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ADVENTURES
IN THE ARTS
INFORMAL
CHAPTERS
ON PAINTERS
VAUDEVILLE
AND POETS
BY
MARSDEN HARTLEY
BONI AND LIVERIGHT
Publishers New York
COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
BONI & LIVERIGHT, INC.
* * * * *
PREFATORY NOTE
The papers in this book are not intended in any way to be professional
treatises. They must be viewed in the light of entertaining
conversations. Their possible value lies in their directness of
impulse, and not in weight of argument. I could not wish to go into
the qualities of art more deeply. A reaction, to be pleasant, must be
simple. This is the apology I have to offer: Reactions, then, through
direct impulse, and not essays by means of stiffened analysis.
MARSDEN HARTLEY.
* * * * *
Some of the papers included in this book have appeared in
_Art and Archeology_, _The Seven Arts_, _The Dial_, _The
Nation_, _The New Republic_, and _The Touchstone_. Thanks
are due to the editors of these periodicals for permission
to reprint.
* * * * *
TO
ALFRED STIEGLITZ
* * * * *
INTRODUCTION
TO
ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS
Perhaps the most important part of Criticism is the fact that it
presents to the creator a problem which is never solved. Criticism is
to him a perpetual Presence: or perhaps a ghost which he will not
succeed in laying. If he could satisfy his mind that Criticism was a
certain thing: a good thing or a bad, a proper presence or an
irrelevant, he could psychologically dispose of it. But he can not.
For Criticism is a configuration of responses and reactions so
intricate, so kaleidoscopic, that it would be as simple to category
Life itself.
The artist remains the artist precisely in so far as he rejects the
simplifying and reducing process of the average man who at an early
age puts Life away into some snug conception of his mind and race.
This one turns the key. He has released his will and love from the
vast Ceremonial of wonder, from the deep Poem of Being, into some
particular detail of life wherein he hopes to achieve comfort or at
least shun pain. Not so, the artist. In the moment when he elects to
avoid by whatever makeshift the raw agony of life, he ceases to be
fit to create. He must face experience forever freshly: reduce life
each day anew to chaos and remould it into order. He must be always a
willing virgin, given up to life and so enlacing it. Thus only may he
retain and record that pure surprise whose earliest voicing is the
first cry of the infant.
The unresolved expectancy of the creator toward Life should be his way
toward Criticism also. He should hold it as part of his Adventure. He
should understand in it, particularly when it is impertinent, stupid
and cruel, the ponderable weight of Life itself, reacting upon his
search for a fresh conquest over it. Though it persist unchanged in
its rôle of purveying misinformation and absurdity to the Public, he
should know it for himself a blessed dispensation.
With his maturity, the creator's work goes out into the world. And in
this act, he puts the world away. For the artist's work defines: and
definition means apartness: and the average man is undefined in the
social body. Here is a danger for the artist within the very essence
of his artistic virtue. During the years of his apprenticeship, he has
struggled to create for himself an essential world out of experience.
Now he begins to succeed: and he lives too fully in his own selection:
he lives too simply in the effects of his effort. The gross and
fumbling impact of experience is eased. The grind of ordinary
intercourse is dimmed. The rawness of Family and Business is refined
or removed. But now once more the world comes in to him, in the form
of the Critic. Here again, in a sharp concentrated sense, the world
moves on him: its complacency, its hysteria, its down-tending
appetites and fond illusions, its pathetic worship of yesterdays and
hatred of tomorrows, its fear-dogmas and its blood-avowals.
The artist shall leave the world only to find it, hate it only because
he loves, attack it only if he serves. At that epoch of his life when
the world's gross sources may grow dim, Criticism brings them back.
Wherefore, the function of the Critic is a blessing and a need.
The creator's reception of this newly direct, intense, mundane
intrusion is not always passive. If the artist is an intelligent man,
he may respond to the intervening world on its own plane. He may turn
critic himself.
When the creator turns critic, we are in the presence of a
consummation: we have a complete experience: we have a sort of
sacrament. For to the intrusion of the world he interposes his own
body. In his art, the creator's body would be itself intrusion. The
artist is too humble and too sane to break the ecstatic flow of vision
with his personal form. The true artist despises the personal as an
end. He makes fluid, and distils his personal form. He channels it
beyond himself to a Unity which of course contains it. But Criticism
is nothing which is not the sheer projection of a body. The artist
turns Self into a universal Form: but the critic reduces Form to Self.
Criticism is to the artist the intrusion, in a form irreducible to
art, of the body of the world. What can he do but interpose his own?
This is the value of the creator's criticism. He gives to the world
himself. And his self is a rich life.
It includes for instance a direct experience of art, the which no
professional critic may possess. And it includes as well a direct
knowledge of life, sharpened in the retrospect of that devotion to the
living which is peculiarly the artist's. For what is the critic after
all, but an "artistic" individual somehow impeded from satisfying his
esthetic emotion and his need of esthetic form in the gross and
stubborn stuff of life itself: who therefore, since he is too
intelligent for substitutes, resorts to the already digested matter of
the hardier creators, takes their assimilated food and does with it
what the athletic artist does with the meat and lymph and bone of God
himself? The artist mines from the earth and smelts with his own fire.
