All the other arts are here. Architecture, music, sculpture, mural and easel painting, drawing, prints and etching, landscape gardening, together with the so-called “Liberal Arts” are adequately represented. But not poetry. A perusal of the “P’s” of the official list in an attempt to discover it is significant. “Poultry” is there with a large exhibit, so is “Plumbago,” “Plumbers’ Implements,” “Pomology” and “Ponies.” Excellent exhibits all, but hardly lyrical.
It may be urged, of course, that other arts, such as the arts of the theatre, acting and stagecraft, and the literary art of prose writing, are also omitted. But although exhibitions of these things would be eminently desirable they present great practical difficulties. And these arts have, after all, a commercial side which is more or less adequately suggested. But with poetry the case is different. The mere fact that commercially poetry is, like Perlmutter’s automobile, a liability and not an asset, ought in our practical age to prove that it is a “fine art!” And the practical difficulty of providing a set of bookshelves and a competent jury to pass on admissions need hardly stagger the directors of so colossal an undertaking. Add to this daily, or even bi-weekly, readings of contemporary poetry and the result would be a representation in proportion to the attention paid the other arts.
It would be useless to urge that this Exposition is a private, or even a local enterprise. It cannot stand as such. It represents in the face of the warring world the development of our country, culturally as well as commercially. And the fact that one of the oldest and most reverenced of the arts is totally unrepresented must inevitably redound to the discredit of the executive officers, and through them of the people at large.
For the root of this cavalier treatment of poetry is, after all, in the American people. As a nation, in spite of our complacency in the present world crisis, we are still in the stage of culture in which we believe that man can live by bread alone. And we can scarcely hope for more adequate recognition of the art until those of us to whom poetry is a living fact, and not an academic perception, have battled at greater length and with greater self-sacrifice in the eternal struggle through commercialism to beauty.
The Mob-God
The seats creak expectantly. The white whirr of the movie machine takes on a special significance. In the murky gloom of the theater you can watch row on row of backs becoming suddenly enthusiastic, necks growing suddenly alive, heads rising to a fresh angle. Turning around you can see the stupid masks falling, vacant eyes lighting up, lips parting and waiting the smile, mouths opening waiting to laugh. A miracle is transpiring. A sodden mass inclined toward protoplasmic atavism, a smear of dead nerves, dead skin, fiberless flesh is beginning to quiver with an emotion. Laughter is about to be born. The lights dance on the screen in front. Letters appear in two short words and a gasp sweeps from mouth to mouth.
The name of a Mob-God flashes before the eyes. Suddenly the screen in front vanishes. In its place appears a road stretching away to the sky and lined with trees. The sky is clear. The scene is cool and healthy. The leaves of the trees flutter familiarly. The road smiles like an old friend. And far in the distance a speck appears and moves slowly and jerkily. Wide open mouths and freshened eyes watch the speck grow larger. It takes the form of a man, a little man with a thin cane. At last his baggy trousers and his slovenly shoes are visible. His thick curly hair under the battered derby becomes clear. He walks along carelessly, quietly, with an infinite philosophy. He walks with an indescribable step, kicking up one of his feet, shuffling along.
Laughter is born. The vapid faces respond magically to His presence. Pure, childish delight sounds. The faces are bathed in a human light. A noisy, wholesome din fills the theater. And the little man comes down the road with his calm and solemn face, his sad eyes, his impossible mustache, his ridiculous trousers, and his nervous, spasmodic gait amid the roars and wild elation of idiots, prostitutes, crass, common churls, and empty souls converted suddenly into a natural and mutual simplicity. The stuffy, maddening “bathoes” that clings to the mob like a stink is dispelled, wiped out of the air. Laughter, laughter, shrieks and peals, chuckles and smiles, the broad permeating warmth of the simplest, deepest joy is everywhere.
Charlie Chaplin is before them, Charles Chaplin with the wit of a vulgar buffoon and the soul of a world artist. He walks, he stumbles, he dances, he falls. His inimitable gyrations release torrents of mirth clean as spring freshets. He is cruel. He is absurd; unmanly; tawdry; cheap; artificial. And yet behind his crudities, his obscenities, his inartistic and outrageous contortions, his “divinity” shines. He is the Mob-God. He is a child and a clown. He is a gutter snipe and an artist. He is the incarnation of the latent, imperfect, and childlike genius that lies buried under the fiberless flesh of his worshippers. They have created Him in their image. He is the Mob on two legs. They love him and laugh.
“Fruits to Om.”