PAME
GRAD
PN
45
.S82
1956
BUHR
A 962,901
Appreciation
Painting, Poetry and Prose
Leo Stein
A Moder Library Paperback
PROPERTY OF
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Dharies

1817
4247
ARTES SCIENTIA VERITAS
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ان شده به روش پر

Appreciation:
Painting, Poetry and Prose
By Leo Stein
THE
MODERA
LIBRARY
It has been Leo Stein's ironic fate to be
referred to as "Gertrude's brother,” ironic
because for many years he was her mentor
and counselor. However, late in his life he
wrote two books, APPRECIATION: PAINTING,
POETRY AND PROSE and JOURNEY INTO THE
SELF, which clearly established his fame in
his own right
This book is a model of lucidity, wisdom and
classical simplicity. It ranges over a wide field
of thought and criticism. Leo Stein's judg
ments on art and literature are crisp, per-
ceptive and original. His approach to his sub-
ject is casual, anecdotal and, though often
sharp and biting, finally mellow. Reading
APPRECIATION: PAINTING, POETRY AND PROSE is
like that rare experience of listening, en-
chanted, for an evening to a great conversa-
tionalist, a man informed and urbane, witty
and wise.

PAPERBACKS MODERN LIBRARY PAPERBACKS are
published by Random House in order to make the best books of
all timė available to the public at a price it can readily afford.


Appreciation:
Painting, Poetry and Prose
Leo Stein

MODERN
LIBRARY
PAPERBACKS
Published by Random House New York
Copyright, 1947, by Leo Stein
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 56-10485
Undergradi
Library
PN
45
•S82
1956
Buhr
Random House IS THE PUBLISHER OF The Modern Library
BENNETT CERF DONALD S. KLOPFER
Manufactured in the United States of America
by H. Wolff
9-446
Undergraduate
Library
tr. to Buhr
11-11-97
To Beatrice and Fred Stein
ت
Foreword
A phrase of A. N. Whitehead's serves me well for an
opening. "Life," he says, "is an offensive against the re-
petitive mechanisms of nature." Though the most recent
science has weakened a little the nineteenth century's
belief in mechanism, this change does not affect the
practical world in which we live. Bricks may rise in the
air if the free-moving electrons move just right, instead
of staying on the ground as they commonly do, yet the
probability that this will happen is measured by a figure
one followed by noughts extending through thousands
of miles. It may be to some a religious or philosophical
comfort to know that this is possible, that nature cannot
be proved a perfect mechanism and may dance an un-
expected rigadoon. None the less, we cannot live as
though fire would chill our cocktails and ice would cook
our porridge. It is still practicable to oppose the appar-
ently capricious life to the apparently mechanistic nature.
Life will have its way if it can, and resists submission
to control. When it reaches the stage of foresight, this
refusal to submit sets goals and devises means to reach
them. All living things, even plants seeking sun and
water, move toward the satisfaction of needs, but in man
this becomes all-important and explicit. The offensive
against the repetitive mechanisms of nature becomes a
war with strategy and tactics.
Life at the human level has for this offensive numer-
ous methods which I shall sketchily order in the second
chapter of this book. Of these methods art is the par-
viii
ticular one of which I propose to write here. I shall not
do this systematically; I shall say as simply as I can things
that I have found it useful to know, thinking that others
too will find them useful. This is not a philosophy of
art-for I agree with Santayana that such philosophy is
verbiage, an attempt to systematize imponderables. Nor
is it science, which in these matters cannot do much. It
is a little debauch in the realm of ideas, the realm in
which I delight to play and in which "I loaf and invite
my soul, I lean and loaf at ease, observing a spear of
summer grass." The greensward is the world of art, and
incidentally of other things; for art is expression, and
not remote from what it expresses. Art is, to use the Eng-
lish vulgarism, a bit of all right, but it is intimately con-
nected with everything else-even with things that are
all wrong, like murder and sudden death. Therefore any-
thing and everything will incidentally come up and get
such treatment as I can give it.
Art has often been concerned with religion, and some-
thing often said of religion can also be said of art: that
it is what man does with his loneliness. The universe
is so big and communication with one's fellowmen is so
limited that men want both to understand and to be
understood better than they can understand or be under-
stood by their fellows. Religion is one way of getting
these desires satisfied, and art is another. The real crea-
tion in these fields is solitary. The community is the ma-
trix in which the individual grows, but it is the individ-
ual crystal that has form and is the occasion of more
form. It is the individual who creates, and it is the in-
dividual who re-creates. Man, the social animal, likes to
take his pleasures in company, but something must even
then be done by the individual as such-unless each
palate has its fineness of sense, the choicest wines are
wasted, no matter how great the jollity. A man who col-
lects in the spirit of a collector collects specimens, but
Foreword
ix
for genuineness of personal experience specimens are of
no importance. One might as well collect specimens
of religion. For the student of comparative religion such
a collection is useful, but for the religious person only
that is useful which communicates or expresses religious
values.
So it is for art. I am not a collector. In this book I am
concerned with the kind of interest that is vital, which
has centrally to do with the offensive against the mecha-
nisms of nature. The choice of subjects and the manner
of treatment are the results of this direction of interest.
Art is often taken to have some special relation to
truth for which Keats is incessantly quoted: Beauty is
truth, truth, beauty. But Keats was here talking phi-
losophy, and if one, using these words as they are com-
monly used, is accurate, art has nothing to do with truth
essentially. Nor has beauty. Truth is not reality, but is
what we say about reality. Art, however, is not what we
say about anything. It is what we say. A portrait which
is a work of art says something about its subject, but it
might remain a work of art even if someone took it as
a still life or a fanfare in blue and scarlet. Art is creation
essentially. Science is also creation, but a scientific theory
would be a useless creation if it did not tell a truth about.
the reality to which it refers. The artist, in so far as he
is concerned with truth, is satisfied with the feeling of it,
which is the same as the sense of reality, and so enjoys
an independence which the scientist cannot share.
A creation in art stands on its own bottom. It is a kind.
of reality, and therefore lies to the further side of truth..
Its standards are not standards of truth but of reality. A
real thing is one that withstands disintegration. So ice.
will melt when it encounters the temperature necessary
to disintegrate it and cease to be ice, and the reflection
in a mirror that seems solid enough will disintegrate if
the mirror becomes clouded. A work of art is a composi--
-
X
tion, and its persistent reality as a work of art depends
on relations between the elements of this composition.
"Right" relations make the composition real, and when
the relations are not "right" the composition lacks reality
and disintegrates. In that case, whatever other merits
the work may have (melted ice may still serve as water),
as a work of art it is a failure.
Art is the union of man and nature; its realities are
essentially man-made. Science is the separation of man
and nature, so far as in a man's universe this is possible.
Science tries to see things as a disembodied intelligence,
a robot intelligence, would see them. It prefers the testi-
mony of a registering apparatus and pointer readings to
the testimony of "a simple separate person." But without
that simple separate person, there is no art. It is an ad-
vantage, to continue with Walt Whitman, “if one can
utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse," and
speak not only for oneself, as some moderns do, but also
for the many, as Homer and Shakespeare, Raphael and
Rembrandt did. But the nub of art is the creation of
something essentially human in terms of such relations
as resist disintegration. When such a product has its own
recognized vitality, it is successful art.
Art is the recurrent theme of this book, which makes
of this individual creative experience its fundamental
assumption. It looks on life as a going concern, and on
art as one of the means to keep it going. It is entirely in-
different to conventions, rituals, orthodoxies, and it fairly
foams at the mouth over the pretensions of the current
orthodoxies. These foolish currencies which often think
themselves to be the issues coming from the mint built
on the topmost pinnacles of time, are really only mo-
ments in the variable river of events, are eddies having a
duration truly, but a duration only as long as they spin:
a little change in the river and they are swept away. Both
life and art are too various to authenticate orthodoxies.
Foreword
xi
These are refuges to cling to for those who fear the tur-
bulencies of the stream; but for others they are merely
definitions, precisions of some of the ways in which things
can be taken. In this they are worthy of regard, even for
those who cannot accept them.
The world since the Renaissance, and for all I know
even before that, has been art conscious more than I
think is good for it. Art is a sort of edge or point given
to appreciation, and is really important when it is the
edge or point to someone's genuinely felt appreciation.
Appreciation is the kind of experience which comes to
a consummation in art, and I now believe that by keep-
ing art related to appreciation, one finds the best ap-
proach to this subject. Art as a fetish is absurd. Everybody
who pretends to culture is supposedly obliged to an
interest in things which are often of no real interest to
him. This means ritual, not reality. It is quite false, and
in this book I treat art sanely as a part of normal ex-
perience. Appreciation belongs to everybody, and for
almost all, if not for all, it has its emergencies in art. Un-
less one thinks of art narrowly, no one is a stranger to
it, though many have never sought for it the honor of
an initial big letter.
Art is always with us, though Herbert Read can say
(in Art Now) that never since the Baroque period has
art served any social or cultural purpose. This statement
I think absurd. It is true that religious art since then
has been in eclipse, but there are other interests in so-
ciety besides religion. French eighteenth-century art was
integrally part of French, even of European, culture,
and the portrait painters of England italicize its eight-
eenth century. Landscape in the nineteenth century was
vitally a worship. Its pantheism came to expression not
only in poetry but in pictures, which were as important
to its devotees as the pictures in the churches of Italy or
Spain. The really holy pictures and statues, it must be
xii
remembered, were almost never, if ever, reputable works
of art, whereas the sacred pictures of the nature lovers
were. Nor is all art made with paint. Since photographic
reproduction has become possible, drawings of immense
social significance are appearing everywhere and all the
time. The occasional Daumier, Gavarni, Rowlandson,
have had innumerable followers. Any review of the
month's news must include cartoons as well as print, and
these cartoons are art, art, art. There is art from day to
day, as well as art from century to century. One recalls a
rare meal at the Tour d'Argent or Voisin's, but one eats
bread day in day out. And bread also is food.
Art is no place for snobs. It is important because
something has happened, and not because there is
solemn or even reverent discourse about it. The museum
is a necessary misfortune, and picture shows a worse one.
It will be a happy moment when reproductions of paint-
ings can be so perfectly made that originals can be left
like first editions and manuscripts to makers of collec-
tions, while anyone can have a copy of his own which,
like the printed book, is just as good. People then will
have private galleries as they have their bookshelves,
and there can be circulating galleries, and it will then
be possible to get away from the absurdity of regarding it
as important to visit shows and supposedly see in a few
minutes scores of pictures that one will never meet
again. This is no more than a bit of Vanity Fair with the
same importance-neither more nor less-as visits to the
other booths.
One has of late heard a lot about the Great Books.
G. B. Stern, in her pleasant story Thunderstorm, tells
how an Italian peasant enjoyed one of the greatest
of these books. She thoroughly enjoyed Hamlet as the
blood and thunder story that it is. But too often the
great books are read as Tennyson's Northern Farmer
listened to the preacher, "An' I thowt a said whot a owt
Foreword
xiii
to a said an' I comed awaäy." An artist puts into his
work as much as he can of what he intends. The reader
takes out of it as much as he can carry off. There may
be or there may not be a close correlation between these
two operations. Certainly there can be no standard of
extraction, which, like stuff in cans guaranteed to be of
a certain quality and strength, can be taken by everyone
with confidence in the result. Every artistic enterprise,
whether by the artist or the audience, is a gamble, and
nothing can make it otherwise.
I wish to thank The Macmillan Company for permis-
sion to quote from Alfred North Whitehead's Adventures
in Ideas; Doubleday and Company for quotations from
Margaret Kennedy's Red Sky at Morning; and Harcourt,
Brace and Company for quotations from Herbert Read's
Art Now.

Contents
Foreword
Introduction
1. What the Book Is About
น
2. The Two Crosses
3. Of Poetry and Prose -
4. Appreciation
5. On Reading Poetry and Seeing Pictures -
6. Personal Adventures
7. More Adventures
8. 27 Rue de Fleurus
9. Appreciation and Education
vii
1
9
16
23
42
65
108
134
157
170

Introduction
The man who can knock out Joe Louis is hard to find,
but there are plenty of fighting men of one kind or an-
other. The exceptional person is of course exceptional,
but only because he is an unusual specimen of a kind
that is common. Otherwise he is a freak. One can make
an efficient army because there are many men who can
carry a gun, who can read a map and make calculations,
who can be trained or educated to fill all the roles from
G.I. Joe to Eisenhower. So it is with art, which we have
in all the forms from pulp magazines to that poem of
Paul Valéry which took four years to write, though only
four hundred lines long, and which no man can under-
stand fully. James Joyce told someone that he expected
his earnest readers to spend their lives reading him.
What he thought they would get out of it I do not know.
Valéry is less sacramental. He says in effect, I wrote this
to please myself; if someone else can get something out
of it he is welcome, but I do not urge anyone to try.
The art of Valéry and Joyce is a rare kind, which calls
for intense devotion and persistent effort both from au-
thor and reader, but there is also art which is so simple
and everyday that the artist who creates it is not even
aware that he is one. Somebody who has never thought
of such a thing may be walking along a country road
and may see trees and houses, fields and hills, streams,
clouds, sky. Nothing there cries aloud to him, "I am a
landscape"; yet a landscape may appear before his eyes.
The landscape didn't make itself, he made it, and any-
one who makes anything like this is an artist. The desire
2
:
may grow on him to be a painter also. He may say to
himself, “Gee, I'd like to paint that.” And if he gets some
paint and brushes, some advice, and has the necessary
patience, he will be a painter-like Winston Churchill.
I have never seen a picture by Churchill. All I know
about him as an artist is that some years ago, when he
was in Florence, he wanted to know about Cézanne.
Charles Loeser, who had Cézannes, showed them and
tried to explain, but Churchill, he told me, was not much
enlightened. Nor was he discouraged for he still
paints when there is time and occasion.
Art is not necessarily a serious matter and I want to
avoid all pretentiousness in treating of it. Art and
genius are both common everyday things, and are not
essentially different in their little and their great occa-
sions. It is true that they seem different, but that is a re-
sult of conventional ways of thinking. The elder moral-
ists and poets of old were continually reminding people
that kings were only mortals like the rest of mankind. I
want to insist that making up a package of candy
at Maillard's is art not altogether different from a pic-
ture by Renoir. Santayana, in The Last Puritan, tells
how Rose received gifts from Mario attractively done
up. Before she undid them she paused with pleasurable
feeling at the art shown in the wrapping. She didn't say
to herself, "This is art," nor do I when I look at a fa-
vorite picture by Domenico Veneziano. But we both
recognize a quality which is called artistic, and what is
artistic is art. A dainty package is a simple form of the
same kind of art as that of Mondrian, just as a well-pro-
portioned box is a simple bit of architecture. A grocer
doing up a pound of cheese has nothing of that sort on
his mind. Every action having as its purpose to give satis-
faction to one's interest in forms is art. Art is not a king
by divine right. Art is a democracy where all are equal
before the law of choice; all are called, though few are
chosen for the museum shrine.
Introduction
3
What is true of art is true of genius. Of few things is
there so much pretentious nonsense current. William
James said that genius was the capacity to get into a
biographical dictionary, but I think even this an under-
statement. Genius is simply creativity, and its opposite is
routine. Both creativeness and routine are common. The
academic artist is at bottom a man of routine, however
much he may play at variation. The creative artist is a
revolutionary, even though the revolution is gradually
and almost imperceptibly effected.
Of course genius is mysterious, but so is routine. Pro-
fessor Levy, a distinguished English physicist, says that
no one can explain why, when we pull a piece of paper
by one corner, the rest of it comes along. Though the
man in the street does not think this mysterious, it is as
mysterious as anything whatever. The mysterious is
neither more nor less than that for which we have no
technique of investigation. When we successfully investi-
gate something, it ceases to be mysterious. Life is a mys-
tery because it cannot be reduced to anything else. The
atom was a mystery until it was broken up. The great is
rarer than the little, but not a whit more mysterious.
Shakespeare's creative powers were enormous and mine
are slight, but if I were not something of a genius-that
is, if I had no creative powers—I couldn't write this book,
which is certainly not a matter of mere routine. So too,
I have muscles in my arm that are not essentially differ-
ent from those of Joe Louis. His have more punch in
them, that is all.
It is, I believe, a good thing to recognize the continu-
ity of the usual and the unusual, and if we are to be
reverent it is better to be widely and not narrowly rev-
erent. It is better to recognize creativity as something
common and to cultivate it generally, than to suppose
that those who have it more are different in kind. I be-
lieve that this regard for genius in its littleness is on the
whole more important than regard for its bigness. That
4
will take care of itself, but the little of it is likely to be
obscured.
We hear much of the need to teach people to use lan-
guage properly. There is no difficulty in teaching them
the routine of expression (yours of the fifteenth ult. re-
ceived and contents noted), but it is good to make them
realize that there is no essential difference between them
and those who write, except interest, use and purpose-
that creativity in writing means nothing more than fit-
ting words accurately and specifically to what one spe-
cifically and accurately intends. Shakespeare certainly
intended more than most and had exceptional gifts, but
anyone who has anything to say and wants to interest
the receiver has a like object. Every personal letter one
writes, every personal statement one makes, may be crea-
tive writing if one's interest is to make it such. Most peo-
ple do not have this interest; what they write in ordinary
communications is as dull as they can make it. They have
never been taught to think of all writing as in its degree
writing and all speaking speaking, and so they write in
rubber stamps and speak in the current routine or slang,
as though writing and speaking were something reserved
for the elect. We can understand Shakespeare if we know
his language and are sufficiently interested really to read
him—that is, to read him with attention-and we can
understand Einstein on the same terms. This is true be-
cause, although we cannot create the great things they
have done, we can re-create them, and we can do this
because we have some measure of creative power, which
they stimulate. To make the most of this is the vital pur-
pose of education.
What there is of system in this little book has as its
directive the notion that continuity illuminates. Art that
is definitely taken as art is no more than the remarking,
the sharpening and the fixing of experiences that may
be noted in the affairs of every day, and the value of the
Introduction
5
great things is made more valuable when they are known
as exceptional, not in their kind but in their degree.
There must be classifications if general statements are to
be made, and it is a good thing if one can find classifica-
tions that are simple and fresh.
Conventional thinking uses conventional classifications
that are taken to be natural and inevitable, although in
great part they lead to confusion. People speak as though
they mean one thing when they really intend something
else. A typical instance is that of the British Constitution,
which even such clever politicians as the Founding Fa-
thers did not really understand because the words used
to describe it were fictitious. Not till Bagehot, well on
in the nineteenth century, described it in terms which
actually fitted it, did people stop thinking and speaking
of it in terms that did not fit. It is a misfortune of our
present culture that so much of our creative energy goes
into our enormously available propaganda and so little
into the precising of meanings, which is for the most
part left to the men of science. Veracity means not ly-
ing, and nothing more stands in the way of veracity than
words like democracy, liberty, good will, liberal culture,
ideals and hundreds of other words, which sound as
though they mean something particular but really mean
anything or nothing. Instead of talking with detailed
precision, which would show one's hand, or more pre-
cisely, one's mind and morals, one uses these inspira-
tional, but to the critical mind, depressing words. There
is no flattering unction laid to the soul more damning
than holy words that cover realities with which holiness
has nothing to do, and the first need of a substantial edu-
cation is to learn the relation of words to things.
It has often been said that the particular distinction
of Shakespeare's style is that the words are the things to
which they apply. This is the greatest quality that writing
can have, and it can be learned to the degree that for
6
anyone it is possible only by an acquired practice of
knowing what one wants to say, and then saying it with-
out in the meantime losing contact with one's subject
matter. Logic will not help if one forgets the precise
thing that one wants to say.
The same holds true for reading. It is astonishing how
often someone will tell you what he has read in a book
or in the papers, and when you read it you find nothing
of the kind. If you ask to have it pointed out, it
isn't there. Good writing and reading are really a simple
matter, though not an easy one. Everybody knows that
a machine will not work well if the parts are not prop-
erly fitted and adjusted. It is exactly the same with the
mind. Words are the tools, and if they are not fitted to
the work and accurately applied, they are not only bad
in themselves but fruitful of mischief. It makes much
less difference what you read than how you read it. What-
ever one reads with close attention to the words and also
to the things the words mean is the instrument of a lib-
eral culture; whatever one reads otherwise, whether
philosophy or history or poetry, is not. The habit of ve-
racity, of not pretending, is fundamental. To understand
one must know the dictionary meaning of words, but
one cannot stop at that. I was once asked to correct the
translation of a book from the German that had been
made by a person meticulously careful to look up in the
dictionary all words not familiar. There must have been
many of these words, for though every word used had a
dictionary warrant, the sentences were almost meaning-
less. One should think in things with the aid of words.
Word thinking is robot thinking. "Aristotelian logic .
is the fertile matrix of fallacies," says Whitehead. Like a
calculating machine it assures that the result shall be
correct, but not that it shall make sense. The things to
which the words refer are the normal checks on the mere
mechanics of thinking, and when these are neglected we
become the easy victims of propaganda.
Introduction
7
There are men so rich in words that they can spend
them unceasingly and still always have more, like fili-
bustering senators. I once met a perfect specimen of this
sort. He talked and talked and said nothing. Suddenly
he stopped and looked distressed.
"I look pretty healthy, don't I?" he said.
I assured him that he did.
"You wouldn't suppose I was suffering from an in-
curable disease, would you?"
"Certainly not."
"Well, I am: incurable, utterly incurable, utterly in-
curable."
"But what can it possibly be?”
"Diarrhea of words, constipation of ideas," he ex-
ploded.
He was the adjuster for a railroad company and well
fitted to the job of talking accident cases into taking the
least possible compensation. In the sixty years since this
meeting I have often had reason to think of him and tell
his sad story, for though he was a rare specimen of his
kind, the kind is not at all rare.
Pleasure in clear hard thinking is not so common as it
ought to be in a democracy that has before it so many
difficult problems as ours. "All propositions for the re-
organization of society must have their complexities,
which may need half an hour of explanation, and half
an hour of explanation is nine and twenty minutes too
much for the average man," says H. G. Wells somewhere.
Only highbrows are so extravagant of intellectual effort.
If the average man reads about these things, he wants
the solution without being bothered to understand the
problem. This saves thinking, and what he reads is in
any case usually so encumbered with tendentious lan-
guage as to be most innutritious food for thought. Even
a real thinker would find his thinking machine gummed
by the flood of sticky words. The average man does not
of necessity object to clear language, provided it ex-
8
presses his prejudices, and therefore certain very good
writers are also popular writers. The readers of the pa-
pers for which they write are prepared to take them for
granted, and do so. It pleases them to be of the same
mind as eminent authorities, and it would surprise them
much to learn that the eminent authorities do not un-
derstand these writings as the enthusiastic reader does.
Often I have tried to make clear to someone who en-
tirely agreed with me that he didn't agree with me at all
-but generally in vain. Usually he begins to have a
headache before the stage is reached where such fine dis-
criminations become clear.
Nor does the average man think such distinctions im-
portant. This reminds me of two admirable Britons
that Mahonri Young once told me about. The National
Gallery had bought a Titian for a great price, and Young
saw these gentlemen approach the picture from opposite
sides, each reading a paper. They met before it and iden-
tified it. Then one said, “I don't see the value in it." The
other said, "Neither do I,” and both shook their heads
in skeptical resignation and departed, to meditate on
the foolish extravagance of the government. So it is gen-
erally when one tries to make the average man see the
importance of exact thinking. He regards it as an extrav-
agant demand. He can understand exactness in a
machine, but the same quality in a mind is beyond the
limits of his interest.
The subject of this book is Prose and Poetry, and it
may seem that all this has little to do with a theme that
smells of esthetics. But as I see it, this kind of thing is
the very heart of the subject. I dislike estheticism. For
me Prose and Poetry belong to the world of vital
interests, to those matters which affect the current of
our days. They are less important than food and shelter,
but as soon as we can sit back and reflect, they become
important enough to be worth bothering about, even to
the point of having a book written about them.
1.
What the Book Is About
A comprehensive anthology of English Poetry like the
four volume Ward's English Poets has within its ample
limits writing of many kinds. It all passes as poetry, and
we may fairly say that it is all poetry. But usually when
poetry is defined the definitions are so limited that they
cut out much, or even most, of what so passes as poetry.
A proper definition should include everything that be-
longs, and exclude everything that does not. A definition
of poetry must therefore be wide in its scope. As I believe
that no such definition is possible, I shall not try to make
one, but instead I shall try to give an intelligible mean-
ing to the adjective "poetic."
That seems to me both practicable and useful.
Throughout this book I shall be concerned with a funda-
mental distinction, that between the poetic and the pro-
saic. By the poetic or poetical (for it is not worth while
trying to keep a difference between these two forms), I
shall mean that which communicates appreciations; and
by the prosaic that which makes statements, that which
analyzes, that which is factual in character, that which
is concerned with use. There are things that in the or-
dinary sense of the word we use, and others that we do
not. When a man says to his wife, "That wall is too bare;
I'll get a picture for it," it is obvious that the picture is
to be used. He wants a modified arrangement of the room
for which the picture is to serve. That is using it. But
when one looks at the picture which one has hung in
place, one is not in any ordinary sense of the word using
10
it. The picture has changed from an object of use to
one of appreciation.
This word appreciation has, I believe, been too much
neglected, though there is no other that I can think of
that will take its place. Appreciation names all the ways.
in which we regard things that we do not define, measure
or directly use. For instance, a man choosing an employee
for some particular purpose considers qualities that he
cannot test. He has to size up the man-which is an act
of appreciation, different from dictating a letter to see
how accurate his stenography is. A detective studying a
man's character does a similar thing, and so may a man
to whom another is introduced, or a painter beginning
on a portrait. The portrait which results from the paint-
er's appreciation is what we call art. The actions of the
others do not have any such end, but I wish to keep art
closely related to other things. Art should be taken im-
portantly only when there is a good reason.
I remember that years ago when Mrs. Mackay was not
satisfied with a portrait that Meissonier had painted,
she paid the large price demanded, and then burned the
picture. Her action seemed to many almost as pernicious
as though she had burned the painter at the stake. Mil-
ton said that one had as good murder a man as murder
a good book, but I doubt whether he would have thought
that a portrait of Mrs. Mackay could be put in the same
class with good books.
In a French comedy one man says to another, "But
Monsieur Durand, don't you believe that art should be
protected?"
"Art of course, but not the artists, who are a lot of
ne'er-do-wells and rascals.”
For Monsieur Durand art was holy, just as the flag is
holy for people who care little for the land or the people.
With this attitude toward art we never can get to the bot-
tom of it, and I like to get to the bottom of things. So
What the Book Is About
11
we are here going to have art treated as just one of the
ways in which appreciations are recorded. The business-
man just mentioned records his appreciation by employ-
ing the man or rejecting him, the detective perhaps by
writing a report, the painter by posing the model in a
certain way and adopting a certain treatment in the por-
trait. The differences in the way of recording the appre-
ciations result in the three classes of things: the instru-
mental, the informational or prosaic, and the poetical.
The businessman puts his employee to work, which is
using him instrumentally; the detective writes a report,
which is to give information and also to tell what his ap-
preciation was; the painter does a portrait which com-
municates his appreciation. Anyone who looks at the
portrait understandingly will share immediately the
painter's experience, while in the other cases there is
nothing of this immediacy. The three ways of putting
things on record which are also related to the interests
that determine the appreciations, I shall call in a rough
way practice, science and art-one concerned with using,
one with knowing, one with renewing appreciation. The
distinctions are, of course, not clean-cut-few distinctions
are-but they are sufficiently clear to be useful, and that
is all that I ask of them.
The practical, the prosaic and the poetic are inextric-
ably mixed up in the actual process of living. One may
at the same time use a motor to go somewhere, be keenly
observant of how it works, and enjoy its smooth-running
adaptation to its purpose. There is writing that is pre-
dominantly prosaic, and writing that is predominantly
poetic, like scientific formulae and lyric poems, but there
is much writing which is not one or the other in so ob-
viously simple a way-the Sermon on the Mount, Isaiah,
most oratory, preaching, fiction.
Nor is this distinction limited to expression in words.
A drawing may be a diagram to be blueprinted; it may
12
be a fantasy by Botticelli or Paul Klee; it may be a car-
toon by Daumier or Mauldin; it may be an advertise-
ment for cars or perfumes. The diagram is undoubtedly
prose, the Botticelli and the Paul Klee undoubtedly
poetry, but all the rest are more or less of both. The
diagram enlightens and is utilized, the fantasies are only
for appreciation, but the others are to be used for in-
formation or satire, to tell about certain conditions ex-
isting somewhere and also to be appreciated.
Appreciation is often withheld from things because
they aren't labeled as the proper objects thereof. For in-
stance, a man named Hambidge made interesting dis-
coveries in proportions used by the Greeks in all their
arts, and many Greek vases in American museums were
measured and found to conform to the formulae that
Hambidge had worked out. Then someone discovered
the same proportions in pots and pans, and this has
been cited as discrediting Hambidge. I can't see why. If
the Greeks had formulae by which ordinary utensils
could be given good proportions, so much the better;
this may happen by chance or through the contriver's
taste, even in pots and pans. The average man finds
poetry only where it is labeled, but the artist will fre-
quently find it elsewhere and bring it to the notice of
all the world.
The word "poetic" is often used to mean "fanciful” or
"dreamy," just as "prosaic" is used to mean "dull" or
"pedestrian"; but good poetry is not fanciful or dreamy
for the most part. It is substantial, just as good prose is
far other than dull or pedestrian. Good words like these
have possibilities of use beyond such degradation, and
should be salvaged. It is best to get rid of all derogatory
words in art, and all flattering ones. I believe that one
cannot do better than with "poetic" and "prosaic" for
general use. Common wine and whiskey bottles are not
usually beautiful, as Italian wine flasks so often are, but
What the Book Is About
13
slight changes in their proportions can make them so,
and introduce into the container something of the
poetic value which already exists for the contained.
Makers of perfumes try to make their bottles poetic as
well as their labels; sometimes they are admirably suc-
cessful, more successful with the bottles than with the
labels, perhaps. I think that much is gained by letting
"poetic" become a common term, rather than a snobbish
one. Some may object that in this way the word is vul-
garized. A word cannot be vulgarized except by being
misapplied.
"Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from imitation
of those whom we cannot resemble," said Dr. Johnson.
What is vulgarity in conduct is also vulgarity in language.
Nothing is vulgar because it is common. There is poetic
expression which is better or worse, wise or silly; there is
that which is first-hand, and that which is vulgarized or
made absurd by imitation of that which it cannot re-
semble. Let it be called bad poetry, but to say that prop-
erty which is bad is not poetry is to talk nonsense. One
says yes and another says no; one says a house is not a
house unless it is full of gadgets, and another says it is a
house if it has a roof and something to hold that up. Best
call both houses, and make distinctions within the class.
There is profit by being hard-headed in these matters,
and ultimately veracity will be the gainer. Let it be
clearly understood then that "prosaic" is to mean what
is for knowledge and utility, and that "poetic" has to do
with appreciation; that most things in this world lend
themselves to use, knowledge and appreciation; that as
dirt is matter in the wrong place, so vulgarity is appre-
ciation in the wrong place. There can be as much vul-
garity in the appreciation of Cézanne or Van Gogh as in
the appreciation of a perfume; there can be as much re-
corded in a painting hung in a museum as in an adver-
tisement for hosiery. The world today is much worried
14
about education, so here is an opening that I consider of
much importance. One can train by routine, but one
can educate only by awakening consciousness of things.
There is no better awakener of consciousness than classi-
fication that cuts across routine, and simple classifications
are best, such as I here propose. I believe that the sequel
will show that the scheme is really useful.
All vital appreciation has a certain simplicity, though
the simplification is not always immediate. Very few peo-
ple can appreciate the poetry of Paul Valéry. When a
man spends four years writing four hundred lines, it is
probable that one would have to spend a lot of
time reading them. But if one can never reach the stage
of simple appreciation of this poetry, one has never
reached the stage of complete appreciation. Even if un-
derstood in an explanatory way-that is, prosaically--
the poetic appreciation remains imperfect. Matisse spent
three years and more than a hundred sittings on a small
statue, which at the end looked to the average person
as though it might have been done in an afternoon. One
might explain to someone that this was not a sketch, as
it appeared to be, but a peculiarly penetrating study; and
the person, if docile, might understand what you were
trying to tell him, but if at the end he didn't see it as it
would appear if he had made the discovery for himself,
his appreciation is not complete. I had seen this figure
in plaster several times and admired it, but it was only
when I saw it in bronze that my enthusiasm flamed, and
I bought it.
When one fully realizes a successful work of art one
finds it to be a kind of just-so story. There is a place for
everything, and everything is in its place. The layman
cannot understand why the artist keeps on fiddling with
his picture when to all appearances it is done, even over-
done. Someone who visited Titian tells that he had a
lot of pictures standing against the wall of his studio, and
What the Book Is About
15
that he would examine them with a hostile eye, as
though they were his worst enemies. Degas was pro-
verbial for this everlasting dissatisfaction with his paint-
ings-the feeling that after all, even when most finished,
they were still not just-so. Henri Rouart, the great
French collector, had a picture considered the best of his
many pictures by Degas, that Degas was always wanting
to retouch. The story was that Rouart held it to the wall
with a padlock. I asked M. Rouart about this, and he
said the padlock was a fiction but that he kept his eye
on Degas when Degas left the house after his customary
dinner on Thursday, even though the picture was a little
large to be hidden under the painter's cape. It is not
everyone who can see well enough to comprehend the
artist's dissatisfaction with his work, but the nearer he
comes to this, the better he understands the work. Pos-
session is the rarely fulfilled goal of the creative process.
Masterpieces are not many.
This chapter, which is intended to tell what this book
is about, has been a rambling one. Other chapters will
develop the various themes a little more systematically,
but not very. I don't think this a subject for much system.
I once wrote a systematic book on esthetics in which all
my fondness for logical development was given the loose,
and I haven't found that most readers like that. When
I read it lately, I didn't like it very much myself. This
book will not err on that side, though it may on
the other.