He is higher brother to the toilers of the soil. The critic takes the
products of the creator, reforges, twists them, always in the cold.
For if he had the fire to melt, he would not stay with metals already
worked: when the earth's womb bursts with richer.
When the creator turns critic, we are certain of a feast. We have a
fare that needs no metaphysical sauce (such as must transform the
product of the Critic). Here is good food. Go to it and eat. The
asides of a Baudelaire, a Goethe, a Da Vinci outweight a thousand
tomes of the professional critics.
* * * * *
I know of no American book like this one by Marsden Hartley. I do not
believe American painting heretofore capable of so vital a response
and of so athletic an appraisal. Albert Ryder barricaded himself from
the world's intrusion. The American world was not intelligent enough
in his days to touch him to an activer response. And Ryder, partaking
of its feebleness, from his devotion to the pure subjective note
became too exhausted for aught else. As a world we have advanced. We
have a fully functioning Criticism ... swarms and schools of makers of
the sonorous complacencies of Judgment. We have an integral body of
creative-minded men and women interposing itself with valiance upon
the antithesis of the social resistance to social growth. Hartley is
in some ways a continuance of Ryder. One stage is Ryder, the solitary
who remained one. A second stage is Hartley, the solitary who stands
against the more aggressive, more interested Marketplace.
You will find in this book the artist of a cultural epoch. This man
has mastered the plastic messages of modern Europe: he has gone deep
in the classic forms of the ancient Indian Dance. But he is, still,
not very far from Ryder. He is always the child--whatever wise old
worlds he contemplates--the child, wistful, poignant, trammeled, of
New England.
Hartley has adventured not alone deep but wide. He steps from New
Mexico to Berlin, from the salons of the Paris of Marie Laurencin to
the dust and tang of the American Circus. He is eclectic. But wherever
he goes he chronicles not so much these actual worlds as his own
pleasure of them. They are but mirrors, many-shaped and lighted, for
his own delicate, incisive humor. For Hartley is an innocent and a
_naïf_. At times he is profound. Always he is profoundly simple.
Tragedy and Comedy are adult. The child's world is Tragicomic. So
Marsden Hartley's. He is not deep enough--like most of our Moderns--in
the pregnant chaos to be submerged in blackness by the hot struggle of
the creative will. He may weep, but he can smile next moment at a
pretty song. He may be hurt, but he gets up to dance.
In this book--the autobiography of a creator--Marsden Hartley peers
variously into the modern world: but it is in search of Fairies.
WALDO FRANK.
_Lisbon_, June, 1921.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION BY WALDO FRANK
_Foreword_
CONCERNING FAIRY TALES AND ME
_Part One_
1. THE RED MAN
2. WHITMAN AND CÉZANNE
3. RYDER
4. WINSLOW HOMER
5. AMERICAN VALUES IN PAINTING
6. MODERN ART IN AMERICA
7. OUR IMAGINATIVES
8. OUR IMPRESSIONISTS
9. ARTHUR B. DAVIES
10. REX SLINKARD
11. SOME AMERICAN WATER-COLORISTS
12. THE APPEAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY
13. SOME WOMEN ARTISTS
14. REVALUATIONS IN IMPRESSIONISM
15. ODILON REDON
16. THE VIRTUES OF AMATEUR PAINTING
17. HENRI ROUSSEAU
_Part Two_
18. THE TWILIGHT OF THE ACROBAT
19. VAUDEVILLE
20. A CHARMING EQUESTRIENNE
21. JOHN BARRYMORE IN PETER IBBETSON
_Part Three_
22. LA CLOSERIE DE LILAS
23. EMILY DICKINSON
24. ADELAIDE CRAPSEY
25. FRANCIS THOMPSON
26. ERNEST DOWSON
27. HENRY JAMES ON RUPERT BROOKE
28. THE DEARTH OF CRITICS
_Afterword_
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING "DADA"
* * * * *
FOREWORD
CONCERNING FAIRY TALES AND ME
Sometimes I think myself one of the unique children among children. I
never read a fairy story in my childhood. I always had the feeling as
a child, that fairy stories were for grown-ups and were best
understood by them, and for that reason I think it must have been that
I postponed them. I found them, even at sixteen, too involved and
mystifying to take them in with quite the simple gullibility that is
necessary. But that was because I was left alone with the incredibly
magical reality from morning until nightfall, and the nights meant
nothing more remarkable to me than the days did, no more than they do
now. I find moonlight merely another species of illumination by which
one registers continuity of sensation. My nursery was always on the
edge of the strangers' knee, wondering who they were, what they might
even mean to those who were as is called "nearest" them.
