Chapter III: Ideas (4)

The reason for this is not far to seek. While man’s fate was still linked with gods or with godlike values, the arts could honorably serve. When that fate was mechanized into some economic or utilitarian or biological “design,” art rebelled and set up a church of its own. The dogma of “pure poetry” and of “art for art’s sake” is a reaction from the dogma of vulgar materialism and of “man for his belly’s sake.” Being a reaction, it partakes of the nature of the source whence, however obscurely, it has risen.

The doctrine of utilitarianism had two esthetic offspring. One is obvious: it is the art which in devious ways aims to “get results” in actual life. The debased condition of such art is coming to be suspected even by the bourgeoisie. The other offspring is the art of the Ivory Tower—the art of “esthetics”—the art of “purposelessness” and of aloofness. And I wish to make clear that these two are radically one. However they may differ in the intelligence that makes them, they are both utilitarian: they are both debased from art’s full function.

The philosophy of utilitarian materialism defined life in terms of the pursuit of specific material values. (I speak of it in the past, for it still lingers only in the minds of tyros.) It committed the fallacy of taking some “end” or process _within_ life—economic or sexual, personal or biological—and setting it up as the Cause. Like all geneticisms, it was illogical and was, indeed, refuted in the texts of the very philosophers whose shallow disciples had invented it. Now, the same point may, of course, be raised against the nugatory notion of “utilitarian art.” Whereas art in its full sense is an organic event of life, sensorily formed, autonomous and yet contingent, like any individual, on its living context, utilitarian art disavows this individual organism of art, and aims to reduce art’s essence to some specific effect within the world of men.

Examples of this class of instrumental or utilitarian art are everywhere about us. Such is the “art” of advertisement, of exhortation: such is the play “with a thesis,” the fiction of reformers like Upton Sinclair or H. G. Wells. Such, too, are the industrial “arts” whose purpose is to turn out _salable_ machines, rather than _livable_ ones, as was the purpose of the ancient craftsmen who worked for an intimate, spiritually harmonious client. The arts of the popular magazines are no less utilitarian. A story which strives simply to amuse is kin to the story which endeavors to reform. The novel that “cleaned up” the Chicago Packingtown may have been more laudable, it was not more utilitarian than the tale that aims merely at killing a few hours’ boredom. In both instances, you have that organic life process called art narrowed and debased to meet some specific sensory demand. Whether the demand be for clean meat or a vicarious amour, esthetically your books are of one class.

And as “utilitarian art” must be grouped—and condemned also—the current works of the esthetes. Mr. Cabell’s fancies may be more refined than Mr. Sinclair’s: they are as remote from the whole province of art which can “help” in life by no less fact than that it _is_ life. Mr. Cabell, engineering an escape from life, is not in the lineage of the masters: he is an epigone of the materialists who lowered the whole life process into a “struggle” for comfort or for survival. I see no essential esthetic difference between the schools of Mr. Cabell and Mr. Aldous Huxley, and that of Pollyanna. In the latter case, you get sugar instead of a whole experience of life; in the former, you get some acrid opiate. If this is in any way the revelation of a superior taste, then the jaded adult who adores rotted cheese is superior in taste to the child who calls for candy.

The organism of art is, of course, constructed of physical materials with sensory and ideological associations, even as is the individual life made up of physical substances. In life, these materials—chemical, mineral, vegetable—are mysteriously organized into the unitary, indivisible _living organism_. And in true art, the same holds. The sensory appeals—to eye, ear, appetite, memory, emotion—are the materials which the artist has composed into the organic whole called art: which differs from its elements, even as life from its ingredients. A utilitarian philosophy of life might be called one in which some group of these materials in life is made more causative than the whole. A utilitarian art, by analogue, is one in which the main matter (instead of the means) is some appeal to the senses.

Purposely, my definition lumps with the commercial, the pornographic, the dully sensational artists, a whole school of haughty favorites: for instance, Virginia Woolf. Analyze “Jacob’s Room,” and what do you discover? A sensitive woman (the authoress) with deft hands picks to pieces the banal story of an English boy. Upon her nerves, its fragments register sensations. She is not, like James Joyce or D. H. Lawrence, composing these sensations into organic life. _They_ are her end and she is using them for a personal sensory delectation which her reader may share. She is not creating at all: she is transposing.

