Part 3

But many American reviewers and professional readers and publishers, who suppose themselves to be devoted to "realism" and to writing of "radical" tendency, believe not at all that the realistic writer should adopt de Maupassant's method and incarnate for us his own American vision of the life he sees here, but simply that he should imitate the manner of de Maupassant. Many such American reviewers and professional readers and publishers believe not at all that the radical writer should find and represent for us some unseen branching root of certain American social phenomena which he himself has detected, but simply that he should copy some excellent drawing of English roots by Mr. Galsworthy, or of Russian roots by Gorky.

The craze for imitation in American writing is almost unbelievably pervasive. The author here, who is devoted to the attempt to speak his own truth--and the more devoted he is the more reverently, I believe, will he regard all other authors' truth as theirs and derived exactly from their own point of view--will find opposed to him not only the great body of conventional romanticists and conservatives who will think he ought to stereotype and conventionalize his work into a poor, dulled contemporary imitation of the delightful narratives of Sir Walter Scott. He will also find opposed to him the great body of conventional "realists" and "radicals" who will think he ought to stereotype and conventionalize his work into a poor, blurred imitation of the keen narratives of Mr. H. G. Wells.

Sometimes these counsellors, not content with commending a copied manner, seriously urge--one might think at the risk of advising plagiarism--that the American author simply transplant the social ideas of some admirable foreign artist to one of our own local scenes. Thus, a year or two ago, in one of our critical journals, I saw the writer of a novel about Indiana state politicians severely blamed for not making the same observations on the subject that Mr. Wells had made about English national parliamentary life in The New Machiavelli. Not long since another American reviewer of "radical" tendency harshly censured the author of a novel about American under-graduate life in a New York college, because the daughter of the college president uttered views of sex and marriage unlike those expressed in Ann Veronica.

This sort of criticism--equally unflattering and obtuse, it appears to me, in its perception of the special characterizations of Mr. Wells's thoughtful pages, and in its counsel to the artist depicting an alien topic to insert extraneous and unrelated views in his landscape--proceeds from a certain strange and ridiculous conception of truth peculiar to many persons engaged in the great fields of our literary criticism and of our publishing and political activities.

This is a conception of truth not at all as something capable of irradiating any scene on the globe, like light; but as some very definite and limited force, driving a band-wagon. People who possess this conception of truth seem to argue very reasonably that if Mr. Wells is "in" it, so to speak, with truth, and is saying "the thing" to say about sex or about the liberal party, then the intelligent author anywhere who desires to be "in" it with truth will surely get into this band-wagon of Mr. Wells's and stand on the very planks he has placed in the platform of its particular wagonbed. It is an ironical, if tragic, comment on the intelligence of American reading that the driver I have chanced to see most frequently urged for authors here should be Mr. H. G. Wells, who has done probably more than any other living writer of English to encourage varied specialistic and non-partisan expression.

We have said that to tell his own truth the American writer will have to sit longer before his subject and will have more to do to express it, than if he chose it from a country of more ancient practices in art, and of longer ancestral sojourns. We have said that he will be urged not to tell his own truth considerably more than an English or German or French writer would be. These authors are at least not advised to imitate American expression, and they live in countries where the habit of copying the work of other artists is much less widely regarded as an evidence of sophistication than it is here.

The American writer must also face a marked historical peculiarity of our national letters. The publishing centres of England and of Germany and of France are in the midst of these nations. Outside the daily press, the greater part of the publishing business of our own country is in New York--situated in the northeast corner, nearly a continent away from many of our national interests and from many millions of our population. By an odd coincidence, outside the daily press, the field of our national letters in magazine and book publication seems to be occupied not at all with individual impressions of truth from over the whole country, but with what may be called the New York truth.

The young American author in the Klondike or in San Francisco who desires to sit long before his subject and to reveal its hitherto unrecorded aspect must do so with the clear knowledge that the field of publication for him in the East is already filled by our old friend the New York Klondike, scarcely changed by the disappearance of one dog or sweater from the early days of the gold discoveries; and that no earthquake has shaken the New York San Francisco.

