Instinct and Intelligence
Clarence Darrow recently echoed that high estimate of instinct at the expense of intelligence which has been the fashion since Bergson. Some of these days, when that case has been overstated often enough, there will be a return swing of that pendulum. The instinctive wasp who, in order to paralyze it, knows how to sting a caterpillar “as though she knew its anatomy” may not always seem in all respects superior to the human surgeon who does actually know anatomy and can apply that knowledge in a thousand ways—versus the wasp’s one. Some day it will strike some one that no creature has an instinct against poison comparable in delicacy, subtlety, and fullness with a chemist’s noninstinctive, intelligent knowledge of poisons—and nonpoisons. So with a number of things. The pragmatic objection to our present glorification of instinct is that it tends to become a glorification of intellectual whim.—George Cram Cook in The Chicago Evening Post.
The Jewels of a Lapidary
Emerson’s Journals, Volume IX, 1856-1863. (Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.)
At least nine events of permanent historic interest have occurred in American literature within the past few years: they are represented by the publication of nine volumes of Emerson’s Journals. Those who are trying to achieve a personal religion, which acknowledges God as an immanence instead of a proposition, hail with a quiet joy every extraction from the great mine in which Emerson stored the jewels of his life. If we do not recognize them as lapidarious we must perceive them as the better metals of ourselves, for this “friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit” inhumed those spiritual values which all men at some time or another seek as their own. Emerson buoys us up for our common struggles and makes us conscious of that aid which is the awakening of latent power. He composed the bricks which thousands of builders have used in fashioning beautiful personal temples. “I dot evermore in my endless journal,” he wrote to Carlyle; “... the arrangement loiters long, and I get a brick-kiln instead of a house.” Speaking of his philosophical work he confesses a “formidable tendency to the lapidary style,” and adds, “I build my house of boulders.”
Emerson’s published journals are kilns and quarries from which the foundation materials for the edifice of character have been obtained by countless builders. If he could not construct a system of philosophy, as Arnold alleges, he could and did provide the “boulders” and indicate the pattern which others have used. He is a part of every well-read American, and, chiefly through Carlyle, still lives in the land of his forefathers. He was an inspiration to Whitman, one of whose “specimen days” closed with “a long and blessed evening with Emerson.” Such evenings are as real now as in Whitman’s time, and are more commonly experienced, for Emerson is westward-bound. He has traveled slowly in this direction: “boulders” are not carried by exploiters and pioneers who build and live in a world not of “the spirit” but of the senses. With the establishing of easier communication between centers of thought and fields of action in America, New England “boulders” were brought hither, to chink the crude walls of western life; and it is a token of Emerson’s vitality and spiritual universality that his “bricks” and “boulders” are discoverable in all sorts of shacks which men are trying to improve. Lumber decays, but “boulders” remain, and some of them become talismanic.
In reading and re-reading Emerson’s Journals one is impressed with their remarkable quotability, and in this mechanical handiness of his work we have a partial explanation of the slowness with which it has been assimilated. “Boulders” are fated to be knocked about before they are appreciated. We throw them at one another with a sort of physical dexterity until, burnished and transformed, they are recognized as adapted to higher uses. We do not flippantly quote or mention the authors who have become personal to us; I quote Emerson’s Journal as a blessed soliloquy.
D. C. W.
New York Letter
George Soule
The most interesting hours of the last week I have spent in listening to discussions of the futurists. Someone told of a superb incident recently reported of a speech by Marinetti, the enunciator of the futurist philosophy. Marinetti, after denouncing the past in his usual method, proceeded to eliminate women from his world. “But,” said someone, “how will you continue the human race?” “We will not continue the human race,” rejoined Marinetti, with superb éclat. Daring and magnificent utterance! But, after all, perhaps he is the only sane one, and the norm of human intelligence quite insane. That fits in well with the recently reported discovery of a Paris scientist, that all variations in the course of evolution are the result of disease, and that there would have been no man had not some ape had a parasite in his thyroid gland. All of which goes to show that I was right in my statement (which Chesterton probably has said before me) that all logical extremes are illogical, since the world is based on an eternal paradox.
Really it is quite simple to follow the futurist line of thought once you get the hang of it. For instance—two developments of painting predicted at the Troubetzkoys. In the first, each plane in the cubist picture, instead of being colored, is to be numbered, and the numbers printed in a catalogue opposite the names of the colors for which they stand. Thus any approach to the vulgar intrusion of realism would be avoided, and abstract beauty furthered. What chances for the imagination! And think of the subtle possibilities in the mathematics of color! One could surely express by some abstruse quadratic a color quite beyond the realm of visual possibility, and thus man by one gigantic tug at his bootstraps would pull his soul out of its finite limitations.