16
2. The Two Crosses
The poetic and the prosaic have their place in a rich
complex of activities, and the purpose of this chapter is
so to place them. The most complicated of all forms of
living is what we call practice, and it is also the most
familiar. In consequence one does not commonly recog-
nize that it is the least simple. But in fact a little of every-
thing goes into it, and simplification comes when we
specialize. For usefulness of illustration, therefore, I be-
gin with a manufacturer. At the other end of the scale is
a state of being which is not far removed from nullity. It
is a condition familiar to many who on occasion have
looked out fixedly and vacantly for so long as almost to
lose consciousness, and return to life with a start. Be-
tween these extremes lies the series of states that has to
do specifically with knowing and appreciating, that is,
with science and art. To arrange all this in a scheme
may be helpful.
The everyday life in business and society is a compli-
cated affair to which no kind of mental activity is lack-
ing. A manufacturer of textiles has to adjust his finances
and overlook his machines. He must use intuition in
choosing his employees and picking designs for the cloths
to be woven. There are actions which are purely intel-
lectual, and others in which feeling predominates. He
may like a design, but know that it would be too expen-
sive to produce. What he would prefer may be some-
thing that he thinks the public would reject. There is a
The Two Crosses
17
crisscross of all things in his mind in the daily round of
complicated employments.
Such a man we call a practical man. Less “practical”
men specialize. The practical man is at one moment
essentially the man of science, not perhaps looking for
brand new solutions for hitherto unknown problems,
but dealing with situations that are particular and more
or less novel, that are technical situations of finance or
mechanics, and that must be treated analytically, which
is the method of science. At another moment he is the
artist, dealing with values, appreciating and working
with them. The scientist and the artist develop further
these specialties, though they do not cease entirely to
be "practical," for they still deal with an existent mate-
rial.
The scientist is a man who applies pure thought, that
is, logic, and if possible, mathematics, to the heteroge-
neous facts of nature. He is not a pure thinker, for he
lives in a mixed world. For him there remains always
the world of things which have appreciable qualities.
When the agricultural college at Berkeley was being
projected, a dirt farmer who offered his advice did not
see the need for such a school. He said, "When I want to
know about a soil I smell it, and taste it, and roll it be-
tween my fingers, and then I know all about it." Profes-
sor Hilgard, who was to be the director of the "Cow Col-
lege," assured him that the pupils would be taught to do
all this, and to analyze the soil as well. There are sci-
ences, like physics, where this kind of thing counts for
little; and others, like medicine, where it still counts for
a great deal.
For the artist there is something analogous. His pure
contemplation of values, his pure appreciation, is dis-
turbed by the multiplicity of the world before him.
People often think of the poet as simply having some-
18
:
thing organically growing in his soul. There is that
beautiful word “inspiration." They do not realize the
heterogeneity of his material, and the large amount of
critical discrimination needed to put it in order. When
we look at a landscape, with its harmony of mood, the
blending of all the elements that compose it, we do not
stop to think that those elements have for the most part
nothing to do with each other, that they belong together
only in the vision of the artist, and that to a closer ob-
server the heterogeneity is overwhelming.
Many, many years ago, it occurred to me to notice that
the elements of the human face were really ugly in the
disparity of their textures, and that one advantage of
art in representing them was the unity of the material.
I was quite obsessed by this for a while and was contin-
ually noticing it. Once I was in the Duomo in Sienna
with a young lady who was curious and liked to hear
things discussed. I was talking of this and said, “If you
notice the way your eyebrows are stuck into the skin, the
ugly contrast of hair and forehead, the glassy surface of
the eyes, the edges of the skin and lip-membrane," and
so on and so on. The young lady in question was an
international beauty, known in all the capitals of
Europe, with whom the Crown Prince of Germany, then
a very nice young boy, had just fallen violently in love;
who was used to being admired, praised, courted, and
who afterwards married a duke. She listened gravely to
my demonstration, even admired my single-mindedness,
and then turned smilingly to a friend with us and said,
"Did you ever in your life hear a man talk like that be-
fore?" The moment for the demonstration was not
well chosen, but it is true that the more closely things
are looked at, the more heterogeneous they appear.
For music the heterogeneity of the elements is less.
than for the other arts. These elements are tones, and
not, as for literature, noises made communicable. Words,
The Two Crosses
19
because they are only noises, will not stand close exami-
nation. I do not know how common it is for children to
do as I used to do when I was quite little-repeat a word
rapidly over and over again until it became a mere
sound, and I wondered how it could ever have come to
mean cat or dog or horse. One cannot completely disso-
ciate meanings and sounds. A Japanese said that the
most beautiful word in English was "cellardoor." This
had not occurred to me, and never would have, but as
soon as I heard this I remembered that "celadon,"
which is so much like it, had always seemed to me a word
of unusual beauty. Shelley and shelly do not sound alike,
nor do Abraham the Prophet and Abraham Lincoln. It
is even difficult for me to believe that "Cromwell, fling
away ambition" is the same name as the Cromwell that
goes with Oliver. Art deals with matters that do not
exist in a vacuum which permits them to have sharp and
unmistakable contours; nor does it, except to some ex-
tent for music, deal with a stuff that, like refined chemi-
cals, is pure. Art deals with matters that are quite other-
wise, ones which are not only heterogeneous but for
which intuition, appreciation, is obstructed-ones in
which it is possible by a somewhat misdirected attention
to break up the unity of the whole, to become analytic
and destructive.
Music as the purest of the arts suffers least from this,
and is the natural way of transition from art to mysti-
cism. The work of art, if successful, is always a whole. If
you take away from art its stuff, its material substance,
and in consequence its form, then what you have left is
the immaterial substance of the mystic experience. For
many mysticism means quite definitely religion, and no
doubt it has a religious flavor, but it need have no more
than this. Essentially it is the feeling of an ineffable
whole, in which nothing can be precisely expressed
because nothing can be precisely laid hold of. Its ana-
20
logue on the side of the intellect is logic, which today is
seen to be the same as pure mathematics, where every-
thing comes nearest to being laid hold of in its detailed
essentiality. Mysticism is the purest intuition, and pure
mathematics is the purest thinking. It is so purely think-
ing that some latter-day philosophers who came to
philosophy from mathematical physics think that God
may be the Absolute Mathematician.
The philosopher's God is perhaps necessarily what he
would be if he were God. The God of the intuitive,
appreciative mind is as different as possible from this.
The intellect is analytic and makes for differences, the
appreciative mind wants rather to wash out differences.
It accepts differences only as these are needed to make
up a varied whole. It is interested in what is alike, and is
constantly looking for and spontaneously finding analo-
gies. The scientific mind finds that things which are
apparently simple are really complicated, and it proceeds
to break them up. It finds wholes to be different and
only elements to be alike, at times even identical. The
appreciative mind neglects elements and finds wholes to
be similar. Mathematics is the absolute complexity
stated in general terms, and mysticism is the felt abso-
lute simplicity for which there are no terms. The whole
of mathematics fills many volumes; the expression of a
perfect mysticism will not admit of so much as a word.
"If what Jacob has to say is ineffable, Jacob [Boehme]
should not try to say it." Thus the downright Dr. John-
son. All expression of mysticism and also mystical poetry
fails to be pure enough symbol; the factual matter of
the symbol is commonly too intrusive. I know only one
mystical poem that is satisfactorily successful: The Ob-
scure Night of the Soul, by St. John of the Cross. In that
amazing poem, what is said counts for almost nothing,
but is sublimated into the purposed significance. The
artist does not intend to go so far as that, but in seeking
The Two Crosses
21
an incorruptible unity, he is always something of a
mystic. Unlike the mystic, he clings to the world of
things, though he transmutes it. He can never say the
whole of what he means, but the mystic cannot say at all
what he means; for his meaning is something singular
and indivisible, something absolute in its inexpressibil-
ity. The simple lover in Cyrano can only say “I love
you,” but the poet Cyrano can say the same thing in a
hundred elaborated ways.
Music is transitional to mysticism, because it makes no
particular statement, although its expression is so pene-
trating and so ample. The most purely poetic form of
poetry, the lyric, is most like music. If you don't quite
understand the meaning of, "What's oft been thought
but ne'er so well expressed," you get little from this line
of Pope. But I have noticed again and again in rereading
familiar lyric poems that I had never noticed the exact
meaning of this line or that. It is even probable that I
had on occasion noticed it, but the enduring impression
had been so little dependent on this meaning that it
had faded, leaving only the music and the generalized
meaning of the whole.
Science and art are clearly distinguished as knowing
and appreciating, and even more absolutely are logic
and mysticism as distinguishing and identifying, but
there are certain human interests that confound them in
certain ways. There are, in especial, philosophy and reli-
gion. Diagrammatically one might say that philosophy
is a cross between art and logic, and religion a cross be-
tween mysticism and science. Religion would like at
once to apprehend the world and to account for it, phi-
losophy to rationalize and picture it. The religious want
a mythology and salvation; only the theologian wants a
metaphysic. "Science suggests a cosmology and whatever
suggests a cosmology suggests a religion," says White-
head. For philosophy, logic is too empty and art too dis-
22
orderly, but a judicious mixture gives at least the ap-
pearance of an orderly world with plenty of stuff to
make it interesting. If we examine it closely and it is
not "our philosophy," it breaks down, the logic and
the intuition do not meet in a perfect joint; but for as
long as it holds, what I say applies. Of course these
comments are only impressionistic. There are many
kinds of religion and many kinds of philosophy, so many
that they all arouse suspicion, and nothing can be sum-
marily said about them that is more than an impression.
But here is enough of exactitude for my present pur-
poses.
When one has followed through the scheme of mental
activity from science to logic and from art to mysticism
one is fairly at an end. But one can perhaps speak of a
state beyond, where mind is not entirely in abeyance,
where there is something not yet death, but a kind of
suspension of conscious life. This we can call Nirvana,
and so offer something which lies at the opposite pole
from the multifarious activity of the practical life. Some
moments we all know when we come back with a jerk to
the realization that we have been momentarily away
from the world where things happen. So this limbo, if
not a state that can endure, is one which is not un-
familiar.
This chapter serves to situate the poetic and the pro-
saic in the general scheme of things. In the practical life
we are concerned with them without stopping to become
aware of them. In art and science we know that we are
dealing with them, and in mysticism and logic we are
dealing with their abstracted values. Beyond, there is
nothing except "absence of mind," and so we can stop
here and next take up Poetry and Prose as our central
theme.
Of Poetry and Prose
23
3. Of Poetry and Prose
Coleridge spoke well and wisely about poetry and prose,
distinguishing clearly between this pair and the other
pair of prose and verse. Nothing of importance, so far
as I know, has been said about them since. It is well
known that poetry is not concerned with factual matters,
and no one would today write a treatise on agriculture
or on the science of the atom in the form of a poem.
Something has of late been gleaned from psychoanalysis,
and we have made acquaintance with the unconscious,
but what we have learned from that does not bear par-
ticularly on this subject. Of course one comes on gener-
alizations on this matter, as on all others, but they are
for the most part the kind of generalizations made by
literary amateurs and not by scientific students. The de-
gree of accuracy possible when one deals with art does
not amount to science in any rigorous sense. What is
possible is rather intelligently discriminated description,
of which there are good examples in the books of A. C.
Barnes. In this book I am attempting nothing of that
kind, for which I have no special talent. My interest
is rather in ideas, ideas which seem to me significant
and stimulating, but which do not amount either to
science or philosophy. I believe in only one “ism” and
that is a rather harmless one, at least as I take it. I am a
pragmatist, by which I mean that the only sense I can
give to the word "truth" is that it is a state of belief, and
therefore a personal matter, and what cannot be taken
in a context of other things can't be talked about. There-
24
"
fore I take no interest in ultimate problems, and look
for no final solutions. I am satisfied if we can get on in a
promising direction. That is all that I want to do here.
No one has ever given a satisfactory definition of
poetry as distinguished from prose, and I don't think
that anyone ever will. It is like trying to distinguish
definitely a working man and a man of leisure. For social
purposes this is practicable, but if we try to be exact we
find that every man does some work, and every man has
some leisure. No exactness is possible in terms which are
terms of more or less. There is in poetry more of the
poetic than there is in prose and there is less of the
prosaic, but neither the one nor the other is pure. There-
fore I am not going to deal with prose and poetry at all,
but with the prosaic and the poetic. By prosaic I mean
having the quality of prose, and by poetic, of course,
having the quality of poetry. I want to find the most in-
telligible meaning that I can for these terms.
A fact familiar to everyone, a word used by everybody,
is for the present purpose brimful of instruction, and yet
I have never seen its significance noted. If it hadn't
taken me so long to hit upon this I should be surprised
that it had not been long since a commonplace. It is
obvious—that is to say, it lies right across our road—but
it is not evident. That is, it does not, as the French say,
jump to the eyes.
I refer to the familiar fact that we use the word com-
position in music as we do not use it for poetry and
painting. We call musical works compositions and their
authors composers, but we speak of composition in paint-
ing and poetry, and we call their makers painters and
poets. It is true that painters like Whistler have taken.
suggestions from music and have called their works com-
positions, opus 1, 2, 3, and so on, and that much modern
painting, and some writing, is explicitly composition,
but no general conclusions have, so far as I know, been
Of Poetry and Prose
25
drawn. I think that such conclusions can be usefully
drawn to make a broad classification.
That music is the purest of the arts needs no discus-
sion because this is not questioned. Some believe it to be
the greatest of the arts, but claims to importance are
made on every side as they are made for every profes-
sion and way of life. But that music is the purest of the
arts is undisputed. All the arts tend toward music. Archi-
tecture has been called frozen music. Tennyson told in a
letter how sometimes he reached the limits of poetical
expression and wanted to go over into music. Later I
shall tell how it served me for completing incomplete
landscape appreciations. If music is the purest of the
arts, and if composition is its special character, some im-
portant conclusions should follow.
Children like composition. This is shown both in
their drawings and in the gibberish in which they de-
light. When I was a small boy I heard my older high-
school brother crooning, "The limit of the product of a
constant and a variable is the product of the constant
and the limit of the variable." I got to be as fond of it as
I was of Captain Nemo's (Twenty Thousand Leagues
Under the Sea), "If you will confound statics and
dynamics, Professor, you will fall into serious error.”
I had no idea what either sentence meant, but I thought
them both wonderful, and when I believed someone to
be talking nonsense, I would often say, "If you will con-
found statics and dynamics, Professor, you will fall
into serious error."
In one class at school we had to learn by heart rules
of grammar. Two I have never forgotten, and have al-
ways enjoyed: “A noun is the name of anything” and “A
preposition is a word introducing a phrase modifier and
showing the relation in sense between its principal word
and the word modified." General Grant said that he
learned in school that a noun is the name of a thing.
26
Note the difference between these two definitions of a
noun, one full-based and massive in its composition, and
the other a mere statement with its loose-hanging end. I
might have remembered the second definition, but I
could never have enjoyed it. The definition of the
preposition is also admirable, with its swing and swirl,
its forward and backward movement. On a small scale it
is like Wordsworth's yew trees-"With intertwisted.
fibres serpentine, upcoiling and inveterately convolved."
What made all these sentences admirable was their form.
Two I understood and two I didn't, but all four seemed
important. In those that were understood, there was still
something more important than was defined. In short,
they had poetic value.
That prose and verse should in any way get mixed
with prose and poetry, though today everyone knows
that they are different, is unfortunate. How unrelated
they are can be shown statistically by reference to good
authorities. Henley published an excellent anthology of
lyric poetry, and was so meticulous as to exclude even
Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard as insufficiently
lyrical, yet he put in forty selections from the Bible. Of
these Logan Pearsall Smith, in his most discriminating
Treasury of English Prose, includes eight, and Quiller-
Couch in the Oxford Book of English Prose four. The
same words can apparently be taken in different ways;
that is, they can be read variously for various values.
My thesis is that there is no such thing as poetry or as
prose-that these words, if they are to be used with in-
telligible accuracy, should be given an adjectival and not
a nominal form; that in case this is done, the words be-
come far more practicable and far less annoying. We
need never ask of any work whether it is prose or poetry,
whether it has demerits of category and ought to be
otherwise because it is this or that kind of thing-for,
outside music, which is the purest poetry, we can have
Of Poetry and Prose
27
no pure poetry except nonsense. What we ordinarily call
nonsense is, however, not pure nonsense, but, as in Lear
and Lewis Carroll, nonsensical; pure nonsense, except
in refrains, is childish. There is in all art composition,
and generally there is something else. This other thing I
shall call construction.
Take architecture as convenient to demonstrate the
difference. The engineer constructs, and the architect
composes. Of course they don't have to be two different
persons. A building that was not constructed would not
stand; and if it was not composed, it would have no
value as art. Very often the only consideration of the
builder is to get as much usable space as possible, and so
proportions and rhythm are entirely neglected. Many
façades in Italy, compared with those in America, give
an impression of massiveness out of all relation to their
actual size, because the wall space, relative to the win-
dows, is so much greater, and so much better propor-
tioned. The lighting of the rooms is bad and space is
wasted: there is failure of constructive utility, but com-
position is effective.
In music (of which I know next to nothing) scales,
counterpoint, harmony, are, I suppose, constructive, and
melody, fugue, sonata and other forms are composition.
Literature is the most varied and complex of the arts,
for literature is words put to use, and words are the ha-
bitual instruments of communication. For constructive
purposes words are used literally as in science: their pur-
pose is simply to make sense. If one does not know what
the words in a statement only intended for information
mean, or if the words are not properly put together, one
does not get their constructive value. For constructive
purposes grammar and logic are important, even manda-
tory, but when composition is the main concern these
can be scattered to the winds. Allusiveness and ellipsis.
fight it out with grammar and logic. "The heart has its
28
reasons which the mind does not know," said Pascal. So
it is with composition and construction.
For the graphic arts, compositional deformation has
become a commonplace since Cézanne. The cubists pre-
tended to something more, to deform not only composi-
tion but construction also, to analyze forms. But there
was, in my opinion, only a pretense of rationality in
their processes, only pseudo-rationality. This will be
dealt with later. Construction in the graphic arts as well
as in the others, is a matter of literalness; it is a means
for telling what is presented, and not for what is
implied. For composition, construction is only the under-
pinning, the armature, the factual basis, which com-
position generally recognizes and often scorns.
To some extent this distinction is like that of content
and form, but it is by no means identical. It also, by be-
ing definitely connected with operations, with actions,
avoids the mystic vagueness of these consecrated but
hard-to-be-understood terms. As the demonstration goes
forward, it will be seen how very different is the mean-
ing of the words I use.
In science we avoid deformation. Things are taken as
though no interests were involved except the general in-
terest in finding out about things. If some particular is
selected for especial attention, it is dissected out from
the mass, but it does not deform the whole; one who is
studying the nervous tract tries to keep it structurally
related to the rest of the body. But a man who makes a
composition is a particular person. His composition ex-
presses his own interest, and this interest deforms the
picture. In so doing, he passes out of the realm of prose
into that of fiction, which is that of poetry.
Though composition is a particular thing, some gen-
eral statements can be made to help in ordering its com-
plexities. One can't be rigorous in these things, which
are capable of only vague definition, but one should
Of Poetry and Prose
29
make for continuity in thought so far as possible. First
get distinctions that are simple, and so far as possible
clear, and then show how widely they can be applied to
co-ordinate matters apparently different. If your distinc-
tions are not clear and valid, they will not help to bring
things to order, but will make only for confusion. In-
valid distinctions are as bad as invalid analogies, as
finding that everything is like everything else—an eva-
sion that appeals to many who do not like the pain of
exact thinking. This distinction between composition
and construction as equivalent to the distinction be-
tween the poetic and the prosaic is, I believe, valid, and
I think that it is far-reaching in its power to simplify and
illuminate. There are many grades and kinds of the
poetic, as I shall go on to show.
Take a baseball game. Structurally a motion picture
would record it. Everybody is just what he is and does
just what he does, but for the individual spectator this is
not at all the case. When the team for which he is root-
ing makes a play, when his particular hero hits a home
run, the whole field is distorted by his interests. It
doesn't make at all the same kind of a composition in
his mind as when the hated enemy has done the thing.
And when he yells himself hoarse, what is he doing but
singing a song of victory? It isn't very musical, nor is it
organized. When a college crowd gives their college yell
it is more so, when they sing their college song it is yet
more so, and one can imagine that they might have a
cheer leader who, like a Welsh bard, would improvise a
song of victory to which the crowd would sing in chorus.
Then there would be no doubt that the proceeding
was poetic.
The distortion of the scene in the mind of the specta-
tor would also be certified if the teams engaged a painter
to make a picture of a certain moment in the play. The
picture that would be "true" for one team would be
30
quite false for the other. Interest of the pictorial kind
always distorts. I am now looking out on hills a little
misty, yellow-greenish-brown, with a milky blue-gray
clouded sky beyond, growing more densely white in
quiet cumulous cloud, and then a pale-blue sky arching
upward to a blue a shade more ultramarine. Nearer is
a hill olive-covered, its green-browns dense, and nearer
yet single olive trees, whose black-green is nearly metal-
lic in luster. All this varied material is for me so amaz-
ingly one, that it is hard to believe that it was not made
to be so it is so "right." It is always so. The spectator at
the ball game does not think that he is composing his
private picture of the game; he does it as spontaneously
as I compose this landscape, which no one else who hap-
pens to look in that direction sees as I do.
No object of composition, that is, no work of art,
exists in the absence of a spectator. Of course this spec-
tator may be the artist himself. We commonly speak of a
book of poems, of poems being printed, but in literal
fact a poem cannot be printed. All that can be put in
print are indications of a poem that is to come into ex-
istence when a reader applies himself to it. One person
tries it and there comes out a poem; another tries it and
there is no such result. He says it doesn't scan. He says it
tells about the unemployed and how if they can't get
jobs they'll up and bust things. He says he's read that in
the papers a lot of times. Do you call that poetry? Of
course it isn't. It happened that the other man read
something different from what this man reads; the words.
were the same but with the same words he made a com-
position where this man reads merely matters of fact.
He reads the words structurally: it says so and so. The
other man put them together so as to mean more and
other. A composition is of necessity an interpretation,
while constructive reading is a mere record.
I have tried again and again the experiment of read-
Of Poetry and Prose
31
ing poems by the greatest poets and in various languages
in such a way that the accent falls on the merely factual,
and at once they cease to be poems or to sound like
poems. One doesn't change the place of a word, and one
doesn't destroy the meter. What one destroys is the com-
position. I have not only tried it for myself, I have tried
it on others, and always with the same effect. The meter
is an essentially structural thing, a kind of trellis on
which the composition is stretched, but the composition
makes the poem.
A really satisfactory demonstration of this can only be
made by reading aloud, and so the reader had best
make experiments for himself. However, something can
be suggested in print, as the following will show. In
Paradise Lost, Milton calls on the muse to sing (1) Of
man's first disobedience (2) and the fruits of that for
bidden tree (3) whose mortal taste brought death into
the world (4) and all our woe (5) with loss of Eden (6)
till one greater man restore us (7) and regain the bliss-
ful seat. If one reads this, noting the itemizing numbers,
though not pronouncing them (which would spoil the
meter) one will have turned the poem into an inventory
without having changed a word or modified the meter.
The poetic never has as its objective the statement of
a fact, however many facts it states. There is always ref-
erence to an interest that goes beyond that fact in the
observer's experience. The man who roots for the ball
team of his town is not doing it merely because it is that
team, or even because it is the team of his town, but in
the last analysis because it is his team. He exults in vic-
tory. A more impartial man may enjoy a good play, no
matter whose, because he exults in felicity of action.
Shelley didn't get excited because a little brown bird
flies into the air twittering its little note, but because
he had aspirations and longings and hopes that he could
concentrate on it. The lyric form of his poem has as its
32
$
basis the composition of a world of meanings around a
little bird that is attending to its own business. The
poets for the most part say everything about the swallow
except that it swallows, which is the real structural rea-
son for those marvelous gyrations which have caused it
to be central to so many compositions. Structurally man
is just one of the facts in the universe, but composition-
ally he is its center. His feelings, his desires, his hopes
cause him to arrange things so that he can get at least a
moment's satisfaction from these interests. If he gets
from them the satisfactions as though he had altered the
world of real things beyond the periphery of his inner
life, he is sentimentally, pathologically falsifying the
world, and confusing the realms of poetry and prose.
It is difficult to avoid this anthropomorphosis, perhaps
impossible to avoid it altogether, but this is what pro-
gressively happens as man becomes more civilized
through science. I rather think that when psychology has
become an effective science to the degree that physical
science is today, the function of art will be the creation
of beauty in a much more exclusive sense than it is to-
day. But much time and many revolutions will have oc-
curred before we come to that.
Just as what passes as poetry becomes prosaic when
factually taken, so what is mainly prose becomes poetic
when it becomes symbolic-with its terms taken in more
complex relations. Oratory is full of this. Webster's pero-
ration to his reply to Hayne is obviously poetical, but so
too is his simple request at the beginning that Foot's res-
olution be read. Foot's resolution was nothing to the
purpose, but the pause created by it before the storm
burst was, and that was composition. Of course the main
purpose of the speech was practical, that is, structural-
to bring about real changes in the world. But that has
been the purpose of much of the serious poetry both of
the past and present. The poet as a poet is not a moral-
Of Poetry and Prose
33
ist, but most important poets have been moralists as well,
and there is no good reason why those who are more in-
terested in morals than in poetry should not read them
for this. Really, verse is just a scheme of speech and can
serve prosaic purposes extremely well at times. Its mne-
monic function is familiar, for everyone knows that it
is easier to remember verse than prose. Therefore, when
reading and writing were less common than they are to-
day, it was usual to express in verse a lot of things—such
as advice to farmers-that today would be written down.
I read the other day quite a long bit of writing in verse
of a social political kind, which I thought gained by
being written in verse, as the short lines simplified and
emphasized the points the author was making. The
insistence that verse be, before all, poetic is a mere
prejudice, a convention, an arbitrary principle of classi-
fication.
The most prosaic utterances can become poetic in a
composition of meanings. The Italians say "quatt' quatt
otto" (four and four make eight) to mean that things
are what they are and will be what they will be. These
simple words are charged with the crack of doom. Their
structural meaning is arithmetical, but compositionally
their force lies in the contrast between that summary
condensation and the immensity of significance. This is
accentuated by cutting down the two syllables of “quat-
tro" to a single one. One cannot find a more emphatic
illustration of the difference between construction and
composition. "Prose" and "poetry" are nouns, and
"poetic" and "prosaic" are adjectives. Adjectives qualify
nouns. Poetry, it has often been said in one form or an-
other, is mostly a matter of nouns. There are many ways
to say this—as that poetry is pictorial, that it points at
things rather than describes them, that it is a calling
them names, and so on. But these particular names are
not essential; they are symbolic of values implicit in
34
them. Hamlet was a prince of Denmark. He might just
as well have been a prince of any other place or no
prince at all. Romeo and Juliet by any other name,
place or station, would have been as sweet. What is sig-
nificant is not the nominal but the adjectival, not the
particular but the quality. Poetry is adjectives expressed
in nouns, the abstract of values expressed in the concrete
of terms.
For purposes of prose, words mean exactly their literal
reference. We may call a horse an equine quadruped, or
use any other synonym, but the other term must be a
synonym. Shelley and Wordsworth were not so re-
stricted, and could call the skylark and the daisy any-
thing they pleased because the structural function of
these beings was merely to serve a compositional purpose
in another structure of moral significance that again was
never made explicit (as in a moral treatise), but was
full of implications. To develop this, some examples are
at hand.
The structural character of the personages in Romeo
and Juliet is characteristically firm. If Romeo and Juliet
had lived, they would have proved thoroughly compe-
tent members of society-Juliet exceptionally so. She
would have been a perfect chatelaine, and this definite-
ness of character is true of almost everyone in the play.
The nature of the language fits them. Despite its
rhetoric, the language is solidly factual; Shakespeare's
words, even in this early play, have the value of things.
A work of art is successful when structure and composi-
tion concur, when what is intended and what is said go
well together. The firmness of the figures and the firm-
ness of the language are perfectly concordant. Of course,
besides being successful, the play is interesting and splen-
did-though a work of art may be successful and still
not be interesting, be successful and not be a success.
Compare the realism of Romeo and Juliet with the
Of Poetry and Prose
35
diaphaneity of the Eve of St. Agnes. This also is a suc-
cessful work of art, also interesting, and in it Keats tells
the same story. There is a lover, a beloved maiden, the
rival houses, the feast, a nurse, a priest, but everything
else how different! When the lovers go out into the
storm, they disappear forever. Beyond the poem they
are not viable. There is a structure there, and a firm one,
but of moving figures of an exquisite but blended out-
line. The language is in perfect keeping, the language
of high poetry:
A casement high and triple-arched there was
All garlanded with carven imag'ries
Of fruit and flowers and bunches of knot-grass,
And diamonded with panes of quaint device,
Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes
As are the tiger-moth's deep-damasked wings
—and so on. The stuff and the language are admirably
concordant in the poem.
Take another case: the fairy tale and the ballad, the
poetry of the lowly. Everything is factually stated; the
unreal is realistic both as to material and language, and
again concordant, once more successful art.
There are many ways in which composition can fail in
relation to structure. For the critics of the Romantic
period, there was something very objectionable in the
eighteenth-century writers' use of artificial language
with naturalistic substance. In opposition to this, Words-
worth invented a dogma of common language as false as
what he opposed. Fortunately, in practice, he did like
most good artists, who are better in their work than in
their thinking about it; he wrote good poetry in spite of
his theories. In both of these cases, it was a matter of a
kind of medium. Often the failure is not of this sort, but
is a failure to express adequately what is intended. The
36
poetical anthologies are a choice of the successful com-
positions, those rare moments of perfection where a
structure of sense has come to life in the perfect selec-
tion of compositional means. Such perfection is rare, and
much critical attention is put upon the failure in great
matter or the failure to make it effective.
To some the notion of composition may seem insuffi-
ciently important for so lofty a theme as poetry, be-
cause they think of poetry only in terms of the final
emergent product. But such a person does not realize
sufficiently that the act of composition is definitively
creative, whether it happens spontaneously or with great
labor. The composer makes the choice of just those
values in his experience which are compositional rather
than structural, which are the things not with isolated
meanings but which lend themselves most readily to in-
terpenetration, to integration. Max Eastman insists on
the poetic value of certain words. To this I agree. He
says that “ruddy" is a poetic word. It is. It is also com-
positionally active. It means a ruddy apple, a ruddy
cheek. If one compares it with "red," one easily sees a
difference. Cheeks are red and so are apples. But equally
red are ochres and one end of the spectrum. “Ruddy”
chooses its associates as "red" does not. The great poeti-
cal interests demand compositional expression, while the
unpoetic, the calculable, the measurable things are satis-
fied with words that connect but do not compose.
Of the poetic substance Hazlitt has spoken forcibly.
He says, "Fear is poetry, hope is poetry, love is poetry,
hatred is poetry; contempt, jealousy, remorse, admira-
tion, wonder, pity, despair, or madness, all are poetry.”
Hazlitt's statement is extravagant, since the feelings are
not poetry, but simply its occasion. But they are specially
the occasion of it because they are qualitative, not spe-
cific and definable things. Action because of them may
MEZ.4
Of Poetry and Prose
37
be the stuff of poetry, but only appreciation of them
grounds poetry.
There is a rule of Latin grammar that smacks of the
poetical. It concerns words that take the dative, words
signifying favor, help, please, trust and their contraries;
also believe, persuade, command, obey, serve, resist,
envy, threaten, pardon, spare. The poetic quality of an
epigram, of Pope's couplets, of proverbs, lies in large
part in their persuasiveness. There is a rapture great or
little as they hit the mark. A hit, a palpable hit! For this
we forbear to inquire into the limitations of their truth.
The analytic and the measurable are not, as such, apt
for composition, but for construction, and are not poetic.
Neither is the instrumental. Milton wrote in Lycidas:
I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude
And with forced fingers rude
Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.
Quiller-Couch, in the Oxford Book of English Poetry, is
guilty of a comma after "rude." As rightly printed, shat-
tering with forced fingers is qualitative and poetical; the
offensive comma puts an emphasis on the instrumental.
One can imagine some teacher using this text asking the
awful question, "With what did Milton shatter the
leaves" and the docile pupil answering that it was “with
forced fingers rude." One could also imagine a modern
poet writing forced-finger-rudely-shattering, and that is
the right sense. Punctuating for the constructive is a
process of articulating, but for composition it is a means
for unity.
I have said that many bits of the Bible that Henley
wisely puts among lyrics, Pearsall Smith and Quiller-
Couch put among prose selections. Yet it is certain that
verse is more commonly recognized as poetic than prose
38
is. I have also said that anything, at least any complete
sentence, can be made poetic or prosaic according as we
stress the constructive or the compositional. The orator,
the preacher, the auctioneer, the lawyer addressing a
jury, would not read even an itemized list the way a
clerk or a statistician does. The latter wants to make the
items naked; the others want them to have implications,
meanings beyond what is said outright. The better they
succeed in the dressing of the mere constructional mate-
rial, the more this is transfigured and suffused with
values not its own. The speakers vary the additions as
they wish to persuade, command or threaten, to please
or horrify. They are variously and in various degrees
poetical. To be sure, their ultimate object is a practical
result, and in so far they are instrumental; but most
poets are also in their degree preachers, even the poets
of today. It happens strangely that the greatest of poets
has no "message," but Shakespeare is an exception.
among poets of importance. Disinterestedness is not at
all common.
Verse is the most generally applicable of all the means
to dispose people to a relatively small concern with what
is constructive. Bacon said, "Prosperity is the blessing of
the Old Testament, adversity is the blessing of the
New." I am no poet, but as I dwell on this sentence of
Bacon's I feel myself swelling with a poetic afflatus. But
on the other hand, as I think about it, I remember that
there are both earlier and later prophets, that the New
Testament also promises eventual bliss to those parted
on the right side. There is a measure of truth in it, but
it is not at once clear how much truth. If instead of a
sentence from Bacon, this had been a poem on that sub-
ject by Milton, I should have been less inclined to con-
sider the measure of this truth. Milton says that Paradise
Lost should justify the ways of God to man. I sometimes
find the arguments tedious, but I never stop to think
Of Poetry and Prose
39
whether they are valid or not, though Dr. Johnson did.
Verse has obvious compositional appeal, and disposes
the reader to confidence. It may satisfy him that it meant
more than he can find in it, or may even content him
with its suggestion of significance when he can find no
definite meaning.
