Part 11

John Gregory in the English Seventeenth Century, read easily almost all the languages of the Orient in which a literature has been written; and Ethiopean, too, for good measure. There was a period in England of something resembling encyclopedic mind—like the Russian Eighteenth Century, to which there seemed to be no limit of acquirement. After that (to me) there came another and a seemingly different England, both in mind and nature. Its rare moment of creative power passed. Very likely I have no right to the following opinion. My guess, however, would be that languages had a common origin. Then came migration of peoples, life in widely separated localities, under different areas of pressure of changing climates, bringing new demands upon the body. This modified speech. This caused the word to be spoken differently. In this way, in long periods of time, regularly appearing, cumulative differences arose.

In the first place, word was uttered to give imitation in sound of emotion. It was gesture made through another bodily medium. It was mind gesture through the throat.

In almost all languages the word for mother expresses the same gesture. Arabic, _oom_. Russian _matushka_. Latin _mater_. English _mother_, and so forth.

This is true likewise of the word for water, and others I might mention, and certain emotions such as joy, fear. I have traced words with interest and pleasure through many languages, I usually come back with increased belief in basic oneness, far away, but findable. Words that express suffering, fear, grow grim and gaunt in any tongue. Their surfaces are shriveled with emotion. Those on the contrary that express love, call with singing softness of vowel liquids.

Words are the patient camels of the grey, lonely deserts of the mind, bearing carefully for increased knowledge, increased welfare, the treasured burdens of intellect.

You can feel the atmosphere in which a word was born, brought up, so to speak, no matter in what tongue it happens to be incorporated. Words have personality. They keep securely the aroma of the past.

Many years ago when I was learning Spanish a word in that tongue puzzled me. My Spanish teacher was not a scholar; he knew nothing about it. I felt sensitively fluttering over its surface the atmosphere of another race, the thinking of a different people. Later I found it came from the East, from Persia. It meant _master_. Then I understood. It had been brought to Spain by the Moors. It had pride, dignity, patriarchal sternness, a peculiar harsh browed aloofness to my ear that Spanish words did not have. It was a memory incorporated in daily speech of Spain of the four hundred years of Moorish rule.

It belongs in the Court of the Lions of the Alhambra. It is draped, turban-crowned. It has nothing in common with the pale, long-faced, ascetic, Spaniard who created the Inquisition.

I think it was an Arab poet who declared words are the thin, embroidered veil in which we wrap thoughts. Races have loved them. In their structure, after the crumbling of ages, may still be felt the stress of composite emotions, ancient, semi-cosmic loves. Words are as near reality as anything life possesses. There are words that for me keep peculiar qualities. The word _Delhi_, for instance, is a carved pendant made of amethyst. It is richly hued, lovely. It could not be any kind of jewel save pendant. Nor made of anything save amethyst. The word _Agra_, on the contrary, is a stone-white cameo, hard, sharp, cold of line.

It is not impossible that words, in effort to catch plastic beauty, may possess extentions not readily catalogueable; that they may build (for sensation) with vowels, with consonants interwoven like a fugue, with guarded emphasis of recurrent letters, similar _sound-pictures_ that echo the sensation of objects of art, rebuild them, in short, in the mind, in a different medium.

We have not explored all the properties of words any more than of matter. There are shores waiting for Columbus. We can not determine exactly their _psycho-plasm_, so to speak. We do not know all the phosphoric, ancient visions that enveloped them, and still cling to them. Their boundaries are always changing. They can not be definitely measured. They possess _degrees_ of being potently visible. For incalculable time the souls of races have wrapped them with love. They have borne intact, to today, the dreams of the world.

In England, in days of Shakespeare, words were fat, red-blooded, unctuous. In America they have been growing leaner and leaner. We lack greatly the rich variety of the older country. Our speech has lost a kind of vigor, sweetness, substantiality. As late as Stevenson, this quality remained in English prose. It has never been transplanted, successfully, to America.

