THE IDEALS AND TENDENCIES 
 OF MODERN ART 
 
The Ideals and Tendencies 
 of Modern Art 
 
 BY 
 
 EDWARD CLARENCE FARNSWORTH 
 
 n 
 
 PORTLAND, MAINE 
 
 SMITH & SALE, PRINTERS 
 
 MDCCCCXVII 
 
COPYRIGHT 1917 
 
 BY 
 EDWARD CLARENCE FARNSWORTH 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 GENERAL INTRODUCTION .... 3 
 
 MODERN PAINTING . . ... II 
 
 MODERN POETRY 53 
 
 MODERN MUSIC 77 
 
 ^69.179 
 
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 
 
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 
 
 OTANDING on the beach and facing the broad 
 O ocean, one sees the flood tide sweeping toward 
 him in majestic waves each at farthest somewhat nearer 
 than its predecessor. Its supreme effort exhausted, 
 every wave recedes leaving only a wide expanse of 
 empty sand which, to the hasty observer, might indi- 
 cate the failure of the waters in their mighty task. 
 
 That human progress is tidal, that it manifests in 
 waves analogous to those of the ocean which, seem- 
 ingly free, are yet subject to law, is apparent to the 
 historian ; but why so he cannot tell. Nor can he 
 imagine what mysterious, moon-like influence lifts the 
 tidal wave of human endeavor and impels it to swell 
 and recede and swell again on every nearest and 
 farthest shore of the world we inhabit. 
 
 To live in the age of Grecian Pericles, or that of 
 the Italian Renaissance, or of the English Elizabethans, 
 was to behold a far-reaching wave of intellectual achiev- 
 ment supreme in its kind. To live in America to-day 
 and note the marvels of mechanical ingenuity constantly 
 appearing, is to experience a great and maybe superla- 
 tive wave of another kind. Whether or not there now 
 is in sweep, or else in formation amidst the sea of 
 human progress, a wave in some ways similar to those 
 
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 
 
 historic ones just mentioned, it is our purpose to 
 inquire. 
 
 That the surface urge behind the outer and gross 
 expression of material progress is allied with the deeper 
 ones behind spiritual and artistic advancement is not 
 likely. Such domineering and self-sufficient Materialism 
 would gradually crowd from the world the spiritual and 
 the purely artistic. Its imperious crest would quell and 
 humble every other. 
 
 Fortunately, Materialism as a whole has its wave 
 limit and its receding, after which a forward movement 
 of another kind is in order. Could we rise to the 
 highest outlook, the steady alternation of the spiritual 
 and the inner or basic material probably would be seen 
 therefrom as the preserver of balance in a world not of 
 angels, but of mortals compounded of fire and clay, of 
 soul and body. 
 
 To the spectator on the beach, the advance and 
 retreat of every wave is obvious enough, but to mark 
 such occurrences in the world of human endeavor 
 requires keener observation. Usually the period of 
 subsidence following the exhaustion of a great wave of 
 intellectual effort is not recognized as such by the con- 
 temporary observer. In fact, he is prone to mistake 
 falling away for further advance ; thus the Alexandrian 
 or critical period succeeding that inspirational age which 
 had produced the Greek dramatist, was, at the time, 
 
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 
 
 considered superior to the former. In the intellectual 
 firmament Aristotle was the new orb eclipsing that of 
 Plato and darkening with the shadow of doubt the 
 intuitions of the great Idealist, and so preparing the 
 way for that analytical age of reason, so-called, which 
 produced the skepticism, the decadence of Pyrrho. 
 
 Who can doubt that the refinements of Virgil were 
 in his day generally considered an advance over 
 the bold simplicity of Homer? Nor is such an esti- 
 mate surprising. But, aside from what that amounts 
 to, the ^Eneid contains certain excellencies of which 
 both the Iliad and the Odyssey are devoid, and so to 
 that extent the ^Eruid stands for progress. To be 
 explicit, the meagre mentions of natural beauty scat- 
 tered through the Homeric poems compare unfavorably 
 with the riches of description abounding in the Virgilian 
 verse. Evidently the Latin poet represented a wave 
 of intellectual effort differing from that of the elder 
 bard, but, all things considered, perhaps of equal 
 volume and reach. 
 