I had a childhood vast with terror and surprise. If it is true that
one forgets what one wishes to forget, then I have reason for not
remembering the major part of those days and hours that are supposed
to introduce one graciously into the world and offer one a clue to
the experience that is sure to follow. Not that my childhood was so
bitter, unless for childhood loneliness is bitterness, and without
doubt it is the worst thing that can happen to one's childhood. Mine
was merely a different childhood, and in this sense an original one. I
was left with myself to discover myself amid the multitudinous other
and far greater mysteries. I was never the victim of fear of goblins
and ghosts because I was never taught them. I was merely taught by
nature to follow, as if led by a rare and tender hand, the then almost
unendurable beauty that lay on every side of me. It was pain then, to
follow beauty, because I didn't understand beauty; it must always, I
think, be distressing to follow anything one does not understand.
I used to go, in my earliest school days, into a little strip of
woodland not far from the great ominous red brick building in a small
manufacturing town, on the edge of a wonderful great river in Maine,
from which cool and quiet spot I could always hear the dominant clang
of the bell, and there I could listen with all my very boyish
simplicity to the running of the water over the stones, and watch--for
it was spring, of course--the new leaves pushing up out of the mould,
and see the light-hued blossoms swinging on the new breeze. I cared
more for these in themselves than I did for any legendary presences
sitting under them, shaking imperceptible fingers and waving invisible
wands with regality in a world made only for them and for children
who were taught mechanically to see them there.
I was constantly confronted with the magic of reality itself,
wondering why one thing was built of exquisite curves and another of
harmonic angles. It was not a scientific passion in me, it was merely
my sensing of the world of visible beauty around me, pressing in on me
with the vehemence of splendor, on every side.
I feel about the world now precisely as I did then, despite all the
reasons that exist to encourage the change of attitude. I care for the
magic of experience still, the magic that exists even in facts, though
little or nothing for the objective material value.
Life as an idea engrosses me with the same ardor as in the earlier
boyish days, with the difference that there is much to admire and so
much less to reverence and be afraid of. I harp always on the "idea"
of life as I dwell perpetually on the existence of the moment.
I might say, then, that my childhood was comparable, in its simplicity
and extravagance of wonder, to the youth of Odilon Redon, that
remarkable painter of the fantasy of existence, of which he speaks so
delicately in letters to friends. His youth was apparently much like
mine, not a youth of athleticism so much as a preoccupancy with wonder
and the imminence of beauty surrounding all things.
I was preoccupied with the "being" of things. Things in themselves
engrossed me more than the problem of experience. I was satisfied with
the effect of things upon my senses, and cared nothing for their
deeper values. The inherent magic in the appearance of the world about
me, engrossed and amazed me. No cloud or blossom or bird or human ever
escaped me, I think.
I was not indifferent to anything that took shape before me, though
when it came to people I was less credulous of their perfection
because they pressed forward their not always certain credentials upon
me. I reverenced them then too much for an imagined austerity as I
admire them now perhaps not enough for their charm, for it is the
charm of things and people only that engages and satisfies me. I have
completed my philosophical equations, and have become enamored of
people as having the same propensities as all other objects of nature.
One need never question appearances. One accepts them for their face
value, as the camera accepts them, without recommendation or
specialized qualification. They are what they become to one. The
capacity for legend comes out of the capacity for experience, and it
is in this fashion that I hold such high respect for geniuses like
Grimm and Andersen, but as I know their qualities I find myself
leaning with more readiness toward Lewis Carroll's superb "Alice in
Wonderland."
I was, I suppose, born backward, physically speaking. I was
confronted with the vastitude of the universe at once, without the
ingratiating introduction of the fairy tale. I had early made the not
so inane decision that I would not read a book until I really wanted
to. One of the rarest women in the world, having listened to my
remark, said she had a book she knew I would like because it was so
different, and forthwith presented me with Emerson's Essays, the first
book that I have any knowledge of reading, and it was in my eighteenth
year. Until then I had been wholly absorbed with the terrors and the
majestical inferences of the moment, the hour, and the day. I was
alone with them, and they were wonderful and excessively baffling in
their splendors; then, after filling my mind and soul with the
legendary splendors of Friendship, and The Oversoul-Circles, and
Compensation, each of these words of exciting largeness in themselves,
I turned to the dramatic unrealities of Zarathustra, which, of course,
was in no way to be believed because it did not exist. And then came
expansion and release into the outer world again through
interpretation of Plato, and of Leaves of Grass itself.
I have saved myself from the disaster of beliefs through these magical
books, and am free once more as in my early childhood to indulge
myself in the iridescent idea of life, as Idea.
