Changes that come so stealthily they could not be chronicled, preceded this. The human skull, the physical eye, have been gradually formed differently.
The old, carefully drawn, punctiliously painted figure, with details insisted upon, hurts the modern eye trained to stenographic seeing. It does not wish to be pelted with fact that way. Seeing is not to be done alone by the painter but partly by the looker on! Increasingly insistent self demands share. The picture is to be a starting point, instead of an end. It is to be something for the seer to help make.
Before the Great War line and color began to disintegrate, to feel their way back to primal selves; this was a step toward new creation, beginning over. The end of a cycle had come. New standards followed. There was a re-valuation. The middle age of the modern man had begun. The old tenements of the mind were being torn down and swept away. When one reaches the top of the hill, there is nothing to do except to find the path that leads down. This is not genius. It does not deserve praise for perception or novelty. It has too great resemblance to necessity. If change means destruction, it likewise means growth, or the level upon which change is permitted to begin, on the other, the south side, of the hill. But Dostoievsky exclaimed when he was living in Germany: “In der neuen Menschheit ist also die æsthetische Idee volkommen betrübt.” Dostoievsky was not only an artist, but a sensitive one. He felt quickly the chill breath of the new order.
New art comes closer to man than the old. We are better mental tailors. In a close-up we must remember figures loom large. We see details we do not wish to see. We are getting a close-up of life. In addition, the old, carefully draped toga is large.
Art being sensitive, heralded approach of the new cycle, and close of the cycle passing. Disintegration of color, line, was not the only change. The bonds that unite people in social intercourse, friendship, family ties, weakened. This was followed by exploitation of self, an increasingly shifting standard. The ego became diseased. In the critical faculty there was discernible a lessening sense of values. The general reading public no longer knew good from bad. There was, too, breaking down, decay, of sociological tissues, just as bodily tissue breaks, with stress of years, or warning of insidious disease. People who had reached forty when the change began, awoke to find themselves in a world they did not know. Everyone became Rip Van Winkle.
Like the trapeze performer, they had forsaken the safe ring, without being sure of the next. New World art picks up and saves crumbs from the wasteful banquet-table. It finds neglected things, minor things, apparently insignificant things beautiful, and with demands, with rights. It says so, if it does not believe it.
A new era is here. Educational ideals are overturned. Some things man created he finds not good. As counterweight there is inclination not to observe rules of the game, unless perchance some game be greater than the rules. In this counterweight there is inclination to translate theorizing into action, and do it quickly. The new world disregards the charm of idle thought. Sometimes it has bad taste to do things not meant to be done, but merely to be talked about. Occasionally it is dull, lacks perception. It has misunderstood the poetry and politeness of the Arab host, who declares: All I own is yours. With present dramatic seriousness and belief in the divine right of self, lack of humor, we would move in, and show the Arab the door.
The impulse back of living is changed. There is indication of a dying in the human race of what was called divine. A red apple rotting at the core!
New religions, moral ideals, are dawning which surprise in form, in substance.
Living is less fine. It is a rush for self exploitation. It is giving over rest, sunny leisure. The idea of work, of dispensing energy for display, decoration of front elevation of Sunday papers, is penetrating the upper classes. In being useful, they plan social achievements. They have found a game in which to star.