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overlook the essential weakness of his composition, the essential unprogressiveness of his art. He is to be commended for having extricated himself from the influence of that highly artificial painter, Diaz (who seems most to have influenced him), but we do not observe in his record that metamorphosis into a memorable and distinctive uniqueness that we observe in Inness, Murphy and Weir. It is certain that he is held by significant critics of painting in less high esteem than any other American painter of his generation, and it is possible that his prices have touched inflated levels. Personally, I should not be surprised to find that Time will deal less favourably with him than with Martin possibly, with Blakelock certainly.

For we find in this latter painter a wealth of executive ability which, in so far as I know, has been insufficiently estimated. I myself do not care for the kind of painting he offers us, but that is beside the point. When, on the night of the Lambert sale, Mr. Thomas Kirby, auctioneer of the American Art Association, referred to his famous Moonlight as the "finest work ever done by an American artist," he said something that cannot easily be gainsaid. This picture, purchased by the Toledo Museum for twenty thousand dollars, is monumental. Again I intrude the matter of personal preference. To me the art of Blakelock is displeasing because it is an art that too exclusively subordinates nature to pattern, a pattern of unrealities arbitrarily evolved out of egoisms often exquisitely and unfamiliarly beautiful but human never with a free, fresh beauty of living fields and pellucid streams and hospitable valleys. His art is a kind of metallic virtuosity; it has affinities with the paint ing of Dupré and Monticelli. And yet, remembering Blakelock as I saw him recently, I am tempted to cancel any word of disparagement I

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have written of his art. I had gone into the Knoedler Galleries to see the Sargent portrait of Rockefeller, and Blakelock was there, accompanied by his attendant; a physically resurrected Blakelock, but bereft of all that fire of soul that makes for genius. His expression, pathetically complaisant, his feeble little amenities of conduct seemed curiously alien to the bustling aggressiveness of his surroundings. "Like a wraith,” I thought. No one paid very much attention to him; superficial attention was directed to the Sargent (although I do not suppose one person out of ten observed the incredible triviality of the work of the redoubtable Sargent). Later, some one showed me a little thing that Blakelock had recently painted, a blatant, inharmonious daub, the sort of thing one has seen on dinner cards. I am told he paints occasionally, even though his original powers are permanently impaired, paints like a tenyear-old child! A great master stricken! a living dead man! It was one of those contrasts that, as Stevenson says in his Across the Plains, "we count too obvious for the purposes of art."

For a great painter Blakelock undoubtedly was in an imaginative sense; greater, it may be, than any of his contemporaries. Even his opalescent dream worlds do not importune our good graces, perhaps, but they command our respect. His colour here is less hot than is usual with him, more tender, more diffused. Place him, however, in juxtaposition with Twachtman, for example, and the antithesis will throw into sharp relief the essential artificiality of his art. It is the difference between a kind of painting that need never have sought the out of doors for its inspiration, a kind of painting essentially literary in its genesis, and another kind of painting, delicate to the point of evanescence, risen out of nature like a mist over a field.

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first sight the juxtaposition of two so diametrically opposite kinds of painting may appear discrepant, but to compare them is not to place the one above the other in the sense of ultimate value, but merely to direct attention to the dominant attribute of the modern point of view namely, its preponderating predilection for a light, high colour scale and a more delicate handling of colour as opposed to the thick, dark, pasty consistency of paint characteristic of older methods. To compare is not, of necessity, to disparage, and there will, no doubt, always be a place in art for the glazings and varnishings and heavy layings on of pigment characteristic of the work of Ryder, Fuller and Blakelock. Nor must we fall into the easy error of assuming that all older painting conformed to the one manner, and that all modern painting conforms to another. This, of course, is manifestly untrue. As we look over the history of art we realise that art is as much a reversion as it is an evolution. The bane of art criticism is hard and fast rules; art is a matter of individualities, not of systems, and the painter of to-day may find it essential to the fulfilment of a perfect self-expression to express himself in a manner manifestly antithetical to the aggre gate manifestations of his age. There are pictures of Corot, for example, that have anticipated all that contemporary landscape has accomplished toward that appearance of evocation, of apparitional evanescence that we see in the finest examples of Inness, Murphy and Weir. I have in mind many a Corot in which there seems to be no tangible laying on of paint; the effect is comparable only to the tremulous imponderability of breath receding from silver surfaces, pictures in which we seem to see impermanence perpetuated. To me, personally, I find that I cannot enjoy the out of doors painted as I would ask that a