But the fairy story is nothing after all but a means whereby we, as
children, may arrive at some clue as to the significance of things
around us, and it is through them the child finds his way out from
incoherency toward comprehension. The universe is a vast place, as we
all know who think we comprehend it in admiring it. The things we
cannot know are in reality of no consequence, in comparison with the
few we can know. I can know, for instance, that my morning is the new
era of my existence, and that I shall never live through another like
it, as I have never lived through the one I recall in my memory, which
was Yesterday. Yesterday was my event in experience then, as it is my
event in memory now. I am related to the world by the way I feel
attached to the life of it as exemplified in the vividness of the
moment. I am, by reason of my peculiar personal experience, enabled to
extract the magic from the moment, discarding the material husk of it
precisely as the squirrel does the shell of the nut.
I am preoccupied with the business of transmutation--which is to say,
the proper evaluation of life as idea, of experience as delectable
diversion. It is necessary for everyone to poetize his sensations in
order to comprehend them. Weakness in the direction of philosophy
creates the quality of dogmatic interrogation. A preoccupancy with
religious characteristics assists those who are interested in the
problem of sublimation. The romanticist is a kind of scientific person
engaged in the correct assembling of chemical constituents that will
produce a formula by which he can live out every one of his moments
with a perfect comprehension of their charm and of their everlasting
value to him. If the romanticist have the advantage of comprehension
of the sense of beauty as related to art, then he may be said to be
wholly equipped for the exquisite legend of life in which he takes his
place, as factor in the perfected memory of existence, which becomes
the real history of life, as an idea. The person of most power in life
is he who becomes high magician with the engaging and elusive trick.
It is a fairy-tale in itself if you will, and everyone is entitled to
his or her own private splendor, which, of course, must be invented
from intelligence for oneself.
There will be no magic found away from life. It is what you do with
the street-corner in your brain that shall determine your gift. It
will not be found in the wilderness, and in one's toying with the
magic of existence is the one gift for the management of experience.
I hope one day, when life as an "idea" permits, and that I have
figured will be somewhere around my ninetieth year, to take up books
that absorb the brains of the intelligent. When I read a book, it is
because it will somehow expose to me the magic of existence. My fairy
tales of late have been "Wuthering Heights," and the work of the
Brothers James, Will and Henry. I am not so sure but that I like
William best, and I assure you that is saying a great deal, but it is
only because I think William is more like life as idea.
I shall hope when it comes time to sit in a garden and fold one's
hands gently, listening to the birds all over again, watching the
blossoms swinging with a still acuter eye, to take up the books of
Grimm and Andersen, for I have a feeling they will be the books that
will best corroborate my comprehension of life as an idea. I think it
will be the best time to read them then, to go out with a memory
softened by the warm hues and touches of legend that rise out of the
air surrounding life itself.
There will be a richer comprehension of "once upon a time there was a
princess"--who wore a great many jewelled rings on her fingers and
whose eyes were like deep pools in the farthest fields of the sky--for
that will be the lady who let me love in the ways I was made to
forget; the lady whose hands I have touched as gently as possible and
from whom I have exacted no wish save that I might always love someone
or something that was so like herself as to make me think it was no
other than herself. It is because I love the idea of life better than
anything else that I believe most of all in the magic of existence,
and in spite of much terrifying and disillusioning experience of late,
I _believe_.
PART ONE
THE RED MAN
It is significant that all races, and primitive peoples especially,
exhibit the wish somehow to inscribe their racial autograph before
they depart. It is our redman who permits us to witness the signing of
his autograph with the beautiful gesture of his body in the form of
the symbolic dance which he and his forefathers have practiced through
the centuries, making the name America something to be remembered
among the great names of the world and of time. It is the redman who
has written down our earliest known history, and it is of his symbolic
and esthetic endeavors that we should be most reasonably proud. He is
the one man who has shown us the significance of the poetic aspects of
our original land. Without him we should still be unrepresented in the
cultural development of the world. The wide discrepancies between our
earliest history and our present make it an imperative issue for
everyone loving the name America to cherish him while he remains among
us as the only esthetic representative of our great country up to the
present hour. He has indicated for all time the symbolic splendor of
our plains, canyons, mountains, lakes, mesas and ravines, our forests
and our native skies, with their animal inhabitants, the buffalo, the
deer, the eagle and the various other living presences in their midst.
He has learned throughout the centuries the nature of our soil and has
symbolized for his own religious and esthetic satisfaction all the
various forms that have become benefactors to him.
Americans of this time and of time to come shall know little or
nothing of their spacious land until they have sought some degree of
intimacy with our first artistic relative. The redman is the one truly
indigenous religionist and esthete of America. He knows every form of
animal and vegetable life adhering to our earth, and has made for
himself a series of striking pageantries in the form of stirring
dances to celebrate them, and his relation to them. Throughout the
various dances of the Pueblos of the Rio Grande those of San Felipe,
Santo Domingo, San Ildefonso, Taos, Tesuque, and all the other tribes
of the west and the southwest, the same unified sense of beauty
prevails, and in some of the dances to a most remarkable degree. For
instance, in a large pueblo like Santo Domingo, you have the dance
composed of nearly three hundred people, two hundred of whom form the
dance contingent, the other third a chorus, probably the largest
singing chorus in the entire redman population of America. In a small
pueblo like Tesuque, the theme is beautifully represented by from
three to a dozen individuals, all of them excellent performers in
various ways. The same quality and the same character, the same sense
of beauty, prevails in all of them.