You may apply, for yourself, the same criterion to our music or our painting. Is the composer building the sensory ingredients of his music into an organic life which transcends bare sense, as life transcends inorganic matter? or is he _using_ his theme—transposing it perhaps from a well-known tonal to a striking dissonance—in order to get a sensory appeal? If this is his end, even though his name be thrice Russian, he is as completely a utilitarian artist as the man who writes a Buick advertisement.

_1927_

5. ART IN OUR JUNGLE

When you have done with the latest work on relativity or the theory of quanta, and the once so solid universe has melted into a mere congeries of spaceless, timeless, substanceless vibrations, go to some modern art gallery and bask in the certainties of our painters. For the best of these are men who hold to a reality or are resolved to re-establish it.

From Picasso to Weber, from Marin to Orozco, it is amazing how harmonious most of these painters and sculptors are, in their formal purpose, even in their formal use of color. They are builders of _structure_. Not of architectures or machines: not even, for the most part, of such designs as the fugue or the canon. The structure which they seek to produce is the answer to the chaos which they find about them. It is as if they were plunging through a liquidated world; and as they fall they build—in order to cease falling.

The best of them are workers in a crisis. Confusion of fundamentals is our atmosphere. Emergency in danger is their temper. Their response to the carpers who expect them to be pretty and pleasant is: “We need ground to stand on!” Would you criticize the manners of the man who rescued you at sea? or judge by metropolitan standard the costume of the fireman who led you from a blazing building? If not—and only then—are you in the proper mood to appreciate the contemporary artist.

Let us hope that the modern gallery director has interspersed a number of pretty or “academic” paintings among the works of the creators and of the seekers of form. They establish a curious dissonance. Who shall quarrel with dainty ladies flimsily attired and dancing to a rose? or with excellent gentlemen silk-hatted and promenading with a spaniel? But what if you find them at their peaceful antics on the walls of an embattled city? In some such way are men like Charles W. Hawthorne, Childe Hassam, Henri Martin, most of the British, out of place in a serious exhibition.

The capacity of any generation for misunderstanding its art is not mysterious: it is equal to, for it is the same thing as, each man’s capacity for ignoring the essence of his soul. How long is it, since you last heard the usual Wise Word about the whole esthetic movement since Cézanne? “Oh, ho—a Saturnalia of decay! These wistful little artists, so out of touch with the great world; reflecting their defeat, their impotence, their despair. These inadequate anarchists glorifying their own chaos! How lucky it is that we have Solid Science!” Well, your too-solid scientific world has melted. Gone is the atom, gone is ether, gone is the whole Mechanism in which, from Aristotle to Newton, man dwelt irrelevant and complacent. The conclusions of our physicists hurl us back, through three thousand years of certainties, to the “vagary” of the Upanishad: our universe is but the Breath of Brahma.

Relation, Vibration, entity of Movement, conformity of impalpable motions into a dream called substance—these are the lean relics of our centuries of science. And these are the precise materials with which the contemporary artist is creating truth and beauty!

The age which produces Picasso, Maillol, Brancusi, Derain, Braque, Marin, Juan Gris, Rivera, Orozco, is not alone an age of art: it is an age of classical and of religious creation. Only the labelmakers, the “wordmen” are lacking, in order that we may know it. These artists are, if anything, too somberly intent upon their basic purpose. Were the saints more pure to their ideal? Man Ray extracts the essential line of jazz, and has no time for dancing. Picasso establishes the formal counterpoint in a woman’s body, and has no eye for the woman. Brancusi’s Bird is the bird at its height: a sort of hero-bird which neither mates, sleeps nor builds its nest—a bird, a bird which soars, which is sheer soaring. One and all, these men make a demand on nature as heroic as their own temper of salvation. One and all, they seem to say: “You, bird; you, woman; you, farm; you, landscape—you are doomed: all of our glamorous dream of earth, sky, men is doomed. Unless you are transfigured—unless you will permit that our spirit of the god burn you pure of your phenomenal dross—of your associations of sentiment, of hierarchy—unless you go to your allotted place as parts of an essential Whole, you are doomed. For we assure you, O bodies and sights of nature—you do not exist save in that Whole. The old men who sought to build up their Whole, by adding you together one by one, as you appeared to yourselves, were wrong. You’ve crumbled and disappeared. The very atoms of your bodies—the very words of your consciousness, have vanished. All that remains is God. If we can reinterpret our tragic memory of you—O bodies and colors of existence—in terms of God, perhaps we can bring you back to life.”

