The Reader Critic

Note

Otto T. Simon, Washington, D. C.:

Your last magazine has just arrived. Be happy. You are sowing seeds of Beauty. You dig into the earth, cut the worm in two, bring the chrysalis to the light that it may flutter its wings, and even the mole blinks and maybe after a while may see.

“Spirit,” etc.

Allan Tanner, Chicago:

Why so much worship of Bauer’s art? He is a mere man who has approached the goal of art through human effort—through such a material thing as hard practice. Anybody will tell you that when he was in Paris he was not even out of the ordinary in technical skill, and that he really transgressed the piano. Those beautiful tonal effects are only mechanical things done to perfection.

While Paderewski—that spiritual thing—who dares not even listen to his own breathing, who makes the piano a living thing, capable of everything. That god! who was born to touch the piano with such divine significance that you sometimes dare not listen. With Bauer it is only that you can listen—so wonderfully beautiful it is. It is the same with Mary Garden. There you have that same spiritual thing. With Paderewski it is now serenity. With Mary Garden it is the same. And Bauer can never reach that for he is not born into it. Paderewski may sometimes play badly—make mistakes—but that is only when something material disturbs or penetrates that far-a-way vision—that mind which communes with space. When Bauer expresses passion it is only that physical nervous tension. But when Paderewski plays! It is that scarlet-colored heat which dims the light of day!

[This sounds like my own ravings in the early days of The Little Review, when I talked straight out of the air without anything to back up my words. So I will have to excuse you. But if you’re going to talk about “spirit”, with any meaning behind it, you will have to give up those wild phrases like “communing with space” and “the goal of art through human effort” and that very awful “dimming the light of day”.

I heard a woman say the other day that Marcella Craft “spiritualized” the role of Salome because she made her a spoiled child instead of what she really was—a woman in whom sex had become too mad a thing. How such denials of the essence of things can become “spiritualizations” is beyond my comprehension. I suppose, by the same reasoning, that because Mary Garden understands that drama of “nature too-heavily laden” her performance should be called a “materialization”. What do you mean when you say that Paderewski has that spiritual thing and Bauer has not—is not “born into it”? Any one with the slightest discrimination of human values will know from one glance at the two men that Paderewski was born with the look of a magician and that Bauer was born with the look of a maker. Both qualities are matters of “spirit”. What vague mist is in your mind when you talk of “spiritual”?

And what is this about transgressing the piano? As you say, Paderewski makes the piano capable of everything. That is what nearly all other pianists have tried to do. But the piano isn’t capable of everything. It is capable of some very special things, and Bauer is the first man to prove it. He has stood for that all alone in a world of ignorant criticism. No “spirit”? And then what do you mean by “out of the ordinary in technical skill”? Is that one of your criterions of an art? Don’t you remember Arthur Symons saying that it isn’t what you can perform but what you can conceive?—M. C. A.]

Alice Groff Again!

Alice Groff, Philadelphia:

In answer to Clive Bell, in the November issue, I would say, words are easy. What does “significant form” mean? Who is to decide what is “significant form”? An art form may be divinely significant to one mind, and be utterly insignificant, indeed without form at all, to another.

There is only one absolutely necessary condition to a good work of art, without which indeed no work of art can be brought into being, even; and that is: creative artistic faculty in the mind of some one artist. There is no human being or group of human beings capable of deciding whether such expression or embodiment of an artist’s creative faculty is a work of art or not. The artist alone can decide as to his own work and leave it to evolution and time to bring a portion at least of humanity to agree with him. Meanwhile the petty critics continually spew out of their mouths the greatest miracles of art that have ever been given to the world.

[Answer this now, if words are so easy. I suppose if the sun were taken out of the universe tomorrow everything would hold its place as now and keep on going? The universe would hold without its significant form? Do you think we are talking of the shape of a vase when we say it has significant form?

I don’t see where you get the word insignificant out of this talk either. You are like those people who talk about good and bad art. There isn’t any such thing as bad art: there is Art and rotten stuff.

And who decides whether or not a man has “creative artistic faculty”? According to your generosity any one can elect himself an artist.

You are the woman who is always writing about art being the embodiment of an ideal. What’s the ideal in Œdipus Rex or in Salome or in the Mona Lisa—in any of them? And speaking of ideals, what is the art in Uncle Tom’s Cabin?

“I am sick at my heart and I want to lie down.”—An Artist.]

Let Them Fight It Out!