Of course we know, because she almost annually reassures the country on these points, that New York instantly welcomes all original and fresh writing arising from the remotest borders of the nation; and that in all these matters she is not and never possibly could be dull. Yet one can understand how the Klondike author, interested, as Mr. Galsworthy advises, in seeing an object in "the way that he alone can see it" and "with the part of him which makes him This man and not That," might feel a trifle dashed by New York's way of showing her love of originality in spending nearly all the money and energy her publishers and reviewers have in advertising and in praising authors as the sixteenth Kipling of the Klondike or the thirtieth O. Henry, of California. This is apt to be bewildering, too, for the readers of Mr. Kipling and O. Henry, who have enjoyed in the tales of each of these men the truth told "with the part of him which makes him This man and not That." It is possible to understand, too, how the young author in San Francisco may feel that since New York's consciousness of his city has remained virtually untouched for eight years by the greatest cataclysm of nature on our continent, perhaps she overrates the extreme swiftness and sensitiveness of her reaction to novel impression from without; and might conceivably not hear a story of heretofore unexpressed aspects of San Francisco told by the truthful voice of one young writer.

These are some of my own guesses as to why individual impressions of our national life are few and why they are not greatly in vogue in America. Whether they be poor or good guesses they represent one Middle Western reader's observation of some of the actual difficulties that will have to be faced in America by the writer who by temperament desires to follow that golden and beautiful way of Flaubert's, which Mr. Galsworthy has mentioned.

This writer will doubtless get from these difficulties far more fun than he ever could have had without them. They are suggested here in the pages of THE LITTLE REVIEW, not at all with the idea of discouraging a single traveler from setting out on that splendid road, but rather as a step towards the beginning of that true and long comradeship with effort that is worth befriending which our felicitous English well-wisher hopes may be THE LITTLE REVIEW'S abiding purpose.

"Henceforth I ask not Good Fortune: I, myself, am Good Fortune."

Impression

GEORGE SOULE

Her life was late a new-built house-- Empty, with shining window panes, Where neither sorrow nor carouse Had left red stains.

A passing vagrant, least of men, Entered and used; her hearth-fire shone. She mellowed, he grew restless then-- Left her alone.

Now she is vacant as before, Desolate through the weary whiles; Yet play about the darkened door Shadows of smiles.

Art and Life

GEORGE BURMAN FOSTER

Odium theologicum--it is a deadly thing. But the ridicule and obloquy, formerly characteristic of credal fanaticism, seem to have passed over in recent years into the camp of art connoisseurs. No denying it, it was a Homeric warfare that reverberated up and down the earth from land to land, and from century to century, between what was ever the "old" faith and the "new." In this year of grace, however, it is the disciples of "classic" art--aureoled with the sanctity of some antiquity or idealism--and "modern" art--in whatever nuance or novelty of most disapproved and screaming modernity--who hereticize each other, who even deny each other right of domicile, save, perhaps, in the unvisited solitudes of interstellar spaces. To be sure, those august and frozen solitudes of the everlasting nothing may be conceivably preferable to the theological Inferno, though probably this question has not yet received the attention from critics and philanthropists that its importance would seem to merit.

At the outset it seemed as if the religious warfare had a certain advantage over the esthetic--it agitated more people, and seized men in their idiomatic and innermost interests, while, on the other side, but small and select circles participated in partisan questions and controversies respecting art. But it looks now as if it would soon be the other way around. The people face religious problems with less and less sympathy and understanding. But art, art of some kind and some degree, they are keenly alive as to that, and quick to appraise or to argue. The churches are ever emptier; the theatres, concert halls, museums, "movies," ever fuller. A religious book--short of epoch-making--finds, at best, only a reluctant and panicky publisher; a new play, a new novel, see how many editions it passes through, how hard it is to draw at the libraries, even after the staff and all their friends and sweethearts have courteously had first chance at it!

Now, it is of no use to quarrel with this turn matters have taken. And we miss the mark if we say that it is all bad. Off moments come to the best of us when we grow a bit tired of being "uplifted" and "reformed." Humanity has turned to art and, in doing so, has, on some side of its life, moved forward apace, mounted to higher modes of existence, and, whether the church knows it or not, along the steeps of Parnassus and in the home of the muses has heard some music and caught some glimpses of the not too distant fatherland of the divine and the eternal.

First-rate spirits of light and leading have pointed the way to a new esthetic culture--prophetic spirits who in blackest night when deep sleep had fallen upon most men saw the rosy-fingered dawn of our new day. It was to be a day when beauty should be bidden to lead the dance at the ball of life. There were serious philosophers--there was Kant, who contemplated art as the keystone in the sublime structure which modern knowledge and moral will should be summoned to erect in life. There was Schopenhauer, to whom art was the unveiling of the riddle of the world, the most intimate revelation of the divine mystery of life. There was the hero of Baireuth, who, in his artistic creations, summed up all the spiritual and moral forces of humanity, and made them fruitful for the rebirth and fruition of our modern day.

