An Isaiah Without A Christ

And the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Son of Man, prophesy, and say thou unto them that prophesy out of their own hearts, hear ye the word of the Lord; thus sayeth the Lord God: woe unto the foolish prophets that follow their own spirit and have seen nothing. O Israel, thy prophets are like foxes in the desert.—Ezekiel 13:1-4.

CHARLES ZWASKA

I.

And the youth returned to his village and found it vile. In the City he had seen visions of what a town might be.... Nicholas Vachel Lindsay had been studying Art in Chicago and on his return to Springfield published, in the fall of 1910, The Village Magazine: a scattering of verse, prose, sketches, and ornamental designs and propaganda. “Talent for poetry, deftness in inscribing, and skill in mural painting were probably gifts of the same person”, he tells us later, in speaking of the ancient Egyptians. “Let us go back”—the village must be redeemed. The first editorial in the magazine was On Conversion. The people of Springfield “should build them altars to the unknown God, the radiant one; He whom they radiantly worship should be declared unto them in His fullness.” The next was An Editorial on Beauty for the Village Pastor—it expressed the belief that the Sunday-school, the Christian Endeavor Society, the Brotherhood, Anti-Saloon League, and the Woman’s Aid were the forces that were to bring about beauty. Springfield was to be the new Athens! A broadside was distributed throughout the village: The Soul of the City receives the gift of the Holy Spirit:

(Etc., the poetry of the thing will not be spoiled by omitting some lines here.)

Verses like the above aside, here was revealed to us a poet; the foundations were laid, it seemed, for a future. But the youth did dream and see visions. Much was said about Utopias and the New Jerusalem, and poetry languished in the youth that he might materialize some ultimate world state. The most inexcusable optimism of them all—“Rome was not built in a day.” True, but it was built: not merely talked about or prophesied. And the youth remembered not that it hath been said in Isaiah: “For, behold, I create a new heaven and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered nor come into mind.” Yet the youth remembered the former still and did say much about the recoming of those civilizations which had been, at last to stay forever! His day, or the great poet who proceeded him by but a few years, he seemed to notice not:

But the youth was at heart the poet, the dreamer, attempting to convince by arguments, similes, rhymes; not as the great Poet, by mere presence! Nor could he stand the offer of rough new prizes, preferring the smooth old prizes. He clung to the organizations of the day, and to augment their “influence toward the Millennium” he published The Village Magazine. That, gentle reader, was in 1910.

II.

In the year 1912 there went forth from Springfield this same lad. Into the West he went—through Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and into New Mexico. He went preaching a gospel,—his own “Gospel of Beauty.” His sustenance he earned by reciting his own rhymes to those who were willing, in exchange, to give him bread. Thus did he make us uncomfortably imagine him a new John the Baptist, François Villon, or even Saint Francis of Assisi.... In the year 1914 his account of this adventure was published. Three rhymes, he claims, contained his “theory of American civilization.” This is from one of them:

And “At the end of the Road”—by faith and a study of the signs—he proclaimed the New Jerusalem for America, particularly for his home-village.... Now, there is a peculiar value attached to this journey—the influence on the poet, not the preacher’s influence on the people. It was after this trip that we got The Santa Fé Trail, The Fireman’s Ball, written in a style in which were later written The Chinese Nightingale and The Congo. And, because of the relation of its style to these, we even judge I heard Emmanuel Singing a good thing. This, then, is Lindsay’s importance among us; his contribution of this style of vaudeville chanting. This is the poet. He does not count when writing Galahad, Knight Who Perished, King Arthur’s Men Have Come Again, Incense, Springfield Magical, or declaring “by faith and a study of the signs.”

III.

On November first, 1915, at Springfield, Illinois, Vachel Lindsay signed a book on The Art of the Moving Picture. The last chapter was called “The Acceptable Year of the Lord.” From having seen forecastings in photoplay hieroglyphics the children in times-to-come can rise and say: “This day is the scripture fulfilled in your ears”:

Scenario writers, producers, photoplay actors, endowers of exquisite films, sects using special motion pictures for a predetermined end, all you who are taking the work as a sacred trust, I bid you God-speed. Consider what it will do to your souls, if you are true to your trust.... The record of your ripeness will be found in your craftsmanship. You will be God’s thoroughbreds.

