H. G. Wells’s Man of the Future
In a little while he will reach out to the other planets, and take the greater fire, the sun, into his service. He will bring his solvent intelligence to bear upon the riddles of his individual interaction, transmute jealousy and every passion, control his own increase, select and breed for his embodiment a continually finer and stronger and wiser race. What none of us can think or will, save in a disconnected partiality, he will think and will collectively. Already some of us feel our merger with that greater life. There come moments when the thing shines out upon our thoughts. Sometimes in the dark, sleepless solitudes of night one ceases to be so-and-so, one ceases to bear a proper name, forgets one’s quarrels and vanities, forgives and understands one’s enemies and oneself, as one forgives and understands the quarrels of little children, knowing oneself indeed to be a being greater than one’s personal accidents, knowing oneself for Man on his planet, flying swiftly to unmeasured destinies through the starry stillnesses of space.—H. G. Wells in Social Forces in England and America.
Lawton Parker
Eunice Tietjens
Paris, the iridescent dream of every struggling art student on the round world; Paris the sophisticated, the most provincial of all cities—as provincial as Athens of old in the sense that she is complacently sufficient to herself and all the world else may wag as it will, since she cares for nothing that does not happen on a few square miles of soil beside the Seine; Paris the proud, the difficult;—Paris has recently done the one thing that could be surprising from her. She has laid aside her prejudices and her pride and has awarded to a foreigner—and that foreigner an American—the most coveted prize in the whole realm of painting. She has given to Lawton Parker of Chicago the first medal at the Old Salon.
Hitherto it has been an unwritten law that the first medal was not to go out of France. The most ambitious American student, dreaming in his little atelier high up among the pigeons, over fifty centimes’ worth of roast rabbit from the rôtisserie and a glass of vin ordinaire, never has dared even to dream of a first medal. A second has been the height of his wildest hopes. Ten times only since the foundation of the Old Salon has a second medal, of which more than one is given each year, been awarded to an American. Sargent had one. Mary Green Blumenschein, H. O. Tanner, Manuel Barthold, Robert Mac Cameron, Aston Knight, the son of Ridgeway Knight, and Richard E. Miller are among the others so honored. Gari Melchers and Frederick MacMonnies have had a third medal.
Now Lawton Parker has carried off the first! Even for a Frenchman this is an extraordinary honor. It is kept for paintings of most unusual merit, and often no work of the many thousands submitted is considered worthy of the honor. At least four Salons have passed without the award being made at all.
The painting with which Mr. Parker has enchanted Paris is called Paresse, or Indolence. It is a picture of a nude model resting on a couch. She lies perfectly relaxed, her body twisted a little and one arm raised behind her head. The delicate flesh tones are outlined against pale draperies, mauve, gray, and light yellow. The whole composition is in a very high key, the red hair of the girl being the strongest note in the picture.
But it is the lighting which seems most strongly to have impressed the French critics. More than forty reviews in Europe have contained favorable accounts of this painting, and they have been unanimous in their praise of the effects of lighting. Indeed, they have almost exhausted the vocabulary in their efforts to describe it. It is the light of a gray day filtered through a Venetian blind, and the picture’s most puissant charm lies in the way Mr. Parker has caught the delicate and subtle values of this lighting. “Delicate, nebulous, pale, sifted, intimate, tender, harmonious”—these are some of the adjectives used by the French reviewers to describe it.
All this is, however, built on a foundation of solid knowledge. Mr. Parker is an excellent draughtsman and understands thoroughly the possibilities and limitations of his medium. He has long been known among the artists in the Quarter as the most scientific of them all. The chemical composition of the colors, their action and interaction, and the result of time on their brilliancy—these Mr. Parker has studied minutely. It is a subject with which the old masters were thoroughly familiar, but which painters of today too often neglect.