Many years ago in the Woods Hole Laboratory mess
I heard a boy and girl talk about poetry. The boy said
how strange it was that some most beautiful poetry was
quite without meaning. The girl agreed, "Like Shelley's
lovely lines, 'Life like a dome of many-colored glass,
stains the white radiance of eternity.'" Prose most easily
impresses as compositional when it is markedly rhyth-
mic, like that of Sir Thomas Browne, Jeremy Taylor, De
Quincey, Ruskin, though some of the most perfect of all
prose which is full of poetic significance, like that of
Lamb and Emerson, is not so obviously rhythmical. But
in much prose writing a direction of attention to com-
positional values will bring out more than is at first ap-
parent. We are accustomed to reading prose without
this attention to all the words which is essential to appre-
ciation of composition. We skim off the meaning and are
satisfied with that. We take it for granted that the prose
writer wishes us to be concerned with what he talks
about, that he is referential, pointing away from the
form to the content, while what is written in verse has
an existential quality and is taken for its own sake. This
may not be the case at all. The writer of prose is at times
as much interested in the value of every word as the
verse writer, but few readers share this interest.
Emerson's essays can admirably illustrate the way the
prosaic and poetic interpenetrate. I find in reading him
that there are constant variations. Passages occur which
I spontaneously take as poetry, passages which may even
have been for Emerson quite literal. For him the ideal-
ism was fact, while for me it is only symbolic. But then I
40
come on sentences of shrewd criticism which I take fac-
tually. Often a passage first read is taken prosaically, it
tells something, but when the sense has become famil-
iar this is easily taken up into the immediacy of the
whole and acts mainly to contribute substance to a whole
whose value is poetical. It is often best at first to read a
difficult poem as though it were prose and gradually to
let its literal meaning become absorbed into the tissue of
the poetic whole which is veritably the poem.
It is a commonplace, not a very clever commonplace,
that art is at bottom emotional—that it is the expres-
sion of the emotions. This may have seemed satisfactory
once upon a time, when in despite of all the evidence,
man was thought to be the rational animal. Today that
illusion is lost. We accept now what people in practice
always knew that it is by emotional appeals that men
are stirred to action, that emotion is found almost every-
where except in pure logic. Since emotion is found every-
where, and not merely in art, it has little value as a
definition. But since in order to make emotion practi-
cally effective it must for the most part make people
think it is something else, the prose form which disguises
it is more effective. For propaganda therefore, in our
literate age, we do not use verse as it was used when
ears were more important than eyes. The famous asser-
tion of Fletcher of Saltoun that "if a man is permitted
to make all the ballads he need not care who made the
laws of the nation" had ceased to have any application
when newspapers took the place of ballads, though now
“the radio voice" and radio style are once more making
ears important. The intervening period has, however,
attuned us to prose propaganda and that is the form con-
tinued even for aural consumption.
A great advantage of this notion of the compositional
and the constructive is that we need never bother to de-
cide whether any work is poetry or prose. We have
Of Poetry and Prose
41
simply to read it and get out of it what we can or what
we are disposed to. We can stress this or that. If it have
not the values we desiderate, we need not object to
others finding what they want. Because we have de-
cided that it is some kind of thing, is no good reason to
accuse those who take it otherwise of taking it wrongly.
Wordsworth wrote in The Prelude one of the most in-
teresting of all autobiographies. Much of it is just prose
written in verse form, utterly blank verse with occa-
sional Miltonic frills; much of it is good passages of
magnificent, unquestionable poetry. The Prelude is a
great book; it is not certainly a great poem. If one ac-
cepts my position, one reads ahead for the interest of
whatever kind that is found, prosaic or poetic, and
makes no protest because what is written ought to be
this or that. The field is not dogmatically narrowed.
The artist is a man who claims to do as he likes. Some-
times he admits to limits, sometimes to very narrow lim-
its, but he insists that they be self-imposed, that they
be not legislation imposed by another. Critics like to
classify and have often been dictatorial. They have
taken what has been done as a rule for what should be
done. They like demarcations, and don't like to be dis-
turbed by an obligation to remove their frontier marks.
They often think that to be inevitable which is not in-
evitable at all. The poetic and the prosaic have both
always been present in all literature, and much is gained
by breaking through the conventions that ignore this.
In 1908 Minkovski said that "from this hour space of
itself and time of itself sink to mere shadows and only a
blend of the two retains an independent existence."
Minkovski could appeal to mathematics to justify what
he said. Without mathematics, I hold it reasonable to
say the same thing of the prosaic and the poetic. As we
read literature, whether in verse or prose form, and
move lightly or heavily through a sea of this common
42
quality, we experience now more, now less, of one or
the other value. Neither is ever entirely absent, though
either may for the time be ignored. Pure time becomes
timeless, pure space is empty even of space, and so it is
with prose and poetry.
4. Appreciation
It is not only obvious, it is known to all that art is not
primarily to give information or to serve practical ends.
It can be opposed to science and utility, but since emo-
tional conduct and rational conduct are no longer con-
trasted sharply, it is no longer useful to call art the ex-
pression of the emotions. As one needs a term for that
with which art is concerned, I propose the word appre-
ciation. It is a word quite free from misleading associa-
tions and is, I think, relevant.
The word is not to have a technical meaning. It will
be used in a sense that is sufficiently usual to make it
readily understood. It means taking things for values
found in them directly, and not as the result of analysis.
Analysis may, of course, be used for purposes of pre-
liminary study, to prepare for a more intimate acquaint-
ance; but appreciation always deals with wholes.
Though art depends on appreciations, appreciations
serve many other purposes than art. We use apprecia-
tions of people to judge capacities that are not suscepti-
ble to accurate testing. The ordinary person does very
little precise analysis, and uses almost everywhere in his
daily affairs the method of appreciation-sniffing, tast-
ing, pushing, pulling, feeling, comparing. His sensibili-
Appreciation
43
ties are trained by practice, and for a new situation he
feels the relevancies, rather than knowing them objec-
tively. So it is that most people more or less successfully
make their way through life.
Science and appreciation are often in competition
with each other, and the less there is of science the more
is the dependence on appreciation. Metal seekers,
dowsers, witch doctors who smelt out the cause of ills,
were all acting appreciatively. The family doctor, so
highly prized, whose diagnosis both physical and mental
was a sensitive perception rather than a systematic
analysis, was appreciative rather than scientific. Until re-
cently our best authorities for characterology were novel-
ists and not psychologists. Only in the last few years,
since Freud and Simon-Binet, has this begun to change.
It is the same with law. We still depend for judgment
in criminal and civil cases on the appreciations of juries
and judges. There are such things as lie detectors, and I
have heard that there is a hypnotic drug which makes it
possible to get truthful replies to questions. The time
will doubtless come when it will be seen that the serious
business of life should be settled by methods where the
concern for truth is primary, and should not be left to
duels between clever people whose object is the evasion
of truth. But in fact the interest in truth is as yet very
slight, and it will be long before it becomes much
greater.
Man is the most confused of all animals. He has cer、
tain impulses, tendencies, instincts, it is hard to say what
they had best be called, which can never come to action
in a pure state. Insects are born full grown as adults, and
other animals in varying degrees are independent of
education; but man is so largely made by it that we can
come to no exact idea of what he would be without it.
What concerns me here is that appreciations are deter-
mined by a lot of things entirely unrecognized, that men
44
feel that they are acting inevitably and in accordance
with their essential nature, thinking that they are pecul-
iarly themselves, when in fact they are merely conven-
tional, and expressing what their education, and not
anything essentially themselves, forces them to. Man
does not know what impels him, and so he easily takes
himself for granted and is to a comical degree the center
of the universe. I do not mean man as a species, but
the individual person. Of course he does not assert this
in so many words, but he thinks and acts as though it
were true.
Whene'er I take my walks abroad
How many poor I see,
What shall I render to my God
For all his gifts to me.
It is the pious Dr. Watts who speaks. Though a good
and charitable man, he has a peculiarly tender feeling
for himself. God is of course the God of the poor as well
as of Dr. Watts, but God's relation to the poor is not
exactly the same as it is to the pious doctor. If instead of
blessings it were afflictions that rained upon him, it
would be the same. He would always be the center of
things.
All men feel this way more or less, but the artist
makes of this peculiar position his stock in trade. His
business is not to inquire into the validity of his feelings.
but to exploit them, to paint the universe, or as much
of it as he can grasp, from the particular angle of his
private perspective. Dr. Watts, if accused of this personal
position, would have denied it, but the artist glories in
it. The artist tends to believe that his private vision is
insight, is the perception of truth in some way beyond
that of the average man. He is to some extent the seer or
prophet. Therefore the extravagant claims he so often
Appreciation
45
makes for his business. Nothing is more fantastic than
poets on poetry, of which Shelley's essay is a famous ex-
ample. "Poetry, and the principle of self, of which
money is the visible incarnation, are the God and Mam-
mon of the world. . . . Poetry is indeed something
divine. It is at once the center and circumference of
knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science
and that to which all science must be referred."
This notion of the poet's authority derives really
from the felt validity of instinct, but ignores the possi-
bility of error. Instinct is indeed infallible if the condi-
tions for its exercise are invariable. Instinct is like a
machine made to work under precisely given conditions.
There can be no failure if the conditions are in all re-
spects observed. If no sands get into the bearings, if the
materials fed into it are of the kind and the quality in-
tended, if the handling is right, the product is assured.
But the more complex the conditions become, the more
varied the uses, the more the machine is fallible.
What is true of the machine is true of the living thing.
Instinct will sufficiently serve the bee and the ant; it will
less competently serve man. The poet, like the reli-
giously inspired, does not reckon with these possibilities
of error. He sees as an individual and believes in himself
as an individual. As an individual he knows because he
appreciates. He is like the religious believer, a man of
faith who knows that God is on his side, that he must
be somehow right if he expresses himself—not right only
in his expression, but also in his insight.
The scientific temper is not adjusted to this mania of
egocentricity. One deals then with the individual as a
member of the class, as representing a kind. If God
really bore the same relation to everybody that he does
to me, he would be a great deal less interesting, for then
others would be as right as I am. If good or bad can be-
fall everybody on exactly the same conditions as they
46
befall myself, then God can with difficulty be given a
sympathetic character. One does not define this but one
feels it.
Some pious Catholic friends thought I ought to be
grateful to God because I had during the German occu-
pation and the fascist republic escaped all perils. I said
to them that there had been six million Jews mur-
dered. Was I to be grateful to God that only six million
had been murdered and not six million and one? I do
not see how anyone can have this quaint combination
of grateful humility and massive conceit without being
in some way profoundly stupid. People will not surren-
der their private claims. So there is a strange incapacity
to see that they are only people, that their feelings of
themselves (which are entirely legitimate for many
things) have gathered up facts of experience which hap-
pen in the indifferent world of things, and twisted them
into the fiber of themselves so that they come to believe
they are dealing with realities of the objective world.
They rely on their appreciations, which are naïvely
taken as descriptions of a real world.
Once upon a time, in the age of faith so much ex-
tolled by some, confusion between appreciation and
factual reality was more openly acceptable than it is to-
day. When St. Anselm was stopped on the coast of
France by a storm, and so prevented from hurrying on
to England, he asked himself why God should have done
this thing. He then remembered a vow to pray before a
certain shrine, and when he had done this the storm
abated. He was not concerned about the others who
were also held up by the storm, for-to his feelings, not,
of course, to his intellect-God was his God. When
someone, Mark Twain, I think, saw the levees burst be-
cause of the floods just when he had relapsed after a
boyhood conversion, he felt that it was because of him
Appreciation
47
that the catastrophe had come. Of course he later knew
that this was silly. For Anselm the objective fact never
came to be so separate from the personal feeling as it
did for the later man, who did not belong to the age of
faith. People are still innocent enough to believe that
there is some interposition serving their personal or
group fortunes though, of course, this must happen
somehow without disturbing the laws of nature. God
will look out for them or their factions or sects or coun-
try, though natural law still rules everything else.
This kind of feeling, so natural to the artist, whose
intuition assures him that he has his finger on the pulse
of Truth, has suffered a serious diminution of range
through science. Science accepts the reality of the in-
stincts and the validity of their impulses. Just as "the
wisdom of the body" is shown by its adjustments to main-
tain temperature and nutrition, so man acts to preserve
his life and his mind. But to a constantly greater extent
in contact with a diversified world, he comes to recognize
that what once upon a time was supposed to be known
was really imagined, and that the real facts are very dif-
ferent. From Galileo on, the physical world has more
and more become a world in which the poet feels less
perfectly at home. The poets painfully lamented the
intrusion of the scientist. Thus Keats:
Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture, she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air and gnomed mine,
Unweave the rainbow.
48
pe
And Wordsworth:
Physician art thou?-one all eyes,
Philosopher! a fingering slave,
One that would peep and botanize
Upon his mother's grave?
And to him he opposes one
with modest looks
And clad in homely russet brown.
He murmurs near the running brooks
A music sweeter than their own.
But he is weak, both man and boy,
Hath been an idler in the land;
Contented if he might enjoy
The things that others understand.
Wordsworth is not doing himself justice; he thought
that he really understood them a great deal better, that
the poet's understanding was real in some enormous
sense beyond that of the nasty physician and philoso-
pher-natural philosopher, of course.
It has now come to pass that the poet leaves to the
man of science the understanding of the physical world,
that here he is without pretensions. But he still tends to
believe that somehow his vision is something more than
a private matter. A private matter, yes, but which ought
to be valid for others also. After all, how does it come
about that anything can be so truly whole unless it be
also somehow true? He fails to see that what is whole
is self-contained, has its own validity, is a little cosmos
with its own constitution and laws, no matter how eccen-
tric it is to common experience-that it is of necessity
right and final because it is a cosmos. It is a creation, a
kind of reality, and it is justified because of this. Its re-
Appreciation
49
lations to the worlds outside itself, and therefore its
effectual worth to the larger world, cannot be judged
from the limited standpoint of its creator. For this there
is needed a view of the complex relations that connect
the individual experience of the artist with experiences
of others. It is this sort of thing that the philosophical
critic considers. Of course he cannot be a final judge be-
cause he too has his limited point of view, but at least
he has the merit, if at all competent, to see the problem
and to try for a more comprehensive solution.
The critic today has some advantage over the critic
of a former day, inasmuch as modern psychology has
since Freud become the psychology of the individual,
and has ceased to ape the physical sciences, which it
could not resemble. As yet it has done very little, but it
has done enough to make the problem clearer, to make
more certain that the poet's insight is not a guarantee of
truth, that the real function of the artist, his intrinsic
function, is to satisfy the need for totality, which he
serves by creating individual worlds, little cosmoses
which satisfy the hunger for wholeness as food satisfies
the body's need for restoration, though only the even-
tual process of assimilation can show what food was
really nourishing.
The total method of art is of necessity opposed to the
analysis of science. The wholes of art deny anything but
a suggestive analysis. The elements of which these
wholes are made resist analysis because they lack inde-
pendence. In the synthesis of science the units remain
unique through all the transformations. Hydrogen ele-
ments and oxygen elements put in certain relations to
each other result in water with its emergent properties,
which are different from those of the gases; but the
atoms in the new molecules do, for the scientist, retain
completely their identity. The philosopher of organism
may insist that this analysis of the scientist is not suffi-
50
cient, that really the atoms in a molecule, the electrons
in an atom, cannot be exactly what they are when not
so related, but the philosopher is not a scientist, rather
a kind of poet who deals with imponderables. The sci-
entist is concerned with what can be measured and
weighed; he cannot deal with imponderables.
The artist is he who deals with imponderables, and as
artist, specifically, with nothing else. In this he is differ-
ent not only from the scientist but also from the con-
structor. In construction every element occupies its par-
ticular place and is externally related to the other ele-
ments. In an arch, for instance, constructively taken, the
stones of the base support those next to them and so on
up to the keystone, but if we take the arch composition-
ally, the stones of the bases are related to every other
stone in the arch and to every particular point in them.
In a composition every element deforms its neighbor.
There is a kind of fusion, an interpenetration, an
action at a distance, and not merely a neighborhood re-
lation between the words of a poem or the colors of a
picture. One can often show that, if a word is changed
or a color altered, there is not merely a difference in
meaning but that everywhere within the present field of
attention there are changes which are utterly incapable
of analysis. When Chevreul, the famous French chemist
whose work started the impressionists on their color nov-
elties, showed a manufacturer that his failure to get
certain blacks was due to his neglect of complementaries,
he was pointing to something which could be analyzed.
But Cézanne, with his famous spots (on the hand in a
portrait) which were left blank because if he put in the
wrong thing the whole picture would go wrong, was con-
cerned with something that could not be analyzed. The
manufacturer wanted a certain black to be locally black
and not grayish. That could be stated in general terms.
But Cézanne wanted a complex whole to satisfy an in-
Appreciation
51
definable demand. If the right color was put in the
place, he could see that all was right, and if it was the
wrong color, he could see that all was wrong. A lot of
indefinable relations were involved.
Another excellent illustration occurs in the composi-
tion of Keats's most famous lines. He wrote:
And magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.
His first thought, "keelless," was imaginatively fine,
much finer than "perilous," but the movement was not
effective nor the volume of sound. If "keelless" had
been left, the lines might have seemed fine to those who
paused over the meaning, but they would not have been
the familiar lines that they have become. The inferiority
in meaning was more than compensated for by the
formal splendor caused by the included dactyl.
Though science and art are so essentially different,
they are both important to us, even though the kinds of
importance are not equally clear. The importance of
science of one kind or another is never questioned, not
even by the most barbarous of peoples. Everybody wants
to have things explained, even little children. There
have been many civilizations for which science meant a
sort of religious cosmology, and for these the distinction
of art and science was not at all definite. It was only
when science began to be rigorous, when measurements
commenced to be exact, and accurate verification was
demanded, that the split became irreconcilable. Then
art had to find another justification than that which be-
fore had been sufficient.
In our time there has come about a change such as
the world never before saw. The extension of scientific
range in application is equaled by its extension in the
popular consciousness. It is the first time in history that
52
everybody is actively aware of it. The resistance is
great. Science means the reign of law, and "free" people
don't like so much law. Art is, by contrast, a world of
freedom, where one can believe what one likes and can
be "proved" wrong only by the negligible critic. Every
time a so-called bankruptcy of science occurs, shouts of
joy and thanksgiving go up. The strait jacket that con-
fines the spirit is ripped, and man once more is free. The
latest instance is the Heisenberg indetermination, which
calls to question the legitimacy of science's pet child,
causality. The will is free, and anyone can believe any-
thing one likes. Of course all the real causalities that
man is faced with remain the same. Fire still burns and
ice still freezes. What the new doctrines mean is not easy
to understand, but there is none the less the pleasure of
release, the triumph over a remorseless enemy.
Despite these successes of the free spirit, art remains
something of an outsider. No one can question it as an
amusement, as an excitant, as a diversion for one's lei-
sure time. But the inclination of man today is not to be
satisfied with this conception. The feeling is that art has
some vital function, and that it should be taken seri-
ously, even in the universities. But when one reads
what is written in favor of this view, one generally finds
it unconvincing. My own impression is that the concept
of appreciation helps.
To appreciate one must apprehend, must in some
sense get hold of things massively. Man, like all animals,
wants food, shelter, sex-satisfaction; like all higher ani-
mals, he wants acquaintance with the world about him.
The satisfactions in appreciation are massive satisfac-
tions, and they belong essentially not to the satisfactions
of the higher but of the lower senses: taste, smell, touch,
the orgasmic. These are also the senses more especially
related to the instincts of animals.
To pass over from them to the higher senses, there
Appreciation
53
was necessary, I think, binocular vision-by which a
combination of spatial order and spatial unity was made
possible. Binocular vision is a means of isolation. It sepa-
rates things from their backgrounds, and so gives them
individual existence. In this way a composite visual field
and a consequent auditory one were made distinctly
available. Then by rhythmic movements dependent on
man's bipedal balance, in walk, developing into march
and dance (perhaps the earliest art expressions), this
massive whole came to be articulated, and the world of
appreciations became the world of art.
Appreciations remain basic, felt wholes of experience.
At an early period these wholes were little individual-
ized. They were tribal interests, religious and social, and
not much varied in kind. But with the development of
individuality, their range extended, till now anything is
included that anyone appreciates in any way. No matter
how far the appreciations are altered and developed by
increase of intellectual and spiritual interests, the basic
massive primitive qualities remain. Without them there
is neither rhythm nor form, nor the mysterious quality
of indeterminate great value.
There is, of course, a great difference between au-
thentic primary and conventional secondary apprecia-
tions. The respect and regard for the classics are mostly
of this second kind. People who have no direct contact
with these believe in them because they are told to do so
-not directly perhaps, but by all sorts of purposed and
incidental propaganda. What I am now considering is
the real kind, which for some has as its object a Bach, a
Holbein or a Donne, and for others the crassest of best
sellers. Admitting that the satisfaction in appreciation is
deep-seated, we may still ask what there is in art that an-
swers to this demand. To illustrate the intensity of this
feeling for art I shall give an example.
I once wanted to buy a Renoir which was costly, and
54
for this purpose I sold other pictures. I had a little Re-
noir, a nude woman standing knee deep in water with
her arms over her head. A certain collector liked it and
had asked me to let him know if I ever wished to get rid
of it. So I wrote him saying that I needed a certain sum,
and if he was ready to pay that much I would sell the
picture. There had been something in the movement of
one arm that disturbed the whole, but as I looked at the
picture after I had written the letter, the arm suddenly
came right. I was in a panic. Before me was an extraor-
dinary picture that I had not yet seen. To lose it now
would be a disaster. Much as I wanted the other picture,
which was much finer, I couldn't face the absence of this
one. I sent a cable message, saying that the offer in the
letter was withdrawn. Only after some weeks, when I had
fully assimilated the picture in its new aspect, were nego-
tiations renewed, and eventually I did get the other one.
Why this so serious reaction to a little painting of
a woman standing in the water with her arms over her
head only when it came just right?
I think this is due in large part to the completion, the
rounding out of certain movements started within. These
meet something outside which seems to make the experi-
ence absolute. The most obvious instance is sex. Sex is
the most common occasion of art, either expressly or by
implication, and the sexual object is for most people the
one unquestionable beauty. The internal organic im-
pulse to seek its object is here the strongest, and that
object is the most enticing. Man and woman become one
flesh even before they are in one another's arms.
What is true of sex is true for all sensory objects which
are desired, and this can be extended also to ideas-for
those to whom ideas have sufficient reality. If men and
women came together too spontaneously they would not
have occasion to find beauty in each other, but the pre-
liminary period of courtship gives this opportunity. So it
Appreciation
55
is with other things, which must be seen, handled; tasted,
before being finally utilized. For most people the interest
in beauty is not strong enough as an impulse from
within to become operative. It needs the stimulus of an
object already prepared to wake them up. The artist is
specifically the person who has this impulse. He also is
the one who enlarges to the utmost the range of com-
pletions. His attention goes out to things that the com-
mon person finds without attraction of any kind. The
important thing in all this is that the object should be
at once absorbed and remain self-existent, like the be-
loved man or woman. When objects so assimilated still
remain separate existences, still have existential char-
acter-though only in memory, as food once eaten and
digested can still be enjoyed-we are in the world of art,
the world of so-called esthetics.
Beauty can in general be conceived in terms of this
kind. Beauty, I should say, is the extension of the or-
ganic over the heterogeneous, or-reversed-the inte-
gration of the heterogeneous into the organic. This
sounds a bit portentous, but simply means that the world
of fact is complex and various, and that appreciation
orders it in response to an organic demand on our part.
What is already organic is most easily apprehended as
beautiful: men, animals, birds, flowers, plants; then
things that are pseudo-organic, like crystals and geo-
metric forms; then the picturesque; and finally every-
thing which an imaginative effort can subdue to our
organic requirements.
There is also a kind of art which concerns objects hav-
ing less of this existential value. One might call it the art
of environment, the art which one does not focally at-
tend to, but which one feels as making for an ambient
delight. Decorative art is of this kind. I once visited a
Frenchman who had an important collection of Renoirs.
His living room was charming, and as we sat over a cup
56
of tea, I noticed that a clock on the mantelpiece was very
fine. This led me to look more particularly at other
things, and I saw that everything was good. He told me
how this had happened.
He was a mining engineer who came home with a for-
tune. He was a widower, and for distraction he furnished
his apartment with slow and serious care. He spent sev-
eral years in this way, insisting that everything should
be good and should enter into the scheme of the whole.
Then he thought he ought to have some pictures. He
knew nothing about pictures but he knew Renoir, had
known him since they were children. So he went to Re-
noir for pictures and advice. He got more and more Re-
noirs, for it is a peculiarity of Renoir's pictures that they
enhance each other, and make decorative wholes. His
pictures, like his furniture, were individually good and
fitted in their places. One room whose walls were cov-
ered with a yellow silk was difficult, and for a while he
thought he would have to change the walls, but he fi-
nally found that a certain type of Renoir went admirably
on it. If I had not noticed the clock while we were hav-
ing tea, I might just have looked at the pictures and have
missed this interesting adventure.
Works of art happen because some people have a gift
for expressing their appreciations in a communicable
form, and in consequence of that gift, intensify and ex-
tend the range of their attention. It is quite natural that
it should come to pass that they fix their appreciations
on the work itself rather than on anything else, and so
we come to have works of art for art's sake, which might
be called the art of immediacy, art which does not medi-
ate between the artist and the world of events, but stops
short at itself. This was the art which people for a while
thought was to be the art for all those of a higher cul-
ture, but things are turning out a little differently.
Propaganda was considered beneath the level of such
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57
people, though most of the great art of all times has been
more or less propaganda. Homer was the laureate of a
warrior class; Dante, Milton, Cervantes, Dickens, Donne,
Blake, Virgil, Horace-all were propagandists. Religious.
painting was propaganda. The appreciations of the artist
are for the most part like those of other people; it is only
his capacity to explore, intensify and express his appre-
ciations that make him different. For a while it seemed
as though there was nothing more of importance for him
to say. Then came the present moment, the moment of
revolution. Men had felt themselves to be at the end of
an epoch, and then discovered that this was only half a
truth-that they are also at the beginning of an epoch.
A beginning is more encouraging than an end, and it is
possible that propaganda will have a new lease of life.
Propaganda can outlive its period of effectiveness as
such. Spenser wrote the Faerie Queene as a moral dis-
course in allegorical form. Hazlitt said that “the allegory
won't bite you." He was not altogether right, for at times
the allegory jumps at you ferociously with a moral plati-
tude, but he was substantially right.
No one today reads Spenser for the moral. But some
propaganda is almost eternal-like the fables and the
parables of Jesus-and there are characters and events
in history, like Caesar and Alexander and Napoleon,
the origins of Christianity and the French Revolution,
which continually come to life for their propagandistic
value. There is other propaganda so short-lived that the
occasion is soon forgotten. Occasional poems live beyond
their occasion. A well-known Italian historian says that
one object of the poems of Horace was to advertise Ital-
ian wines when Greek wines were the fashion. I don't
know whether this is true, but we all know that when
we read Horace we do not notice this.
Propaganda, what one in art wishes to induce, leads
naturally to the "art of one's time." Since there are only
58
a few original people in the world, people with funda-
mentally fresh appreciations and who have their total
trend of expression determined by their personal experi-
ence, there is more uniformity than one might expect, in
view of the large number who think they have something
to say. Art is mostly a game of "follow the leader” even
when one pretends that one doesn't. There are periods
of extreme stylistic uniformity, and periods so little so
that there seems to be more originality than is real.
Such is the Jazz Age. It was fortunate in having,
among others, Freud to shake up the human insides, and
Cézanne to shake up the program of painting. Cézanne
did two things; he emphasized color and he simplified
forms. There were a lot of close Cézanne imitators, of
course, but they were the dullest of the dull. Cézanne,
making his appeal by purely compositional qualities, and
with a negligible illustrative interest, is satisfying only
when the effort is successful. Cézanne had the vision and
the patience to pull the thing off, completely now and
then, approximately more often.
No one else could do it at all. Therefore the Cézan-
nesque tradition could be made effective only by disag
gregation, some using this bit and some that, but leaving
the whole high and dry. The world received shock after
shock as the disaggregation went on, and finally was
afraid to hazard a judgment. They had to say to the artist,
"Do as you please," the famous slogan of Rabelais' Ab-
bey of Thélème-and the artist did in fact as he pleased.
The readiness of the public to see was pathetic. I once
asked a young woman in charge of a museum what she
saw in a certain Cézanne which was a hopeless failure,
abandoned by the artist when the mess was complete.
She said that at first she saw nothing, but by dint of look-
ing she had come to see something. I asked whether she
thought she would have been able to see anything if she
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59
had not known it was a Cézanne, and she said she
thought she would not.
That is the sort of thing that happens when art has
been discovered. Someone has to "discover" it if it is a
new kind, and then propaganda, which propagates ap-
preciation, is required to make others come to the
scratch. I've done some discovering and some propa-
ganda, and know how it happens. One man who came to
my place in Paris told me that the only Cézannes he
cared for were those he saw there. Certainly they were
not the best Cézannes, but the place was charged with
the atmosphere of propaganda, and he succumbed.
There are individual appreciations and mass apprecia-
tions. Mass appreciations of what the individual couldn't
possibly see for himself are rather of the nature of taste
than of real appreciation. To be a man of good taste is
for the most part to be one subdued to an environment
from which one takes color, and if one has been rightly
brought up one sees and does the contemporary right
thing. As I grew up rather Topsy-like, I was often
amazed to see how people in good society showed such
excellent judgment when I knew that as individuals they
were incapable of any judgment at all in such matters.
They knew the right thing, because for them the right
thing was not a particular thing, but a kind of thing, and
they were conditioned to the kind. To be conditioned to
particular appreciations is impossible, because that which
is decisive is particular, a whole which differs from
others in ways that can be recognized only in the whole
—in short, an individual experience, and not an experi-
ence of a kind.
What is called the art of the time is not generally what
the people of the time appreciate. The art of the time is
paradoxically that which only a tiny minority at the mo-
ment consider as such, and which even they can't be sure
60
is really the art of the time, that which will be so con-
sidered in retrospect. What is taken to be such may be
mere scum and froth. Practically, the notion is not of
much value, except to the historian. In one's own time
the important thing is to know what counts vitally in
one's experience, to use the superior people as stimulants
to one's attention, but not as authorities, which they
aren't. They are just a little herd who have their own
herd leaders, a bit more perceptive than the leaders of
the bigger herds, but not any more decisive.
What I here say is peculiarly true of today. At no pre-
vious time was so much extravagance admissible and
such eccentricity permissible. We are in so many ways at
the breakdown of a civilization of old and established
standing, and so vaguely in view of what is to succeed it,
that the future is any man's guess. Therefore one can
choose one's costume, and do as one pleases. Everything
is legitimate, provided there is a man of talent to try it
―for in art there are no known laws, but only conven-
tions. And for the moment, there is no convention ex-
cept that there shall be none. The only criticism that
could be brought against anyone is that he has not suc-
ceeded in doing what he has tried to do. But the critic
may in any case be wrong, because the painter, the poet,
the musician or the architect may be trying to do some-
thing different from what the critic decides.
There will probably be a future, despite the atomic
bomb. It is not going to arrive tomorrow or the day
after; the interim between the present and the future is
going to be long and troubled. But I have some impres-
sions on the subject, and as they help to explain what I
mean by appreciation, they can serve as a tail to this
chapter.
The unconscious has come to be one of the contem-
porary commonplaces. It is well known that the word
refers to two things that are quite different-the prim-
Appreciation
61
+
itive unconscious, which means the impulses that put in
operation our individual and social life, and the re-
pressed unconscious, made up of things once known but
not effectively available. Two purposes of the human
animal have always been recognized as primary, self-
preservation and sociality. Man defends himself from at-
tack, and man cannot live alone. He must assure his
safety, and he needs the companionship of the other sex
and also of other persons.
The lower animals defend themselves, defend their
families, and when they are tribal-defend their kind.
They also defend their food, and sometimes their feeding
places, but that is probably all. The range of man's de-
fensiveness is enormously larger. He defends not only
the present but also the past, on which he relies, and
the future, for which he hopes. And because of his re-
pressions, he defends a lot of things that he doesn't even
think of defending. To appreciate is to enter into sym-
pathetic contact with things, and every act of defense is
a limitation of one's sympathy. It makes of appreciations
pseudo-appreciations.
It is, of course, possible to approve in judgment what
one appreciates only by convention. The intelligent
man who can recognize the right thing may be, and
often is, a man who is tightly bottled up in his resist-
ances; his catholic acceptances, which generally exclude
the eccentric and in consequence often the important,
leave him unchanged. Outside a narrow range of vital
experience, he is no more than a superior man of taste.
The large possibilities of genuine appreciation are
both limited by his resistances and canalized by them.
The more one is on the defensive, the less widely can
one appreciate. One sniffs heresies and secret offensives.
One is restricted to what will pass the "censor." Of
course one can still be amiably receptive to lots of things,
provided they keep their distance; but this attitude be-
62
longs to the realm of good manners rather than to that
of vital culture.
The more one reduces one's resistances, the more one
releases things from the repressions of the unconscious.
-the larger will be the range of one's appreciations. I
am convinced that Shakespeare's vast range of apprecia-
tions was in part a result of his freedom from the tyranny
of defense. It is a quality strikingly in evidence in his
sonnets. There is in his plaints an almost open imper-
sonality, an objectiveness which is unique. His humility
is also one of simple acceptance. He is not on the defen-
sive about anything: religion, politics, ethics. Bunyan, or
some other equally moral person, said of a man in the
stocks, "There but for the mercy of God sits John Bun-
yan." Shakespeare might have said of even his absurdest
character, "There but because I can see round him sits
William Shakespeare." He was too freely superior to
need to feel superior.
The world is full of men who are limited to their own
way of seeing things, and who can see no vital possibil-
ities elsewhere. They know what is right, what ought to
be, because they see clearly, and feel that they see im-
partially. Of course this is an utter illusion. They read
arguments from the other side, and their intelligence
may determine them to say that there is something in it
-but with that the matter ends. Even if the reasoning
seems convincing, it makes no difference. They are like
the Jumping Frog of Calaveras; they are natively com-
petent to jump, but are held in place by their resistances,
as the frog was held in place by a handful of birdshot.