The second school was aptly named the auto-symbolists. In this school Nietzschean individualism attains its sublime extreme. The artist, instead of expressing his spirit in the vulgar symbols understood by everybody, arbitrarily chooses a symbol known only to himself. If he wishes to depict a determined man going up a mountain on a mule’s back he may paint a mouse-trap. To him the mouse-trap perfectly expresses the particular feeling he has when viewing his own mental image of the picture he has decided to paint. What matter about anybody else? If you ask him cui bono?—he will reply: why any bono at all? And, of course, he is perfectly logical. And the satisfying aristocratic aloofness of his position! If people—as they surely will—study his mouse-trap and discuss in vain what it portends, if they pay vast sums for his pictures and start a literature of criticisms to guess his unguessable riddles, so much the better. He can laugh at them with diabolical glee. Everybody is a fool but himself, and he can go on creating in the seventh circle of his own soul undisturbed by the barnyard cackle of the world.
Has the cubist literature of Gertrude Stein awakened echoes in Chicago? I have read it without understanding before this. But one night my host—a great, strong, humorous, intelligent hulk of a man, himself a scoffer at cubism—read part of her essay on Matisse so that it was almost intelligible. His inflection and punctuation did it. Her chief characteristics seem to be an aversion to personal pronouns and a strict adherence to simple declarative statements, untroubled by subordinate clauses or phrases of any kind. Her thought, therefore, resolves itself awkwardly in a four-square way. The multiplicity of her planes becomes confusing after a page, but each plane stands alone. Thus—(I quote inaccurately)—“Some ones knew this one to be expressing something being struggling. Some ones knew this one not to be expressing something being struggling. This one expressed something being struggling. This one did not express something being struggling.” Which, of course, is the cubist way of saying that “Some thought he was trying to express struggle in an object, others thought the contrary. As a matter of fact, he sometimes did express struggle; sometimes he did not.”
But it seems her early work is now getting too obvious, so she is in the throes of a later phase. In her “Portrait of Miss Dodge” she has eliminated verbs and sentence structure entirely, flinging a succession of image-nouns at the reader. One can surely not accuse her of “prettiness.”
The craze for colored wigs is, of course, an outgrowth of futurism. Why should a man be any color except that which his will dictates? This has long (a few months) been the cry of the painter, and the smart set has echoed: Why should he? Women in green and blue wigs have been seen in New York already. But, of course, it would be senseless to stop there; if one has an orange toupé he should surely have a mauve face. Yellow complexions are worn with indigo hair. We have long been accustomed to blue powdered noses on Fifth Avenue, and the setting of diamonds in the teeth is an old story. The only trouble with this epoch-making idea is that it is old. Phœnician women did it! And wasn’t it Edward Lear who wrote of The Jumblies:
“Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a sieve”?
Of course, if one doesn’t believe in this new development of art, but is naturalistic, he should be brave enough to chase his idea to its lair and act upon it, like Lady Constance Stewart Richardson, who is now tripping about the homes of the rich in New York with nothing at all on—or worse than nothing.
Forgive my preposterosities! But the ridiculous seriousness with which everything unfamiliar is taken by a sensation-sated haute monde is such a brilliant target for satire. I think with immense relief of a wonderful bit of sky, and a long stretch of beach, and of all things tangible and—yes, though it may be bourgeois—healthy.
To a Lost Friend
Eunice Tietjens
Across the tide of years you come to me,
You whom I knew so long ago.
A poignant letter kept half carelessly,
A faded likeness, dull and gray to see....
And now I know.
. . . . . .
Strange that I knew not then,—that when you stood
In warm, sweet flesh beneath my hand,
Your soul tumultuous as a spring-time flood
And life’s new wonder pulsing in your blood,
I could not understand.
I could not see your soul like thin red fire
Flash downward to my gaze,
Nor guess the strange, half-understood desire,
The tumult and the question and the ire
Of those far days.
I saw your soul stretch longing arms to love
In adolescent shyness bound,
And passionately storm the gods above.
Yet, since my own young heart knew naught thereof,
You never found.
It is too late now. You have dropped away
In formless silence from my ken,
And youth’s high hopes turn backward to decay.
Yet, oh, my heart were very fain to-day
To love you then!
Culture has one great passion—the passion for sweetness and light. It has one even yet greater!—the passion for making them prevail.—Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy.
The Irish Players: An Impression
A small, low room with walls of cool green-grey; in the center an old brown fire-place with a great black chimney; on the hearth a light like a deep raspberry; at each end a chair of smudgy brown; near the front a table toned with the walls; on it two black mugs and a stein; in one corner at the back, piled against the green-grey, flour sacks the color of dirty straw; and standing in the foreground, balanced as Whistler would have done it, a miller in a suit of brown, a thin widow in rusty black, a fat widow with bustles in rusty black and dirty white.—Somehow one planned beauty in that place.