It is the little pueblo of Tesuque which has just finished its series
of Christmas dances--a four-day festival celebrating with all but
impeccable mastery the various identities which have meant so much to
them both physically and spiritually--that I would here cite as an
example. It is well known that once gesture is organized, it requires
but a handful of people to represent multitude; and this lonely
handful of redmen in the pueblo of Tesuque, numbering at most but
seventy-five or eighty individuals, lessened, as is the case with all
the pueblos of the country to a tragical degree by the recent
invasions of the influenza epidemic, showed the interested observer,
in groups of five or a dozen dancers and soloists including drummers,
through the incomparable pageantry of the buffalo, the eagle, the
snowbird, and other varying types of small dances, the mastery of the
redman in the art of gesture, the art of symbolized pantomimic
expression. It is the buffalo, the eagle, and the deer dances that
show you their essential greatness as artists. You find a species of
rhythm so perfected in its relation to racial interpretation as hardly
to admit of witnessing ever again the copied varieties of dancing such
as we whites of the present hour are familiar with. It is nothing
short of captivating artistry of first excellence, and we are familiar
with nothing that equals it outside the Negro syncopation which we
now know so well, and from which we have borrowed all we have of
native expression.
If we had the redman sense of time in our system, we would be better
able to express ourselves. We are notoriously unorganized in esthetic
conception, and what we appreciate most is merely the athletic phase
of bodily expression, which is of course attractive enough, but is not
in itself a formal mode of expression. The redman would teach us to be
ourselves in a still greater degree, as his forefathers have taught
him to be himself down the centuries, despite every obstacle. It is
now as the last obstacle in the way of his racial expression that we
as his host and guardian are pleasing ourselves to figure. It is as
inhospitable host we are quietly urging denunciation of his pagan
ceremonials. It is an inhospitable host that we are, and it is amazing
enough, our wanting to suppress him. You will travel over many
continents to find a more beautifully synthesized artistry than our
redman offers. In times of peace we go about the world seeking out
every species of life foreign to ourselves for our own esthetic or
intellectual diversion, and yet we neglect on our very doorstep the
perhaps most remarkable realization of beauty that can be found
anywhere. It is of a perfect piece with the great artistry of all
time. We have to go for what we know of these types of expression to
books and to fragments of stone, to monuments and to the preserved
bits of pottery we now may see under glass mostly, while there is the
living remnant of a culture so fine in its appreciation of the beauty
of things, under our own home eye, so near that we can not even see
it.
A glimpse of the buffalo dance alone will furnish proof sufficient to
you of the sense of symbolic significances in the redman that is
unsurpassed. The redman is a genius in his gift of masquerade alone.
He is a genius in detail, and in ensemble, and the producer of today
might learn far more from him than he can be aware of except by
visiting his unique performances. The redman's notion of the theatric
does not depend upon artificial appliances. He relies entirely upon
the sun with its so clear light of the west and southwest to do his
profiling and silhouetting for him, and he knows the sun will
cooperate with every one of his intentions. He allows for the sense of
mass and of detail with proper proportion, allows also for the
interval of escape in mood, crediting the value of the pause with the
ability to do its prescribed work for the eye and ear perfectly, and
when he is finished he retires from the scene carefully to the beating
of the drums, leaving the emotion to round itself out gradually until
he disappears, and silence completes the picture for the eye and the
brain. His staging is of the simplest, and therefore, the most
natural. Since he is sure of his rhythms, in every other dancer as
well as himself, he is certain of his ensemble, and is likewise sure
there will be no dead spots either in the scenario or in the
presentation. His production is not a show for the amusement of the
onlooker; it is a pageant for the edification of his own soul. Each
man is therefore concerned with the staging of the idea, because it is
his own spiritual drama in a state of enaction, and each is in his own
way manager of the scene, and of the duos, trios, and ensembles, or
whatever form the dances may require. It is therefore of a piece with
his conception of nature and the struggle for realism is not
necessary, since he is at all times the natural actor, the natural
expresser of the indications and suggestions derived from the great
theme of nature which occupies his mind, and body, and soul. His
acting is invented by himself for purposes of his own, and it is
nature that gives him the sign and symbol for the expression of life
as a synthesis. He is a genius in plastic expression, and every
movement of his is sure to register in the unity of the theme, because
he himself is a powerful unit of the group in which he may be
performing. He is esthetically a responsible factor, since it concerns
him as part of the great idea. He is leading soloist and auxiliary in
one. He is the significant instrument in the orchestration of the
theme at hand, and knows his body will respond to every requirement of
phrasing. You will find the infants, of two and three years of age
even, responding in terms of play to the exacting rhythms of the
dance, just as with orientals it was the children often who wove the
loveliest patterns in their rugs.