Of course, I am saying this in words: the painters are creating this in paint. Spaniards, Frenchmen, Rumanians, Americans, Orientals, all are tending toward a single declaration. And it would be a shallow error to believe that this symphonic kinship is due simply to the influence of the schools or of certain men in Paris. Paris for fifty years has been the focus of so much modern art, because men from all the world _were looking in one direction_. Paris is not an influence, it is a confluence. The reason why Cézanne rediscovered El Greco, and why French Colonials brought African sculpture to their metropolis, is aside my point. The significant is that the arabesque or body-language of Picasso, the plastic lyres of Maillol and Brancusi, the mosaics of Braque and of Marin, the rituals of O’Keeffe, the revelations of Julia Codesido and Sonia Brown, the mass equations of Derain and Walt Kuhn, and the instinct rhapsodies of Walkowitz and Epstein, are so many personalized departures from a common experience and toward a common purpose.

The common experience is that the old static formulas and bodies wherein Western civilization dwelt are gone; that only relations and the movements of relations are real and are immortal. The common purpose is, to produce from these immediate experiences of relation new bodies (unities) and new forms (faiths and ideas) wherein mankind may dwell and thrive again. And the achievement is already of sufficient stature to presage a modern classic art.

_1926_

6. THE ARTIST IN OUR JUNGLE

Gilbert Seldes has revived what might be called the classic debate of American culture: Should an American artist stay at home? Mr. Seldes holds that the artist is at home wherever he chooses to settle. And he cites instances in favor of his contention. He is indirectly seconding Edmund Wilson who reproached Van Wyck Brooks for writing an admirable book about Henry James without more than a word about the novelist. Mr. Brooks, of course, was writing about Henry James the exile; and employed him as a symbol in his own thesis which is contrary to that of Mr. Seldes. It seems to me that the considerations and examples presented by both sides have suffered, because they were neither specific nor general enough. Perhaps the exiles of Joyce, Stravinsky, Picasso, were successful; perhaps the pilgrimage of Henry James meant failure. If a law or a rule is to be sketched from these instances, the elements that enter into them should be essentially understood. One might study the basic idiom of the arabesque which Picasso brought with him from Málaga, or the basic folk voice with which Stravinsky came away from Russia; and plot the intellectual transfiguration of these primary materials by the schools of Paris. Or one might attempt to correlate the chaste designs which Henry James desired to produce, and the American chaos from which he escaped in order to produce them. One might at the end decide that James was a shrewd tactician, saving his art by retreat; or that Picasso was a brilliant culturist, enhancing his art by transplantation. Yet the general and haunting problem of the artist in America, which unconsciously inspires all these arguments, would be as untouched as ever.

This problem of the artist is, after all, not unrelated to the question of his materials. In some manner, the successful creator organizes a fusion between what we call his will, his vision or his experience, on the one hand, and what we call life, on the other. Both the creative will and the workable objective material must exist, else there will be no art. Now with this simple idea to illumine us, let us venture into the specific dilemma of the American artist and the American world.

The first thought to occur is that this material of ours is still inchoate; it has not been digested by the conceptual activity of previous generations of American artists and thinkers; and in this it is abysmally apart from the native material of the European. The arabesque, for instance, has been an essential form in Andalusian life for so many ages that Picasso must have absorbed it as instinctively as he did his language. Ages of cultural selection have simplified the expressional background of European peoples; these simplifications beget traits and provide tools for the European artist which he can take with him: moreover, the relation between these concepts in different European countries is so close that deeply a European artist remains at home, wherever he is, in Europe.

A concept is an essence; and it can be transported. Or, to shift the figure, if one belongs to a world which has culturally refined its gold, one can leave that world yet take the gold along. But if one has had the fortune—good or ill—to be born upon the scarce-scratched surface of an unmined treasure, and if one indeed wants that treasure for his own—then, it is necessary to get down and dig.

This, it seems to me, is the very human crux of our classic problem: Should an American artist stay at home? The answer may be left to him. He will seek the material fitted for his creative will. To the peculiar will of Henry James, of Whistler, of Ezra Pound, it seems clear that the right material was best available abroad. The point of vision of these artists was static; they required a fixed focus wherefrom to trace in leisured sureness the Apollonian intricacies of their designs.