 Despite of a certain reversion to the Homeric models, 
 Virgil was an innovator. Now, when seen at close 
 range, often the output of some great innovator seems 
 to render null and void the work of all his predeces- 
 sors, but, afterward, in the mature and just esteem of 
 the world, he is recognized only as the revealer of 
 truth seen from a new angle. 
 
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 
 
 It were folly to argue that the rise of mankind from 
 mere savagery has not been along all lines, but it were 
 equally unwise to contend that every departure from 
 the conventional and time-honored is progress. Such 
 departure may be an actual turning back, though not 
 at the time so recognized, for to see with the eye of the 
 future is sight indeed. 
 
 That the present era is one of departure from con- 
 vention is obvious enough, but, for the race, this depar- 
 ture may mean decadence, or it may signify a period of 
 gestation already advanced to the throes of a new birth, 
 and the bringing forth of a humanity the heir of the 
 ages, a humanity wiser and better because of the 
 blunders and shortcomings of countless ancestors. 
 
 Examination of this larger matter being aside from 
 our purpose, we would undertake the lesser problem 
 indicated by the departures from the olden lately 
 occurring in the arts of painting, poetry, and music, 
 those sister arts sourced in some parent stem, some 
 underlying unity, as evidenced by their almost equal 
 sensitiveness to the dynamic forces beneath the total 
 of modern world happenings. 
 
 It was an ancient belief, one walled and buttressed 
 by a great and profound philosophy, that Sound, Color, 
 and Form, in their original manifestation, were the 
 powers that brought the earth into being and orbed 
 and kindled the stars above it. Sound was the first 
 
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 
 
 vibration stirring amidst the dead darkness of ancient 
 night. Color was the fire, and Form was the shaping 
 influence perfecting that divine Archetype, the self- 
 luminous Sphere. Sound, Color, and Form were the 
 original Trinity, in fact the primeval, Creative Word 
 of God. 
 
 Dealing with Painting, Poetry and Music, we shall 
 keep well in mind this exposition of their remote 
 origin. In Music, sound is predominant, with form 
 subordinate and also color, but, being vibration, color 
 is sound had we but the ears for it. In Painting, sound 
 cannot of course be considered since it is unapprehen- 
 sible as such, but color, or else form, holds first or 
 second place according to the viewpoint of the artist. 
 In Poetry, we have first language, seemingly a new 
 element, but language is only sound shaped by form to 
 vowels and consonants and then by it arranged as 
 words which convey ideas to the mind. As Poetry 
 demands the perfection of word painting, the poet 
 should in some degree acquire the artist's eye, so that 
 his language may have the effect of pigments. In 
 Poetry, we shall give to form a secondary place, perhaps 
 disputed by those who think too highly of the conven- 
 tional shapes into which the art has slowly crystallized. 
 
 Putting aside for the moment the various schools of 
 Painting peculiar to modern times, we can broadly 
 divide painters into two classes, those who copy more 
 
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 
 
 or less mechanically the outward face of nature, or of 
 man, and those who pierce deeper. As the prism 
 divides the white sunlight into the seven spectrum colors, 
 so the prism of the human mind can divide the world 
 and man each into seven components. This uncover- 
 ing of the world is not like that performed by the pick 
 and the shovel, for, to the prism of the mind, the coarse 
 strata of the world is but another aspect of the material. 
 
 According to the genius of the artist, the landscape 
 within the landscape is revealed till the inmost and 
 basic reality is approached. So, seeking the inmost of 
 man, the portrayer of the human face can, according to 
 his genius, throw upon it the hidden light of the soul. 
 