In the instance of the buffalo dance of the Tesuque Indians, contrary
to what might be expected or would popularly be conceived, there is
not riotry of color, but the costumes are toned rather in the sombre
hues of the animal in question, and after the tone of the dark flanks
of the mountains crested and avalanched with snows, looking more like
buffaloes buried knee deep in white drifts than anything else one may
think of. They bring you the sense of the power of the buffalo
personality, the formidable beast that once stampeded the prairies
around them, solemnized with austere gesturing, enveloping him with
stateliness, and the silence of the winter that surrounds themselves.
Three men, two of them impersonating the buffalo, the third with bow
and arrow in hand, doubtless the hunter, and two women representing
the mother buffalo, furnish the ensemble. Aside from an occasional
note of red in girdles and minor trappings, with a softening touch of
green in the pine branches in their hands, the adjustment of hue is
essentially one of the black and white, one of the most difficult
harmonies in esthetic scales the painter encounters in the making of a
picture, the most difficult of all probably, by reason of its limited
range and the economic severity of color. It calls for nothing short
of the finest perception of nuance, and it is the redman of America
who knows with an almost flawless eye the natural harmonies of the
life that surrounds him. He has for so long decorated his body with
the hues of the earth that he has grown to be a part of them. He is a
living embodiment in color of various tonal characteristics of the
landscape around him. He knows the harmonic value of a bark or a hide,
or a bit of broken earth, and of the natural unpolluted coloring to be
drawn out of various types of vegetable matter at his disposal. Even
if he resorts to our present-day store ribbons and cheap trinkets for
accessories, he does it with a view to creating the appearance of
racial ensemble. He is one of the essential decorators of the world. A
look at the totem poles and the prayer robes of the Indians of Alaska
will convince you of that.
In the buffalo dance, then, you perceive the redman's fine knowledge
of color relations, of the harmonizing of buffalo skins, of white
buckskins painted with most expressively simple designs symbolizing
the various earth identities, and the accompanying ornamentation of
strings of shells and other odd bits having a black or a grey and
white lustre. You get an adjusted relation of white which traverses
the complete scale of color possibility in monochrome. The two men
representing the buffalo, with buffalo heads covering their heads and
faces from view, down to their breasts, their bodies to the waist
painted black, no sign of pencillings visible to relieve the austerity
of intention, legs painted black and white, with cuffs of skunk's fur
round the ankles to represent the death mask symbol, relieving the
edges of the buckskin moccasins--in all this you have the notes that
are necessary for the color balance of the idea of solemnity
presented to the eye. You find even the white starlike splashes here
and there on backs, breasts and arms coinciding splendidly with the
flecks of eagles-down that quiver in the wind down their black bodies,
and the long black hair of the accompanying hunter, as flecks of foam
would rise from waterfalls of dark mountain streams; and the feathers
that float from the tips of the buffalo horns seem like young eaglets
ready to leave the eyry, to swim for the first time the far fields of
air above and below them, to traverse with skill the sunlit spaces
their eyes have opened to with a fierce amazement. Even the clouds of
frozen breath darting from the lips of the dancers served as an
essential phase of the symbolic decoration, and the girdles of tiny
conchlike shells rattling round their agile thighs made a music you
were glad to hear. The sunshine fell from them, too, in scales of
light, danced around the spaces enveloping them along with the flecks
of eagle-down that floated away from their bodies with the vigors of
the dance, floating away from their dark warm bodies, and their
jet-blue hair. It is the incomparable understanding of their own
inventive rhythms that inspire and impress you as spectator. It is the
swift comprehension of change in rhythm given them by the drummers,
the speedy response of their so living pulsating bodies, the
irresistible rapport with the varying themes, that thrills and invites
you to remain close to the picture. They know, as perfect artists
would know, the essential value of the materials at their disposal,
and the eye for harmonic relationships is as keen as the impeccable
gift for rhythm which is theirs. The note of skill was again
accentuated when, at the close of the season's ensemble with a
repetition of the beautiful eagle dance, there appeared two
grotesqueries in the form of charming devil spirits in the hues of
animals also, again in startling arrangements of black and white, with
the single hint of color in the red lips of the masks that covered
their heads completely from view, and from which long tails of white
horsehair fell down their grey white backs--completing the feeling
once again of stout animal spirits roaming through dark forests in
search of sad faces, or, it may even be, of evil doers.
All these dances form the single spectacle surviving from a great race
that no American can afford actually to miss, and certainly not to
ignore. It is easy to conceive with what furore of amazement these
spectacles would be received if they were brought for a single
performance to our metropolitan stage. But they will never be seen
away from the soil on which they have been conceived and perpetuated.
