Part 2

As for the things he does, most of them are the things that any good musician does: he makes his conception run just ahead of his execution, like a switchman who regulates trains from a high tower; he makes tone contrasts that—what do the critics usually say? Of course he does many things better than most good musicians: he throws out handsful of color that most of them would give their souls to achieve; he makes the piano sing more deeply than any one else has done; he strikes chords that no piano except his Mason and Hamlin has ever given forth; he never hurts the sounds, and he never applies music to the instrument instead of drawing music out of it, as even the best pianists have a way of doing. There is less diffusion of sound in his performances; you have a feeling that it is the most closely-thought music you have ever heard. He edits the composition until it is flawlessly adjusted to the piano’s best values. All these are essentials of his playing; but they are not the “difference” of which I wish to write.

Harold Bauer uses the piano as if it were an instrument endowed with an intrinsic “significant form.” I once heard Fritz Kreisler play some accompaniments, and I shall never forget how he showed his feeling that the piano has a mysterious life of its own with which he did not mean to interfere. It was as though he simply touched the springs which set that life in motion. Not being a creator on the piano he did not try to do more than that. Bauer believes the same thing; but on top of that theory he builds up the edifice of his own “significant form.” With most pianists you have a feeling that what they want to say is interspersed with what the piano is saying on its own account, and the result is a muddle. What Bauer has to say is placed carefully on top of that life growing just beneath, and the result is the most consciously-intelligent art I have ever come in contact with.

This is making the piano not what paint is to the painter, but what color is to him. There’s a great difference. Even Hofmann can use the keys as if they were paint—colors to be mixed into _color_; but to touch them as if they were color—something already complete and living—is to do a significant thing.

And so in the case of Bauer you are made to realize that the piano is the thing, even more than the music that is to be played on it—far more than the stunts that can be done with it. I believe he says something to this effect: that the piano is the only instrument for which no technique is demanded; and “How, if I were to practice all day, could I possibly play at night?” I know that he has no use for the agonizing drill of even the greatest teachers of the piano. You can imagine him asking “Is there any longer any meaning in that? Does the sound of it _interest_ you?” You can get any effect you want, on the piano, if you can think clearly what effect you want. You needn’t practise six months to achieve a chord in which the middle note sings louder than the other two: strike it the fraction of a second before the other two and the sound will be what you are listening for.

In January I heard his Modern Program in Chicago, and it was the most beautiful performance on the piano I ever dreamed of hearing. The other day in Aeolian Hall he and Casals gave a joint recital, in which Bauer played the Schumann _Papillons_ as his solo. In almost every measure of it you could hear effects attained by the kind of thinking I have described—marvelous values that can be offered only by one who can conceive greatly. But I heard musicians in the audience saying that they couldn’t discover any new thing in this music. Casals is very close to the soul of music, of course; but sometimes his mastery of the instrument is unrelated to its best beauty. His playing seems not to be built solidly on the beauty of sound; while with Bauer the emphasis is always on sound—which means merely this: that an interesting and compact phrasing made out of thin or harsh sound is as worthless as beautiful tunes played on a worn-out piano.

How I love these concerts of his in which you need never think of the magic of finger-tips—“the hand the perfect instrument”, etc., etc., because of long patient years of diabolical muscular exercise. Once I believe I said that Harold Bauer was not a genius. It must have been in that period when I thought that the genius carries around with him always the look of being submerged in great emotions. I know now that he is probably _the_ genius of our world—the man who has made something entirely of his own, and something that will live not only as a tradition of great piano-playing but as a great invention of new sound.

And—

jh.

_The War, Madmen!_

Honor:

Speculations in misery, forced famines, sweat shops, child labor, suppression of free speech, leaks, lynchings, frame-ups, prisons....

Protection:

Millions for munitions: Starvation for millions....

Justice:

The death sentence for no crime and without trial: Conscription.....

Freedom:

The right to be free: Prison....

Glory:

Parades, cheers, flags: Wooden limbs, blindness, widows, orphans, poverty, soldiers’ homes, asylums....

“_Daybreak_”

It would be easy enough to be disappointed in the last volume of _Pelle the Conqueror_ if you did not go any deeper than the story.

It is so silent. All the people seem to be gone—all the people who passed through the other books like a dark secret procession, each carrying his story in his hands. You miss the sounds of the many, many footsteps,—the heavy footsteps of the workers, the fagged footsteps of the women, the searching footsteps of the children, and the wandering footsteps of the godforsaken, which made a dull pattern of sound behind the story of Pelle. In this book the strong confident footfall of Pelle strikes out clear against the faint fall of those who walk beside him or those who walk far off.

