With Special Praises for Jennie Vanvleet Cowdery
Some of the finest instances of pure painting will be found, not as might be imagined by the layman, among the professional artists, but among those amateurs whose chief occupation is amusing themselves first of all. If you who read will make close reference to those rich examples of the mid-Victorian period, when it was more or less distinguished to take up painting along with the other accomplishments, you will find that the much tabooed antimacassar period produced a species of painting that was as indicative of personal style and research as it was fresh in its elemental approach. The perfect instance in modern art of this sort of original painting raised to the highest excellence is that of Henri Rousseau, the true primitive of our so eclectic modern period. No one can have seen a picture of this most talented douanier without being convinced that technique for purely private personal needs has been beautified to an extraordinary degree.
Rousseau stands among the very best tonalists as well as among the best designers of modern time, and his pictures hold a quality so related to the experience contained in their subjects, as to seem like the essence of the thing itself. You feel that unquestionably Rousseau's Paris is Paris, and you are made to feel likewise that his jungle scenes are at very least his own experiences of his earlier life in Mexico. Rousseau convinces by his unquestionable sensitivity and integrity of approach. He was not fabricating an art, he was endeavoring to create a real picture for his own private satisfaction, and his numerous successes are both convincing and admirable.
As I have said, if you have access to a variety of amateur pictures created during the mid-Victorian era, of whatever style or subject, you will find in them the most admirably sincere qualities of painting as well as singularly enchanting gifts for simplication and the always engaging respect for the fact itself out of which these painted romanzas are created. There was the type of memorial picture for instance, with its proverbial tombstone, its weeping willow tree, and its mourner leaning with one elbow, usually on the cornice above, where the name of the beloved deceased is engraved; below it the appropriate motto and its added wealth of ornamentation in the way of landscape, with houses, hills, winding roads, with maybe an animal or two grazing in the field, and beyond all this vista, an ocean with pretty vessels passing on their unmindful way, and more often than not, many species of bright flowers in the foreground to heighten the richness of memory and the sentimental aspects of bereavement.
I wish I could take you to two perfect examples of this sort of amateur painting which I have in mind, now in the possession of the Maine Historical Society, of Portland, Maine, as well as one other superb and still more perfect example of this sort of luxuriously painted memory of life, in the collection of a noted collector of mid-Victorian splendours, near Boston. It is sensation at first hand with these charmingly impressive amateur artists. They have been hampered in no way with the banality of school technique learned in the manner of the ever-present and unoriginal copyist. They literally invent expression out of a personally accumulated passion for beauty and they have become aware of it through their own intensely personalised contact with life. The marine painters of this period, and earlier, of which there have been almost numberless instances, and of whose fine performances there are large numbers on view in the Marine Museum in Salem, Mass., offer further authentication of private experience with phases of life that men of the sea are sure to know, the technical beauty alone of which furnishes the spectator with many surprises and fascinations in the line of simplicity and directness of expression.
Many of these amateur painters were no longer young in point of actual years. Henri Rousseau was as we know past forty when he was finally driven to painting in order to establish his own psychic entity. And so it is with all of them, for there comes a certain need somewhere in the consciousness of everyone, to offset the tedium of common experience with some degree of poetic sublimation. With the result that many of them find their way out by taking to paints and brushes and canvas, astonishing many a real painter, if not the untutored layman, who probably expects to be mystified in one way or another by something which he thinks he does not understand. It is of the charming pictures of Jennie Vanvleet Cowdery that I wish to speak here.
Mrs. Cowdery is a southern lady, and of this fact you become aware instantly you find yourself in conversation with her. She evidences all the traits and characteristics of a lady of her period, which is to say the late mid-Victorian, for she must have been a graceful young woman herself at the close of this fascinating period. And you find, therefore, in her quaint and convincingly original pictures, the passion for the charms and graces that were consistent with the period in which she spent her girlhood, and which has left upon her consciousness so dominant a trace. The pictures of Mrs. Cowdery, despite their remoteness of surrounding—for she always places her graceful figures, which are no less than the embodiments of her own graceful states of being, in a dense woodland scene—bring up to the senses all the fragrances of that past time, the redolence of the oleander by the wall, of the camelia in the shadow, and of the pansy by the hedge. You expect these ladies to shake gently upon the air, like flowers in the morning, their own fascinating perfumes, as you expect them to recite in the quietude of the wood in which they are walking those sentiments which are appropriate to the season and of other soft remembrances.
Mrs. Cowdery might have taken to needlework, and sat like many another young woman of that time by the window with the sunlight streaming in upon the coloured stitches of her work, or she might perhaps more strictly have taken to miniature painting, the quality of which style is so much in evidence in these pleasant pictures of hers. The pictures of Mrs. Cowdery will not stimulate the spectator to reflect with gravity upon the size of the universe, but they dwell entirely upon the intimate charm of it, the charm that rises out of breeding and cultivation, and a feeling for the finer graces of the body and sweet purities of mind. Mrs. Cowdery is essentially a breather and a bringer of peace. There is no purpose in these gracious and entertaining pictures, for they are invented solely to recall and make permanent, for this lady's own delight, those moments of joy of which there must have been many if the gentleness and the clear quality of revery in them is to be taken; and these pictures are to be taken first and last as genuine works of art in their own way, which is the only way that true works of art can be taken seriously.
The most conspicuous virtue of these quaintly engaging pictures of Mrs. Cowdery is the certainty you find in them of the lack of struggle. Their author is, without doubt, at peace with the world, for the world is without significance in the deeper sense to all really serious artists, those who have vital information to convey. Mrs. Cowdery's career as a painter is of short and impressive duration, barely four years she confides, and she has been an engaging feature of the Society of Independent Artists for at least three of these years, I believe. It is her picture which she names "1869" which has called most attention to her charming talents, and which created so convincing an impression among the artists for its originality and its insistence upon the rendering of beautified personal experience.
Mrs. Cowdery must have loved her earliest girlish hours with excessive delight, and perhaps it is the garish contrast of the youth of the young women of this time, energetic and, from the mid-Victorian standpoint certainly, so unwomanly, that prompts this gentle and refined woman to people her gracious solitudes of spirit with those still more gracious lady-like beings which she employs. For her pictures, that is her most typical ones, contain always these groupings of figures in crinoline-like gowns with perhaps more of the touch of eighteen-eighty than of seventy in them, so given to flounces and cascades of lace with picture hats to shade the eyes, and streamers of velvet ribbon to give attenuated sensations of grace to their quietly sweeping figures that seem to be always in a state of harmless gossip among themselves. One never knows whether it is to be quite morning or afternoon for there is seldom or never present the quality of direct sunlight; but as ladies and gentlemen usually walk in the afternoon even now, if there are still such virtuous entities as ladies and gentlemen, we may presume that these are afternoon seances, poetically inscribed, which Mrs. Cowdery wishes to convey to us. That Mrs. Cowdery has a well adjusted feeling for the harmony of hues is evident in her production as well as in the outline of her simple and engaging conversation.
Thus the lady lives, in a world gently fervorous with lyric delicacies, and her own almost girlish laughter is like a kind of gracious music for the scenes she wishes to portray. I am reminded in this instance to compare her gentle voice with the almost inaudible one of Albert Ryder, that greatest of visionaries which America has so far produced. It is probable that all mystical types have voices softened to whispers by the vastness of the experience which they have endured. These gentle souls survive the period they were born in, and it is their clean and unspoiled vision that brings them over to us in this hectic and metallic era of ours. They come, it must be remembered, from the era of Jenny Lind and Castle Garden, though of course in Mrs. Cowdery's case she is too young actually to have survived that period literally. It is the grace of that period, however, to which she has become heir and all her efforts have been exercised in rendering of the graces of this playful and pretty hour of human life.
We are reminded, for the moment only, of Monticelli, chiefly through similarity of subject, for he also was fond of the silent park inhabited with gracious beings in various states of spiritual ecstasy and satisfaction. In the pictures of Mrs. Cowdery there is doubtless greater intimacy of feeling, because it is a private and very personal issue with her own happy soul. She has come out on the other edge of the horizon of the world of humans, and finds the looking backward so imperatively exquisite as to make it necessary for her to paint them with innocent fidelity; and so she has set about, without any previous experience in the handling of homely materials, to make them tell in quaint and gracious accents the pretty story of the life of her revivified imagination. In these ways she becomes a kind of revivification of the spirit of Watteau, who has made perfect, for us all, what is perfect in the classicized ideality of experience.
I think of Mrs. Cowdery's pictures as mid-Victorian fans, for they seem more like these frail shapes to be wafted by frail and slender hands; I seem to feel the quiet glitter of prisms hanging from huge chandeliers in a ball-room, as I look at them; for they become, if you do not scrutinize them too closely as works of art, rather as prismatic memories bathed in the light of that other time, when men and women now grandfathers and grandmothers were young and handsome boys and girls, seeking each other out in the fashion of polite beaus and belles, a period that will never come again, it is certain. Mrs. Cowdery need not be alarmed that modern painters wish to offer plain homage to her fresh and engaging talents. It is an object lesson, if such is necessary, to all men and women past fifty: that there is still something for each of them to do in a creative way; and I can think of no more engaging way for them than to recite the romantic history of their youthful longings and realizations to a world that has little time for making history so romantically inoffensive.
Mrs. Cowdery may be complimented therefore that she has followed her professional daughter's advice to take up painting as a pastime, and she has already shown in these brief four years, with all the intermissions that are natural to any ordinary life, that she is a fine type of amateur artist with all the world of rediscovery at her disposal. She will be hampered in no way with the banalities of instruction offered her by the assuming ones. She is beyond the need of anything but self-invention, and this will be her own unique and satisfying pleasure. It is in no way amiss, then, to congratulate Mrs. Cowdery upon her new and vital artistic career. That she will have further success is proven by the few pictures already created by her. They show the unmistakable signs of taste and artistic comprehension as applied to her own spiritual vision. No intervention will be of any avail, save perhaps the permissible intervention of praise and congratulations.
Incidentally, I would recommend to those artists who are long since jaded with repetition and success, and there are many of them, to refresh their eyes and their senses with the work of these outwardly unassuming but thoroughly convincing amateurs, like Henri Rousseau, Mrs. Cowdery and the many others whose names do not appear on their handsome works of art. There is such freshness of vision and true art experience contained in them. They rely upon the imagination entirely for their revelations, and there is always present in these unprofessional works of art acute observation of fact and fine gifts for true fancy. These amateurs are never troubled with the "how" of mediocre painting; neither are they troubled with the wiles of the outer world. They remain always charming painters of personal visionary experience, and as such are entitled to praise for their genuine gifts in rendering, as well as for a natural genius for interpretation.
HENRI ROUSSEAU
Not long since, we heard much of naïveté—it was the fashion among the schools and the lesser individuals to use this term in describing the work of anyone who sought to distinguish himself by eccentricity of means. It was often the term applied to bizarrerie—it was fashionable to draw naïvely, as it was called. We were expected to believe in a highly developed and overstrained simplicity, it was the resort of a certain number who wanted to realize speedy results among the unintelligent. It was a pose which lasted not long because it was obviously a pose, and a pose not well carried, it had not the prescribed ease about it and showed signs of labor. It had, for a time, its effect upon really intelligent artists with often respectable results, as it drew the tendency away from too highly involved sophistication. It added a fresh temper in many ways, and helped men to a franker type of self-expression; and was, as we may expect, something apart from the keen need of obliviousness in the great modern individualists, those who were seeking direct contact with subject.
We have learned in a short space of time that whatever was exceptional in the ideas and attitudes of the greater ones, as we know them, was not at all the outcome of the struggle toward an affected naïveté such as we have heard so much about, but was, on another hand, a real phase of their originality, the other swing of the pendulum, so to call it. It was the "accent" of their minds and tempers, it was a true part of their personal gesture, and was something they could not, and need not, do anything about, as if it were the normal tendency in them in their several ways. We all of us know that modern art is not haphazard, it is not hit or miss in its intention at least, certainly not the outcome of oddity, of whim, or of eccentricity, for these traits belong to the superficial and cultivated. We have found that with the best moderns there has been and is inherent in them the same sincerity of feeling, the same spirit directing their research. The single peculiarity of modern art therefore, if such there be, is its special relationship to the time in which it is being produced, explicitly of this age.
What we know of the men, much or little, proves that they are, and have all been, simple earnest men, intelligent, following nowise blindly in pursuit of fresh sensation, excitement, a mere phantasy, or freak of the mind. It was, and is, the product of a logic essentially of themselves, and of the period they represent; and because this period is not the period of sentimentality in art, but a period striving toward a more vigorous type of values—something as beautiful as the machinery of our time—it is not as yet to any great degree cared for, understood nor, up to very recently, even trusted. It has destroyed old fashioned romance, and the common eye has ceased to focus, or rather, does not wish to concentrate on things which do not visualize the literary sensation. In the midst of all this struggle was Henri Rousseau, the real and only naif of this time, and certainly among the truest of all times. As much as a man can remain child, Rousseau remained the child, and as much as a man could be naïve and childlike, certainly it was this simple artist who remained so.
If report has the truth correctly, Rousseau began his career as painter at the age of forty, though it is quite possible and probable that he was painting whenever he could, in his untutored fashion, in all of his spare intervals, and with but one object in view apparent: to give forth in terms of painting those phases of his own personal life which remained indelibly impressed upon his memory, pictorially always vivid to him, as in his pictures they are seen to be the scenes or incidents of loveliness to his fine imagination. We find them covering a rather wide range of experience, apparently in two places, somewhere in the tropics of Mexico, and Paris; the former, experiences of youth in some sort of governmental service I believe, and the latter, the more intimate phases of life about him in Paris, of Paris herself and of those people who created for him the intimacy of his home life, and the life which centered about the charming rue de Perelle where he lived.
In Rousseau then, we have one of the finest individual expressions of the amateur spirit in painting, taking actually a place among the examples of paintings, such as those of the Kwakiutl Indians, or the sculpture of the Congo people, partaking of the very same quality of directness and simplicity, and of contact with the prevailing image chosen for representation. He was too evidently the product of himself, he was not hybrid, nor was he in any sense something strange springing up out of the soil in the dark of night, he was not mushroom. He did not know the meaning of affectation, and I doubt if he even knew what was meant by simplicity, so much was he that element himself.
It is with fascination that we think of him as living his life out after his discharge for incompetency from the customs service outside the fortifications of Paris, and doubtless with the strain of poverty upon him also, within a ten minutes' walk from the world famous quartiers, and almost certainly knowing nothing of them. That there was a Julian's or a Colarossi's anywhere about, it is not likely that he knew, or if he knew, not more than vaguely. He drew his quaint inspirations directly from the sources of nature and some pencil drawings I have seen prove the high respect and admiration, amounting to love and worship, which he had for nature and the phenomena of her, to be disclosed at every hedge.