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still-life or an interior be painted, and that is, precisely, what Blakelock does and what Twachtman does not do. Paint may be put on copiously, fluently, and yet give an impression of radiant, luminous, vibrant aliveness (the later Manet, for instance), and it may be put on too thinly and result in an impression of downright penuriousness (Whistler, at times, and, in particular, the portrait painter John W. Alexander). To my taste the supreme satisfaction is derived from middle course wherein a superb and inspirational equilibrium is achieved. In the most proficient examples of Inness, Murphy and Weir, you are not conscious of paint. Beauty has accom. plished a miraculous emancipation from substance, and no one element that has gone to make up the finished picture intrudes at the expense of the whole. The majority of Twachtman's later canvases err through their very excess of delicacy. Where we should like to perceive an ultimate refining of colour, we perceive, instead, a scant, ill-nourished canvas, Twachtman's art fails in its sum-total to command the recognition that its individual efforts entitle it to. The general impression one gets of it is of a too tenuous, too fragile beauty. Perhaps the most aristocratic temperament in American painting (less robustly so than Martin, less fantastically so than Blakelock), Twachtman echoed in this country that quivering something of acute and recondite sensi bility that we feel to be the peculiar, esoteric projection of the art of Whistler. I am inclined to suspect from unsubstantial data that Twachtman laboured under difficulties of an emotional and pathological nature. However this may be, his is one of the rare, unique notes in our painting. When he has successfully achieved (as, for instance, the exquisite Snow Bound exhibited in the season of 1917 at the Montross

Galleries, and purchased from Mr. Montross by the Friends of American Painting for the permanent collection of the Chicago Art Institute), he is, perhaps, far more a new im pulse than Ryder or Fuller, I had almost said Martin and Wyant. Here, Twachtman surprises us with the full import of what elsewhere he hints at only. It is a catch phrase of criticism to say that Twachtman paints the "soul" of nature. Only the God of us all, the God of "things as they are" knows the soul of nature. Twachtman merely does what every artist does; he paints the reactions to nature of his particular temperament, but in this case his temperament happened to be an exquisitely sharpened nervous system, saved from facile adulterations by the chastity inherent in earnestness of purpose. His predilection for a peculiarly meagre, thin, pinched aspect of winter-a winter devoid of invigoration, of the gracious glow of sun-may be noted. It is his characteristic note. Perhaps I have erred in including him in a consideration of our dead painters, for his work hangs more appropriately with the work of Weir, Hassam and Murphy than with work of an older order. The frugal, primitive work of Fuller, the rather mechanical, unessential, artificial art of Albert Ryder (a painter famous for his less valuable paintings, and not for such a painting as the little barnyard that passed almost unnoticed in the Williams sale, its beauty obscured by the spurious prestige of the Toilers of the Sea), fail to supply us with so precious a personality, with so keen a sense of that valuable, indefinable something we call "being different from the rest."

It is, of course, hardly necessary for me to remark upon the obvious fact that the discriminations set down in this, perhaps, too cursory survey of the work of our older painters are merely the expressions of per

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sonal preference. George Moore has pointed out in his essay on Balzac Impressions and Opinions) that criticism is more the story of the critic's soul than it is an exact science. The observation is accurate. No principle has yet been formulated by which we may infallibly judge the work of art. We detect beauty through our instincts; we appraise it only in proportion to the fineness of our spiritual development. Personally, I believe that painting, because of its inherent contradictoriness, is, of all the arts, the one most difficult to appreciate. Take the case of Fuller, for example. Reviewing the exhibit of "Deceased American Artists," held in March of 1914 at the Macbeth Gallery, that excellent critic, Royal Cortissoz, says: "George Fuller is represented, and, as always, his work has something to say to us but the technical weakness which dogged him marks all three of the paintings shown." In the Ichabod T. Williams Sale, 1915, Fuller's Romany Girl sold for ten thousand five hundred dollars. In the Alexander C. Humphreys Sale, 1917, the same painter's Girl with Turkeys sold for fifteen thousand six hundred dollars. Surely this points a moral. Manet, in 1867, excluded from the Exposition Universelle, arranged a private exhibition of his works, complete up to that date, and in the sober plea prefixed to his catalogue, he disclaims the name of revolutionary. "The artist," he says, "does not say to-day, Come to see faultless works, but, Come to see works that are sincere." Now if the end of art were to be sheerly beautiful regardless of extraneous significances such as point of view and attitude of mind, there would seem to be no place for an art technically otherwise than flawless. Obviously, painting is not the disembodied abstraction so many theorists would have it; its contents and various extraneous considerations, quite apart

