Book Discussion
Modern Painting, by Willard Huntington Wright. New York: John Lane Company.
Itis a hard book. None of Clive Bell’s sunny cynicism, none of Kandinsky’s colorful musicalness; surely nothing in common with the watery ecstacies of our official Chicago modernist, Arthur Jerome Eddy. While reading the voluminous book I experienced an uneasy, an uncertain feeling in regard to the author: to hate him, or just to dislike him? Let me confess that when I turned over the last page I lowered my head in respect for a brilliant enemy.
It is a hard book, brothers-dilettanti. It gives us a merciless thrashing, we who love without being able to state why and wherefore. We are ordered to go to school, children, to study chemistry and color, to approach a work of art as scientifically equipped as a surgeon venturing to operate on a human body. As a reward we are promised the bliss of unadulterated aesthetic emotion. Ah, that aesthetic emotion! For a time we believed that it was possible to grasp that slippery “blue bird” by following Clive Bell’s maxim on the significance of form. Alas, this theory is obsolete. Color itself should become form, proclaims Mr. Wright, and he quotes the manifesto of his beloved Synchromists: “In our painting color becomes the generating function. Painting being the art of color, any quality of a picture not expressed by color is not painting!”
With a sigh of relief we reach the chapter on Synchromism. All art up to the year 1912 has been nothing but preliminary experimentation. In Rubens were consummated the aims of the old painters (beginning with the fifteenth century; the Primitives are dismissed as not deserving consideration)—organization and composition. The new cycle opens in the nineteenth century with Turner, Constable, and Delacroix, who experiment in naturalism. Manet introduces thematic freedom—not more. The Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists close the second, naturalistic, cycle, having enriched art with laborious investigations into the secrets of color in relation to light. All these have been but precursors forging weapons for the third andlast(!) cycle—the final purification of painting. Synchromism, of course. Of this last cycle Cezanne was—hear, Messieurs andMesdames Questioners—the primitive! Still Cezanne and Matisse and Picasso ignored color as a generator of form, until two Americans, MacDonald-Wright and Russell, rent asunder the ultimate veil from purity and truth, and the new and final deity emanated from their canvasses, the unsurpassable Synchromism.
There is so much truth in Mr. Wright’s statements, particularly in his negative statements, that we may disregard his fanatic credo. Who will deny that painting has been “a bastard art—an agglomeration of literature, religion, photography, and decoration”? Who will not approve of the efforts of modern painters to eliminate all extraneous considerations and make painting as pure an art as music? But why dogmatize again and anew? Why reduce creative art to scientific formulae, to mathematical calculations, to Procrustean standards? Why ridicule those who paintcomme l’oiseau chante? Why belittle Kandinsky for his too-subjective symphonies? Why be so hard, Mr. Wright, so finite, so sententious, so encyclical? Why not have a little sense of humor, pray?
My Childhood, by Maxim Gorky. New York: The Century Company.
That Gorky is deteriorating has become a truism. Exaggerated as the importance of his early works has been, one could not deny their freshness, elementary adroitness, soulfulness. But the god-fire was soon exhausted in the none-too-deep spirit of the tramp-poet. He gave us the few good songs he knew about the life of the has-beens, and then went hoarse. The public, Hauptmann’s Huhn, is not irresponsible for Gorky’s false notes. Compel the canary to imitate the nightingale and the poor bird will lose her short, simple, pretty twitter, and rend her little heart with shrill ejaculations. I have in mind Gorky’s later dramas and stories.
The book before me makes me think that Gorky has come to recognize his fallacy in attempting to treat subjects alien to his inherent capacity. At any rate in this case he is free from pretentiousness. His childhood memories are related simply, realistically, sans philosophizing, sans allegorizing. It is left for the reader to deduce the “moral” from the sordid panorama that is revealed before him, that malodorous dunghill swarming with human beings, whose crawling and writhing is called life. The book should have been much shorter; the super-abundance of details makes it Dreiserian or Bennetian.
And here I should like to touch upon a sore which reviewers customarily do not discuss, for fear ofmauvais ton. Why are the English translations so careless and comical? The book in question is full of such glaring errors, such nonsensical misunderstandings, such atrocious ignorance, that it has made me pull my hair in despair of solving the dilemma whether I should laugh at the comicalness or whether I should rage at the impertinence. I am quite sure that the translator (his name is not revealed) knows as much Russian as Percy Pinkerton, the crucifier of Artzibashev; he mutilated Gorky from a German translation, I suspect. The book has another jolly feature—illustrations. They are reproductions from popular Russian paintings, with inscriptions that are supposed to illustrate the text. The naive forgery is too crude and unskilful to mislead even the unsuspecting reader. Will the publishers ever acquire respect for the printed word?