If he was no success as a douanier, he was learning a great deal, meanwhiles, about those delicate and radiant skies which cover Paris at all times, charming always for their lightness and delicacy, pearl-like in their quiet splendour; and it was during this service of his at the city's gates that he learned his lovely sense of blacks and greys and silvers, of which Paris offers so much always, and which predominate in his canvases. Even his tropical scenes strive in no way toward artificiality of effect, but give rather the sense of their profundity than of oddity, of their depth and mystery than of peculiarity. He gives us the sense of having been at home in them in his imagination, being so well at home in those scenes of Paris which were daily life to him. We find in Rousseau true naïveté, without struggle, real child-likeness of attitude and of emotion, following diligently with mind and with spirit the forms of those stored images that have registered themselves with directness upon the area of his imagination, never to be forgotten, rendered with perfect simplicity for us in these quaint pictures of his, superb in the richness of quality which makes of them, what they are to the eye that is sympathetic to them, pictures out of a life undisturbed by all the machinations and intrigues of the outer world, a life intimate with itself, remote from all agencies having no direct association with it, living with a sweet gift of enchantment with the day's disclosures, occupied apparently with nothing beyond the loveliness contained in them.
There is not once, anywhere, a striving of the mind in the work of this simple man. It was a wealth of innocence that tinged all his methods, and his pictures are as simple in their appeal as are the declarations of Jacob Boehme—they are the songs of innocence and experience of a nature for whom all the world was beautiful, and have about them the element of song itself, a poetry that has not yet reached the shaping of words. Who looks at the pictures of this true and charming naif, will find nothing to wonder at beyond this extreme simplicity, he had no prescribed attitude, no fixity of image that characterizes every touch of school. He was taught only by nature and consulted only her relationships and tendencies. There is never a mistaking of that. Nature was his influence, and he saw with an untrammelled eye the elemental shape of all things, and affixed no falsity of feeling, or anything, to his forms which might have detracted from their extreme simplicity. He had "first sight," first contact with the image, and sought nothing else beyond this, and a very direct correspondence with memories dictated all his efforts.
That Rousseau was musical, is shown in the natural grace of his compositions, and his ideas were simple as the early songs of France are simple, speaking of everyday things with simple heart and voice, and he painted frankly what he saw in precisely the way he saw it. We, who love richness and sobriety of tone, will never tire of Rousseau's beautiful blacks and greys, and probably no one has excelled them for delicacy of appreciation, and perfection of gradation. It will be long before the landscapes will be forgotten, it will be long before the exquisite portrait of the "Child with the Harlequin" will fade from remembrance, we shall remember them all for their loveliness in design, a gift which never failed him, no matter what the subject. Simple arabesque, it was the jungle that taught him this, and therein lay his special power, a genuine feeling for the richness of laces and brocades in full and subdued tones, such as one would find in the elaborate intricacies of tropical foliage, strange leaves intermingled with parrots, monkeys, strange white lilies on high stalks, tigers peering through highly ornate foliage and branches intertwined, all excellently suggestive of that foreign land in which the mind wanders and finds itself so much at home.
"Le Charmeur," "Jadwigha," in these are concentrated all that is lovely in the land of legend; and, like all places of legend, replete with imaginative beauty, the places where loveliness and beauty of form congregate, after they have passed through the sensuous spaces of the eye travelling somewhere to an abode where all those things are that are perfect, they live forever. Rousseau was a charming and lovable child, whether he was painting or whether he was conducting his own little orchestra, composed of those people who kept shop around his home, and it is as the child of his time that he must be considered, child in verity among the sophisticated moderns who believed and believe more in intellect than in anything else, many of whom paid tribute to him, and reverenced him, either in terms of sincere friendship, or by occasional visit. The various anecdotes, touching enough, are but further proof of the innocence of this so simple and untutored person.
The real amateur spirit has, we like to think, much in its favor, if only for its freshness, its spontaneity, and a very gratifying naturalness. Rousseau was all of this, and lived in a world untouched, he wove about himself, like other visionaries, a soft veil hiding all that was grossly unreal to him from all that was real, and for Rousseau, those things and places he expressed existed vividly for him, and out of them his pictures became true creations. He was the real naif, because he was the real child, unaffected and unspoiled, and painting was for him but the key of heaven that he might open another door for the world's weary eye.
PART TWO
THE TWILIGHT OF THE ACROBAT
Where is our once charming acrobat—our minstrel of muscular music? What has become of these groups of fascinating people gotten up in silk and spangle? Who may the evil genius be who has taken them and their fascinating art from our stage, who the ogre of taste that has dispensed with them and their charm? How seldom it is in these times that one encounters them, as formerly when they were so much the charming part of our lighter entertainment. What are they doing since popular and fickle notions have removed them from our midst?
It is two years since I have seen the American stage. I used to say to myself in other countries, at least America is the home of real variety and the real lover of the acrobat. But I hear no one saying much for him these days, and for his charming type of art.
What has become of them all, the graceful little lady of the slack wire, those charming and lovely figures that undulate upon the air by means of the simple trapeze, those fascinating ensembles and all the various types of melodic muscular virtuosity?
We have been given much, of late, of that virtuosity of foot and leg which is usually called dancing; and that is excellent among us here, quite the contribution of the American, so singularly the product of this special physique. Sometimes I think there are no other dancers but Americans. It used to be so delightful a diversion watching our acrobat and his group with their strong and graceful bodies writhing with rhythmical certitude over a bar or upon a trapeze against a happily colored space. Now we get little more in the field of acrobatics beyond a varied buck and wing; everything seems tuxedoed for drawing room purposes. We get no more than a decent handspring or two, an over-elaborated form of split. It all seems to be over with our once so fashionable acrobat. There is no end of good stepping, as witness the Cohan Revue, a dancing team in Robinson Crusoe, Jr., and "Archie and Bertie" (I think they call themselves). This in itself might be called the modern American school: the elongated and elastic gentleman who finds his co-operator among the thin ones of his race, artistically speaking. I did not get to the circus this year, much to my regret; perhaps I would have found my lost genius there, among the animals disporting themselves in less charitable places. But we cannot follow the circus naturally, and these minstrel folk are disappearing rapidly. Variety seems quite to have given them up and replaced them with often very tiresome and mediocre acts of singing.
How can one forget, for instance, the Famille Bouvier who used to appear regularly at the fêtes in the streets of Paris in the summer season, living all of them in a roving gipsy wagon as is the custom of these fête people. What a charming moment it was always to see the simple but well built Mlle. Jeanne of twenty-two pick up her stalwart and beautifully proportioned brother of nineteen, a strong, broad-shouldered, manly chap, and balance him on one hand upright in the air. It was a classic moment in the art of the acrobat, interesting to watch the father of them all training the fragile bodies of the younger boys and girls to the systematic movement of the business while the mother sat in the doorway of the caravan nursing the youngest at the breast, no doubt the perfect future acrobat. And how charming it was to look in at the doors of these little houses on wheels and note the excellent domestic order of them, most always with a canary or a linnet at the curtained window and at least one cat or dog or maybe both. This type is the progenitor of our stage acrobat, it is the primitive stage of these old-time troubadours, and it is still prevalent in times of peace in France. The strong man gotten in tawdry pink tights and much worn black velvet with his very elaborate and drawn out speeches, in delicate French, concerning the marvels of his art and the long wait for the stipulated number of dix centimes pieces before his marvellous demonstration could begin. This is, so to say, the vagabond element of our type of entertainment, the wandering minstrel who keeps generation after generation to the art of his forefathers, this fine old art of the pavement and the open country road. But we look for our artist in vain these days, those groups whose one art is the exquisite rhythmical display of the human body, concerted muscular melody. We cannot find him on the street in the shade of a stately chestnut tree as once in Paris we found him at least twice a year, and we seek him in vain in our modern music hall.
Is our acrobatic artist really gone to his esthetic death; has he given his place permanently to the ever present singing lady who is always telling you who her modiste is, sings a sentimental song or two and then disappears; to the sleek little gentleman who dances off a moment or two to the tune of his doll-like partner whose voice is usually littler than his own? Perhaps our acrobat is still the delight of those more characteristic audiences of the road whose taste is less fickle, less blasé. This is so much the case with the arts in America—the fashions change with the season's end and there is never enough of novelty; dancing is already dying out, skating will not prevail for long among the idle; what shall we predict for our variety which is in its last stages of boredom for us?
I suspect the so-called politeness of vaudeville of the elimination of our once revered acrobats. The circus notion has been replaced by the parlor entertainment notion. Who shall revive them for us, who admire their simple and unpretentious art; why is there not someone among the designers with sufficient interest in this type of beauty to make attractive settings for them, so that we may be able to enjoy them at their best, which in the theater we have never quite been able to do—designs that will in some way add luster to an already bright and pleasing show of talents.
I can see, for instance, a young and attractive girl bareback rider on a cantering white horse inscribing wondrous circles upon a stage exquisitely in harmony with herself and her white or black horse as the case might be; a rich cloth of gold backdrop carefully suffused with rose. There could be nothing handsomer, for example, than young and graceful trapezists swinging melodically in turquoise blue doublets against a fine peacock background or it might be a rich pale coral—all the artificial and spectacular ornament dispensed with. We are expected to get an exceptional thrill when some dull person appears before a worn velvet curtain to expatiate with inappropriate gesture upon a theme of Chopin or of Beethoven, ideas and attitudes that have nothing whatsoever to do with the musical intention; yet our acrobat whose expression is certainly as attractive, if not much more so generally, has always to perform amid fatigued settings of the worst sort against red velvet of the most depraved shade possible. We are tired of the elaborately costumed person whose charms are trivial and insignificant, we are well tired also of the ordinary gentleman dancer and of the songwriter, we are bored to extinction by the perfectly dull type of playlet which features some well known legitimate star for illegitimate reasons. Our plea is for the re-creation of variety into something more conducive to light pleasure for the eye, something more conducive to pleasing and stimulating enjoyment. Perhaps the reinstatement of the acrobat, this revival of a really worthy kind of expression, would effect the change, relieve the monotony. The argument is not too trivial to present, since the spectator is that one for whom the diversion is provided.
I hear cries all about from people who once were fond of theater and music hall that there is an inconceivable dullness pervading the stage; the habitual patron can no longer endure the offerings of the present time with a degree of pleasure, much less with ease. It has ceased to be what it once was, what its name implies. If the old school inclined toward the rough too much, then certainly the new inclines distressingly toward the refined—the stage that once was so full of knockabout is now so full of stand-still; variety that was once a joy is now a bore. Just some uninteresting songs at the piano before a giddy drop is not enough these days; and there are too many of such. There is need of a greater activity for the eye. The return of the acrobat in a more modern dress would be the appropriate acquisition, for we still have appreciation for all those charming geometrics of the trapeze, the bar, and the wire.
It is to be hoped that these men will return to us, stimulating anew their delightful kind of poetry of the body and saving our variety performances from the prevailing plague of monotone.
VAUDEVILLE
I have but recently returned from the vaudeville of the centuries. Watching the kick and the glide of very ancient performers. I have spent a year and a half down in the wonderful desert country of the Southwest. I have wearied, however, of the ancient caprice, and turn with great delight to my old passion, vaudeville. I return with glee to the ladies and gentlemen and pet animals of the stage, including the acrobats. Is there one who cares for these artists and for their rhythmical gesture more than myself? I cannot think so. I have wished with a real desire to create new sets for them, to establish an altogether new tradition as regards the background of these charming artists. If that were the chosen field for my esthetic activities, I should be famous by now for the creation of sets and drops by which these exceptional artists might make a far more significant impression upon the type of public they essay to interest and amuse.
I would begin first of all by severing them from the frayed traditions of worn plush and sequin, rid them of the so inadequate back drop such as is given them, the scene of Vesuvius in eruption, or the walk in the park at Versailles. They need first of all large plain spaces upon which to perform, and enjoy their own remarkably devised patterns of body. I speak of the acrobats, the animals, the single and double dancers who perform "down in one" more especially. The so called headliners have their plush parlours with the inevitable purple or rose lamp, and the very much worn property piano just barely in tune. Only the dressmaker and the interior decorator can do things for them, as we see in the case of Kitty Gordon. It is to be hoped that a Beardsley of the stage will one day appear and really do something for the dainty type of person or the superbly theatric artist such as Miss Gordon, Valeska Suratt, and the few other remarkable women of the vaudeville stage.
I am more concerned with the less appreciated artists. I would see that they glitter by their own brilliance. Why, for instance, should a fine act like the Four Danubes and others of their quality be tagged on to the end of a bill, at which time the unmannerly public decides to go home or hurry to some roof or other, or dining place?
I should like seeing the Brothers Rath likewise, perhaps as refined acrobatic artists as have been seen on our stage for some time, in a set that would show them to better advantage, and give the public a greater intimacy with the beauty of their act than can be had beyond the first six rows of the Winter Garden. They are interposed there as a break between burlesques, which is not the place for them. I would "give" them the stage while they are on it. Theirs is a muscular beauty which has not been excelled. I have no doubt that if I attempted to establish these ideas with the artists whom I spend so much time in championing, they would no doubt turn aside with the word "highbrow" on their lips. They would have to be shown that they need these things, that they need the old-fashioned ideas removed, and fresher ones put in their place. I have expressed this intention once before in print, perhaps not so vehemently. I should like to elaborate. I want a Metropolitan Opera for my project. An orchestra of that size for the larger concerted groups, numbers of stringed instruments for the wirewalkers and jugglers, a series of balanced woodwinds for others, and so on down the line, according to the quality of the performer. There should be a large stage for many elephants, ponies, dogs, tigers, seals. The stage should then be made more intimate for the solos, duets, trios, and quartets among the acrobats. I think a larger public should be made aware of the beauty and skill of these people, who spend their lives in perfecting grace and power of body, creating the always fascinating pattern and form, orchestration if you will, the orchestration of the muscles into a complete whole. You will of course say, go to the circus, and get it all at once. The circus is one of the most charming places in existence, because it is one of the last words in orchestrated physical splendour. But the circus is too diffused, too enormous in this country to permit of concentrated interest, attention, or pleasure. One goes away with many little bits. It is because the background is made up of restless nervous dots, all anxious to get the combined quota which they have paid for, when in reality they do not even get any one thing. It is the alert eye which can go over three rings and two stages at once and enjoy the pattern of each of them. It is a physical impossibility really.