Nothing can change them unless it comes with the devas-
tating force of the new bomb. Outside what they already
accept, the world is-in terms of appreciation-merely a
play world, and when they are interested in some kind
of art not their own, it is merely an elegant amusement.
To amuse, to entertain, to please, is, of course, an im-
Appreciation
63
portant function of appreciation. The scientist not only
practices science but also appreciates it; the business man
appreciates business; the politician appreciates political
manipulation. One appreciates any activity for which
one is competent. There is no more rich and satisfying
pleasure than the feeling of an understanding apprecia-
tion. This is the special value of escapist literature, even
the worst. These are things easy to understand, and easy
to appreciate, as they are just objectified satisfactions
to elementary demands, without involving the reality
which would make them difficult with opposing compli-
cations. I remember that when, as a child, I read in fairy
tales of "their living happily ever after," I felt that to
live happily ever after, all in a minute, was very tedious.
Such skepticism did not, of course, belong there, but such
skepticism does belong to a more serious criticism of ap-
preciation and art.
Everyone knows that the world is in a bad way, that
we are at the end of the road which has led from the be-
ginning of organized society to us, and that we must now
take a turning. Either the new way must go through the
battlefield of civil war or through the ways of a more
comprehensive appreciation. As long as people keep to
their repressions and resistances, they will refuse to ap-
preciate each other, and will fight desperately for their
own. They have an animal and a human right to their
own, but as long as that own is made up in part of
repressions which determine unchangeable attitudes-
religious, social, proprietary-and which ignore the sim-
ilar unchangeable attitudes of others, there is no way
out except to fight it out.
A new age can begin with Freud; though, of course,
with him it only begins. It is often complained that this
is an age of irrationality, and some dear people look back
regretfully to the ages of faith and rationality. They ig-
nore that such rationality could exist only because there
64
I
was a sufficiently widespread superstitious basis of con-
viction. The present Pope in November, 1944, addressing
a group of Polish soldiers, reminded them that Sigis-
mund III won the battle of Choçim the very day that the
head of the Blessed Stanislaus, for which he had sent to
Rome, crossed the frontiers of Poland. Post hoc, propter
hoc. A skeptic asks what Stanislaus was doing when Po-
land was cut to pieces by its neighbors, and when the
Nazis murdered millions of Poles, but those who belong
to the ages of faith, though they may argue acutely, do
not ask embarrassing questions.
When I was young I once met on the train three young
priests, who were on their way to America after having
finished their studies in Rome. We soon got into discus-
sions on philosophy. They put forth their basic affirma-
tions. I declined to accept them. They varied the state-
ment somewhat, but I continued recalcitrant.
"But how can we argue if you don't accept something?"
they asked.
I said, “You want to argue, and I want to investigate.
There is an essential difference."
Faith and rationality go well together, so long as your
rationality does not question your grounds of faith. A
future age of faith will have to be different from those of
the past. It will have to be grounded in a human nature
cleansed of confusion and contradiction. The dark cel-
lars must be opened to the light, and then one will see to
build both society and art on something better than the
rubbish on which creeds and much art, especially that
of the surrealists, would raise their edifices.
On Reading Poetry and Seeing Pictures 65
5. On Reading Poetry and Seeing Pictures
One finds poetry nowhere if there is no poetry within,
said Joubert. There is a stanza in a poem by Campion,
not ostensibly about the reading of poetry, which ad-
mirably puts the matter:
What harvest half so sweet is
As still to reap the kisses
Grown ripe in sowing?
And straight to be receiver
Of that which thou art giver,
Rich in bestowing?
One has to match the text with that which meets the
text if the text is to amount to much. “Anch' io sono pit-
tore," "I too am a painter," said Correggio when he saw
the works of Michelangelo. Correggio could do more
than feel a response to the creative activity whose aura
came to him from those colossal things; he actually could
do something of his own which, if not Michelangelesque,
was at least Correggiesque. Most of us cannot, but where
this resonance of the "I too am an artist" is completely
lacking, there is at least imperfect appreciation.
I can illustrate with a difference in my reactions to the
sonnets of Shakespeare and to those in the House of
Life of Rossetti. With the sonnets of Shakespeare I feel
a complete accord. Even those which are full of conceits
and which I have to puzzle out, I can meet—if not half-
way, at least well along on the road. But many of Ros-
66
setti's, though I may understand them, are foreign to me.
If I read and reread them often enough, I may get into
tune with them, though at the expense of getting a little
out of tune with myself. My appreciation of them does
not seem intimately mine. However distant a cousin I
may be, I feel myself to be of the family of Shakespeare,
while in Rossetti I meet an interesting stranger.
Shakespeare has certainly the largest family of anyone
since Homer. Almost everybody at all sensitive to liter-
ature is related to him. It happened once, while talking
with the late Giorgiana King of Bryn Mawr, that I hes-
itated in something I was saying as though doubtful
whether she understood. She said, "That's all right, we
belong to the same generation and talk the same
language." Though words may be obsolete and meanings
sometimes obscure, yet in a more essential sense we talk
the language of Shakespeare and he talks ours. Shake-
speare I can take neat; I can take him as he stands. But
much of Rossetti I must pause upon; I must re-create
him by a sort of translation. His language has not the
universality of Shakespeare's, but is, so to speak, a dialect.
His creations do not, like Shakespeare's, induce a respon-
sive re-creation in every man's mind, but only in those
of his own parish.
Creation and re-creation, these are the motives run-
ning through this chapter on reading poetry and seeing
pictures. Of course these apply to much besides poetry
and painting, but my knowledge of other arts is less. I
have long been hard of hearing, and music is for me a
reverberation from the past-except in so far as I can
murmur it to myself, an obviously inadequate rendering
of the masterpieces. "Heard melodies are sweet but those
unheard are sweeter" may apply to a Mozart, but not to
ordinary beings. Anyway, we are to be concerned with
creation and re-creation, and the stuff to work on will
be mostly literature and painting.
On Reading Poetry and Seeing Pictures
· 67
The question why we should be so much in earnest
about art and poetry is one that is bound to recur, for it
is really a strange thing. We know why we are in earnest
about science, because everyone who is not dull wants to
know why things happen; he wants a reason for things
even though he is for the most part satisfied with flimsy
and foolish reasons. We know why people are in earnest
about religion, because they are afraid to stand alone in
a universe that is as hostile as ours seems to be. The
greater the peril the greater the religious interest. The
aristocracy, though officially conservative, are more com-
monly, in their private lives, freethinkers than people
who are less secure. Increases in church membership and
church attendance measure the failures of civilization.
One can easily understand why gambling and games
are taken seriously, because people in the mass are pas-
sionately excited by them. So with the theatre and the
novel, which are forms of vicarious experience for that
which most people cannot get out of life itself. And music
is for all the world-savage and civilized, peasant and
lord.
Poetry and pictures are not like these things. Every-
body likes pictures, but pictures of something. Everyone
likes jingly verses set to music, but only a few people
read poetry with the kind of interest that they show for
all the things already mentioned. People commonly run
through the great galleries of the world in less time than
they spend at the theatre in one evening, and they do
not often come back. Millionaires who are perfectly in-
different to pictures spend millions on collecting them,
and states consider them as among their most precious
possessions. Henry McBride told me that the proprietor
of the New York Sun, who left a large fortune to the
Metropolitan Museum, in his monthly meetings with
the department editors of his paper had something to say
68
to everyone except the art editor. The motive that leads
to these abnormal actions must be a strong one.
Tradition plays a great part. Pictures, statues, verses-
all were once much more intimately related to religion,
to the state and to social ritual, than they are today. The
older poetry was concerned with important interests,
love, glory, conduct. Montaigne quotes the Latin poets
on every page, and almost always the reference is a moral
one. The wisdom of the older world was in large part
contained in its verse, and the older criticism always in-
sisted on this role of poetry.
This is no longer true for us, and that is one of the
reasons why poets today are less concerned than they
used to be to make themselves intelligible to the reader.
Communication is subordinated to their private interests,
and they expect the reader to take their poetry as one
of his private interests also. Of course, not all are like
this, but many are. Poetry as an art has come to be more
sophisticated than it ever was, and therefore there is
doubly a question why it should be considered impor-
tant.
What counts for much is a fetishism of the creative
absolute. Creation is doubtless the most wonderful thing
in human experience; to see something come to life is to
live in the world of the apparently miraculous. I know
nothing more awe-inspiring than to watch in a micro-
scope an egg begin its cleavage and continue its unfold-
ing. The miracle of pseudo-creation is the stock in trade
of the fakir and the magician. Art is the symbol of crea-
tiveness, detached from utility, existing in its essentiality.
The work of art is the ideally complete. Stuffed birds
and beasts are gathered into museums; industrial mu-
seums gather utensils, textiles, machines. But these are
all the same things under conditions other than their
natural states. That is not the case with works of art.
Each one of them is just itself—something absolute, total,
On Reading Poetry and Seeing Pictures
69
complete, final. They are treasured, almost worshiped,
by those who are really quite indifferent to them. The
very idea of them is important. No one thinks of the
purpose they may have served for religion or national
pride; they are just works of art standing for themselves,
demanding attention because they are just that which
they are.
What is true of art is true of poetry. People buy vol-
umes of poetry, anthologies and collected works, in quan-
tities out of all proportion to what they read. Carlyle
said he never bought a book that he did not read from
cover to cover, but most people are not like that. Even
prose writers, when they are "Classics," share in this
adoration. "Classics" one might almost define entirely in
reference to their authors' names. The difference in price
between a picture that is anonymous and the same pic-
ture when some authority has given it an honored parent
is enormous.
The Venus of Giorgione illustrates this, for it was long
neglected as a copy by Sassoferrato after Titian, and came
to reputation only when Morelli proved it to be a Gior-
gione. The Great Books are not in the minds of the
public what Emerson said they were: things produced
in libraries by young men, considered for the most part
as rather impudent young men by their respectable con-
temporaries. To most people philosophers are wise old
men, and scientists also, though in fact the production of
anything important in the field of thought by elderly
persons is rare. Ostwald, the famous chemist, considered
compulsory military training the grave of genius, because
its routine killed what was budding in the adolescent
mind. The sons and daughters of revolutionaries are
notoriously conservative, and often it is so with the old
age of the adventurous soul "that broke into the silent
seas beyond the farthest Hebrides." What he did in
youth has become a vested interest.
70
The papers often speak of the great loss sustained by
the country at the death of an old man who, fifty years
before, had done something interesting. They do not
realize what Stefan Zweig calls to our attention—that
while the work remains young, the creator of it grows
old. There is one thing more than another worthy of
reverence, and that is the creative spirit. But it is better
when this is reverenced without fetishism and without
auras. The creative spirit is the only source of what is
freshly important, but it can miscarry and produce mon-
sters as well as shapely things. Even it is not an ab-
solute good, as cancers painfully prove.
Nor is interest in a work of art always of the re-crea-
tive kind. There is an important difference between the
appreciation and the estimation of art. A doctor diag-
noses a patient impartially, because it is his purpose to
do something for the man. So a professional critic at-
tempts to deal with literature and art in order to give
the public a kind of prescription, telling them what is
good for them. He has a word to say on everything, how-
ever great or little may be his real appreciations. In
principle he is a kind of judge. The individual reader is
not concerned with anything so impersonal. Not every
patient absorbs all the drugs the doctor prescribes. So,
in matters of appreciation also, man has his idiosyncra-
sies, his limited capacities, his allergies, his needs. Some-
times advice may help him to profit by his opportunities,
but he must be the eventual judge.
One does not always know what one is really in want
of. There was a man painting in Paris years ago, an in-
dustrious student who was getting nowhere. I told him
there were three men he should especially study in the
museums: Rubens, Delacroix and Renoir. Like so many
earnest students in those days, he thought time spent in
the museums was time wasted. He answered that he
loathed Rubens-he was something of a puritan—that
On Reading Poetry and Seeing Pictures
71
he couldn't bear Delacroix, and that he thought Renoir
trivial. Anyway, I said, they were what he needed and
he had better overcome his aversions sufficiently to look
at them more closely. He did, and during his remaining
stay in Paris he copied pictures by all three of these men.
Later I saw works of his which were definitely in the
tradition of Renoir.
One cannot always give such advice with certainty. In
this case it was clear to me what he was trying to do,
though it was not clear to him. But every case is as par-
ticular as are cases for psychoanalysis. This man was
capable of certain appreciations, but didn't know what;
so he tried to follow what he thought he ought to follow,
and do what he was quite incapable of doing. "Clear
your mind of cant," said Doctor Johnson; and the cant
of unreal appreciations is the special cant of art.
Appreciations are growths, and subject to variation.
When I was fifteen I read, while in the country, Tenny-
son's Idylls of the King. I was intensely interested and
found one idyll missing; that is, there seemed to be a
gap at one place. When I got back to town I happened
on a later edition of the poems, and there found what
was missing. Tennyson had written a final idyll that fitted
in this place. Before that and since, I have read in the
Idylls, but never since then have I read them with enough
interest to notice whether or not the narrative was com-
plete.
When Neilson, later president of Smith College, was a
graduate student at Harvard I once noticed in his room
a small bookcase full of books by and about Tennyson.
I said, "You're greatly interested in Tennyson."
"That sounds as though you're not," he answered.
"No. He reminds me too much of the title of one of
his early poems."
"You mean Thoughts of a Second-rate Sensitive
Mind," Neilson said.
72
"Just so."
At fifteen I didn't know that Tennyson's thought was
second-rate, but I knew that he could write beautiful
verse. Since then, I have ceased to be annoyed by his
ideas, and can enjoy without reserve his luminous and
perfectly articulated lyrics and his occasional masterpieces
of blank verse.
In '94 I was returning from Los Angeles to the East. I
had only one book with me, Milton's poems. In the
afternoon I began reading Paradise Lost and read on
with intense interest. I read in my seat till the porter
made up the berths. Then I read in the smoking room
till the porter made up his berth there. Now there was
only one light left, a tiny gaslight at the angle leading to
the platform, and I sat under this light on the little
bench made for climbing into the upper berths, till Adam
and his consort through Eden took their solitary way.
Never before or since have I read Paradise Lost with
such immoderate absorption.
There seems often to be a fatality in these happenings.
One picks up a book as though by pure chance, a book
that one has read before or that one knows of, and finds
it to be just what one wants and needs. Quite unaware
that one is choosing, one chooses. A fatal moment has
come: there is a need, actual though not consciously felt,
and one seizes on the one thing that will satisfy this. This
happens, of course, to a growing mind, when fate is still
knocking at the door, when all one's possibilities are not
yet exhausted and this, if one is fortunate, will last till
the end.
What is true of poetry is likewise true of ideas. This is
natural, because philosophy is just poetry that tries to
pull itself up higher with logical bootstraps. When one
has such illuminating moments, one is (especially when
young) convinced that one has something that everyone
should appreciate. I recall how at college I heard Wil-
On Reading Poetry and Seeing Pictures
73
liam James say that all classification is teleological. This
seemed to me one of the most important things I had
ever heard, and I talked to everyone I knew about clas-
sification being teleological. This is basic for pragmatism,
which appeared above the horizon only much later. But
no one of my acquaintance cared in the least whether
classification was teleological or not, or could see any
importance in it.
Marsden Hartley, when he was in Paris in '26 or '27,
wrote to Stieglitz that I was growing flabby, and amusing
myself with an insignificant painter named Coubine.
Then Hartley went to Aix-en-Provence, the town of
Cézanne, and while there discovered "space." Poussin
understood "space," but very few painters since have
done so. When Hartley returned to Paris, he again hap-
pened on some pictures by Coubine, and spent much
time at a gallery where they were to be seen. Coubine is
one of the rare masters of space. Space is my especial in-
terest. Hartley had suddenly awakened to something to
which he had not before been alive, and saw things dif-
ferently.
What you don't know won't hurt you, says the proverb.
But it often makes you talk nonsense, and what one man
sees and another does not, makes intercourse difficult
when it has to do with the kinds of things that are not
really capable of explanation. The qualities of art are
perceived, as it were, by a multitude of senses, and he
who hasn't them operative, is not in communication with
him who has. The difference between these psychic senses
and the physical ones is that the former are not simple
but composed, and the compositions are very variable.
So it happens that a little juggling and shocking can pro-
duce a capacity for seeing, even when rational explana-
tion cannot.
A chapter on reading poetry and seeing pictures must
deal with this essential question of seeing, for that is
74
the heart of the matter. People commonly assume that
they can see, and need only learn what they should look
at. My experience contradicts this, and insists on the all-
importance of learning to see. The what will take care.
of itself if the how has been acquired. I don't mean to
say that then one will see everything, as the authorities.
say you should. But if you remember that the au-
thorities are for the most part commonplace persons
who, with no extraordinary qualifications, make criti-
cism their business, there is no reason why you should
so see things. If you learn to see, you will be able to see
for yourself, and will be content to skip much of what
is offered but does not really concern you. I shall now
tell how I went about the business of learning to see.
I was interested in esthetics even in childhood, though
I did not know it by that name. When we were children,
we used often to go for picnics to Dimond's Canon,
which was a few miles from our home in East Oakland.
Scrub oak was a common tree in those hills, but I was
again and again struck by a little bunch of these that
stood at the turning of a road and seemed singularly
beautiful. The trees themselves were not exceptional,
and it was only after a time that I understood this to be
a matter of composition, their somewhat unusual place-
ment at this spot.
Once aware of composition, I noticed it elsewhere and
often. When I was fourteen, my brother, who had been
at college in the East, brought home some etchings-
among them one of apple trees. There were plenty of
apple trees all about, and to see why this etching pleased
me so I took it into the orchard and compared it with
the trees. Then I saw that the artist had simplified and
made more evident certain characteristics of the trees
themselves—once more a matter of composition—and I
improvised a definition of art: that it is nature seen in
the light of its significance. Then, recognizing that this
On Reading Poetry and Seeing Pictures
75
significance was one of forms, I added "formal" to "sig-
nificance." Significant Form was then born for me.
Gradually I came on to realize that art and composi-
tion are one. Not that in poetry and painting there is
nothing else. Shakespeare goes beyond Milton as much
in intellect, in varied knowledge, in penetration, as he
does in power of composition. He was great enough to
be an immoralist, and to make and sympathize with such
a rascal as Falstaff. But insight into human nature and
ability to appreciate are not a speciality to artists. They
are shared by men and women of the world-politicians,
detectives, executives-many of whom see much more
deeply and wisely than artists in general do. But they
are not artists, and when they give some sort of form to
their appreciations, that form is not essential. They do
not compose what they have to say in any significant
manner, and do not make literature.
Long ago, forty-five years ago, I tried to get to the bot-
tom of this matter. Up to then I had taken composition
as I found it. I had discovered in myself no aptitude for
any of the arts, and thought of myself as essentially a
scientist-one who tried to find out why and how things
were, rather than to create or re-create them. But one
day it occurred to me to ask the definite question: how
does a painter see when he paints? What he produces is
a translation into another medium. The thing seen exists
outside, and yet it is presumably not what everyone sees.
There must be a possibility of seeing things in such a
way that they are related to the picture without being it.
The problem was to see, and then to learn what was
particular about this way of seeing. There is no use spec-
ulating when one can experiment; so I began to experi-
ment.
I put on the table a plate of the kind common in Italy,
an earthenware plate with a simple pattern in color, and
this I looked at every day for minutes or for hours. I had
76
in mind to see it as a picture, and waited for it to be-
come one. In time it did. The change came suddenly
when the plate as an inventorial object, one made up of
parts that could be separately listed, a certain shape, cer-
tain colors applied to it, and so on, went over into a com-
position to which all these elements were merely con-
tributory. The painted composition on the plate ceased
to be on it but became a part of a larger composition
which was the plate as a whole. I had made a beginning
to seeing pictorially.
What had been begun was carried out in all direc;
tions. I wanted to be able to see anything as a composi-
tion, and found that it was possible to do this. I tried it
on everything from a scrap of paper torn from the corner
of a sheet, to a line of trees extending half a mile into
the distance; and I found that with practice seeing pic-
tures was possible everywhere. I soon found that things
could be seen in two ways, pictorially and sculpturally,
as though one saw with reference to a plane in front of
the object, or with reference to a plane behind the ob-
ject. In one case the thing was seen as flat, but in deep
space, which is the paradox of pictorial composition. In
the other, it was seen as round, but in shallow space.
This habit of mine of seeing pictorial composition in
nature, of seeing it anywhere and whenever I am so in-
clined, in little or on the grandest scale, makes me dif-
ficult in the acceptance of pictures. Such landscape as
Claude's and Turner's is for me picturesque only, not
really pictorial. It is landscape as anyone sees it, com-
posed, that is, within the limits of a naturalistic vision.
In many cases Cézanne does not get beyond that in his
composition as a whole. Only in China and Japan was
this higher grade of landscape common, and its greatest
master in Europe is Poussin.
The difference between the pictorial and the sculptur-
esque vision is interesting. In the pictorial one sees as
On Reading Poetry and Seeing Pictures
77
though the pictured thing were seen within the limits of
a frame, which marks the plane to which the focus is
referred. What lies beyond is in a way brought to this
plane, or at least adjusted to it. The recession of planes
is rhythmic, and never goes off into a meaningless infin-
ity of distance. The infinites of art are inward and not
outward. Every good work of art is a self-contained
whole, and that which is not, however many good things
it may contain, is fragmentary.
The same is true of the sculptural, though this is ap-
plicable only to things rather near. I used often, when
sitting opposite persons in a tram, to look at them now
as pictures, then as sculpture, simply by changing the
focus. The same thing can be done for architecture, and
is specially interesting for interiors. In fact, I first noticed
this when I saw what a change there was in the space of
a corridor beyond an open door. The space grew deep or
shallow as I changed the focus from the door to the wall
beyond. Further trials led to developments. In the in-
terior of churches with columns, the different effects are
striking.
It often happened to me in my earlier experiment that
I was not able to complete my nature compositions; and
sometimes what might have been, but did not come off,
was very beautiful. Then the tension was agonizing; then
I used to find myself humming or whistling a certain
theme, which would bring the needed relief as though on
another plane completion had come. It was always the
same theme, which I had not chosen and which I
couldn't place. A musical friend with whom I was dis-
cussing rhythm, played, for purposes of illustration, what
he said was the most intense expression of rhythmic
emotion in all music, something from the Ninth Sym-
phony of Beethoven, and that was my theme. I was not
aware till then that I remembered anything from the
Ninth Symphony, which I had rarely heard. It is many
78
years since I have used it for this purpose, as with prac-
tice I came to be able to fill the composition without re-
course to any outer aid. But this incident will show how
intense may be the demand for total compositional real-
ization.
People have commonly to wait upon the artist to show
them pictures, except when there is something obviously
picturesque before them; but if they have become edu-
cated to pictorial seeing, this is not at all necessary. The
beauty of the world is immensely increased; it becomes
all, potentially, beautiful. Every man, woman and child
is beautiful, and any group of them. The superabundant
beauty becomes at times exasperating; one feels a need
of doing something about it; one is almost forced to try
being an artist, not only in seeing but in doing; one tries
to paint. One soon learns that there is no mystery in the
fact that things not beautiful to ordinary vision can be
made beautiful in pictures. It is nothing more or less
than a question of composition-not, of course, arrange-
ment, which is the ordinary photographer's notion of
composition; but the artist's, which I have spoken of at
such length.
One is not thrown entirely on his own resources for
one's education in composition. It is a commonplace that
people learn to see things as they have been habituated
to seeing them in the pictures that at any moment are
most in view; and so they then seem to people really to
be. There was a time when to cultivated people land-
scape meant Claude Lorraine and his tradition: what did
not lend itself to that way of seeing was not pictorially
seen at all. Fashions change. For a while Cézanne dom-
inated the vision of many. In any case this thing is a
limited affair, and automatic; a great deal more can be
done if one has learned the art of creative seeing.
For a long time my favorite landscape in western art
On Reading Poetry and Seeing Pictures
79
(in China where rhythm was religiously infused, land-
scape painting was something far more profound) was
the Tempest of Giorgione. Compared with many Claudes,
this is a simple affair, but compositionally much further
from a mere arrangement. Many a time I have gone to
Venice, when I would not have gone if that picture had
not been there. I don't much like Venice, where I feel
confined, and annoyed by the ever-recurrent perspectives
down the canals. Giorgione came from the mainland,
like Titian, and did not paint Venetian landscapes. The
Tempest was long in private possession and, though easy
of access, was not as satisfactorily seen as pictures in a
public gallery. At last it was bought by the state and put
in the Academy; then I could go to Venice and look at it
as long as I liked. Once I spent a whole morning with it
and made a pencil sketch of it. Then I had really seen it,
and it was no longer important to me. The next time I
went to Venice I spent a few minutes with it, and found
it richly pleasant, but no more.
Just what had happened? Art, as I say and resay, is
composition. What goes into composition is sometimes
more important than at other times. So I feel in the work
of Piero della Francesca or of Michelangelo the expres
sion of an intellectual power which is itself interesting,
even though I do not try to find out what it specifically
says. There is the difference between a Herrick or Beau-
mont and Fletcher and a Donne or Shakespeare. T. S.
Eliot has admirably expressed this when he says that to
Donne "a thought was an experience, it modified his
sensibility."
In Donne this is shown nakedly, as though he paused
to digest the thought, while Shakespeare takes it in his
stride. So with Piero compared with Michelangelo. In
Giorgione I feel nothing of this sort. His lyric feeling is
essentially song-though at a high level of intelligence,
80
which makes his form splendid and thrilling. But when
once fully assimilated, while it has lost none of its charm,
it has lost much of its power.
When I had really assimilated this form in its essen-
tials, I no longer needed it. I had taken to painting again
at this time, and found that everything I did was com-
posed like the Tempest of Giorgione. There was noth-
ing similar in the arrangement; there was nothing sim-
ilar in the subject matter; there was nothing similar in
the mood. I am sure that to no one would it have oc-
curred that there was any relation whatever between
what I was doing and the Giorgione, and yet I felt that
somehow I was seeing things in his terms. I preferred
Hsia Kuei and some other Sung landscape painters, but
I couldn't grasp their compositions as I could Gior-
gione's. It wasn't more difficult to analyze theirs, so far
as analysis can go, but I couldn't make them mine. I
couldn't arrive at seeing in their terms except when by
chance something suggested them.
After a while I outgrew this Giorgione compositional
phase, and my work suggested no one else's to me until
I happened to see reproductions of earlier Chinese work,
landscapes of the Tang period, with which I felt an
affinity; but this time it was just an affinity, not an in-
fluence.
I am always uncertain when speaking of these things
how far a reader can get what I mean. It is simple
enough if one has had experience of this kind, but one
does not know what the experiences of another are. Cer-
tainly most persons who are not artists are too passive in
their seeing to be creative seers-though this is not due to
incapacity, but to lack of this kind of exercise. In Amer-
ica it seems now to be necessary that all college students
should learn something of the significance of an art,
should learn to appreciate it. I am convinced by my own
experience that a little active practice in seeing goes
On Reading Poetry and Seeing Pictures
81
much farther than a great deal of concern with art that
does not involve activity of this sort. Passive receptivity
gives something that has little growing power, and one
usually stops taking interest before long. To be sure, one
may go on with exhibition visiting, but the succession of
these events amounts to little more than a panorama,
and has small cultural value.
For education in hearing, there is nothing comparable
to the practice in composition that the visible world
offers. For music and speech, we are thrown back on
human efforts. There is the compensation of a wide field
of possible interpretation, since music has to be played
or sung, and in the reading of poetry one must, if one
is to get its full value, read it word for word as though
one read it aloud-which is a kind of acting with voice,
if not with the body.
A principal education in words is to use them as
though they were living things, sensitive to use or to
abuse. Once a nephew of eight was to spend the summer
with us in Fiesole: one small boy and four grown-ups. To
keep him occupied, I suggested he should make a collec-
tion of butterflies, but his father objected that the boy
was rather callous and should not be set to killing things.
So I explained to him that insects did not suffer pain in
any sense to which we could give a meaning, but that in-
discriminate killing was bad for the killer, even if it was
only a wanton knocking off the heads of flowers in cross-
ing a field. Therefore he should catch butterflies for his
collection, and no more. This he quite conscientiously
did.
Words also do not actually suffer when one misuses
them, though it has been said of some poets that their
words would bleed if they were cut. But it is certain that
the person who uses words indifferently, who uses them
as though they were rubber stamps, who never stops
to find out what exactly the words he uses or reads mean,
82
is not on the high cultural road. Only the other day I
read of some business man who disliked rubber stamps
as a means of correspondence, but found himself obliged
to return to them, because otherwise he was misunder-
stood, or not understood at all. People commonly find
in books not exactly what the author put in, but what is
easy to understand or to suppose that one has under-
stood. Only a few discover what fascinating things words
are-how admirably they can be fitted together, like the
works of a watch, to say things with delicate discrimina-
tion. For the book to be taken to the traditional desert
island, few would prove more interesting than an un-
abridged dictionary, and the ten volumes of the Oxford
Dictionary might make one wish that it were possible to
retire with it to a deserted, if not quite a desert, island
for more than a year or two.
It is not, of course, necessary to define words. Ability
to define is a special gift, and not at all common. In some
cases it is almost an evil, for many words have so many
meanings, meanings central and peripheral, that defini-
tions clog one's perceptions. It is almost as vicious at
times as the practice, common when I went to school,
of "paraphrasing" poetry—that is, perverting it into
prose. Poetry is not something to translate into some-
thing else; it is something to be read and reread till it
reveals its secrets. It is better to read one poem ten times
than to read ten poems once. All that one should do in
aid is to find out the meanings of unknown words and
the sense of unknown allusions; the rest should come
from acquaintance with the text.
Words in poetic and in prosaic utterance have very
different values. For prose purposes it is necessary only
that one should know what is meant, what is intended,
what is referred to. I think that one very good way of
distinguishing the prosaic and the poetic is to see that
On Reading Poetry and Seeing Pictures
83
one is referential and the other existential. That is a
summary abstract statement which it will be worth de-
veloping.
Keats in the Eve of St. Agnes:
Forth from the close brought a heap
Of candied apple, quince and plum and gourd:
With jellies soother than the creamy curd
And lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon;
Manna and dates in argosy transferred.
From Fez, and spiced dainties, every one,
From silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon.
Compare this to a bill of lading from some eastern mer-
chant in which these articles are itemized. For the mer-
chant, the articles have a real existence, but the words of
the invoice have merely a referential value. For the poet,
the articles serve merely the purpose of the words.
For the poet these articles might not, if actually pres-
ent, suggest to him at all what the words, as he has come
to understand them, mean. His experience may be like.
that of the bored people abroad who do not find, when
they travel, the objects of their dreams. For the merchant
it is quite the contrary. If the things are not really what
the words have implied that they are, the shipment will
be rejected. For the prosaic we need merely know exactly
what the words mean—that is, to what they refer—but
for the purpose of the poetic we must also know what
meanings are so intimately tied up with the words here
and now, that the words carry the things meant with
them. Such words are poetic words, many of them com-
monplaces like roses and nightingales. The splendid
poem of Keats from which I quoted is largely made up
of poetic words, though not so shopworn. But in the last
scene of Lear, Shakespeare gets along without poetic
84
words. It is a composition of meanings and sounds ex-
pressed in simple words which become existential by
being charged with the meaning of the whole.
An excellent illustration is the line from Wordsworth's
Michael that Matthew Arnold quotes as typically Words-
worthian: "And never lifted up a single stone." One
might say of a lazy workman, "He's been out there, just
loafing, for an hour and never lifted up a single stone,"
and no one would think this great poetry; most would
not even recognize that there are two perfectly good iam-
bic pentameters. These lines would have no existential
value; they would simply call attention to the lazy work-
man. But the compositional use by Wordsworth of his
line makes it something entirely different. These simple
words become weighted with the tragedy of the old shep-
herd, and are saturated with poetry. Their referential
importance is slight, for the importance of the action
to which they refer is not in the action itself, but in the
meaning; and that meaning is borne by the words.
Therefore this is a line of great poetry.
“Existential” and “inferential" point the mind toward
"illustration." Illustration has an ordinary meaning—
simply to illustrate-but it has also a pejorative mean-
ing, when we say of a picture that it is "mere illustra-
tion." This means that the interest of the picture is not
self-contained, but refers away from itself to an object
outside. In the first sense, almost all the world's great
painting is illustration; but in the second sense it is not.
When the good dramatic painters paint a dramatic epi-
sode, the drama is complete in itself. This does not mean
that the subject must of necessity not count. In Shake-
speare it makes no difference whether we have ever be-
fore heard of Macbeth or Lear; they are in all senses fully
contained in the play. But this is not true of Julius Cae-
sar or Antony and Cleopatra. Here we are expected to
know more about the characters and the period than is
On Reading Poetry and Seeing Pictures
85
told in the plays. But that knowledge we bring to the
play; we are not sent out to it.
To be sent out to it is the characteristic of illustration
-of the usual historical narrative, for instance. It may
also be the characteristic of a philosophical style. In an
article I once wrote, I pointed out that it was practicable
to read William James in the text itself, but that to un-
derstand Dewey, one had better keep one's attention.
fixed more on what he was talking about than on the
text itself. Dewey's writing is not creative, whatever his
thought may be. James wrote existentially and Dewey
referentially.
In Walt Whitman there is much to the point when we
think about illustration. Sometimes he succeeds in real-
izing the objects that he names, but often these names
are mere names that bring to mind the objects which
have then to be made real by the imagination of the
reader. In this there is poetic expression at second hand.
One is referred to the object which excites a poetic in-
terest which was not adequately realized in the first state-
ment.
Great writers in their successful moments realize at
first hand, and then their expression is commonly of ex-
treme precision. For prosaic purposes this precision is
limited to meanings-to reference. It serves essentially
the purpose of construction. To repeat in this context
what has already been said, engineering is construction
and architecture is composition. Scales are construction
and melody is composition. Imitative painting or model-
ing is construction and art is composition. Prosaic writing
is construction and poetic writing is composition. Just as
for architecture there must be a basic construction, so
for all the other arts. But for the prosaic, in all forms of
expression the constructive is sufficient. For the poetic it
is never sufficient; the compositional from which the exis-
tential derives is essential.
86
Most works that are important for their poetic value
have incidental prose values. Incidental values are, of
course, legitimate. One can use precious brocades to keep
oneself warm or even to wipe up the floor, but this is
not making the best use of them. When Dante and Mil-
ton argue, they are often both dull and unconvincing.