Sanity is one of the chief characteristics of Mr. Parker’s work. This is a day of extravagance, of cutting loose from all ties that bind us to the past. In Paris the academies are virtually emptied of students, that the young men may search for individuality in their own little ateliers. The Cubists and the Futurists are the flowering of the tree of experimentation that has thrust its roots even into the most academic of sanctuaries. Many a promising young man has lost his head entirely. But Lawton Parker has succeeded in keeping his.
He has gone forward with his day, but not blindly. He has carefully tested each step as he came to it, and has stopped short where sanity stopped. The old virtues of draughtsmanship, composition, and color he has kept. But he has added thereto the modern discoveries in the treatment of light.
He and his colleagues, the little group of painters called the Giverny school, are already known as Luminists. Frederick C. Frieseke, Richard E. Miller, and Karl Anderson belong to this group. During the summer months they paint at the beautiful little village of Giverny. They experiment with light in all its possible manifestations. Frieseke and Parker have an open-air studio together, a “water-garden” traversed by a little brook. Here on warm days they paint beautiful opalescent nudes in the sunlight, among the shimmering greens of the leaves or beside the luminous water surfaces. All who have followed the exhibitions in France or even in America during the last few years are familiar with this “nymph pasture,” as it has been wittily called. It was here that the prize picture was painted—but not on warm, sunny days. A year ago it rained all summer, and in desperation Mr. Parker resorted to an indoor canvas, executed in the house adjoining. It was painted with extreme care. One comparatively unimportant part of the canvas, a bit of wall space, he painted over twelve or fifteen times to get just the precise shade he wanted. This painting is now on exhibition in this country.
Lawton Parker’s canvases in his Giverny style are interesting technically. On a foundation of very careful drawing they are handled with great freedom of execution. The brush work is loose and vigorous, the paint being laid on thickly, especially in the background. The flesh is painted more closely, always with great subtlety in the values. A nude body in the shade flecked with spots of brilliant sunlight is a favorite and very difficult subject, in which this subtlety is well shown. The color is excellent, at times, as in the prize picture, very delicate and carefully harmonized; at times dealing successfully with great splashes of autumn leaves or the vivid green of spring foliage. The composition is pleasing.
Mr. Parker is not by any means limited to this style. Indeed, it is in another and quite different character that he is best known in this country. As a portrait painter his work has for a number of years been gaining steadily in popularity. Many prominent people have sat for him, including President Harry Pratt Judson, Judge Peter S. Grosscup, Martin Ryerson, Mrs. Leonard Wood, and Mrs. N. W. Harris.
This portrait style of Mr. Parker’s is very different from his Giverny style. He developed it much earlier in his career, but still uses it on occasion. The difference is one of psychological viewpoint rather than of technic. A portrait, he feels, should be a livable presentation of the subject. It is not a picture to be looked at casually and passed by, but a work to be lived with intimately for long spaces of time. The exceptions are, of course, those portraits of well-known men and women which are to hang in public places. Generally speaking, he paints his portraits in color schemes that will wear well, in a rather low key, with neutral backgrounds. These likenesses are solid, dignified, and simple. To catch the individuality of the sitter is of more importance to him than to paint a striking canvas. That his portraits are successful technically is proved by the fact that he has taken a number of prizes with them, both here and abroad.
Lawton Parker was born at Fairfield, Michigan, in 1868, but spent his early youth in Kearney, Nebraska. When he took up seriously the study of painting he moved to Chicago, which has since remained his pied-à-terre in this country. He studied and taught at the Art Institute there. Later he went to New York, where, in 1897, he took the “Paris Prize” founded by John Armstrong Chaloner: a five years’ scholarship abroad. In Paris he studied under Gerome, Whistler, and Jean Paul Laurens. In 1899 he took the “Prix d’atelier” at the Beaux Arts. In 1900 he received honorable mention at the Old Salon with a nude; in 1902 a third medal, on a portrait. Four years ago he missed by three votes a second medal, which was fortunate for him, since the first cannot be awarded a painter who has received a second.
He has also received medals from the Chicago Society of Artists, the St. Louis Exposition, and the International Exhibition in Munich in 1905.
