Part 2

I am bringing no personal accusation against the factory owner or the publishers of factory-made literature. They are business men and if I were a business man I would try to be a good one. I would try to make money. And anyway the individual factory owner or the individual owner or owners of a magazine with a circulation of hundreds of thousands has no more to do with the matter than have you and I. They also are caught in a trap. Present day conditions are but the natural result of our living in an industrial age. Until the impulse for vast production of second-rate goods and the tendency to be satisfied with second-rate art wears itself out or people grow tired of it things will go on just as they are.

Back of it all, of course, lies the silly notion that people can get happiness out of success, out of making money, the silly notion that any man can be happy doing poor or sloppy work no matter how much temporary success or praise he may win.

You must bear in mind that the mass of people here in America are pretty much what the mass of people have always been in every other country in every age, that is to say, rather lazy-minded, pretty immature. We are given to childish pretense, to pretending to be the thing we secretly admire rather than to go to all the trouble of being it. We accept what is given us. For most of us, I suspect, bad hurried cheap work doesn’t matter too much. It is the craftsman really who suffers.

Now if you will consider with me what I have just said and will bear in mind that the manufacturer of stories for popular magazines has nothing at all to do with writing, and if you will also bear in mind that the writer is but the workman whose materials are human lives you will get at what I am trying to say and will understand the attitude toward his work that the so-called Modern is trying to take.

The individual impulse in men to do good work goes on. Men are arising everywhere who are trying to be true to the very complex materials they have to try to handle. In spite of standardization the individual impulses of men as workmen cannot quite be put down.

As I have gone about in the streets of American towns and cities I have noticed that even the Ford cannot escape the workman impulse. Boys buy second hand Fords and rebuild them into ‘Bugs’ and these ‘Bugs’ are often enough light, graceful and fine. Ugly lines have been cut away. Something altogether lacking in grace has been made graceful and it would be worth while if people could come to understand that the boy who does that is a craftsman following a craftsman’s impulse and is more important to the community than a dozen manufacturers of cheap novels, little tame verses or cheap magazine stories. He is meeting the aesthetic needs of his nature with the materials at hand, and a Cezanne, a Matisse, a Turgenieff or a Shakespeare could do no more than that. The artist is after all but the craftsman working more intensively in more complex and delicate materials.

The artist who works in stone, in color, sounds, words, building materials, and often in steel, as in the designing of bodies for some of the finer automobiles, is but the craftsman working in materials that are often elusive and difficult to handle and bringing into his work not only the skill of the craftsman but also the attempt at an expression of some need of his own inner being. That is the whole story.

The Modern Movement, then, seen from this point of view, is in reality an attempt on the part of the workman to get back into his own hands some control over the tools and materials of his craft. In certain fields it is very difficult. In the theatre, for example, the artist, to work at all, has to have an expensive equipment. There is needed a large investment and money doesn’t like to take chances. It is much safer when the theater wants to be artistic to run into Belasco realism, bring a Child’s restaurant onto the stage or have a real automobile cross the stage at thirty miles an hour--something of that sort, some stunt, is safer when large sums of money have to be spent.

However, the workman in words or in color has a better chance. If, for example, I can make my living by going somewhere and delivering a dull sermon, something like this, to a lot of good-natured patient people, or by working six months of the year in an advertising agency writing soap advertisements, I can perhaps save enough money to write disregarding the magazines for another six months. I know one very good modern painter who becomes a house painter when he is broke, and one of America’s finest poets works as a reporter on a newspaper. In America, just now, it is not too hard for a man to make a living, particularly if he is discreet enough not to have children.

And then things are slowly getting better. In his “_Life on the Mississippi_” Mark Twain said something to the effect that the writer in the end always wrote what the public and the editors wanted. “We often write what we think and feel but in the end we scratch all out and give them what they want,” he said. I am not quoting exactly. You will find it in the book. The fact is that it was pretty much true in Twain’s day and isn’t quite so true now.

That the workman is a better and truer man when he is given control of the tools and materials of his craft is being found out. There is a small public growing up that has discrimination enough to want good work. Honest books begin to sell a little. Honest painting that isn’t just pretty picture making begins to sell. Puritanism, as such, is pretty well licked. It cannot any longer so easily suppress books of artistic merit because some housewife is afraid the morals of her daughter, who has just come home from the movies or the Follies, will be ruined by being told how babies happen to be born. The force of the New England moralistic culture is spent. Today in America any man of talent who writes a book that is significant, a work of art, can get it published and there will be critics to acclaim him. The real pioneering for the better workmen has been done by men like Whitman and Dreiser for the writers, and others like Stieglitz, Marin and the critics Rosenfeld, Cheney and others for the painters.

If you want to do good work and can pick up a living in some way there will be people to recognize what you are trying to do and perhaps no man has a right to ask more than that. There are ways to get moments of happiness out of life other than by making money and being successful and the men who grind out second-rate flashy stories for the magazines have their bad moments. They are not really happy men. It is no fun, believe me, to wake up in the middle of the night and to realize that you have sold out your own craft.

For it is as true as there is a sun in the sky that men cannot live in the end without love of craft. It is to the man what love of children is to the woman. When you are considering what it is that makes the younger generation so restless, what makes the workers on your buildings and in your factories such indifferent workmen, what makes so much of contemporary art cheap and transitory, consider also what the industrial age has tended to do to this old love of craft so deeply rooted in men.

It is a dangerous process. Soil the workman’s tools and materials long enough and he may turn and kill you. You are striking at the very root of the man’s being.

