Democracy—who was it that recently stated with charming aplomb that “Individualism and democracy are synonymous terms?” Yes, I recall: it came from the pen of the author of Incense and Splendor and To the Innermost. I confess this statement, especially when considering its authorship, came to me as a revelation. To me the word “democracy,” as many another beautiful word, has lost its original lofty meaning and has come to rhyme with mediocrity, with the strangling of the Few of the Mountain by the Many of the Valley. Could you name many great things that the most democratized countries, like America and Switzerland, have produced outside of Schweitzer-cheese and Victrolas? Has there ever been a great individualist who appeared as a child of his age, as an outgrowth and a reflection of a democracy? I do not know of such instances. Of course, I grant that the writer of that statement put into the word “Democracy” a higher, a more idealistic meaning. Words, like music, like practically every medium of art, express the author’s personality, and, provided he is an artist, he binds us to share his interpretation. Take, for example, that popular song, “Oh, You Beautiful Doll”; apparently there is nothing tragic in it, yet my emotions were stirred when I heard its French interpretation by Olga Petrova (it was before the kind American entrepreneurs had forced her to perform stunts in Panthea). She had managed to put so much sorrow and tenderness into “O Ma Grande Belle Poupée!” that one forgot the triteness of the words and felt gripping sadness. Or take a less vulgar illustration—Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons.[1] It is an exquisite little thing in cream covers, with a green moon in the center, implying the yolk of an egg with which “something is the matter,” and it gave me rare pleasure to witness the first attempt to revolutionize the most obsolete and inflexible medium of Art—words. The author has endeavored to use language in the same way as Kandinsky uses his colors: to discard conventional structure, to eliminate understandable figures and forms, and to create a “spiritual harmony,” leaving to the layman the task of discovering the “innerer Klang.” Both iconoclasts have admirably succeeded; both the “Improvisations” and the little “essays” on roast-beef and seltzer-bottles have given me the great joy of cocreating, allowing me to interpret them in my own autonomous way. Says the Painter:[2]
The apt use of a word, repetition of this word, twice, three times or even more frequently, will not only tend to intensify the inner harmony but also to bring to light unsuspected spiritual properties of the word itself. Further than that, frequent repetition of a word deprives the word of its original external meaning.
Gertrude Stein has beautifully followed this recipe. Words, plain everyday words, have lost their “external meaning” under her skilful manipulation, and in their grotesque arrangement, frequent repetition, and intentional incoherence they have come to serve as quaint ephemeral sounds of a suggestive symphony, or, if you please, cacophony. The Tender Buttons arouse in the sympathetic reader a limitless amount of moods, from scherzo to maestoso. I shall recall for you a few lines of one peculiar motive:
(From A Substance in a Cushion.)
What is the use of a violent kind of delightfulness if there is no pleasure in not getting tired of it.
(From Red Roses.)
A cool red rose and a pink cut pink, a collapse and a sole hole, a little less hot.
Aider, why aider why whow, whow stop touch, aider whow, aider stop the muncher, muncher munchers.
(From Breakfast.)
What is a loving tongue and pepper and more fish than there is when tears many tears are necessary.