It is only when you have finished the book that the design of the whole story becomes clear and perfect: the design back of the life of man. In his childhood he walked with animals; in his youth he gathered to himself knowledge and those after his own heart; in his manhood he became a leader of multitudes; and then, forsaken by all, in solitude he found his own soul.

For those who wish to read it that way _Pelle the Conqueror_ may be a labor novel. But it seems to me that through all the story Nexö has gone the stronge way of the artist and not the strict way of the reformer. Here in the last volume he leaves the labor question,—leaves the question as to whether Pelle’s cooperative workshop is the solution or whether his working-men’s homes are a success—as part of something that will work out its own fate or be worked out by the Pelles of the world. It is not something he has been teaching or solving. It is something he has been creating. Out of the drama of material poverty he has created the more profound tragedy of the poor-in-heart. And as if he could never forget them he turns to them again. With a few reluctant stories of prison life told by Pelle he makes the prison loom against our lives like “that dark mill over hell, grinding misery into crime.”

And then, so that _you_ may never forget, he chooses—not with that mere truth which is life but with that absolute truth which is Art—the child of the lovely dreaming Hanne, whom life so ironically sacrificed, to be again a sacrifice. The story of the death of this petulant child of little airs and sudden angers, of her pathetic and furious wrestle with the ghastly memories of her life, bites into your heart and you are maddened by the brutality of the life that takes away everything before it has given anything.

I should like to tell all over again why I think this book is _the_ novel—greater than _Jean-Christophe_, _Jacob Stahl_, or any of them.

_A Blow!_

Imagine what it did to us to have Harriet Monroe say in _Poetry_ that there is too much art in Amy Lowell’s _Men, Women and Ghosts_? Too much art! And she is an editor and we know what kind of poems she has to read!

I can imagine a book having all sorts of too much, but art means not too much or too little of anything. How does Miss Monroe expect Amy Lowell to write, if not like Amy Lowell? She has not come the way of Masters or of Dreiser. She is really the first poet in America to express in her writing something of that leisure from which they tell us Art flowers best.

_Men, Women and Ghosts_ is a beautiful book, full of stately measures.

_James Joyce:_

There isn’t time for me to write about James Joyce’s _The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_ in this issue. It came too late from the publisher. So far as I have seen the whole comment of the reviewers has been on the background for the portrait: “the social, political, and religious life of Ireland today”, etc. But there is the portrait itself—bearing a slight resemblance to the Playboy, a strong sensitive romancer; and the painting of the portrait—spontaneous, masterly, free: the color like this: “The spell of arms and voices: the white arms of roads, their promise of close embraces and the black arms of tall ships that stand against the moon, their tale of distant nations.”

Next time I shall have something more to tell of Joyce,—something thrilling and personal.

_The Price of Empire_

Richard Aldington’s two poems, with their frail reticent sadness, were sent to us from the trenches. Why do poets keep on singing in a world which doesn’t value them? Why does the moon keep on shining? Surely it isn’t obligation!

_Harold Bauer’s Hands_

Have you ever noticed how Bauer brings his hands in when he comes out to play? He carries them as if he didn’t want to brush them against anything, for fear they would strike out music from whatever they touched. Or as if they were precious violins that might be broken.

_Zuloaga_

There is an exhibition of Zuloaga touring the galleries of America. If you have a chance don’t fail to see how he carries on the tradition of Spain as a place where great painters grow.

The Reader Critic

Note

_Otto T. Simon, Washington, D. C.:_

Your last magazine has just arrived. Be happy. You are sowing seeds of Beauty. You dig into the earth, cut the worm in two, bring the chrysalis to the light that it may flutter its wings, and even the mole blinks and maybe after a while may see.

“Spirit,” etc.

_Allan Tanner, Chicago:_

Why so much worship of Bauer’s art? He is a mere man who has approached the goal of art through human effort—through such a material thing as hard practice. Anybody will tell you that when he was in Paris he was not even out of the ordinary in technical skill, and that he really transgressed the piano. Those beautiful tonal effects are only mechanical things done to perfection.