All lovers of art in this country, as well as the painters themselves, should thank Mr. Parker for having opened the way in Paris for so unprecedented an honor.
It is rhythm that makes music, that makes poetry, that makes pictures; what we are all after is rhythm, and the whole of the young man’s life is going to a tune as he walks home, to the same tune as the stars are going over his head. All things are singing together.—George Moore in Memoirs of My Dead Self.
New York Letter
George Soule
Pavlowa and her Russian dancers have just finished their tour here in a high tide of enthusiasm,—and financial success, which is worth mentioning because it means other tours next year. There is a whisper that we shall see a ballet still more important which hasn’t hitherto been coaxed west of London and Paris. Only a little of the new art-form now being developed by Fokine, Diaghilev, Bakst, Rimski-Korsakoff, and the rest of the great Russian romanticists of the stage, has come to us. But the important fact is that America, as always behind Europe in seeing new ideas that are not mechanical, is at last waking up to the dance as an art on equal terms with the greatest.
It is curious, but not comforting, to know that in this case the original inspiration came from Illinois. My authority is Troy Kinney, who is, without question, our best-informed critic of dancing outside of the performers and choregraphers themselves. Mr. Kinney tells me that after Isadora Duncan failed to arouse much interest in America she went to Europe, leaving a trail of heated discussion there. When she reached St. Petersburg the head of the imperial academy, Fokine, saw the vision of a renaissance of the dance from its classic sterility. He gathered about him the group of dancers whose names are now known around the world, and persuaded them to desert the imperial academy, which clung to the formalism of the old French and Italian ballet. Artists and musicians were attracted to the movement. This proceeding was quite as daring as it would have been for the superintendent of the United States Naval Academy to desert with part of his faculty and the best of the middies. But Diaghilev espoused their cause and persuaded the government not to punish them, but to let them work out their ideas and then make themselves useful politically by showing western Europe that Russia was not as barbarous as was generally supposed. They are now fully recognized in St. Petersburg and Fokine is again head of the academy.
On the basis of the old formal steps and positions Fokine built a freer structure of movement whose chief aim is not virtuosity or pure beauty of line, but expression. In this new style more modern music was not only possible, but necessary. Meanwhile, setting and costume of the most imaginative type—often futuristic—had to be developed. They all set to work with an ardor possible only to tradition-breakers and are producing an art which is likely to achieve the supreme place first dreamed of by the inventors of modern opera.
Here is another keenly interesting relation brought to light by Mr. Kinney. Everybody knows, of course, that opera was begun during the Renaissance as an attempt to revive the Greek drama. It now appears that in our present Renaissance the revived ballet is probably much nearer the highest form of Greek drama than opera or anything else ever has been. The early drama of Athens, according to Mme. Nelidoff of Moscow, consisted largely of pantomime, dance, and chorus. Words were introduced for the literal-minded. As the size of theatres increased, the actors came to use megaphones, to conceal which the mask was invented. The masks were made larger and heavier to add to the height. With this handicap to dancing, the actor had to depend more on his voice and stature; and the elaborate dialogue, combined with the high heels of the cothurnus, gave dancing its final blow. This kind of drama, says Mme. Nelidoff, appealed largely to the less imaginative and uncultivated, on account of their desire to know in detail what was going on. The other kind, however, continued being developed for smaller audiences, and retained its purer beauty of form in space, sound, and thought. We have little record of it outside of sculpture simply because there were few words, and a choregraphic vocabulary had not been invented. We have almost no record of Greek music, either. It is a bit shocking to think that Aeschylus and Sophocles were, perhaps, contributors to an inferior art, but there seem to be grounds for the ingenious theory.
Everyone who has been to a “movie show” knows how effective even crude pantomime can be. But make your pantomime a portrayal of moods and emotions rather than of events, give it visual beauty which will occasionally wring tears from anyone sensitive to line, and accompany it with music whose most complex rhythm and harmonic color are intensified by the stage picture, and you have an expression on a plane of the imagination where the introduction of a spoken word is like the creak of a piano pedal. If we can’t lead the people back from the movies to “plays,” can’t we give them the modern ballet?
