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."
The phrase that brings these two strikingly original personages in art together is the one of Cézanne: "I remain the primitive of the way I have discovered"; and that of Whitman, which comes if I am not mistaken from Democratic Vistas, though it may be from elsewhere in Whitman's prose, running chiefly: "I only wish to indicate the way for the innumerable poets that are to come after me," etc., and "I warn you this is not a book, this is a man." These two geniuses are both of one piece as to their esthetic intention, despite the great gulf that lies between their concepts of, and their attitudes toward life. For the one, life was a something to stay close to always, for the other, it was something to be afraid of to an almost abnormal degree; Whitman and his door never closed, Cézanne and his door seldom or never opened, indeed, were heavily padlocked against the intrusion of the imaginary outsider. These are the geniuses who have done most for these two arts of the present time, it is Whitman and Cézanne who have clarified the sleeping eye and withheld it from being totally blinded, from the onslaughts of jaded tradition.
There were in Cézanne the requisite gifts for selection, and for discarding all useless encumbrances, there was in him the great desire for purification, or of seeing the superb fact in terms of itself, majestically; and if not always serenely, serenity was nevertheless his passionate longing. He saw what there was for him in those old and accepted masters who meant most to him, and he saw also what there was for him in that newest of old masters, which was also in its way the assumed discovery of our time, he saw the relativity of Greco's beautiful art to the art of his own making. He saw that here was a possible and applicable architectonic suited to the objects of his newly conceived principles, he felt in Greco the magnetic tendency of one thing toward another in nature, that trees and hills and valleys and people were not something sitting still for his special delectation, but that they were constantly aspiring to fruition, either physical, mental, or let us say, spiritual, even when the word is applied to the so-termed inanimate objects. He felt the "palpitancy," the breathing of all things, the urge outward of all life toward the light which helps it create and recreate itself. He felt this "movement" in and about things, and this it is that gives his pictures that sensitive life quality which lifts them beyond the aspect of picture-making or even mere representation. They are not cold studies of inanimate things, they are pulsing realizations of living substances striving toward each other, lending each other their individual activities until his canvases become, as one might name them, ensembles of animation, orchestrated life. We shall, I think, find this is what Greco did for Cézanne, and it is Cézanne who was among the first of moderns, if not the first, to appreciate that particular aspirational quality in the splendid pictures of Greco. They "move" toward their design, they were lifted by the quality of their organization into spaces in which they were free to carry on the fine illusion of life.
Whitman has certainly aspired equally, but being more things in one than Cézanne, his task has been in some ways greater, more difficult, and may we say for humanistic reasons, loftier. Whitman's inclusiveness was at one and the same time his virtue and his defect. For mystical reasons, it was imperative for him to include all things in himself, and so he set about enumerating all those elements which were in him, and of which he was so devoted and affectionate a part. That he could leave nothing out was, it may be said, his strongest esthetical defect, for it is by esthetical judgment that we choose and bring together those elements as we conceive it. It is the mark of good taste to reject that which is unessential, and the "tact of omission," well exemplified in Cézanne, has been found excellently axiomatic. So that it is the tendency in Whitman to catalogue in detail the entire obvious universe that makes many of his pages a strain on the mind as well as on the senses, and the eye especially. The absolute enforcement of this gift of omission in painting makes it easier for the artist, in that his mind is perforce engrossed with the idea of simplification, directness, and an easy relationship of the elements selected for presentation to each other.
It is the quality of "living-ness" in Cézanne that sends his art to the heights of universality, which is another way of naming the classical vision, or the masterly conception, and brings him together with Whitman as much of the same piece. You get all this in all the great masters of painting and literature, Goethe, Shakespeare, Rubens, and the Greeks. It is the reaching out and the very mastering of life which makes all art great, and all artists into geniuses. It is the specializing on ideas which shuts the stream of its flow. I have felt the same gift for life in a still-life or a landscape of Cézanne's that I have felt in any of Whitman's best pieces. The element in common with these two exceptional creators is liberation. They have done more, these modern pioneers, for the liberation of the artist, and for the "freeing" of painting and poetry than any other men of modern time. Through them, painting and poetry have become literally free, and through them it is that the young painters and poets have sought new fields for self deliverance. Discipleship does not hold out long with the truly understanding. Those who really know what originality is are not long the slave of the power of imitation: it is the gifted assimilator that suffers most under the spell of mastery. Legitimate influence is a quality which all earnest creators learn to handle at once. Both poetry and painting are, or so it seems to me, revealing well the gift of understanding, and as a result we have a better variety of painting and of poetry than at the first outbreak of this so called modern esthetic epidemic.
The real younger creators are learning the difference between surface and depth, between exterior semblances, and the underlying substances. Both Whitman and Cézanne stand together in the name of one common purpose, freedom from characteristics not one's own. They have taught the creators of this time to know what classicism really is, that it is the outline of all things that endure. They have both shown that it is not idiosyncrasy alone which creates originality, that idiosyncrasy is but the husk of personal penetration, that it is in no way the constituent essential for genius. For genius is nothing but the name for higher perception, the greater degree of understanding. Cézanne's fine landscapes and still-lifes, and Whitman's majestic line with its gripping imagery are one and the same thing, for it reaches the same height in the mind. They walk together out of a vivid past, these two geniuses, opening the corridors to a possibly vivid future for the artists of now, and to come. They are the gateway for our modern esthetic development, the prophets of the new time. They are most of all, the primitives of the way they have begun, they have voiced most of all the imperative need of essential personalism, of direct expression out of direct experience, with an eye to nothing but quality and proportion as conceived by them. Their dogmas were both simple in the extreme, and of immense worth to us in their respective spheres. We may think of them as the giants of the beginning of the twentieth century, with the same burning desire to enlarge the general scope of vision, and the finer capacity for individual experience.
ALBERT P. RYDER
Albert P. Ryder possessed in a high degree that strict passivity of mental vision which calls into being the elusive yet fixed element the mystic Blake so ardently refers to and makes a principle of, that element outside the mind's jurisdiction. His work is of the essence of poetry; it is alien to the realm of esthetics pure, for it has very special spiritual histories to relate. His landscapes are somewhat akin to those of Michel and of Courbet. They suggest Michel's wide wastes of prodigal sky and duneland with their winding roads that have no end, his ever-shadowy stretches of cloud upon ever-shadowy stretches of land that go their austere way to the edges of some vacant sea. They suggest, too, those less remote but perhaps even more aloof spaces of solitude which were ever Courbet's theme in his deeper hours, that haunting sense of subtle habitation, that acute invasion of either wind or soft fleck of light or bright presence in a breadth of shadow, as if a breath of living essences always somehow pervaded those mystic woodland or still lowland scenes. But highly populate as these pictures of Courbet's are with the spirit of ever-passing feet that hover and hold converse in the remote wood, the remoter plain, they never quite surrender to that ghostliness which possesses the pictures of our Ryder. At all times in his work one has the feeling of there having lately passed, if ever so fleetly, some bodily shape seeking a solitude of its own. I recall no other landscapes impressed with a more terrific austerity save Greco's incredible "Toledo," to my thinking a finality in landscape creation.
There is quietude, solace, if you will, in Michel, in Courbet, but there is never a rest for the eye or the mind or the spirit in those most awesome of pictures which Ryder has presented to us, few as they are; for the Ryder legend is akin to the legend of Giorgione. There is always splendor in them but it is the splendor of the dream given over to a genius more powerful than the vision which has conjured them forth. It is distinctly a land of Luthany in which they have their being; he has inscribed for us that utter homelessness of the spirit in the far tracts that exist in the realm of the imagination; there is suffering in his pictures, that fainting of the spirit, that breathlessness which overtakes the soul in search of the consummation of beauty.
Ryder is akin to Coleridge, too, for there is a direct visional analogy between "The Flying Dutchman" and the excessively pictorial stanzas of "The Ancient Mariner." Ryder has typified himself in this excellent portrayal of sea disaster, this profound spectacle of the soul's despair in conflict with wind and wave. Could any picture contain more of that remoteness of the world of our real heart as well as our real eye, the artist's eye which visits that world in no official sense but only as a guest or a courtly spectator? No artist, I ought to say, was ever more master of his ideas and less master of the medium of painting than Ryder; there is in some of his finest canvases a most pitiable display of ignorance which will undoubtedly shorten their life by many years.
I still retain the vivid impression that afflicted me when I saw my first Ryder, a marine of rarest grandeur and sublimity, incredibly small in size, incredibly large in its emotion—just a sky and a single vessel in sail across a conquering sea. Ryder is, I think, the special messenger of the sea's beauty, the confidant of its majesties, its hauteurs, its supremacies; for he was born within range of the sea and all its legends have hovered with him continually. Since that time I have seen a number of other pictures either in the artist's possession or elsewhere: "Death on the Racetrack," "Pegasus," canvases from The Tempest and Macbeth in that strange little world of chaos that was his home, his hermitage, so distraught with débris of the world for which he could seem to find no other place; I have spent some of the rare and lovelier moments of my experience with this gentlest and sweetest of other-world citizens; I have felt with ever-living delight the excessive loveliness of his glance and of his smile and heard that music of some far-away world which was his laughter; I have known that wisdom which is once and for all wisdom for the artist, that confidence and trust that for the real artist there is but one agency for the expression of self in terms of beauty, the eye of the imagination, that mystical third somewhere in the mind which transposes all that is legitimate to expression. To Ryder the imagination was the man; he was a poet painter, living ever outside the realm of theory.
He was fond of Corot, and at moments I have thought of him as the heir and successor to some of Corot's haunting graces; but there was all the difference between them that there is between lyric pure and tragic pure. Ryder has for once transcribed all outer semblances by means of a personality unrelated to anything other than itself, an imagination belonging strictly to our soil and specifically to our Eastern geography. In his autographic quality he is certainly our finest genius, the most creative, the most racial. For our genius, at its best, is the genius of the evasive; we are born lovers of the secret element, the mystery in things.
How many of our American painters have given real attention to Ryder? I find him so much the legend among professional artists, this master of arabesque, this first and foremost of our designers, this real creator of pattern, this first of all creators of tragic landscape, whose pictures are sacred to those that revere distinction and power in art. He had in him that finer kind of reverence for the element of beauty which finds all things somehow lovely. He understood best of all the meaning of the grandiose, of everything that is powerful; none of his associates in point of time rose to just that sublimated experience; not Fuller, not Martin, not Blakelock, though each of these was touched to a special expression. They are more derivative than Ryder, more the children of Barbizon.