Louise Gebhard Cann, Seattle:

This came out of me after reading Mr. Puteklis’ letter in the January Little Review. I notice that all my socialist and anarchist friends hold a similar view, one going so far as to declare in the course of an argument on art with a well-known etcher that his etchings could not live because they did not portray the struggles of the masses. Being in principle an anarchist myself, and sympathetic towards much of socialism, I cannot speak as an antagonist to these people but as one of their number who sees that on this point of art’s purpose they are mistaken.

Mr. Puteklis’s communication reminded me again of the misconception of art’s essence noticeable among various classes of those today who possess what they term “social consciousness”. For though it is true that the strongest names in contemporary literature, painting, sculpture are those of men and women who in some extreme way are opposed to the existent social order, and the only being capable of producing profound and significant art is of revolutionary mind, essentially; nevertheless, we find in the socialistic university professor (as when Dr. Cox of the University of Washington writes in The South Atlantic Quarterly of “The Distemper of Modern Art and its Remedy”), in the intelligent working-man and the revolutionary worker, the same misunderstanding of art that we suffer from in the well-to-do bourgeois and in the church and other capitalistic institutions, with the same determination to degrade art to some form of direct utility.

The communal art of the past necessarily served the emotional life of the community. It was the “handmaiden”, as Mr. Puteklis puts it, “of oppression and superstition”. Much of pre-modern painting and sculpture, as we all so well know, was not painting and sculpture per se. It was merely symbols used like language for information on extrinsic topics by means of illustration.

A fallacy lurks in the too close judging of modern arts and institutions by their ancient history. Art as part of human progress has its revolutions. Once weak and a slave to ideas alien to itself, today, by recognition of the truth that it is entitled to its own intrinsic life, it is rapidly becoming muscular and self-sufficient. Those who continually regard modern art in the light of its history obstruct the progress of art, for in the course of art’s century-long process of coming to itself, a transmutation took place, the precise moment of which is difficult to seize, and the aspect engendered by this transmutation is so different from the ancient aspects of art that many nonplussed by it or dazzled, or blinded to ignorance of it, fail to grasp the fact of its quite complete newness. By this one would not be understood as saying that the history of art is illogical and contains bottomless and wide gulfs. The modern mind deeply cognizant of evolved art can trace relationship just as an anthropologist can trace the steps in the evolution of man; but we all admit in this latter department of human knowledge the looseness of judging modern man by the cave man. We concede modern man to be an entirely different being—a being in whom the struggle for animal existence is vastly complicated and modified as compared to his primitive ancestor, whose motives would be unseizable by that ancestor, and whose sensual, expressive, intellectual, moral and æsthetic forces have attained a volume which would overwhelm to the mereness of a wolf or a bear that progenitor. It is not for nothing that humanity has the vision of going beyond itself—the vision of the more-than-human. Somewhere in the history of animal life, spirit slipped in and we have a new species. Somewhere about the time of Cézanne, or a trifle earlier, from the old communal pictorial representations of sin, death, Christianity, the will-to-be-itself slipped into painting and today we are witnessing the evolution through several varieties of manifestation of a new species of art.

We of today are not discussing in contemporary art the old art of the Renaissance—beautiful as that revelation was. We are not discussing art as the Greeks understood it nor as the Japanese of the past understood it, nor the Indians. We are discussing the new species, the birth of which we have almost ourselves witnessed.

But now we need an Emmanuel Kant, who in a Critique on Pure Art will investigate for us art’s necessary limits and authentic nature and free it for us from its inheritance of superstition.

Truly much of the “social vision” today is blind, as blind as the vision of any fanatic. Those who are under its spell (and one does not deny it to be a world-renovating spell, on the whole) are determined to halt art and shackle it with the command that it serve the “masses.” These humanitarians are still deluded by the idea that subject is the important part of art; they would retain art as a part of informative literature—denying it even the right to be a literature of power—and they would have it reduced to the level of illustration for the propaganda of socialism and anarchy. This attitude is tyrannical, and it is a refusal to allow art its place under the sun. Those of true social vision should perceive that all the forces of life—and art is perhaps the most potent—should be accepted and allowed to lift humanity along their course.

The human spirit is broader and deeper than mere class consciousness; for among other consciousnesses it includes the consciousness of the rights of the masses as against those who deny those rights. If we narrow all our activity to a direct service of social betterment, we shall never attain social betterment, for this condition, like the condition of happiness, or health, or any other valued state, is missed by a too-narrow and direct seeking.

Art fulfilling itself will be an inexhaustible source of power, mental and moral fertilization, of vitalizing spiritual life to all who come within its influence. But art reduced to illustration of class struggle, bound in service to mere social consciousness, will soon turn sterile and will fail to inspire even those it serves.

It is significant that only those individualities that have attained self-realization—true freedom—have inspired and lead humanity. The same must be true of any spiritual movement.