Poets are rarely great or original thinkers, and even if
they were, their medium is not adapted to the adequate
expression of critical thought except in epigram. It is
difficult enough to express subtle thinking referentially
without being obliged to find for it an adequate existen-
tial form. But since only few people are interested in
exact thinking, what they get out of the poets may be
good enough for them. It is not, however, the best that
poetry has to give. Its best is appreciations, for which
existential expression, through the power of composi-
tion, is especially adapted.
Words are marvelous materials for construction and
composition, but one must make them adaptable by
constantly using them as a good mechanic uses his tools.
Everybody recognizes that careless use of the instrument
will not give satisfactory results, but they do not see that
they cannot be really intelligent about anything being
discussed until they learn to use the tools which are nec-
essary—that is, the meaning of words, and the putting
them together into sentences and discourses. There is a
fascination in watching a real master of language fit
meaning to purpose with the exquisite precision of a
jeweler. "Your reasons at dinner have been sharp and
sententious: pleasant without scurrility, witty without
affectation, audacious without impudency, learned with-
out opinion, and strange without heresy."
Thus Shakespeare, every word clean-cut and telling.
One can write like that only if one loves words. Or this
of Johnson, on Dryden: "Of him that knows much it is
On Reading Poetry and Seeing Pictures
87
natural to believe that he has read with diligence, yet I
rather believe that the knowledge of Dryden was gleaned
from accidental intelligence and various conversation,
by a quick apprehension, a judicious selection, and a
happy memory, a keen appetite of knowledge, and a pow-
erful digestion, by vigilance that permitted nothing to
pass notice, and a habit of reflection that suffered noth-
ing useful to be lost." Only the habit of precision in the
use of words makes it possible to have such exquisite
discrimination in ideas.
For science, words are often not accurate enough, and
instead, symbols and equations are used. But the paradox
of words in poetry is their combination of precision and
imprecision. The cheap poet can easily get his effect by
using words that pour over their natural confines of
meaning-loves and doves, roses and woeses, home and
mother, Alabama and Dolores. None the less, dozens of
good poems in all languages have been written on so
hackneyed a subject as the advice that you had better
have a good time while you can-with girls and roses to
illustrate. Here it is as in music: a subtle difference in
composition, and there is something vitally different,
even new. For the bad poet, the words slip into place as
though they were greased; for the good poet, they go into
place as though they were jeweled. Nor is it necessary,
in order to be bad, that the words should be of the sappy
poetic kind. Today, especially in poetry of the proletar-
ian sort, one finds quantities written in the plainest lan-
guage, which is as flat as a city square, the words as little
distinguished by their placements as the pavement
blocks. These words do not bleed if you cut them, any
more than do those blocks.
All that is here said of words is true of forms. A few
years ago, the walls of exhibitions were covered with
Cézannesque still lifes which were quite without rhyme
88
or reason. They made me think of the sword combat be-
tween Tom Sawyer and Joe Harper: "When you get the
hang of it go it lively."
That is a show that repeats itself in all fields. If you
are doing the latest thing, you can feel at least a little bit
important. I recall the disgust of a young fellow in Paris
when I said that I was a pragmatist at a time when every-
body who was up to snuff was a phenomenologist. You
had to be impressed by the neue Sachlichkeit, even if
that was all the German you knew-just as a few years
before, you were all agog over the élan vitale.
Now it is Kierkegaard who has the cry. When Kierke-
gaard wrote, he was really important; but today, after
pragmatism, Freud and a lot of other things, he is resur-
rected because now anyone can understand him. As lit-
erature he remains; as revelation he reveals as in a glass
darkly, what has been much more clearly stated. Like
Vico a few years ago, he becomes a contemporary
prophet, for the contemporary prophet is often a resur-
rection. People love to say, "I told you so,” and they get
much satisfaction in telling the discoverers of their own
time that these things have already been discovered.
Probably there will be a crop of little Kierkegaards
as there was a crop of little Nietzsches. There are many
people really uncreative, who can get the illusion of cre-
ation if they are a few feet ahead of the masses, no mat-
ter how far they are behind the leaders. What they write
has either the flatness or the frothiness of the second-
rate. Their variations on the original theme are hardly
more than lipstick and rouge. Their changes of the orig-
inal constructions make these a little more shaky, and
their compositions are too artificial to permit a life-blood
of rhythm to flow through them.
One cannot too much insist that the vitality of appre-
ciation is re-creation. Of course being rocked in the
cradle of the deep is a great delight, but it is a passing
On Reading Poetry and Seeing Pictures
89
thing. Lorelei told the truth when she said that kissing
one's hand is very nice, but a diamond bracelet lasts for-
ever. William James made an oft-quoted, though usually
misquoted, remark: that those who were not really musi-
cal should work off their emotion by doing something
active, even if it were only speaking a kind word to their
aunt. The quoters usually ignore the essential distinc-
tion between the musical, who can re-create, and the
unmusical, who cannot.
Saying a kind word to one's aunt is re-creation on an-
other plane. When one can get into a sort of tit-for-tat
relation to art (you make me, I make you); when you
can feel that the artist has started something which you
are completing on his terms and on yours, until (as I
have illustrated with the Giorgione landscape) the orig-
inal work remains in essence a stage in your journey and
a delightful memory, while you go on to further possi-
bilities-then you are getting the esthetic experience
in its essential richness, something which cannot be
summed up as an emotional debauch, but is an experi-
ence which is rich in all the qualities proper to the intel-
lect and the imagination.
One can hardly discuss hearing and seeing without
going on to criticism, a very complicated subject. Criti-
cism makes, explains and justifies discriminations. When
Sam Weller was puzzled by a blotted word in his valen-
tine, a word beginning with "circum," his father-to
whom the valentine was being read-suggested "circum-
wented," but finally Sam made it out to be "circum-
scribed." The father thought "circumwented" was a bet-
ter word, but Sam thought "circumscribed" meant more;
and his father agreed that perhaps it was a "more ten-
derer" word.
These are, of course, very delicate discriminations,
which only sophisticated connoisseurs like Sam and
Tony Weller could make, but ordinary critics have to
90
deal with similar matters. Words in poetry often make
trouble for one. There are not only individual but also
epochal differences. We can read Donne, but the eight-
eenth century could not. His wide popularity is quite
recent. In '95 I tried to find a Donne, but there was
none in print. The following year, the Muses Library
was made to include him, and now he is abundant. The
romantics of the nineteenth century found the diction
of the eighteenth atrocious, but they could not realize
that the eighteenth century would have found it atro-
cious also if it had sounded to them as it did to the ro-
mantics. That is one of the difficulties of criticism. The
critic makes the extravagant assumption that he is nor-
mal, and can therefore serve as a standard.
Today, in consequence of modern psychology, more
people are aware that they are peculiar, but their aware-
ness does not change them. Bertrand Russell, in an essay
criticizing John Dewey, says that he recognizes his own
peculiarities, and that these will affect his criticism;
therefore he will begin by a statement of these peculiari-
ties. But once the statement is made, the peculiarities
are ignored. Really, they ought to be factors in the ulti-
mate equation, but they are not. Reaction times are,
when necessary, accounted for in accurate experiments
or observations-astronomical ones, for instance. But
criticism is, in any case, not an exact science; so these
idiosyncrasies are not necessarily a disadvantage. Critics
are useful for a variety of purposes, but delivering a final
judgment is not one of them. A principal role they play
is to discover things and bring them to the attention of
others, and often their eccentricities make them particu-
larly sensitive to new and valued expressions.
Works of art have to be discovered by someone who
will make known what he has found, for only the few
can do this work for themselves. Of course, discovery is
not an absolute affair, except in rare cases. Norman
On Reading Poetry and Seeing Pictures
91
Douglas told me he once heard a servant at a hotel sing-
ing something that he recognized as Wagnerian, though
it was unknown. The servant, he found on inquiry, had
worked for Wagner, in Venice I think, and had heard
Wagner sing this. So Douglas wrote it out, and added to
the stock of Wagnerian music. In most cases, someone
discovers something for a certain public, although others
may already know this. When Stanley said, "Dr. Living-
stone, I presume," he was discovering Livingstone for
Europeans, though the Negroes in Africa already knew
where he was. Discovering and rediscovering goes on
indefinitely. Things are forgotten. Critics discover aspects
that were ignored. Critics discover things that they
didn't know before, and think that no one else did. Dis-
covering things is great fun, and therefore critics never
tire of the game.
Works of art have many dimensions, and the critic can
help to bring these to light and emphasize their value.
Of course I do not here refer to dimensions of space; I
am speaking of qualitative and not spatial dimensions.
Everyone knows that sex makes a difference in art, that
a portrait of a woman brings a higher price than the
portrait of a man, without regard to difference in merit.
Sex has a specific value of interest incommensurable
with any other quality, and for that reason I call it a
dimension. This dimension needs no critic for its revela-
tion, but it is not so with others. A picture by a known
painter does not look exactly like a picture by an un-
known painter, even to a person who values it independ-
ently of this. What lies in the back of the mind influ-
ences what is seen, and the awareness of the author
places and warms the object. It gets to have not only an
individual but a family interest.
For this reason, critical connoisseurship has its impor-
tance, even for appreciation. Then there is historical
criticism—not merely as history, for that is another mat-
92
ter, but for reasons analogous to authorship. Just as our
consciousness of a man's descent or race colors our sense
of the man, so it is with works of art. It does not make
them better or worse, but makes them different; and so
I call this another dimension. One can think of others:
subject matter, types of landscape, propaganda. The con-
servative has his dimension, the radical another, and so
the bourgeois or the proletarian.
I have just been reading a book of proletarian writ-
ing. I was much interested, and as I believe that social-
ism is the only possible solution for the society of the
future-though I have no program for making it work
—I was much in sympathy with it. Yet I know that I can-
not possibly realize it as can those whose experience it
approximates. There are dimensions of social under-
standing which are different for them and me. I may
point out in such a work some formal insufficiency
which another may agree to, and yet we may disagree
entirely concerning the effect of this on the whole work.
Therefore criticism is a relative thing.
I know only one value character of the work of art
where there seems possible an objective decision. In a
considerable experience of art criticism, and a very little
one of literary criticism, it has seemed to me that one
can give a definite answer as to whether a certain formal
result has been completely realized. When I am asked
for an opinion on his work by a painter, I never criticize
anything but this. Of other things I just talk as anyone
does if something has to be said, but I don't take that
kind of talk seriously. But about formal completion I
mean business.
A formally complete picture is one in which all the
parts are so related to one another that they all imply
each other. If one looks at one spot in a picture and does
not have one's eye pulled to other spots, and so on over
the whole picture till every bit of it is implicated in the
On Reading Poetry and Seeing Pictures
93
operation, the picture is incomplete. This is the mean-
ing of the oft-repeated story of Cézanne and the two
uncovered spots in a portrait. Why did he leave those
spots uncovered? Because he did not know just what
ought to go there, and the wrong thing would falsify the
whole.
Perhaps no one except Cézanne would have noted
this; perhaps they would. I don't know. Once Matisse
was working on a picture that measured over eight by
twelve feet. It was hung high on a wall, in a position
like that which it was to have in a palace in Moscow.
Matisse and I were sitting below, talking, while his mind
ran partly on the picture. Several times he mounted the
ladder and slashed at the picture with big brushes, mak-
ing big changes in it. Once, after a long pause and some
silent meditation, he climbed the ladder and altered a
line on the neck of one figure, flattening just a little
bit a line a couple of inches long. When he came down,
I said, “I've understood everything you did before this
last change, but I don't see the point of that.”
He replied, "I'm not surprised, because I've decided
to change entirely the orientation of the figures." Per-
haps if Cézanne had put the wrong color on those bare
places that too would have been obvious.
I have noticed over and over again that if one points
out to a painter that there is a hole in his picture, he
agrees. Often he says that he too has noticed it, but did
not know what he should put there. Once a painter
said to me, "It's damnable, but every time there is a
spot in my picture where I didn't know what to put,
and put something as a makeshift, you light on it.”
Composition is my passion. I have already told how
I cultivated it, and the intense demand there was in me
for the completion of composition. Often when the
painter cannot find the last word, I can find it for him.
The best painters find it for themselves, but the lesser
94
ones often stop short; their creative energy does not
carry through. A French painter whom I knew slightly
asked me to look at his work. He showed me a lot of pic-
tures, but almost all incomplete. As I did not know
how he would take it, I made conventional remarks,
but at last could not help pointing to a hole and sug-
gesting how it could be filled. He was pleased, and asked
whether I had noticed anything else. I said I had no-
ticed many things; so we went all over the pictures
again, and he learned a lot about composition.
To fill a hole in a picture does not usually mean that
something should be put into that place. It usually
means that the relations existing are inadequate. Once I
pointed to such a hole in a picture of an interior.
"Yes," said the painter. "I noticed that and thought
I'd put a chair in there.”
"That is not what is needed. You don't want to clutter
up your picture with objects. If the relations between
this and that were right, there wouldn't be any hole."
And so it was.
I could give dozens of instances, some of them amus-
ing; but as this sounds too much like bragging, I shall
pass them over. But in fact what interests me in these
instances is not the element of “I” but the element of
"it," the fact that this is the kind of thing in art on
which consensus is possible. It is extraordinary to a per-
son who never had the experience before, when he is
shown how in a picture a slight change often remote
from the point where the trouble is, where the hole is,
fills that up completely and alters entirely the pictorial
totality. An eighth or even a sixteenth of an inch on
quite a large canvas may do the trick, or an almost im-
perceptible spot of color. It is a satisfaction to know that
in painting there is something of which it can be said
that it is right or wrong.
On Reading Poetry and Seeing Pictures
95
The works of the old painters were almost never com-
plete in this sense. When one speaks of triangular com-
position or rather pyramidal, of oval composition or
S-shaped and so on, one generally refers to the figures or
the principal objects. In completeness a picture in a rec-
tangular frame cannot be anything but a rectangular
composition. But the older painters were primarily illus-
trators: they were working for a public that wanted pic-
tures of things, saints, scenes from Holy Script, drama,
genre, still life. Consequently there was a distinction be-
tween the subject and the accessories. A Giorgione or a
Rubens went beyond this, but it must have been a prod-
uct of their personal genius, for they don't seem to have
taught it to their followers. But even if the pictures had
been more unified as compositions than they were, that
unity would long since have been destroyed by darken-
ing and repaint, or have been converted into a sort of
unity of tone.
:
I once made the effort to look at pictures in the
Louvre exactly as I look at pictures of today, but I
found it a great strain. There was a marked resistance to
breaking up the familiar things, as was inevitable when
one ceased to make the automatic allowance for the
discolorations, the false values, the disappearance of es-
sential contours in the murk of obscurity. One must in
great measure take the old masters as one takes Greek
sculpture—as more or less fragmentary, and often re-
stored to the point of being hardly more than copies.
Fortunately, where the basis is substantial, much is left,
even in the ruins. Matisse once pointed to the difference
in two plaster casts that I had of heads by Donatello and
Michelangelo. In the Donatello, he said, if one cut away
the surface modeling nothing would be left, but the
Michelangelo could be rolled down a hill till most of
the surface elements were knocked off, and the form
96
would still remain. So it is with the greatest of the older
painters, though many of the pictures in the museums
are of little value, except as specimens.
Criticism, I have said, makes, explains and justifies
discriminations. Many people have little interest in criti-
cism. They simply accept things or reject them, and are
the little ones of whom is the kingdom of heavenly inno-
cence. But others are more cantankerous. They roundly
assert that what they like is good and what they don't
like is bad. When you ask them why, they say that they
don't know why; it isn't a matter for reasoning; anyone
can see that this is good and that isn't. These are people
who make discriminations, but don't explain or justify
them.
Then there are those who explain. They have knowl-
edge, much or little of technique in verse or paint; they
have ideas about form and matter, origins and develop-
ment; and they are often instructive, but rarely amusing.
They can tell much about a work of art, but not what it
finally is why it is definitely successful, or a failure.
This depends on differences like those between a copy
and an original, differences that may be obvious or so
subtle that only the extra-sensitive can perceive them.
This shows the limit of explanation of masterpieces.
Next comes the justification of discrimination, and
here things become really exciting and the fur starts to
fly. Here come to words, and sometimes to fisticuffs, the
differences between the ancients and the moderns,
classic and romantic, moralists and immoralists, abstract
and concrete, academic and free thought, bourgeois and
proletarian, and many others. Man was not born to full
protection, and one thing he commonly needs to keep
him warm is opinions. Without opinions he feels un-
armed, even naked. I have just read in the papers of
someone who had been a communist, but because com-
On Reading Poetry and Seeing Pictures
97
munism aims at a tyranny of the human spirit, he left
communism and joined the Catholic church—which, as
everyone knows, welcomes the rebels and the independ-
ents. He is to teach in a Catholic college, and will doubt-
less be free to teach whatever he likes. Evidently this is a
man who cannot stand freezing in the winter cold of
uncertainty. If he next becomes a freethinker, he will
certainly feel free to do everything except think freely,
and will tie up to an authoritative freethinker, so as
to feel safe.
Most people are like that. They naturally join some-
thing and are then on the defensive or the aggressive,
according to differences of character. I once, while living
in Paris, subscribed for six months to a communist and
to a clerical newspaper, but long before the six months
were over I had stopped reading both-they were so im-
possibly stupid. One knew what they would say about
everything, and that they were as much interested in the
truth as members of a Piscatorial Club. Of course the
more able members of the different groups and direc-
tions often say admirable things, while justifying their
opinions. They mingle explanation and justification art-
fully and sometimes luminously-T. S. Eliot, for in-
stance.
Criticism of art does not confine itself to formal or
quasi-formal matters. There is in some poets, and in a
few painters, an intellectual content of so much impor-
tance that it becomes seriously interesting. Though they
do not, like philosophers, make systems which are at-
tempted constructions, they do make what one might
call compositions of thought which are impressive. Poets
like Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, Wordsworth, Leo-
pardi, men of mind, contrast with Herrick, Lovelace,
Elizabethan lyricists, poets who sing beautifully, but say
little that is not obvious. Between them are men like
98
Herbert, Crashaw, Gray, Tennyson, Byron, who say
things that they feel to be important, but whose impor-
tance is not first-rate.
In those greatest men one realizes their ethical, reli-
gious or social significance, without the need of any
formulation. These are expressed in the values of a com-
positional object, the values of living things presented
as plastic realities. This sort of thing marks the unique
quality of Don Quixote, of Hamlet, of Milton's Satan,
of Achilles and Odysseus, of Blake, of Donne, of
Goethe's Faust. If one forgets the Elizabethan lyrics, one
has left over only an aroma of sweetness, but if one has
really known Wordsworth and can't recall a single line,
Wordsworth will remain. Criticism of these characteris-
tics is, however, not often criticism of poetry. The com-
positional values must be taken massively and directly,
and the critical discussion of these things too often be-
comes ethical and philosophical.
In pictures there is something analogous to these
qualities in literature. In Michelangelo, there is the su-
preme power of a really great creative mind. He makes
on me a curiously contradictory impression, to which I
know no parallel-that of a destructive, crushing force
engaged in creation, a cross between Genesis and the
Day of Judgment. It was a coincidence that he painted
the Last Judgment on the wall of the Sistine Chapel
after having illustrated Genesis on the ceiling-a coinci-
dence, for he did both because commissioned thereto.
But it seems like a fatality, like just what he ought to
have done to fulfill his destiny, and he did them in such
a manner as to make every other treatment since then
seem a slight affair.
Many other painters have merits of this sort. Piero
della Francesca seems like a monumental veracity, like
something indefeasibly authentic. Cézanne is similar,
though on a lower intellectual level. A suggestion of in-
On Reading Poetry and Seeing Pictures
99
tellectual vigor almost always goes with these cases.
Even in Giorgione, perhaps the greatest of all lyric paint-
ers, I feel that only an intellectual grasp could have
given that massive richness which makes his Sleeping
Venus unique among nudes. In Renoir I feel this less.
He seems to me to be the man who lifted the pictur-
esque to the highest level of the pictorial, but whose
feeling was none the less essentially of the picturesque.
Of course this kind of criticism is sketchy and impres-
sionistic, but most analytic criticism is nothing but a
lumbering effort to expand such impressions. No real
analysis of the essential is possible, because one has to
deal with imponderables. But it is fun to try to put in
words these indeterminate apprehensions; some readers
will understand them, and some will not.
Criticism serves intrinsic appreciation of art only as an
introduction. When I was young I liked to read critical
works, but now I can read very few of them. One reason
is that it is almost all familiar, for the range of critical
ideas is not great. Another thing is that my facility of
contact with the works themselves continually augments,
my sense of them grows more keen, my capacity to take
what I want and leave what I don't, develops; and so I
need no intermediates. Criticism of what I do not see or
read is uninteresting because I don't know what is being
talked about, and what I can get at I prefer to know by
the only effective way-by repeated contact. It is better
to read a difficult poem a dozen times, than to read it
once and then have it explained to you. In the one case
the process of re-creation takes place and in the other it
does not. To get to know what a poem is about is not a
matter of importance. Other kinds of books are more
important, if one wants to know what things are about.
It is best to take poetry for its poetic value, if one can.
Of course, if one cannot, one must do what is possible.
There are one or two more things that must be
100
treated while we are on criticism-what is meant by bad
art, and what is meant by good?—what is beautiful, and
what is ugly? Good art is that which is better than the
average of what one is familiar with, and bad art is that
which is worse. Therefore with experience one's stand-
ard rises.
Every other definition I know is arbitrary. If I call
Van Gogh's painting bad, and someone else calls it good,
it is because it falls below my standard in qualities
which I consider essential, and it does not do so for the
other man. It may be possible for me to make the other
man understand what are my standards, or it may not-
that depends on a lot of things—but the fact that Van
Gogh is now held at so high a rate is for my apprecia-
tions a matter of no importance. I have tested him, and
find that he doesn't stand it. I agree with his own opin-
ion that he had barely reached the end of his apprentice-
ship, and it is possible that if he had preserved his sanity
and gone on painting, he might have arrived. Those
who find that he had arrived have not the same de-
mands determined by their experience of art as I have,
and so we must amiably agree to differ.
It is, of course, not difficult to understand the enthusi-
asm for Van Gogh. He was essentially a popular painter,
who missed popularity because the populace of his time
was not ready to see as pictures what was not “finished."
His violent, unrestrained temper, his passionate sym-
pathies, his coarse intense colors hurled at the canvas,
often in masses so as to produce impetuous effects, all
serve the moment. There is on the one hand today much
so-called primitivism, and on the other an amount of
pseudo-intellectuality that is absolutely laughable. I
have just been looking over a lot of American art maga-
zines of the war, and find even the purpose of special
exhibitions defined in intellectual terms. Painters who
never would have guessed that they had intellects if this
On Reading Poetry and Seeing Pictures
101
news hadn't been forced on them, now intellectualize.
There is an orgy of pitiable intellectuality. So between
popular vision and intellectual interpretations, Van
Gogh has a wonderful time.
Now comes the turn to say something of the beautiful,
of that which is not the beautiful, and of the ugly. The
beautiful has not so far been mentioned in this book.
I dislike the word, as used in any other than a popular
sense, because so much that is pretentiously meaningless,
vaguely pretentious, highfalutin, has been talked about
it from the time of Plato on, and I don't suppose that
Plato was the one who began it. Simply, the beautiful
means the attractive, the agreeable, the ordered, the
pleasing, the charming, the gracious, even the comforta-
ble. It runs the scale from the trivially pleasant to the
cosmically passionate and the ideally complete. There
are no frontiers between its widely ranging degrees. The
opposite to the beautiful is not the ugly, but the oppo-
sites to all the things that make up the beautiful. These
are the repulsive, the repellent, the discordant, the dis-
ordered, the disturbing, irritating, annoying, troubling,
awkward, clumsy, gawky. The ugly has a different di-
mension. It is not a primary notion at all, but is related
to choice. Nothing is ugly, except by contrast, except
when we think it ought to be something else. It implies
a disappointment in expectation, not necessarily a real
expectation, but at least an as-if one. We don't really ex-
pect a mule or a donkey to be a horse, but if we did not
know horses we would have a different feeling about
mules and donkeys. In themselves, no things are ugly.
Matisse once used a pretty girl as a model for a statu-
ette which turned out to be something queer-a long cy-
lindrical torso, a large-featured, distorted face, long
bunchy legs. The girl looked at the finished product and
said, "How awfully ugly."
"Yes," said Matisse. "Isn't it?"
102
The girl looked a while longer. "Of course it's ugly,
it's awfully ugly, and yet-and yet, there's something
about it—something that isn't exactly ugly."
Matisse was, of course, interested, and tried to get
more.
"Well, of course it's ugly, but yet there's something
about it-something different, something-oh-oh I
don't know what I mean," she ended, half in tears with
the irritation.
Of course, once more, what she meant was simple
enough. When she first looked at the figure, she thought
of it as the portrait of the pretty girl who had posed.
So considered, it was ugly, and no question. But as she
looked longer, she began to see qualities that were in-
trinsic, and these were, in part at least, not ugly. It was
ugly when regarded in terms of expectation, but it was
beautiful, somehow, when taken by itself. Not altogether
beautiful, because it still remained in some ways un-
attractive, even repulsive-but somehow beautiful.
What is true of Matisse's statuette is true of all cases
of the ugly, as distinguished from the unbeautiful. A girl
who is not ugly at all when selling apples in the market,
is ugly as a chorus girl. She is out of place. The chorus
as a whole may be made unbeautiful, that is, disordered
by the presence of such ugly girls. But it would be-
come ugly only if considered as out of place in the larger
setting of the whole scene. What is unbeautiful may be
ugly, but it need not so be. Often the unbeautiful, even
the repulsive, is not at all ugly, because it is taken as
right in the existing relations, as for instance the un-
pleasant subjects of many Velasquez portraits. Only
those would consider them there as ugly, who think
that all people in pictures should be in themselves attrac-
tive. Matisse's girl was simple enough to follow the lead
of her impression, and to see what one could hardly
have expected her to see. Matisse himself did not expect
On Reading Poetry and Seeing Pictures
103
1
it. Many so-called cultured people cannot make this pas-
sage, because they think they "know."
It is natural that in art, as well as in nature, much that
is indifferent or even beautiful should at first acquaint-
ance be held as ugly. This is commonly true of unfamil-
iar works, of other races, unusual landscapes, eccentric
vegetable growths. Like Matisse's girl, we first think in
terms of the expected, and as these are disappointed, our
appreciations are frustrated. Only the experienced in
these matters are willing to wait, to see what will be re-
vealed. Matisse's girl, if she were a very unusual person,
would on the next occasion be more cautious in judg-
ment, but if she were like most people it would take
many such experiences to produce an effect. Until the
present moment, when it is common to throw up one's
hands and cry "Kamerad," no matter what impossibili-
ties are offered to one's sight, people found ugly what-
ever was new. Ruskin was as much offended by the
"blotesque" of Corot as Kenyon Cox was by the massa
cres of Matisse, and both had the same justification in
the habits and conventions of so-called civilized people.
Although these are not so rigid as the habits and con-
ventions of more primitive folks, yet who is to decide
how rigid they should be? Kenyon Cox was a conscien-
tious person. He believed that he had fairly looked at
the things that he rejected, both because they were
unbeautiful-unpleasant or even repellent—and ugly—
being the things that they ought not to be. It is not
always the person who accepts readily who turns out in
the long run to be "right." Here as everywhere, for the
subjects discussed in this book, there are no definable
limits.
There remains one more question of criticism: con-
temporary and permanent importance. Permanence is
commonly considered to be almost decisive as a value,
a final pronouncement on the worth of a work. I take
104
issue with this, and believe permanence to be a minor
matter, except for practical reasons. With respect to na-
ture, we all know this. Sunsets and sunrises, June days
and storms, are held as valuable as granite cliffs and
sequoias. In art it is the same. There are important
things that last longer than more important things that
come and go. The poetry of Byron is vastly more impor-
tant, even if little read today, than much that remains
current. Every anthology of the past has a proportion of
poems that are dropped from the anthologies that suc-
ceed it, but they are not necessarily less important for
any other characters than the particular ones that in-
sure permanence. There are little songs of the Eliza-
bethans or the Cavalier poets that were slight things
when they were made and which are slight things today:
that is, they are perfect trifles, and therefore immortal.
But to say that they should be held more important than
Blair's Grave or Young's Night Thoughts, which nobody
reads, or Thomson's Seasons, which few read, is non-
sense.
If one wants to make sense of such an assertion, one
must limit it. Things can be rendered permanent by the
effective importance of what is said or by the fine per-
fection in the saying. Things that do not sufficiently
excel in either way fall sooner or later, but in the mean-
while they may have greatly worked upon the current of
events, artistically or socially. Consider Volney's Ruins,
Ossian, Paul and Virginia. There are many of these
things. What is influential has its own kind of impor-
tance, and things that are merely pleasant cannot be put
into comparison. When things can keep their power of
influence endlessly and be also masterpieces of expres-
sion, we have the Shakespeares, the Dantes and the
Michelangelos, where it is a mockery to put the names
in the plural; but for lesser things we must discriminate.
For today what counts is what does today's work. It is
On Reading Poetry and Seeing Pictures
105
pleasant to think that it did work also yesterday and the
day before, but this is value of a secondary kind.
"Antiques" is not only an unbeautiful word, it is also
ugly-in my technical sense. It implies that things have
merit because they are old. It is best that all things
should be put on an equality for testing; an insistence
on the value of the old obscures the sense of art as
something live.
The classics are, in a general way, the works that last.
For any particular age, they are the works of the past
that have lasted up to then. For today, they are the
works that we still acknowledge; that we gather into
museums, select libraries, anthologies; and treasure in
reproductions. To be more exact, however, we should
recognize that classics, to be a vital term, should be a
term expressed in relation to those for whom the classics
exist. I wander through museums and see a lot of stuff
that could for all of me be thrown into the ash barrel.
They are classics for somebody, no doubt-but what
isn't? I have come to distinguish between the classics and
the "classics." To find out what the classics are, I read
them or look at them. To find out what the "classics"
are, I look into the books of the authorities. When I
agree with the authorities I can wipe out the distinction;
when I can't I must insist on it.
For an example: I have repeatedly during the last
thirty years or more tried to read The Wings of the
Dove and The Golden Bowl of Henry James. I could
appreciate the marvelous style, the mastery over words,
the closeness with which he kept those words in contact
with his ever-shifting, glancing theme. But otherwise
they bored me. I couldn't get interested. Fifty or a hun-
dred pages were enough for tasting the style, and then I
stopped. Now I have read both books with interest. I am
not sure that I shall ever want to read them again. Jane
Austen's Emma I have read ten times at the least. The
106
first time ever so many years ago. I was in the gallery of
the opera house in San Francisco, and the opera was
Aïda. Its name is all I remember of it. My seat was at the
edge and a little gas light burned over me continuously.
I had begun with Emma before the opera started, and
I doubt whether I ever knew that it did start. I have
been reading Emma on and off ever since. I just read it
again a few days ago. For a few minutes I had some
doubts, I wasn't quite sure it was still a classic; but soon
I was in it up to the neck, and the doubts were stilled.
Some day, if I live long enough, I shall read again The
Wings of the Dove or The Golden Bowl. My one read-
ing assured me that they are candidates for classical hon-
ors. My next reading will tell whether or not they have
passed. Despite this, I have little doubt that they are
"classics."
Of course the case is different for the young and the
old, for those with and those without experience; but it
is not essentially different. One can learn like a man,
not be trained like a beast, in so far as one has at once
an open mind and a selective digestion. There are
things that are at once convincing, and things that one
must hold in abeyance. What one likes one should like
despite the authorities, though one should be ready to
change. I read the other day that Fitzgerald's Omar
Khayyam is losing its contemporaneity—that its bloom
as a “classic” is wilting, that it "dates." For some time I
have felt this also. But I have vivid memories of other
days when this was not at all true. I had by chance heard
a couple of the stanzas quoted. In those days San Fran-
cisco had good book stores, but no copy of Omar was
there, and I had to wait impatiently till one came from
New York. Then, although I do not easily commit
things to memory, I read this so constantly that soon I
had it all by heart. A bookseller friend was about to
publish a series of reprints, and asked me whether I had
On Reading Poetry and Seeing Pictures
107
anything to suggest. I told him about Omar-which was
printed from my copy in 1891, the first, I believe, of the
numerous cheap reprints.
One will naturally have prejudices which both stand
in one's way and act as stimulus. As a boy I was mad
about Carlyle, and detested Ruskin. In my freshman
year at Berkeley, I wrote an essay contrasting them and
quoted from memory a passage from Carlyle as some-
thing quite opposed to Ruskinism. One should always
verify one's quotations, for the instructor in English,
Mr. Hubbard, showed me that I had inadvertently
quoted not from Carlyle, but from Ruskin. I have long
since become quite unable to read Carlyle—the quan-
tity of noise is so in excess of the measure of sense-
while Ruskin at his best is a delight.
So with time one builds up one's five-foot shelf. One
does not refuse the "classics." They always call upon you
to try again, but as my father used to say to us when we
were children and were to make up our own minds,
"You're the doctor." A person who goes on indefinitely
in a hazy state, reading dutifully more or less of the
"classics" but never finding out whether they are classics
or not, is not achieving culture. A man of real culture
stands on his own ground. If he is honest, he will like
some things that are "good" and some things that are
“bad.” I am amazed at the "blunders" committed by
friends who are authorities of the first water, and they
are amazed at mine. But we don't care. Be sure you're
right, and then go ahead, says the proverb; but if in
this field one wanted to be as sure as that, one would
have to stick to Shakespeare and the Bible. I remember
our surprise, many years ago, when Charles Eliot Nor-
ton in a lecture gave us the Bible and the Golden Treas-
ury instead of the classic Bible and Shakespeare. Now
not a little of the Golden Treasury goes into the discard.
When that passionate Grecian, Thomas Love Peacock,
108
lay dying, and someone would talk of current events, he
said, "I want to hear no news less than two thousand
years old."
Which ones of our contemporaries will make the
grade we cannot say, but as we shan't be here even a
hundred years from now to say "I told you so,” we
needn't worry about that. Someone sent me recently
Untermeyer's anthology of recent American poetry. As
I don't know one of the young poets from another, I can
read them without bias, and I find some things in the
book that I can read again and again. At the least, they
are classic enough to last me overnight.