The creator who yearns to weave ever more intricate glosses upon a given fundamental statement of life is fortunate if he is born across the water. France, for instance, will provide him with a completely conceptualized experience which he can build on and variate forever. And if such a man is born in America and yet feels drawn to the, after all, not too-distant cultures of Europe, it is idle to begrudge his departure.

But there is another kind of artist: he who rejects the fixed limits of any established cultural status, and whose will it is to forge the parabolas of chaos into unitary form. This creator might broadly be termed the religious artist, in so far as his purpose is to bind together what appears confusion, and to make whole what strikes the sense as multiform and diverse.

If an artist of this kind is born in America, he is fortunate indeed. For he inherits a world particularly apt for his purpose. The _life_ of America is a stupendous symbol of the human chaos which such an artist beholds in all life ere the transfiguring magic of his unitary vision has been worked upon it. And yet the implicit _idea_ of America is symbolic of just such a unitary will. America, in other words, is a multiverse craving to become One; it both challenges and invites the purpose of the religious artist.

This American will to be One is manifest in every noble chapter of our history. More encouraging still, it is the very theme of our follies, the essence of our most ignoble social acts. It is the ideology shallowly applied, of our bar on immigration. It is the unconscious factor in our sumptuary laws, in our pathetic efforts to legislate uniformity of morals. We are not One; and we desire to be One. The whole American scene is, hence, a symbol on a human plane of the sort of activity which takes place in the mind of the religious artist. It provides him with the challenging material; it energizes him toward creation.

The Middle Ages in central Western Europe established a similar apt symbol for the religious artist. Europe was a turbulent chaos in material and fact. Yet it possessed in the ideal Body of the Catholic Church a unitary will. It was this marvelous conjunction of material and will in the objective world, with material experience and will within the artist, that made possible the success of Dante, of Aquinas, of the Gothic architects, of the polyphonists—a success not equaled in the modern European epochs, whose art has been for the most a wistful echo or a frustrate fragmentation of that last great Synthesis.

The American artist whose will is to join in the tristful litany over the dissolving body of European culture does well, like T. S. Eliot, to live abroad. The American artist who feels within himself the power to add to the intricate glosses of that culture does well, like Ezra Pound or Henry James, to live abroad. But the artist who is tempted to the task of forging new organic life from chaos may bless his stars if America is his home. For in all the world there is no symbol of this chaos so potent and so pregnant as our American jungle.

Moreover, the failure of artists of this high aim heretofore in our land need dishearten no one. It is true that the athletic will of Poe was not supported by a consonant strength of nerves. It is true that Melville broke down. It is true perhaps that Whitman sounded little more than a summons. But failures of a kind so heroic—and all within a century—will, we may be sure, discourage only those whose intimate desire it is, for their own comfort’s sake, to be discouraged.

_1925_

7. THE MACHINE AND METAPHYSICS

At first thought there seems an insoluble difference between the machine and the tool. The tool is passive in the hand of the workman, and by that fact comes to express his will both intimately and directly. The tool is, indeed, an extension of the hand. The crude laborer has a crude tool and does crude work. The subtle craftsman becomes an artisan, an artist: the tool holds close to his nature and works his will in ways so immediate that the instinctive love attaching limb to mind goes over, consciously, into the brush, the knife, the hammer.

With the machine, this alchemy inspiriting a thing of wood or stone is gone. The machine is set in motion and achieves therewith a somewhat autonomous life. Moreover, the nature of this life does not depend upon the man who works it. Its qualities and its powers are fashioned for it and are inevitably determined, at a source to which the machinist has no access. An inventor, abstracted from his products, designs their future acts. The machines go forth. And the mechanic by a series of rote behavior sets them going, runs them, stops them without for an instant coming into creative contact with the thing by which he lives. A crude man may work at a delicate machine: a blind or illiterate man may print a book: a man with no sense of texture or design may run a machine which manufactures lace or turns out decorations. And conversely, the delicate man—the creative man—can find no immediate channel for his will in running a machine. Whatever creativeness or delicacy it possesses has been ordained for it and is aloof. He cannot swerve it from its stubborn independence. All he can do is care for it. Attendant, doctor, nurse—however you look at it, he is the slave of a creation which in its act and its idea remains beyond him.

