, he
presently hits upon a combination that tickles him. He has invented a
new cliché. He is a made man. The painter, expounding his work, falls
into the same bog. The plain fact, nine times out of ten, is that
he painted his picture without any rational plan whatever. Like any
other artist, he simply experimented with his materials, trying this
combination and then that. Finally he struck something that pleased
him. Now he faces the dreadful job of telling why. He simply doesn’t
know. So he conceals his ignorance behind recondite and enigmatical
phrases. He soars, insinuates, sputters, coughs behind his hand. If he
is lucky, he, too, invents a cliché. Three clichés in a row, and he is
a temporary immortal.
Behind what is written about painting there is always, of course,
the immense amount of drivel that is talked about it. No other art
is so copiously discussed by its practitioners, or encrusted with so
much hollow theorizing. The reason therefor--the second of the two I
mentioned above--lies in the obvious fact that painters can talk while
they work, and are debarred from working at least half of their waking
hours. A poet, when his hormones begin to ferment, not infrequently
labors all night; when there is a fog, a thunder-storm or a torch-light
parade he is specially inspired. So with a musical composer. But
a painter can work only while the light is good, and in the north
temperate zone that is not often. So he has much time on his hands,
and inasmuch as he seldom has money enough to venture into general
society and is usually too ignorant to enjoy reading, he puts in that
time talking. Nowhere else on this earth is there so much gabbling as
you will find in painters’ studios, save it be in the pubs and more or
less public bed-rooms that they frequent. It begins as soon as the sun
goes down, and it keeps on all night. And it is always about painting,
painting, painting. No other class of artists is so self-centered.
Once a youth gets a brush into his hand and turpentine in his hair,
he appears to join a race apart, and is interested no longer in the
general concerns of the world. Even the other arts do not commonly
engage any of his attention. If he ventures into music, it is into the
banal music of college boys and colored stevedores. If he reads it is
only the colicky nonsense that I have been describing. Even his amours
are but incidents of his trade. Now put this immense leisure and this
great professional keenness against the plain fact that the problems of
painting, in the main, are very simple--that very little that is new is
to be said about any of them. The result is a vast dilution of ideas, a
stormy battle of mere words, an infinite logomachy. And on its higher
levels, embellished with all the arts of the auctioneer, it is art
criticism.
8
_Greenwich Village_
The whole saga of Greenwich Village is in Alfred Kreymborg’s
autobiography, which he calls, very appropriately, “Troubadour.” The
story begins with an earnest and insolvent young man in a garret,
fighting cockroaches and writing free verse. It ends with a respectable
gentleman of passing forty, legally married to one very charming wife,
and in receipt of a comfortable income in royalties from the 6000
Little Theatres which now freckle and adorn our eminent Republic,
distracting the males of the Younger Married Set from the Red Peril and
Service, and their wives from millinery and birth control.
Of all the motley revolutionaries who flourished in the Village in
its heyday, say fifteen years ago, Kreymborg was surely one of the
most engaging, as he was one of the most honest. Most of the others,
for all their heroic renunciation of commercialism, were quite as
hot for the _mazuma_ as other literary artists. With one breath
they pledged themselves to poverty--though not, surely, to chastity
or obedience!--and denounced such well-heeled poets as Kipling and
Shakespeare as base harlots of the marts. With the next they bargained
with such editors as ventured to buy their wares like Potash tackling
One-Eye Feigenbaum. From this lamentable trafficking Kreymborg held
aloof, a genuine Parnassian. He composed his bad poetry and his worse
novels on a diet of _Schnecken_ and synthetic coffee, and paid for that
meager fare by teaching Babbitts the elements of chess.
Gradually the tumult died, and Greenwich Village fell into decay.
The poets moved out, and Philistines moved in; it was all over. But
Kreymborg kept the faith--at all events, longer than most. He continued
to write poems like a series of college yells, plays unearthly and
impossible, novels that brought the Comstocks sliding down their poles
like firemen. But gradually he, too, began to show change. His hair
grew thin on top; his blood grew sluggish. Presently some of his plays
were produced; he had at last squeezed through the proscenium arch.
Then he began to accept calls to read his dithyrambs before provincial
Poetry Societies. Then he became an editor and an anthologist--ten
paces behind his ancient enemy, Louis Untermeyer. Then he went through
two divorces, one of them legal, and married an estimable lady of
Brooklyn. Now he is past forty, has an agent, and pays income-tax.