Ryder gave us first and last an incomparable sense of pattern and austerity of mood. He saw with an all too pitiless and pitiful eye the element of helplessness in things, the complete succumbing of things in nature to those elements greater than they that wield a fatal power. Ryder was the last of the romantics, the last of that great school of impressive artistry, as he was the first of our real painters and the greatest in vision. He was a still companion of Blake in that realm of the beyond, the first citizen of the land of Luthany. He knew the fine distinction between drama and tragedy, the tragedy which nature prevails upon the sensitive to accept. He was the painter poet of the immanent in things.
WINSLOW HOMER
In Winslow Homer we have yankeeism of the first order, turned to a creditable artistic account. With a fierce feeling for truth, a mania, almost, for actualities, there must have been somewhere in his make-up a gentleness, a tenderness and refinement which explain his fine appreciation of the genius of the place he had in mind to represent. There is not an atom of legend in Homer, it is always and always narrative of the obvious world. There is at once the essential dramatic import ruling the scene. With him it is nothing but dramatic relationship, the actionary tendency of the facts themselves, in nature. You are held by him constantly to the bold and naked theme, and you are left to wander in the imagination only among the essentials of simple and common realism.
Narrative then, first and last with Homer, and the only creative aspect of his pictures is concealed in the technique. The only touch of invention in them is the desire to improve the language they speak. Dramatic always, I do not call them theatric excepting in the case of one picture that I know, called "Morro Castle" I think, now in the Metropolitan Museum, reminding me much of the commonplace, "Chateau de Chillon" of Courbet's, neither of these pictures being of any value in the careers of their authors. But once you sat on the rocks of Maine, and watched the climbing of the surf up the morning sky after a heavy storm at sea, you realize the force of Homer's gift for the realities. His pictures are yankee in their indications, as a work of art could be, flinty and unyielding, resolute as is the yankee nature itself, or rather to say, the original yankee, which was pioneer then in a so rough yet resourceful country. It is the quality of Thoreau, but without the genius of Thoreau for the poetry of things.
Homer's pictures give you nothing but the bare fact told in the better class terms of illustration, for he was illustrator, first of all. While the others were trying to make a little American Barbizon of their own, there were Homer, Ryder, Fuller, Martin, working alone for such vastly opposite ideas, and yet, of these men, four of them were expressing such highly imaginative ideas, and Homer was the unflinching realist among them. I do not know where Homer started, but I believe it was the sea at Prout's Neck that taught him most. I think that William Morris Hunt and Washington Allston must have seemed like infant Michelangelos then, for there is still about them a sturdiness which we see little of in the American art of that time, or even now for that matter. They had a certain massive substance, proving the force of mind and personality which was theirs, and while these men were proving the abundance and warmth of themselves, Homer was the frozen one among them. Nature was nature to him, and that alone he realized, and yet it was not precisely slavish imitation that impelled him.
There was in him a very creditable sense of selection,—as will be seen especially in the water colours, so original with him, so gifted in their power of treatment—one of the few great masters of the medium the world has known. He knew the meaning of wash as few since have known it, he knew that it has scale and limitation of its own, and for all that, infinite suggestibility. Not Turner or Whistler have excelled him, and I do not know of anyone who has equalled him in understanding of this medium outside of Dodge Macknight and John Marin. It is in these so expressive paintings on paper that you feel the real esthetic longing as well as a certain contribution in Homer, the desire to realize himself and to release himself from too slavish imitation of nature and the too rigid consideration of truth. He was finer in technique than perhaps any that I have mentioned, though the two modern men have seconded him very closely, and in point of vision have, I am certain, surpassed him. Homer arrived because of his power to express what he wished to say, though his reach was far less lofty than theirs. He was essentially on the ground, and wanted to paint the very grip of his own feet on the rocks. He wanted the inevitability put down in recognizable form. He had not feeling for the hint or the suggestion until he came to the water-color, which is of course most essentially that sort of medium. He knew its scope and its limitations and never stepped out of its boundaries, and he achieved a fine mastery in it. His imitators will never arrive at his severity because they are not flint yankee. They have not the hard head and snappy tongue. It was yankee crabbedness that gave Homer his grip on the idea he had in mind. Florida lent a softer tone to what Maine rocks could not give him. He is American from skin to skeleton, and a leader among yankee as well as American geniuses. He probably hated as much as Thoreau, and in his steely way admired as much. It was fire from the flintlock in them both, though nature had a far softer and loftier persuasion with the Concord philosopher and naturalist.
Homer remains a figure in our American culture through his feeling for reality. He has learned through slavery to detail to put down the essential fact, however abundantly or however sparsely. He has a little of Courbet's sense of the real, and none whatever of his sense of the imaginative. It was enough for him to classicize the realistic incident. He impels me to praise through his yankee insistence upon integrity. Story is story with Homer and he leaves legend to itself. It is the narrative of the Whittier type, homely, genuine, and typical. He never stepped outside of his yankee determination. Homer has sent the art of water colour painting to a very high place in world consideration. He cannot be ignored as a master in this field. His paintings must be taken as they are, solid renderings of fact, dramatically considered. He offers nothing else. Once you have seen these realistic sea pictures, you may want to remember and you may want to forget, but they call for consideration. They are true in their living appreciation of reality.
He knew the sea like the old salts that were his neighbors, and from accounts he was as full of the tang of the sea as they. He was a foe to compromise and a despiser of imposition. The best and most impersonal of him is in his work, for he never ventured to express philosophies, ethics, or morals in terms of picture-painting. That is to his credit at least. He was concerned with illustration first and last, as he was illustrator and nothing else. He taught the proceeding school of illustrators much in the significance of verity, and in the ways and means of expressing verity in terms of pigment. What the stiff pen and ink drawings and the cold engravings of his time taught him, he conferred upon the later men in terms of freedom of technique. And at the same time he rose a place, as painter and artist of no mean order, by a certain distinction inherent in him. He had little feeling for synthesis outside of the water-colours, and here it was necessary by virtue of the limitations of the medium.
Winslow Homer will not stimulate for all time only because his mind was too local. There is nothing of universal appeal in him. His realism will never reach the height even of the sea-pieces of Courbet, and I shall include Ryder as well. Courbet was a fine artist, and so was Ryder, and both had the advantage of exceptional imagination. Homer and Ryder are natives of the same coast and typify excellently the two poles in the New England temper, both in art and in life. Homer as realist, had the one idea in mind only, to illustrate realism as best he could in the most distinguished terms at the disposal of his personality. He succeeded admirably.
Homer typifies a certain sturdiness in the American temper at least, and sends the lighter men away with his roughness, as doubtless he sent the curious away from his cliffs with the acidity of truth he poured upon them. He had lived so much in the close association of the roughest elements in existence, rocks and the madly swinging sea that glides over and above them defiantly, that he had without doubt taken on the character of them. The portrait of Homer gives him as one would expect him to look, and he looks like his pictures. His visage bore a ferocity that had to be met with a rocky certainty. It is evident there was no fooling him. He was filled with yankee tenacity and yankee courage. Homer is what you would expect to find if you were told to hunt up the natives of "Prout's Neck" or "Perkins Cove," or any of the inlets of the Maine coast. These sea people live so much with the roughness of the sea, that if they are at all inclined to acidity, and the old fashioned yankee was sure to be, they take on the hard edges of a man's temper in accordance with the jaggedness of the shores on which they live. The man around the rocks looks so very like the profiles one sees in the rocks themselves. They have absorbed the energy of the dramatic elements they cope with, and you may be sure that life around the sea in New England is no easy existence; and they give out the same salty equivalent in human association.
If you have lived by the sea, you have learned the significance of the bravery of sea people, and you learn to understand and excuse the sharpness of them which is given them from battle with the elemental facts they are confronted with at all times. That is the character of Homer, that is the quality of his painting. That is what makes him original in the American sense, and so recognizable in the New England sense. He is one of New England's strongest spokesmen, and takes his place by the side of Ryder, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Fuller, Whittier, and such representative temperaments, and it is this quality that distinguishes him from men like Inness, Wyant, and the less typical painters. It is obvious, too, that he never painted any other coast, excepting of course Florida, in the water colours.
It was Florida that produced the chef d'œuvre in him. It was Maine that taught him the force of the southern aspect. Romancer among the realistic facts of nature, he might be called, for he did not merely copy nature. He did invest things with their own suggestive reality, and he surmounted his earlier gifts for exact illustration by this other finer gift for romantic appreciation. Homer was an excellent narrator, as will be seen in the "Gulf Stream" picture in the Metropolitan Museum. It has the powers of Jack London and of Conrad in it. Homer was intense, vigorous, and masculine. If he was harsh in his characteristics, he was one who knew the worth of economy in emotion. He was one with his idea and his metier, and that is sufficient.
AMERICAN VALUES IN PAINTING
There are certain painters who join themselves together in a kind of grouping, which, whether they wish to think of themselves in this light or not, have become in the matter of American values in painting, a fixed associative aspect of painting in America. When we speak of American painting, the choice is small, but definite as to the number of artists, and the type of art they wished themselves to be considered for. From the Hudson River grouping, which up to Inness is not more marked than as a set of men copying nature with scrupulous fidelity to detail, rather than conveying any special feeling or notion of what a picture of, or the landscape itself, may convey; and leaving aside the American pupils of the Academy in Paris and Rome, most of whom returned with a rich sense of rhetorical conventionalities in art—men like William Morris Hunt and Washington Allston—we may turn to that other group of men as being far more typical of our soil and temper. I mean artists such as Homer Martin, Albert P. Ryder, George Fuller, and the later Winslow Homer who certainly did receive more recognition than any of them prior to his death.
Martin, Ryder, and Fuller could not have enjoyed much in the way of appreciation outside of a few artists of their time, and even now they may be said to be the artists for artists. It is reasonable to hope that they were not successful, since that which was à la mode in the expression of their time was essentially of the dry Academy. One would hardly think of Homer Martin's "Border of the Seine" landscape in the Metropolitan Museum, hardly more then than now, and it leaves many a painter flat in appreciation of its great dignity, austerity, reserve, and for the distinguished quality of its stylism. What Martin may have gotten, during his stay in Europe, which is called impressionism is, it must be said, a more aristocratic type of impressionism than issued from the Monet followers. Martin must then have been knowing something of the more dignified intellectualism of Pissarro and of Sisley, those men who have been the last to reach the degrees of appreciation due them in the proper exactitude.
