WAGNER – The rape of the Sabines … a kommers in Olympus.
Beethoven – The glory that was Greece … the grandeur that was Rome … a laugh.
Haydn – A seidel on the table … a girl on your knee … another and different girl in your heart.
Chopin – Two embalmers at work upon a minor poet … the scent of tuberoses … Autumn rain.
Richard Strauss – Old Home Week in Gomorrah.
Johann Strauss – Forty couples dancing … one by one they slip from the hall … sounds of kisses … the lights go out.
Puccini – Silver macaroni, exquisitely tangled.
Debussy – A pretty girl with one blue eye and one brown one.
Bach – Genesis I, 1.
1 The reader with any curiosity about Beethoven’s method of planning and writing the stupendous first movement will find plenty to his taste in The Unconscious Beethoven, by Ernest Newman; New York, 1927. It is a story packed with almost incredible marvels.
XXVIII. THE LESSER ARTS
Hand-Painted Oil Paintings
From TOWARD A REALISTIC ÆSTHETIC, PREJUDICES: FOURTH SERIES,
1924, pp. 240–48.
First printed in the Smart Set, Jan., 1921, pp. 39–40
TO me, at all events, painting seems to be half an alien among the fine arts. The trouble with it is that it lacks movement, which is to say, the chief function of life. The best a painter can hope to accomplish is to fix the mood of an instant, the momentary aspect of something. If he suggests actual movement he must do it by palpable tricks, all of which belong to craftsmanship rather than to art. The work that he produces is comparable to a single chord in music, without preparation or resolution. It may be beautiful, but its beauty plainly does not belong to the highest order, and the mind soon tires of it. If a man stands before a given painting for more than five or ten minutes, it is usually a sign of affectation: he is trying to convince himself that he has more delicate perceptions than the general. Or he is a painter himself and thus engrossed by the technical aspects of it, as a plumber might be engrossed by the technical aspects of a bathroom. Or he is enchanted by the story that the picture tells, which is to say, by the literature that it illustrates.
Sculpture is in measurably better case. The spectator, viewing a fine statue, does not see something dead, embalmed and fixed in a frame; he sees something that moves as he moves. A fine statue, in other words, is not one statue, but hundreds, perhaps even thousands. The transformation from one to another is infinitely pleasing; one gets out of it the same satisfying stimulation that one gets out of the unrolling of a string quartet. So with architecture. It not only revolves; it also moves vertically, as the spectator approaches it. When one walks up a street past a beautiful building one certainly gets an effect beyond that of a mere chord; it is the effect of a whole procession of beautiful chords, like that at the beginning of the slow movement of the “New World” symphony or that in the well-known and muchbattered Chopin prélude. If it were a painting it would soon grow tedious. No one, after a few days, would give it a glance.
This intrinsic hollowness of painting has its effects even upon those who most vigorously defend it as the queen of all the fine arts. One hears of such persons “haunting the galleries,” but one always discovers, on inquiry, that it is the show-rooms that they actually haunt. In other words, they get their chief pleasure by looking at an endless succession of new paintings: the multitude of chords produces, in the end, a sort of confused satisfaction. The other arts make a far more powerful and permanent appeal. I have heard each of the first eight symphonies of Beethoven more than fifty times, and most of Mozart’s, Haydn’s, Schubert’s and Schumann’s quite as often. Yet if Beethoven’s C Minor were announced for performance tonight, I’d surely go to hear it. More, I’d enjoy every instant of it. Even secondrate music has this lasting quality. Some time ago I heard Johann Strauss’ waltz, “Geschichten aus dem Wiener Wald,” for the first time in a long while. I knew it well in my goatish days; every note of it was still familiar. Nevertheless, it gave me immense delight. Imagine a man getting delight out of a painting of corresponding calibre—a painting already so familiar to him that he could reproduce it from memory.