Now all this is clear enough and from it philosophers deduce our woes, rightly—and wrongly our despair. If this state of things were final, we might forsee man’s downgoing in sterile servitude to a too-exterior, too-permanent grandeur. For, indeed, much of our common misery has sprung from man’s loss of tools which were his own and through which in myriad ways he did express himself. With the tool came beauty, because it was a subtly extended and yet obedient hand bringing between subject and object that harmony which is beauty’s norm. With the tool came contentment, because by means of it the humblest worker put his seal on his craft; and came pride and those births of pride—morality and value—since the work of the tool was the man himself, and so must be good, and so must be regarded. Finally, with the tool came fullness: for that man alone is unified and full who has spent himself in self-expressive labor. And by contrast, the man is empty and disrupted who has been spent in labor which excludes his deep co-operation. Thus far the pessimists of the machine are right. But here their rightness ends. Could they look back upon what must have been the experience of man ere he mastered the tool, they might more sanguinely look forward.

The primitive man, wielding an artifact, paddling a dugout or making an instrument of a horse, had to undergo a profound psychological revolution ere this element in his hands, stone or wood or flesh, could become an extension of his personal will. He had to grow. How far he had to grow you can see symbolized for yourself by comparing your own hand with the paw of a dog. The step was inscrutably vast: so vast that once man made it, he dared not look back, and soon he forgot—and still he fights to forget. Who shall say what tragic ages went to the transition? to what insanities and despairs men plunged with the strange tool in their bewildered hands, with a wild horse beneath them? Surely, those unmastered weapons must have committed follies; must have broken the measure of men’s life; must have inspired the wiseacres of that day to gloomy forecasts. We do not know the names of the Rousseaus of these desperate generations in which man’s brain had not yet instinctively grasped the tool. But nothing is more certain than that they existed.

Now, with the machine, we are once more primitive. The tool is ours: we have tamed it and made it part of our dominion by a step in consciousness. Before the machine, we are still barbarian or savage even like early man before a horse or a stone. Through a failure to make a certain further step in consciousness, before the machine we are still external.

Of course, there are differences. And it is precisely they which point to a new departure in man’s life. If the machine were merely a more complex tool, there would not be this new element to our exciting day. The machine is a new part of nature: one which did not, like the stone or the horse, exist before. There is in the machine a marriage of what we call the old elements and what we call the human. The domestic animal, in this sense, was a tool: its elements were outside of human nature. In dominating it, as with any other tool, we mastered a part of external nature. And this was comparatively simple, since in our use of the tool we did not come in conflict with any human will. But if we dominate the machine—make it part of ourselves—we shall have won control over a realm of nature which includes mankind; for man’s will, other men’s wills, are constant and determining factors of the machine. We shall have won a victory of consciousness not merely over the nature of the external world—but over our own nature.

The problem was one of consciousness in the days of the stone artifact; and it is again of consciousness today. It is a problem profound as human destiny, inscrutably complex. Yet I think the heart of it can be thus simply stated. The animal, so far as we can see, is incapable of the idea of any part of nature becoming part of itself. Man, with the tool, achieved this: fused unto himself the animal and the stone. Call the process what you may, this attitude of his toward portions of the physical world was metaphysical. And no savage could paddle a canoe without this metaphysical inheritance, made instinct.

We flounder before the machine, we are features more or less groveling of its external life, because we lack an instinctive metaphysical consciousness to make us master and absorb it—to fuse the machine with all its elements of will and act into our own expression. Such consciousness, of course, must be evolved vastly beyond the childish metaphysics beneath the use of a tool. In the machine are adumbrated the will of the inventor, the will of the owner, the will of many workers, the will, indeed, of an age and of a world. Only when the individual worker experiences that these wills are not alien to him; that these elements of life contained in the machine fuse, in a higher synthesis, together with his own, into a unitary act—only then will his spirit in participation be able to go out through the machine, so that it and the whole mechanized world may once again, in his joy, in his beauty, in his human pride, express him.

But such a mechanic would possess the consciousness of a Spinoza? No less! No less is needed, in order that the human world may not go down before this new Nature—the free-spawning mechanical invention. The modern machine converges with the wisdom of the ages to force man ahead. From India, from Judea, from Greece, from Germany, has come the single canon: that life is unitary, that experience is One, and that the human consciousness in one form or another must know and be this One. The machine will compel us, at this human crisis, to experience what heretofore merely great men have known. The machine again makes metaphysics man’s most practical engagement.

_1925_

THREE: BOOKS