We are losing, too, some of our fine, former pride in Saxon strength, which is our heritage. We are less faithful to ideals. We are falling away from its precepts. We are losing sight of belief in the desirability of its future power over our race. We are turning rather briskly toward foreign gods, toward false standards.

We are losing, too, the homely faith and friendliness of English social life, which is something whose strength we can not estimate; its merriment, uncomplaining courage, in the heart. We have nothing to substitute, or worse, things not our own.

They who loved words best, and perhaps understood best their varying values, were decadent Greek and Roman writers, who looked upon them as gems, who knew all their tints, their shades, and certain French writers, a little later (roughly estimating) than 1830. Callimichus loved them in the ancient world. He spoke of them as the Arab loved and spoke of _Saïf_, the sword. Something clean, cruel, powerful, decisive, uncompromising. Mallarmé, of the moderns, I think has loved them best. Hokusai, the Japanese print-maker, cried with sincerity: _Write me down as the old man who is mad about line._ With equal sincerity I exclaim: Write me down as the woman who is mad about words.

Cubism, so-called, does not necessarily belong to plastic art, nor verse. A new mind which may be termed _cubism of the spirit_ has come; a spirit of destruction largely, brought about by the increasing passion of the individual for _self_, expression of self, assertion of self. The three points of time, that led to this, widely separated, different as they are, were (first) Christ and his teachings; (second) the Eighteenth Century in revolt against government forms and established standards; and the present, its equally great revolt against reverence of all kinds, its deification of _the ego_, its passion for destruction and the dawning scientific mind. This has brought a condition which might be termed _the golden age of the commonplace_, when people who can neither write nor think, paint nor carve, dance nor make music, insist upon the sacredness, the necessity of expression. The _ego_ of the individual is enlarged. This is one cause of the increase in crime. It is inflamed. Everyone is convinced he has rights that bear no relation to his ability. Moral fiber is breaking. Ambition and talent are not the same.

This may be herald of a cycle of time, a new, a different world civilization. When such change has come, history tells us, art begins to die first, before morals or manners. The spirit of destruction is directed toward ideals.

In the plastic arts the careless, blithe, fine laughter is gone. The moment’s creative joy. There is less real beauty, but more _nerve_, daring. When the sculptor boasts either of _modernism_, or primitive vision, he harks back to things Assyrian, not Greek. The last touch in the world of that serenity we found in Greek marbles, is in the figures of Clodion. Afterward, it comes no more. When art and letters feel breath of decay, nations have gone a long way toward that decay. As proof, review the history of antiquity. Is that what is setting in? Is that what is going to result in remaking the world, in creating a new order of mind? Transition is startling. Everything is changing. Art and letters are changing rapidly; music too, the political outlook, morals, religions. Nothing is left untouched. A period of rebellion is here. Love, sincerity, friendliness, are disappearing. Another civilization is heaving to sight with the wild, brawling winds, the harsh atmospheric disturbance of birth of a star.

Some quality, usually in solution in life of our planet, and to us indispensable, disappeared. Since this has been evident.

It was after the Peloponnesian war, we must remember, that disintegration began in Greece. Consider, too, the slow dissolving of the Roman Empire, beginning in the West, then progressing, like political paralysis, toward the East. Consider the ruin, annihilation, of the powerful, the richly cultivated Han Dynasty, the change, decay, brought by war. Wars are to established civilizations what cancers are to the healthy body. They destroy tissue that can not be rebuilt. Sometime a law can be stated between war and decay.

In _Cubism of the Spirit_, as I have named it, revolts are many. This tragic, asserting of self is revolting now against death. When you divide the forces of the enemy you lessen his strength. Carrel divided the forces of Death, into general and elemental. That is a beginning. Who knows what the end will be?