6. Personal Adventures
What happens is history; who makes it happen is a per-
sonal detail, though often an interesting and sometimes
an important one. In what follows this detail is neither
interesting nor important-at best occasionally amusing
—but in order to happen at all it had to happen to
someone, and as I am telling about it, I have to be in it.
Autobiography is generally speaking not very reliable,
less reliable even than history. The historian investi-
gates his facts, the autobiographer just remembers them.
When General Sherman was reproached for mistakes
in his autobiography he answered, in effect, "That's the
way I remember these things. Let those who remember
them otherwise write what they remember, and so
everyone will be pleased.”
A queer thing in reading autobiographies in which
one happens to appear, and in which much that is said
Personal Adventures
109
about one is wrong because the writer didn't know
enough of the affairs about which he writes, is that one
still believes what the writer says of others. It is difficult
to be skeptical when one has heard only an ex parte
statement. There was the well-known judge who
thought that there was no use of the second lawyer's
speaking, since the first one had already convinced him.
When one reflects, one can see that one is not a special
case. But what can one do about it? To be so skeptical
as to believe nothing, is to make the reading of the book
useless. The most sensible way to read autobiographies
is as Fiction and Truth-Dichtung und Wahrheit, as
Goethe entitled his—that is, to read them for what they
are worth. As authoritative documents, they are open to
suspicion.
What follows is not precisely autobiography, though
it is autobiographical. It is the story of certain adven-
tures with art. It is based entirely on memory, as I have
no documents. My memory is both good and bad, for
though I forget much, I remember rather accurately
what I have not forgotten. And then I like to verify,
and always do it when this is possible. If a recollection
is suspicious, I call up the context to see whether it fits.
When I revisit a place in which I have not been for a
long time, I inevitably look up everything I recall, to
see whether it is as I recall it. When I reread a book I
note the difference and the agreement with my previous
impressions. Verification is a concession to my scien-
tific spirit, even in matters of art. Therefore, I think
that what follows is tolerably reliable.
My interest in pictures began early. Though I had no
precocious talent for drawing, I was always trying to
draw, and pictures were important for me. In the
eighties the Century Magazine was noted for its excel
lent illustrations, especially for its wood engravings by
Kruell, Cole and others. After the numbers had been
110
read I used to cut out these engravings and mount them.
In California, in those days, pictures were not often to
be seen. Occasionally one
was exhibited, but very
occasionally. One or two landscape painters had a local
reputation, but if they ever had exhibitions I never
heard of them. We had at home a volume of large scale
line drawings of historical incidents, most of which I
still remember. I recall with particular amusement a
scene of armored knights with their families before a
castle. This illustrated Luther's hymn, Eine feste Burg
is unser Gott, A mighty fortress is our Lord-which I
took to mean that you should put your trust in a mighty
fortress as in God. I seem to have been even at that
early age inclined to Napoleon's view that God is on
the side of the stronger battalions.
Besides the panoramas of the battles of Waterloo and
Gettysburg, I remember only four pictures: the Con-
stance de Beverly by Toby Rosenthal, a Californian
who had studied in Paris; a J. G. Brown; a Hudson
School Niagara; and the Man with a Hoe by Millet. I
talked with the painter of the Niagara, who explained
to me how all the other Niagaras that had been painted
were not the real thing, but his was. The Millet was the
first picture I had seen that was done by a Famous
Painter, and the local intellectuals were much exercised.
We talked about nothing else for days. In fact, these
were not absolutely the first pictures I remember, for I
can recall one picture of a St. Anthony plagued by Dev-
ils at the Belvidere in Vienna, which was then the pic-
ture gallery. Of the Louvre, which I must have visited
in '78 or '79, I remember only the ship models and (cu-
riously) most clearly of all, some links of a chain cable
of the Great Eastern. When, many years later, I came
again to Paris, I looked for the links and found them
just as I remembered them, but with no label referring
to the Great Eastern.
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111
1
In '92 I left California to go to Harvard and spent
as much time as I could in the Boston Museum, the
Metropolitan, and the Walters Gallery in Baltimore,
which had Chinese porcelains and a really choice collec-
tion of the Barbizon men. In '95 I came to Europe
again. I had at this time the conviction that is charac-
teristic of the young and serious student, that art should
be pure and noble, that what isn't, isn't really art, and
so on. I questioned genre and illustration. Therefore a
picture in the Luxembourg illustrating the story of the
quarreling donkey stealers, caused me qualms. It looked
to me very good, and I came back to it again and again.
But it was unquestionably a story-telling picture. It
was by Daumier, whom I knew then only as a cartoon-
ist. In time I came to know that there was no reason
whatever why a painter should not tell a story if he
could make a good painting of it, or even if he couldn't
-provided he could make the story-telling sufficiently
effective.
In time I ceased to be a purist, but at this moment I
couldn't stay in Munich because it was so shoddy. There
was imitation of everything. Once in a square I noticed
that a building on one side of me was Corinthian, and
a building on the other side was Ionic, and I said to
myself, "I bet the building behind me is Doric." Doric
it was. There were Venetian palaces and Florentine pal-
aces and an early basilica where, as I sprawled some-
what, looking at the painted beams of the openwork
ceiling, a peasant woman scolded me for misbehaving in
God's house. Wasn't I ashamed that an old woman like
her must tell me so? Except the beer and the old
Pinakothek, nothing in Munich pleased me-how those
Rubenses reverberate in memory-so I fled to Dresden
and its charming late Baroque and Rococo.
In Paris I spent every morning in the Louvre and
much of the time in the Salle Carrée, at that time an
112
epitome of the galleries, a selection of the masterpieces
of all schools. My pet maxim then was, "Keep your eye
on the object and let your ideas play about it." I always
had plenty of ideas, though of course most of them came
and went for ideas in these matters that will stick
are hard to find. Even Faraday said that ninety-nine
ideas out of a hundred are no good. For a blissful month
I looked and wondered "why," and then I had to go to
Germany, and afterwards came back for another month
in Paris, where I began to find things more intelligible.
I was from the first obsessed by the notion of unity, for
if one feels that somehow art is that pleasure which of
all pleasures is most nearly related to essential satisfac-
tion, then unity is all-important.
Goethe said: He who has art and science has religion;
he who has not art and science let him get religion. The
maximal religious condition is the mystical identifica-
tion, a unity of self and whatever is or stands for God.
There must be a unity with which to be unified, and
when this is not the unity of everything, it must be rep-
resented by a unity which is its symbol. Every scientific
law has to some extent this quality, and has this for its
religious significance. Every work of art which is an
achieved thing has this possibility, and though most
works of art are too insignificant to suggest it, this pos-
sibility persists. So most scientific laws are too special to
make one go so far afield.
But what I say is true for one who reflects and recog-
nizes that the little and the big are in essentials equal,
that the animals in a drop of water are as truly animals
as the whale or the Brontosaurus. Newton's Law ap-
pealed as religiously significant to many who were not
so impressed by the law of the pendulum or of gases.
Men's minds need a strong reagent, and only thinking
people think because they enjoy it. I recently read that
an exchange professor, returning from England, said,
Personal Adventures
113
"Believe it or not, English students think”—which
seems to have been news in America. English soldiers
who have been in contact with Americans are surprised
to find that these almost never think of politics, though
politics are for the moment the world's crucial matter.
Thinking now and then is really not very bad for one;
one can think in contraction about some particular busi-
ness, or in expansion, and it is the expansive kind of
thinking that I have here in mind.
There is in the Salle Carrée a huge picture of the
Marriage of Cana by Veronese, a gorgeous thing with
lots of people in splendid robes, backed by lofty classic
architecture and a white-cloud-studded blue sky. Dur-
ing my first month in Paris, I couldn't make this picture
come together, though I often tried. But when I had re-
turned from Germany and came into the room, at the
first glance I saw it as it had never been before-one
and indivisible, as a picture ought to be. It was one, and
I was one in the face of it. We were altogether one, and
so something had been accomplished in the way of pic-
torial enlightenment.
My favorite picture in the Louvre was the Crucifixion
by Mantegna, which to me seemed made of color as no
other picture, even by the great Venetians or Rubens,
was. This picture started me on the road which, when
it arrived at Cézanne, made him familiar at first sight.
Mantegna was born to be one of the greatest masters of
color, but went to pot because instead of painting as
nature said he ought to paint, he had ideas about this,
and thought he ought to be a Roman. He ended by
making rather ugly Roman statues in paint. This Cruci-
fixion is one of the few pictures about which my feeling
has never wavered. Most of the pictures, the Rem-
brandts, the Titians, the Velasquez and many others,
have had their ups and downs, but that Mantegna has
never budged.
114
I am also proud to have "discovered" the Rubens
Marie de Medici decorations. At that time they hung in
a never-ending line, in narrow frames, all the way down
the long gallery, and were treated rather with contempt
by the critics. It was only in 1900, when the present
room was built, that they shone in all their glory and
were generally seen. Those few months in Paris were
radiant months for me and fixed my eventual interests,
though I did a number of things before art became
definitely the dominant one.
When in the fall I returned to America, it was to join
a cousin with whom his father had invited me to go
around the world. There were memorable moments on
this trip: the first view of Fujiyama after nine days of
storm at sea with all hatches closed; the wonder ride on
the first evening ashore through the paper-lantern-
lighted streets of Yokohama (for in '95 Japan was still
to outer view the old Japan); then a couple of months
of fascinating life in Kioto, which was out of bounds
and where there were no foreigners; the strange ac-
counts kept by Kai Inch with items like "trengobi”—
which meant his ticket when we sent him to Kobe to
find out whether Cleveland was going to war with Great
Britain; Canton with its mysterious, keenly, almost fero-
ciously intelligent-looking crowds; Ceylon, where I sat
under a upas tree and survived, and where in Colombo
I saw the streets, so Kiplingesque; Egypt, where more
fascinating than the monuments were the gallops in the
desert; Italy and the first taste of Naples, Rome,
Florence, Venice; the trip through Vienna to Carlsbad,
where I left my cousin with his family.
The world-encircling was richer for experience than
for development, and when at the end of the summer I
returned to America I was at loose ends. I tried biology
for a while, but one day I got an idea that seemed fruit-
ful for esthetics—something like what Croce turned out
Personal Adventures
115
a few years later, and which he as a philosopher consid-
ered permanently important, but which I, with an inter-
est in art and not in philosophy, soon came to regard as
of little importance. None the less, I decided to come to
Europe and write a book on Mantegna. There was at
that time no recent book on him in English, though
two, it soon proved, were in the making, and appeared
before I had time to look around much. Besides that, I
found that my interest in art was esthetic and not his-
torical; so I didn't want really to write it anyway. I spent
two winters in Florence, and these were important for
me for other reasons.
During those two winters I did the work I spoke of
on seeing; I became really intimate with quattrocento
Italian art-the art of Piero della Francesca, Paolo
Ucello, Domenico Veneziano, Andrea del Castagno, and
the early Siennese-and I discovered pragmatism. I was
not the first to discover it. Charles Peirce had discovered
it twenty years earlier; William James had given his
California lecture two years before. At any rate, James
says that pragmatism is just a new name for an old way
of thinking; so it would seem that nobody really discov-
ered it. But if it was never absolutely discovered, it was
relatively discovered by me as well as by others. In phi-
losophy as in art, it is more important to discover things
for oneself. One has them then to satisfy felt needs. To
be the first to make the discovery has social but not in-
dividual importance, and to insist on it is matter either
of profit or pride.
I had naturally always been curious about philoso-
phy, but I lacked the credulity that is necessary for the
metaphysician. I couldn't make out just how it was
that the different philosophers could be so skeptical
when criticizing others, and so credulous when criticiz
ing themselves. William James wanted a metaphysic
as badly as anyone, but was too honest to shut his eyes
116
to the no-thoroughfare signs, and remained, a bit un-
certainly, on the outskirts. Most philosophers gave up
the game at some point and crashed the gates. Others
could catch them at it, as they could catch others, but
they all refused to catch themselves. The history of phi-
losophy is of course interesting, not for the solutions of
the problems so much as for the study of the questions
posed. I found in pragmatism a means of giving repose
to my soul from the mysteries of metaphysics.
My pragmatism was a simple affair. It grew out of my
attempt to find an intelligible meaning for identity—
what sense could be given to A is B. I came to the con-
clusion that A is B whenever A could be put in place of
B, could be substituted for it-which could be in any
place except that of being opposed to B. Absolute iden-
tity was therefore not a puzzle, but a meaningless no-
tion. I then came to the conclusion that nothing had a
meaning that was not in some way limited, that had a
context, and that therefore the Absolute, the central
bastion in the philosophical battles of those days, was
an illusion when considered a matter for thought. I
finally came to a generalization that I called presupposi-
tions as hypotheses, and which Schiller called axioms as
postulates, which means that we start reasoning not with
certainties but with things that we take for granted.
There I stopped. If we have to remain in the world of
the probable, I can't get any satisfaction in pretending
that I'm in a world of certitudes. People often say that
if they have no absolute beliefs, why should they not
eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow they die. The
simple answer is that, generally speaking, we don't die
tomorrow. We usually go on living for quite a while
longer, and make the best of it. That is what I do, and
quite cheerfully, though I know nothing whatever
about God, Freedom or Immortality.
When I had got rid of philosophy as a bugaboo, I
Personal Adventures
117
found in the works of some philosophers the literature
that had been more or less concealed when one worried
over their fallacies. I now read them as I read the Bible,
the Buddhist Scriptures, or my special favorites, the
Gospel of St. Matthew and the Tao Teh King of Lao
Tse. Kant is not amusing, but he is splendid as he goes
through the seas of epistemology like a sea-shouldering
whale, to use Chapman's impressive phrase. Leibnitz's
Monadology is more thrilling than a whodunit. I never
can remember it all, and each time I read, I get a thrill
wondering how he's going to "get out of it." Berkeley's
Three Dialogues combines ingenuity, ingenuousness
and charm elsewhere unequaled; and Plato, whom I
have just reread in Jowett's translation, is the perfect
blend of the sweet, the sour, and the bitter of charm
and irony and scorn. There is no finer prose than
Schopenhauer's or Nietzsche's, which one can enjoy to
the full if one will not quarrel with their ideas, but treat
them as what they really are-writers of penetrating fic-
tion.
Between my two winters in Florence, I spent a sum-
mer in Spain. I expected, of course, that my great sensa-
tion would be Velasquez, but I was disappointed. I had
already begun my experiments in seeing, and wasn't in
the least impressed by what Velasquez saw. His vision
seemed to me utterly commonplace. Again and again I
noticed that people who stood before his pictures, look-
ing at them, were to me pictorially more interesting
than the pictures they were looking at. Of course he
could paint very well what he saw, and there was some-
thing of interest in that. Also, he could place a single
figure in the canvas admirably, but this was hardly
enough. I found Goya more satisfactory. At that date it
was still possible to “discover" El Greco, but the pictures
in the Prado were being rehung and the Grecos were
not yet in place, and to Toledo I did not go. Both Ger-
118
trude and I suffered from insomnia on the high dry
plateau of Madrid. Toledo was to come after Madrid,
but suddenly in desperation we ran away to a more rest-
ful climate, and in Bordeaux we slept the clock around.
The winter of 1902 I spent in London, and there
bought my first modern painting. While in Florence, I
used to pick about in the junk shops as everyone does,
but I had neither the patience nor the talent for finger-
ing over the messes that one finds in them. I got one
minor "masterpiece" for very little, but that was
pointed out to me by a more talented friend. In Lon-
don, it was another matter, for I bought an oil painting
—just like that.
To have bought an oil painting may not seem like a
remarkable thing to have done, but it was remarkable
forty-odd years ago for one who was not rich. I had al-
ready bought etchings and Japanese prints, but when I
bought that picture by Wilson Steer I felt a bit like a
desperado. Oil paintings were for the rich: that was part
of the American credo. A minor Parisian dealer told
me that an American woman came into his shop and
asked if he had any Raffaellis. He showed her what he
had, and she liked one picture very much. She asked the
price. Eight hundred francs-one hundred and sixty
dollars.
"But then it isn't an original?" she queried.
He assured her he had it from Raffaelli himself. She
was disappointed. She said that was not what she
wanted; she wanted a picture for about a thousand dol-
lars. So he sent her to Durand Ruel, where pictures were
more expensive. My Wilson Steer cost me a good deal
less than that Raffaelli. It wasn't in itself very impor-
tant, but it was important to me as an encouragement.
One could actually own paintings even if one were not
a millionaire.
At the end of 1902, I left London rather hurriedly be-
Personal Adventures
119
:
cause I lacked diplomatic talent of even an elementary
kind. At the Japan Society, to which I had been taken
by Laurence Binyon, I met a very gracious old gentle-
man, a well-known writer on architecture. We came to-
gether several times and he asked me what I was doing
on the near-approaching Christmas Eve. I said I had no
intimate acquaintances in London; so I would do the
same on Christmas Eve as on any other evening.
The good old man was horrified. To be alone on
Christmas Eve? He couldn't bear the idea. I must come
to his house. I said that would not do at all, that he
would have his children and grandchildren there, that I
was clumsy and unadaptable to such conditions, and
would not fit in. But he said that he could not and
would not let me be alone that evening, and that I must
promise to come. As I expected to go across the channel
before long, I said I would come if I were still in Lon-
don. I left it the afternoon of the twenty-fourth of
December.
Years later, I thought how simple it would have been
to write a note, saying that friends had unexpectedly
turned up and I would spend the evening with them.
But deliberate lying, even of this diplomatic kind, never
came easy to me. So, instead, I wrote a note announcing
my departure. I did not intend to stay long in Paris; I
was really on my way to Florence and America. Diis
aliter visum, the gods decided otherwise, and I stayed.
One night when Pablo Casals and I were dining to-
gether, as we did once a week, I said to him that I felt
myself growing into an artist. The leaven of pictorial
vision was working. When I got back to the hotel, I
made a rousing fire, took off my clothes, and began to
draw from the nude. Then I spent a week drawing from
the statues in the Louvre; after that, I went to Julian's.
I kept on painting for a few years, but nothing came of
it because of a neurosis. Years after, when I had cured
120
the neurosis, I took up painting again. Here it is impor-
tant only because it decided me to stay in Paris. A sculp-
tor cousin had come to Paris a little earlier and had
searched widely for a place to live. As I don't like apart-
ment hunting, I said to him that doubtless he had taken
the best he found: what was the next best? He said the
next best was 27 Rue de Fleurus. So I settled at 27 Rue
de Fleurus, which in time became famous. A romance
was published some years ago about this place and the
people who lived in it, but it was so very romantic and
so little related to the facts that what follows will make
a quite different narrative. My impression is that it is
more veridical.*
In those old days the official salons were still taken se-
riously. All the American painters in Paris sent to them,
and the younger ones, when they got a picture accepted,
got drunk with joy or with alcohol or, more commonly,
with both. The vernissages were great events, the first
of the social season, and one saw there everybody who
was anybody. Willy with his flat-brimmed top hat, his
wife Colette, and Polaire, who had the slimmest waist
in France, were a trio one can't forget. The old salon
was full of pictures big enough to cover a wall, sprawl-
ing with pink nudes and landscapes painted with a kind
of leaden color, especially the water and the foliage—
impenetrable, one would think, to any radiations. The
kind of thing that the salon was full of forty-odd years
ago is dead as the mastodons, though a few frozen speci-
mens of the one, as of the other, no doubt exist some-
where. One lives through epochs nowadays, even in a
lifetime of moderate duration.
The new salon was livelier, and showed what was try-
ing to be the art of the then today. There was a certain
freshness and vivacity in many of the pictures, and yet
* The manuscript for this book was in the hands of the publisher
before Gertrude Stein's unexpected death.
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121
they were somehow not art with a big A; they were es-
sentially not complete things. What was the matter?
I used to say that they lacked form, but that is too
easy and rather stupid. It takes at least two terms to
make a formula, and so I stopped at this point in my
writing to find one. I looked into an old French art re-
view which had a yearly article on the salons with very
good reproductions, to refresh my memories of the work
of Simon, Cottet, Henri Martin, Ménard and others;
and as I looked, I found what I wanted. In the preced-
ing chapter I have spoken of the opposition of construc-
tion to composition-that in the art of building, engi-
neering is construction and architecture composition,
and so on. In this I found my formula: sufficient art is
where construction and composition coincide. In this
salon art, that does not happen. The composition is
made out of constructional elements, but is not one
with it, and the result is either illustration or decora-
tion. In these art magazines, there are many other good
reproductions of pictures in galleries and private collec-
tions, and the striking contrast in respect to composi
tion and construction between this salon art and the
good stuff showed that my formula worked. I had al-
ready written the third chapter in terms of composi-
tion only, and now rewrote it in terms of the two
factors.
In Paris forty years ago I didn't have the formula, but
I had the fact. I had, on first coming to Paris, bought of
the little dealer who did not have Raffaellis for a thou-
sand dollars, a little picture by Du Gardier of a woman
in white with a white dog on a green lawn. It was a
pleasant thing of no real importance, but I spent much
time at the shop, talking and getting acquainted with
art matters in Paris, and this purchase paid my entrance
fee. But then there was nothing more to buy, and I was
discouraged. Of course there was plenty of older stuff,
122
but this was too expensive-and, besides, it was not
what I wanted. I wanted an adventure. It was in the
second year that Berenson, the well-known authority on
Italian art, helped me. He was in Paris, and I told him
of the dearth of art. He said, "Do you know Cézanne?”
I said that I did not. Where did one see him? He said,
"At Vollard's"; so I went to Vollard's, and was
launched.
Of course, in my frequentations of the Rue Lafitte,
then the center of the Parisian art trade, I often passed
Vollard's. But there never seemed to be any exhibitions
on, and through the doors one had a glimpse of some-
thing like a junk shop, with heaps of pictures on the floor
and against the walls, but nothing to indicate that one
would be welcome. Occasionally there was a queer pic-
ture on show in the window, but isolated queer pictures
remain queer. Now, however, I boldly went in, and
soon was quite at home. In fact, once when rummaging
through a heap of pictures, I saw something that in-
terested me and showed it to Vollard. He said, “Oh,
where did you find that? I sold that picture a month ago
and have been looking for it ever since." I went there
often, for Vollard liked to ask questions and learn what
you thought about things, sometimes about pictures and
often about other matters as well. He didn't mind my
turning things upside down, since they were already in
that state, and so we got on nicely.
I have already said that for me Mantegna's Cruci-
fixion was a sort of Cézanne precursor "with the color
running all through it." Also the Tuscan quattrocen-
tisti, especially Piero della Francesca and Domenico Ve-
neziano, were an excellent preparation. I was quite
ready for Cézanne, and before going to Fiesole for the
summer, I bought a Landscape which is figured on page
218 of Barnes's book.* The composition is a good one,
* Art of Cézanne by Albert C. Barnes.
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123
and the space handling for the most part even exception-
ally good. It was altogether a good beginning.
That summer I passed more time with Cézanne than I
did with the pictures in the Uffizi and the Pitti. I told
Berenson how I had profited by his suggestion, and he
told me that Charles Loeser, who lived in Florence, had
a lot of Cézannes. I thought that strange, as I had often
been at Loeser's house, but Berenson explained that the
Cézannes were not mixed with the other pictures which
filled his house, but were all in his bedroom and dressing
room. Loeser, the son of Brooklyn's "Macy's," had come
to Italy soon after leaving Harvard, and was a hardened
collector. He collected everything-pictures, bronzes,
faïence, drawings, furniture, ivory-headed canes. Then
he bought a villa and rebuilt it. Until his marriage, long
after, he didn't live in it, but just had it for building.
He said to me that a painter or a sculptor kept changing
his work till it was satisfactory-why shouldn't one do
the same thing with a building? It finally turned out an
interesting amalgam of new and old.
He had begun buying Cézannes in the early days,
when Vollard's was a kind of five-and-ten establishment,
and had got together an interesting lot. Loeser was not
an intellectual, and he insisted that the best critic of
Italian art that he knew was his old cook Maria. He al-
ways showed her his last discovered Madonna, and when
Maria said, “Si signore, that is a madonna,” he knew
that it was all right. But when she shook her head and
said, "No signore, that is not a madonna," he was
sure that the picture did not ring true. During the sum-
mer I spent many days with the Cézannes and could
never get enough of them. Loeser is long since dead, but
I saw the pictures again a few months ago, when a show
of French painting was held in the Pitti. The pictures
are about as they were, but I am not, and only one or
two still seemed to me important.
124
When I got back to Paris after the Cézanne debauch,
I was ready to look further. It was a queer thing in those
days that one could live in Montparnasse and be entirely
unaware of what was going on in the livelier world of
Montmartre. Of course, one went there at times, but not
for art. The only Montmartre art we knew was the
posters: Willette, Leandre, Cheret, Steinlen. Whistler
was the patron saint of the Americans, and poor Alfred
Maurer, who was no more akin to Whistler than was
Toulouse-Lautrec, tried to paint in pastel colors the fat
whores of the Boul'Mich' that he adored. If Maurer
had landed on the other mountain, far from the Amer-
icans, he would have been in his element and doubtless
have succeeded. But these things came to him too late;
they came when painters were "experimenting," and for
him that was too late. The Americans, as I first knew
them, were not experimenting; they were not even going
abroad. Beyond the official salons, they knew nothing
and had heard of nothing. So now, when I went forth
from Montparnasse, I was a Columbus setting sail for a
world beyond the world.
It was interesting to come into this situation. I had
just heard of Cézanne, and of course I knew Renoir and
the impressionists, whose work one saw at the Luxem-
bourg and at Durand Ruel's, but I had never heard of
Seurat and Van Gogh, both long since dead, or of Gau-
guin. Except for the Renoirs at Durand Ruel's, there
was nothing current of importance at the known dealers.
For me it was virgin soil.
The Autumn Salon was new, and I began there. I
went again and again, until things began to take shape.
I looked again and again at every single picture, just as
a botanist might at the flora of an unknown land. Bon-
nard and Vuillard and Maurice Denis and Van Gogh, of
whom there was a little retrospective, Dufrenoy, La-
prade, Girieud, Matisse, Marquet, Vallotton, Valtat,
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125
Rouault-there were plenty of those now known, half-
known or almost forgotten. Matisse made perhaps the
strongest impression, though not the most agreeable. He
was at this moment trying pointillism, the ugliest tech-
nique to my thinking-ever invented. His pointillism
was splotchy and messy, and though both his drawing
and his color had a decisive quality of energy, the pic-
tures were not satisfying. I learned a lot at this Autumn
Salon, but I bought nothing.
The following spring I went through the Independ-
ents' as thoroughly as I had gone through the Autumn
Salon. This time I bought two pictures-one by Vallot-
ton, a talented and essentially witty painter, a Swiss who
had started painting rather powerful portraits influenced
by Holbein, but who ruined his promise by marrying a
rich wife—which a painter can rarely afford to do. The
other picture was a successful study of the nude by Man-
guin, really school of Matisse, but of a kind of Matisse
that I had not yet seen; otherwise I should not have
been so well pleased with this Matisse at second-hand. I
made acquaintance with both the painters, and so be-
gan moving out of Montparnasse.
The autumn of this year was marked by something
that was decisive. Matisse came out from pointillism
with the Femme au Chapeau. It was a tremendous effort
on his part, a thing brilliant and powerful, but the nas-
tiest smear of paint I had ever seen. It was what I was
unknowingly waiting for, and I would have snatched it
at once if I had not needed a few days to get over the
unpleasantness of the putting on of the paint. One was
not yet accustomed to the smears that since then are the
commonplaces of technique. It was almost worse than
had been the splashy points.
A tempest raged at the Autumn Salon. Matisse was
told that only because he was a member and had a right
to exhibit was the picture admitted. The visitors howled
126
and jeered. Even the most faithful supporter of Matisse,
the socialist Sembat, would have none of it. Matisse came
to the salon once only, and his wife never dared to come
at all. When Gertrude stopped in at the tiny gallery in
Montmartre-where Mlle. Weill, the funny little squint-
ing near-sighted old lady who sympathized with revolu-
tionaries, good, bad or indifferent and showed their pic-
tures to the few who were interested-she heard the sad
tale of Matisse's amazed disappointment and his discour-
agement. Matisse had thought that this time he had
played the ace of trumps, and apparently it would take
nothing.
After the couple of days needed to get used to the
smearing, I made an offer for the picture. I had been
told when I bought the pictures in the spring that no
one in France ever pays the catalogue price, and that I
should always offer about two-thirds, which is the real
price. That is what I had done, and it had seemed satis-
factory. So I did the same now, but at the office they
showed me a reply from Matisse, saying that he did not
consider the price of five hundred francs excessive, and
that he could not let it go for less than four-fifty. I said
I did not consider the price excessive either, that I had
simply conformed to custom, and that if Matisse wished
to innovate, I was quite content to follow him. So I did,
and I had bought my first Matisse.
The next thing was to meet the painter. Manguin
took me there. Matisse was different from the other
painters whom I had met through Vallotton and Man-
guin. Vallotton himself was witty and cynical, Manguin
a man of the world who talked easily and fluently, the
rest earnest, serious workers-each a personality but not
distinguished or really interesting. Matisse was really
intelligent. He was also witty, and capable of saying
exactly what he meant when talking about art. This is a
rare thing with painters, and it is what makes occasional
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127
sayings of Cézanne valuable. Matisse was at work on the
Joie de Vivre, his first big decoration, and it was giving
him no end of trouble.
In this, however, the picture was not exceptional-for
all his pictures, for a long time to come, were to give
him a lot of trouble. He liked giving his opinion, and
he liked to hear the opinions of others. I do not know
whether he ever followed their suggestions, but he al-
ways wanted to hear them. A fellow student told a most
amusing story of the corrections hour, when for a while
Matisse worked in the atelier of Carrière. Carrière went
from one student to the other, casting occasional nervous
glances toward Matisse's easel, and managed by a skillful
maneuver to bypass it.
But Matisse wouldn't let him off. "Monsieur, you
have not criticized my study."
Unable to escape, poor Carrière sat down in front of
it and burbled, "Well, you know, of course not everybody
sees things as everybody else does, and of course one can't
judge fairly when one is not sure just how someone else
sees things who sees them differently from the way one
sees them, and in that case one might say the wrong
thing if one said anything, since one isn't sure where
the other person stands in relation to oneself," and so
on. Finally, perspiring somewhat, he escaped without
having committed himself. Matisse has great maturity,
and the temper of the eternal pupil: he is always willing
to learn anyhow, anywhere, and from anyone.
To my thinking, Matisse was by far the most impor-
tant and essentially vital of the younger (no longer
younger, though I still so think of them) painters. He
did something new with colors-bold, brilliant, subtle. I
had a picture by him of a girl with a yellow hat, in which
the hat was specially to be remarked. I never could make
out why those yellows did what they did. Renoir, colorist
as he was, could not understand how Matisse controlled
128
his intense colors and made them keep their places—
foreground, middle ground, background-just as he
wanted them.
Just how much Matisse came in time to understand
all this, I don't know, but once in the early days he told
me that Maurice Denis had in a book said that it was
all calculated, whereupon he had led Denis up to one
of his pictures and asked him to examine it minutely
and tell him whether the feat of calculating all those
relations would not be a far more extraordinary thing
than composing them intuitively. On this confronta-
tion, Denis admitted that it would be. The picture of
the girl with the yellow hat was one that Matisse had
determined to work on a long time, but after the first
séance he could do nothing more with it. In a way it was
"unfinished," but finished so far as his seeing for the
moment went. Matisse is intuitive, he is intelligent, in
his way he is as persistent as Cézanne himself; and his
best compositions are full, complete, veritable pictorial
finalities such as one rarely finds.
Matisse was religiously conscientious about his work.
He once showed me a picture that he had tried to make
into a best seller when he was particularly hard up, but
he couldn't see it through. After I had seen it, he put it
on the floor and broke it with his heel. He worked end-
lessly on his pictures, and wouldn't let them go till they
were finished. Once a picture had been ordered, and
when the people who had given the order came to Cla-
mart and saw it, they were pleased, and wanted to carry
it off at once. But the picture was not finished. I hap-
pened to be there at the moment, and when the visitors
had gone Matisse said sadly that no doubt when it was
finished they wouldn't want it; and that was exactly
what happened. I told Matisse that the next time he
had better sell the "sketch," and begin the "picture" over
again. As late as 1914, he showed me an interior with
Personal Adventures
129
goldfish and said how he hoped in time to be able to
finish freshly and at once, but that as yet painting was
as difficult as ever. Norman Douglas told me once that
every sentence he wrote was as painful as having a baby,
and for a long time something of the sort was true of
the pictures of Matisse. Later he did come to paint swiftly
and decisively.
During the three years that followed on the Woman
with the Hat I bought a number of Matisses—the last
one, The Blue Woman, now in the Cone collection in
Baltimore, but really a pink woman in blue scenery.
Then I brought several pictures to the house for con-
sideration, but did not keep any. For the moment they
no longer served me.
It was the rhythm in Matisse that I found insufficient.
Art is composition, and the life of composition is rhythm.
Rhythm is movement, and where there is no movement
it has to be as though there were movement. This is of
necessity the case with painting, sculpture and archi-
tecture. As the things don't move, the movement must
be suggested. I long ago came to think that perhaps the
profound importance of rhythm depends on the feeling
of recovery from a fall. It is often suggested that the
feeling for rhythm depends on experience of the change
of seasons, the movement of the sun and moon and stars,
or on the pulse and breath, but this does not seem plau-
sible. The former rhythms are too slow, and the latter
are not attended to.
Man is a two-legged animal, but not, like the birds—
who can sleep comfortably on their legs—a perfect
biped. When he walks, he falls forward and arrests his
fall by putting one leg before the other. Often he gets
tired, and is very conscious of this. By stressing the foot-
fall he gets the march and the dance, perhaps the most
primitive of the arts. There is an acute pleasure in fall-
ing, if one is confident of recovery, as swings and gravity
130
railroads prove. It happens that Watson found the fear
of falling to be the primitive fear, and to fall indefi-
nitely in dreams is terrible, but to swoop down and up
is delightful. I don't claim that my thesis is demonstrably
true, but it is suggestive, and in so far useful.