It has come then, this new weapon of men, and the face of the whole earth changes. In after centuries its beginning will be indeed remembered.

It has come, this new weapon of men, and by faith and a study of the signs we proclaim that it will go on and on in immemorial wonder.

This, then, is the prophecy, and thus has he proclaimed it: “By my hypothesis, Action Pictures are sculpture-in-motion, Intimate Pictures are paintings-in-motion, Splendour Pictures are architecture-in-motion.... The rest of the work is a series of after thoughts and speculations not brought forward so dogmatically.”

Now, the Arts are complete in themselves; they contain all. The moving picture has come to be a parasite on them.

Sculpture has become a vital thing to this age because of August Rodin. Meunier has moved us too. Also Monolo and Fagi. Now comes Lindsay: “I desire for the moving picture not the stillness but the majesty of sculpture.... Not the mood of Venus de Milo, but let us turn to that sister of hers—the great Victory of Samothrace”.

... I have seen much of Lindsay’s advice followed word for word since this book of his was published. Tyrone Power in The Dream of Eugene Aram. Power’s face and figure were more majestic on the stage than in this picture. There was a “sculpture-group,” as you would call it, in this picture—a farmer and two squires on a hilltop. It was in silhouette, a sketch and not sculpture. The nearest I have seen to the majesty and immobility of sculpture, marble or otherwise, was the head of William S. Hart in The Aryan. The picture was shadowed so as to center on his poetic face, the fascination of which none but Forbes Robertson’s has. Hart’s face on the screen, his eyes looking into the eyes of you, at his throat a handkerchief of white—a bust by an artist indeed! But the shadows parted, and the hieroglyphic-crowded background came into view. Hart’s head moved, became part of a moving picture and sculpture was no more. The moment was worth it—but it moved.... “Moving pictures are pictures and not sculpture”, says Lorado Taft in a public statement, objecting to Lindsay’s phrase. “To a sculptor the one thing cherished as most essential to his art is its static quality, its look of absolute quiescence. It is the hint of eternity which marks and makes all monumental art”.... Has Lindsay no feeling for sculpture?

Frank Lloyd Wright has models in plaster of some of his buildings—“modern” skyscrapers, hotels, and homes, growing, rising upward, white and beautiful. It was these works of architecture which called forth the phrase “flowers in stone”. He alone, it seems, has made art of architecture in our day. He objects to Lindsay saying his art can be that of moving pictures; its very literalness, its actualness being the very negation of the soul and constitution of art. In The Dumb Girl of Portici the Smalleys, as inspired as any of the producers, used the entire Field Museum in Jackson Park, Chicago, as a background for a pageant of Italian royalty, of the middle ages. Insisting on architecture can spoil pictures. It did this one.

Painting-in-motion—rhythm. Rhythm seems alien to the application of the theory of jerky fade-away close-ups. “Intimate Dutch interior” scenes fading into the close-up and then back into the entire scene again. Intimate, friendly, and moving, but lacking in rhythm and the flow of naturalness. Some think that “moving lines”, made an art in themselves, will be an achievement of the moving film. Have you ever been struck dumb by the lines made by a dancer across the stage, the moving of life across life? I have seen it in the moving-picture only in the flight of gulls (unconscious actors) or in pictures of rivers and trees and the sea; in short—nature. But nature is nature. The painter’s art! Botticelli’s Spring, or The Birth of Venus—pictures containing the essence of rhythmic natural movement. Never yet have the movies given us this. If Lindsay must prophesy and “take the masses back to art” there are artists living today—who are for today. Lindsay seems to know nothing of them. His knowledge of painting seems to have stopped with his art school days. The later work of Jerome Blum, for example, has this movement, this rhythm, not only in composition and line but in the color as well. Reds and greens and blues that vibrate, paintings that live.