It is a period of shattering of ideals, when all things, even of the spirit, are being bent to forms of material gain, of foolish, self-flattering assertion, shorthand, incompetent stating. Christian Science is product of the age because it is an age of self-delusion. The power is lost to distinguish between things that are and things as we wish they were. Man is breaking trammels, and in the triumphant emergence, he sees himself greater than he is. The prophets have been many who heralded reaction against restraints of the past. There was the Christ. Before the coming of Christianity there was Greek philosophy. In the early Nineteenth Century there was German philosophy. There were Kant, Wagner. Wagner was an eloquent preacher of revolt. Like the warring angels of Milton who were cast out of Heaven, Wagner in rebellion, scaled again the battlements. This found its way to the brain of man in preachment more dangerous than words. It heralded gloriously the era whose disconcerting, unsuspected changes are upon us, making us shiver with presage of unmeasured things. No longer shall the golden, fluent splendor, _life_, be expressed in stale formulas. For new day a new robe. Who can guess what the result will be? While we live, while change progresses, what will be our attitude toward things we loved? Books, art, music, the world of the spirit?

_Cubism_ was brought about in some degree, too, by focussing for purpose of quick, personal vision, of the art, the science, of the world. Some of them who were great in the past were great because of limitations. Dante was one whose nature possessed depth not breadth. Will art resolve itself into expression of untrammeled personality? In throwing away form are leaders nearer essence? Are we peeling to the skin, like wrestlers, for the Games, leaving nothing proud, superfluous? Surely there must be luxurious languor, foolish recreation, the fine, idle space for the unexpected, in addition to defiant assertion.

The lower class, peculiarly enough, under pressure of new ways of living, is disappearing, just as in the Eighteenth Century there was no effective middle-class. A social chasm results with disappearing at top of the aristocrat. Fromentin wrote some time ago: “_Vers 1828 on vit du nouveau_” and “_le dixhuitième siècle brisa beaucoup de formules_.” It was the sensitive artists, not thinkers, who felt it first. In serious consideration of facts of living, the artist is not to be despised. The decay of the great age of Louis XIV was heralded by great artists beginning to lessen in number or lose their luster.

In this general destruction, excesses must be expected. In the on-rushing tidal-wave of mediocrity against the Lords, wrong will be done. Sometimes _Cubism of the Spirit_ will insist pearls are the best food for hogs. It will not be easy to find that absolute, that prepared outspread level of mind, suitable for pearls to roll on. Some of the pearls may melt, become invisible forever, such as pity, sympathy, old-fashioned kindliness. I suppose it is significant that Marquis de Sade was writing, in prison, his book _Le Roman Philosophique_, which shows a cruel mind, just one year before the outbreak of the French Revolution.

Changes that come so stealthily they could not be chronicled, preceded this. The human skull, the physical eye, have been gradually formed differently.

The old, carefully drawn, punctiliously painted figure, with details insisted upon, hurts the modern eye trained to stenographic seeing. It does not wish to be pelted with fact that way. Seeing is not to be done alone by the painter but partly by the looker on! Increasingly insistent _self_ demands share. The picture is to be a _starting point_, instead of an end. It is to be something for the seer to help make.

Before the Great War line and color began to disintegrate, to feel their way back to primal selves; this was a step toward new creation, beginning over. The end of a cycle had come. New standards followed. There was a _re_-valuation. The middle age of the modern man had begun. The old tenements of the mind were being torn down and swept away. When one reaches the top of the hill, there is nothing to do except to find the path that leads down. This is not genius. It does not deserve praise for perception or novelty. It has too great resemblance to necessity. If change means destruction, it likewise means growth, or the level upon which change is permitted to begin, on the other, _the south side_, of the hill. But Dostoievsky exclaimed when he was living in Germany: “_In der neuen Menschheit ist also die æsthetische Idee volkommen betrübt_.” Dostoievsky was not only an artist, but a sensitive one. He felt quickly the chill breath of the new order.

New art comes closer to man than the old. We are better mental tailors. In a _close-up_ we must remember figures loom large. We see details we do not wish to see. We are getting a _close-up_ of life. In addition, the old, carefully draped _toga_ is large.

