It is appropriate that the man who has arisen to prove capability of plants for sensation, to prove they feel fear, suffer agony, should come from India, (Bose), where the idea was projected. And now we are on the threshold of truth that lies ahead.
The romances of the future will be more thrilling than the old commonplace of a man falling in love with a woman, or vice versa. The romances of the future, when the novel as we know it now must disappear, will be written by that sleepless, fiery-eyed Demon, Science. How tame, silly, will the old novels, plays, seem of Priscilla, (say), meeting Paul in the garden! What a ridiculous thing in which to be interested!
In this period of fashion not reason, which is to aim one’s heavy cannons, one’s best made spit balls, at the gods of yesteryear, it is well to read books of criticism for novelty, pleasure of mental exercise, and not trouble about believing what they say. Look upon it as a mental stunt! I have read recently that Flaubert was mediocre, and could not write, that Balzac had no ability of any kind, Maupassant lacked the short-story sense, and Shakespeare should be done over by someone who knows his rich Elizabethan England better than he did.
Very likely the age we are living in is sterile save scientific mind. How can it go on, when it can not see the road? Probably little, or nothing, being written in this feverish period, will last. It is the bridge that leads from one shore to another. We may find pleasure in the shores, but the bridge will be forgotten.
An impulse to besmirch what no one dared to besmirch is not genius. Its fineness, originality, value as attitude of mind, are questionable. Yet I can not dispute the fact that a large spot of black shows on a white surface. It can be observed at a distance. People see it. A thing that is new is not necessarily better, not to mention best.
I am thinking, among other things, of critical discoveries of Croce. Sometimes his discoveries are like the originality of finding how much more comfortable to live in is a house without a roof than one with a roof. Here is hoping Signor Croce always had his umbrella or lived in a land where rain did not fall!
Marsden Hartley is a poet. He is sometimes prosy with his brush, but when he takes to pen and ink, he blossoms. There is the making of a charming stylist in Hartley, which is just what he would like to have us believe he disdains.
Among his pictures, I have liked his tragic New England farms, black with accumulated terrors of puritan winters. I have liked his slender vases of crystal, holding a flower visioned to disappearing outline, where loveliness alone remains. This is gold. But gold circulates, is most useful, with admixture of alloy.
Art is stenographic mind-reading of the trembling soul. It is the truth which living obscures, or makes us unable to see, because we are insensitive. One who has gentleness, sensitiveness, which are other names for fineness, feels and responds. It is not dependent upon intellect, sharpness of wit. It has to do with nobility. It is this critics neglect. It does not need book-learning. It needs the fine human instrument.