The taste of honey

by Edna Worthley Underwood

This may be herald of a cycle of time, a new, a different world civilization. When such change has come, history tells us, art begins to die first, before morals or manners. The spirit of destruction is directed toward ideals.

In the plastic arts the careless, blithe, fine laughter is gone. The moment’s creative joy. There is less real beauty, but more nerve, daring. When the sculptor boasts either of modernism, or primitive vision, he harks back to things Assyrian, not Greek. The last touch in the world of that serenity we found in Greek marbles, is in the figures of Clodion. Afterward, it comes no more. When art and letters feel breath of decay, nations have gone a long way toward that decay. As proof, review the history of antiquity. Is that what is setting in? Is that what is going to result in remaking the world, in creating a new order of mind? Transition is startling. Everything is changing. Art and letters are changing rapidly; music too, the political outlook, morals, religions. Nothing is left untouched. A period of rebellion is here. Love, sincerity, friendliness, are disappearing. Another civilization is heaving to sight with the wild, brawling winds, the harsh atmospheric disturbance of birth of a star.

Some quality, usually in solution in life of our planet, and to us indispensable, disappeared. Since this has been evident.

It was after the Peloponnesian war, we must remember, that disintegration began in Greece. Consider, too, the slow dissolving of the Roman Empire, beginning in the West, then progressing, like political paralysis, toward the East. Consider the ruin, annihilation, of the powerful, the richly cultivated Han Dynasty, the change, decay, brought by war. Wars are to established civilizations what cancers are to the healthy body. They destroy tissue that can not be rebuilt. Sometime a law can be stated between war and decay.

In Cubism of the Spirit, as I have named it, revolts are many. This tragic, asserting of self is revolting now against death. When you divide the forces of the enemy you lessen his strength. Carrel divided the forces of Death, into general and elemental. That is a beginning. Who knows what the end will be?

It is a period of shattering of ideals, when all things, even of the spirit, are being bent to forms of material gain, of foolish, self-flattering assertion, shorthand, incompetent stating. Christian Science is product of the age because it is an age of self-delusion. The power is lost to distinguish between things that are and things as we wish they were. Man is breaking trammels, and in the triumphant emergence, he sees himself greater than he is. The prophets have been many who heralded reaction against restraints of the past. There was the Christ. Before the coming of Christianity there was Greek philosophy. In the early Nineteenth Century there was German philosophy. There were Kant, Wagner. Wagner was an eloquent preacher of revolt. Like the warring angels of Milton who were cast out of Heaven, Wagner in rebellion, scaled again the battlements. This found its way to the brain of man in preachment more dangerous than words. It heralded gloriously the era whose disconcerting, unsuspected changes are upon us, making us shiver with presage of unmeasured things. No longer shall the golden, fluent splendor, life, be expressed in stale formulas. For new day a new robe. Who can guess what the result will be? While we live, while change progresses, what will be our attitude toward things we loved? Books, art, music, the world of the spirit?

Cubism was brought about in some degree, too, by focussing for purpose of quick, personal vision, of the art, the science, of the world. Some of them who were great in the past were great because of limitations. Dante was one whose nature possessed depth not breadth. Will art resolve itself into expression of untrammeled personality? In throwing away form are leaders nearer essence? Are we peeling to the skin, like wrestlers, for the Games, leaving nothing proud, superfluous? Surely there must be luxurious languor, foolish recreation, the fine, idle space for the unexpected, in addition to defiant assertion.

The lower class, peculiarly enough, under pressure of new ways of living, is disappearing, just as in the Eighteenth Century there was no effective middle-class. A social chasm results with disappearing at top of the aristocrat. Fromentin wrote some time ago: “Vers 1828 on vit du nouveau” and “le dixhuitième siècle brisa beaucoup de formules.” It was the sensitive artists, not thinkers, who felt it first. In serious consideration of facts of living, the artist is not to be despised. The decay of the great age of Louis XIV was heralded by great artists beginning to lessen in number or lose their luster.

In this general destruction, excesses must be expected. In the on-rushing tidal-wave of mediocrity against the Lords, wrong will be done. Sometimes Cubism of the Spirit will insist pearls are the best food for hogs. It will not be easy to find that absolute, that prepared outspread level of mind, suitable for pearls to roll on. Some of the pearls may melt, become invisible forever, such as pity, sympathy, old-fashioned kindliness. I suppose it is significant that Marquis de Sade was writing, in prison, his book Le Roman Philosophique, which shows a cruel mind, just one year before the outbreak of the French Revolution.