_Schön ist die Jugendzeit; sie kommt nicht mehr!_ As I have hinted,
there was always something charming about Kreymborg, even in the days
of his most raucous verse. He threw up a good job with the Aeolian
Company, demonstrating mechanical-piano records, in order to become
a poet, and he stuck to his dream through many a long year. The
waspishness of the other Villagers was not in him, and he was happily
free of their worst imbecilities. Between cantos of free verse, I
suspect, he often read Swinburne and even Tennyson; in his mandolute he
concealed Howells and Mark Twain.
As one who poked many heavy jocosities at it while it lasted, I hope I
may now say with good grace that I believe Greenwich Village did a good
service to all the fine arts in this great land, and left a valuable
legacy behind it. True enough, its own heroes were nearly all duds,
and most of them have been forgotten, but it at least broke ground,
it at least stirred up the animals. When it began to issue smoke and
flame, the youth of the country were still under the hoof of the
schoolma’m; when it blew up at last they were in full revolt. Was it
Greenwich Village or Yale University that cleared the way for Cabell?
Was it the Village or the Philharmonic Society that made a place for
Stravinsky? Was it the Village or the trustees of the Metropolitan
Museum that first whooped for Cézanne? That whooping, of course, did
not stop with Cézanne, or Stravinsky, or Cabell. There were whoops
almost as loud for Sascha Gilhooly, who painted sunsets with a shaving
brush, and for Raoul Goetz, who wrote quartettes for automobile horns
and dentist’s drills, and for Bruce J. Katzenstein, whose poetry was
all figures and exclamation points. But all that excess did no harm.
The false prophets changed from day to day. The real ones remained.
X. ESSAY IN PEDAGOGY
1
On the purely technical side the American novel has obviously made
immense progress. As ordinarily encountered, it is very adeptly
constructed, and not infrequently it is also well written. The old-time
amorphous novel, rambling all over the place and ending with pious
platitudes, has pretty well gone out. The American novelists of
to-day, and especially the younger ones, have given earnest study to
form--perhaps, indeed, too much. For in concentrating their powerful
intellects upon it they have lost sight of something that is far more
important. I allude, of course, to the observation of character. Thus
the average contemporary American novel, though it is workmanlike and
well-mannered, fails to achieve its first business. It does not evoke
memorable images of human beings. One enjoys reading it, perhaps, but
one seldom remembers it. And when it gets beyond the estate of a mere
technical exercise, it only too often descends to the even worse estate
of a treatise. It attempts to prove something--usually the simple fact
that its author is a clever fellow, or a saucy gal. But all a novel of
genuine bulk and beam ever proves is that the proper study of mankind
is man--the proper study and the most engrossing.
In brief, a first-rate novel is always a character sketch. It may be
more than that, but at bottom it is always a character sketch, or, if
the author is genuinely of the imperial line, a whole series of them.
More, it is a character sketch of an individual not far removed from
the norm of the race. He may have his flavor of oddity, but he is never
fantastic; he never violates the common rules of human action; he never
shows emotions that are impossible to the rest of us. If Thackeray had
made Becky Sharp seven feet tall, and given her a bass voice, nine
husbands and the rank of lieutenant-general in the British Army, she
would have been forgotten long ago, along with all the rest of “Vanity
Fair.” And if Robinson Crusoe had been an Edison instead of a normal
sailorman, he would have gone the same way.
The moral of all this is not lost upon the more competent minority
of novelists in practice among us. It was not necessary to preach
it to Miss Cather when she set out to write “My Antonía,” nor to
Abraham Cahan when he tackled “The Rise of David Levinsky,” nor to
Sinclair Lewis when he was at work on “Babbitt.” All such novelists
see the character first and the story afterward. What is the story
of “Babbitt”? Who remembers? Who, indeed, remembers the story of “The
Three Musketeers”? But D’Artagnan and his friends live brilliantly,
and so, too, I believe, will George F. Babbitt live brilliantly--at
all events, until Kiwanis ceases to trouble, and his type ceases to
be real. Most of the younger American novelists, alas, seem to draw
no profit from such examples. It is their aim, apparently, to shock
mankind with the vivacity of their virtuosity and the heterodoxy of
their ideas, and so they fill their novels with gaudy writing and banal
propaganda, and convert their characters into sticks. I read novel
after novel without getting any sense of contact with actual human
beings. I am, at times, immensely amused and sometimes I am instructed,
but I seldom carry away anything to remember. When I do so, it is not
an idea, but a person. Like everyone else, I have a long memory for
persons. But ideas come and go.