We cannot think of Martin as ever having carried off academic medals during his period. We cannot think of Martin as President of the Academy, which position was occupied by a far inferior artist who was likewise carried away by impressionism, namely Alden Weir. The actual attachment in characteristic of introspective temper in Alden Weir is not so removed from Martin, Fuller and Ryder as might be imagined; he is more like Martin perhaps though far less profound in his sense of mystery; Fuller being more the romanticist and Ryder in my estimation the greatest romanticist, and artist as well, of all of these men. But Alden Weir failed to carry off any honor as to distinctive qualities and invention. A genial aristocrat if you will, but having for me no marked power outside of a Barbizonian interest in nature with a kind of mystical detachedness.
But in the consideration of painters like Martin, Fuller and Ryder we are thinking chiefly of their relation to their time as well as their relation to what is to come in America. America has had as much painting considering its youth as could be expected of it and the best of it has been essentially native and indigenous. But in and out of the various influences and traditional tendencies, these several artists with fine imaginations, typical American imaginations, were proceeding with their own peculiarly original and significantly personal expressions. They represent up to their arrival, and long after as well, all there is of real originality in American painting, and they remain for all time as fine examples of artists with purely native imaginations, working out at great cost their own private salvations for public discovery at a later time.
All these men were poor men with highly distinguished aristocratic natures and powerful physiques, as to appearances, with mentalities much beyond the average. When an exhibition of modern American painting is given, as it surely will and must be, these men and not the Barbizonian echoes as represented by Inness, Wyant & Co., will represent for us the really great beginning of art in America. There will follow naturally artists like Twachtman and Robinson, as likewise Kenneth Hayes Miller and Arthur B. Davies for reasons that I think are rather obvious: both Hayes Miller and Arthur B. Davies having skipped over the direct influence of impressionism by reason of their attachment to Renaissance ideas; having joined themselves by conviction in perhaps slight degrees to aspects of modern painting. Miller is, one might say, too intellectually deliberate to allow for spontaneities which mere enthusiasms encourage. Miller is emotionally thrilled by Renoir but he is never quite swept. His essential conservatism hinders such violence. It would be happier for him possibly if the leaning were still more pronounced.
The jump to modernism in Arthur B. Davies results in the same sort of way as admixture of influence though it is more directly appreciable in him. Davies is more willing, by reason of his elastic temper and intellectual vivacity, to stray into the field of new ideas with a simple though firm belief, that they are good while they last, no matter how long they last. Davies is almost a propagandist in his feeling for and admiration of the ultra-modern movement. Miller is a questioner and ponders long upon every point of consequence or inconsequence. He is a metaphysical analyst which is perhaps the extraneous element in his painting. In his etching, that is, the newest of it, one feels the sense of the classical and the modern joined together and by the classical I mean the quality of Ingres, Conjoined with modern as in Renoir, relieved of the influence of Italian Renaissance.
But I do not wish to lose sight of these several forerunners in American art, Martin, Ryder and Fuller who, in their painting, may be linked not without relativity to our artists in literary imagination, Hawthorne and Poe. Fuller is conspicuously like Hawthorne, not by his appreciation of witchcraft merely, but by his feeling for those eery presences which determine the fates of men and women in their time. Martin is the purer artist for me since he seldom or never resorted to the literary emotion in the sense of drama or narrative, whereas in the instances of Ryder or Fuller they built up expression entirely from literary experience. Albert Ryder achieves most by reason of his vaster poetic sensibility—his Homeric instincts for the drama and by a very original power for arabesque. He is alone among the Americans in his unique gift for pattern. We can claim Albert Ryder as our most original painter as Poe takes his place as our most original poet who had of course one of the greatest and most perfect imaginations of his time and possibly of all time.
But it is these several painters I speak of, Martin, Ryder, and Fuller, who figure for us as the originators of American indigenous painting. They will not be copied for they further nothing beyond themselves. No influence of these painters has been notable, excepting for a time in the early experience of one of the younger modernists who, by reason of definite associations of birthright and relativity of environment, essayed to claim Albert Ryder as a very definite influence; just as Courbet and Corot must in their ways have been powerful influences upon Ryder himself. Albert Ryder is too much of a figure to dismiss here with group-relationship, he must be treated of separately. So far then, there is no marked evidence that the influence of Fuller or Martin was powerful enough to carry beyond themselves. They had no tenets or theories other than those of personal clarification. All three remained the hermit radicals of life, as they remain isolated examples in American art; and all of them essentially of New England, in that they were conspicuously introspective, and shut in upon their own exclusive experience.
But for all these variances, we shall find Homer Martin, George Fuller, and Albert Ryder forming the first nucleus for a definite value in strictly American painting. They were conscious of nothing really outside of native associations and native deductions. The temper of them is as essentially American as the quality of them is essentially Eastern in flavor. They seldom ventured beyond more than a home-spun richness of color, though in Ryder's case Monticelli had assisted very definitely in his notion of the volume of tone. We find here then despite the impress of artists like William Morris Hunt, Washington Allston, and the later Inness with the still later Winslow Homer, that gripping and relentless realist who took hold of the newer school of painter-illustrators, that the artists treated of here may be considered as the most important phase of American painting in the larger sense of the term. If I were to assist in the arrangement of an all American exhibition to show the trend toward individualism I should begin with Martin, Fuller and Ryder. I should then proceed to Winslow Homer, John H. Twachtman, Theodore Robinson, Hayes Miller, Arthur B. Davies, Rockwell Kent, then to those who come under the eighteen-ninety tendency in painting, namely the Whistler-Goya-Velasquez influence.
From this it will be found that an entirely new development had taken place among a fairly large group of younger men who came, and very earnestly, under the Cézannesque influence. It may be said that the choice of these men is a wise one for it is conspicuous among artists of today that since Cézanne art will never, cannot ever be the same, just as with Delacroix and Courbet a French art could never have remained the same. Impressionism will be found to have had a far greater value as a suggestive influence than as a creative one. It brought light in as a scientific aspect into modern painting and that is its valuable contribution. So it is that with Cézanne the world is conscious of a new power that will never be effectually shaken off, since the principles that are involved in the intention of Cézanne are of too vital importance to be treated with lightness of judgment. Such valuable ideas as Cézanne contributes must be accepted almost as dogma, albeit valuable dogma. Influence is a conscious and necessary factor in the development of all serious minded artists, as we have seen in the instances of all important ones.
So it is I feel that the real art of America, and it can, I think, justly be said that there is such, will be headed by the imaginative artists I have named in point of their value as indigenous creators, having worked out their artistic destinies on home soil with all the virility of creators in the finer sense of the term. They have assisted in the establishment of a native tradition which without question has by this time a definite foundation. The public must be made aware of their contribution to a native production. It will no doubt be a matter for surprise to many people in the world today that art in general is more national or local than it has ever been, due mostly to the recent upheaval, which has been of great service to the re-establishment of art interest and art appreciation everywhere in the modern world. Art, like life, has had to begin all over again, for the very end of the world had been made visible at last. The artist may look safely over an utterly new horizon, which is the only encouragement the artist of today can hope for.
MODERN ART IN AMERICA
The question may be asked, what is the hope of modern art in America? The first reply would be that modern art will one day be realized in America if only from experience we learn that all things happen in America by means of the epidemical principle. It is of little visible use that single individuals, by sitting in the solitary confinement of their as yet little understood enthusiasms, shall hope to achieve what is necessary for the American idea, precisely as necessary for us here as for the peoples of Europe who have long since recognized that any movement toward expression is a movement of unquestionable importance. Until the moment when public sincerity and the public passion for excitement is stimulated, the vague art interests of America will go on in their dry and conventional manner. The very acute discernment of Maurice Vlaminck that "intelligence is international, stupidity is national, art is local" is a valuable deduction to make, and applies in the two latter instances as admirably to America as to any other country. Our national stupidity in matters of esthetic modernity is a matter for obvious acceptance, and not at all for amazement.
That art is local is likewise just as true of America as of any other country, and despite the judgment of stodgy minds, there is a definite product which is peculiar to our specific temper and localized sensibility as it is of any other country which is nameable. Despite the fact that impressionism is still exaggeration, and that large sums are still being paid for a "sheep-piece" of Charles Jacque, as likewise for a Ridgeway Knight, there is a well defined grouping of younger painters working for a definitely localized idea of modernism, just as in modern poetry there is a grouping of poets in America who are adding new values to the English language, as well as assisting in the realization of a freshly evolved localized personality in modern poetics.
Art in America is like a patent medicine, or a vacuum cleaner. It can hope for no success until ninety million people know what it is. The spread of art as "culture" in America is from all appearances having little or no success because stupidity in such matters is so national. There is a very vague consideration of modern art among the directors of museums and among art dealers, but the comprehension is as vague as the interest. Outside of a Van Gogh exhibition, a few Matisses, now and then a Cézanne exhibited with great feeling of condescension, there is little to show the American public that art is as much a necessity as a substantial array of food is to an empty stomach. The public hunger cannot groan for what it does not recognize as real nourishment. There is no reason in the world why America does not have as many chances to see modern art as Europe has, save for minor matters of distance. The peoples of the world are alike, sensibilities are of the same nature everywhere among the so-called civilized, and it must be remembered always that the so-called primitive races invented for their own racial salvation what was not to be found ready made for them. Modern art is just as much of a necessity to us as art was to the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Greeks. Those peoples have the advantage of us only because they were in a higher state of culture as a racial unit. They have no more of a monopoly upon the idea of rhythm and organization than we have, because that which was typical of the human consciousness then, is typical of it now. As a result of the war, there has been, it must be said, a heightening of national consciousness in all countries, because creative minds that were allowed to survive were sent home to struggle with the problem of their own soil.
There is no reason whatever for believing that America cannot have as many good artists as any other country. It simply does not have them because the integrity of the artist is trifled with by the intriguing agencies of materialism. Painters find the struggle too keen and it is easy to become the advertising designer, or the merchant in painting, which is what many of our respectable artists have become. The lust for prosperity takes the place of artistic integrity and courage. But America need not be surprised to find that it has a creditable grouping of artists sufficiently interested in the value of modern art as an expression of our time, men and possibly some women, who feel that art is a matter of private aristocratic satisfaction at least, until the public is awakened to the idea that art is an essentially local affair and the more local it becomes by means of comprehension of the international character, the truer it will be to the place in which it is produced.
