Art, by Clive Bell. [Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York.]
It is an exquisite pleasure to disagree with Clive Bell! Like a fierce Hun he whirls through the art galleries of Europe, and smashes all venerated masterpieces into a heap of rubbish, sparing but the Byzantine Primitives and some of the Post-Impressionists. Between these two epochs he sees a hideous gap; not more than one in a hundred of the works produced between 1450 and 1850 is he willing to accept as a work of art. It naturally hurts to witness the slaughter of your old friends, such as Michelangelo, Velasquez, Whistler; but our Attila performs his massacre so beautifully, with such a charming sense of humor, that you cannot help admiring the paradoxical feats. What but a good-humored smile will provoke in you such a prank, e. g.: “Nietzsche’s preposterous nonsense knocked the bottom out of nonsense more preposterous and far more vile”? The best part of it is the fact that the author does not attempt to convince you in anything, for neither is he convinced in the infallibility of his hypotheses. The book is a relucent gem among the recent dull and heavy works of art.
Comments of an Idler on Three New Books
Eris: A Dramatic Allegory, by Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff (Moffatt, Yard), is, we are told on the cover, “full of vigorous enthusiasm, and embodies the philosophy of Henri Bergson,” to whom on a flyleaf the book is duly dedicated. It is in careful rhythmic blank verse; a dialogue, principally, between “Man” and “Thought,” with “Past” and “Future” now and then interrupting. The allegory is prefaced by a portrait of the author by Helleu; we trust an unfair one. A strangely bovine expression greets us from under a plumed black hat and from over shoulders and arms drawn like a Goops. Helleu made lovely things once; why this?
In Eris we find Man hurling defiance at Thought, who taunts him, “You cannot vanquish me while Life endures.” Discussion between them on this point covers some forty pages of melodious argument. Six of these (and they are consecutive) form a fairly comprehensive guide-book to a trip around the world, as Man, distracted, stops off at many well-known points seeking to escape pursuing Thought.
In Venice I spread sail with Capulet
And plied an oar across the green lagoons
The soft air vibrant with the minstrels’ song:
I dreamed in Pisa’s woodland and the gulf
Of Lerici, where once again I heard