Among these prophets of a new esthetic culture, Friedrich Nietzsche occupies a quite special place, and influences the course of coming events. As a most enthusiastic apostle of the gospel of a world-redeeming art he first flung his fire-brand into the land, but only to scorn and blaspheme soon thereafter the very gods he had formerly so passionately worshipped; now degrading them to idols. His faith in art, not this art or that, but in all art, in art as such, pathetically wavered. Still the artist in him himself did not die; its eye was undimmed and its bow abode in strength. And though he later confronted every work of art with a malevolent and exasperating interrogation, all this was only his pure and pellucid soul wrestling for better and surer values, for new and nobler revelations, of the artistic genius. Indeed, it was precisely in these interrogations that he was at once our liberator and our leader--our liberator from the frenzy into which the overfoaming enthusiasm as regards art had transported men; our leader to a livelier, loftier beauty summoned to the creation of the humanest, divinest robes for the adornment of humanity as a whole.

The great movement and seething in the artistic life of our age signifies at the same time a turning point in our entire cultural life. This turning point discloses new perspective into vast illimitable distances where new victories are to be achieved by new struggles. The great diremption in our present world, making men sick and weak, calling for relaxation and convalescence, appears at a definite stage as the opposition between life and art. Life is serious, art is gay--so were we taught. Seriousness and gaiety--it was the fatality of our time that these could not be combined. So art and life were torn asunder. Art was no serious matter, no vital matter, satisfying a true and necessary human requirement. Art was a luxury, a sport, and since but few men were in a position to avail themselves of such luxury, art came to be the prerogative of a few rich people. Down at the bottom, in homes of want and misery, life's tragedies were real and fearful; life was real, indeed, life was earnest, indeed; at the top, however, pleasures claimed the senses and thoughts of men; so much so, that even tragedies served but to amuse; tragedies were an illusion of the senses, not realities of life and pain. What God had joined together man had put asunder--and there was art without life, life without art, and both art and life suffering from ailments which neither understood.

There was a time when men worked, too, but it was a beautiful halcyon time, when pleasure and joy throbbed in the very heart of the work itself; when a sunny serenity suffused life's profoundest seriousness. Art pervaded all life, active in all man's activities, present in every nook and corner whither his vagrant feet wandered. Indeed, art was the very life of man, revealing his strength, his freedom, his creativeness, with which he fashioned things after his own image and according to his own likeness. Every craftsman was an artist, every peasant a poet. Man put his soul into all that he said and did, all that he lived; his work was a work of art, his speech a song, his life beauty. No man lived by bread alone; everyone heard and had a word that was the True Bread. His cathedrals--domes of many-colored glass--preached it to him; his actors sang it to him; even his priests were artists. With a sort of divine humor, man thus subjected to himself all the anxiety and need of life.

Then, later, man came to think that he could live by bread alone. Even the True Bread came to be mere bread--public influence; political power. And then man's poor soul hungered. And when he longed for a Living Word that was not mere bread, he was given printer's ink and the "sacred letter" of the Bible. But this--ah, this was no soul's food. So the soul lost its soul. Then, as man had no soul to work with, he had to work with his head, his arms, his feet. Man ceased to be an artist who breathes his living soul into his life, an artist who illumined all the seriousness of life with the sunshine of his living love. Would he art, he could not make it, he had to buy it. Could he not buy it, he had to do without it. Thus, life became as jejune and rational as a Protestant service, where, to be sure, there was no priest more, but also no artist, only scribe and theologian--where religion became dogmatics, faith a sum in arithmetic, Christianity a documentarily deposited judicial process between God and man. To be sure, under certain circumstances, decoration and color, even pomp and magnificence, may be found in this church, but no living connection between the outward appearance of these churches and their inner and peculiar service. Thus, too, our private dwellings have lost living union between their appointments and their inmates. What all are curious to know about these houses is whether the men who dwell in them are rich or poor, not whether they have souls, and what lives in their souls, should they have any.

And because art had no soul of its own more, it became patronizing and mendicant--coquetting for the favors of the rich and powerful, sitting at their tables, perhaps even picking up the crumbs that fall beneath the tables. Art, ah, art sought bread--mere bread--and adopted the sorry principle that to get bread was the sacredest of all duties.