The rest of this might be entitled: “An open letter to Vachel Lindsay”, for it is “not so dogmatically set forth” and is mere man-to-man talk.

I have seen most of your suggestions swallowed whole by moving-picture makers.... Your hieroglyphics idea—well, James Oppenheim was an accomplice in that. “On Coming Forth by Day” or your suggestion to use the Book of the Dead—a Chicago woman, the patient, too-patient, beautifully reverent Lou Wall Moore has been working for years on an adaptation of one of the books which, when it does appear on the stage, will have more rhythm and terrible swiftness than ever your moving picture could, the splendor of color, space, height, distance, and most magical of all, the voice:

Priest:

As for your “too ruthless a theory” of having silence in the theatre, or rather just the hum of conversation, let me tell you of the “midnight-movies” in our town: Can you imagine a crowd of people standing in line outside a theatre at one or a quarter after in the morning? And inside an audience—or optience?!—which for interest and variety can equal any of the moving-pictures shown or yet to be shown. I wish you could hear the ludicrous, cutting, knowing remarks made by these people about your pictures, when, after twelve-thirty the piano stops, and the oppressive silence outweighs the interest of the picture. (The piano formerly stopped at eleven, but the management decided that the only way to maintain order was to keep the piano going.) Well, the silence never lasts: snoring, wheezing, roaring, shouting and laughing and calls for “Silence”, “Wake up, the rest of us wanna sleep”, “You’re off key”, or “What time shall I call, sir?” These people are here: business men; newsboys, hobos, drunks, who sleep here all night; salesmen; night clerks; telegraphers; bell-boys; hotel and restaurant maids; scrub-women; actors; vaudevillians; cabaret singers; pressmen; newspapermen; chauffeurs, teamsters; traveling men; gentlemen of leisure; painted youths and scented women. They “get” the psychology of the pictures. Helen’s hazards call forth telegraph tappings to each other; close-ups showing jealousy, rage, or overdone emotion get “woof-woofs” and howls and hoots; the murder prevented “just in time” gets its sarcasms; and “immoral situations” their due appreciation. But—this, which seemed on the way to become our most individual phase of night-life, is passing. The jolly manager, who passed up and down the aisle like a hen among her brood, keeping us awake until one o’clock, has been replaced by a uniformed policeman; the council has legislated women out after two o’clock; and a “ride in the wagon” or ejection faces the one who would “get gay”. Now, as a place of interest, it is passing in this day of short-lived gayety and censored originality. The Law, Lindsay, will not allow your plan to work. In the neighborhoods?—the audiences themselves do not know why they are there. Why disturb them?

Your educational film also I have seen applied. Saved From the Flames worked out in co-operation with the New York Fire department. It teaches a lesson. So does The Human Cauldron—your own phrase, I believe, taken from the first line of page forty-two, your book. This picture was done with the aid of the New York Police department. Both were stupid, inane in story and treatment, and on the whole a bore. Even Walthall couldn’t save The Raven from cardboard clouds and angels and “visions”.

Your scenario, the “second cousin to the dream that will one day come forth”, seems quite symbolic of your prophecies. Pallas Athena, Jeanne D’Arc, and Our Lady Springfield; a treeless hill top in Washington Park: this then is the rank of the Goddesses. Springfield is to have secular priests and her patriots are irresolute! “Without prophecy there can be no fulfillment. Without Isaiah there can be no Christ”.—A truly Christian interpretation of the Hebrew’s great Isaiah, to whom Christ was but a disciple! But so you will have it.... We need Isaiahs and John the Baptists, but they were prophets and fore-runners of a Christ, a personality—not a Utopia, World State or International Brotherhood. If you appear before us as an Isaiah we demand to hear of your Christ. You recognize the demand of Confucius for rectification of names. Do you realize Nietzsche’s transvaluations for our day? Faith as opposed to affirmation! Zarathustra has spoken! There is now the mountain peak—and you are still rhyming about a hill top.