Obviously no rhythm can exist for one who does not
in some way participate. A dancing figure would be only
a figure moving from place to place, if there were no
participation. We all know how natural it is to beat time,
to sway, to show with our hands and feet that we too are
artists of a kind. However secondarily we do it, we are
participants.
In the case of sculpture, painting, architecture, where
the objects are entirely at rest, we must supply all the
real movement. People who look at pictures as mere rep-
resentation are not bothered by this, but those who want
rhythm have to do something about it. I happen to want
it very much. I often said that there were only two arts
for which I had a natural aptitude, cooking and dancing.
My father was somewhat eccentric, and once discharged
the cook because he wanted his daughters to learn
cooking. So we all turned into the kitchen. Everything
Gertrude tried to cook turned out badly, but I made
bread and apfelstrudel—which is very difficult—and in-
vented new pies and pancakes which were actually eaten.
My dancing I did mostly in private, quite by myself,
developing combinations of rhythms. When on one rare
occasion, having absorbed enough preliminary alcohol, I
did some imitations of Isadora Duncan, a young lady
who was present said, "It is too beautiful to be bur-
lesque,” and she wrote a poem about it. Rhythm is my
element, rhythm and space. Composition suggests the
way we should inwardly move in response, and the result
depends on our capacity to deal with wholes.
We are somewhat like the strings of a violin, and a
picture is the bow that sets us in motion. Just as a bow
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131
may become too smooth and fail to bite on the strings, or
the strings may lose their elasticity, so it is with pictures
and ourselves. A rhythm that is too obvious may cease to
stimulate or one that is too simple. Other things in the
picture, technical qualities that once interested, or illus-
trative ones, drama or religious meanings, may grow
stale; the picture may thus become a more purely formal
thing, and we may make more demand on these formal
characters. Esthetically untrained people are bored by
the endless madonnas in the great galleries, which were
painted when the audience was more interested in ma-
donnas, though even then they may not have cared for
so many in a row. Today it is necessary to be interested
in those pictures with little reference to the original in-
tention, or else not to be interested at all.
It happened to me over and over again that I lost in-
terest in very good pictures when the novelty of the kind
of thing which had before been genuinely interesting
wore off, and that I then demanded of them the qualities
that made important pictures which had not these novel
values. Cézanne did magnificently certain things. Renoir
said of him that he could not put colors together at all
without making a picture. In the early days I often tore
a little hole in a piece of paper and moved it about on
a painting enjoying these little compositions. Also, Cé-
zanne rarely fails in bringing fragments of his pictures
to tolerable completion, or in getting a whole carried to
a certain point. But to get that whole to the stage where
I can rest in it content is, I find, anything but common
with him; in fact, it is uncommon.
Cézanne would probably have agreed. He deplored his
incapacity to "realize,” and once said of pictures that he
considered insufficient, “And really, they admire that
stuff in Paris?" I also deplore it, and see no reason why
I should be more easily satisfied than he. Occasionally
the thing comes off and a masterpiece results, but master-
132
pieces in painting, as in the other arts, are not common.
It happens in those arts where the original can be known
in reproduction, especially literature and music, that
we can all have the best and ignore the rest, whereas in
painting the original is unique and one puts up with
what is inferior.
The practice I had spoken of, seeing compositions in
nature, is an education unlike any other. I can look out
at the window in any direction, here where I am now
writing, from my bedroom, from the kitchen, from the
bathroom, and see things that no one could adequately
render. There is nothing remarkable to be seen from
any of these windows-no "views," no perspectives, no
panoramas. If I go upstairs I can get all those things—
splendid ranging hills, Florence with its cupolas and
towers, one side clustered under Settignano, the other
sweeping into the plain that looks toward the distant
Pisan mountains, a marvelous picture.
But though I can revel in all this, I have no need to
go upstairs, for the contracted space here below-with
a few olive trees, some buildings, piles of faggots, bits of
green field and stone wall-are "dukedom large enough."
The rhythms that I can draw out of, or put into, what
I see, are so tremendous and so vital, that I cannot find
as more than casually interesting what in art is less-for
I do not take art either as a business or a ritual. The
space in Cézanne's landscapes is rarely a complete rhyth-
mic realization. His figure things are almost always frag-
ments. His incomplete portrait of Vollard after a hun-
dred and fifteen sittings is typical of this. The nothings
that I spoke of as seeing from my windows, I have been
looking at daily for six years, and they are more wonder-
ful than ever. But in the six years from the time I bought
that first Cézanne, I had had enough of intensive con-
cern with so-called modern art. I had come to find it only
very occasionally good enough.
Personal Adventures
133
From this excursus on rhythm, I return to Matisse.
After three years I could not buy any more of his pic-
tures, for they were rhythmically insufficient. I was al-
ways interested to see what he was doing, because he al-
ways kept moving and generally moved forward; but it
was enough for me to see his pictures at exhibitions.
Only when I came to Paris after the first war did I see
something that was more than interesting.
Matisse had a show in 1920. None of the pictures
seemed to me especially important, but there was also
on show a little drawing on a scrap of torn paper, a girl
at the piano, which I thought essential. There was some-
thing in it that I had never seen before in a work by
Matisse, something pointing toward a greater signifi-
cance. That evening I spoke to my sister-in-law, who was
intimate with Matisse, and told her my impressions of
the drawing. She said that Matisse had talked to her
about this drawing and had said that if he could do in
paint what he had done in this sketch he would be doing
what he really wanted to do.
The great result predicted in the drawing was not
immediately attained, but in time it was-not constantly,
but often enough to prove the master. In '39 was pub-
lished a volume of color reproductions of Matisse's pic-
tures, and among these are a few that are completely
satisfying. Matisse may fairly be counted as a fortunate
man, who has accomplished his destiny.
134
7. More Adventures
It was later in the year I met Matisse that I met Picasso.
I had known for some time in the Rue Lafitte a little
dealer, an ex-clown with a pointed beard and bright eyes
and a hat pushed back on his head, who twinkled with
enthusiasm whatever was the subject, but especially
when that subject was Zan or current painting. Zan
was a particular brand of licorice which was different
from any other and the only one that had the properties
of a life-preserver. He would interrupt the talk on mod-
ern art to put a bit of Zan between his teeth and com-
mend its virtues; then we were back again on the latest
show, the latest artistic scandal, the prospects for the
future. There was a Spaniard whose works he lauded,
and as he had done me some favors I bought a little
Spanish water color; but when he recommended an-
other Spaniard, I balked.
"But this is the real thing," he said. So I went to the
exhibition, and in fact this was the real thing. Besides
the pictures, there were some drawings for which I left
an offer, since there was no one in charge of the show,
but from this I heard nothing further. When, a few days
later, I dropped in at Sagot's to talk about Picasso, he
had a picture by him, which I bought. It was the picture
of a mountebank with wife and child and an ape. The
ape looked at the child so lovingly that Sagot was sure
this scene was derived from life; but I knew more about
apes than Sagot did, and was sure that no such baboon-
like creature belonged in such a scene. Picasso told me
.
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135
later that the ape was his invention, and it was a proof
that he was more talented as a painter than as a natu-
ralist.
Soon after, I learned that a friend, Pierre Roché,
knew Picasso. Roché, a tall man with an inquiring eye
under an inquisitive forehead, wanted to know some-
thing more about everything. He was a born liaison of
ficer, who knew everybody and wanted everybody to
know everybody else. He introduced me to the literary
band at the Closeries des Lilas-Jarry, Moreas, Paul Fort
and others who had recently made literary history-and
once a month or so he came to see me, to tell his news
and hear mine. We talked the whole night through. I
was always having ideas, and as the same neurosis that
kept me from painting kept me from writing also, it was
nice to have someone like Roché, who was more ear than
anything else. He was delighted to know that I had
seen the work of Picasso, and a few days later led me to
the Rue Ravignon.
One could not see Picasso without getting an indelible
impression. His short, solid but somehow graceful figure,
his firm head with the hair falling forward, careless but
not slovenly, emphasized his extraordinary seeing eyes.
I used to say that when Picasso had looked at a drawing
or a print, I was surprised that anything was left on the
paper, so absorbing was his gaze. He spoke little and
seemed neither remote nor intimate-just quite com-
pletely there. The impression he made was satisfying.
He seemed more real than most people while doing
nothing about it. The atelier was a mess. There was a
heap of cinders beside the round cast-iron stove, which
was held together with a twisted wire (it later burst);
some crippled furniture; a dirty palette; dirty brushes;
and more or less sloppy pictures. Long after many of the
pictures had become mine, Picasso came to the house one
day with his paint box and cleaned them up. Later Vol-
136
lard bought a bunch of them on condition that he should
do the same for him, but I believe he never did.
The homes, persons and minds of Picasso and Matisse
were extreme contrasts. Matisse-bearded, but with pro-
priety; spectacled neatly; intelligent; freely spoken, but
a little shy-in an immaculate room, a place for every-
thing and everything in its place, both within his head
and without. Picasso-with nothing to say except an
occasional sparkle, his work developing with no plan,
but with the immediate outpourings of an intuition
which kept on to exhaustion, after which there was noth-
ing till another came. The difference in mental type be-
tween Picasso and Matisse came out vividly in a later
incident.
At Durand Ruel's there were at one time two exhibi-
tions on, one of Odilon Redon, and one of Manet. Ma-
tisse was at this time specially interested in Redon, be-
cause of his own work and because of friendship with
the older man, who was then in difficulties. When I hap-
pened in he was there, and spoke at length of Redon
and Manet, with emphasis on the superior merits of the
lesser man. It was quite common for Matisse, whose
mind was not rigid, to overflow in some direction be-
cause of a temporary interest. He told me he had seen
Picasso earlier, and Picasso had agreed with him. This
seemed to me improbable. Picasso's appreciations did
not have this fluidity, and he had no special interest in
Redon. However, there was no reason to say this, so I
let it pass.
Later on that same day Picasso came to the house and
I told him what Matisse had said about Redon and Ma-
net. Picasso burst out almost angrily, "But that is non-
sense. Redon is an interesting painter, certainly, but
Manet, Manet is a giant." I answered, "Matisse told me
you agreed with him." Picasso, more angrily: "Of
course I agreed with him. Matisse talks and talks. I can't
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talk, so I just said oui oui oui. But it's damned nonsense
all the same." Picasso, though often influenced by others,
was not so openly receptive as Matisse was.
Matisse was a social person rather than a convivial
one. Picasso was more convivial than social. Matisse felt
himself to be one of many, and Picasso stood apart,
alone. He recognized others, of course, but as belonging
to another system. There was no fusion. Matisse exhib-
ited everywhere. He always wanted to learn, and be-
lieved there was no better way than to see his work along-
side the work of everybody else. Picasso never showed
with others. It was partly diffidence, partly pride. Once at
a salon he said to me, "I don't see how these fellows can
exhibit this stuff; of course my work is bad too, but then
I know it"; after a moment, "Perhaps they know it too,
but they show because it's the best they can do."
Renoir once said, "I want to remain in the ranks"-
something Picasso could never have said. He felt himself
a man apart—what the story books call a man of genius,
though not pretentiously so. But in those days he was
not sure. He was not aggressive, but felt the right to be
aggressive. Once we were waiting for places in an om-
nibus, and many went on. After the passengers with
lower numbers than ours had mounted, Picasso burst
out, "This is not the way it ought to be. The strong
should go ahead and take what they want." But he was
not very sure. When he had something in his head he
could easily put it forth, but when he was fallow there
was nothing behind. Matisse often felt uncertain, but he
never felt empty. He was eternally revolving the artist's
eternal problem: how to realize (to use Cézanne's favor-
ite term). This did not trouble Picasso. He had always
been an illustrator, and when he had his theme he could
easily develop it.
Once when I said to Berenson that Picasso had a vital
personality, he answered, “Perhaps, but not an artistic

138
personality.” In an important sense that was true and
is still true. His personal feeling is more important than
his personal form, and this has made it possible to be
the greatest trick artist known without falling into emp-
tiness. He has not had an organic development. His taste
is impeccable (his fatal good taste, as someone has called
it); he has a grace like that of Raphael, which is per-
vasive and perhaps his greatest real esthetic asset; he has
humor, fancy, both light and tragic, invention, an abun-
dant supply of qualities. He would have been a truly
great artist, I think, if he had been more genuine; as it
is, he's an extraordinary phenomenon. At the moment
when I met him, he was at his best and made on me a
strong impression.
After meeting Picasso I went again to Sagot's. Gertrude
was with me this time and Sagot showed us a picture of
a nude, almost naked little girl with a basket of red flow-
ers. I liked the picture, but Gertrude hated it. A few
days later I bought it. That day I came home late to din-
ner, and Gertrude was already eating. When I told her
I had bought the picture she threw down her knife and
fork and said, "Now you've spoiled my appetite. I hated
that picture with feet like a monkey's." Some years after,
when we were offered an absurd sum for the picture and
I wanted to sell it since for that money one could get
much better things-Gertrude would not agree to sell,
and I believe that she always kept it.
From this time on I saw Picasso often, either at the
Rue Ravignon or the Rue de Fleurus. He was then in
the last months of the Harlequin Period, painting acro-
bats and mountebanks. His inspiration had not yet run
dry, for the best things of the period came then: The
Boy Leading a Horse, and the large composition with a
group of people, which I think was the last. With this
period's end came an end to more than one of his char-
acteristic periods; it was the end of an epoch in his life.
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139
It was Cézanne's fault, or rather the fault of Cézanne's
reputation. Hitherto Cézanne had been important only
for the few; he was about to become important for every-
body. At the Autumn Salon of 1905 people laughed them-
selves into hysterics before his pictures, in 1906 they
were respectful, and in 1907 they were reverent. Cézanne
had become the man of the moment.
Matisse said once that Cézanne is "the father of us
all," but he did not reckon with the phoenix Picasso,
who had no father. Yet Cézanne could not be ignored. It
was no longer a time for illustration, and Picasso for the
first time tried for something that was not illustration at
all: the result was deplorably feeble. This was the pink
period, Picasso at his weakest. He did figures that were
just figures, and there was hardly enough to them to
make them worth doing. It was at this moment that I
suggested he try working from the model in order to get
more stuff into his figures. He came to my studio twice,
but could make nothing of it; the few drawings he
made did not, so to speak, look at the model. He also
worked on Gertrude's portrait, but could not finish that.
Picasso's interior resources were too small for his then
needs, and he had to have support from the outside. He
found it in Negro art, which was a kind of substitute for
an illustrative subject. With this he managed to "finish"
Gertrude's portrait while we were away in Fiesole;
though, as he left all except the mask as it had been be-
fore, the picture as a whole is incoherent. An artist, like
a business man, needs a working capital; and if he can't
make it by his own exertions, he has to borrow it. Picasso
now borrowed it from the Negroes and it kept him go-
ing for a while. His forms grew bigger and in intention
more powerful, but the reality was less than the appear-
ance. I was not seriously interested in this stuff, but I
was in his talent. Nor did I trust his morale. I often said
that I had complete confidence in Matisse, who would
140
give all that was possible for him to give, but that the
future of Picasso was unpredictable, as there was no as-
sured center. His present way was a makeshift, and to it
there was no future that was inevitable. Of course with
his talent he could make something of it as he could of
anything, and in hopes of something better I bought a
few of these Negroid things. Matisse was once looking at
one of them with the patient earnestness with which he
always studied the work of his contemporaries, and at
length he spoke. "Ye-es, it's very ni-ice, very ni-ice, but
-isn't it just the same thing?" Of course what Matisse
meant was that though the forms were larger and the
curves more sweeping, the forms were not really any
bigger than they had been. In spite of the pretense, the
difference was only a matter of illustration.
Picasso was pleasantly childlike at times. I had some
pictures relined, and Picasso decided that he would have
one of his pictures too treated like a classic, though in
reverse order-he would have the canvas lined first and
paint on it afterwards. This he did on a large scale, and
painted a composition of nudes of the pink period, and
then he repainted it again and again and finally left it
as the horrible mess which was called, for reasons I never
heard, the Demoiselles d'Avignon.
A revolutionary moment succeeded. Picasso began to
have ideas. Bergson's creative evolution was in the air
with its seductive slogan of the élan vital. There was a
friend of the Montmartre crowd, interested in mathe-
matics, who talked about infinities and fourth dimen-
sions. Picasso began to have opinions on what was and
what was not real, though as he understood nothing of
these matters the opinions were childishly silly. He would
stand before a Cézanne or a Renoir picture and say con-
temptuously, "Is that a nose? No, this is a nose," and
then he would draw a pyramidal diagram. "Is this a
glass?” he would say, drawing a perspective view of a
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glass. "No, this is a glass," and he would draw a diagram
with two circles connected by crossed lines. I would ex-
plain to him that what Plato and other philosophers
meant by "real thing" were not diagrams, that diagrams
were abstract simplifications and not a whit more real
than things with all their complexities, that Platonic
ideas were worlds away from abstractions, and couldn't
be pictured, but he was bent now on doing something
important—reality was important whatever else it might
be, and so Picasso was off.
The first attempts were not at all novel. In fact, they
were just like the diagrammatic reductions of heads
that one finds in books on drawing, like those in Had-
don's Figure Drawing, for instance. But Picasso did not
stop there; he went on and on. He and Braque worked
together, and, as Braque wrote later, tried to be ab-
solutely impersonal and absolutely original. All kinds of
speculative funny business and shorthand went into the
making, until finally the subject was ignored, except as
a suggestive starting point.
Picasso had now what in view of his lack of essential
seriousness he needed. It is possible that if he had not
found a system he would in time have gone to pot. Mere
drifting and waiting for inspiration might have soured,
and Picasso might have taken to drink or something
worse. The exercise of ingenuity was a safeguard. As
Margaret Kennedy says somewhere, "Ingenuity is per-
haps the most satisfactory exercise in the world for the
human brain. It keeps man happy much longer than
inspiration can.”
It does more than that-it stimulates inspiration, at
least inspiration of a kind, just as rhymes may do when
one is writing verse. In my younger days I sometimes.
suffered from insomnia, and would talk to myself in
rhyme, generally in the meter of, "Here comes Poe with
his raven like Barnaby Rudge, Three-fifths of him genius
142
and two-fifths sheer fudge." Once it got well under way,
the difficulty was to stop it, for the rhymes would carry
on almost of themselves. So it is with Picasso's inventions.
Often the end of one picture is the beginning of the
next. When I say that Picasso was essentially not serious,
I do not mean to say that he did not feel serious. Of
course he did. But to take inventions for something else
is essentially not being serious. Picasso had no longer
the need of intervals of recharging. His inventive genius
was constantly productive, and served as a sufficient stim-
ulus to his feelings to give them an outlet. Picasso was
at this critical moment being an intellectual, which may
have been a saving grace for him on the whole, but was
otherwise unfortunate-unfortunate because it is a real
misfortune when a man of great talent must depend on
a low-grade intellectuality.
Another of the great truths excogitated at this time
was the definition of a head. A head, he told me, was a
matter of eyes, nose, mouth, which could be distributed
any way you like—the head remained a head. And so
Picasso made innumerable heads on this novel pattern,
sometimes throwing in some hair and teeth for good
measure. The nose, which was the starting point of all
this, is never ignored, though often reduced to two dots
which are, I suppose, the nostrils. But the ears are never
given. Perhaps Picasso considered them as mere appen-
dages not worthy to enter into this world of reality.
Picasso did not stop at re-creating the head, he re-
created the body also. Call a thing a woman, and a
woman it is—and you profit by what I have called the
dimensionality of sex. He made the most marvelous
women and many other marvelous things. They got
sometimes to be so queer that even he could not recog-
nize them, but he told me that the faithful disciple and
dealer, Kahnweiler, was never at fault. He could always
tell what they were.
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The fantastic contraptions invented by Picasso had
no limit. If it was not one thing, it was another; it came
rather close to being everything. Besides cubistic analyses
and syntheses, there were scrapbag assemblages like The
Three Musicians, in which more or less real people, or
those who could pass as such, were made up of odds and
ends. With his extraordinary powers as an illustrator,
he could give considerable expressive values to the
most extravagant fantasies, and any chance suggestion
could revive him if for the nonce he had exhausted the
present stock. Of course I have no idea what were the
suggestions for the more than fifty-seven varieties of
Picassian fantasticalities, but it does seem to me almost
incredible that a public could have been found to take
seriously this odd stuff simply because Picasso was a man
of talent.
Picasso himself declares that he ought to be accepted
for this reason. One of the quotations from him in Ger-
trude's book says that though people admit that he can
draw like Raphael, they want to stop him from doing
what he likes. Picasso's argument might have been valid
if these things had been the genuine institutions of an
artist, but they were not. I know that they were not be-
cause we talked of these things again and again, and I
heard Picasso's reasons.
Even where there is a blackberry plenty of reasons,
few will be so absurd as were Picasso's. If he had not had
these reasons and had none the less been able to develop,
his development would have been saner. He would have
been less of a sensation but perhaps a more serious artist.
Some people do not agree with me, and find his intellect
impressive. Henry McBride speaks of the intellectual
keenness of the things that Gertrude quotes from Picasso.
After reading this opinion, I read them through again
carefully, and I will say that either McBride is no judge
of intellectual keenness, or I am not-for I can find no
144
trace of such a thing. Picasso is no fool-anything but it.
He is observant and often shrewd. He is humorous and
can wisecrack on occasion, but having significant thoughts
is quite another matter, and having one's direction de-
termined by ideas is altogether a serious matter for an
artist. It is to subject his essential purpose to the direc-
tion of his intellect, and it would seem to me that any
sane person looking at the result could see how absurd
it was in this case.
There is one expression of Picassian intellectuality so
extraordinary that I must put it in here. His friend Coc-
teau is the authority for it. A decoration for the theatre
was being made, and Picasso strode up and down before
a large white wooden panel. Suddenly he stopped and
rubbed red chalk on it. Then with ink he blackened
some places and three columns leaped to view. This ap-
parition startled those present, and they applauded. In
the street, on leaving, Cocteau asked whether this had
been calculated or whether it came as a surprise. Pi-
casso answered that it was unexpected, though one, no
doubt, calculated without knowing it. He added that
as he had invented these columns, so perhaps had the
Greeks discovered the Doric column.
All this was very surprising. I wondered whether the
words could mean something different from what they
seemed to mean. Was it possible that one should so fatu-
ously confound reminiscence and invention? Whether
possible or not, here it was done. This is especially amus-
ing when one remembers how pronounced the tendency
to reminiscence was in Picasso. Picasso was continually
playing variations on other people's themes-sometimes
with intention, sometimes without. Stephen Bourgeois.
says that Picasso has a powerful intellect. Sample it any-
where, and this is about the way it works. A powerful
imagination if you will, but intellect never.
Picasso was incapable of any intensive study of form.
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When he tried to make his forms big, he gave his figures
elephantiasis. In this respect he was entirely different
from Matisse. Manguin told me that a group of students
was not satisfied with the week's pose, because it did not
give them time enough for thorough study. So they got
a pose for a month, but Matisse was the only one who
stuck it out. Not only that, but yet dissatisfied, he got
the same model to pose in the same position for a
statuette, and worked on it for three years with more
than a hundred sittings.
Some years later, Matisse did a similar thing with a
female torso, which was cast in plaster and kept to be
reworked every little while. Picasso, when he worked a
long time, was busy with a remaking. The Demoiselles
d'Avignon began as one thing and went through many
phases, ending as a mixture of all sorts of things. In the
powerfully effective Guernica, the research was for ef-
fectiveness of composition and expression, not for form.
In the Museum of Modern Art catalogue it says that、
"Picasso's ability to breathe new life and charm into a
style so exhausted by overuse as the neo-classic is dem-
onstrated by the Woman in White." This statement,
which is quite correct, is made pretentiously impressive
by conventional habits of thought. Picasso's almost
specific ability is to breathe life and charm into things.
Why not into what anyone may be pleased to call the
neo-classic? After all, that means no more than a rather
linear painting of a woman with a Greekish head. Most
people would make that dull, just as they make dull a
Cézanne still life or a cubist concoction. Breathing life
and charm into things is what made me take to Picasso
in the first place, and if he had gone on doing this with
increase of passion and of power as he matured, my in-
terest would have continued and doubtless grown. But
when he became an intellectual at a contemptible level
of degradation, I couldn't accept it. Of course his talent
146
didn't die, it became in fact more mature. There is more
power of expression and design in later work than in the
earlier. It is not the lack of ability that puts me off, but
the silliness. It is not abstract ability that makes for in-
terest in a work of art, but competence applied to good
purpose. What one wants, at least what I want, is a cer-
tain total result.
I have already said that full appreciation is a re-crea-
tion by the observer. If the observer in question is me,
he is a person of a given intelligence and culture. My
plenary reactions have to be mine and not those of an-
other. If there is to be an intellectual expression I want
the intellect to be valid. If there is to be primitivism, I
don't want it to be childish. I like primitive art of a kind.
All rhythm is basically primitive, and when this basic
power is manifest through all developments, one has
primitivism at its greatest sufficiency. I know nothing
more primitive than the theme of Beethoven of which
I spoke when treating of seeing. I know nothing more
primitive than Michelangelo. The more basic power
there is in the expression, the more I realize its essential
primitiveness. But I prefer this primitiveness expressed
either as pure barbarism or at my own level of intelli-
gence and culture, and not at that of chambermaids, bus
drivers, and douaniers.
The first time I saw the work of Rousseau at the Inde-
pendents', I recognized a talent, a gift for composition
and color, but I don't want that sort of thing hanging on
my wall and staring me in the face all the time. I like to
talk with the people of the village, but I don't want to
live with them. After I had talked with one who had
some interest in art and ideas, he told my wife that it
was as though he had passed out of the provinces into
the great world. He was as good a man as I was—in some
ways that I can recognize he is better-but what is for
him the upper ether is my dwelling place. With Picasso
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as a man, and an artist, well and good, but with Picasso
as a thinker there's nothing doing.
Picasso may have given up "thinking." In the dis-
courses printed in the Modern Museum catalogue he
speaks of himself as a pure intuitive. It is quite possible
that this is true now, though I put little faith in the in-
trospections of the uncritical. By thinking he got him-
self shunted onto the track which led into the beyond
where his ingenuity could have full play, and the re-
sults of that thinking are all over the place. It is quite
possible that no more thinking is necessary. Every fantasy
has rights of citizenship, and his incredible facility could
make something of it. There is in this nothing to quarrel
with. These things apparently satisfy Picasso and many
are enthusiastic over the results. The editor of the Mod-
ern Museum catalogue can tell us with a straight face
that No. 231 is a most important painting of the Bone
Period. Picassian archeology may some day be the occa-
sion of professorial chairs. But I chuckle as I read. Suum
cuique, if everyone could get his own, all the world
would be happy, at least for a little while, and Picasso
seems to have made no inconsiderable contribution to
what some people want.
Picasso and Braque invented, contrived, excogitated,
or educed cubism. I am not sure what the proper word
is, but Picasso says it was not "researched." I doubt, how-
ever, whether he has ever applied his thinking powers
to the elucidation of this word. Research may mean that
you are after something that you foresee, as people were
looking for the atomic bomb, or it may mean that you
are following certain clues to see what they will lead to.
In that sense Picasso and Braque were researchers. When
once you know that a nose is not a nose is not a nose you
can go on to discover what all the other things are not,
and arrive at the conclusion that the way to build up
"real" things is out of "the broken fragments of a once
148
glorious union, of states dissevered, discordant.” But
when the analysis is only a kind of funny business, the
synthesis will be only another kind of funny business.
With this kind of funny-business analysis, anything can
be analyzed into any elements, and with this funny-busi-
ness synthesis any elements can be synthesized into any
form. The analysis and the synthesis alike are mere funny
business, and it is absurd to take them seriously.
Among other great ideas unfolded were the simulta-
neity of aspects and the intersection of planes. “Back
and sides go bare, go bare," says the old song, and the
simultaneists proceeded to put this into effect, and lay
bare the concealed aspects of things. Metzinger and
others painted pitchers cut in two down the middle,
with one-half facing outward, and the other in profile.
I don't think that Picasso ever did anything quite so
silly, but to a naïve human being like myself it seems
obvious that the back and sides of a figure even seen
from the front are made more real when the object is
realized in deep space than when some fragmentary hints
are given of what one would see if one peeped round
the corner.
Picasso had no command of deep space, as he had none
of substantial form. I once pointed out to Mr. Sam Lewi-
sohn that two Picassos which hung on a wall with other
pictures, one early and one late, but neither one a cubist
picture, were shallower than any other of the others.
The simultaneity of aspects amounts to nothing more
than a slightly stereoscopic effect, as in some of Picasso's
later heads, or the fact that forms suggested by the ob-
ject can be used for compositions. Of course, Picasso,
with his great talent for composition, often so used the
elements delightfully. Also one can get other-dimensional
suggestions. I use the word dimension, as I have used it
for sex, to mean effective values in art which are incom-
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mensurable with others. For instance, when bits of vio-
lins, guitars, notes suggestive of music, are introduced,
the dimension of music is added to the formal composi-
tion. Sometimes this is effective, and sometimes not. The
notion can be applied with anything that has suggestive-
ness, like Poussin's well-known Et in Arcadia Ego or Pi-
casso's less familiar J'aime Eve, or someone's visiting card.
Braque too arrived at something that was quite successful
in the application of the method of more or less frag-
mentation when he did those little still lifes with fruits
and nuts and tableware.
Intersecting planes seem to me to be entirely without
justification. Long before cubism, it had seemed to me
reasonable that if the subject did not count, one might
make pictures entirely abstract, and I made a number of
drawings on that assumption in 1906. But I found that
when lines and planes intersected, they became con-
fused, and the composition lost determinate character,
and could be read in different ways. In Cézanne the
planes do not intersect, but interlock. When better art-
ists than I took up this thing, I was interested to see
what they could do to avoid this confusion. But they
seemed to revel in it. I am interested to see that in the
linear drawings illustrated in the Museum catalogue
(No. 205 a) Picasso has put knots at the intersection of
the lines and thus preserved a certain order.
In an interesting book which chance brought to my
notice, Architecture, Time and Space, I saw pictures of
Picasso and other cubists put parallel to buildings and
significantly related. So far as I could see, the compari-
sons were only schematic. In the buildings, the spatial
relations suggested and those seen were the same. In the
pictures, they were only told about. Many people today
as in former days look at pictures for what they say
rather than for what they are. Then, stories and senti-
150
ments were read; today, the reading is of formal rela-
tions. The authenticity in one case may be no greater
than in the other.
No one with a sense of realities can set up as a judge
in matters esthetic. I have not the slightest idea what
other people, who find admirable the portrait of Kahn-
weiler or the Pierrot of the Guggenheim Foundation,
see. If they see something I don't see, they have the ad-
vantage of me; if they see no more and get some satisfac-
tion out of it, then their interests are other than mine.
In 1911 or 1912 Gertrude bought a cubist Picasso, the
first picture for which she was responsible to come to
27 Rue de Fleurus. I looked at it often, and it always
remained the confusion that it was at the beginning.
I have of course seen a lot of them, and find these
mixed-up ones as futile to contemplation as I find the
ideas underlying them to be silly. The so-called analysis
is a mere make-believe of analysis, and the synthesis a
half-correlated correlation between an intention in re-
spect of the object and decorative exigencies. Picasso ad-
mitted this when I asked him the reason for certain
lines in some early work of that kind. I also once asked
him the reason for some wavy shading all over the place.
He said that didn't mean anything except a sort of com-
pletion, since the lines which were the real picture were
too bare. Later he became more courageous and left the
lines bare. I have seen many explanations of pictures by
Picasso which ignore entirely things that I know were
in his mind when he did them, but of which the com-
mentators know nothing. This has mightily encour-
aged a skeptical trend in me regarding many matters
which are plausibly explained to the satisfaction of
those who must have an explanation, even when the
explanation has no basis except the explainer's wish for
an explanation.
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In 1910 I bought my last picture from Picasso and that
was one that I did not really want, but I had from time
to time advanced him sums of money, and this cleared
the account. Picasso was amusing sometimes when he
was hard up. At one such moment the pictures of Renoir
for the first time brought large prices at an auction, and
Picasso, who had no coal and no money to buy it, drew
glowing pictures of Renoir's house with sacks of coal
everywhere and some specially choice hunks on the
mantelpiece. Once when I gave him a hundred francs to
buy coal, he stopped on the way home and spent sixty of
it for Negro sculpture.
Picasso was not pleased that I would have none of
his cubism. As long as he was not committed, but only ex-
perimenting, all went well enough between us, but
when he had finally made the turning there was noth-
ing to go on. None the less, whenever we met he would
recur to this and say, "Why don't you like my painting?”
I explained over and over again, but he was not satis-
fied. Once he was angry and burst out, “You have no
right to judge. I'm an artist, and you are not."
“But Pablo," I answered, "I deliberately and con-
sciously avoid this subject. It's you who always raise it.
Leave it alone, and nothing will be said about it."
When it happened that in order to buy a Renoir, I
had to sell some of his pictures, I asked Gertrude to
let him know at once of my intention. He took it nicely
and said, "If Leo sells pictures of mine to get a Renoir,
I hope he'll get a good one." After I had the picture, I
once saw him coming in to see Gertrude and I said,
"Don't you want to see your Renoir?" He found it
very good, and we had a pleasant talk. We went over the
whole subject of his painting once more, and he con-
cluded, "Even if this new way is a mistake, it has
profited me, for I did a figure the other day and it was
152
better than any I had done before." Soon after this I left
Paris to live in Settignano, and I did not see Picasso
again till after the war.
In 1920 I called on him at the Rue de la Boetie. He
was a little bitter and not very polite. He said, "The
trouble with you is that you can't see things till the cogs
have become somewhat rusty." I didn't find this remark
very clever. I had recognized the value of Picasso the first
time I saw his work, and for a while was the only person
that bought his pictures. I was the only person any-
where, so far as I know, who in those early days recog-
nized Picasso and Matisse. Picasso had some admirers,
and Matisse had some, but I was alone in recognizing
these two as the two important men. Nor did I come to
an admiration of cubism when the cogs had grown rusty.
No, Picasso's comment, if it did not flatter me, did not
flatter his judgment.
My interest in Picasso and Matisse calls to mind "kinds
of things." Most people in matters of art are interested
in some kind of thing, and are not interested in some
other kind till it becomes a matter of habit. This habitu-
ation makes it possible to gather heterogeneous collec-
tions of the things that have been established, but for
the new it's first a matter of kinds. That means that
most people find it natural to belong to a sect, except
for the few who find it equally natural to refuse to be-
long to a sect. I was never of either kind, but tended
rather to consider the particular thing than the kind of
thing that it was.