I think we should be made aware in finer ways of the artists who open and close our bills. Why must the headliner always be a talking or a singing person who tells you how much money he needs, or how much she is getting? There is more than one type of artistic personality for those who care for vaudeville. Why doesn't a team like the Rath Brothers, for example, find itself the feature attraction? Must there always be the string of unnecessary little men and women who have such a time trying to fill up their twenty-two minutes or their fourteen? Why listen forever to puppy-like song writers when one can hear and watch a great artist like Ella Shields? My third visit to Ella Shields convinces me that she is one of the finest artists I have ever heard, certainly as fine in her way as Guilbert and Chevalier were. It is a rare privilege to be able to enjoy artists like Grock—Mark Sheridan—who is now dead, I am told. Mark, with his "They all walk the wibbly-wobbly walk, they all wear the wibbly-wobbly ties," and so on. Mark is certainly being missed by a great many who care for the pleasure of the moment. When I look at and listen to the aristocratic artist Ella Shields, I feel a quality in her of the impeccable Mrs. Fiske. And then I am thinking of another great woman, Fay Templeton. What a pity we must lose them either by death or by decisions in life. Ella Shields with her charming typification of "Burlington Bertie from Bow."
The other evening as I listened to Irene Franklin, I heard for certain what I had always thought were notes from the magic voice of dear old Fay. Unforgettable Fay. How can one ever say enough about her? I think of Fay along with my single glimpses of Duse, Ada Rehan, Coquelin. You see how I love her, then. Irene Franklin has the quality of imitation of the great Fay without, I think, the real magic. Nevertheless I enjoy her, and I am certain she has never been finer than now. She has enriched herself greatly by her experiences the last two years, and seems at the height of her power. It was good to get, once again, little glimpses of her Childs waitress and the chambermaid. It seemed to me that there was a richer quality of atmosphere in the little Jewish girl with the ring curls and the red mittens, as also in her French girl with, by the way, a beautiful gown of rich yellow silk Frenchily trimmed in vermilion or orange, I couldn't make out which. The amusing French girl, who having picked up many fag-ends of English from her experience with the soldats Américains—got her "animals" mixed—"you have my goat, I have your goat, et—tie ze bull outside," and so on. I am crossing Irene and Fay here because I think them similar, only I must say I think the magic was greater in Fay, because possibly Fay was the greater student of emotion. Fay had the undercurrent, and Irene has perfected the surface. If Irene did study Fay at any time, and I say this respectfully, she perhaps knows that Fay went many times to Paris to study Rejane. The light entertainer is, as we know, very often a person of real intellect.
If you want distinction, then, you will get it in the presence of Ella Shields. Her "Burlington Bertie" is nothing less than a chef d'œuvre; "Tom Lipton, he's got lots of 'oof—he sleeps on the roof, and I sleep in the room over him." Bertie, who, having been slapped on the back by the Prince of Wales (and some others) and asked why he didn't go and dine with "Mother," replied—"I can't, for I've just had a banana with Lady Diana.... I'm Burlington Bertie from Bow." Miss Shields shows also that she can sing a sentimental song without slushing it all over with saccharine. She has mastered the droll English quality of wit with real perfection. I regret I never saw Vesta Tilley, with whom the old tops compare her so favourably. Superb girls all these, Fay, Ella, Cissie, Vesta, as well as Marie Lloyd, and the other inimitable Vesta—Victoria.
Among the "coming soon," we have Miss Juliet, whom I recall with so much pleasure from the last immemorable Cohan Revue. I wait for her. I consider myself fortunate to be let in on James Watts. We thought our Eddy Foy a comic one. He was, for I remember the Gibson girl with the black velvet gown and the red flannel undershirt. I swing my swagger stick in the presence of Mr. Watts by way of applause. His art is very delicately understood and brought out. It has a fine quality of broad caricature with a real knowledge of economy such as Grock is master of. The three episodes are certainly funny enough. I find myself caring more for the first, called "June Day," since he reminds me so strongly in make-up of the French caricaturists in drawing, Rouveyre and Toulouse-Lautrec. Mr. Watts's feeling for satirical make-up is a fine shade of artistry in itself. He has excellent feeling for the broad contrast and for fierce insinuation at the same time. If you want real unalloyed fun, Mr. Watts will supply you. Nor will Grock disappoint you. Quite on the contrary, no matter what you are expecting.
I do not know why I think of vaudeville as I think of a collection of good drawings. Unless it is because the sense of form is the same in all of the arts. The acrobat certainly has line and mass to think of, even if that isn't his primal concern. He knows how he decorates the space on which he operates. To make another comparison, then, Grock is the Forain of vaudeville. He achieves great plastic beauty with distinguished economy of means. He dispenses with all superfluous gesture, as does the great French illustrator. Grock is entirely right about clownery. You are either funny or you are not. No amount of study will produce the gift for humour. It is there, or it isn't. Grock's gift for musicianship is a singular combination to find with the rest of his artistry. It goes with the remarkably refined look in his face, however, as he sits upon the back of the seatless chair, and plays the little concertina with superb execution. There are no "jumps" in Grock's performance. His moods flow from one into another with a masterly smoothness, and you are aware when he is finished that you have never seen that sort of foolery before. Not just that sort. It is the good mind that satisfies, as in the case of James Watts, and Miss Shields.
From elephants carrying in their trunks chatelaines of Shetland ponies, curtseying at the close of the charming act like a pretty miss at her first coming out, to such work as the Four Danubes give you as the closing number, with Irene as a lead, you are, to say the least, carried over the dreadful spots, such as the young man who sways out like a burlesque queen and tells you whom he was with before Keith got him. His name should be "Pusher," "Advance Man," or something of that sort, and not artist. What he gives you, you could find just as well if not better done on Fourteenth Street. He has a ribbon-counter, adenoid voice production that no really fine artist could afford. He will "get by," because anything does, apparently.
One turns to the big artist for relief, even though minor artists like The Brown Sisters charm so surely with their ivory and silver diamond-studded accordions, giving very pleasing transitions from grave to gay in arias and tunes we know. Accordions and concertinas are very beautiful to me, when played by artists like these girls, and by such as Joe Cawthorne, and Grock.
There are more dancing men of quality this season, it seems to me, who are obscured by dancing ladies of fame, and not such warrantable artistry. Perhaps it is because male anatomy allows of greater eccentricity and playfulness. There are no girls who have just such laughing legs as the inimitable Frances White. It is the long-legged American boy who beats the world in this sort of thing.
The lovely bit of hockey which James Barton gives is for me far more distinguished than all the rest of his work in the Winter Garden Revue. He is a real artist, but it is work that one sees rather a deal of this season, whereas the hockey dance is like nothing else to be found. A lovely moment of rhythmic leg work. We are now thoroughly familiar with the stage drunk, as we have long been familiarized by Weber and Fields with the stage Jew, which is fortunately passing out for lack of artist to present it. Léon Errol is good for once, even twice. He is quite alone in his very witty falls and runs. They are full of the struggle of the drunk to regain his character and manhood. The act lives on a very flat plane otherwise. It has no roundness.
I have come on my list to Mijares and Co., in "Monkey Business." We have the exquisite criterion always for the wire, in the perfect Bird Millman. "Monkey Business" is a very good act, and both men do excellent work on the taut and slack wire. "Monkey," in this case being a man, does as beautiful a piece of work as I know of. I have never seen a back somersault upon a high wire. I have never heard of it before. There may be whole generations of artists gifted in this particular stunt. You have here, nevertheless, a moment of very great beauty in the cleanness of this man's surprising agility and sureness. The monkey costume hinders the beauty of the thing. It should be done with pale blue silk tights against a cherry velvet drop, or else in deep ultramarine on an old gold background.
The acrobatic novelty called "The Legrohs" relies chiefly on its most exceptional member, who would be complete without the other two. He is most decidedly a virtuoso in vaudeville. Very gifted, certainly, if at moments a little disconcerting in the flexibility and the seemingly uncertain turns of his body. It is the old-fashioned contortionism saved by charming acrobatic variations. This "Legroh" knows how to make a superb pattern with his body, and the things he does with it are done with such ease and skill as to make you forget the actual physical effort and you are lost for the time being in the beauty of this muscular kaleidoscopic brilliancy. You feel it is like "puzzle—find the man" for a time, but then you follow his exquisite changes from one design into another with genuine delight, and appreciate his excessive grace and easy rapidity. He gives you chiefly the impression of a dragon-fly blown in the wind of a brisk morning over cool stretches of water. You would expect him to land on a lily-pad any moment and smooth his wings with his needle-like legs.
So it is the men and women of vaudeville transform themselves into lovely flower and animal forms, and the animals take on semblances of human sensibility in vaudeville. It is the superb arabesque of the beautiful human body that I care for most, and get the most from in these cameo-like bits of beauty and art. So brief they are, and like the wonders of sea gardens as you look through the glass bottoms of the little boats. So like the wonders of the microscopic, full of surprising novelties of colour and form. So like the kaleidoscope in the ever changing, ever shifting bits of colour reflecting each other, falling into new patterns with each twist of the toy. If you care for the iridescence of the moment you will trust vaudeville as you are not able to trust any other sort of a performance. You have no chance for the fatigue of problem. You are at rest as far as thinking is concerned. It is something for the eye first and last. It is something for the ear now and then, only very seldomly, however. For me, they are the saviours of the dullest art in existence, the art of the stage. Duse was quite right about it. The stage should be swept of actors. It is not a place for imitation and photography. It is a place for the laughter of the senses, for the laughter of the body. It is a place for the tumbling blocks of the brain to fall in heaps. I give first place to the acrobat and his associates because it is the art where the human mind is for once relieved of its stupidity. The acrobat is master of his body and he lets his brain go a-roving upon other matters, if he has one. He is expected to be silent. He would agree with William James, transposing "music prevents thinking" into "talking prevents silence." In so many instances, it prevents conversation. That is why I like tea chitchat. Words are never meant to mean anything then. They are simply given legs and wings, and they jump and fly. They land where they can, and fall flat if they must. The audience that patronizes vaudeville would do well to be present at most first numbers, and remain for most or many of the closing ones. A number, I repeat, like the Four Danubes, should not be snubbed by any one.
I have seen recently, then, by way of summary, four fine bits of artistry in vaudeville—Ella Shields, James Watts, the Brothers Rath, and the Four Danubes. I shall speak again of these people. They are well worth it. They turn pastime into perfect memory. They are, therefore, among the great artists.
A CHARMING EQUESTRIENNE
I am impelled to portray, at this time, my devotion to the little equestrienne, by the presence of a traveling circus in these lofty altitudes in which I am now living, seven thousand feet above the sea, in our great southwest. The mere sight of this master of the miniature ring, with all the atmosphere of the tent about him, after almost insurmountable difficulties crossing the mountains, over through the canyons of this expansive country, delivering an address in excellently chosen English, while poised at a considerable height on the wire, to the multitude on the ground below him, during which time he is to give what is known as the "free exhibit" as a high wire artist—all this turns me once more to the ever charming theme of acrobatics in general and equestrianism in particular, and it is of a special genius in this field that I wish to speak.
I have always been a lover of these artists of bodily vigour, of muscular melody, as I like to call it. As I watched this ringmaster of the little traveling circus, this master mountebank of the sturdy figure, ably poised upon his head on the high wire, outlined against the body of the high mountain in the near distance, about which the thunder clouds were huddling, and in and out of which the lightning was sharply playing, it all formed for me another of those perfect sensations from that phase of art expression known as the circus. My happiest memories in this field are from the streets of Paris before the war, the incomparably lovely fêtes. Only the sun knows where these dear artists may be now.
But I am wanting to tell of the little equestrienne, whose work has for the past five years been a source of genuine delight to me, charming little May Wirth, of Australian origin, with her lovely dark eyes, and captivating English accent. If you have a genuine sympathy for this sort of expression, it is but natural that you want to get inside the ring, and smell the turf with them, and so it was the representative of this gifted little woman who brought us together. It is, in the first place, a pity that there is so little written of the history of these people, so little material from which to gather the development of the idea of acrobatics in general, or of any one phase in particular. It would be impossible to learn who was the first aerial trapezist, for instance, or where high wire performing was brought from, just when the trick of adjusting the body to these difficult and strenuous rhythms was originated. They cannot tell you themselves. Only if there happens to be more than two generations in existence can you trace the development of this form of athletic entertainment. It may have begun with the Egyptians, it may have begun with the first gypsies.
These people do not write their history, they simply make it among themselves, and it is handed down through the generations. When I asked May Wirth for information, she said she knew of none on the subject, save that she herself sprang from five generations of acrobats and equestrians, and that it is terrifically hard labour from beginning to end, equestrianism in particular, since it requires a knowledge of several if not all the other physical arts combined, such as high wire walking, handspring and somersault, trapeze work, bars, ballet dancing, etc.; that she herself had begun as a child, and had run the entire gamut of these requirements, coming out the finished product, so to speak, in all but ballet dancing, which she disliked, and wept always when the time came for her lesson in this department.
When one sees the incomparable brilliancy of this little woman of the horse, watching her marvellous ground work, which is in itself an example of virtuosity, one realizes what accomplishment alone can do, for she is not yet twenty-five, and the art is already in the condition of genius with her. Five handsome side-wheels round the ring, and a flying jump on the horse, then several complete somersaults on the horse's back while he is in movement round the ring, is not to be slighted for consideration, and if, as I have said, you have a love or even a fancy for this sort of entertainment, you all but worship the little lady for the thrill she gives you through this consummate mastery of hers.
"I always wanted to do what the boys could do, and I was never satisfied until I had accomplished it." This was the strongest assertion the little lady of the horse was moved to make while in conversation, and that the ring is more beautiful to work in than on a mat upon a stage, for it is in the ring that the horse is most at home, it is easier for him, and gives him greater muscular freedom, with the result naturally, that it is easier on the muscles of the human body while in action. I have never tired of this species of entertainment. It has always impressed me as being the most natural form of transposed physical culture, esthetically speaking. It does for the eye, if you are sensitive, what music does for the ear. It gives the body a chance to show its exquisite rhythmic beauty, as no other form of athletics can, for it is the beautiful plastic of the body, harmonically arranged for personal delight.