That is exactly what Kinney proposes. He wants a National Academy for America, with resources equal to the backing of the Metropolitan Opera House. Big managers and opera authorities have already admitted that such an undertaking would, if properly managed, be successful. Compared with the present interest in good ballet the interest in good music with which Theodore Thomas started, was nothing. But it is a miracle if America does a thing like that in the right way. Our princes have, as a rule, neither good taste nor much public spirit. Our race of artists—thinkers—mental heroes—is small and largely uncourageous. Our government accurately represents the most of our people, who still regard art either as immoral or entertaining and hence not worth the attention of sensible people.
How bitterly we need missionaries like The Little Review and the people who feel the same spirit! But our case is far from hopeless. The good fighters among us are glad there is a lot still to do. Such visions give strength to our hewing arms as we cry room for our new images.
The men who are cursed with the gift of the literal mind are the unfortunate ones who are always busy with their nets and neglect the fishing.—Rabindranath Tagore in Sadhana.
Union vs. Union Privileges
Henry Blackman Sell
“We have granted the miners every union demand,” benevolently asserts the remarkable J. D. R., Jr., “but we will not recognize their organization”—and here is the hitch. The average lay observer of the fearful struggle raging in Colorado tosses aside his paper after reading this, and possibly comments that he can’t see what the miners want, if all the union privileges have been granted.
That was my first thought, but I felt that there must be something behind the trouble; so I hunted out my old friend Tony Exposito, a walking delegate for Chicago’s pick-and-shovel men, and asked him to explain.
Now Tony never took a degree, and his English is reminiscent of sunny Italy, but he knows just what the trouble is in Colorado.
“Eh? You wanta know what ees matta downa there? Eh? Meester Rokefella say he geeve union preeveleg to all da men? Eh? Meester Rokefella say begess shara men no wanta strike? Eh? He geeve many thengs to da men? Sure! Sure! He geeve many thengs! He geeve many preeveleg! Sure! He geeve! Das justa trubble! Das why da men go strike! No wanta thengs be geeva to them. Santa Maria! when a man breaka hees back en wear da skeen off hees hans wet da pick en da shovel, hasn’ he gotta right to da money he gets? Eh? Now, w’at you theenka dat? Eh?”
“Well, Tony,” I answered, “I never thought of it that way. It does seem as though a man might have what he earns without its being handed to him as if it were a charity.”
“Sure! Sure!” cut in the impetuous Tony. “Sure! das da theng—charety! Meester Rokefella, he say, ‘Coma here, leetle slave, nica leetle slave, coma here;’ en he patta on da head en say, ‘You donna have to work so meny hours; I geeve you tena cents more pay!’ Eh? en then what? Eh? He calla all the newsapaper up en tella dem, ‘I maka mucha mon; I geeve some to my workaman.’ Then all the peeple say, ‘Whata fuss about?’ Eh? I tella you: Workaman want to sell hees labor justa lika Meester Rokefella buy hees beega machenes. Notheng extra to nobody. Eh?”
“But, Tony,” I interrupted, “they say that only a few of the men want the union recognized. What about that?”
“Sure! Das true! Sure! Das jus da fac. When deesa beeg, granda countree fighta Eengeland, deed all the men wanta fight? Eh? Tell me! Eh? No, et was justa few et ferst, dena more, dena more, teel everyone wanta to be free. Sure! Das da way. Poor nuts, dea don’a know whata rights dea shoulda have, en dea musta be ah—educate to steek togeater.”
And I wondered how many of my highly educated friends realized so well as Tony Exposito how frightfully devitalizing gratuities are, and what it means to be able to take a week’s pay with the feeling not of accepting a charity, but of receiving an honest wage for honest work; what it means to teach mentally stunned and browbeaten laborers that they have certain definite rights of life and happiness, and that they must earn them; that when they have earned those rights, it is no favor given or received.