It is with a simple cordiality the redman permits you to witness the
esthetic survivals of his great race. It is the artist and the poet
for whom they seem to be almost especially created, since these are
probably nearest to understanding them from the point of view of
finely organized expression; for it is by the artist and the poet of
the first order that they have been invented and perfected. We as
Americans of today would profit by assisting as much as possible in
the continuance of these beautiful spectacles, rather than to assist
in the calm dismissal and destruction of them. It is the gesture of a
slowly but surely passing race which they themselves can not live
without; just as we, if we but knew the ineffable beauty of them,
would want at least to avail ourselves of a feast for the eye which no
other country in existence can offer us, and which any other nation in
the world would be only too proud to cherish and foster.
We are not, I think, more than vaguely conscious of what we possess in
these redman festivities, by way of esthetic prize. It is with pain
that one hears rumors of official disapproval of these rare and
invaluable ceremonials. Those familiar with human psychology
understand perfectly that the one necessary element for individual
growth is freedom to act according to personal needs. Once an
opposition of any sort is interposed, you get a blocked aspect of
evolution, you get a withered branch, and it may even be a dead root.
All sorts of complexes and complexities occur. You get deformity, if
not complete helplessness and annihilation. I can not imagine what
would happen to the redman if his one racial gesture were denied him,
if he were forbidden to perform his symbolic dances from season to
season. It is a survival that is as spiritually imperative to him as
it is physically and emotionally necessary. I can see a whole flood of
exquisite inhibitions heaped up for burial and dry rot within the
caverns and the interstices of his soul. He is a rapidly disappearing
splendor, despite the possible encouragement of statistics. He needs
the dance to make his body live out its natural existence, precisely
as he needs the air for his lungs and blood for his veins. He needs to
dance as we need to laugh to save ourselves from fixed stages of
morbidity and disintegration. It is the laughter of his body that he
insists upon, as well as depends upon. A redman deprived of his racial
gesture is unthinkable. You would have him soon the bleached carcass
in the desert out of which death moans, and from which the lizard
crawls. It would be in the nature of direct race suicide. He needs
protection therefore rather than disapproval. It is as if you clipped
the wing of the eagle, and then asked him to soar to the sun, to cut a
curve on the sky with the instrument dislodged; or as if you asked the
deer to roam the wood with its cloven hoofs removed. You can not cut
the main artery of the body and expect it to continue functioning.
Depriving the redman of his one enviable gesture would be cutting the
artery of racial instinct, emptying the beautiful chamber of his soul
of its enduring consciousness. The window would be opened and the bird
flown to a dead sky. It is simply unthinkable. The redman is
essentially a thankful and a religious being. He needs to celebrate
the gifts his heaven pours upon him. Without them he would in short
perish, and perish rapidly, having no breath to breathe, and no
further need for survival. He is already in process of disappearance
from our midst, with the attempts toward assimilation.
Inasmuch as we have the evidence of a fine aristocracy among us still,
it would seem as if it behooved us as a respectable host to let the
redman guest entertain himself as he will, as he sublimely does, since
as guardians of such exceptional charges we can not seem to entertain
them. There is no logical reason why they should accept an inferior
hospitality, other than with the idea of not inflicting themselves
upon a strange host more than is necessary. The redman in the
aggregate is an example of the peaceable and unobtrusive citizen; we
would not presume to interfere with the play of children in the
sunlight. They are among the beautiful children of the world in their
harmlessness. They are among the aristocracy of the world in the
matters of ethics, morals, and etiquette. We forget they are vastly
older, and in symbolic ways infinitely more experienced than
ourselves. They do not share in tailor-made customs. They do not need
imposed culture, which is essentially inferior to their own. Soon we
shall see them written on tablets of stone, along with the Egyptians
and the others among the races that have perished. The esthetics of
the redman have been too particular to permit of universal
understanding, and of universal adaptation. It is the same with all
primitives, who invent regimes and modes of expression for themselves
according to their own specific psychological needs. We encourage
every other sign and indication of beauty toward the progress of
perfection. Why should not we encourage a race that is beautiful by
the proof of centuries to remain the unoffensive guest of the sun and
the moon and the stars while they may? As the infant prodigy among
races, there is much that we could inherit from these people if we
could prove ourselves more worthy and less egotistic.
