And——

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A Decadent Art!

We have had grand opera in Chicago for several weeks. I am going to write here of grand opera, not of singing classes.

Grand opera, like a great hand whose fingers are the different arts, is trying to give us what the closed hand holds. Galli-Curci has undone the critics for adjectives of praise, has fulfilled the hopes of managers, and filled the Auditorium with the sleep-walking public. We have had Muratore with his beautiful voice and his treacle personality. We have had efficient and awful Wagnerian singers. We have had satisfaction in our opera. And now comes Mary Garden, so surcharged with life that she sends a thrill of it before her—Mary Garden who outsings the composer in her feeling, who outpaints the painter in her acting, who outsculpts the sculptor with her body. Mary Garden gives us grand opera; she gives what the closed hand holds.

And so the fight will begin again and the old favorite record will be put on all the cheap human talking machines: “Of course Mary Garden can’t sing, but she can act.”

Grand opera by its very character is outside such simple criticism as this; it is outside all talk of voice production or singing off key or distracting the conductor. There is a measurable value in the component parts of any art, but the test that cannot be analyzed lies in the unity of these parts. This unity is the principle of Art. But grand opera is a composite of the arts, and the true test for it should lie in the unity of the employed arts, not in weighing any part of any one art. People will rave for days if Mary Garden fails in a note, although the aesthetic and emotional experience of the whole was unmarred; but the same people will never be disturbed if Galli-Curci moves about the stage like a lost cloak-model and breaks up the picture of the whole illusion by holding her body in positions not possible in human awkwardness; and is so intent on breathing that she almost forgets to attend to Juliet’s funeral. So long as she sings according to a fixed standard she need go no further than a moving-picture screen. And Mary must be decried, though her performance hold in color like a tapestry and move in rhythm like a frieze.

When anything is as far from life as sung dialogue it must have a different treatment than either pure song or pure drama. Decoration should be the design for opera: a libretto that is a dramatic poem, music working itself out in a decoration for the poem, scenery a design of the matter and feeling of the libretto, and actors that can point the design not in the realistic day-life manner of the drama but with decorative acting. With this we might have great grand opera. One thing we have now: the great decorative actress and singer, Mary Garden.

Mary Garden is the biggest thing on our horizon today. To think that flesh could be so intelligent! She gives as generously of her undraped body as a Rodin statue; and the audience gives her back their applause, grudgingly, not knowing the great art of her. To put Rodin into inspired motion, but to do more than that even—! In the next issue I shall try to write of all she does,—Mary Garden,

“What Is Art?”

When Tagore first gave his lecture on Art in Chicago I was not here, and all I could read about it or find out about it by asking was that it was anti-Tolstoyan. But I got the whole truth of it in a sentence when I asked a pupil of Tagore’s, a young artist, “What does Mr. Tagore say in his lecture on Art?”

“What does he say? Oh, he just says what it is, this Art.”

Every layman in this country who finds it necessary to establish himself a critic of Art and artists should hear that lecture and try to understand it, if only in parts. But I suppose they wouldn’t accept Tagore’s word for it because he doesn’t take them in on the ground floor, in the manner of The Seven Arts, for instance.

I can’t quote directly, as the lecture is not yet published, but he has said all the things that one longs to say oneself. He defines the artist as one who says to the world: “I see you where you are what I am.” Art is the most personal thing in the world. Man reveals himself and not his objects in Art. Matter and manner find their harmonics in our personality. The artist does not particularize through peculiarity, which is the discord of the unique, but through the personality, which is its harmony. Art is man’s answer to the “Supreme Person.” Art is personal and beyond science. So, too, is beauty. Beauty is not a fact but an expression. “Facts are like wine-cups that carry it.” To all the confusion and misconceptions about beauty in Art he answers: The creation of beauty is not the object of Art. Beauty in Art has merely been an instrument and not its complete and ultimate significance. And to those who demand teaching or utility in Art there is this answer: The stage of pure utility is like a state of heat which is dark. When it surpasses itself it becomes white heat and then it is expressive; and when man thwarts his desire for delight, wanting to make it into good or into knowledge, it loses its bloom and healthiness.

Taking up the old controversy of Art for Art’s sake, the fact that the phrase has fallen into disrepute is a sign of the return of the ideals of the puritanic age when enjoyment as an end in itself was held to be sinful. The idea of Art for Art’s sake had its origin in a surplusage of life, not in asceticism or decadence. When our personality is at its flood-tide with love or other emotion it longs to express itself for the sake of expression, and we forget the claims of usefulness and the thrift of necessity.

After all the fighting and arguing one has to do up and down the world over what is Art, and Art for Art’s sake, one comes from this lecture feeling: “He leadeth me beside the still waters; he maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he restoreth my soul.”

Little Theatre Atrocities

Last month the Chicago Little Theatre strayed down into the Playhouse with Mrs. Warren’s Profession. I won’t say anything about the acting, nor even of Mrs. Warren and her Oak Park vulgarity—Mrs. Warren of London, Brussels, Budapest! But I can’t let the scenery go by without a protest.