While Paderewski—that spiritual thing—who dares not even listen to his own breathing, who makes the piano a living thing, capable of everything. That god! who was born to touch the piano with such divine significance that you sometimes dare not listen. With Bauer it is only that you can listen—so wonderfully beautiful it is. It is the same with Mary Garden. There you have that same spiritual thing. With Paderewski it is now serenity. With Mary Garden it is the same. And Bauer can never reach that for he is not born into it. Paderewski may sometimes play badly—make mistakes—but that is only when something material disturbs or penetrates that far-a-way vision—that mind which communes with space. When Bauer expresses passion it is only that physical nervous tension. But when Paderewski plays! It is that scarlet-colored heat which dims the light of day!

[This sounds like my own ravings in the early days of _The Little Review_, when I talked straight out of the air without anything to back up my words. So I will have to excuse you. But if you’re going to talk about “spirit”, with any meaning behind it, you will have to give up those wild phrases like “communing with space” and “the goal of art through human effort” and that very awful “dimming the light of day”.

I heard a woman say the other day that Marcella Craft “spiritualized” the role of Salome because she made her a spoiled child instead of what she really was—a woman in whom sex had become too mad a thing. How such denials of the essence of things can become “spiritualizations” is beyond my comprehension. I suppose, by the same reasoning, that because Mary Garden understands that drama of “nature too-heavily laden” her performance should be called a “materialization”. What do you mean when you say that Paderewski has that spiritual thing and Bauer has not—is not “born into it”? Any one with the slightest discrimination of human values will know from one glance at the two men that Paderewski was born with the look of a magician and that Bauer was born with the look of a maker. Both qualities are matters of “spirit”. What vague mist is in your mind when you talk of “spiritual”?

And what is this about transgressing the piano? As you say, Paderewski makes the piano capable of everything. That is what nearly all other pianists have tried to do. But the piano isn’t capable of everything. It is capable of some very special things, and Bauer is the first man to prove it. He has stood for that all alone in a world of ignorant criticism. No “spirit”? And then what do you mean by “out of the ordinary in technical skill”? Is that one of your criterions of an art? Don’t you remember Arthur Symons saying that it isn’t what you can perform but what you can conceive?—_M. C. A._]

Alice Groff Again!

_Alice Groff, Philadelphia:_

In answer to Clive Bell, in the November issue, I would say, _words_ are easy. What does “significant form” mean? Who is to decide what _is_ “significant form”? An art form may be divinely significant to one mind, and be utterly insignificant, indeed without form at all, to another.

There is only one absolutely necessary condition to a good work of art, without which indeed no work of art can be brought into being, even; and that is: creative artistic faculty in the mind of some one artist. There is no human being or group of human beings capable of deciding whether such expression or embodiment of an artist’s creative faculty is a work of art or not. The artist alone can decide as to his own work and leave it to evolution and time to bring a portion at least of humanity to agree with him. Meanwhile the petty critics continually spew out of their mouths the greatest miracles of art that have ever been given to the world.

[Answer this now, if words are so easy. I suppose if the sun were taken out of the universe tomorrow everything would hold its place as now and keep on going? The universe would hold without its significant form? Do you think we are talking of the _shape_ of a vase when we say it has significant form?

I don’t see where you get the word insignificant out of this talk either. You are like those people who talk about good and bad art. There isn’t any such thing as bad art: there is Art and rotten stuff.

And who decides whether or not a man has “creative artistic faculty”? According to your generosity any one can elect himself an artist.

You are the woman who is always writing about art being the embodiment of an ideal. What’s the ideal in _Œdipus Rex_ or in _Salome_ or in the _Mona Lisa_—in any of them? And speaking of ideals, what is the art in _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_?

“I am sick at my heart and I want to lie down.”—_An Artist._]

Let Them Fight It Out!

_Louise Gebhard Cann, Seattle:_

This came out of me after reading Mr. Puteklis’ letter in the January _Little Review_. I notice that all my socialist and anarchist friends hold a similar view, one going so far as to declare in the course of an argument on art with a well-known etcher that his etchings could not live because they did not portray the struggles of the masses. Being in principle an anarchist myself, and sympathetic towards much of socialism, I cannot speak as an antagonist to these people but as one of their number who sees that on this point of art’s purpose they are mistaken.

Mr. Puteklis’s communication reminded me again of the misconception of art’s essence noticeable among various classes of those today who possess what they term “social consciousness”. For though it is true that the strongest names in contemporary literature, painting, sculpture are those of men and women who in some extreme way are opposed to the existent social order, and the only being capable of producing profound and significant art is of revolutionary mind, essentially; nevertheless, we find in the socialistic university professor (as when Dr. Cox of the University of Washington writes in _The South Atlantic Quarterly_ of “The Distemper of Modern Art and its Remedy”), in the intelligent working-man and the revolutionary worker, the same misunderstanding of art that we suffer from in the well-to-do bourgeois and in the church and other capitalistic institutions, with the same determination to degrade art to some form of direct utility.