A catalogue of names will suffice to indicate the character and variation of the localized degree of expression we are free to call American in type: Morgan Russell, S. Macdonald Wright, Arthur G. Dove, William Yarrow, Dickinson, Thomas H. Benton, Abraham Walkowitz, Max Weber, Ben Benn, John Marin, Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler, Marsden Hartley, Andrew Dasburg, William McFee, Man Ray, Walt Kuhn, John Covert, Morton Schamberg, Georgia O'Keeffe, Stuart Davis, Rex Slinkard. Added to these, the three modern photographers Alfred Stieglitz, Charles Sheeler, and Paul Strand must be included. Besides these indigenous names, shall we place the foreign artists whose work falls into line in the movement toward modern art in America, Joseph Stella, Marcel Duchamp, Gaston Lachaise, Eli Nadelman. There may be no least questioning as to how much success all of these artists would have in their respective ways in the various groupings that prevail in Europe at this time. They would be recognized at once for the authenticity of their experience and for their integrity as artists gifted with international intelligence. There is no reason to feel that prevailing organizations like the Society of Independent Artists, Inc., and the Société Anonyme, Inc., will not bear a great increase of influence and power upon the public, as there is every reason to believe that at one time or another the public will realize what is being done for them by these societies, as well as what was done by the so famous "291" gallery.
The effect however is not vast enough because the public finds no shock in the idea of art. It is not melodramatic enough and America must be appealed to through its essentially typical melodramatic instincts. There is always enough music, and there are some who certainly can say altogether too much of the kind there is in this country. The same thing can be said of painting. There is altogether too much of comfortable art, the art of the uplifted illustration. It is the reflex of the Anglo-Saxon passion for story-telling in pictures which should be relegated to the field of the magazines. Great art often tells a story but great art is always something plus the idea. Ordinary art does not rise above it.
I often wonder why it is that America, which is essentially a country of sports and gamblers, has not the European courage as well as rapacity for fresh development in cultural matters. Can it be because America is not really intelligent? I should be embarrassed in thinking so. There is nevertheless an obvious lethargy in the appreciation of creative taste and a still lingering yet old-fashioned faith in the continual necessity for importation. America has a great body of assimilators, and out of this gift for uncreative assimilation has come the type of art we are supposed to accept as our own. It is not at all difficult to prove that America has now an encouraging and competent group of young and vigorous synthesists who are showing with intelligence what they have learned from the newest and most engaging development of art, which is to say—modern art. The names which have been inserted above are the definite indication, and one may go so far as to say proof, of this argument that modern art in America is rapidly becoming an intelligently localized realization.
OUR IMAGINATIVES
Is it vision that creates temperament or temperament that creates vision? Physical vision is responsible for nearly everything in art, not the power to see but the way to see. It is the eye perfect or the eye defective that determines the kind of thing seen and how one sees it. It was certainly a factor in the life of Lafcadio Hearn, for he was once named the poet of myopia. It was the acutely sensitive eye of Cézanne that taught him to register so ably the minor and major variations of his theme. Manet saw certainly far less colour than Renoir, for in the Renoir sense he was not a colourist at all. He himself said he painted only what he saw. Sight was almost science with Cézanne as it was passion.
In artists like Homer Martin there is a something less than visual accuracy and something more than a gift of translation. There is a distinguished interpretation of mood coupled with an almost miniature-like sense of delicate gradation, and at the same time a something lacking as to a sense of physical form. In the few specimens of Martin to be seen there is, nevertheless, eminent distinction paramount. He was an artist of "oblique integrity": He saw unquestionably at an angle, but the angle was a beautiful one, and while many of his associates were doing American Barbizon, he was giving forth a shy, yet rare kind of expression, always a little symbolic in tendency, with the mood far more predominant. In "The sand dunes of Ontario" there will be found at once a highly individualistic feeling for the waste places of the world. There is never so much as a hint of banality in his selection. He never resorts to stock rhetoric.
Martin will be remembered for his singularly personal touch along with men like Fuller and Ryder. He is not as dramatic as either of these artists, but he has greater finesse in delicate sensibility. He was, I think, actually afraid of repetition, a characteristic very much in vogue in his time, either conscious or unconscious, in artists like Inness, Wyant, and Blakelock, with their so single note. There is exceptional mysticity hovering over his hills and stretches of dune and sky. It is not fog, or rain, or dew enveloping them. It is a certain veiled presence in nature that he sees and brings forward. His picture of peaks of the White Mountains, Jefferson and Madison, gives you no suggestion of the "Hudson River" emptiness. He was searching for profounder realities. He wanted the personality of his places, and he was successful, for all of his pictures I have seen display the magnetic touch. He "touched it off" vividly in all of them. They reveal their ideas poetically and esthetically and the method is personal and ample for presentation.
With George Fuller it was vastly different. He seemed always to be halting in the shadow. You are conscious of a deep and ever so earnest nature in his pictures. He impressed himself on his canvases in spite of his so faulty expression. He had an understanding of depth but surface was strange to him. He garbled his sentences so to speak with excessive and useless wording. "The Octoroon" shows a fine feeling for romance as do all of the other pictures of Fuller that have been publicly visible, but it is romance obsessed with monotone. There is the evidence of extreme reticence and moodiness in Fuller always. I know little of him save that I believe he experienced a severity of domestic problems. Farmer I think he was, and painted at off hours all his life. It is the poetry of a quiet, almost sombre order, walking in the shadow on the edge, of a wood being almost too much of an appearance for him in the light of a busy world.
Why is it I think of Hawthorne when I think of Fuller? Is there a relationship here, or is it only a similarity of eeriness in temper? I would suspect Fuller of having painted a Hester Prynne excepting that he could never have come to so much red in one place in his pictures.
There was vigour in these strong, simple men, masculine in sensibility all of them, and a fine feeling for the poetic shades of existence. They were intensely serious men, and I think from their isolation in various ways, not popular in their time. Neither are they popular now. They will only be admired by artists of perception, and by laymen of keen sensibility. Whether their enforced isolations taught them to brood, or whether they were brooders by nature, it is difficult to say. I think they were all easterners, and this would explain away certain characteristic shynesses of temper and of expression in them. Ryder, as we know, was the typical recluse, Fuller in all likelihood also. Martin I know little of privately, but his portrait shows him to be a strong elemental nature, with little feeling for, or interest in, the superficialities either of life or of art. Of Blakelock I can say but little, for I do not know him beyond a few stylish canvases which seem to have more of Diaz and Rousseau in them than contributes to real originality, and he was one of the painters of repetition also. A single good Blakelock is beautiful, and I think he must be included among the American imaginatives, but I do not personally feel the force of him in several canvases together.
All of these artists are singularly individual, dreamers like Mathew Maris and Marées of Europe. They all have something of Coleridge about them, something of Poe, something of the "Ancient Mariner" and the "Haunted Palace", sailors in the same ship, sleepers in the same house. All of these men were struggling at the same time, the painters I mean, the same hour it might be said, in the midst of conventions of a severer type of rigidity than now, to preserve themselves from commonplace utterance. They were not affected by fashions. They had the one idea in mind, to express themselves in terms of themselves, and they were singularly successful in this despite the various difficulties of circumstance and of temper that attended them. They understood what this was better than anyone, and the results in varying degrees of genius attest to the quality of the American imagination at its best.
I should like, for purposes of reference, to see a worthy exhibition of all of these men in one place. It would I am sure prove my statement that the eastern genius is naturally a tragic one, for all of these men have hardly once ventured into the clear sunlight of the world of every day. It would offset highly also, the superficial attitude that there is no imagination in American painting. We should not find so much of form or of colour in them in the stricter meaning of these ideas, as of mood. They might have set themselves to be disciples of William Blake's significant preachment, "put off intellect and put on imagination, the imagination is the man"; the intellect being the cultivated man, and the imagination being the natural man. There is imagination which by reason of its power and brilliance exceeds all intellectual effort, and effort at intellectualism is worse than a fine ignorance by far. Men who are highly imaginative, create by feeling what they do not or cannot know. It is the sixth sense of the creator.
These artists were men alone, touched with the pristine significance of nature. It was pioneering of a difficult nature, precarious as all individual investigation of a spiritual or esthetic character is sure to be. Its first requisite is isolation, its last requisite is appreciation. All of these painters are gone over into that place they were so eager to investigate, illusion or reality. Their pictures are witness here to their seriousness. They testify to the bright everlastingness of beauty. If they have not swayed the world, they have left a dignified record in the art of a given time. Their contemporary value is at least inestimable. They are among the very first in the development of esthetics in America in point of merit. They made no compromise, and their record is clear.
If one looks over the record of American art up to the period of ultra-modernism, it will be found that these men are the true originals among American painters. We shall find outside of them and a very few others, so much of sameness, a certain academic convention which, however pronounced or meagre the personalities are, leave those personalities in the category of "safe" painters. They do not disturb by an excessively intimate point of view toward art or toward nature. They come up to gallery requirements by their "pleasantness" or the inoffensiveness of their style. They offer little in the way of interpretive power or synthetic understanding. It is the tendency to keep on the comfortable side in American art. Doubtless it is more practical as any innovator or investigator has learned for himself. Artists like Ryder and Martin and Fuller had nothing in common with market appreciations. They had ideas to express, and were sincere to the last in expressing them.
You will find little trace of commercialism in these men, even when, as in the case of Martin and Ryder and I do not know whom else, they did panels for somebody-or-other's leather screen, of which "Smuggler's Cove" and the other long panel of Ryder's in the Metropolitan Museum are doubtless two. They were not successful in their time because they could not repeat their performances. We know the efforts that were once made to make Ryder comfortable in a conventional studio, which he is supposed to have looked into once; and then he disappeared, as it was altogether foreign to him. Each picture was a new event in the lives of these men, and had to be pondered over devoutly, and for long periods often, as in the case of Ryder. Work was for him nine-tenths reflection and meditation and poetic brooding, and he put down his sensations on canvas with great difficulty in the manner of a labourer. It seems obvious that his first drafts were always vivid with the life intended for them, but no one could possibly have suffered with the idea of how to complete a picture more than he. His lack of facility held him from spontaneity, as it is likewise somewhat evident in Martin, and still more in Fuller.
They were artists in timidity, and had not the courage of physical force in painting. With them it was wholly a mental process. But we shall count them great for their purity of vision as well as for the sincerity and conviction that possessed them. Artistry of this sort will be welcomed anywhere, if only that we may take men seriously who profess seriousness. There is nothing really antiquated about sincerity, though I think conventional painters are not sure of that. It is not easy to think that men consent to repeat themselves from choice, and yet the passing exhibitions are proof of that. Martin and Ryder and Fuller refresh us with a poetic and artistic validity which places them out of association among men of their time or of today, in the field of objective and illustrative painters. We turn to them with pleasure after a journey through the museums, for their reticence let us say, and for the refinement of their vision, their beautiful gift of restraint. They emphasize the commonness of much that surrounds them, much that blatantly would obscure them if they were not pronouncedly superior. They would not be discounted to any considerable degree if they were placed among the known masters of landscape painters of all modern time. They would hold their own by the verity of feeling that is in them, and what they might lose in technical excellence, would be compensated for in uniqueness of personality. I should like well to see them placed beside artists like Maris and Marées, and even Courbet. It would surprise the casual appreciator much, I believe.