It is something for so young a woman to have walked away with first honours in her chosen field, yet like the true artist that she is, she is thinking always of how she can beautify her accomplishment to a still greater degree. She is mistress of a very difficult art, and yet the brilliancy of her performance makes it seem as if it were but the experiment of an afternoon, in the out-of-doors. Like all fine artists, she has brushed away from sight all aspects of labour, and presents you, with astounding ease, the apparent easiness of the thing. She is powerfully built, and her muscles are master of coordination, such as would be the envy of multitudes of men, and with all this power, she is as simple in her manner and appearance as is the young debutante at her coming out function. You are impressed with her sweetness and refinement, first of all, and the utter lack of show about her, as also with her brother who is a dapper young man of the very English type, who works with her, and acts as the dress-suited gentleman in this acrobatic ringplay of theirs. Three other members of her family take part also with her, the ring-mistress, a woman of possibly forty, acting as host, looking exceptionally well, handsome indeed, in grey and silver evening dress, with fine dark eyes and an older sister who opens the performance with some good work. This seems to me to be the modern touch, for there was a time when it was always the very well groomed ringmaster, with top hat and monocle, who acted as host of the ring.
It will likewise be remembered by those who saw the Hannafords at the circus, that they were also possessed of a very handsome ring-mistress, elegantly gowned, both of these older ladies lending great distinction, by their presence, to already brilliant performances. I would be very pleased to make myself historian for these fine artists, these esthetes of muscular melody. I should like very much to be spokesman for them, and point out to an enforcedly ignorant public, the beauties of this line of artistic expression, and to give historical account of the development of these various picturesque athletic arts. Alas, that is not possible, for it must remain forever in the limbo of tradition.
We shall have to be grateful beyond expression for the beautiful art of May Wirth, and devote less enthusiasm to asking of when and how it came about. To have established one's art at the perfect point in one's girlhood, is it not achievement, is it not genius itself? Charming little May Wirth, first equestrienne of the world, I congratulate you for your beautiful presentation, for the excellence of its technique, and for the grace and fascination contained therein. Triumph in youth, victory in the heroic period of life, that surely is sufficient. Let the bays fall upon her young head gleefully, for she earned them with patience, devotion, intelligence, and very hard labours. Salutations, little lady of the white horse! How charming, how simple she was, the little equestrienne as she rode away from the door of the huge theatre, in her pale blue touring car. "I love the audiences here in this great theatre, but O, I love the circus so much more!" These were the sentiments of the little performer as she rode away. She is now touring, performing under the huge canvases in the open areas of the middle West, and the little traveling circus is on its way over the mountains. Fascinating people, and a fascinating life for whom there is not, and probably never will be, a written history; the story of whose origin lies almost as buried as that of the primitive peoples. Charming rovers, content with life near to the bright sky, charming people, for whom life is but one long day in which to make beautiful their bodies, and make joyful the eyes of those who love to look at them!
JOHN BARRYMORE IN PETER IBBETSON
The vicissitudes of the young boy along the vague, precarious way, the longing to find the reality of the dream—the heart that knew him best—a study in sentimentality, the pathetic wanderings of a "little boy lost" in the dream of childhood, and the "little boy found" in the arms of his loved mother, with all those touches that are painful and all that are exquisite and poignant in their beauty—such is the picture presented by John Barrymore, as nearly perfect as any artist can be, in "Peter Ibbetson." Certainly it is as finished a creation in its sense of form, and of color, replete with a finesse of rare loveliness, as gratifying a performance, to my notion, as has been seen on our stage for many years. Perhaps if the author, recalling vain pasts, could realize the scum of saccharinity in which the play is utterly submerged, and that it struggles with great difficulty to survive the nesselrodelike sweetness with which it is surfeited, he would recognize the real distinction that Barrymore lends to a rôle so clogged by the honeyed sentimentality covering most of the scenes. Barrymore gives us that "quickened sense" of the life of the young man, a portrayal which takes the eye by "its fine edge of light," a portrayal clear and cool, elevated to a fine loftiness in his rendering.
The actor has accomplished this by means of a nice knowledge of what symbolic expression means to the art of the stage. He is certainly a painter of pictures and moods, the idea and his image perfectly commingled, endowing this mediocre play with true charm by the distinction he lends it, by sheer discretion, and by a power of selection. All this he brings to a play which, if it had been written nowadays, would certainly have convicted its author, and justly too, of having written to stimulate the lachrymal effusions of the shop-girl, a play about which she might telephone her girl friend, at which she might eat bon bons, and powder her nose again for the street. No artist, no accepted artist, has given a more suggestive rendering than has Barrymore here. It would be difficult to say where he is at his best, except that the first half of the play counts for most in point of strength and opportunity.
A tall frail young man, we find him, blanched with wonder and with awe at the perplexity of life, seeking a solution of things by means of the dream, as only the dreamer and the visionary can, lost from first to last, seemingly unloved in the ways boys think they want to be loved; that is, the shy longing boy, afraid of all things, and mostly of himself, in the period just this side of sex revelation. He is the neophyte—the homeless, pathetic Peter, perplexed with the strangeness of things real and temporal—vision and memory counting for all there is of reality to him, with life itself a thing as yet untasted. Who shall forget (who has a love for real expression) the entrance of Peter into the drawing-room of Mrs. Deane, the pale flowery wisp of a boy walking as it were into a garden of pungent spices and herbs, and of actions so alien to his own? We are given at this moment the keynote of mastery in delicate suggestion, which never fails throughout the play, tedious as it is, overdrawn on the side of symbolism and mystical insinuation.
One sits with difficulty through many of the moments, the literary quality of them is so wretched. They cloy the ear, and the mind that has been made sensitive, desiring something of a finer type of stimulation. Barrymore has evoked, so we may call it, a cold method—against a background of what could have been overheated acting or at least a superabundance of physical attack—the warmth of the play's tender sentimentalities; yet he covers them with a still spiritual ardor which is their very essence, extracting all the delicate nuances and arranging them with a fine sense of proportion. It is as difficult an accomplishment for a man as one can imagine. For it is not given to many to act with this degree of whiteness, devoid of off colorings or alien tones. This performance of Barrymore in its spiritual richness, its elegance, finesse, and intelligence, has not been equaled for me since I saw the great geniuses Paul Orleneff and Eleonora Duse.
It is to be at once observed that here is a keen pictorial mind, a mind which visualizes perfectly for itself the chiaroscuro aspects of the emotion, as well as the spiritual, for Barrymore gives them with an almost unerring felicity, and rounds out the portrayal which in any other hands would suffer, but Barrymore has the special power to feel the value of reticence in all good art, the need for complete subjection of personal enthusiasm to the force of ideas. His art is akin to the art of silver-point, which, as is known, is an art of directness of touch, and final in the instant of execution, leaving no room whatever for accident or untoward excitement of nerve.
We shall wait long for the silver suggestiveness such as Barrymore gives us when Peter gets his first glimpse of Mary, Duchess of Towers. Who else could convey his realization of her beauty, and the quality of reminiscence that lingers about her, of the rapt amaze as he stands by the mantel-piece looking through the door into the space where he sees her in the midst of dancers under a crystal chandelier somewhere not very distant? Or the moment when he finds her bouquet neglected on the table in the drawing-room, with her lace shawl not far from his hands? Or when he finds himself alone, pressing his lips into the depth of the flowers as the curtain gives the finale to the scene with the whispered "l'amour"! These are moments of a real lyrist, and would match any line of Banville, of Ronsard, or of Austin Dobson for delicacy of touch and feeling, for freshness, and for the precise spiritual gesture, the "intonation" of action requisite to relieve the moments from what might otherwise revert to commonplace sentimentality.
Whatever the prejudice may be against all these emotions glacé with sugary frosting, we feel that his art has brought them into being with an unmistakable gift of refinement coupled with superb style. How an artist like Beardsley would have revelled in these moments is easy to conjecture. For here is the quintessence of intellectualized aquarelle, and these touches would surely have brought into being another "Pierrot of the Minute"—a new line drawing out of a period he knew and loved well. These touches would have been graced by the hand of that artist, or by another of equal delicacy of appreciation, Charles Conder—unforgettable spaces replete with the essence of fancy, of dream, of those farther recesses of the imagination.
Although technically and historically Barrymore has the advantage of excellent traditions, he nevertheless rests entirely upon his own achievements, separate and individual in his understanding of what constitutes plastic power in art. He has a peculiar and most sensitive temper, which can arrange points of relation in juxtaposition with a keen sense of form as well as of substance. He is, one might say, a masterly draftsman with a rich cool sense of color, whose work has something of the still force of a drawing of Ingres with, as well, the sensitive detail one finds in a Redon, like a beautiful drawing on stone. An excellent knowledge of dramatic contrasts is displayed by the brothers Barrymore, John and Lionel, in the murder scene, one of the finest we have seen for many years, technically even, splendid, and direct, concise in movement. Every superfluous gesture has been eliminated. From the moment of Peter's locking the door upon his uncle the scene is wrapped in the very coils of catastrophe, almost Euripedean in its inevitability. All of this episode is kept strictly within the realm of the imagination. It is an episode of hatred, of which there is sure to be at least one in the life of every young sensitive, when every boy wants, at any rate somewhere in his mind, to destroy some influence or other which is alien or hateful to him. The scene emphasizes once again the beauty of technical power for its own sake, the thrill of discarding all that is not immediately essential to simple and direct realization.
Little can be said of the play beyond this point, for it dwindles off into sentimental mystification which cannot be enjoyed by anyone under fifty, or appreciated by anyone under eighteen. It gives opportunity merely for settings and some rare moments of costuming, the lady with the battledore reminding one a deal of a good Manet. This and, of course, the splendid appearance of the Duchess of Towers in the first act—all these touches furnish more than a satisfying background for the very shy and frail Peter.
This performance of Barrymore holds for me the first and last requisite of organized conception in art—poise, clarity, and perfect suggestibility. Its intellectual soundness rules the emotional extravagance, giving form to what—for lack of form—so often perishes under an excess of energy, which the ignorant actor substitutes for the plastic element in all art. It has the attitude, this performance, almost of diffidence to one's subject-matter, except as the intellect judges clearly and coolly. Thus, in the sense of esthetic reality, are all aspects clarified and made real. From the outward inward, or from the inward outward, surface to depth or depth to surface—it is difficult to say which is the precise method of approach. John Barrymore has mastered the evasive subtlety therein, which makes him one of our greatest artists. The future will surely wait for his riper contributions, and we may think of him as one of our foremost artists, among the few, "one of a small band," as the great novelist once said of the great poet.
PART THREE
LA CLOSERIE DE LILAS
Divine Tuesday! I had wondered if those remarkable evenings of conversation in the rue de Rome with Mallarmé as host, and Henri de Regnier as guest, among many others, had been the inspiration of the evenings at the Closerie de Lilas, where I so often sat of an evening, watching the numbers of esthetes gather, filling the entire café, rain or shine, waiting unquestionably, for it pervaded the air always, the feeling of suspense, of a dinner without host, of a wedding without bridegroom, in any event waiting for the real genius of the evening, le grand maitre prince de poètes, Paul Fort. The interesting book of Amy Lowell's, "Six French Poets," recalls these Tuesday evenings vividly to my mind, and a number of episodes in connection with the idea of poetry in Paris.
Poetry an event? A rather remarkable notion it would seem, and yet this was always so, it was a constituent of the day's passing, there was never a part of the day in this arrondissement, when you would not find here, there, everywhere, from the Boul-Mich up, down Montparnasse to Lavenue's, and back to the Closerie, groups of a few or of many, obviously the artist or poet type, sometimes very nattily dressed, often the reverse, but you found them talking upon one theme, art, meaning either poetry or painting, cubistes, futuristes, orphistes and doubtless every "iste" in poetry from the symboliste period up to the "unanimistes" of the present time, or the then present time nearly two years before the war. It was a bit novel, even for a sensitive American, sitting there, realizing that it was all in the name of art, and for the heralding of genius—a kind of sublimated recruiting meeting for the enlistment in the army of expression of personality, or for the saving of the soul of poetry.
It was a spectacle, edifying in its purport, or even a little distressing if one had no belief in a sense of humour, for there were moments of absurdity about it as there is sure to be in a room filled with any type of concerted egotism. But you did not forget the raison d'etre of it all, you did not forget that when the "prince" arrived there was the spirit of true celebration about it, the celebration not only of an arrived artist, but of an idea close to the hearts and minds of those present, and you had a sense, too, of what it must have been like in that circle of, no doubt, a higher average of adherents, in the drawing room of the genius Mallarmé, who, from all accounts, was as perfected in the art of conversation, as he was in expression in art. When I read Miss Lowell's chapter on Henri de Regnier, I find myself before the door of the Mallarmé house in the rue de Rome, probably the only American guest, on that Sunday morning in June, just one given a privilege that could not mean as much as if I had been more conversant with the delicacies of the language.
It was the occasion of the placing of a tablet of homage to the great poet, at which ceremony Henri de Regnier himself was the chief speaker: a tall, very aristocratic, very elegant looking Frenchman, not any more to be called young, nor yet to be called old, but conspicuously simple, dignified, dressed in a manner of a gentleman of the first order, standing upon a chair, speaking, as one would imagine, with a flow of words which were the epitome of music itself to the ear. I had been invited by a poet well known in Paris, with several volumes to his credit and by a young literary woman, both of whom spoke English very creditably. After the ceremonies, which were very brief, and at which Madame Mallarmé herself was present, standing near the speaker, de Regnier, the entire company repaired to a restaurant near the Place Clichy, if I remember rightly. My hostess named for me the various guests as they appeared, Madame Rachilde, Reynaldo Hahn, André Gide, and a dozen other names less conspicuous, perhaps, excepting one, Léon Dierx, who was an old man, and whose death was announced about the city some days later. It was, needless to say, a conspicuous company and the dinner went off very quietly, allowing of course for the always feverish sound of the conversation of many people talking in a not very large room.
But all these suggestions recall for me once more what such things mean to a people like the French, or, let one say, Europeans as well. I wonder what poetry or even painting will do, if they shall rise to such a state in this country that we shall find our masters of literature holding audience with this degree of interest like Fort, or as did all the great masters of literature in Paris, hold forth in the name of art, a divine Tuesday set apart for the admirable worship of poetry, or of things esthetic. I can imagine Amy Lowell doing something of this sort after the custom of those masters she so admires, with her seemingly quenchless enthusiasms for all that is modern in poetry. I think we shall wait long for that, for the time when we shall have our best esthetics over the coffee, at the curbside under the trees with the sun shining upon it, or the shadow of the evening lending its sanction, under the magnetic influence of such a one as Paul Fort or Francis Jammes, or Emile Verhaeren—as it was once to be had among such as Verlaine, Baudelaire and that high company of distinguished painters who are now famous among us.