All this becomes the more remarkable when one considers the peculiar
richness of the American scene in sharply-outlined and racy characters.
Our national ideas, indeed, are mainly third-rate, and some of them are
almost idiotic, but taking one year with another we probably produce
more lively and diverting people than all the rest of the world taken
together. More, these lively and diverting people tend to cluster into
types. Mark Twain put half a dozen of them into “Huckleberry Finn” and
as many more into “Roughing It,” a novel disguised as history. Montague
Glass collared a whole flock for his Potash and Perlmutter stories, and
Ring Lardner has got another flock into his studies of the American
bounder. But the younger novelists, or at least the overwhelming
majority of them, stick to their sticks. Thus even the most salient and
arresting of American types still lack historians, and seem doomed to
perish and be forgotten with the Bill of Rights. Babbitt stood around
for a dozen years, waiting for Lewis; the rest of the novelists of
the land gaped at him without seeing him. How long will they gape at
the American politician? At the American university president? At the
American policeman? At the American lawyer? At the American insurance
man? At the Prohibition fanatic? At the revival evangelist? At the
bootlegger? At the Y. M. C. A. secretary? At the butter-and-egg man? At
the journalist?
2
I have put the politician at the top of my list. He probably embodies
more typical American traits than any other; he is, within his limits,
the arch-Americano. Yet how seldom he gets into a novel! And how
seldom, having got there, is he real! I can recall, indeed, but one
American political novel of any value whatever as a study of character,
and that is Harvey Fergusson’s story of Washington, “Capitol Hill”--a
series of casual sketches, but all of them vivid and true. Fergusson
really understands the American politician. There is, in “Capitol
Hill,” no division of the _dramatis personæ_ between Democrats
and Republicans, progressives and reactionaries, materialists and
idealists, patriots and traitors; the only division is between men and
women who have something, and men and women who want it. In that simple
fact lies most of the book’s curious reality. For the truth about
Washington is that it is not a town of politics, in the conventional
and romantic sense; it is, if anything, a town almost devoid of
politics. The people in the industrial cities and out on the farms take
political ideas seriously; what they cherish in that department they
refuse passionately to surrender. But so far as I know there are not a
dozen professional politicians in Washington, high or low, who would
not throw overboard, instantly and gladly, every political idea they
are assumed to be devoted to, including especially every political idea
that has helped them into public office, if throwing it overboard would
help them to higher and gaudier and more lucrative office. I say high
or low, and I mean it literally. There has not been a President of the
United States for half a century who did not, at some time or other in
his career, perform a complete _volte face_ in order to further his
career. There is scarcely a United States Senator who does not flop at
least three times within the limits of a single session.
The novelists who write about Washington are partly recruited from
the ranks of the Washington newspaper correspondents, perhaps the
most naïve and unreflective body of literate men in Christendom, and
for the rest from the ranks of those who read the dispatches of such
correspondents, and take them seriously. The result is a grossly
distorted and absurd picture of life in the capital city. One carries
off the notion that the essential Washington drama is based on a
struggle between a powerful and corrupt Senator and a sterling young
uplifter. The Senator is about to sell out the Republic to the Steel
Trust, J. P. Morgan or the Japs. The uplifter detects him, exposes him,
drives him from public life, and inherits his job. The love interest
is supplied by a fair stenographer who steals the damning papers
from the Senator’s safe, or by an Ambassador’s wife who goes to the
White House at 3 A. M., and, at the peril of her virtue, arouses the
President and tells him what is afoot. All this is poppycock. There
are no Senators in Washington powerful enough to carry on any such
operations single-handed, and very few of them are corrupt: it is too
easy to bamboozle them to go to the expense of buying them. The most
formidable bribe that the average Senator receives from year’s end
to year’s end is a bottle or two of very dubious Scotch, and that is
just as likely to come from the agent of the South Central Watermelon
Growers’ Association as from John D. Rockefeller or the Mikado of
Japan. Nor are there any sterling young uplifters in the town. The
last was chased out before the Mexican War. There are to-day only
gentlemen looking for something for themselves--publicity, eminence,
puissance, jobs--especially jobs. Some take one line and some another.
Further than that the difference between them is no greater than the
difference between a Prohibition agent and a bootlegger, or tweedledum
and tweedledee.