OUR IMPRESSIONISTS
I have for purely personal reasons chosen the two painters who formulate for me the conviction that there have been and are but two consistently convincing American impressionists. These gentlemen are John H. Twachtman and Theodore Robinson. I cannot say precisely in what year Twachtman died but for purposes intended here this data is of no paramount consequence, save that it is always a matter of query as to just how long an artist must live, or have been dead, to be discovered in what is really his own time.
John H. Twachtman as artist is difficult to know even by artists; for his work is made difficult to see either by its scarcity as determined for himself or by the exclusiveness of the owners of his pictures. It requires, however, but two or three of them to convince one that Twachtman has a something "plus" to contribute to his excursions into impressionism. One feels that after a Duesseldorf blackness which permeates his earlier work his conversion to impressionism was as fortunate as it was sincere. Twachtman knew, as is evidenced everywhere in his work, what he wished to essay and he proceeded with poetic reticence to give it forth. With a lyricism that is as convincing as it is authentic, you feel that there is a certain underlying spirit of resignation. He surely knew that a love of sunlight would save any man from pondering on the inflated importance of world issues.
Having seen Twachtman but once my memory of his face recalls this admixture of emotion. He cared too much for the essential beauties to involve them with analyses extraneous to the meaning of beauty. That the Japanese did more for him than any other Orientals of whom he might have been thinking, is evident. For all that, his own personal lyricism surmounts his interest in outer interpretations of light and movement, and he leaves you with his own notion of a private and distinguished appreciation of nature. In this sense he leads one to Renoir's way of considering nature which was the pleasure in nature for itself. It was all too fine an adventure to quibble about.
Twachtman's natural reticence and, I could also believe, natural skepticism kept him from swinging wildly over to the then new theories, a gesture typical of less intelligent natures. He had the good sense to feel out for himself just where the new theories related to himself and set about producing flat simplicity of planes of color to produce a very distinguished notion of light. He dispensed with the photographic attitude toward objectivity and yet at the same time held to the pleasing rhythmical shapes in nature. He did not resort to divisionalism or to ultra-violence of relationship. The pictures that I have seen such as "February", for instance, in the Boston Museum, present for me the sensation of a man of great private spiritual and intellectual means, having the wish to express tactfully and convincingly his personal conclusions and reactions, leaning always toward the side of iridescent illusiveness rather than emotional blatancy and irrelevant extravagance. His nuances are perhaps too finely adjusted to give forth the sense of overwhelming magic either in intention or of execution. It is lyrical idea with Twachtman with seldom or never a dramatic gesture. He is as illusive as a phrase of Mallarmé and it will be remembered that he is of the period more or less of the rose and the lily and the lost idea in poetry. He does recall in essence at least the quality of pastels in prose, though the art intention is a sturdier one. It is enough that Twachtman did find his relationship to impressionism, and that he did not evolve a system of repetition which marks the failure of all influence.
Twachtman remains an artist of super-fine sensibility and distinction, and whatever he may have poured into the ears of students as an instructor left no visible haggard traces on his own production other than perhaps limiting that production. But we know that while the quality is valuable in respect of power it has no other precise value. We remember that Giorgione perished likewise with an uncertain product to his credit, as to numbers, but he did leave his immemorial impression. So it is with John H. Twachtman. He leaves his indelible influence among Americans as a fine artist, and he may be said to be among the few artists who, having taken up the impressionistic principle, found a way to express his personal ideas with a true degree of personal force. He is a beautifully sincere product and that is going far. Those pictures I have seen contain no taint of the market or clamoring for praise even. They were done because their author had an unobtrusive yet very aristocratic word to say, and the word was spoken with authority. John H. Twachtman must be counted as one of the genuine American artists, as well as among the most genuine artists of the world. If his pictures do not torment one with problematic intellectualism, they do hold one with their inherent refinement of taste and a degree of aristocratic approach which his true intelligence implies.
With the work of Theodore Robinson, there comes a wide divergence of feeling that is perhaps a greater comprehension of the principles of impressionism as applied to the realities involved in the academic principle. One is reminded of Bastien Le Page and Léon L'Hermitte, in the paintings of Robinson, as to their type of subject and the conception of them also. That he lived not far from Giverney is likewise evident. Being of New England yankee extraction, a Vermonter I believe, he must have essayed always a sense of economy in emotion. No one could have gone so far as the then incredible Monet, whose pictures wear us to indifference with vapid and unprofitable thinking. What Monet did was to encourage a new type of audacity and a brand-new type in truth, when no one had up to then attempted to see nature as prismatical under the direct influence of the solar rays. All this has since been worked out with greater exactitude by the later theorists in modernism.
While Van Gogh was slowly perishing of a mad ecstasy for light, covering up a natural Dutch realism with fierce attempts at prismatic relationship, always with the rhythms in a state of ecstatic ascendency; and Seurat had come upon the more satisfying pointillism as developed by himself; somewhere in amid all these extravagances men like Robinson were trying to combine orthodoxy of heritage and radicalist conversion with the new and very noble idea of impressionism. That Robinson succeeded in a not startling but nevertheless honorable and respectable fashion, must be conceded him. I sometimes think that Vignon, a seemingly obscure associate of the impressionists, with a similar impassioned feeling of realism, outdid him and approached closer to the principles as understood by Pissarro: probably better by a great deal than Monet himself, who is accredited with the honor of setting the theme moving in a modern line of that day. And Pissarro must have been a man to have so impressed all the men young and old of his time. After seeing a great number of Monet's one turns to any simple Pissarro for relief. And then there was also Sisley.
But the talk is of Theodore Robinson. He holds his place as a realist with hardly more than a realist's conception, subjoined to a really pleasing appreciation of the principles of impressionism as imbibed by him from the source direct. Here are, then, the two true American impressionists, who, as far as I am aware, never slipped into the banalities of reiteration and marketable self-copy. They seem to have far more interest in private intellectual success than in a practical public one. It is this which helped them both, as it helps all serious artists, to keep their ideas clean of outward taint. This is one of the most important factors, which gives a man a place in the art he essays to achieve. When the day of his work is at an end it will be seen by everyone precisely what the influences were that prompted his effort toward deliverance through creation. It is for the sake of this alone that sincere artists keep to certain principles, and with genuine sacrifice often, as was certainly the case with Twachtman. And after all, how can a real artist be concerned as to just how salable his product is to be? Certainly not while he is working, if he be decent toward himself. This is of course heresy, with Wall Street so near.
ARTHUR B. DAVIES
If Arthur B. Davies had found it necessary, as in the modern time it has been found necessary to separate literature from painting, we should doubtless have had a very delicate and sensitive lyric poetry in book form. Titles for pictures like "Mirrored Dreaming," "Sicily-Flowering Isle," "Shell of Gold," "A Portal of the Night," "Mystic Dalliance," are all of them creations of an essentially poetic and literary mind. They are all splendid titles for a real book of legendary experience. The poet will be first to feel the accuracy of lyrical emotion in these titles. The paintings lead one away entirely into the land of legend, into the iridescent splendor of reflection. They take one out of a world of didactic monotone, as to their artistic significance. They are essentially pictures created for the purpose of transportation.
From the earlier days in that underground gallery on Fifth Avenue near Twenty-seventh Street to the present time, there has been a constantly flowing production of lyrical simplicity and purification. One can never think of Davies as one thinks of Courbet and of Cézanne, where the intention is first and last a technically esthetic one; especially in Cézanne, whose object was the removal of all significance from painting other than that of painting for itself. With Cézanne it was problem. One might even say it was the removal of personality. With Davies you are aware that it is an entirely intimate personal life he is presenting; a life entirely away from discussion, from all sense of problem; they are not problematic at all, his pictures; they have lyrical serenity as a basis, chiefly. Often you have the sensation of looking through a Renaissance window upon a Greek world—a world of Platonic verities in calm relation with each other. It is essentially an art created from the principle of the harmonic law in nature, things in juxtaposition, cooperating with the sole idea of a poetic existence. The titles cover the subjects, as I have suggested. Arthur B. Davies is a lyric poet with a decidedly Celtic tendency. It is the smile of a radiant twilight in his brain. It is a country of green moon whispers and of shadowed movement. Imagination illuminating the moment of fancy with rhythmic persuasiveness. It is the Pandaean mystery unfolded with symphonic accompaniment. You have in these pictures the romances of the human mind made irresistible with melodic certainty. They are chansons sans paroles, sung to the syrinx in Sicilian glades.
I feel that it is our own romantic land transposed into terms of classical metre. The color is mostly Greek, and the line is Greek. You could just as well hear Glück as Keats; you could just as well see the world by the light of the virgin lamp, and watch the smoke of old altars coiling among the cypress boughs. The redwoods of the West become columns of Doric eloquence and simplicity. The mountains and lakes of the West have become settings for the reading of the "Centaur" of Maurice de Guerin. You see the reason for the titles chosen because you feel that the poetry of line and the harmonic accompaniment of color is the primal essential. They are not so dynamic as suggestive in their quality of finality. The way is left open, in other words, for you yourself to wander, if you will, and possess the requisite instincts for poetry.
The presence of Arthur B. Davies, and conversation with him convince one that poetry and art are in no sense a diversion or a delusion even. They are an occupation, a real business for intelligent men and women. He is occupied with the essential qualities of poetry and painting. He is eclectic by instinct. Spiritually he arrives at his conviction through these unquestionable states of lyrical existence. He is there when they happen. That is authenticity sufficient. They are not wandering moods. They are organized conditions and attitudes, intellectually appreciated and understood. He is a mystic only in the sense that perhaps all lyrical poetry is mystic, since it strives for union with the universal soul in things.
It is perfectly autobiographical, the work of Arthur B. Davies, and that is so with all genuine expression. You find this gift for conviction in powerful painter types, like Courbet and Delacroix, who are almost propagandic in their fiercely defined insistence upon the chosen esthetic principle. Whatever emanation, illusion, or "aura," dreadful word that it is, springing from the work of Davies, is only typical of what comes from all magical intentions, the magic of the world of not-being, made real through the operation of true fancy. Davies' pictures are works of fancy, then, in contradistinction to the essays of the imagination such as those of William Blake. Poets like Davies are lookers-in. Poets like Blake are the austere residents of the country they wander in. The lookers-in are no less genuine. They merely "make" their world. It might be said they make the prosaic world over again, transform it by a system of prescribed magic. This work, then, becomes states of fancy dramatized in lyric metre. Davies feels the visionary life of facts as a scientist would feel them actually. He has the wish for absolute order and consistency. There is nothing vague or disconcerting in his work, no lapses of rhetoric. It is, in its way, complete, one may say, since it is the intelligently contrived purpose of this poet to arrive at a scheme of absolute spiritual harmony.