from the question of technical dexterities, manifestly exert a considerable, possibly a preponderating influence upon our decisions. I say this because I believe our older painters, many of them, hold, for the present at least, their prestige from the matter of their nobility of intention and view-point. I repeat my original contention that they are often less satisfyingly beautiful than much of the work that is being done to-day. Prophecy is both futile and impertinent, but taking them at their present valuations, we are inclined to believe that their eminence is only partially ascribable to their intrinsic artistic worth. Frankly, I cannot see one-tenth the beauty in a picture such as the Girl with Turkeys of Fuller that I see in a seascape by Dearth or a landscape by Murphy. Values are not made and maintained in art exclusively by artistic considerations. Perhaps this ought not to be so, but the fact remains that it is so. The chief justification of the men I have so briefly summarised in these pages appears to me to exist in their manner of seeing

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and feeling as a virtue in itself and quite apart from any degree of technical excellence. Their common possession of an innate dignity, a noble sensitiveness would, we have doubt, have prevented them from exercising their talents in the impudent manner so notoriously characteristic of our contemporaries. What would they have thought, I wonder, of the flagrant impertinences on view recently at the MacDowell Club (Mr. John Sloan and his pig pens, for example)! They were of an older order that approached nature with a kind of secret solemnity. To them it retained its rituals of brooding, its subtle, sensitive mysticisms, its deep, inscrutable omnipotence. Their period was a period different from ours in the quite prosaic and con crete difference of a slower rhythm to life, a less of luxury, extravagance and materialism, a more of illusion, sentiment and reverence. We shall remember them always respectfully, although we must go elsewhere for what is most representatively vital, valuable and compelling in our painting.

SNAP-SHOTS OF FOREIGN AUTHORS: ROLLAND

BY RICHARD BUTLER GLAENZER

THEY are our intimates

As well as yours,

A human family

Humming fragmentary Credos

To give themselves courage

Through the wild humoresque of life.

At their side,

Yet somehow high above,

You smile sadly

Like one from Nazareth.

OF THE MAKING OF LITERARY CRITICISM

PROFESSOR SHERMAN AGAIN AND THE FOLLETTS AND A FEW
OTHER CONSIDERATIONS

EVER since man began to think, far back through the dim vistas of his geologic past, his thoughts have taken two courses, two divergent lines of development. On the one hand the exigencies of keeping alive compelled him to take thought how he should get his food, his shelter and his mate-such a thinker was the first realist; on the other hand, the development of imagination af forded man a tool by means of which he could escape from the duress of life in the spinning of fancies and ideals to charm him away from the bitter realities of a hard-won existence-such a thinker was the first romanticist. And ever since, all down through the course of human evolution and human history, this schism in man's thought has gone on its twofold way, calling him now to strenuous efforts in the conflict with nature, now to flights of imagination in his anxiety to escape from the trouble of living.

But ever has romanticism claimed the far larger part of man's time and nerve-energy and thought, ever has he devoted his godlike capacities of memory and desire to the dreaming of dreams, the weaving of fanciful tapestries of beauty, the designing of heavenly cities and utopias. And while he built up his dream-world, while he evolved his schools of ideal ists, his Platos and his Kants, while he fastened his eyes upon the mysteries of the stars, his poor stumbling feet were carrying him aimlessly through his world of reality, through the stress and harshness and cruelty of Nature's realm, through the welter of the unguided savagery of his own biologic inheritance and the un

guarded ruthlessness of blind social forces.

Reformers there have been in every age-but their reforms passed with them; priests and hermits-but they left no purity; philosophersbut they did not bring happiness. They only carried man the further from the elemental conditions of his

keeping himself alive. Yet the indomitable human spirit rises again and again to cast aside these futili ties, to get at grips with the hostile world, to try to organise society for stability and well-being; though never has man's grasp of reality reached a fifty per cent. consumption of his energy, always has his romantic impulse maintained a claim upon the greater part of his capacities. So the Athenian Golden Age, the Roman Empire, the Renaissance in southern Europe, all stand out as peaks in Western history, for in them man's attention to the art of living rose, let us say, to a twenty-five or thirty per cent. consumption of his vitality. As for the East, hardly has it expended two per cent. of its thought in making itself at home in the world.

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