There is a subtle but definite sense of analogy of line which goes through all the arts. It is obvious in acting and painting. Why shouldn’t it be sought in decoration when decoration is dependent upon words? Bernard Shaw has perhaps but one line—the straight horizontal line. He cuts through clear and straight—a cross-section of life. He brings people and all their relations out upon this broad flat plane. That’s Shaw. I didn’t mind that the text of Mrs. Warren called for period architecture; it was the insistence on the long perpendicular line that maddened me. And the color! There, too, was a chance for line. But—well, who can tell how bad the performance was with the futile effort of the denying horizontal lines of the play against the asserting perpendicular lines of the scenery?

Moore and More

I have been reading Frank Harris in Pearson’s on George Moore’s The Brook Kerith. What Mr. Harris really does is to jump on George Moore for not writing a history of the life of Christ—the sociology, biology, and geology of Jerusalem.

Only in books of information and science does the writer have to submerge his personality and let the facts have first place. But Mr. Moore thought he was making a work of art, and here no one will deny the first right to the personality of the artist. Mr. Harris cavils about types, landscapes, customs, etc.

Almost the only presentation of Christ outside the Bible has been in painting. Have those painters “defiled our most sacred spiritual possessions” who, from the day when Florence knelt in her streets before Cimabue’s Madonna, have painted every incident in the life of Christ and of the Holy Family in every setting from an Italian pasture to a Medici palace, using Italian types, Italian dress, Italian gestures? Has the great El Greco defiled the Christian religion because he painted Spanish Christs and saints in tomb-damp colors? Did Michael Angelo dethrone God because in his Creation he painted him with beard and flowing robe on his own authority? And the Germans and the Dutch? They must have been all leagued together to “misrepresent through ignorance,” according to such critics as Mr. Harris. But who can say that they have not raised the tradition to a height the old Jews dared not dream?

“A. E.”

There is a great interest in America just now over A. E.—poet, painter, mystical teacher, labor leader, economist, and editor. There are lectures by Colum, reviews of his books, studies of his life, a revival of the reading of George Moore’s Salve where he is portrayed with such love, and in January we are to have an exhibition of his paintings brought from Ireland by a Chicago woman at her own expense and loaned to the Art Institute. To my knowledge only once before have any of A. E.’s paintings been seen in Chicago. There were two with the “Cubists.”

The coming exhibitions will have pictures in several manners: a group of wood interiors where gay young things sport—the trees human and the girls wild; joyous sea pictures with cockle-gatherers and bathers; and one frankly symbolic. One is called Dove-Grey Sands: The Face of Brooding Love in the Sky. I love most those close-toned ones in which he has seemed to paint the very spirit of the air to create his subject—a painted intuition of mood. Most painters do no more than paint the nature of the atmosphere to give the mood of their subjects. There seems to be in all A. E.’s painting a sense of a living divine soul in all things that make up the universe, and their unity with the soul of man.

Fritz Kreisler; Pianist

Kreisler came and played the piano!—accompanying a young Russian baritone, de Warlich. It was a lesson for all pianists and accompanists; but of course they were not there. Very few were there, so excited are people in Chicago over music.

It was good to see how Kreisler subdued the strength of his own personality and the sound of the piano and let the boy sing. But he did more than that: he subdued the authority of a great violinist and let the piano play.

It would have made you glad to see how he came to the instrument. He reached out as if he were drawing it to him; with hands and feet at once he seemed to swing it into place.

H. M. for Art; H—L for Artists

At a recent exhibition in the Art Institute a committee granted honorable mention to Stanislaw Szukalski, the young Polish sculptor, and it is told that he tore up the H. M. before their faces. He would undoubtedly have thrown back the thousand-dollar prize to them.

Well, who of them all is able to give him place? Better be free of their praise for his work if he cannot be free of their criticism for his personality. The newspapers take it up and call him the eccentric young sculptor. A citizen may be eccentric—so eccentric that his fellows may shut him up in an asylum; but that’s a game among themselves. How on earth can a sculptor be eccentric? It’s a waste of terms. One who creates as indirectly as through Art must always seem eccentric to society; but he is not eccentric to life: he creates as an artist: he exists as an artist.

Paint and Personality

The new Arts Club opened its galleries with an exhibition of Sargent and Dearth—just wild enough contrast for great interest: Sargent resting back on old methods, expressing himself only in his subjects; Dearth vitalizing his method with feeling and creating a manner full of life-stuff to express himself in his peculiar subjects.

Next came an exhibition of Henri, Bellows, and Sloan—a matter of men, not of manner.

The courtesy with which Mr. Henri treats all his subjects stamps his technique and his color with that final necessary thing. In Mr. Bellows the organization stands the test, but Bellows seems to be wanting. Mr. Sloan, with his humpy line, makes one feel a soul that has never blown out like an unfurled scroll.

Frederic Stuck!

There is an unintentional explanation in the German pronunciation of Mr. Stock’s name as to why the Orchestra programs never “move on” with new music or with much variation of the old.