Art without life, life without art! Then came that mighty movement of spirits to bring art and life together again, to reconquer and recreate and reestablish a view of life in which man should learn to see and achieve beauty once yet again. Of that movement, Friedrich Nietzsche was the purest and intensest herald. Bold, fiery spirit, with words that burn, he uttered what had been for a long time a soul-burden of all deeper spirits. This burden of souls was that an art creation should go on in every human life as its highest and holiest calling; that, without the living effectuation of the artistic power of the human soul, all human culture would serve but beastliness and barbarity.

To this end our poet-philosopher returns to the Urgrund, the abyss of nature's life, from whose mysterious deep all tempestuous, wild impulses tumble forth and struggle for form and expression in man. It is life which seeks death in order to renew itself in the painful pleasure of its destruction, perceived but then by man in the thrill of delight which prepares the way for his most original eternal revelation. To breed pleasure from pain; to suck forces of life from the most shocking tragedies; to eavesdrop on the brink of the abysmal so as to fashion sweet phantoms in the divine intoxication of the soul,--this is music, this is art, in this, man struggles beyond and above his whole contradictory nature, transfigures death, creates forms and figures in which he celebrates his self-redemption from seriousness, from the curse of existence. Here, at last, art is no sport, no fiddle-faddle, but at once highest and gayest seriousness. It returns from the service of death which it has performed, to its life, which it receives from "every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." Herein lies the over-powering, the prophetic, in this Nietzschean preaching of art. It tells us that we are very far from comprehending life when we have but measured its length and breadth with yardstick and square; that nature is far different from what scholars have figured it out to be, or from what investigators have seen of it with telescope and microscope. It teaches us to listen to the old eternal murmurs of the spirit, whose sigh we hear indeed, but whence it comes and whither it goes we never know--murmurs and sighs which bring forth the elementary forces, instincts, passions, and friendships in man, which men fashion and shape, regulate and direct indeed, but whose coming and going, whose ebbing and flowing, is not within their power. Inspiration, divine in-breathing--a dead concept as applied by theologians to their Bible--comes into its own again in human nature as a whole, it is the true element in man's life, by virtue of which the soul feels within itself a creative life--its own proof that its dependence is no slave-service, but freedom; that its deepest suffering of pain is itself creative life, creative pleasure.

Is it, now, the tragic fatality of a sick soul, is it the demoniac play of a spirit of negation when precisely the very preacher of this grandiose art-prophecy goes astray in his own preaching, when he finally thrusts it from him, with shrill laughter? The poet-philosopher begins to think concerning his preaching! Art makes the thinker's heart heavy! Art ever speaks a language which thought cannot express. Art strikes chords in the human heart, and there are at once intimations of a Beyond of all thought. And the thinker of today has bidden good-bye to every Beyond of his thought. Nothing unthinkable was to be left for the feelings. So the thinker felt a stab in every art for his thinker's heart, a doubt whether he should hold fast to the incomprehensible or sell himself to the devil of the universally comprehensible. And this doubt becomes an open confession of sin in the Zarathustra poesy: poets--and Zarathustra himself was a poet--lie too much! It is adulterated wine which they set before the thirsty. They muddy all their streams so that they shall appear deep. Into the kingdom of clouds they go, and build their air-castles on all too airy foundations. Thus, Zarathustra, poet, grows weary of their lies; he is a bit tired even of himself. And so, now, this doubt-respecting art slips into the soul of even its most enthusiastic prophets--nor are they the worst artists at whose souls these doubts gnaw! To create a beautiful culture in which man shall receive a higher revelation of life, and mount to a higher stage of his development, to this, art which receives its consecration in dizziness and dream, is not yet called. In fact, these artists do lie too much! They seek life indeed, they hunger for life; but, because life is too living to them, too natural, they create an artificial glow in whose heat they think they first have life. Thus, the second deception becomes worse than the first. The devil of matter-of-fact prose is driven out by the beelzebub of over-stimulated nerves, and men flee from the monotony of every-day life to the refinement of sensibility, which art shall superinduce. Poets do lie too much, not because they tell us fairy tales--fairy tales could be the beautifulest, holiest truths! But because they simulate feelings they do not have--feelings which arise in them not naturally but narcotically! Sculptors, painters, do lie too much, not because they create forms and colors which no man's eyes have ever seen, but because they create their own selves unfaithfully--an alien life which they have somewhere inoculated themselves with and given out as their own. Even architects lie too much, because they compel their works to speak a foreign language, as if stone should be ashamed to speak as stone, wood as wood, iron as iron!

The Nietzschean doubt respecting art--today this has become a demand for truth in art and for truthfulness in the artist! And from these a third--the demand for simplicity! And all this is of a piece with the purpose to live a simple life.