The studio of Gertude Stein, that quiet yet always lively place in the rue de Fleurus, is the only room I have ever been in where this spirit was organized to a similar degree, for here you had the sense of the real importance of painting, as it used to be thought of in the days of Pissarro, Manet, Degas, and the others, and you had much, in all human ways, out of an evening there, and, most of all, you had a fund of good humour thrust at you, and the conversation took on, not the quality of poetic prose spoken, as you had the quality of yourself and others, a kind of William James intimacy, which, as everyone knows, is style bringing the universe of ideas to your door in terms of your own sensations. There may have been a touch of all this at the once famed Brook Farm, but I fancy it was rather chill in its severity.
There is something of charm in the French idea of taking their discussions to the sunlight or the shadow under the stars, either within or outside the café, where you feel the passing of the world, and the poetry is of one piece with life itself, not the result of stuffy studios, and excessively ornate library corners, where books crowd out the quality of people and things. You felt that the café was the place for it, and if the acrobat came and sang, it was all of one fabric and it was as good for the poetry, as it was for the eye and the ear that absorbed it. Despite the different phases of the spectacle of Tuesday, at the Closerie de Lilas, you had the feeling of its splendour, its excellence, and, most of all, of its reality, its relationship to every other phase of life, and not of the hypersensitivity of the thing as we still consider it among ourselves in general; and if you heard the name of Paul Fort, or Francis Jammes, it was a definite issue in daily life, equal with the name of the great statesmen in importance, you were being introduced into a sphere of activities of the utmost importance, that poetry was something to be reckoned with.
It was not merely to hear oneself talk that artists like Mallarmé held forth with distinction, that artists like de Regnier and Fort devote themselves, however secretly, or however openly to the sacred theme. They had but one intention, and that to arrive at, and assist in the realization of the best state of poetry, that shall have carried the art further on its way logically, and in accordance with the principles which they have created for their time; endeavoring always to create fresh values, new points of contact with the prevailing as well as with the older outlines of the classics. It was, then, a spectacle, from our removed point of view, the gathering of the poetic multitude around the café tables, over the Dubonnet, the grenadines, and the café noir, of a Tuesday evening. It gave one a sense of perpetuity, of the indestructibility of art, in spite of the obstacles encountered in the run of the day, that the artist has the advantage over the layman in being qualified to set down, in shapes imperishable, those states of his imagination which are the shapes of life and of nature.
We may be grateful to Amy Lowell for having assembled for our consummation, in a world where poetry is not as yet the sublime issue as it was to be felt at every street corner, much of the spirit of the rue de Rome, the Café Novelles D'Athènes, and the Closerie de Lilas, as well as the once famed corner of the Café D'Harcourt where the absinthe flowed so continuously, and from which some very exquisite poetry has emanated for all time. It is the first intimation we have of what our best English poetry has done for the best French poets of the present, and what our first free verse poet has done for the general liberation of emotions and for freedom of form in all countries. He has indicated the poets that are to follow him. He would be the first to sanction all this poetic discussive intensity at the curbside, the liberty and freedom of the café, the excellence of a divine Tuesday evening.
EMILY DICKINSON
If I want to take up poetry in its most delightful and playful mood, I take up the verses of that remarkable girl of the sixties and seventies, Emily Dickinson, she who was writing her little worthless poetic nothings, or so she was wont to think of them, at a time when the now classical New England group was flourishing around Concord, when Hawthorne was burrowing into the soul of things, Thoreau was refusing to make more pencils and took to sounding lake bottoms and holding converse with all kinds of fish and other water life, and Emerson was standing high upon his pedestal preaching of compensations, of friendship, society and the oversoul, leaving a mighty impress upon his New England and the world at large as well.
I find when I take up Emily Dickinson, that I am sort of sunning myself in the discal radiance of a bright, vivid, and really new type of poet, for she is by no means worn of her freshness for us, she wears with one as would an old fashioned pearl set in gold and dark enamels. She offsets the smugness of the time in which she lived with her cheery impertinence, and startles the present with her uncommon gifts. Those who know the irresistible charm of this girl—who gave so charming a portrait of herself to the stranger friend who inquired for a photograph: "I had no portrait now, but am small like the wren, and my hair is bold like the chestnut burr, and my eyes like the sherry in the glass that the guest leaves," this written in July, 1862—shall be of course familiar with the undeniable originality of her personality, the grace and special beauty of her mind, charm unique in itself, not like any other genius then or now, or in the time before her, having perhaps a little of relationship to the crystal clearness of Crashaw, like Vaughan and Donne maybe, in respect of their lyrical fervour and moral earnestness, yet nevertheless appearing to us freshly with as separate a spirit in her verse creations as she herself was separated from the world around her by the amplitude of garden which was her universe. Emily Dickinson confronts you at once with an instinct for poetry, to be envied by the more ordinary and perhaps more finished poets. Ordinary she never was, common she never could have been, for she was first and last aristocrat in sensibility, rare and untouchable if you will, vague and mystical often enough, unapproachable and often distinctly aloof, as undoubtedly she herself was in her personal life. Those with a fondness for intimacy will find her, like all recluses, forbidding and difficult, if not altogether terrifying the mind with her vagueries and peculiarities.
Here was New England at its sharpest, brightest, wittiest, most fantastic, most wilful, most devout, saint and imp sported in one, toying with the tricks of the Deity, taking them now with extreme profundity, then tossing them about like irresistible toys with an incomparable triviality. She has traced upon the page and with celestial indelibility that fine line from her soul which is like a fine prismatic light, separating one bright sphere from another, one planet from another planet, and the edge of separation is but faintly perceptible. She has left us this bright folio of her "lightning and fragrance in one," scintillant with stardust as perhaps no other before her, certainly not in this country, none with just her celestial attachedness, or must we call it detachedness, and withal also a sublime, impertinent playfulness which makes her images dance before one like offspring of the great round sun, fooling zealously with the universes at her feet, and just beyond her eye, with a loftiness of spirit and of exquisite trivialness seconded by none. Who has not read these flippant renderings, holding always some touch of austerity and gravity of mood, or the still more perfect "letters" to her friends, will, I think, have missed a new kind of poetic diversion, a new loveliness, evasive, alert, pronounced in every interval and serious, modestly so, and at a bound leaping as it were like some sky child pranking with the clouds, and the hills and the valleys beneath them, child as she surely was always, playing in some celestial garden space in her mind, where every species of tether was unendurable, where freedom for this childish sport was the one thing necessary to her ever young and incessantly capering mind—"hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou ever wert"!
It must be said in all justice, then, that "fascination was her element," everything to her was wondrous, sublimely magical, awsomely inspiring and thrilling. It was the event of many moons to have someone she liked say so much as good morning to her in human tongue, it was the event of every instant to have the flowers and birds call her by name, and hear the clouds exult at her approach. She was the brightest young sister of fancy, as she was the gifted young daughter of the ancient imagination. One feels everywhere in her verse and in her so splendid and stylish letters an unexcelled freshness, brightness of metaphor and of imagery, a gift of a peculiarity that could have come only from this part of our country, this part of the world, this very spot which has bred so many intellectual and spiritual entities wrapped in the garments of isolation, robed with questioning. Her genius is in this sense essentially local, as much the voice of the spirit of New England as it is possible for one to hold. If ever wanderer hitched vehicle to the comet's tail, it was the poetic, sprite woman, no one ever rode the sky and the earth as she did in this radiant and skybright mind of her.
She loved all things because all things were in one way or in another way bright for her, and of a blinding brightness from which she often had to hide her face. She embroidered all her thoughts with starry intricacies, and gave them the splendour of frosty traceries upon the windowpane in a frigid time, and of the raindrop in the sun, and summered them with fragrancing of the many early and late flowers of her own fanciful conjuring. They are glittering garlands of her clear, cool fancies, these poems, fraught in some instances, as are certain finely cut stones, with an exceptional mingling of lights coursing swiftly through them. She was avid of starlight and of sunlight alike, and of that light by which all things are illumined with a splendour not their own merely, but lent them by shafts from that radiant sphere which she leaned from, looking out gleefully upon them from the window of that high place in her mind.
To think of this poet is to think of crystal, for she lived in a radianced world of innumerable facets, and the common instances were chariots upon which to ride widely over the edges of infinity. She is alive for us now in those rare fancies of hers, with no other wish in them save as memorandum for her own eyes, and when they were finished to send them spinning across the wide garden, many of them to her favorite sister who lived far, far away, over beyond the hedge. You shall find in her all that is winsome, strange, fanciful, fantastic and irresistible in the eastern character and characteristic. She is first and best in lightsomeness of temper, for the eastern is known as essentially a tragic genius. She is perhaps the single exponent of modern times of the quality of true celestial frivolity. Scintillant was she then, and like dew she was and the soft summer rain, and the light upon the lips of flowers of which she loved to sing. Her mind and her spirit were one, soul and sense inseparable, little sister of Shelley certainly she was, and the more playful relative of Francis Thompson.
She had about her the imperishable quality that hovers about all things young and strong and beautiful, she was the sense of beauty ungovernable. What there are of tendencies religious and moral disturb in nowise those who love and have appreciation for true poetic essences. She had in her brain the inevitable buzzing of the bee in the belly of the bloom, she had in her eyes the climbing lances of the sun, she had in her heart love and pity for the innumerable pitiful and pitiable things. She was a quenchless mother in her gift for solace and she was lover to the immeasurable love. Like all aristocrats she hated mediocrity, and like all first rate jewels, she had no rift to hide. She was not a maker of poetry, she was a thinker of poetry. She was not a conjurer of words so much as a magician in sensibility. She has only to see and feel and hear to be in touch with all things with a name or with things that must be forever nameless. If she loved people, she loved them for what they were, if she despised them she despised them for what they did, or for lack of power to feel they could not do. Silence under a tree was a far more talkative experience with her than converse with one or a thousand dull minds. Her throng was the air, and her wings were the multitude of flying movements in her brain. She had only to think and she was amid numberless minarets and golden domes, she had only to think and the mountain cleft its shadow in her heart.
Emily Dickinson is in no sense toil for the mind accustomed to the labours of reading, she is too fanciful and delicious ever to make heavy the head, she sets you to laughter and draws a smile across your face for pity, and lets you loose again amid the measureless pleasing little humanities. I shall always want to read Emily Dickinson, for she points her finger at all tiresome scholasticism, and takes a chance with the universe about her and the first rate poetry it offers at every hand within the eye's easy glancing. She has made poetry memorable as a pastime for the mind, and sent the heavier ministerial tendencies flying to a speedy oblivion. What a child she was, child impertinent, with a heavenly rippling in her brain!
These random passages out of her writings will show at once the rarity of her tastes and the originality of her phrasing. "February passed like a kate, and I know March. Here is the light the stranger said was not on sea or land—myself could arrest it, but will not chagrin him"—
"The wind blows gay today, and the jays bark like blue terriers."
"Friday I tasted life, it was a vast morsel. A circus passed the house—still I feel the red in my mind though the drums are out."
"The lawn is full of south and the odors tangle, and I hear today for the first the river in the tree."
"The zeros taught us phosphorus
We learned to like the fire
By playing glaciers when a boy
And tinder guessed by power
"Of opposite to balance odd
If white a red must be!
Paralysis, our primer dumb
Unto vitality."
Then comes the "crowning extravaganza.... If I read a book, and it makes my whole body so cold no fire will ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. Is there any other way? These are the only ways I know it."
No one but a New England yankee mind could concoct such humours and fascinatingly pert phrases as are found here. They are like the chatterings of the interrupted squirrel in the tree-hole at nut-time. There is so much of high gossip in these poetic turns of hers, and so, throughout her books, one finds a multitude of playful tricks for the pleased mind to run with. She was an intoxicated being, drunken with the little tipsy joys of the simplest form, shaped as they were to elude always her evasive imagination into thinking that nothing she could think or feel but was extraordinary and remarkable. "Your letter gave no drunkenness because I tasted rum before—Domingo comes but once," etc., she wrote to Col. Higginson, a pretty conceit, surely to offer a loved friend. The passages offered will give the unfamiliar reader a taste of the sparkle of this poet's hurrying fancy and set her before the willing mind entrancingly, it seems to me. She will always delight those who find it in their way to love her elfish, evasive genius, and those who care for the vivid and living element in words will find her, to say the least, among the masters in her feeling for their strange shapes and the fresh significance contained in them. A born thinker of poetry, and in a great measure a gifted writer of it, refreshing many a heavy moment made dull with the weightiness of books, or of burdensome thinking. This poet-sprite sets scurrying all weariness of the brain, and they shall have an hour of sheer delight who invite poetic converse with Emily Dickinson. She will repay with funds of rich celestial coin from her rare and precious fancyings. She had that "oblique integrity" which she celebrates in one of her poems.
ADELAIDE CRAPSEY
One more satellite hurried away too soon! High hints at least, of the young meteor finding its way through space. Here was another of those, with a vast fund of wishing in her brain, and the briefest of hours in which to set them roaming. Brevities that whirl through the mind as you read those cinquains of Adelaide Crapsey, like white birds through the dark woodlands of the night. Cameos or castles, what is size? Is it not the same if they are of one perfection of feeling? Such a little book of Adelaide Crapsey, surely like cameos cut on shell, so clear in outline, so rich in form, so brave in indications, so much of singing, so much of poetry, of courage.
"Just now,
Out of the strange
Still dusk—as strange, as still,
A white moth flew; Why am I grown
So cold?"
Isn't the evidence sufficient here of first rate poetic gifts, sensibility of an exceptional order? Contrast in so many ways with that perhaps more radiant and certainly more whimsical girl, with her rarest of flavours, she with her "whip of diamond, riding to meet the Earl"! I think geniuses like Keats or Shelley would have said "how do you do, poet?" to Adelaide Crapsey and her verse, lamenting also that she flew over the rainbowed edge of the dusk too soon, like the very moth over the garden wall, early in the evening. It is sure that had this poet been allowed her full quota of days, she would have left some handsome folios bright enough for any one caring for verse at its purest. Pity there was not time for another book at least, of her verses, to verify the great distinction conferred. She might have walked still more largely away with the wreaths of recognition. Not time for more books, instead of so much eternity at her bedside. She would surely have sent more words singing to their high places and have impressed the abundant output of the day with its superficiality by her seriousness. There is no trifling in these poetic things of hers. Trivial might some say who hanker after giantesque composition. Fragile are they only in the sense of size, only in this way are they small.