Painters, like barbers and cigarmakers, are able to talk while they are at work, so they commonly gabble about their art a great deal more than other artists, and the world, in consequence, has come to assume that it is very complex, and full of subtleties. This is not true. Most of its so-called subtleties are manufactured by painters who cannot paint. The genuinely first-rate painters of the world have little to say about the technique of their art, and seem to be unaware that it is difficult. Go back to Leonardo’s notes and sketches: you will find him a great deal more interested in anatomy than in painting. In fact, painting was a sort of afterthought with him; he was primarily an engineer, and the engineering that fascinated him most was that of the human body. Come down, then, to Cézanne. He painted in the way that seemed most natural to him, and was greatly astonished when a group of bad painters, seeking to imitate him, began crediting him with a long string of more or less mystical theories, by the Boul’ Mich’ out of the article on optics in the Encyclopædia Britannica.
The earliest Paleolithic men were already accomplished painters. They were so near to the ape that they had not even invented bows and arrows, usury, the gallows or the notion of baptism by total immersion, yet they were excellent draftsmen. Some of their drawings on the walls of their caves, indeed, remain a great deal more competent than the average magazine illustration of today. They also carved in stone and modeled in clay, and no doubt they were adept poets, as are the lowest Zuñi Indians of our own time. Moreover, they soon began to move out of their caves into artificial houses, and the principles of architectural design that they devised at the very dawn of history have been unchanged ever since, and are poll-parroted docilely every time a sky-scraper thrusts its snout among the cherubim. True enough, they could not draw as accurately as a photographic lens, but they could certainly draw as accurately as, say, Matisse or Gauguin. It remains for physicists, i. e., men disdainful of drawing, to improve it. All the progress that has been made in the art during the past fifty or sixty years has been based upon quiet filches from the camera, just as all the progress that has been made in painting has been based upon filches from the spectroscope. When one finds a painter who professes to disdain these scientific aids, one always beholds a painter who is actually unable to draw or paint, and who seeks to conceal his incompetence by clothing it in hocus-pocus. This is the origin of the Modern Art that regales us with legs eight feet long, complexions of olive green, and human heads related to the soap-box rather than to the Edam cheese. This is the origin of all the gabble one hears in ratty and unheated studios about cubism, vortism, futurism and other such childish follies.
I regard any human being who, with proper instruction, cannot learn to draw reasonably well as, to all intents and purposes, a moron. He is in a stage of culture actually anterior to that of the Crô-Magnons. As for a human being incapable of writing passable verse, he simply does not exist. It is done, as everyone knows, by children—and sometimes so well that their poems are printed in books and quite solemnly reviewed. But good music is never written by children—and I am not forgetting Mozart, Schubert and Mendelssohn. Music belongs to the very latest stage of culture; to compose it in the grand manner requires painful training, and the highest sort of natural skill. It is complex, delicate, difficult. A miraculous youth may show talent for it, but he never reaches anything properly describable as mastery of it until he is mature. The music that all of us think of when we think of the best was written by men a bit bent by experience. And so with prose. Prose has no stage scenery to hide behind, as poetry has. It cannot use masks and wigs. It is not spontaneous, but must be fabricated by thought and painstaking. Prose is the ultimate flower of the art of words. Next to music, it is the finest of all the fine arts.
Art Critics
From THE FRINGES OF LOVELY
LETTERS, PREJUDICES: FIFTH SERIES,
1926, pp. 208–14.
First printed in the Baltimore Evening Sun, Nov., 20, 1925
HAVING emerged lately from a diligent course of reading in socalled art criticism, and especially in that variety of it which is concerned with the painters since Cézanne, I can only report that I find it windy stuff, and sadly lacking in clarity and sense. The new critics, indeed, seem to me to be quite as vague and absurd as some of the new painters they celebrate. The more they explain and expound the thing they profess to admire, the more unintelligible it becomes. Criticism, in their hands, turns into a sort of cabalism. One must prepare for it, as one prepares for the literature of the New Thought, by acquiring a wholly new vocabulary, and a new system of logic.