Art being sensitive, heralded approach of the new cycle, and close of the cycle passing. Disintegration of color, line, was not the only change. The bonds that unite people in social intercourse, friendship, family ties, weakened. This was followed by exploitation of self, an increasingly shifting standard. The _ego_ became diseased. In the critical faculty there was discernible a lessening sense of values. The general reading public no longer knew good from bad. There was, too, breaking down, decay, of sociological tissues, just as bodily tissue breaks, with stress of years, or warning of insidious disease. People who had reached forty when the change began, awoke to find themselves in a world they did not know. Everyone became Rip Van Winkle.

Like the trapeze performer, they had forsaken the safe ring, without being sure of the next. New World art picks up and saves crumbs from the wasteful banquet-table. It finds neglected things, minor things, apparently insignificant things beautiful, and with demands, with rights. It says so, if it does not believe it.

A new era is here. Educational ideals are overturned. Some things man created he finds not good. As counterweight there is inclination not to observe rules of the game, unless perchance some game be greater than the rules. In this _counterweight_ there is inclination to translate theorizing into action, and do it quickly. The new world disregards the charm of idle thought. Sometimes it has bad taste to do things not meant to be done, but merely to be talked about. Occasionally it is dull, lacks perception. It has misunderstood the poetry and politeness of the Arab host, who declares: _All I own is yours_. With present dramatic seriousness and belief in the divine right of _self_, lack of humor, we would move in, and show the Arab the door.

The impulse back of living is changed. There is indication of a dying in the human race of what was called divine. A red apple rotting at the core!

New religions, moral ideals, are dawning which surprise in form, in substance.

Living is less fine. It is a rush for self exploitation. It is giving over rest, sunny leisure. The idea of work, of dispensing energy for display, decoration of front elevation of Sunday papers, is penetrating the upper classes. In being useful, they plan social achievements. They have found a game in which to star.

The opening of the Twin Americas, Africa, meant, demanded, a tremendous amount of practical work, exploiting; expanding technical skill. Under progressive conquest of things material, increasing manual dexterity, increasing technical achievement, the idealizing spirit of a smaller world, content with fewer things for the few, was in abeyance. Whatever happens or threatens to happen is not final. A glimpse, if imperfect, beyond the age helps steady us. Time has no model of perfection meant to be copied forever.

The more modern the unit of art, the more unrest, that nameless something that disturbs. In activities of the rapid present, there is not sufficient place for gentle things. Not all flowers bloom best when the storms rage. But in a future, far perhaps, after the material conquest has been carried through, there will come, I have faith to believe, a nobler conquest, loftier. Now artists are merely trying to explore, then map a new world. We can not travel always upon mountains. Meadow lands have to be crossed. We can not sweep all the new with vision at any one moment.

Wrapped in Christianity, which taught sacredness of the individual, lay undeveloped seed of socialism, the French Revolution, world-upheavals. At inception of new faith, no one can measure expansion. Vast processes of change are in progress all about us everywhere.

The restlessness in the United States has varied causes, one, the possibility (soon to become desire) of individuals leaving the class in which they were born. Restlessness welcomes change. Anything different is good. It is not necessary it be better. Life is a game. Concept is cheapened. Every small boy is given one ideal; namely, to get out of the class in which he was born and become President. It is like considering life as being poised upon the crest of excitement. The object of life should be to widen the horizon of intelligence, preserve kindness in the heart, and keep a margin of security for comfortable living. He lives most who thinks best, not he who has the largest accumulation of dollars, and moves about upon wheels in the air.

The Great War was the demolishing blow to the vast, antique structure, the marble columns of whose first falling echoed thunderously in May, 1787, in France.

In the West there exists dramatic, political idealism; inexperience, youth, together with lack of international outlook. In the West there is still youth, its desire, its progress, a dream suitable for a rich, young, unexploited country permitted for a century to develop undisturbed. Wealth has too often become end, instead of aid to larger living. It has habit of shrinking the horizon of the one who possesses it. It might provide broad spaces of leisure, instead of a mad, noisy movie program, which resembles destructive fury of the mastodons, the monsters, when they dashed ahead to escape the approaching ice cap. The ideal, however unrealizable, is not wasted because it forms compensating pendant to the practical.