Those who know the difficulties of writing poetic composition are aware of the task involved in creating such packed brevities. Emily Dickinson knew this power. "H. D." is another woman who understands the beauty of compactness. Superb sense of economy, of terseness the art calls for, excessive pruning and clipping. Singular that these three artists, so gifted in brevity were women. There is little, after all, in existence that warrants lengthy dissertation. Life itself is epigrammatic and brief enough. No volumes needed by way of explanation. The fascinating enigma diverts and perplexes everyone alike. The simple understand it best, or at least they seem to do so. Segregation, aloofness, spiritual imprisonment, which is another name for introspection, the looking out from bars of the caged house, all this discovers something through penetration. Walking with life is most natural, grazing its warm shoulder. There is little room for inquiry if one have the real feeling of life itself. Poetry is that which gleans most by keeping nearest to life. Books and firesides avail but little. Secretaries for the baggage of erudition do not enhance poetic values, they encumber them. Poetry is not declamation, it is not propaganda, it is breathing natural breaths. There is nothing mechanical about poetry excepting the affectation of forms. Poetry is the world's, it is everybody's. You count poetry by its essence, and no amount of studied effect, or bulging erudition will create that which is necessary, that which makes poetry what it is. The one essential is power to sing, and the intelligence to get it down with degrees of mastery or naturalness, which is one and the same thing.
Real singing is unusual as real singers are rare. Adelaide Crapsey shows that she was a real singer, essentially poet, excellent among those of our time. She impresses her uncommon qualities upon you, in the cinquains of hers, with genuinely incisive force. She has so much of definiteness, so much of technical beauty, economy, all very valuable assets for a true poet. She had never been touched with the mania for journalistic profusion. She cared too much for language to ride it. She cared too much for words to want to whip them into slavery. She was outside of them, looking on, as it might be, through crystal, at their freshness. She did not take them for granted. They were new to her and she wanted the proper familiarity. She worked upon a spiritual geometric all her own. She did not run to the dictionary for eccentricities, she did not hunt words out of countenance. They were natural to her. She wanted most their simple beauty, and she succeeded. She had dignity, a rare gift in these times. She raises herself above the many by her fine feeling for the precision. That is her artistry, the word, the thing of beauty and the joy forever with her.
It is to be regretted that Adelaide Crapsey had no more time for the miniature microscopic equations, the little thing seen large, the large thing seen vividly. She might have spent more hours with them and less with her so persistent guest, this second self at her side; ironic presence, when she most would have strode with the brighter companion, her first and natural choice. Her contribution is conspicuous among us for its balance and its intellectualism tempered with fine emotions. She had so much to settle for herself, so much bargaining for the little escapes in which to register herself consistently, so much of consultation for her body's sake, that her mind flew the dark spaces about her bed with consistent feverishness.
Reckoning is not the genius of life. It is the painful, residual element of reflection. One must give, one must pay. It is not inspiring to beg for breath, yet this has come to many a fine artist, many a fine soul whose genius was far more of the ability for living, with so little of the ability for dying. You cannot think along with clarity, with the doom of dark recognition nudging your shoulder every instant. There must be somehow apertures of peace for production. Adelaide Crapsey's chief visitant was doom. She saw the days vanishing, and the inevitable years lengthening over her. No wonder she could write brevities, she whose existence was brevity itself. The very flicker of the lamp was among the last events. What, then, was the fluttering of the moth but a monstrous intimation. If her work was chilled with severity, it was because she herself was covered with the cool branches of decision. Nature was cold with her, hence there is the ring of ice in these little pieces of hers. They are veiled with the grey of many a sunless morning.
"These be
Three silent things;
The falling snow,—the hour
Before the dawn,—the mouth of one
Just dead."
Here you have the intensity once more of Adelaide Crapsey. It haunts you like the something on the dark stairway as you pass, just as when, on the roadway in the dead of night, the twig grazing one's cheek would seem like the springing panther at one's throat. Dramatic vividness is certainly her chief distinction. No playfulness here, but a stout reckoning with austere beauty. The wish to record the element at its best that played so fierce a rôle in her life. She writes her own death hymn, lays her own shroud out, spaces her own epilogue as if to give the engraver, who sets white words on white stone, the clue, stones the years stare on, leaving the sunlight to streak the old pathos there, and then settles herself to the long way of lying, to the sure sleep that glassed her keen eyes, shutting them down too soon on a world that held so much poetry for her.
The titles of her cinquains, such as "November night", "The guarded wound", "The warning", "Fate defied", and the final touch of inevitability in "The Lonely Death", so full of the intensity of last moments, intimate the resolute presence of the grey companion of the covering mists. It must be said hurriedly that Adelaide Crapsey was not all doom. By no means. The longer pieces in her tiny book attest to her feeling for riches, and the lyrical wonders of the hour. Her fervour is the artist's fervour, the longing, coming really to passion, to hold and fix forever the shapes that were loveliest to her. That is the poet's existence, that is the poet's labour, and his last distress. No one wants to give in to a commonplace world when the light that falls on it is lovelier than the place it falls on. If you cannot transpose the object, transport it, however simply, however ornately, then of what use is poetry? It is transport!
Adelaide Crapsey was efficient in her knowledge of what poetry is, as she was certainly proficient as workman. She was lapidary more than painter or sculptor. It was a beautiful cutting away, and a sweeping aside of the rifts and flaws. That is to say, she wanted that. She wanted the white light of the perfect gem, and she could not have been content with just matrix, with here and there embedded chips. She was a washer of gold, and spared no labours for the bright nuggets she might get, and the percentage of her panning was high. But the cloud hung on the mountain she clomb, and her way was dimmed.
"In the cold I will rise, I will bathe
In the waters of ice; Myself
Will shiver, and will shrive myself
Alone in the dawn, and anoint
Forehead and feet and hands;
I will shutter the windows from light,
I will place in their sockets the four
Tall candles and set them a-flame
In the grey of the dawn; And myself
Will lay myself straight in my bed,
And draw the sheet under my chin."
There could be no more of resolute finality in this chill epilogue. There is the cold of a thousand years shuddering out of this scene, it is the passing, the last of this delicate and gifted poet, Adelaide Crapsey. If she has written more than her book prints, these must surely be of her best. She took the shape of that which she made so visible, so cold, so beautiful. With her white wings she has skirted the edge of the dusk with an incredible calm. No whimpering here. Too much artistry for that; too much of eye to let heart rule. The gifts of Adelaide Crapsey were high ones, and that she left so little of song is regrettable, even though she left us a legacy of some of the best singing of the day. It is enough to call her poet, for she was among the first of this hour and time. She had no affectations, no fashionable theories and ambitions. She simply wrote excellent verse. That is her beautiful gift to us.
FRANCIS THOMPSON
If ever a meteor fell to earth it was Francis Thompson. If ever a star ascended to that high place in the sky where sit the loftier planets in pleasant company, it was this splendid poet. Stalking through the shadows of the Thames Embankment to find his clear place in the milky way, is hardly the easiest road for so exceptional a celebrity. It is but another instance of the odd tradition perpetuating itself, that some geniuses must creep hand and knee through mire, heart pierced with the bramble of experience, up over the jagged pathways to that still place where skies are clear at last. Thompson is the last among the great ones to have known the dire vicissitude, direst, if legends are true, that can befall a human being. We have the silence of his saviour friends, the Meynells, saying so much more than their few public words, tender but so careful. What they knew, and what the walls of the monastery of Storrington must have heard in that so pained stillness, there, is probably beyond repetition for pathos. De Quincey had taught him much in the knowledge of hardship. Whether it is just similarity of experience or a kind of imitation in nature, is not easy to say. It was hardly the example to repeat. It is singular enough also, that De Quincey's "Ann" should have become so vivid a repetition to Thompson, in just the same terms.
London has no feeling for the peace of poets. They are the little things in the confused maelstrom of human endeavor. Poets are taught with the whip. They must bleed for their divine idea, or so it was then. Sometimes it seems as if a change had come, for so many poets sit in chairs of ease these days. Science produces other kinds of discomfort, and covers the old misery with a new tapestry of contrasts. I doubt if many poets are selling matches these days, living on eleven pence a day. There is still the poet who knows his cheap lodging. There seems enough of them still for high minds to crawl into, and yet there is another face to the misery.
Thompson was seraph from the first. You see the very doom burning out of his boy's eyes in the youthful portrait, and you see the logical end in that desperate and pitiful mask, the drawing of the last period in the Meynell Book. His was certainly the severed head, and his feet were pathetically far away, down on a stony earth. That he should have forfeited the ordinary ways of ease, is as consistent with his appearance, as it was necessary to his nature. That he should find himself on the long march past the stations of the cross, to the very tree itself, for his poetic purpose, if it is in keeping with tradition, is not precisely the most inspiring aspect of human experiences. Human he was not, as we like to think of human, for he was too early in his career marked for martyr. There is the note of cricket-time in his earlier life, and how long this attached to the physical delights of his being cannot be told here. His eyes were lodged too far in heaven to have kept the delights for long, to have comprehended all that clogged his impatiently mercurial feet.
"The abashless inquisition of each star" was the scrutiny that obsessed his ways, the impertinence that he suffered most; for he had the magnitude of soul that hungered for placement, and the plague of two masters was on him. Huntress and "Hound" he had to choose between, beauty and the insatiable Prince; harsh and determined lovers, both of them, too much craving altogether for an artistic nature. The earth had no room for him and he did not want heaven so soon. He was not saint, even though his name followed him even, for recognition.
"Stood bound and helplessly, for Time to shoot his barbed minutes at me, suffered the trampling hoof of every hour," etc., all this confided to some childish innocent in "The child's kiss". Whom else should he tell but a child? Where is the man or woman with understanding but has the "child" lodged somewhere for sympathy, for recognition? The clearest listener he could find, and the least commiserative, happily. "The heart of childhood, so divine for me", is but typical of a being so dragged, and emaciate with the tortures of the body, in earth places where no soul like his could ever be at home. What was Preston, or Ashton-under-Lyne to him, more than Kensall Green is to him now? What is such dust in his sky but some blinding and blowing thing? What is there for singer to do but sing until the throat cracks? Even the larks and the thrushes do that. They end their morning and evening with a song. He was brother to these birds in that loftiness. He sang, and sang, and sang, while flesh fainted from hunger and weakness.
Had not Storrington come to him in the dark places of London, we should have had no "Hound of Heaven", and without that masterpiece what would modern poetry do? He sang to cover up his wounds with climbing music. That was his sense of beauty. He filled his hollowing cheek with finer things than moaning. He might have wept, but they were words instead of drops.
It will be difficult to find loftier song as to essences. We shall have room for criticising stylistic extravagances, archaisms of a not interesting order for us, yet there will be nothing said but the highest in praise of his genius. Excess of praise may be heaped upon him without cessation, and it may end in the few cool yet incisive words that fell from the lips of Meredith, with the violets from another's worshipped hands, "a true poet, one of a small band." Poets of this time will have much to gather from Thompson in point of sincerity. There is terrific mastery of words, which is like Shakespeare in felicity we do not encounter so often it seems to me.
Thompson has scaled the white rainbow of the night, and sits in radiant company among the first planetary strummers of song. His diamond is pure, and the matrix that hid him so long from showing his glinted facets is chipped away of miseries carried down with death. They will soon be forgotten by the multitude as death itself made him forget them. We have his chants and his anthems and plainsongs to remind us of the one essential, of how lofty a singer passed down our highroad. "Dusty with tumbling about amid the stars!" That is what he is for us now, if he rolled in too much clay of earth. Shelley might have turned his own handsome phrase on him, for they both strode the morning of their bright minds like sun the sky, with much of the same solemn yet speedy gait. There are times when they are certainly of the one radiance, lyrical and poetical. Their consuming intellectual interests were vastly apart, as were their paths of spirit.
I think we shall have no more "dread of height". Poetry has passed into scientific discovery. Intellectual passions are the vogue, earth is coming into its own, for there is no more heaven in the mind. We are showing our humanities now, and the soul must wait a little, and remain speechless in some dull corner of the universe. Thompson was the last to believe. We are learning to think now, so poetry has come to calculation. Rhapsody and passion are romantic, and we are not romantic. The last Rhapsodist was Francis Thompson, and in the sense of lyrical fervour, the last great poet was Francis Thompson.
ERNEST DOWSON
It is late to be telling of Dowson, with the eighteen-nineties nearly out of sight, and yet it is Dowson and Lionel Johnson that I know most of, from the last of this period. Poles apart these two poets are, the one so austere and almost collegiate in adherence to convention, the other too warm to let a coldness obsess his singing. There doesn't seem to be anything wonderful about Dowson, and yet you want to be saying a line of his every now and then, of him "that lived, and sang, and had a beating heart," ere he grew old, and he grew old so soon. "Worn out by what was really never life to him," is a prefatorial phrase I recall. There was a genuine music in Dowson, even if it was smothered in lilies and roses and wine of the now old way of saying things. "Come hither child, and rest—Behold the weary west," might have been the thing he was saying to himself, so much is this the essence of his lost cause.
There is a languor and a lack of power to lift a hand toward the light, too much a trusting of the shadow. "I have flung roses, roses riotously with the throng, to put those pale lost lilies out of mind." Always verging on a poetic feeling not just like ourselves in these days, and yet Dowson was a poet. He caressed words until they sang for him the one plaint that he asked of them. That he was obsessed of the beauties and the intimations of Versailles, is seen in everything he did, or at least he imbibed this from Verlaine. He was himself a pale wanderer down soft green allées, he had a twilight mind struggling toward the sun, which was too bright for him, for the moon was his brightest light. Echoes of Verlaine linger through his verse and a strain of Poe is present, poet whom he with his French taste admired so much, two very typical idols for a young man with a sentimental journey to pursue. Lost Adelaides, to keep him steeped in the sorrow that he cherished, for he petted his miseries considerably; or was it that he was most at home when he was unhappy? He would rather have seen the light of day from a not quite clear window, for instead of a clear hill, he might see a vague castle of his fancy somewhere. He hadn't the sweep of a great poet, and yet somehow there was the linnet in him, there was the strain of the lute among the leaves, there was the rustle of a soft dress audible, and the passing of hands he could not ever hold.
He was the poet of the lost treasure. "Studies in Sentiment" is, I think, the title of a small book of prose of his. He might have called his poems "Studies in sentimentality". And yet, for his time, how virile and vigorous he sounds beside "Posies out of Rings", of his friend Theodore Peters, of the renaissance cloak, the cherry coloured velvet cloak embroidered in green leaves and silver veinings, so full of the sky radiance of Dowson himself, this cloak. Cherry sounds red and passionate. But it was a cherry of olden time, with the bloom quite gone, the dust of the years permeating its silken warp. It reposes here in America, the property of an artist of that period.