Art’s strength today is in its revolutionary character. And the revolution of art, like the social revolution which accompanies it in the world’s awakening, will react beneficially on the human spirit, helping it to ever greater realizations and liberations. But art, as such, cannot even exist if ENSLAVED to the social movement.

This month really begins the fourth year of The Little Review, but since we have missed several numbers on account of our eternal poverty, and since we have a special editorial surprise for the next issue (a gorgeous surprise), I shall just call this the last of Volume III and let the next one begin the new year.

We are getting established in New York, and within a month can invite you to our office.

I am too embarrassed about the prize poem to say more than that it will really appear in the next issue. After dynamiting the judge who was holding up the whole contest we managed to have the poems sent on to the second judge; but it was beyond human effort to get the verdict here in time for inclusion in this number.

The photograph on page 4 is from Grisélidis, an opera of Massenet’s given this season, for the first time in America, by the Chicago Grand Opera Company.

METROPOLITAN OPERA HOUSE

Tuesday Evening, March 6

AT 8.30 O’CLOCK

ONLY APPEARANCE

ISADORA DUNCAN

Cesar Franck, Schubert Tschaikowsky

ORCHESTRA: OSCAR SPIRESCUE, Conductor

Paul Geraldy wrote it in French W. B. Blake translated it

The War, Madame

Out of the trenches for 24 hours—and in PARIS!

He couldn’t bear to go back to his camphor smelling apartment, with its old associations—yet somehow he found himself there. How curious his thoughts—how wonderful his re-born sense of the beautiful, after the trench harshness.

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THE MYSTERIOUS POETS

The latest school of poetry is “The Spectrists.” It denies any connection with all the other of the late and later schools of poetry, the Futurists, the Imagistes, the Vorticists, etc. The writers of the Spectric School follow the musical convention by giving no titles to their poems, but calling them merely “Opus I,” “Opus II,” etc. The first work of this school to be brought out is a book of verses entitled “Spectra,” by Anne Knish and Emanuel Morgan, published by Mitchell Kennerley.

These writers believe that Americans over-accent the personal circumstances and doings of artists and would rather let their work speak for them than their biographers. The publisher, however, suggests these few biographical details: Anne Knish is a native of Buda-Pesth, who has for the past few years lived in Pittsburgh. She is the author of numerous critical reviews in Continental periodicals, and of one volume of poems in Russian, but with a Latin title, “Via Aurea.” Emanuel Morgan, the originator of the Spectra School of Poetry, has for years been interested primarily in painting, and is now beginning to publish his work in verse. He recently returned to Pittsburgh, his native city, after living for twenty years in Paris. Some years ago he met the late Remy De Gourmont, and out of this meeting there grew a close friendship. It was Remy De Gourmont, so it is stated, who suggested to Mr. Morgan that he devote himself to writing and to expression in the new form he invented. Mr. Morgan, however, does not claim that M. De Gourmont accepted the theories of poetry that are formulated and expressed in “Spectra.”

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PELLE THE CONQUEROR

Martin Andersen Nexö

English translation just completed in four volumes. Each, $1.50 net.

“When the first part of ‘Pelle the Conqueror’ appeared, in 1906, its author, Martin Anderson Nexö, was practically unknown even in his native country, save to a few literary people, who knew that he had written some volumes of stories and a book full of sunshiny reminiscences from Spain. And even now, after his great success with ‘Pelle,’ very little is known about the writer. He was born in 1869, in one of the poorest quarters of Copenhagen, but spent his boyhood in his beloved island, Bornholm, in the Baltic, in or near the town Nexö, from which his final name is derived. There, too, he was a shoemaker’s apprentice, like Pelle in the second part of the book, which resembles many great novels in being largely autobiographical. Later he gained his livelihood as a bricklayer, until he somehow managed to get to one of the most renowned of our ‘people’s high schools,’ where he studied so effectually that he was enabled to become a teacher, first at a provincial school, and later in Copenhagen.

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VOLUME I. Boyhood.

VOLUME II. Apprenticeship.

VOLUME III. The Great Struggle.

VOLUME IV. Daybreak.

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Advertisements were collected at the end of the text.

The table of contents on the title page was adjusted in order to reflect correctly the headings in this issue of The Little Review.

The original spelling was mostly preserved. A few obvious typographical errors were silently corrected. All other changes are shown here (before/after):

(multiple cases) ... Carmen, Griselidis, Tosca, Mélisande, Salome! ... ... Carmen, Grisélidis, Tosca, Mélisande, Salome! ...

(multiple cases) ... Zoluaga ... ... Zuloaga ...