He is first of all the poet-painter in the sense that Albert Ryder is a painter for those with a fine comprehension of the imagination. Precisely as Redon is an artist for artists, though not always their artist in convincing esthetics, he too, satisfies the instinct for legend, for transformation. Painters like Davies, Redon, Rops, Moreau, and the other mystical natures, give us rather the spiritual trend of their own lives. In Redon and in Davies the vision is untouched by the foul breath of the world around them. In Rops and Moreau you feel the imagination hurrying to the arms and breasts of vice for their sense of home. The pathos of deliverance is urgent in them. In the work of Davies, and of Redon, there is the splendid silence of a world created by themselves, a world for the reflection of self. There is even a kind of narcissian arrogance, the enchantment of the illumined fact.
Beauty recognizing herself with satisfaction—that seems to be the purpose of the work of Arthur B. Davies. It is so much outside the realm of scientific esthetics as hardly to have been more than overheard. These pictures are efficiently exemplary of the axiom that "all art aspires to the condition of music." I could almost hear Davies saying that, as if Pater had never so much as thought of it. They literally soothe with a rare poetry painted for the eye. They are illuminations for the manuscripts of the ascetic soul. They are windows for houses in which men and women may withdraw, and be reconciled to the doom of isolation.
With the arrival of Cubism into the modern esthetic scene, there appeared a change in the manner of creation, though the same methods of invention remained chiefly without change. The result seems more in the nature of kaleidoscopic variance, a perhaps more acutely realized sense of opposites, than in the former mode. They register less completely, it seems to me, because the departure is too sudden in the rhythmus of the artist. The art of Davies is the art of a melodious curved line. Therefore the sudden angularity is abrupt to an appreciative eye.
It is the poetry of Arthur B. Davies that comes to the fore in one's appreciation. He has the almost impeccable gift for lyrical truth, and the music of motion is crystallized in his imagination to a masterful degree. He is the highly sensitized illustrator appointed by the states of his soul to picture forth the pauses of the journey through the realm of fancy. It has in it the passion of violet and silver dreaming, the hue of an endless dawn before the day descends upon the world. You expect the lute to regain its jaded tune there. You expect the harp to reverberate once again with the old fervors. You expect the syrinx to unfold the story of the reed in light song. It contains the history of all the hushed horizons that can be found over the edges of a world of materiality. It holds in it always the warm soul of every digit of the moon. Human passion is for once removed, unless it be that the mere humanism of motion excites the sense of passion. You are made to feel the non-essentiality of the stress of the flesh in the true places of spiritual existence. The life of moments is carried over and made permanent in fancy, and they endure by the purity of their presence alone. There is no violence in the work of Davies. It is the appreciable relation of harmony and counterpoint in the human heart and mind. It is the logic of rhythmical equation felt there, almost exclusively. It is the condition of music that art in the lyrical state has seemed to suggest.
The artistic versatility of Davies is too familiar to comment upon. He has no distress with mediums. His exceptional sensitivity to substance and texture gives him the requisite rapport with all species of mediums to which the artist has access. One might be inclined to think of him as a virtuoso in pastel possibly, and his paintings in the medium of oil suggest this sort of richness. He is nevertheless at home in all ways. All these are issues waved away to my mind, in view of his acute leaning to the poet that leads the artist away from problems other than that of Greek rhythmical perfection. It is essentially a Platonic expression, the desire of the perfect union of one thing with another. That is its final consummation, so it seems to me.
REX SLINKARD
"I doubt not that the passionately wept deaths of young men
are provided for."—Walt Whitman.
We have had our time for regretting the loss of men of genius during the war. We know the significance of the names of Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas, Elroy Flecker on the other side of the sea, to the hope of England. And on this side of the sea the names of Joyce Kilmer, Alan Seeger and Victor Chapman have been called out to us for the poetic spell they cast upon America. All of them in their manful, poetic way. They were all of them poets in words; all but Victor Chapman were professional poets, and he, even if he himself was not aware, gave us some rare bits of loveliness in his letters. There are others almost nameless among soldier-hero people who gave us likewise real bits of unsuspected beauty in their unpretentious letters.
Rex Slinkard was a soldier, poet-painter by inclination, and ranchman as to specific occupation. Rex has gone from us, too. How many are there who know, or could have known, the magic of this unassuming visionary person. Only a few of us who understand the meaning of magic and the meaning of everlasting silences. It is the fortune of America that there remain with us numbers of highly indicative drawings and a group of rare canvases, the quality of which painters will at once acclaim, and poets will at once verify the lyric perfection of, paintings and drawings among the loveliest we have in point of purity of conception and feeling for the subtle shades of existence, those rare states of life which, when they arrive, are called perfect moments in the poetic experience of men and women.
There will be no argument to offer or to maintain regarding the work of Rex Slinkard. It is what it is, the perfect evidence that one of the finest lyric talents to be found among the young creators of America has been deprived of its chance to bloom as it would like to have done, as it so eagerly and surely was already doing. Rex Slinkard was a genius of first quality. The word genius may be used these days without fear of the little banalities, since anyone who has evolved for himself a clear vision of life may be said to possess the quality of genius.
"The day's work done and the supper past. I walk through the horse-lot and to my shack. Inside I light the lantern, and then the fire, and sitting, I think of the inhabitants of the earth, and of the world, my home."
These sentences, out of a letter to a near friend, and the marginalia written upon the edges of many of his drawings, show the varying degrees of delicacy Rex was eager to register and make permanent for his own realization. His thought was once and for all upon the realities, that is, those substances that are or can be realities only to the artist, the poet, and the true dreamer, and Rex Slinkard was all of these. His observation of himself, and his understanding of himself, were uncommonly genuine in this young and so poetic painter. He had learned early for so young a man what were his special idealistic fervors. He had the true romanticist's gift for refinements, and was working continually toward the rarer states of being out from the emotional into the intellectual, through spiritual application into the proper and requisite calm. He lived in a thoroughly ordered world of specified experience which is typified in his predilection for the superiority of Chinese notions of beauty over the more sentimental rhythms of the Greeks. He had found the proper shade of intellectuality he cared for in this type of Oriental expression. It was the Buddhistic feeling of reality that gave him more than the platonic. He was searching for a majesty beyond sensuousness, by which sensuous experience is transformed into greater and more enduring shades of beauty. He wanted the very life of beauty to take the place of sensuous suggestion. Realities in place of semblances, then, he was eager for, but the true visionary realities as far finer than the materialistic reality.
He had learned early that he was not, and never would be, the fantasist that some of his earlier canvases indicate. Even his essays in portraiture, verging on the realistic, leaned nevertheless more toward the imaginative reality always. He knew, also, with clarity, the fine line of decision between imagination and vision, between the dramatic and the lyric, and had realized completely the supremacy of the lyric in himself. He was a young boy of light walking on a man's strong feet upon real earth over which there was no shadow for him. He walked straightforwardly toward the elysium of his own very personal organized fancies. His irrigation ditches were "young rivers" for him, rivers of being, across which white youths upon white horses, and white fawns were gliding to the measure of their own delights. He had, this young boy of light, the perfect measure of poetic accuracy coupled with a man's fine simplicity in him. He had the priceless calm for the understanding of his own poetic ecstasies. They acted upon him gently with their own bright pressure. He let them thrive according to their own relationships to himself. Nothing was forced in the mind and soul of Rex Slinkard. He was in quest of the modern rapture for permanent things such as is to be found in "L'après midi d'un Faun" of Mallarmé and Debussy for instance, in quest of those rare, whiter proportions of experience. It was radiance and simplicity immingled in his sense of things.
He would have served his country well as one of its clearest and best citizens, far more impressively by the growth and expansion of his soul in his own manly vision, than by the questionable value of his labors in the military service. He did what he could, gladly and heroically, but he had become too weakened by the siege of physical reverses that pursued his otherwise strong body to endure the strain of labor he performed, or wanted to accomplish. He knew long before he entered service the significance of discipline from very profound experience with life from childhood onward. Life had come to him voluminously because he was one who attracted life to him, electrically. He did not "whine" or "postpone," for he was in all of his hours at least mentally and spiritually equal to the world in all of its aspects. He was physically not there for the thing he volunteered to do, despite the appearance of manly strength in him, or thought he would be able to do. He hoped strongly to serve. None knew his secret so well as himself, and he kept his own secret royally and amicably.
Exceptional maturity of understanding of life, of nature, and all the little mysteries that are the shape of human moments, was conspicuously evidenced for as long as his intimates remember. The extraordinary measure of calm contained in his last pictures and in so many of the drawings done in moments of rest in camp is evidence of all this. He had a boy's brightness and certainty of the fairness of things, joined with a man's mastery of the simple problem. He was a true executive in material affairs and his vision was another part of the business of existence.
As I have said, Rex Slinkard had the priceless poise of the true lyric poet, and it was the ordered system in his vision that proved him. He knew the value of his attitudes and he was certain that perfection is imperishable, and strove with a poet's calm intensity toward that. He had found his Egypt, his Assyria, his Greece, and his own specific Nirvana at his feet everywhere.
As he stood attending to the duties of irrigation and the ripening of the alfalfa crops, he spent the moments otherwise lost in carving pebbles he found about him with rare gestures and profiles, either of his own face or body which he knew well, or the grace of other bodies and faces he had seen. He was always the young eye on things, an avid eye sure of the wonder about to escape from every living thing where light or shadow fell upon them gently. He was a sure, unquestionable, and in this sense a perfect poet, and possessed the undeniable painter's gift for presentation.
He was of the company of Odilon Redon, of whom he had never heard, in his feeling for the almost occult presence emanating from everything he encountered everywhere, and his simple letters to his friends hold touches of the same beauty his drawings and paintings and carvings on pebbles contain.
A born mystic and visionary as to the state of his soul, a boy of light in quest of the real wisdom that is necessary for the lyrical embodiment, this was Rex Slinkard, the western ranchman and poet-painter. "I think of the inhabitants of the earth and of the world, my home." This might have been a marginal note from the Book of Thel, or it might have been a line from some new songs of innocence and experience. It might have been spoken from out of one of the oaks of William Blake. It must have been heard from among the live oaks of Saugus. It was the simple speech of a ranchman of California, a real boy-man who loved everything with a poet's love because everything that lived, lived for him.
Such were the qualities of Rex Slinkard, who would like to have remained in the presence of his friends, the inhabitants of the earth, to have lived long in the world, his home.