One likes Dowson because of his sincerity, and a clear beauty which, if not exactly startling, was in its way truly genuine. It was merely too late for Dowson, and it was probably too soon. Swinburne had strummed the skies with every kind of song, and Verlaine had whispered every secret of the senses there was, in the land of illusion and vaguery. Dowson was worshipper of them both, for it was sound first and last that he cared most for, the musical mastery of the one and the sentimentality of the other. He was far nearer Verlaine in type. He had but the one thing to tell of, and that was lost love, and he told it over and over in his book of verse. His Pierrot of the Minute was himself, and his Cynara was the ever vanishing vision of his own insecurity and incapability. He perished for the love of hands. He is so like someone one knows, whom one wants to talk to tenderly, touch in a friendly way, and say as little as possible. He comes to one humanly first, and asks you for your eye to his verse afterward, something of the "Little boy Lost", in his so ineffectual face, weak with sweetness and hidden in shyness, covered with irresponsibility, or lack of power to be responsible.
He was a helpless one, that is certain. He resorted to the old-fashioned methods of the decadents for maintaining the certain requisite melancholy apparently necessary to sing a certain way. In the struggle of that period, he must have seemed like a very clear, though a very sad singer. There were no lilies or orchids in his buttonhole, and no strange jewels on his fingers, for you remember, it was the time of "Monsieur Phocas", and the art of Gustave Moreau. He was plain and sincere, and pathetic, old-fashioned too in that he was bohemian, or at least had acquired bohemianism, for I think no Englishman was ever really bohemian. Dieppe and the docks had gotten him, and took away the sense of mastery over things that a real poet of power must somehow have. He was essentially a giver-in. His neurasthenia was probably the reason for that. It was the age of absinthe and little taverns, for there was Verlaine and the inimitable Café d'Harcourt, which, as you saw it just before the war, had the very something that kept the Master at his drinks all day.
Murger, Rimbaud, Verlaine had done the thing which has lasted so singularly until now, for there are still echoes of this in the air, even to the present day. Barmaids are memories, and roseleaves dried and set in urns, for that matter, too. How far away it all seems, and they were the substance of poetry then. Sounds were the important things for Dowson, which is essentially the Swinburne echo. Significant then, that he worshipped "the viol, the violet, and the vine" of Poe. There was little else but singing in his verse however. His love of Horace did less for him than the masters of sound, excepting that the vision comes in the name "Cynara". But it was all struggle for Dowson, a battle with the pale lily. It was for this he clung to cabmen's lounging places. He was looking for places to be out of the play in. He couldn't have survived for long, and yet there is a strain of genuine loveliness, the note of pure beauty in the verse of Dowson. He was poet, and kept to his creed with lover-like tenacity.
He helped close a period that was distinguished all over the world, the period of the sunflower. Apart from its wildest and most spectacular genius, it has produced Lionel Johnson with his religious purity, and Aubrey Beardsley. It was the time of sad and delicate young men. They all died in boyhood really. These were, I think, with Dowson the best it offered. We never read Arthur Symons for his power in verse, he with so much of the rose-tinted afterglow in him, so much of the old feeling for stage doors and roses thrown from the boxes, and the dying scent of lingerie. His essays will be a far finer source of delight for a much longer time, for therein is the best poetry he had to offer.
Dowson was, let us say not mockingly, the boyish whimperer in song. He was ineffectual, too much so, to take up the game of laughter for long. That would have been too strenuous for him, so he had to sit and weep tears of wordy rain. "Il pleut dans mon cœur" was the famous touch of his master, it was the loudest strain in him. That was the lover-strain, and Dowson was the lover dying of love, imaginary love probably, and saw everywhere something to remind him of what he had pathetically lost. If there had been a little savage in him, he would have walked away with what he wanted. He maybe did have a try or two, but they couldn't have endured, for he wasn't loving a particular Adelaide. That was the name he gave to love, for it was woman's lips, and eyes and hands that he cared most for, or at least seemed most to care.
It was in the vision that crossed his ways in the dark and boisterous taverns where love finds strange ways for expression, that the singleness of feeling possessed him. It was among the rougher elements of dock life that his refinements found their level. Dowson sang and sang and sang, until he grew old at thirty-three, "worn out by what was never really life to him". Aged pierrot, gone home to his mother, the Moon, to bask forever in the twilight of his old and vague fancies. There might he strum his heart out in the old way, and the world would never hear, for it has lost the ear for this kind of song. Perhaps in two hundred years, in other "golden treasuries" there may appear the songs of Dowson as among the best of those early and late singers of the nineteenth century. We cannot say now, for it cloys a little with sweets for us at this time, though it was then the time of honey and jasmine, and the scent of far away flowers. Pierrot of the glass, with the hours dripping away in fine, gold rain. That was the genius of poets like Dowson, and pierrot was the master of them all.
HENRY JAMES ON RUPERT BROOKE
Henry James on Rupert Brooke! Here is certainly a very wide interval, separated, artist and subject, by the greatest divergence of power, and one may be even amazed at the contrast involved. He is surely, James, in all his elaborateness, trying to square the rose and compute the lily, algebraical advances upon a most simple thesis. Brooke—a nature so obvious, which had no measure at all for what the sum had done to him, and for all that about him, or for those stellar ecstasies which held him bound with fervour as poet, planetary swimmer, and gifted as well with a fine stroke for the sea, and runner of all the beautiful earth places about the great seas' edge.
For me, there is heaviness and over-elaboration paramount in this preface to the Letters from America, excess of byword, a strained relationship with his subject, but that would of course be Jamesian, and very naturally, too. It is hardly, this preface, the tribute of the wise telling of beautiful and "blinding youth", surely more the treatise of the problemist forging his problem, as the sculptor might; something too much of metal or stone, too ponderous, too severe let one say, for its so gracing and brightening theme, something not springing into bloom, as does the person and personality of the young subject himself. Only upon occasion does he really come upon the young man, actual, forgetful of all but him.
There is no question, if the word of those be true who had relation however slight or intimate with Brooke, that he was an engrossing theme, and for more than one greater than himself, as certainly he was for many much less significant than James. It is distinguished from the young poet's point of view that he was impressed, and that as person to person he really did see him in a convincing manner, as might one artist of great repute find himself uncommonly affected by the young and so living poet with more than a common gift for creation. It seems to me however that James is not over certain as to how poetic all things are in substance, yet all the while treating Brooke coolly and spaciously as an artist should.
I did not know Brooke, and I know nothing of him beyond various photos showing him one way, quite manly and robust, and I feel sure he was so, and in another way as neither youth nor man, but something idyllic, separate and seraph-like, untouched mostly with earthly experience. These pictures do show that he was, unquestionably, a bright gust of England, with an almost audible splendour about even these poor replicas, which make it seem that he did perform the ascribed miracle, that England really had brought forth of her brightest and best, only to lay away her golden fruitage in dust upon the borders of a far and classical sea, with an acute untimeliness. But respectfully let me say, I think much in these hours of the incongruity and pathos of excessive celebration. There shall not be for long, singers enough to sing high songs commensurate with the delights of those numberless ones "who lived, and sang, and had a beating heart", those who have sped into the twilight too soon, having but a brief time to discover if years had bright secrets for them or clear perspective. There shall always lack the requisite word for them who have made many a dull morning splendid with faith, they who have been the human indication immeasurably of the sun's rising, and of the truth that vision is a thing of reason.
Of Brooke and the other dead poets as well, there has, it seems to me, been too much of celebration. But of Brooke and his poetry, which is a far superior product to these really most ordinary "Letters", there is in these poetic pieces too much of what I want to call "University Cleavage", an excess of old school painting, too much usage of the warm image, which, though emotional, is not sensuous enough to express the real poetic sensuousness, to make the line or the word burn passionately, too much of the shades of Swinburne still upon the horizon. Rose and violet of the eighteen ninety hues have for long been dispensed with, as has the pierrot and his moon. We have in this time come to like hardier colourings, which are for us more satisfying, and more poetic. We hardly dare use the hot words of "Anactoria" in our day. To be sure rose is English, for it has been for long a very predominant shade on the young face of England, but in Brooke there is an old age to the fervour, and in spite of the brilliant youth of the poet, there is an old age in the substance and really in the treatment as well. We are wanting a fresher intonation to those images, and expect a new approach, and a newer aspect. It is not to adhere by means of criticism to the prevailing graveyard tendency, nor do we want so much of the easy and cheap journalistic element, as comes so often in the so named "free verse". What is really wanted is an individual consistency, and a brightness of imagery which shall be the poet's own by reason of his own personal attachment, and not simply the variance of the many-in-one poetry of the day.
It is not enough to write passably, it is only enough when there are several, or even one, who will give their or his own peculiar contact with those agencies of the day, the hour, and the moment, who will find or invent a style best suited to themselves. Attempts at excessive individualism will never create true individualistic expression, no affected surprise in personal perversity of image or metaphor will make a real poet, or real poetry. There must be first and last of all, a sure ardour, the poet's very own, which will of itself support obvious, or even slightly detectable, influences. It is not enough to declaim oneself, or propose continually one's group. The single utterance is what is necessary, a real freshness of vocalization which is, so to speak, the singer's own throat. If he be original in his freshness, we shall be able to single him away from the sweeping movements of the hour by his very "specialness" in touch, that pressure of the mind and spirit upon the page, which is his.
We shall translate a poet through his indications and intentions as well as through his arrivals, and we must condemn no one to fame beyond his capacity or deserts. We have never the need of extravagant laud. It is not enough to praise a poet for his personal charm, his beauty of body and of mind and soul, for these are but beautiful things at home in a beautiful house. In the case of Brooke, we have ringing up among hosts of others, James's voice that he was all of this, but I would not wish to think it was the wish of any real poet to be "condemned to sociability", merely because he was an eminently social being, or because he was the exceptionally handsome, among the many less so; or be condemned to overpraise for what is after all but an indication to poetic power. "If I should die", is of course a very lovely sonnet, and it is the true indication of what Brooke might have been, but it is not the reason to be doomed to find all things wonderful in him. For in the state of perfection, if one see always with a lancet eye, we really do accentuate the essence of beauty by a careful and very direct critical sense, which can and should, when honorably exercised, show up delicately, the sense of proportion.
It is as much a part of the artist's equipment to find fault as it is to praise, for he wants by nature the true value with which he may relate himself to the sense of beauty. It seems, perhaps only to me, that in Brooke's poems there is but a vigorous indication to poetic expression, whereas doubtless the man himself was being excessively poetic, hour and moment together, and spent much energy of mind and body poetizing sensation. For me, there is a journalistic quality of phrasing and only very rarely the unusual image. As for the "Letters", they are loose and jotty in form, without distinction either in observation or in form, without real felicity or uniqueness. Art is nothing if it is not the object, or the idea, or experience seen in review, with clarity. In Brooke, I feel the superabundance of joy in the attractiveness of the world, but I do not feel the language of him commensurate or distinguished in the qualities of poetic or literary art. There seems to me to be too much of the blown lock and the wistful glance, too much of the attitudinized poet, lacking, I may even say, in true refinement, often.
A too comfortable poet, and poetry of too much verve without incision, too much "gesturing", which is an easy thing for many talented people, and there is also missing for me the real grip of amazement. You will not find anything in the letters that could not have been done by the cub reporter, save possibly in the more charming of the letters with reference to swimming in the South Seas. Here you feel Brooke at home instantly, and the picturing is natural and easy. But other than this, you will find no phrasing to compare with passages of James's preface, such, for instance, as the "sky-clamour of more dollars", surely a vastly more incisive phrase regarding the frenzies of New York, than all that Brooke essays to tell of it. Brooke is distinctly "not there" too often in these so irregular letters of his. Letters are notably rare in these times anyhow, and so it is with the letters of Brooke. We look for distinction, and it is not to be found, they have but little of the intimacy with their subjects that one expects.
As to his poetry, it seems to be a poetry rapidly approaching state approval, there is in it the flavour of the budding laureate, it seems to me to be poetry already "in orders". Brooke was certainly in danger of becoming a good poet, like the several other poets who perished in the throes of heroism. Like them, he would, had he lived, have had to save himself from the evils of prosperity, poetically speaking. He would have had to overcome his tendency toward what I want to call the old-fashioned "gold and velvet" of his words, a very definite haze hanging over them of the ill effect of the eighteen-ninety school, which produced a little excellent poetry and a lot of very tame production. Poetry is like all art, difficult even in its freest interval. Brooke must rest his claim to early distinction perhaps upon the "If I should die" sonnet alone, he would certainly have had to come up considerably, to have held the place his too numerous personal admirers were wont to thrust upon him. Unless one be the veritable genius, sudden laurels wither on the stem with too much of morning.
This poet had no chance to prove what poetry of his would have endured the long day, and most of all he needed to be removed from too much love of everything. The best art cannot endure such promiscuity, not an art of specific individual worth. In the book which is called "Letters from America", the attraction lies in its preface, despite the so noticeable irrelevancy of style. It seems to me that James might for once have condescended to an equal footing with his theme, for the sake of the devoutness of his intention, and have come to us for the moment, the man talking of the youth. He might then have told us something really intimate of "Rupert", as he so frequently names him, for this would indicate some intimacy surely, unless perchance he was "Rupert" to the innumerables whom he met, and who were sure of his intimacy on the instant's introduction, which would indeed be "condemned to sociability".
This book is in two pieces, preface and content, and we are conscious chiefly of the high style and interest of the preface, first of all, and the discrepancy inherent in the rest of the book accentuating the wide divergence between praiser and praised. It is James with reference to Brooke, it is not Henry James informing of the young and handsome Rupert Brooke. Apollo in the flesh must do some mighty singing. Brooke had not done much of this when they laid him by on the borders of that farther sea. He had more to prove the heritage laid so heavily upon him by the unending host of his admirers and lovers. He needed relief from the popular notion, and we must relieve ourselves from his excessive popularity if we are to enjoy him rightly, by being just with him. A little time, and we should have learned his real distinction. It is too soon for us, and too late for him. We must accept him more for his finer indications then, and less for his achievement in the sense of mastery.
THE DEARTH OF CRITICS
There is just cause for wonder at the noticeable absence of critics in the field of painting, of individuals who are capable of some serious approach to the current tendencies in art. We have witnessed a very general failure to rise above the common or high-class reportorial level in this particular sphere. Why do so many people who write specifically about painting say so little that really relates to it? It is because most of them are journalists or men of letters who have made emotional excursions into this field, which is in most instances foreign to them; well-known literary artists, occasionally, intent upon varying their subject matter.