I do not argue here that the new painting, in itself, is always absurd. On the contrary, it must be manifest to anyone with eyes that some of its inventions are bold and interesting, and that now and then it achieves a sort of beauty. What I argue is simply that the criticism it has bred does not adequately account for it—that no man of ordinary sense, seeking to find out just what it is about, will get any light from what is currently written about it. All he will get will be a bath of metaphysics, heated with indignation. Polemics take the place of exposition. One comes away with a guilty feeling that one is somehow grossly ignorant and bounderish, but unable to make out why. This tendency to degenerate into a mere mouthing of meaningless words seems to be peculiar to art criticism. There has never been, so far as I know, a critic of painting who wrote about it simply and clearly, as Sainte-Beuve, say, wrote about books, or Schumann and Berlioz about music. Even the most orthodox of the brethren, when he finds himself before a canvas that genuinely and moves him, takes refuge in esoteric winks and grimaces and mysterious gurgles and belches. He can never put his feelings into plain English
Painters themselves, when they discuss their art, go the same route. Every time a new revolutionist gives a show he issues a manifesto explaining his aims and achievements, and in every such manifesto there is the same blowsy rodomontadizing that one finds in the texts of the critics. The thing, it appears, is very profound. Something new has been discovered. Rembrandt, poor old boy, lived and died in ignorance of it. Turner, had he heard of it, would have yelled for the police. Even Gauguin barely glimpsed it. One can’t make out what this new arcanum is, but one takes it on faith and goes to the show. What one finds there is a series of canvases that appear to have been painted with asphalt and mayonnaise, and by a man afflicted with binocular diplopic strabismus. Is this sound drawing? Is this a new vision of color? Then so is your grandmother leftfielder of the Giants. The exceptions are very few. I have read, I suppose, at least two hundred such manifestoes during the past twenty years; at one time I even started out to collect them, as odd literary delicatessen. I can’t recall a single one that embodied a plain statement of an intelligible idea—that is, intelligible to a man of ordinary information and sanity. It always took a special talent to comprehend them, as it took a special talent to paint the fantastic pictures they discussed.
Two reasons, I believe, combine to make the pronunciamentos of painters so bombastic and flatulent. One lies in the plain fact that painting is a relatively simple and transparent art, and that nothing much of consequence is thus to be said about it. All that is remarkable in even the most profound painting may be grasped by an educated spectator in a few minutes. If he lingers longer he is simply seeing again what he has seen before. His essential experience, in other words, is short-lived. It is not like getting shaved, coming down with cholera morbus, or going to the wars; it is like jumping out of the way of a taxicab or getting kissed. Consider, now, the position of a critic condemned to stretch this experience into material for a column article or for a whole chapter in a book. Obviously, he soon finds it insufficient for this purpose. What, then, is he to do? Tell the truth, and then shut up? This, alas, is not the way of critics. When their objective facts run out they always turn to subjective facts, of which the supply is unlimited. Thus the art critic begins to roll his eyes inward. He begins to poetize and philosophize his experience. He indulges himself in dark hints and innuendoes. Putting words together aimlessly, he presently hits upon a combination that tickles him. He has invented a new cliché. He is a made man. The painter, expounding his work, falls into the same bog. The plain fact, nine times out of ten, is that he painted his picture without any rational plan whatever. Like any other artist, he simply experimented with his materials, trying this combination and then that. Finally he struck something that pleased him. Now he faces the dreadful job of telling why. He simply doesn’t know. So he conceals his ignorance behind recondite and enigmatical phrases. He soars, insinuates, sputters, coughs behind his hand. If he is lucky, he, too, invents a cliché. Three clichés in a row, and he is a temporary immortal.