The communal art of the past necessarily served the emotional life of the community. It was the “handmaiden”, as Mr. Puteklis puts it, “of oppression and superstition”. Much of pre-modern painting and sculpture, as we all so well know, was not painting and sculpture _per se_. It was merely symbols used like language for information on extrinsic topics by means of illustration.

A fallacy lurks in the too close judging of modern arts and institutions by their ancient history. Art as part of human progress has its revolutions. Once weak and a slave to ideas alien to itself, today, by recognition of the truth that it is entitled to its own intrinsic life, it is rapidly becoming muscular and self-sufficient. Those who continually regard modern art in the light of its history obstruct the progress of art, for in the course of art’s century-long process of coming to itself, a transmutation took place, the precise moment of which is difficult to seize, and the aspect engendered by this transmutation is so different from the ancient aspects of art that many nonplussed by it or dazzled, or blinded to ignorance of it, fail to grasp the fact of its quite complete newness. By this one would not be understood as saying that the history of art is illogical and contains bottomless and wide gulfs. The modern mind deeply cognizant of evolved art can trace relationship just as an anthropologist can trace the steps in the evolution of man; but we all admit in this latter department of human knowledge the looseness of judging modern man by the cave man. We concede modern man to be an entirely different being—a being in whom the struggle for animal existence is vastly complicated and modified as compared to his primitive ancestor, whose motives would be unseizable by that ancestor, and whose sensual, expressive, intellectual, moral and æsthetic forces have attained a volume which would overwhelm to the mereness of a wolf or a bear that progenitor. It is not for nothing that humanity has the vision of going beyond itself—the vision of the more-than-human. Somewhere in the history of animal life, spirit slipped in and we have a new species. Somewhere about the time of Cézanne, or a trifle earlier, from the old communal pictorial representations of sin, death, Christianity, the will-to-be-itself slipped into painting and today we are witnessing the evolution through several varieties of manifestation of a new species of art.

We of today are not discussing in contemporary art the old art of the Renaissance—beautiful as that revelation was. We are not discussing art as the Greeks understood it nor as the Japanese of the past understood it, nor the Indians. We are discussing the new species, the birth of which we have almost ourselves witnessed.

But now we need an Emmanuel Kant, who in a _Critique on Pure Art_ will investigate for us art’s necessary limits and authentic nature and free it for us from its inheritance of superstition.

Truly much of the “social vision” today is blind, as blind as the vision of any fanatic. Those who are under its spell (and one does not deny it to be a world-renovating spell, on the whole) are determined to halt art and shackle it with the command that it serve the “masses.” These humanitarians are still deluded by the idea that subject is the important part of art; they would retain art as a part of informative literature—denying it even the right to be a literature of power—and they would have it reduced to the level of illustration for the propaganda of socialism and anarchy. This attitude is tyrannical, and it is a refusal to allow art its place under the sun. Those of true social vision should perceive that all the forces of life—and art is perhaps the most potent—should be accepted and allowed to lift humanity along their course.

The human spirit is broader and deeper than mere class consciousness; for among other consciousnesses it includes the consciousness of the rights of the masses as against those who deny those rights. If we narrow all our activity to a direct service of social betterment, we shall never attain social betterment, for this condition, like the condition of happiness, or health, or any other valued state, is missed by a too-narrow and direct seeking.

Art fulfilling itself will be an inexhaustible source of power, mental and moral fertilization, of vitalizing spiritual life to all who come within its influence. But art reduced to illustration of class struggle, bound in service to mere social consciousness, will soon turn sterile and will fail to inspire even those it serves.

It is significant that only those individualities that have attained self-realization—true freedom—have inspired and lead humanity. The same must be true of any spiritual movement.

Art’s strength today is in its revolutionary character. And the revolution of art, like the social revolution which accompanies it in the world’s awakening, will react beneficially on the human spirit, helping it to ever greater realizations and liberations. But art, as such, cannot even exist if ENSLAVED to the social movement.

This month really begins the fourth year of _The Little Review_, but since we have missed several numbers on account of our eternal poverty, and since we have a special editorial surprise for the next issue (a gorgeous surprise), I shall just call this the last of Volume III and let the next one begin the new year.

We are getting established in New York, and within a month can invite you to our office.