We read Meier-Graefe, for instance, on the development of modern art, and we find his analogies more or less stimulating, but taken as a whole his work is unsatisfactory from an artist's point of view; not much more than a sort of novel with art for its skeleton, or rather a handbook from which the untutored layman can gather superficial information about group and individual influences, a kind of verbal entertainment that is altogether wanting in true critical values. I have listened to lectures on art by people who were supposed to know about it, merely to see how much this type of critical study could satisfy the really artistic mind somewhat conversant with true relations, and I have found these lectures of but the slightest value, resumés compounded of wearisome and inappropriate detail. There is always an extreme lack of true definition, of true information, there is always too much of the amateur spirit passing for popular knowledge among these individuals who might otherwise do so much to form public taste and appreciation. Thus we find that even the chatty Meier-Graefe stops without going any further than Cézanne. It is possible that after writing two very heavy volumes upon the development of modern art, he has to remain silent on modern art itself, that he really feels he is not qualified to speak upon Cézanne and his successors; or does he assume possibly that there is nothing this side of Cézanne? How many writer people are there who really do understand what has taken place since then?
I have heard these characteristic remarks among the so-called art writers who write the regular notices for the daily journals—"You see I really don't know anything about the subject, but I have to write!" or—"I don't know anything about art, but I am reading up on it as much as possible so that I won't appear too stupid; for they send me out and I have to write something." Their attitude is the same as if their subject were a fire or a murder: but either of the latter would be much more in their line, calling for nothing but a registration of the simplest of facts. Just why these people have to write upon art will never be clear. But because of this altogether trivial relationship to the theme of painting we find it difficult to take seriously at all what we read in our dailies, in every case the barest notation with heavily worded comment, having little or no reference to what is important in the particular pictures themselves. How can anyone take these individuals seriously when they actually have no opinion to offer, and must rely either upon humor or indignation to inspire them?
If we turn to the pundits of criticism we find statements like this of Ruskin on Giotto:—"For all his use of opalescent warm color, Giotto is exactly like Turner, as in his swift expressional power he is like Gainsborough!" Again, speaking of Turner's Fighting Téméraire, he says: "Of all pictures of subjects not visibly involving human pain, this is, I believe, the most pathetic that was ever painted—no ruin was ever so affecting as this gliding of the vessel to her grave." Journalism of the first class certainly, but at the farthest stretch of the imagination how can one possibly think of Gainsborough or Turner in connection with any special quality of Giotto? As for the pathos of an aged ship, that belongs to poetry, as Coleridge has shown; sentiment of this kind has never had any proper place in painting. A far worthier type of appreciation in words is to be found, of course, in Pater's passages on La Gioconda and Botticelli's Birth of Venus. But these belong to a different realm, in which literature rises to a height independent of the pictures themselves by means of the suggestion that is in them, the power of suggestion being a finer alternative for crude and worthless description. We shall always dispute with the writer on art as to exactly what symbol is inherent in the presence of a rose in the hand or a tear upon the cheek, but we cannot quarrel when the matter is treated as sublimely as in the case of a literary artist like Pater. It is in the sphere of professed critical judgment that the literary authorities so often go astray.
Thus between the entertaining type of writer like Meier-Graefe and the daily reporter there is no middle ground. The journalist is frank and says that he doesn't know but that he must write; the other writes books that are well suited for reference purposes, but have scant bearing upon the actual truth in relation to pictures. Are there any critics who attempt seriously to approach the modern theme, who find it worth their while to go into modern esthetics with anything like sincerity or real earnestness of attitude? Only two that I am aware of. There is the intelligent Leo Stein, who seldom appears in print, but who makes an art of conversation on the subject; and there is Willard Huntingdon Wright, who has appeared extensively and certainly with intelligence also, both of these critical writers being very much at variance in theory, but both full of discernment whatever one may think of their individual ideas. We are sure of both as being thoroughly inside the subject, this theme of modern art, for they are somehow painter people. I even suspect them both of having once, like George Moore, painted seriously themselves.
Nevertheless there is a hopeful seriousness of interest developing in what is being done this side the sea, a rediscovery of native art of the sort that is occurring in all countries. The artist is being taught by means of war that there is no longer a conventional center of art, that the time-worn fetish of Paris as a necessity in his development has been dispensed with; and this is fortunate for the artist and for art in general. It is having its pronounced effect upon the creative powers of the individual in all countries, almost obliging him to create his own impulse upon his own soil; it is making the artist see that if he is really to create he must create irrespective of all that exists as convention in the mind.
How will this affect the artist? He will learn first of all to be concerned with himself, and what he puts forth of personality and of personal research will receive its character from his strict adherence to this principle, whether he proceeds by means of prevailing theories or by departure from them. The public will thus have no choice but to rely upon what he produces seriously as coming clearly from himself, from his own desire and labor. He will realize that it is not a trick, not a habit, not a trade—this modernity—and that with fashions it has nothing to do; that it is explicitly a part of our modern urge toward expression quite as much as the art of Corot and Millet were of Barbizon, as the art of Titian, Giorgione and Michelangelo were of Italy; that he and his time bear the strictest relationship to one another and that through this relationship he can best build up his own original power. Unable to depend therefore upon the confessedly untutored lay writer or even the better class essayist to tell him his place, he will establish himself, and his place will be determined in the régime of his day by precisely those qualities which he contributes to it. He will not rely too insistently upon idiosyncrasy; the failure of this we have already seen, in the post-impressionists.
The truth is that painters must sooner or later learn to express themselves in terms of pure language, they must learn that creation is the thing most expected of them, and, if possible, invention as well. Oddity in execution or idea is of the least importance. Artists have a more respectable service to perform than this dilettantist notion of beauty implies. Since the utter annihilation of sentimentality, of legend, of what we call poetry has taken place, a richer substance for expression has come to us by means of which the artist may express a larger, newer variety of matter, more relevant to our special need, our modernity.
The war disintegrated the art habit and in this fact lies the hope of art. Fads have lost what slight interest they possessed, the folly of imitation has been exposed. As a result of this, I like to think that we shall have a finer type of expression, a richer kind of personal quality. Every artist is his own maker, his own liberator; he it is that should be the first to criticise, destroy and reconstruct himself, he should find no mood convenient, no attitude comfortable. What the lay-writer says of him in praise or blame will not matter so much in the future; he will respect first and last only those who have found the time to share his theme, at least in mind, if not in experience, and the discerning public will free itself from the temporary influences of the confessedly untutored critic. The artist will gain its confidence by reason of his own sincerity and intelligence. It is probable, too, that in time criticism in the mode of Ruskin will utterly disappear and the Meier-Graefe type of critic will have found a fitter and true successor, someone who, when he calls himself a critic, will prove a fairly clear title to the distinction and will not have to apologize for himself or for his occupation.
AFTERWORD
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING "DADA"
We are indebted to Tristan Tzara and his followers for the newest and perhaps the most important doctrinary insistence as applied to art which has appeared in a long time. Dada-ism is the latest phase of modernism in painting as well as in literature, and carries with it all the passion for freedom of expression which Marinetti sponsored so loudly in his futuristic manifestoes. It adds likewise an exhilarating quality of nihilism, imbibed, as is said, directly from the author of Zarathustra. Reading a fragment of the documentary statement of Dada-ism, we find that the charm of the idea exists mainly in the fact that they wish all things levelled in the mind of man to the degree of commonplaceness which is typical of and peculiar to it.
Nothing is greater than anything else, is what the Dada believes, and this is the first sign of hope the artist at least can discover in the meaningless importance which has been invested in the term ART. It shows best of all that art is to betake itself on its own way blandly, despite the wish of its so ardent supporters and suppressors. I am greatly relieved as artist, to find there is at least one tenet I can hold to in my experience as a useful or a useless human being. I have always said for myself, I have no office, no obligations, no other "mission", dread-fullest of all words, than to find out the quality of humor that exists in experience, or life as we think we are entitled to call it. I have always felt the underlying fatality of habit in appreciation, because I have felt, and now actually more than ever in my existence, the fatality of habit indulged in by the artist. The artist has made a kind of subtle crime of his habitual expression, his emotional monotonies, and his intellectual inabilities.
If I announce on this bright morning that I am a "Dada-ist" it is not because I find the slightest need for, or importance in, a doctrine of any sort, it is only for convenience of myself and a few others that I take up the issue of adherence. An expressionist is one who expresses himself at all times in any way that is necessary and peculiar to him. A dada-ist is one who finds no one thing more important than any other one thing, and so I turn from my place in the scheme from expressionist to dada-ist with the easy grace that becomes any self-respecting humorist.
Having fussed with average intelligence as well as with average stupidity over the various dogmatic aspects of human experience such as art, religion, philosophy, ethics, morals, with a kind of obligatory blindness, I am come to the clearest point of my vision, which is nothing more or less than the superbly enlightening discovery that life as we know it is an essentially comic issue and cannot be treated other than with the spirit of comedy in comprehension. It is cause for riotous and healthy laughter, and to laugh at oneself in conjunction with the rest of the world, at one's own tragic vagaries, concerning the things one cannot name or touch or comprehend, is the best anodyne I can conjure in my mind for the irrelevant pains we take to impress ourselves and the world with the importance of anything more than the brilliant excitation of the moment. It is thrilling, therefore, to realize there is a healthy way out of all this dilemma of habit for the artist. One of these ways is to reduce the size of the "A" in art, to meet the size of the rest of the letters in one's speech. Another way is to deliver art from the clutches of its worshippers, and by worshippers I mean the idolaters and the commercialists of art. By the idolaters I mean those whose reverence for art is beyond their knowledge of it. By the commercialists I mean those who prey upon the ignorance of the unsophisticated, with pictures created by the esthetic habit of, or better to say, through the banality of, "artistic" temperament. Art is at present a species of vice in America, and it sorely and conspicuously needs prohibition or interference.
It is, I think, high time that those who have the artistic habit toward art should be apprised of the danger they are in in assuming of course that they hold vital interest in the development of intelligence. It is time therefore to interfere with stupidity in matters of taste and judgment. We learn little or nothing from habit excepting repetitive imitation. I should, for the benefit of you as reader, interpose here a little information from the mind of Francis Picabia, who was until the war conspicuous among the cubists, upon the subject of dada-ism.
"Dada smells of nothing, nothing, nothing.
It is like your hopes: nothing.
Like your paradise: nothing.
Like your idols: nothing.
Like your politicians: nothing.
Like your heroes: nothing.
Like your artists: nothing.
Like your religions: nothing."
A litany like this coming from one of the most notable dada-ists of the day, is too edifying for proper expression. It is like a window opened upon a wide cool place where all parts of one's exhausted being may receive the kind of air that is imperative to it. For the present, we may say, a special part of one's being which needs the most and the freshest air is that chamber in the brain where art takes hold and flourishes like a bed of fungus in the dark.
What is the use, then, of knowing anything about art until we know precisely what it is? If it is such an orchidaceous rarity as the world of worshippers would have us believe, then we know it must be the parasitic equivalent of our existence feeding upon the health of other functions and sensibilities in ourselves. The question comes why worship what we are not familiar with? The war has taught us that idolatry is a past virtue and can have no further place with intelligent people living in the present era, which is for us the only era worth consideration. I have a hobby-horse therefore—to ride away with, out into the world of intricate common experience; out into the arena with those who know what the element of life itself is, and that I have become an expression of the one issue in the mind worth the consideration of the artist, namely fluidic change. How can anything to which I am not related, have any bearing upon me as artist? I am only dada-ist because it is the nearest I have come to scientific principle in experience. What yesterday can mean is only what yesterday was, and tomorrow is something I cannot fathom until it occurs. I ride my own hobby-horse away from the dangers of art which is with us a modern vice at present, into the wide expanse of magnanimous diversion from which I may extract all the joyousness I am capable of, from the patterns I encounter.
The same disgust which was manifested and certainly enjoyed by Duse, when she demanded that the stage be cleared of actors in order to save the creative life of the stage, is the same disgust that makes us yearn for wooden dolls to make abstract movements in order that we may release art from its infliction of the big "A", to take away from art its pricelessness and make of it a new and engaging diversion, pastime, even dissipation if you will; for all real expression is a phase of dissipation in itself: To release art from the disease of little theatre-ism, and from the mandibles of the octopus-like worshipper that eats everything, in the line of spurious estheticism within range, disgorging it without intelligence or comprehension upon the consciousness of the not at all stupid public, with a so obviously pernicious effect.
"Dada is a fundamentally religious attitude, analogous to that of the scientist with his eyeglass glued to the microscope." Dada is irritated by those who write "Art, Beauty, Truth", with capital letters, and who make of them entities superior to man. "Dada scoffs at capital letters, atrociously." "Dada ruining the authority of constraints, tends to set free the natural play of our activities." "Dada therefore leads to amoralism and to the most spontaneous and consequently the least logical lyricism. This lyricism is expressed in a thousand ways of life." "Dada scrapes from us the thick layers of filth deposited on us by the last few centuries." "Dada destroys, and stops at that. Let Dada help us to make a complete clearance, then each of us rebuild a modern house with central heating, and everything to the drain, Dadas of 1920."
Remembering always that Dada means hobby-horse, you have at last the invitation to make merry for once in our new and unprecedented experience over the subject of ART with its now reduced front letter. It is the newest and most admirable reclaimer of art in that it offers at last a release for the expression of natural sensibilities. We can ride away to the radiant region of "Joie de Vivre", and find that life and art are one and the same thing, resembling each other so closely in reality, that it is never a question of whether it shall or must be set down on paper or canvas, or given any greater degree of expression than we give to a morning walk or a pleasant bath, or an ordinary rest in the sunlight.
Art is then a matter of how one is to take life now, and not by any means a matter of how the Greeks or the Egyptians or any other race has shown it to be for their own needs and satisfaction. If art was necessary to them, it is unnecessary to us now, therefore it is free to express itself as it will. You will find, therefore, that if you are aware of yourself, you will be your own perfect dada-ist, in that you are for the first time riding your own hobby-horse into infinity of sensation through experience, and that you are one more satisfactory vaudevillian among the multitudes of dancing legs and flying wits. You will learn after all that the bugaboo called LIFE is a matter of the tightrope and that the stars will shine their frisky approval as you glide, if you glide sensibly, with an eye on the fun in the performance. That is what art is to be, must come to in the consciousness of the artist most of all, he is perhaps the greatest offender in matters of judgment and taste; and the next greatest offender is the dreadful go-between or "middleman" esthete who so glibly contributes effete values to our present day conceptions.
We must all learn what art really is, learn to relieve it from the surrounding stupidities and from the passionate and useless admiration of the horde of false idolaters, as well as the money changers in the temple of success. Dada-ism offers the first joyous dogma I have encountered which has been invented for the release and true freedom of art. It is therefore most welcome since it will put out of use all heavy hands and light fingers in the business of art and set them to playing a more honourable and sportsmanlike game. We shall learn through dada-ism that art is a witty and entertaining pastime, and not to be accepted as our ever present and stultifying affliction.