When, in America, the poor become rich too speedily, the perspective of living is changed over night, there is boiling, seething. The new rich can not enjoy what money buys. In fact, they are still poor. True-judging, poised living, is not easy.

It is too bad a race should get so it can not support a moment without amusement. We have much to learn from the European emigrant. Civilization, what we agree to call by that name, becomes disease. The hardy, patient fibre disappears. The newspaper helps. It sets ideal of greed, haste. It preaches ambition, conquest. This destroys stable social basis. Each individual longs to grow to size of a monstrous cabbage in overstimulated soil. There was always inclination in the Saxon to stubborn independence. Too quick material advancement is balanced by moral letting down. It is a pity modernity should be afraid of plain spaces. It is too bad every State has not a Vachel Lindsay to preach the religion of beauty. May his tribe increase!

We have applied _Kultur_ to money-getting. In doing it we were copying Germany. It was Germany that discovered the modern world and no one was at fault for the War. Its cause was cosmic; biological, an impulse of world-growth not to be turned aside. Cosmic impulses lift nations like waves, hurl them against other nations, lightly as helpless fish, and tangled sea-weeds, shells, in season of tides and storms. It was merely a mighty migration of peoples. It was dumb forces turning over races, with results we can not know.

The world felt the cataclysm coming. This is proven by the many writing nervously about _spirit of the times_. The increase, too, in knowledge, wealth, material power, knowledge poured into the human mind too swiftly and in quantities too great for assimilation. Lack of balance resulted. There was top-heavy overturning. Re-adjustments had to be made too soon. A different basis of morals became effective without being recognized _in mind_. Things merely fine began to be looked down upon as superfluities. The changing _moral self_ began to wear a new garment, which was ill-fitting.

_De Hoc—Cubism of the Spirit._

I trust there will not be silence eternal when the Troubadours are no more.

In reading many years in many languages, merely for pleasure, a peculiar unmentioned fact has come to notice. Most creative artists in whom imagination plays predominant part, (writers, musicians, painters), are born in the months of the fall and winter. It is true of all ages and nations. To prove conclusively the statement would be to fill pages with lists of names.

This occurred to me when I was studying Russian, reading Russian poets. There the list born in fall and winter is astonishing: Chemnitzer, Kapnist, Neledinski-Meletzki, Karamsin, Krylov, Schukowski, Ryleiev, Griboiedow, Baratinsky, Kolzow, Lermontov, Countess Rostoptchchin, Tjutchew, Benedikkow, Schevtschenko, Nikitin, Nekrassow, Turgenev, Aksakow, Pleschtschejow, Polonsky, Minajew. To be sure the greatest Russian writers are the exception that prove the rule, Puschkin and Gogol. In other countries I recall just at this moment, Rimbaud, Racine, Heine, Poe, Alexander Petofi, the fluent lyric poet of the Magyar race, Bobby Burns, Cervantes, Milton, André Chenier, Flaubert, Kolomon Mikszáth, the Hungarian of ironical fantastic prose and José Asuncion Silvá and Blanco-Fombona, born in grey November. Unexplored scientific fact underlies this. January and December claim those of maddest mind. And March has been the birth month of the greatest number of murderers.

The more I read Goethe the more conscious I am of the depth of untapped power he held in reserve. He was never written out.

Today the period of a writer’s productivity is brief. Life saps him. Its interests are too complex. Kipling has been written out for years. I could name others. Goethe was last of the great. After him there are no monumental figures.

He worked, off and on, at his _Faust_ for sixty years. The general reading public has no comprehension of what a unique, powerful, creation of the mind that is, nor what unplumbed depth is in it. Byron, in his _Manfred_, had it in mind. _Manfred_ is a copy. So is the Russian Lermontov’s _Demon_, which is superior, considered as poetry, to _Manfred_.