It is all a fine clear testimony to the certainty of youth, perhaps the only certainty there can be. He was the calm declaimer of the life of everlasting beauty. He saw with a glad eye the "something" that is everywhere at all times, and in all places, for the poet's and the visionary's eye at least. He was sure of what he saw; his paintings and drawings are a firm conviction of that. Like all who express themselves clearly, he wanted to say all he had to say. At thirty he had achieved expression remarkably. He had found the way out, and the way out was toward and into the light. He was clear, and entirely unshadowed.
This is Rex Slinkard, ranchman, poet-painter, and man of the living world. Since he could not remain, he has left us a carte visite of rarest clarity and beauty. We who care, among the few, for things in relation to essences, are glad Rex Slinkard lived and laughed and wondered, and remained the little while. The new silence is but a phase of the same living one he covered all things with. He was glad he was here. He was another angle of light on the poetic world around us, another unsuspected facet of the bright surface of the world. Surfaces were for him, too, something to be "deepened" with a fresh vividness. He had the irresistible impulse to decorate and to decorate consistently. His sense of decoration was fluid and had no hint of the rhetorical in it. He felt everything joined together, shape to shape, by the harmonic insistence in life and in nature. A flower held a face, and a face held a flowery substance for him. Bodies were young trees in bloom, and trees were lines of human loveliness. The body of the man, the body of the woman, beautiful male and female bodies, the ideal forms of everyone and everything he encountered, he understood and made his own. They were all living radiances against the dropped curtain of the world. He loved the light on flesh, and the shadows on strong arms, legs, and breasts. He avoided theory, either philosophic or esthetic. He had traveled through the ages of culture in his imagination, and was convinced that nothing was new and nothing was old. It was all living and eternal when it was genuine. He stepped out of the world of visible realities but seldom, and so it was, books and methods of interpretation held little for him. He didn't need them, for he held the whole world in his arms through the power of dream and vision. He touched life everywhere, touched it with himself.
Rex Slinkard went away into a celestial calm October 18, 1918, in St. Vincent's Hospital, New York City. It is the few among those of us who knew him as poet and visionary and man, who wish earnestly that Rex might have remained. He gave much that many wanted, or would have wanted if they had had the opportunity of knowing him. The pictures and drawings that remain are the testimony of his splendid poetic talents. He was a lyrical painter of the first order. He is something that we miss mightily, and shall miss for long.
SOME AMERICAN WATER-COLORISTS
With the arrival of Cézanne into the field of water-color painting, this medium suffers a new and drastic instance for comparison. It is not technical audacity alone, of course, that confronts us in these brilliantly achieved performances, so rich in form as well as radiant with light. It is not the kind of virility for its own sake that is typical of our own American artists so gifted in this special medium, like Whistler, Sargent, Winslow Homer, Dodge Macknight, John Marin, and Charles Demuth. With Cézanne it was merely a new instrument to employ for the realization of finer plastic relations. The medium of water-color has been ably employed by the English and the Dutch painters, but it seems as if the artists of both these countries succeeded in removing all the brilliance and charm as well as the freshness which is peculiar to it; few outside of Cézanne have, I think, done more with water-color than the above named American artists, none who have kept more closely and consistently within the confines and peculiarities of this medium.
In the consideration of the American water-color artists it will be found that Sargent and Homer tend always toward the graphic aspect of a pictorial idea, yet it is Homer who relieves his pictures of this obsession by a brilliant appreciation of the medium for its own sake. Homer steps out of the dry conventionalism of the English style of painting, which Sargent does not do. Much of that metallic harshness which is found in the oil pictures of Homer is relieved in the water-colors and there is added to this their extreme virtuosity, and a great distinction to be discovered in their sense of light and life, the sense of the object illumined with a wealth of vibrancy that is peculiar to its environment, particularly noticeable in the Florida series.
Dodge Macknight has seen with a keen eye the importance of this virility of technique to be found in Homer, and has added to this a passion for impressionistic veracity which heightens his own work to a point distinctly above that of Sargent, and one might almost say above Winslow Homer. Macknight really did authenticate for himself the efficacy of impression with almost incredible feats of visual bravery. There is no array of pigment sufficient to satisfy him as for what heat and cold do to his sensibility, as experienced by the opposite poles of a New England winter and a tropical Mexican landscape. He is always in search of the highest height in contrasts, all this joined by what his sense of fierceness of light could bring to the fantastic dune stretches of Cape Cod in fiery autumn. His work in water-color has the convincing charm of almost fanaticism for itself; and we find this medium progressing still further with the fearlessness of John Marin in the absolute at-home-ness which he displays on all occasions in his audacious water-color pictures.
Marin brings you to the feeling that digression is for him imperative only as affording him relief from the tradition of his medium. John Marin employs all the restrictions of water-color with the wisdom that is necessary in the case. He says that paper plus water, plus emotion will give a result in themselves and proceeds with the idea at hand in what may without the least temerity be called a masterly fashion; he has run the gamut of experience with his materials from the earliest Turner tonalities, through Whisterian vagaries on to American definiteness, and has incidentally noted that the Chinese have been probably the only supreme masters of the wash in the history of water-color painting. I can say for myself that Marin produces the liveliest, handsomest wash that is producible or that has ever been accomplished in the field of water-color painting. Perhaps many of the pictures of John Marin were not always satisfying in the tactile sense because many of them are taken up with an inevitable passion for technical virtuosity, which is no mean distinction in itself but we are not satisfied as once we were with this passion for audacity and virtuosity. We have learned that spatial existence and spatial relationships are the important essentials in any work of art. The precise ratio of thought accompanied by exactitude of emotion for the given idea is a matter of serious consideration with the modern artists of today. That is the special value of modern painting to the development of art.
The Chinese really knew just what a wash was capable of, and confined themselves to the majesty of the limitations at hand. John Marin has been wise in this also though he is not precisely fanatical, which may be his chief defect, and it is probably true that the greatest experimenters have shown fanatical tendency, which is only the accentuated spirit of obsession for an idea. How else does one hold a vision? It is the only way for an artist to produce plastic exactitude between two planes of sensation or thought. The parts must be as perfect as the whole and in the best art this is so. There must be the sense of "existence" everywhere and it might even be said that the cool hue of the intellect is the first premise in a true work of art. Virtuosity is a state of expression but it is not the final state. One must search for as well as find the sequential quality which is necessitated for the safe arrival of a work of art into the sphere of esthetic existence.
The water-colors of John Marin are restless with energy, which is in its way a real virtue. They do, I think, require, at times at least, more of the calm of research and less of the excitement of it. All true artistry is self-contained and never relies upon outer physical stimulus or inward extravagance of phantasy, or of idiosyncrasy. A work of art is never peculiar, it is always a natural thing. In this sense John Marin approaches real art because he is probably the most natural water-colorist in existence.
With Charles Demuth water-color painting steps up into the true condition of ideas followed by experience. He has joined with modernism most consistently, having arrived at this state of progression by the process of investigation. The tradition of water-color painting takes a jump into the new field of modernism, and Demuth has given us his knowledge of the difference between illustration, depiction, and the plastic realization of fact. Probably no young artist has accomplished a finer degree of artistic finesse in illustration than has Charles Demuth in his series of illustrations for "The Two Magics" of Henry James, or more explicitly to say "The Turn of the Screw". These pictures are to the true observer all that could be hoped for in imaginative sincerity as well as in technical elusiveness. Demuth has since that time stepped out of the confinement of water-color pure, over into the field of tempera, which brings it nearer to the sturdier mediums employed in the making of pictures evolving a greater severity of form and a commendable rigidity of line. He has learned like so many moderns that the ruled line offers greater advantages in pictorial structure. You shall find his approach to the spirit of Christopher Wren is as clear and direct as his feeling for the vastiness of New England speechlessness. He has come up beyond the dramatisation of emotion to the point of expression for its own sake. But he is nevertheless to be included among the arrived water-colorists, because his gifts for expression have been evolved almost entirely through this medium. There is then a fine American achievement in the art of water-color painting which may safely be called at this time a localized tradition. It has become an American realization.
THE APPEAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Photography is an undeniable esthetic problem upon our modern artistic horizon. The idea of photography as an art has been discussed no doubt ever since the invention of the pinhole. In the main, I have always said for myself that the kodak offers me the best substitute for the picture of life, that I have found. I find the snapshot, almost without exception, holding my interest for what it contains of simple registration of and adherence to facts for themselves. I have had a very definite and plausible aversion to the "artistic" photograph, and we have had more than a surfeit of this sort of production for the past ten or fifteen years. I have referred frequently in my mind to the convincing portraits by David Octavius Hill as being among the first examples of photographic portraiture to hold my own private interest as clear and unmanipulated expressions of reality; and it is a definite as well as irresistible quality that pervades these mechanical productions, the charm of the object for its own sake.
It was the irrelevant "artistic" period in photography that did so much to destroy the vital significance of photography as a type of expression which may be classed as among the real arts of today. And it was a movement that failed because it added nothing to the idea save a distressing superficiality. It introduced a fog on the brain, that was as senseless as it was embarrassing to the eye caring intensely for precision of form and accuracy of presentation. Photography was in this sense unfortunate in that it fell into the hands of adepts at the brush who sought to introduce technical variations which had nothing in reality to do with it and with which it never could have anything in common. All this sort of thing was produced in the age of the famous men and women, the period of eighteen ninety-five to nineteen hundred and ten say, for it was the age when the smart young photographer was frantic to produce famous sitters like Shaw and Rodin. We do not care anything about such things in our time because we now know that anybody well photographed according to the scope as well as the restrictions of the medium at hand could be, as has been proven, an interesting subject.
It has been seen, as Alfred Stieglitz has so clearly shown, that an eyebrow, a leg, a tree trunk, a body, a breast, a hand, any part being equal to the whole in its power to tell the story, could be made as interesting, more so indeed than all the famous people in existence. It doesn't matter to us in the least that Morgan and Richard Strauss helped fill a folio alongside of Maeterlinck and such like persons. All this was, of course, in keeping with the theatricism of the period in which it was produced, which is one of the best things to be said of it. But we do know that Whistler helped ruin photography along with Wilde who helped ruin esthetics. Everyone has his office nevertheless. As a consequence, Alfred Stieglitz was told by the prevailing geniuses of that time that he was a back number because of his strict adherence to the scientific nature of the medium, because he didn't manipulate his plate beyond the strictly technical advantages it offered, and it was not therefore a fashionable addition to the kind of thing that was being done by the assuming ones at that time. The exhibition of the life-work of Alfred Stieglitz in March, 1921, at the Anderson Galleries, New York, was a huge revelation even to those of us who along with our own ultra modern interests had found a place for good unadulterated photography in the scheme of our appreciation of the art production of this time.