When I was fourteen I belonged to a baseball club,
and was continually puzzled by the lack of objective
vision of its members and those of other clubs with
which we played. I couldn't understand how they could
always see things in a purely partisan spirit. If it was a
question of a foul or a pickup, those who saw the play
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and those who had their backs turned were equally sure
and equally vociferous. I was the only one affected by
what was actually seen. It has remained so ever since
in art and other things. I am typically and essentially
non-partisan and find myself under no spiritual necessity
to be for or against anything. Therefore, it was easy
enough to see that here were two great talents doing two
entirely different things. One stuck to his line and has
brought it far. The other had not sufficient character
for this, and became the playboy of modern art. His
emotional intensity is real, and he seems to be ending as
he began a great illustrator-and so he will have justi-
fied his talent.
The next time I saw Picasso was some years later
when I met him on the street. I said, "You're getting
fat."
"Yes," he said, patting his belly. "Isn't it shameful? I
hear you're painting again."
"Yes."
"I'm curious to see what you're doing. Aren't you go-
ing to exhibit?”
"Not yet."
"Perhaps you're waiting till the crisis is over." This
was after '29.
"I think I'd better," I replied.
"By the way, I saw Gertrude recently. She said to me,
'There are two geniuses in art today, you in painting
and I in literature.'" Picasso shrugged his shoulders.
"What do I know about it? I can't read English. What
does she write?"
I said she used words cubistically, and that most peo-
ple couldn't understand at all.
"That sounds rather silly to me. With lines and col-
ors, one can make patterns, but if one doesn't use words
according to their meanings, they aren't words at all."
154
"Well," I said, "if you want to know more about it,
you'll have to ask someone more cubistically inclined
than I am."
One more meeting, and that was the last. I happened
in at Rosenberg's where some Picasso pictures were on
exhibition, including the big Dance. Picasso came in and
spoke to me a moment, but seemed nervous. “You look
at the pictures," he said. "I'm going upstairs to smoke a
cigarette. I'll be down soon." Picasso, I recognized, had
now come into the class of Great Men, and as Emerson
said after his visit to England in '33, one talks to great
men as one does to children, one humors them. So when
he came down, I said that the action of the big Dance
was splendid, which it is, and then we agreed in criti-
cism of pictures by Leger which were also being shown,
and everything went very nicely.
I am sorry that I did not see his Guernica. I returned
from America while the World's Fair was still on, but
the Spanish house was closed. From the photographs,
one gets an impression of effectively applied expressive
power. Of course, one cannot judge a big picture from a
little reproduction, which often flatters it, but I certainly
would like to see it.
As an appendix to this account of Picasso, I must say
something about the Rousseau Banquet. Everyone who
writes about those times gets round to it somehow. It
has been overdescribed, and I don't propose to describe
it again. I shall only tell how there came to be a banquet
at all, for I was innocently the cause of it.
One day I had gone to see Picasso, who was not at
home. While I was talking with Fernande, Rousseau
came in to rest a moment, for he had been giving a vio-
lin lesson in the neighboring Rue Lepic. As I had never
heard him, I asked him to play, but he excused himself:
he was tired, and the day was hot. Then Fernande said,
"Monsieur Rousseau, you must come to dinner soon
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and play for us and a few friends." Rousseau said he
would be delighted, whereon Fernande added, "Let's
not leave it at some time; make it a week from Saturday,
and I'll ask the Steins, and Braque and Apollinaire and
Marie Laurencin." That was agreed to, but when the
news got about, so many others wanted to come that the
dinner was changed to a picnic supper, famous through
all the world as the Banquet Rousseau. Great oaks from
little acorns grow. If I had not that drowsy summer
afternoon asked Rousseau to play, there would have
been no banquet, and no post-fabricated explanations
to account for it.
Matisse's work, unlike Picasso's, was one whose genu-
ineness one could never question. He played with
cubism a little and profited by Negro sculpture, but he
was too intelligent and too sincere to drown in these
things. He experimented, but kept control. One summer
he brought back from the country a study of a young
fisherman, and also a free copy of it with extreme de-
formations. At first he pretended that this had been
made by the letter carrier of Collioure, but finally ad-
mitted that it was an experiment of his own. It was the
first thing he did with forced deformations. He also
brought back some landscapes in bright colors, which at
first attracted me so strongly that I wanted the whole
lot; but I could only get two of them, as the others were
already promised. In these, for the first time, I noticed
that after a little while the essential rhythm went flat.
However, despite this, what he did always interested me,
and I was always wanting to see what he did next. One
could be certain that he was properly carrying on.
I thoroughly understood his work, and this he then
recognized. One day he came to the house to ask me to
do something. He was always diffident when asking, and
it took some time for him to get to the point. Young
men, office workers and others, had formed a group to
156
visit the ateliers of painters, where someone would make
a little speech about their work. He wanted me to make
this speech for him. I declined. I said that I was ready
to talk French extemporaneously, but not to address
Frenchmen deliberately in their own tongue. Matisse
urged me, as he said there was no one else to do it, but
I had to refuse. I mention it as evidence from Matisse
himself that I really understood him.
While on this theme, I can tell a characteristic Vollard
incident. In the earliest days, I once talked to Vollard
for a long time about Matisse. Vollard listened intently,
and when I concluded, he said, "And you really think
that Matisse is as important as that?" I said that I did.
This was in the early autumn, and we were expecting
Matisse back from the country to show us his work first.
He then said he had been much surprised to get a letter
from Vollard, asking to see his pictures before they were
offered to another dealer-since Vollard had never felt
great interest in what he did. So I told him of this con-
versation, which made everything clear.
Vollard on another occasion was very Vollardian. He
talked to me one day of the charms of Parisian society,
and how I greatly erred in not getting out into that
world. He expatiated on the conversation of the French
salons, in which I should take a part. I assured him that
this sort of thing was not at all in my line, and quite
out of the question, but I was surprised by his speaking
of it. Meeting Picasso the next day, I told him about this
strange attack. Picasso laughed. Yes, he said, Vollard had
already spoken to him of this, and what splendid public-
ity I could supply if I would go out into society and talk
about painting. In fact, however, I confined myself to
27 Rue de Fleurus, which will be the subject of the next
chapter.
27 Rue de Fleurus
157
8. 27 Rue de Fleurus
27 Rue de Fleurus was filling with pictures, and also
with visitors. My brother, who was our banker, surprised
me one day when he said we had eight thousand unex-
pended francs. As this was regarded as criminal waste, we
went at once to Vollard's. Vollard liked to sell us pic-
tures because, as he told me, we were the only custom-
ers who bought pictures not because they were rich but
despite the fact that they weren't. So we never had to
bargain with him, as he always gave us good prices. Be-
sides, he said, the rich paid when they happened to
think of it, and their thoughts ran mostly to other mat-
ters, while we paid at once. On this occasion I selected
two Gauguins, two Cézanne figure compositions, two
Renoirs, and Vollard threw in a Maurice Denis, Virgin
and Child, for good measure. In later years, people
often said to me that they wished they were able to buy
such things for such prices, and I had to remind them
that they also were in Paris then and had more money
than I had. But they, to use Picasso's words, had to wait
till the cogs were rusty, or-as it would perhaps be bet-
ter to say-till they were worn smooth and ran easily.
One day at the Autumn Salon I had picked out some
pictures to buy-a Bonnard, a Vuillard and something
else-but when I came to the office it was closed. So I
went to lunch, intending to finish the affair later. But
while eating, I got an idea that was thrilling: to buy a
big Cézanne figure, instead of a lot of little pictures. Vol-
lard was enthusiastic, and wanted us to have the largest
158
possible range of choice. He would say, "Wait, I can
get some other ones to show you," and so for several
weeks we toddled over to the Rue Lafitte again and
again. It was difficult to make a choice, because all these
pictures are fragmentary and unfinished, and each has
in it good and bad. One had to compromise, unless one
were rich enough to buy half a dozen of them and have
the pictures supplement each other.
Our collection became in time one of the sights of
Paris, for everyone who was curious to know modern art.
We were supposed by many to be eccentric millionaires.
who wore corduroys and lived in a pavilion-that is,
a little detached house in a court-in order to be differ-
ent. A bearded porter at the Gare St. Lazare came to me
once when I was leaving after having seen a friend off,
and asked me about my philosophy of life. Just then my
beard was bushy because, as often, I had forgot to get it
trimmed, and I wore sandals and corduroys. I was sur-
prised, and said that I had no particular philosophy of
life. But I must have, he insisted: when cultured people
do things different from those done by others, it must be
because they have a philosophy of life. So I told him
that I was both disorderly and careless, and sometimes I
forgot to shave. I didn't like finding myself, suddenly,
unshaved, and so I grew a beard. As for the sandals, I
had once worn them all the summer, and on my return
to the city my feet were blistered when I took a long
walk, and so I came back to the sandals. The corduroys
were convenient, for they were not made of wool, and
so there was no need of precautions to keep the moths
off. The disappointed porter turned away. I ought to
have asked him for his philosophy of life, for certainly
he had one.
Sometimes people who knew our circumstances
wanted to know how we managed. We not only had the
pictures, but also thousands of books; we traveled as we
27 Rue de Fleurus
159
wanted to and entertained a great deal. The only expla
nation I could give was that we never kept any accounts
and never had any debts. The dealers often wanted to
sell me things which I could pay for later, but I would
have none of this. We spent all the money we had and
no more, and so we were free. Life was then cheap in
Paris, rents were low, food was not dear, we had no doc-
tor's bills. There were good little restaurants wherever
one traveled, and we didn't expect hot and cold running
water in the hotels we stopped at or any running
water, for that matter. We despised luxury except when
someone else paid for it, and got what we most wanted.
That made a satisfactory living.
Our collection was not a collection of specimens, and
many well-known painters were not represented. There
was no Derain. In an early Autumn Salon I noticed an
Interior that seemed good to me. The price was only a
hundred francs, but I never liked to buy pictures by un-
known men till I had seen them at least twice, for then
one incurs a responsibility, as when one does a favor of
which a repetition is expected. This picture of Derain's
on a second view was not good enough. So it always
remained, they were never good enough, and I never
bought any. He had a curious way of painting a head as
though this was cut off from a large figure, and of put-
ting a figure into a place where it did not fit-a curious
and unique perversity. His most satisfying pictures were
his russet still lifes, but even these I did not care to have.
Though Braque was for some time one of the intimates
at the house, I never had anything of his. His pre-cubist
paintings were insignificant, and the earlier cubist
things were like Picasso's, but weaker. His little dark
decorative still lifes were the first interesting things he
did, and by that time I was no longer actively concerned
with pictures.
Of Van Gogh I never had anything, and I would
160
rather read his letters than look at his pictures. Van
Gogh was sensitive, appreciative to an unusual degree,
intelligent, and keenly interested, but he had hardly, as
he himself said, finished his apprenticeship, before he
went mad. Once Fenéon, when he was in charge of the
modern pictures at Bernheim's, was unpacking a large
consignment of Van Goghs as I happened in. We looked
over them together. When he asked me what I thought
of them, I said that if these had been by Cézanne or
Matisse, they would have held them to be interesting be-
ginnings, though it still remained to make pictures of
them. That is the way with most of his work. However
profound they may be emotionally, they are pictorially
too superficial to amount to much. They are mostly in-
tense impressions. He had worked so long and seriously
at composition that these impressions had often a real
formal intention which was incompletely realized. His
earlier things that were more thoroughly worked are
student's work. On the whole I prefer his drawings, es-
pecially his landscape drawings, to his paintings.
We had an exquisite little Manet and a little head by
Daumier. There was a Greco St. Francis that came from
South America, and a Delacroix. It is long since Dela-
croix has been the fashion, but I consider him to be by
all odds the greatest French painter of his century. It has
always amused me that the people who say that the sub-
ject does not count object to Delacroix's romantic sub-
jects. If the subject makes no difference, why should one
object to "Brian de Bois-Guilbert carrying off Rebecca
from the burning castle of Front-de-Boeuf"? The im-
portant question is, can the painter get away with it, and
Delacroix could. He was one of the rare dramatic artists
who is a real painter-one with Giotto, Michelangelo,
Tintoretto, Rubens-a great colorist, a great master. It
has become one of the conventions of our day that a pic-
ture is primarily, and then exclusively, a matter of paint,
27 Rue de Fleurus
161
but that this should be so is not at all obvious. In fact,
it was obvious until quite recently that pictures should
say things of interest, and that the art of painting was to
say them well. There came about a period in painting
when the academician was dominant, and the specific
art was neglected, but even then it was possible to make
pictures that were good as illustration and of permanent
interest, if one had a sufficient dramatic gift.
Jean Paul Laurens was one who had this gift. I once
asked a superior person whether he remembered a cer-
tain picture by Laurens in the Luxembourg. He snorted
indignation at the suggestion that he should remember
a Laurens, but when I began to describe the picture, he
knew it well. As painting, it was not good, but as with
color one can legitimately do anything that color will do,
and as drama is one of those things, such pictures are
entirely reputable. I would rather have a good Laurens
or a good Meissonier than half a ton of the empty can-
vases covered moderately well with paint that of late
years one has seen everywhere. People have a very mis-
taken notion that their conventions are something more
than conventions. It is not a convention to say that
Laurens is not a great "painter," but it is a convention
to say that what he does well is unimportant. There
are not as yet ascertained laws of nature which tell what
it is in art that shall be considered important. This still
remains a matter of opinion.
The bulk of the collection at 27 Rue de Fleurus was
made of Picassos, Matisses, Cézannes and Renoirs. I
noticed once that when I hung all the Renoirs together
they enhanced each other, but grouping the Cézannes
had no such result. Another thing I noticed was that
when I returned from Italy at the end of the summer,
the Cézannes maintained their full affirmations, but all
the other things were somewhat dimmed and needed a
little time to recover. I did not then have a fully devel-
162
oped late Renoir or Matisse, but none the less the fact
was interesting.
The Saturday evenings became more and more
crowded. I expounded and explained. Some people are
given to explaining. I knew an Englishman in Florence,
a mere acquaintance whom I saw at times in a caffé or,
more commonly, on a street corner. Once I came upon
him in the Piazza Santa Trinita and he told me that he
had bought an apartment, that he had tried several
towns but had come back to Florence, which he pre-
ferred. He didn't know why, because he thought he liked
some others better. So I explained to him why he pre-
ferred Florence.
"There it is," he said, "my wife and I were talking
about this, and I said to her that when I met Mr. Stein
I'd bring up the subject and that he would explain it-
and so you have."
Professor Boas of Johns Hopkins University once said
to me that if he knew ever so little about a subject he
could get up on a platform and give an hour's lecture
on it. I can't give a lecture, but I can explain. So on Sat-
urday evenings I explained. One young fellow who
greatly admired a Greco-Romantic painter named Mé-
nard came one evening and, when leaving, said, “Oh,
I'll admit that you can talk, but that doesn't alter the
facts.” There are people whose confidence in the facts is
proof against all attack.
A year later he came again. He said, "You don't re-
member me."
I said, "Oh, yes, how's Ménard?”
"Rotten," said he, and after that came almost every
Saturday.
At the beginning, some of my friends who thought a
strayed sheep like myself ought to be brought back to
the flock, decided that one of them should speak seri-
ously to me about my blunders, but Bancel La Farge told
27 Rue de Fleurus
163
me that no one would take on the role of bell-the-cat. So
I was left to go on, and in time most of them were fol-
lowing.
There was an Englishman who came one evening and
grew indignant. "Why do you just sit there and talk to
these docile people?" he stormed. "Why don't you go
out and encounter those who disagree and are compe-
tent to maintain their disagreement?"
I said that I had no program, but acted quite casually.
People came, and so I explained, because it was my
nature to explain. Many wanted to know why I didn't
write. I said I couldn't write. This was before I knew of
Freud, so I could not tell them about inhibitions. If I
had been living somewhere else, I would have known
about Freud before this, but he was late to arrive in
France. So I talked, and some of what I said got into
books without my putting pen to paper. Eventually I
tried psychoanalysis, but as that did not work, I devel-
oped a method for myself that did work. Then I wrote
some articles; when I had analyzed some more I wrote a
book; and now that my analysis is unusually complete,
it looks as though I would do nothing else but write and
paint.
When my interest in Cézanne declined, when Matisse
was temporarily in eclipse, when Picasso turned to fool-
ishness, I began to withdraw from the Saturday eve-
nings. After a time the pictures which were joint prop-
erty of Gertrude and myself were divided, and I ex-
changed many for Renoirs. The Gauguins I had long
before disposed of. Gauguin made an important de-
parture, but he is only second-rate. I don't want any pic-
tures in my room that I could not recommend for the
Louvre-except my own. I can have these around be-
cause I can consider their defects with a remunerated
eye, as I think how to make them better. For those of
others, I can only regret that they did not do this, and
164
sometimes a specific defect becomes so annoying that the
picture has to be done away with. A picture may have
many deficiencies and yet be tolerable, while some ap-
parently trifling misadventure in composition may dis-
rupt the whole.
In "modern art" I was never interested. I don't even
know what it is, and I dislike the term. If the phrase
meant anything important, it would mean art produced
by a modern mind. Obviously not Cézanne or Renoir or
Matisse or Picasso-though he is now a communist-is
a modern mind. I shan't discuss the matter here, as I
propose to write a book about the modern mind, which
really does not yet exist. The mind of today is the same
old mind as ever, though it has a greater interest in
gadgets. I think it is better to say recent art, or contem-
porary art. Much of this contemporary art is "abstract,"
and therefore something must be said of this.
Distortion in art has already been spoken of. It is
found everywhere, since anything which is seen out of
focus is of necessity distorted, and everything particular
in a work of art is out of focus, since it is seen as related
to something not itself. In recent years distortion has
come to be cherished. Cézanne distorted noticeably-
not because he wanted to, but because only so could he
get his results. Matisse distorted more than he wished to
distort. At the time when his distortions were most ex-
treme and offensive to the general, he told me that at
every beginning of a picture he hoped that he could end
without any distortion that would offend the public, but
that he could not succeed. In his popular Nice period he
did succeed, and much of his distortion since is not of
the pseudo-naturalistic kind, but decorative.
Much of Picasso's distortion in the Negroid period
was a facile means for securing tension in drawing,
which he lacked. Sometimes he put the lower half of a
face at an angle to the upper half, instead of subtly
""
27 Rue de Fleurus
165
1
modifying the curvature. Modigliani also makes things
easier by distortion. His best things are admirably har-
monized and rhythmed; and this can, of course, be more
easily done when heads and necks, and torsos and limbs,
can be given arbitrary proportions. The result, to my
thinking, is rather offensive. It is more or less ugly that
is, not what we expect in a face or figure that is not pur-
posely caricatured. All essential values can be achieved
without these manifest distortions, but it is not so easy;
and Modigliani, like so many others of today, thinking
ugliness a virtue, preferred the easier way.
Abstract art was bound to come to people's minds
after Cézanne, even though Cézanne's painting was not
so different from what had gone before as theorists often
pretend. There is distortion in all art, but obvious dis-
tortion in former art had been interpretive, a fashion in
shapes, and so intentional, or else it was caricature, while
Cézanne's was compositional and so incidental. This
implied that the subject might fairly be subordinated to
the purpose of the picture as a whole. Courbet had al-
ready given the shove toward any subject being good
enough, and so one was launched toward the objective
that no-subject would serve one's purpose. A great deal
has been written about abstract art, and of this I have
seen very little. Also there are many painters of abstract
pictures whose works I have not seen. What I have to say
is not grounded in a scholarly acquaintance with the
subject, and is justified perhaps only because these chap-
ters are autobiographical.
Abstraction in art may mean two very different things
-abstraction of qualities and abstraction of subject mat-
ter. Abstraction of qualities is essentially a matter of at-
tention, of direction of interest. One person may be
interested most in form, another in drama, another in
social significance, another in philosophy or religion,
and so on. This kind of abstraction can never be deliv-
166
ered pure, since it is in its nature interpretive and there
must be something to interpret. It is the abstraction of
subject matter which has had a recent emergence.
The thing is not entirely new. Reynolds believed that
draperies should be abstract in so far as they should not
be woolen or cotton or silk, but just draperies. Picasso
went further. A nose should not be a Greek nose or a
Roman nose or a snub nose-in short not a nose but the
nose. Finally a nose need not even be a nose at all, but
anything else, or almost nothing at all. By that time a
nose had reached the limit of abstraction. This was one
way to become abstract.
Abstraction could be come to by other roads. One
might condense one's feelings into form. There were
horizontality and verticality and obliquity, there were
feelings of heat and cold, of sublimity and the trivial,
and there were lines and squares and circles and spirals,
and hot and cold colors. With these one could say all
that one wanted, without the horizontals being fields,
the verticals trees, the obliques perspectives, or the colors
being the colors of objects. Inevitably people tried out
this sort of thing and got some results. Some find the
results satisfying, and some do not. I am one of those
who is only a little thrilled.
There are some persons who think that, apart from
its results in practice, the idea of abstract art is impor-
tant. I am one of those who thinks that ideas in art may
be amusing and sometimes serviceable, but that they are
never important. I do not mean that they may not be
important for the artist. Picasso had ideas that I consider
silly, and yet they made a great difference to him and to
subsequent art. What I mean is that the work of art
stands on its own bottom, and is made neither better
nor worse because of intentions in the artist's mind.
Reynolds may have thought that while a mere man may
look well dressed in a silk gown, a hero is rightly garbed
27 Rue de Fleurus
167
1
only in neutral stuff. A hero may be considered a sort
of abstraction, and should be abstractly clothed. Picasso
thought it a fault that Cézanne and Renoir made use of
real noses, when in truth only unreal noses were really
real. Even when reasons are as plentiful as blackberries,
one should be careful about using them, since they are
often either unripe or rotten.
I shall consider one case where the thesis of abstract
art is developed with Cézanne as its object—not what
Cézanne painted, but what he is interpreted as thinking.
I have seen a good many of these profound lucubrations
in notices of pictures and reviews of books. I have no
American books at hand, and shall use an English one,
Art Now, by Herbert Read. Read is said to be the lead-
ing English critic of this stripe, so the examination is
not unfair.
Though Read's objective is Cézanne, he starts far back
with Plato. Plato in the Philebus discusses kinds of pleas-
ure, and comes to a pleasure in what he calls pure
beauty. "I do not intend by beauty of shapes what most
people would expect, such as that of living creatures or
pictures, but for the purpose of my argument, I mean
straight lines and curves and the surfaces or solid forms
produced out of these by lathes and rulers and squares."
To make the matter clearer, he adds, "Such sounds as
are pure and smooth and yield a single pure tone,"
and a little further along-this Read does not quote-
“Then we shall be perfectly right in saying that a little
pure white is whiter and more beautiful and truer than
a great deal of mixed white." Read concludes, "The
Philebus is Plato's last work, and here we have a definite
abandonment of the unfortunate theory of mimesis, or
art conceived as a technique for the direct imitation of
the appearance of things."
In short, when Plato says precisely that he is not re-
ferring to art, that is, to pictures, but to a certain kind
168
of pleasure which he calls the pleasure in absolute
beauty, and according to which pure white is more beau-
tiful and truer than gray, Read says he is offering a
theory of art; though anyone who wanted this pure
white would ask a chemist to make it and not an artist.
When someone who ought to know what he is talking
about talks what seems to be nonsense, one tries to find
sense in it somehow, but here I can find none whatever.
Still less, if possible, when Read goes on to Cézanne.
Plato's remark about the forms made with lathes and
rulers and squares, Read says, comes very near to
Cézanne's words regarding spheres, cones and cylinders.
Here nonsense, to my thinking, becomes sheer extrava-
gance. I have never seen one bit of evidence to show that
Cézanne, when he referred to these geometric forms,
meant anything else than what drawing teachers who
refer to them have meant: that a head is essentially a
sphere, the trunk and limbs essentially cylinders and
cones, and that it is bad academic drawing to ignore
these underlying forms. Cézanne was insisting on a
commonplace-which does not mean that he was being
commonplace, since commonplaces are often very much
to the point. Cézanne told Vollard that he should pose
like an apple: does an apple budge? Of course an apple
budges if you give it time enough. It shrivels, discolors,
rots.
If Cézanne had wanted to paint spheres and cylinders
and cones, he would have done so, and he could have
had them made of good hard wood, and they would not
have budged in forty years. There is no evidence that he
had anything of the sort in his mind, and there is much
evidence that he didn't. Cézanne was what few good
painters are, an intellectual, and he thought clearly and
expressed himself precisely. Read speaks of his “inno-
cent way" in saying that he wanted to do Poussin again
after nature, and to make of impressionism something
27 Rue de Fleurus
169
solid and enduring like the art in the museums; but
these remarks are not "innocent." They say exactly
what he meant. Plato, who was a philosopher and psy-
chologist, also said exactly what he meant, and he did
not mean at all the same thing as Cézanne, who talked
not as a philosopher or psychologist, but as a painter.
There has been in recent years a large output of
abstract art, of which I have seen very little. Of what I
know, either in originals or reproduction, that which
pleased me most was Calder's, Mondrian's and Paul
Klee's. Calder's contraptions are so lively, so alert, that
I was always entertained. They gave an impression of
fullness of form, and have the great advantage that they
wiggle. Klee is the only abstractionist whose work is sen-
sitive enough to be charming. Mondrian avoids confu-
sion, is exquisite in his sense of measure, and is the ex-
treme opposite to Calder-the absolute no-wiggle con-
trasted with the wiggle. Other than these, what I have
seen has left me indifferent. I am not prejudiced against
it, but I don't find that it satisfies enough to be bothered
with.
Western man is a restless animal, and the creative
spirit is the spirit of restlessness. Many who are thus
restless, and who cannot create, are eager to follow the
latest novelty-which, of course, is not always an ad-
vance. The conservative does not approve. He thinks
that when you have something good, you had better
stick to it. The Athenian in Plato's Laws says that in
Egypt, "You will find that their works of art are painted
and moulded in the same forms which they had ten
thousand years ago."
"How extraordinary."
"I should rather say how statesmanlike, how worthy of
a legislator."
True, if one had once discovered the perfect world, it
might be well to take up within it one's permanent habi-
170
tation, but as yet this is to seek. We prefer when we have
been roasted long enough on one side to turn the other,
especially if we are artists, and it is not in the cards that
this process will soon be arrested.
9. Appreciation and Education
There is self-education and education by others. There
is education that is intended, and education that just
happens. But of necessity there is either education or
stagnation.
There is education of the body and education of the
mind. This is not as simple as it sounds, for there is an
education of the body that is not physical education. For
purposes of science it is probably enough to use the
mind. The facts lie outside us and need to be related and
re-related; ideas connect them; and so things go onward.
The genius of discovery is more profound, but none the
less, important acquisitions can be made on the cerebral
level. But for appreciations to be effective, something
more than this is needed. These involve more amply
the so-called emotions, which are more corporeal and
less exclusively cerebral than what is employed in mere
knowing.
In the discussions that I have noted taking place
in America today, there is constant recurrence of the
terms, liberal education, classical education, education
through the Great Books, and so on. I think another
and more vital classification would be serviceable, and
though the subject is much too large for a concluding
Appreciation and Education
171
chapter, it fits well enough into this book to be at least
referred to.
Education, as I see it, can be for three things mainly
-intellectual education, learning to understand and
manipulate ideas; practical education, learning to ma-
nipulate instruments and materials; education for
appreciation. There is also an education of a lower
order, which is education for routine and is better called
training. This is applied to animals as well as human
beings. It is the method of dogma, of the ten command-
ments. Thou shalt not steal: that is, thou shalt not take
what does not belong to thee. But the subtly complex
question of what should be yours and what another's
is not gone into.
It is possible to consider morals in another way, to
consider them in terms of appreciations. Thou shalt
love thy neighbor as thyself. Qbviously I can't if I don't
like him, and I can't like him if I don't appreciate him.
Even if I do, I mightn't like him; but if we appreciate
each other, things would be more promising. Apprecia-
tion is a basic concept for many things.
Far too much fuss is made about art, as though it were
important because it is art. Art merely as art is an amuse-
ment, and nothing more. Art for art's sake is a silly slo-
gan, as though one ought to be a high-stepper and go
prancing along, admiring the perfection of one's gait.
There is nothing discreditable about this; it is a quite
decent way of amusing oneself. But art is important only
as an integral part of culture, and that concerns appre-
ciations of all kinds.
One can hardly speak of education today without re-
gard to what the world promises and threatens. The
atomic bomb has put its thunderous emphasis on the
fact that the culture of the past is not good enough. The
fatuous persons who see in Greece or the thirteenth cen-
tury a model for the modern world have only to con-
172
sider how pleased the Athenians or the Popes would
have been if they had possessed a medium like the bomb
to compel the whole world to their orders. They used
whatever they had, though that was not enough. People
today are as like as two peas to what people were then,
though the conditions were different. The Greeks were
not a people specially devoted to art, but to politics. The
people of the Middle Ages were more credulous than we
are, and therefore more religious, as credulous people
universally are.
It is not really difficult to understand the past if we
remember the simple fact that the differences between us
and them are differences of condition. We ignore the
conditions and try to imagine some other kind of people.
Of course it is difficult to know enough of any special
situation to be sure of understanding it, but that applies
also to yesterday and today in our own country. In the
last few years American history has been entirely re-
written, and the rewriting continues. The minds of
other times concerned themselves with interests then
dominant, but those interests are almost always interests
that in us too could be awakened if the conditions de-
manded it. Everyone is superstitious enough, is avari-
cious enough, is indifferent enough or cruel enough, to
understand the extremes of these things in others, if he
really let himself appreciate himself. But when we read
history, we try to understand it outside ourselves, and in
consequence it is something in which all the actors are
other kinds.
"Look in thy heart and write," said Sir Philip Sidney.
For intellectual and practical education, this is not nec-
essary; for everything else it is. It is, however, not our
way to know much of ourselves except distantly, and so
we understand very little of what can be understood
in no other way. We take ourselves for granted, and be-
cause Freud has revealed the unconscious, a lot of silly

Appreciation and Education
173
people think there is some special merit in recording
what comes out of these opened sores. They create works
of art that are as meritorious as the mechanical outpour-
ings of Goldberg. Others imagine that the Great Books
are magical transformers, regardless of what the world
has been for centuries, with and without the great books.
Triviality is the dominant note in all these discussions.
The great plaint of the times is that science outruns
humanity. Of course. Science is what could have been
done by the people of any time if the necessary condi-
tions had existed; that is, the persons themselves need
not have been changed, but the ability to make a better
use of science means a change in those who use it. For
this there was formerly no technique available except
religion. A few people here and there were perma-
nently converted, but only on condition that they pro-
foundly believed things that were perhaps, or even
probably, not true. A new world can date only from
Freud-not that he brought it in, but that he did for
appreciation what Galileo did for knowing; he unlocked
the door. We must become capable of change without
first drowning in credulity, and must not be content
with programs for changing others. Everyone who wishes
to practice psychoanalysis must first be analyzed, but for
the most part this amounts to little more than getting a
little insight into himself. Much more than this is pro-
spectively necessary.
It has long been evident that modern knowledge is in-
consistent with the competitive system, and the atomic
bomb now dots the i's and crosses the t's, but people as
they are cannot be socialists. They can read novels and
treatises on the subject, and consider pros and cons, but
they cannot be it or even realize what it means. To
"appreciate" in a book a thing that one cannot appre-
ciate in real life, is ivory tower appreciation. Every in-
telligent person can see this in Abie and his Irish Rose,

174
but not when presented at a higher level. Both are forms
of escape. The philosophically-minded who have a new
philosophy every ten years are just clowning with phi-
losophy. They feel deeply with Bergson one day, with
Husserl another day and just now it's Kierkegaard. Does
this change them? Not a bit. They are simply having fun
with a new dialect. The critic I quoted as saying that
Picasso could give fresh charm to the "neo-classic" was
talking about words, not things. So it is for the most.
part. We are really at too grave a moment in the course
of events to believe that our teachers are competent to
teach. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
The concluding chapter of this book is not the place
to go into this matter more deeply or more extensively.
The chief value of the study of history is to show that
people in the historic period have always been the same,
but that what they know has altered their ways. Chance
just put into my hands The Psychological Frontiers of
Society by Kardiner, which in this professionally con-
firms my amateur opinion. Now the time has come when
the need of altering their ways is so great that they them-
selves must be altered. Hitherto the function of knowl-
edge has been to change the machine, and to play at im-
proving the machinist. Psychology must learn to do
something better than improving the methods of gull-
ing people by advertisements or dividing the sheep
from the goats for some practical purpose. It has, to be
sure, helped the neurotics. It must now help to save the
world from the far more dangerous "normal" people.
Even a Hitler could not have done much more than
make a noise without the efficient help of the "perfectly
sane." For many years to come, we must remain at the
mercy of big business men, senators, diplomats, clergy-
men, professors and the rest. Perhaps the bomb will get
its innings first, perhaps not. Who lives, will see.
The concept of appreciation is, I believe, a useful and
Appreciation and Education
175
2
unifying one. It applies to the whole realm of things
that can't be counted, can't be measured, can't be ana-
lyzed other than roughly—the things that, to be of great
importance, have to be taken into our psychophysical
organism as a whole. The long duration of analyses in
psychiatry is due to the ineffectualness of knowledge to
change personality. Sometimes in the process of analysis
forgotten events are recalled, but for the most part the
patient knows all that is necessary, though he takes good
care that it does not get to be so deeply known as to
make any effective difference. As soon as the knowledge
threatens his organism as a whole, he shuts it off and
perhaps takes a little illness on the side. Only the attri-
tion of repetition on repetition wears down the resist-
ance. One can't have everything, and for a long time a
mere disturbance of one's health seems a small price to
pay for the privilege of remaining profoundly and terri-
bly a fool.
Wisdom is a good for which some sacrifices may well
be made. But wisdom that is worth having must be
brought down to earth. It must not remain unused, un-
utilizable speculation, mere ritual of thinking. To bring
it to earth is a long and tedious matter, demanding sac-
rifices of those who would make it serviceable. Wisdom
flies on eagle wings through the air, but on the solid
earth a snail's pace is the measure of its progress.


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