The New Architecture
From the American Mercury, Feb., 1931, pp. 164–65
THE NEW ARCHITECTURE seems to be making little progress in the United States. The traces of it that are visible in the current hotels, apartment-house and office buildings are slight, and there are so few signs of it in domestic architecture and ecclesiastical architecture that when they appear they look merely freakish. A new suburb built according to the plans of, say, Le Corbusier would provoke a great deal more mirth than admiration, and the realtor who projected it would probably bebadly stuck. The advocates of the new style are full of earnestness, and some of them carry on in the shrill, pedagogical manner of believers in the Single Tax or the New Humanism, but save on the level of factory design they do not seem to be making many converts. In other directions precious few persons seem to have been persuaded that their harsh and melodramatic designs are either logical or beautiful, or that the conventions they denounce are necessarily meaningless and ugly.
Those conventions, in point of fact, are often informed by an indubitable beauty, as even the most frantic Modernist must admit when he contemplates the Lincoln Memorial at Washington or St. Thomas’s Church in New York; and there is not the slightest reason for holding that they make war upon anything essential to the modern spirit. We live in a Machine Age, but there are still plenty of us who have but little to do with machines, and find in that little no answer to our aspirations. Why should a man who hates automobiles build a house designed upon the principles which went into the Ford Model T? He may prefer, and quite honestly, the principles which went into the English dwelling-house of the Eighteenth Century, and so borrow them with a clear conscience.
I can sympathize with that man, for in many ways he is I and I am he. If I were building a house tomorrow it would certainly not follow the lines of a dynamo or a steam shovel; it would be, with a few obvious changes, a replica of the houses that were built in the days when human existence, according to my notion, was pleasanter and more spacious than ever before or since. The Eighteenth Century, of course, had its defects, but they were vastly overshadowed by its merits. It got rid of religion. It lifted music to first place among the arts. It introduced urbanity into manners, and made even war relatively gracious and decent. It took eating and drinking out of the stable and put them into the parlor. It found the sciences childish curiosities, and bent them to the service of man, and elevated them above metaphysics for all time. Lastly and best, it invented the first really comfortable human habitations ever seen on earth, and filled them with charming fittings. When it dawned even kings lived like hogs, but as it closed even colonial planters on the banks of the Potomac were housed in a fashion fit for gentlemen.
The Eighteenth Century dwelling-house has countless rivals today, but it is as far superior to any of them as the music of Mozart is superior to Broadway jazz. It is not only, with its red brick and white trim, a pattern of simple beauty; it is also durable, relatively inexpensive, and pleasant to live in. No other sort of house better meets the exigencies of housekeeping, and none other absorbs modern conveniences more naturally and gracefully. Why should a man of tod
ay abandon it for a house of harsh masses, hideous outlines, and bald metallic surfaces? And why should he abandon its noble and charming furniture for the ghastly imitations of the electric chair that the Modernists make of gas-pipe? I can find no reason in either faith or morals. The Eighteenth Century house fits a civilized man almost perfectly. He is completely at ease in it. In every detail it accords with his ideas. To say that the florid chicken-coops of Le Corbusier and company are closer to his nature is as absurd as to say that the tar-paper shacks behind the railroad tracks are closer to his nature.
Nor is there any sense in the common contention that Gothic has gone out, and is now falsetto. The truth is that St. Thomas’s Church not only represents accurately the Christian mysticism of Ralph Adams Cram, who designed it, but also the uneasy consciences of the rich Babbitts who paid for it. It is a plain and highly intelligible signal to the world that, at least on Sundays, those Babbitts search their hearts and give thought to Hell. It is, in its sordid surroundings, distinctly otherworldly, just as Bishop Fulbert’s cathedral was otherworldly when it began to rise above the medieval squalor of Chartres. The other worldliness is of the very essence of ecclesiastical architecture. The moment it is lost we have the dreadful “plants” that barbaric Baptists and Methodists erect in the Pellagra and Goitre Belts. Of all forms of visible otherworldiness, it seems to me, the Gothic is at once the most logical and the most beautiful. It reaches up magnificently—and a good half of it is palpably useless. When men really begin to build churches like the Bush Terminal there will be no religion any more, but only Rotary. And when they begin to live in houses as coldly structural as step-ladders they will cease to be men, and become mere rats in cages.
Mencken Chrestomathy (Vintage) Page 63