The Greatest of Literary Problems, by James Phinney Baxter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Have you the sense of humor to guess which is the Problem? Shakespeare or Bacon! About seven hundred gigantic pages on this vital question, with illustrations and data. Are you curious to know who wins? I shall not tell. Why should the reader be spared the reviewer’s agony in wading through the bewildering labyrinth of speculations and arguments till he reaches ... the same point that he started from. Bon voyage!
Tales from Old Japanese Dramas, by Asataro Miyamori. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
Some Musicians of Former Days, by Romain Rolland. New York: Henry Holland Company.
These books, like the preceding one, are intended to be instructive; they attain their purpose, however, thanks to gracefulness of style and fascination of subject. Mr. Miyamori has condensed the plots of the most famousjoruri—the epical dramas of the Yeddo period, which are to this day chanted in Japanese theatres. It is an exotic atmosphere of oriental fairyland, tapestries of childlike love and naive passion, of smiling bloody tragedies and blissful harakiris. When lovers are prevented from beingmarried they do not employ the cumbersome process of elopment, but transport themselves into the other world by committingshinjuor double suicide. The author tells us that Metizahormach shinju dramas have had such powerful influence on the audiences that there have been numerous instances of lovers performing that delicious suicide after leaving the theatre. I fear that for the occidental reader the dramas will not prove as convincing—alas.
AfterMusicians of To-Daythe last book of Rolland has little appeal. Journalistic notes, interesting information, brilliant suggestions—and we look in vain for the profound spirit of the old Romain.
Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1915, by William Stanley Braithwaite. New York: Gomme and Marshall.
Mr. Braithwaite has chosen the guests for his house party with kindly catholicity. Amy Lowell, John Gould Fletcher, and H. D. sit uncomfortably in his New England parlor eyeing one another furtively. Clement Wood clowns in a corner. Vachel Lindsay before the mantel-piece declaims to James Oppenheim and Louis Untermeyer, who listen with an air of importance. Edgar Lee Masters sits on thecorpus jurisand meditates upon the beauties of silence. Sara Teasedale dances in the hallway. Harriet Monroe reclines on a porch chair, listening to the rain. A crowd in the library recreate themselves by reading from a set of British Poets. Percy MacKaye gloomily reads the war news to a group in the dining-room, while little Arvia, his daughter, lisps happily to herself. And alone in the kitchen is Robert Frost roasting chestnuts.
Who will say that Mr. Braithwaite could have better performed the duties of host? Did he omit any of the “older established names”? And did he not make a special Cook’s tour to far off islands (not shown in the atlas of theBoston Transcriptoffice) for the purpose of bringing home with him certain “new discoveries”?
Mr. Braithwaite pats his guests admiringly upon the back and regrets that there are other excellent poets for whom he has no accommodations. Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Maxwell Bodenheim, perhaps he will invite you next time. Is it not a pleasant anticipation?
The Later Life, by Louis Couperus. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company.
This is the second part of the tetralogy of “Small Souls” which began to appear in English last year. The slowly-developing epic is pregnant with promises, but, oh how slowly the skein unrolls. We are still in the midst of Dutch bourgeoisie, dull, stony-faced, petty, filthy; again the incessant rain, ever-cloudy skies, bicycle rides, large dinner-parties at Mama’s. Small souls. Last year I asked the question whether in depicting Dutch life Couperus could not find a single big soul, one interesting individual. This second book gives us pale glimmers of potentialities, very pale indeed. The big man is big only relatively; he has been in America, worked in factories, and is now ... lecturing on peace.
The book introduces a feature that may interest the sexologist: frequent passionate love among near kinsmen. Two sisters are in love with their brothers. A romance between uncle and niece. The heroes and heroines are awakened to love for the most part at the dangerous age of forty. I recall that Przybyszewski presents in two of his works love between brother and sister. Shall we say that ideal sex-relationship requires the closest kinship of body and spirit? In the Pole’s lovers the force driving them together is the harmonious coincidence of two morbidly developed intellects with a common craving for beauty and fullness. In Couperus we face mutual yearning of small, pale, empty souls. But I am not interested in sex-problems, not yet.
K.
Violette of Pere Lachaise, by Anna Strunsky Walling. New York: Frederic A. Stokes.
A gigantic background—the eternal graves and trees and monuments of the old Paris cemetery. The rest is fudge. A mouse born out of the bowels of a mountain. Nauseating feminine sentimentalism. Boring talk, talk, talk.
K.
The reviewer above is absolutely mistaken about Mrs. Walling’s book, I believe. It is the story of one of those human beings—rare people—who live inner lives of extraordinary intensity. It is radiantly absorbing, to me.
M. C. A.