NON-PARTIZAN QUESTIONS ON WHICH PRESIDENT WILSON BEGINS WELL
HE is a poor patriot who can wish a new administration anything but success—at least in policies unrelated to party differences—and it is creditable to the American people that the new President enters upon his difficult task amid general good-will. His lack of previous acquaintance with “the way the thing is done” in Washington, though it excited the apprehension of some of his warmest friends, proves to be a positive advantage. If precedents are broken they are not his, and sometimes the breaking is done with a naïveté just this side of innocence, as in the discountenancing of the time-honored but expensive and meaningless inaugural ball. The President evidently realizes his responsibilities and the conventional obstacles that must be cleared out of his path if he is to accomplish much for the good of the country. The idealism of his inaugural address, with its appeal for the coöperation of “honest, patriotic, and forward-looking men,” is already being supplemented by practical action so fraught with “saving common sense” as to seem revolutionary.
Seen in the retrospect, what could be done more wise or simple than the shunting of the office-seekers to the heads of departments? What more useful or self-respecting than the announced policy of disapproval of legislation carrying “riders”—of which, by the way, a flagrant example is found in the Panama tolls exemption, to which both the President and the Vice-President have announced their opposition? What more direct or reassuring than the kindly words of warning to Central American revolutionists? What more prompt than the announcement through the Secretary of State that the United States cannot ignore its responsibilities toward Cuba? or, again, through the Postmaster-General, that there is to be no wholesale looting of the offices, with the object-lesson of the retention or promotion of several public servants of marked efficiency? or, still again, the immediate action through the Secretary of War and the Attorney-General toward the safeguarding of the public interests in Niagara Falls? What more prudent than the disentanglement of our relations in the Far East from financial loans to China? These events, occurring in the first fortnight of the administration, display a point of view of government as an instrument of public service which, though it may do violence to traditions, makes thoughtful citizens exclaim, “Why not?”
It is not to be expected that we are to have another Era of Good Feeling, or that, when questions of party policy arise, Mr. Wilson’s opponents will yield their convictions. He cannot fail to meet with many a storm, within and without party lines; but he will do much to advance his ideas if he shall preserve the poise of direct and unsophisticated common sense which he has shown at the beginning.
LAWLESSNESS IN ART
THE EXPLOITATION OF WHIMSICALITY AS A PRINCIPLE
THE recent admirably arranged exhibition in New York made by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, and including a full representation of the work of the Cubists and the Post-Impressionists, has proved in one respect a veritable success, namely, in point of attendance. If not, as one critic puts it, a succès de scandale, it has been a succès de curiosité. It contained pieces of historic work of great beauty by eminent painters of France and America—Ingres, Daumier, Puvis de Chavannes, Childe Hassam, Alden Weir, and others, but no great point was made of their inclusion and they were not the attraction for the crowds. What drew the curious were certain widely talked-of eccentricities, whimsicalities, distortions, crudities, puerilities, and madnesses, by which, while a few were nonplussed, most of the spectators were vastly amused.
At the spring exhibition of the National Academy of Design, which followed, one unaccustomed visitor was heard to say to another, “Oh, come on, Bill, there’s nothing to laugh at here.” It will be impossible to repeat the Parisian sensation another season; and, happily, the eccentricities have served to awaken a new interest in genuine types of art, both in and out of their own exhibition, and have furnished that element of contrast which is useful if not essential in the formation of a robust taste.
Meanwhile, for the benefit of the young and unthinking, it is well to keep on inculcating the fact that while art is not a formula, nor even a school, it is subject, whether in painting, sculpture, poetry, architecture, or music, to certain general principles tending to harmony, clarity, beauty, and the stimulus of the imagination. A fundamental error is that its laws are hampering, the fact being that it is only as one learns them that he can acquire the freedom of individual expression. The exploitation of a theory of discords, puzzles, uglinesses, and clinical details, is to art what anarchy is to society, and the practitioners need not so much a critic as an alienist. It is said that a well-known Russian musician has begun a new composition with (so to speak) a keynote of discord involving the entire musical scale, as a child might lay his hand sidewise upon all the notes of the piano it can cover. A counterpart of this could have been found in more than one ward of the recent exhibition. One can fancy the laughter over the absinthe in many a Latin Quarter café of those who are not mentally awry, but are merely imitators, poseurs, or charlatans, at learning that their monstrosities, which have exhausted the interest of Paris, have been seriously considered by some American observers. They have only been trying to see how far they could go in fooling the public. But he laughs best who laughs last, and we believe that Americans have too much sense of humor not to see the point of this colossal joke of eccentricity, or to endure its repetition.