I can say without a qualm that photography has always been a real stimulus to me in all the years I have been personally associated with it through the various exhibitions held along with those of modern painting at the gallery of the Photo-Secession, or more intimately understood as "291". Photography was an interesting foil to the kind of veracity that painting is supposed to express, or rather to say, was then supposed to express; for painting like all other ideas has changed vastly in the last ten years, and even very much since the interval created by the war. I might have learned this anywhere else, but I did get it from the Stieglitz camera realizations with more than perhaps the expected frequency, and I am willing to assert now that there are no portraits in existence, not in all the history of portrait realization either by the camera or in painting, which so definitely present, and in many instances with an almost haunting clairvoyance, the actualities existing in the sitter's mind and body and soul. These portraits are for me without parallel therefore in this particular. And I make bold with another assertion, that from our modern point of view the Stieglitz photographs are undeniable works of art, as are also the fine photographs of the younger men like Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand. Sheeler, being also one of our best modern painters, has probably added to his photographic work a different type of sensibility by reason of his experience in the so-called creative medium of painting. It is, as we know, brain matter that counts in a work of art, and we have dispensed once and for all with the silly notion that a work of art is made by hand. Art is first and last of all, a product of the intelligence.
I think the photographers must at least have been a trifle upset with this Stieglitz Exhibition. I know that many of the painters of the day were noticeably impressed. There was much to concern everyone there, in any degree that can be put upon us as interested spectators. For myself, I care nothing for the gift of interpretation, and far less for that dreadful type of effete facility which produces a kind of hocus-pocus technical brilliancy which fuddles the eye with a trickery, and produces upon the untrained and uncritical mind a kind of unintelligent hypnotism. Art these days is a matter of scientific comprehension of reality, not a trick of the hand or the old-fashioned manipulation of a brush or a tool. I am interested in presentation pure and simple. All things that are living are expression and therefore part of the inherent symbology of life. Art, therefore, that is encumbered with excessive symbolism is extraneous, and from my point of view, useless art. Anyone who understands life needs no handbook of poetry or philosophy to tell him what it is. When a picture looks like the life of the world, it is apt to be a fair picture or a good one, but a bad picture is nothing but a bad picture and it is bound to become worse as we think of it. And so for my own pleasure I have consulted the kodak as furnishing me with a better picture of life than many pictures I have seen by many of the so-called very good artists, and I have always delighted in the rotograph series of the Sunday papers because they are as close to life as any superficial representation can hope to be.
It was obvious then that many of those who saw the Stieglitz photographs, and there were large crowds of them, were non-plussed by the unmistakable authenticity of experience contained in them. If you stopped there you were of course mystified, but there is no mystery whatever in these productions, for they are as clear and I shall even go so far as to say as objective as the daylight which produced them, and aside from certain intimate issues they are impersonal as it is possible for an artist to be. It is this quality in them which makes them live for me as realities in the art world of modern time. All art calls for one variety of audacity or another and so these photographs unfold one type of audacity which is not common among works of art, excepting of course in highly accentuated instances of autographic revelation. It is the intellectual sympathy with all the subjects on exhibition which is revealed in these photographs: A kind of spiritual diagnosis which is seldom or never to be found among the photographers and almost never among the painters of the conventional portrait. This ability, talent, virtue, or genius, whatever you may wish to name it, is without theatricism and therefore without spectacular demonstration either of the sitter or the method employed in rendering them.
It is never a matter of arranging cheap and practically unrelated externals with Alfred Stieglitz. I am confident it can be said that he has never in his life made a spectacular photograph. His intensity runs in quite another channel altogether. It is far closer to the clairvoyant exposure of the psychic aspects of the moment, as contained in either the persons or the objects treated of. With these essays in character of Alfred Stieglitz, you have a series of types who had but one object in mind, to lend themselves for the use of the machine in order that a certain problem might be accurately rendered with the scientific end of the process in view, and the given actuality brought to the surface when possible. I see nothing in these portraits beyond this. I understand them technically very little only that I am aware that I have not for long, and perhaps never, seen plates that hold such depths of tonal value and structural relationship of light and shade as are contained in the hundred and fifty prints on exhibition in the Anderson Galleries. Art is a vastly new problem and this is the first thing which must be learned. Precisely as we learn that a certain type of painting ended in the history of the world with Cézanne.
There is an impulse now in painting toward photographic veracity of experience as is so much in evidence in the work of an artist of such fine perceptions as Ingres, with a brushing aside of all old-fashioned notions of what constitutes artistic experience. There is a deliberate revolt, and photography as we know it in the work of Alfred Stieglitz and the few younger men like Strand and Sheeler is part of the new esthetic anarchism which we as younger painters must expect to make ourselves responsible for. It must be remembered you know, that there has been a war, and art is in a condition of encouraging and stimulating renascence, and we may even go so far as to say that it is a greater world issue than it was previous to the great catastrophe. And also, it must be heralded that as far as art is concerned the end of the world has been seen. The true artist, if he is intelligent, is witness of this most stimulating truth that confronts us. We cannot hope to function esthetically as we did before all this happened, because we are not the same beings intellectually. This does not mean in relation to photography that all straight photography is good. It merely means that the kind of photography I must name "Fifth Avenue" art, is a conspicuous species of artistic bunkum, and must be recognized as such.
Photographers must know that fogging and blurring the image is curtailing the experience of it. It is a foolish notion that mystification is of any value. Flattery is one of the false elements that enter into the making of a work of art among the artists of doubtful integrity, but this is often if not always the commercial element that enters into it. There is a vast difference between this sort of representation and that which is to be found in Greek sculpture which is nothing short of conscious plastic organization. These figures were set up in terms of the prevailing systems of proportion. Portraits were likewise "arranged" through the artistry of the painter in matters of decoration for the great halls of the periods in which they were hung. They were studies on a large scale of ornamentation. Their beauty lies chiefly in the gift of execution. In these modern photographs of Stieglitz and his followers there is an engaging directness which cannot be and must not be ignored. They do for once give in the case of the portraits, and I mean chiefly of course the Stieglitz portraits, the actuality of the sitter without pose or theatricism of any sort, a rather rare thing to be said of the modern photograph.
Stieglitz, therefore, despite his thirty or more years of experimentation comes up among the moderns by virtue of his own personal attitude toward photography, and toward his, as well as its, relation to the subject. His creative power lies in his ability to diagnose the character and quality of the sitter as being peculiar to itself, as a being in relation to itself seen by his own clarifying insight into general and well as special character and characteristic. It need hardly be said that he knows his business technically for he has been acclaimed sufficiently all over the world by a series of almost irrelevant medals and honours without end. The Stieglitz exhibition is one that should have been seen by everyone regardless of any peculiar and special predilection for art. These photos will have opened the eye and the mind of many a sleeping one as to what can be done by way of mechanical device to approach the direct charm of life in nature.
The moderns have long since congratulated Alfred Stieglitz for his originality in the special field of his own creative endeavor. It will matter little whether the ancients do or not. His product is a fine testimonial to his time and therefore this is his contribution to his time. He finds himself, and perhaps to his own embarrassment even, among the best modern artists; for Stieglitz as I understand him cares little for anything beyond the rendering of the problem involved which makes him of course scientific first and whatever else afterward, which is the hope of the modern artists of all movements, regardless. Incidentally it may be confided he is an artistic idol of the Dadaists which is at least a happy indication of his modernism. If he were to shift his activities to Paris, he would be taken up at once for his actual value as modern artist expressing present day notions of actual things. Perhaps he will not care to be called Dada, but it is nevertheless true. He has ridden his own vivacious hobby-horse with as much liberty, and one may even say license, as is possible for one intelligent human being. There is no space to tell casually of his various aspects such as champion billiard player, racehorse enthusiast, etcetera. This information would please his dadaistic confrères, if no one else shows signs of interest.
SOME WOMEN ARTISTS IN MODERN PAINTING
It is for the purpose of specialization that the term woman is herewith applied to the idea of art in painting. Art is for anyone naturally who can show degree of mastery in it. There have been a great many women poets and musicians as well as actors, though singularly enough the women painters of history have been few, and for that matter in question of proportion remain so. Whatever the wish may be in point of dismissing the idea of sex in painting, there has so often been felt among many women engaging to express themselves in it, the need to shake off marked signs of masculinity, and even brutishness of attack, as denoting, and it must be said here, a factitious notion of power. Power in painting does not come from muscularity of arm; it comes naturally from the intellect. There are a great many male painters showing too many signs of femininity in their appreciation and the conception of art in painting. Art is neither male nor female. Nevertheless, it is pleasing to find women artists such as I wish to take up here, keeping to the charm of their own feminine perceptions and feminine powers of expression. It is their very femininity which makes them distinctive in these instances. This does not imply lady-like approach or womanly attitude of moral. It merely means that their quality is a feminine quality.
In the work of Madame Delaunay Terck, who is the wife of Delaunay, the French Orphiste, which I have not seen since the war came on, one can say that she was then running her husband a very close second for distinction in painting and intelligence of expression. When two people work so closely in harmony with each other, it is and will always remain a matter of difficulty in knowing just who is the real expressor of an idea. Whatever there is of originality in the idea of Orphisme shall be credited to Delaunay as the inventor, but whether his own examples are more replete than those of Mme. Delaunay Terck is not easy of statement. There was at that time a marked increase of virility in production over those of Delaunay himself, but these are matters of private personal attack. Her Russian temper was probably responsible for this, at least no doubt, assisted considerably. There was nevertheless at that time marked evidence that she was in mastery of the idea of Orphisme both as to conception and execution. She showed greater signs of virility in her approach than did Delaunay himself. There was in his work a deal of what Gertrude Stein then called "white wind", a kind of thin escaping in the method. The designs did not lock so keenly. His work had always typical charm if it had not always satisfying vigor. His "Tour Eiffel" and a canvas called "Rugby" I think, I remember as having more grace than depth, but one may say nevertheless, real distinction.
In the exchanging of ideas so intimately as has happened splendidly between Picasso and Braque, which is in the nature of professional dignity among artists, there is bound to be more or less confusion even to the highly perceptive artist and this must therefore confuse the casual observer and layman. So it is, or was at that time with the painting of Robert Delaunay and Mme. Delaunay Terck; what you learned in this instance was that the more vigorous of the pictures were hers. She showed the same strength and style in her work as in her interesting personality which was convincing without being too strained or forced; she was most probably an average Russian woman which as one knows means a great deal as to intelligence and personal power.