The artist and the poet of perception come forward with heartiest
approval and it is the supplication of the poet and the artist which
the redman needs most of all. Science looks upon him as a phenomenon;
esthetics looks upon him as a giant of masterful expression in our
midst. The redman is poet and artist of the very first order among the
geniuses of time. We have nothing more native at our disposal than the
beautiful creations of this people. It is singular enough that the as
yet remote black man contributes the only native representation of
rhythm and melody we possess. As an intelligent race, we are not even
sure we want to welcome him as completely as we might, if his color
were just a shade warmer, a shade nearer our own. We have no qualms
about yellow and white and the oriental intermediate hues. We may
therefore accept the redman without any of the prejudices peculiar to
other types of skin, and we may accept his contribution to our culture
as a most significant and important one. We haven't even begun to make
use of the beautiful hints in music alone which he has given to us. We
need, and abjectly so I may say, an esthetic concept of our own. Other
nations of the world have long since accepted Congo originality. The
world has yet to learn of the originality of the redman, and we who
have him as our guest, knowing little or nothing of his powers and the
beauty he confers on us by his remarkable esthetic propensities,
should be the first to welcome and to foster him. It is not enough to
admit of archaeological curiosity. We need to admit, and speedily, the
rare and excellent esthetics in our midst, a part of our own intimate
scene. The redman is a spiritual expresser of very vital issues. If
his pottery and his blankets offer the majority but little, his
ceremonials do contribute to the comparative few who can perceive a
spectacle we shall not see the equal of in history again. It would
help at least a little toward proving to the world around us that we
are not so young a country as we might seem, nor yet as diffident as
our national attitude would seem to indicate. The smile alone of the
redman is the light of our rivers, plains, canyons, and mountains. He
has the calm of all our native earth. It is from the earth all things
arise. It is our geography that makes us Americans of the present,
children. We are the product of a day. The redman is the product of
withered ages. He has written and is still writing a very impressive
autograph on the waste places of history. It would seem to me to be a
sign of modernism in us to preserve the living esthetic splendors in
our midst. Every other nation has preserved its inheritances. We need
likewise to do the same. It is not enough to put the redman as a
specimen under glass along with the auk and the dinosaur. He is still
alive and longing to live. We have lost the buffalo and the beaver and
we are losing the redman, also, and all these are fine symbols of our
own native richness and austerity. The redman will perpetuate himself
only by the survival of his own customs for he will never be able to
accept customs that are as foreign to him as ours are and must always
be; he will never be able to accept a culture which is inferior to his
own.
In the esthetic sense alone, then, we have the redman as a gift. As
Americans we should accept the one American genius we possess, with
genuine alacrity. We have upon our own soil something to show the
world as our own, while it lives. To restrict the redman now would
send him to an unrighteous oblivion. He has at least two contributions
to confer, a very aristocratic notion of religion, and a superb gift
for stylistic expression. He is the living artist in our midst, and we
need not think of him as merely the anthropological variation or as an
archaeological diversion merely. He proves the importance of
synthetic registration in peoples. He has created his system for
himself, from substance on, through outline down to every convincing
detail. We are in a position always of selecting details in the hope
of constructing something usable for ourselves. It is the superficial
approach. We are imitators because we have by nature or force of
circumstance to follow, and improve upon, if we can. We merely
"impose" something. We can not improve upon what the redman offers us
in his own way. To "impose" something--that is the modern culture. The
interval of imposition is our imaginary interval of creation. The
primitives created a complete cosmos for themselves, an entire
principle. I want merely, then, esthetic recognition in full of the
contribution of the redman as artist, as one of the finest artists of
time; the poetic redman ceremonialist, celebrant of the universe as he
sees it, and master among masters of the art of symbolic gesture. It
is pitiable to dismiss him from our midst. He needs rather royal
invitation to remain and to persist, and he can persist only by
expressing himself in his own natural and distinguished way, as is the
case with all peoples, and all individuals, indeed.
WHITMAN AND CÉZANNE
It is interesting to observe that in two fields of expression, those
of painting and poetry, the two most notable innovators, Whitman and
Cézanne bear a definite relationship in point of similarity of ideals
and in their attitudes toward esthetic principles. Both of these men
were so true to their respective ideals that they are worth
considering at the same time in connection with each other: Cézanne
with his desire to join the best that existed in the impressionistic
principle with the classical arts of other times, or as he called it,
to create an art like the Louvre out of impressionism. We shall find
him striving always toward actualities, toward the realization of
beauty as it is seen to exist in the real, in the object itself,
whether it be mountain or apple or human, the entire series of living
things in relation to one another.
It is consistent that Cézanne, like all pioneers, was without
prescribed means, that he had to spend his life inventing for himself
those terms and methods which would best express his feelings about
nature. It is natural that he admired the precision of Bouguereau, it
is also quite natural that he should have worshipped in turn,
Delacroix, Courbet, and without doubt, the mastery of Ingres, and it
is indicative too that he felt the frank force of Manet. It was his
special distinction to strive toward a simple presentation of simple
things, to want to paint "that which existed between himself and the
object," and to strive to solidify the impressionistic conception with
a greater realization of form in space, the which they had so much
ignored. That he achieved this in a satisfying manner may be observed
in the best of his landscapes and still-lifes, and in some of the
figure studies also. The endeavor to eliminate all aspects of
extraneous conception by dismissing the quality of literature, of
poetry and romance from painting, was the exact characteristic which
made him what he is for us today, the pioneer in the field of modern
art. It was significant enough when he once said to Renoir, that it
took him twenty years to find out that painting was not sculpture.
Those earlier and heavy impasto studies of his are the evidence of
this worthy deduction. It was significant, too, when he said that
Gaugin was but "a flea on his back," and that "he does nothing but
paint Chinese images."