Whitman has certainly aspired equally, but being more things in one than Cézanne, his task has been in some ways greater, more difficult, and may we say for humanistic reasons, loftier. Whitman's inclusiveness was at one and the same time his virtue and his defect. For mystical reasons, it was imperative for him to include all things in himself, and so he set about enumerating all those elements which were in him, and of which he was so devoted and affectionate a part. That he could leave nothing out was, it may be said, his strongest esthetical defect, for it is by esthetical judgment that we choose and bring together those elements as we conceive it. It is the mark of good taste to reject that which is unessential, and the "tact of omission," well exemplified in Cézanne, has been found excellently axiomatic. So that it is the tendency in Whitman to catalogue in detail the entire obvious universe that makes many of his pages a strain on the mind as well as on the senses, and the eye especially. The absolute enforcement of this gift of omission in painting makes it easier for the artist, in that his mind is perforce engrossed with the idea of simplification, directness, and an easy relationship of the elements selected for presentation to each other.
It is the quality of "living-ness" in Cézanne that sends his art to the heights of universality, which is another way of naming the classical vision, or the masterly conception, and brings him together with Whitman as much of the same piece. You get all this in all the great masters of painting and literature, Goethe, Shakespeare, Rubens, and the Greeks. It is the reaching out and the very mastering of life which makes all art great, and all artists into geniuses. It is the specializing on ideas which shuts the stream of its flow. I have felt the same gift for life in a still-life or a landscape of Cézanne's that I have felt in any of Whitman's best pieces. The element in common with these two exceptional creators is liberation. They have done more, these modern pioneers, for the liberation of the artist, and for the "freeing" of painting and poetry than any other men of modern time. Through them, painting and poetry have become literally free, and through them it is that the young painters and poets have sought new fields for self deliverance. Discipleship does not hold out long with the truly understanding. Those who really know what originality is are not long the slave of the power of imitation: it is the gifted assimilator that suffers most under the spell of mastery. Legitimate influence is a quality which all earnest creators learn to handle at once. Both poetry and painting are, or so it seems to me, revealing well the gift of understanding, and as a result we have a better variety of painting and of poetry than at the first outbreak of this so called modern esthetic epidemic.
The real younger creators are learning the difference between surface and depth, between exterior semblances, and the underlying substances. Both Whitman and Cézanne stand together in the name of one common purpose, freedom from characteristics not one's own. They have taught the creators of this time to know what classicism really is, that it is the outline of all things that endure. They have both shown that it is not idiosyncrasy alone which creates originality, that idiosyncrasy is but the husk of personal penetration, that it is in no way the constituent essential for genius. For genius is nothing but the name for higher perception, the greater degree of understanding. Cézanne's fine landscapes and still-lifes, and Whitman's majestic line with its gripping imagery are one and the same thing, for it reaches the same height in the mind. They walk together out of a vivid past, these two geniuses, opening the corridors to a possibly vivid future for the artists of now, and to come. They are the gateway for our modern esthetic development, the prophets of the new time. They are most of all, the primitives of the way they have begun, they have voiced most of all the imperative need of essential personalism, of direct expression out of direct experience, with an eye to nothing but quality and proportion as conceived by them. Their dogmas were both simple in the extreme, and of immense worth to us in their respective spheres. We may think of them as the giants of the beginning of the twentieth century, with the same burning desire to enlarge the general scope of vision, and the finer capacity for individual experience.
ALBERT P. RYDER
Albert P. Ryder possessed in a high degree that strict passivity of mental vision which calls into being the elusive yet fixed element the mystic Blake so ardently refers to and makes a principle of, that element outside the mind's jurisdiction. His work is of the essence of poetry; it is alien to the realm of esthetics pure, for it has very special spiritual histories to relate. His landscapes are somewhat akin to those of Michel and of Courbet. They suggest Michel's wide wastes of prodigal sky and duneland with their winding roads that have no end, his ever-shadowy stretches of cloud upon ever-shadowy stretches of land that go their austere way to the edges of some vacant sea. They suggest, too, those less remote but perhaps even more aloof spaces of solitude which were ever Courbet's theme in his deeper hours, that haunting sense of subtle habitation, that acute invasion of either wind or soft fleck of light or bright presence in a breadth of shadow, as if a breath of living essences always somehow pervaded those mystic woodland or still lowland scenes. But highly populate as these pictures of Courbet's are with the spirit of ever-passing feet that hover and hold converse in the remote wood, the remoter plain, they never quite surrender to that ghostliness which possesses the pictures of our Ryder. At all times in his work one has the feeling of there having lately passed, if ever so fleetly, some bodily shape seeking a solitude of its own. I recall no other landscapes impressed with a more terrific austerity save Greco's incredible "Toledo," to my thinking a finality in landscape creation.
There is quietude, solace, if you will, in Michel, in Courbet, but there is never a rest for the eye or the mind or the spirit in those most awesome of pictures which Ryder has presented to us, few as they are; for the Ryder legend is akin to the legend of Giorgione. There is always splendor in them but it is the splendor of the dream given over to a genius more powerful than the vision which has conjured them forth. It is distinctly a land of Luthany in which they have their being; he has inscribed for us that utter homelessness of the spirit in the far tracts that exist in the realm of the imagination; there is suffering in his pictures, that fainting of the spirit, that breathlessness which overtakes the soul in search of the consummation of beauty.
Ryder is akin to Coleridge, too, for there is a direct visional analogy between "The Flying Dutchman" and the excessively pictorial stanzas of "The Ancient Mariner." Ryder has typified himself in this excellent portrayal of sea disaster, this profound spectacle of the soul's despair in conflict with wind and wave. Could any picture contain more of that remoteness of the world of our real heart as well as our real eye, the artist's eye which visits that world in no official sense but only as a guest or a courtly spectator? No artist, I ought to say, was ever more master of his ideas and less master of the medium of painting than Ryder; there is in some of his finest canvases a most pitiable display of ignorance which will undoubtedly shorten their life by many years.
I still retain the vivid impression that afflicted me when I saw my first Ryder, a marine of rarest grandeur and sublimity, incredibly small in size, incredibly large in its emotion—just a sky and a single vessel in sail across a conquering sea. Ryder is, I think, the special messenger of the sea's beauty, the confidant of its majesties, its hauteurs, its supremacies; for he was born within range of the sea and all its legends have hovered with him continually. Since that time I have seen a number of other pictures either in the artist's possession or elsewhere: "Death on the Racetrack," "Pegasus," canvases from The Tempest and Macbeth in that strange little world of chaos that was his home, his hermitage, so distraught with débris of the world for which he could seem to find no other place; I have spent some of the rare and lovelier moments of my experience with this gentlest and sweetest of other-world citizens; I have felt with ever-living delight the excessive loveliness of his glance and of his smile and heard that music of some far-away world which was his laughter; I have known that wisdom which is once and for all wisdom for the artist, that confidence and trust that for the real artist there is but one agency for the expression of self in terms of beauty, the eye of the imagination, that mystical third somewhere in the mind which transposes all that is legitimate to expression. To Ryder the imagination was the man; he was a poet painter, living ever outside the realm of theory.