However, I do not want to be sensational. In spite of the growth of standardization there are for me many hopeful signs. Men are becoming increasingly conscious of what is being done to them. The very man who lends his talents to cheapness is unconvinced. He will come to you in private with an apology. “I have to live,” he will say. “I have a wife and children. I am only doing cheap work for the time being. When I have made a little money I intend to do some honest, decent work.”

In reality I think many men of talent might be saved for the doing of good work in the arts if the whole situation could be clearly stated. Too often the younger man or woman who has talent does not get the situation in hand until he is too old to save himself. We have all been brought up with the notion, firmly planted in us, that to succeed in a material sense is the highest end for a life. Our fathers tell us that. Often our mothers tell us so. Schools and universities often enough teach the same lesson. We hear it on all sides and when we are young and uncertain our very youthful humbleness often enough betrays us. Are we to set ourselves up against the opinions of our elders? How are we to know that truth to ourselves, to the work of our own hands, to our own inner impulses, is the most vital thing in life? It has become almost a truism here in America that no man does good work in the arts until he is past forty. Nearly all the so called Moderns, the younger men, so called, are already gray. It takes a long time for most men to get ground under their feet, to find out a little their own truth in life.

The effort to find out the truth is what is called the Modern Movement. It is growing. Do not have any doubt about that.

Let me state the matter again. It cannot be stated too often. The writer, the painter, the musician, the practitioner of any of the arts who wants to do real work and honest work has got to put money making aside. He has got to forget it. There is but one way in which the young man or woman of talent can defeat the corrupting influence of the present day magazines and most of the book publishers and that is by forgetting their existence and giving all his attention to his work. And again let me say that when I speak of corrupting influence I am not speaking of the men who run these institutions as corrupt individuals. I am speaking only in the workman’s sense. I am speaking only of the workman in relation to his tools and materials.

Consider for a moment the materials of the prose writer, the teller of tales. His materials are human lives. To him these figures of his fancy, these people who live in his fancy should be as real as living people. He should be no more ready to sell them out than he would sell out his men friends or the woman he loves. To take the lives of these people and bend or twist them to suit the needs of some cleverly thought out plot to give your readers a false emotion is as mean and ignoble as to sell out living men or women. For the writer there is no escape, as there is no real escape for any craftsman. If you handle your materials in a cheap way you become cheap. The need of making a living may serve you as an excuse but it will not save you as a craftsman. Nothing really will save you if you go cheap with tools and materials. Do cheap work and you are yourself cheap. That is the truth.

To speak again of the way out for the Moderns--for the young man or the young woman who wishes to do work for which he need not, in the end and when the temporary acclaim that so often follows cheap and flashy work has passed, be ashamed, well, there is one. In America it is not too difficult to make a living. Mr. Henry Mencken says that in America any man not a complete fool cannot help make a living, and there is some truth in what he says. If you have no money and no one will give you any, make your living in some other way and keep the real side of yourself for the honest work you want to do in your own craft. There are worse fates than being poor. If you have talent do not sell out your birthright. My own belief is that there never was a people in the world more anxious for men of talent to stay on the track and be true to the crafts than we Americans. We all know something is wrong with the flood of cheap work we are always getting. The literary clubs and the various kinds of culture clubs that spring up everywhere are perhaps rather silly in some of their gropings but they mean something. Often enough the man who spends all of his own life absorbed in money making would really like his wife and children to have something else as an end in life. I suspect that is the real reason there are so many young men and women in colleges who have no real interest in scholarship. They want something and their parents want something for them. Is it any wonder they do not know what they want?

At bottom Americans are kind. They are good natured. So anxious are we as a people for men of talent that it takes but the merest show of talent to get recognition among us. Why, any man or woman who wants to be respected has but to set himself up as a poet. He does not need to write poetry. Let him write a few verses. We will all invite him to dine with us, we will put up with his idiosyncracies and small vanities, we will nurse and feed him like a very babe.

And if he is a musician or a young painter we will, as likely as not, shell out our money and send him off to Paris to become as commonplace and unreal and successful as an artist as the very people we have been talking about here today.

But my preaching on this subject had better come to an end. It is a subject on which books might be written. When your young man or woman has made the sacrifices for the sake of a craft that I have spoken of as necessary--and they are not really sacrifices at all--the struggle has but begun. There remains the question of talent and if you have talent that doesn’t settle the matter.

There is no agreement among artists as to the ends they are seeking, no absolute standards. “A. E.”, the famous Irish publicist, painter and poet once said that a literary movement consisted of several men of talent living at the same time and cordially hating each other.

That is the truth and yet it is not quite true. What it really means is that when men are devoted to their work there will still remain a wide difference of opinion as to methods, treatments of the subject, the baffling question of form achieved or not achieved--the question of when a craftsman’s work becomes also a work of art. These are old questions about which all craftsmen have always struggled among themselves. It is all a queer and fascinating game just as life itself is queer and fascinating.

The real reward I fancy lies just in the work itself, nowhere else. If you cannot get it there, you will not get it at all.

And speaking for my craft I can say that it is tremendously worth while. You are undertaking a task that can never be finished. You are starting on a road that has no end. The longest life will be too short to ever really get you anywhere near what you want. And that I should say is the best part of the story.

_One thousand copies of this book have been printed for The Lantern Press, San Francisco, (Gelber, Lilienthal, Inc.) by Edwin & Robert Grabhorn. Nine hundred & fifty copies are on B. R. Book Paper, numbered from 51 to 1000, and fifty on Japan Vellum, numbered from 1 to 50._

_This is copy number_ 185

* * * * * Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:

ever do as as=> ever do as {pg 23}

worked in the the=> worked in the {pg 26}

no absollute standards=> no absolute standards {pg 43}