 The basic reality existant both in nature and man is 
 "The Thing in Itself" which Kant would have unat- 
 tainable by human intelligence. However, certain 
 other philosophers have been more sanguine. Human 
 mind is progressive, both in reason and intuition, and 
 to it the seemingly unknowable exists as a constant 
 challenge and stimulus. Let us then beware of setting 
 bounds to man's possibilities, or, what is more in line 
 with our present inquiry, let us not doubt that the artist 
 of the subjective will yet reach his utmost quest. 
 
:/"' 
 
 
 
 MODERN PAINTING 
 
MODERN PAINTING 
 
 IN examining the ideals and tendencies of modern 
 painting, we shall look first to the French, that 
 versatile and impressionable people, perhaps keener 
 than any other to feel the subtle influences manifest- 
 ing of late in divers modes of artistic expression. 
 
 Because of its reversion to the Greco- Roman, as well 
 as the Italian of the sixteenth and seventeenth cen- 
 turies, a severe and sculpturesque school of painting 
 obtained in Europe, especially in France, during the 
 latter part of the eighteenth and the early part of the 
 nineteenth centuries. Opposing this school were the 
 methods of the Dutch masters," whose art had developed 
 through contact with the soil even as had the sturdy 
 bodies which it loved to depict, idealized only by 
 their enveloping light against a background of shadows. 
 This art availed little outside of England, whereas, 
 under the leadership ofJDavid, and later of Ingfi the 
 French painters made composition and draughtmanship 
 their chief requisites and, in a desire for correctness 
 and Greek symmetry, they gave to the human form a 
 stiffness as of statuary. This is evidenced by David's 
 "Oath of the Horatii," the " Death of Socrates," 
 " Belisarius," " Rape of the Sabines," and other works 
 
 ii 
 
which earned for him an immense reputation and the 
 admiration of Royalty itself. 
 
 Now because, from viewpoints more and more interior, 
 the word form signifies that which deeper and deeper 
 underlies the objective phase of form, it is evident that, 
 in the progress of art, a school of painting, having for 
 ideal the mere dead externals of form, should be suc- 
 ceeded by a school having in view a more subjective, a 
 freer, a vitalized and more truthful phase of form, one 
 which, eschewing the stilted, would express the human 
 face and figure when influenced by the various 
 emotions. So, through Gerard and others, we see the 
 advent of Romanticism, the school at the beginning 
 and head of which Delacroix, with his "Dante and 
 Virgil" and his "Massacre in Scio" repainted in the 
 manner of Constable at once placed himself. Thus 
 an effectual and permanent protest against the methods 
 of David and the lesser lights of Classicisms was begun 
 by a school less trammeled than the other, a school 
 discarding, for warm color and its dramatic possibilities, 
 the dry and cold the earth colors of its prede- 
 cessor, but still a school with the human form and face 
 as the central interest; moreover, a school in which 
 rhythm and linear balance, sometime lost to French 
 painting, again appeared. Since the days of Homer, the 
 love of Nature, apart from the interest excited by histor- 
 ical associations with certain scenes, has been of slow 
 
 12 
 
MODERN' PAINTING 
 
 growth. Only in modern times has appreciation of 
 natural objects existed in any save the few. Even the 
 painters of the modern classical school had apologized 
 for Nature by dressing her up as for some occasion. 
 
 As evidenced by the school of Font a inehleftu, through 
 such a representative as Corot one of the first to 
 reject, at least in part, thosTlnheritances of Poussain 
 and Claude the supposedly noble and fit in land- 
 scape and also through MUJet^ who beneath the 
 homely discerned the beautiful, and in the simple and 
 seemingly trivial discovered the sublime, the time had 
 now come when the painter could find outside of man 
 the impulse essential to his work. Still this impulse 
 was not as yet sourced wholly in the landscape, 
 even when stripped by Corot of the disquieting and 
 filled by him with the charm of ideal summer scenery. 
 Nor was the landscape all, though seen by artists free- 
 ing themselves from the absurd restraints which out- 
 worn convention had hitherto opposed. While finding 
 whatsoever Nature sets before the eye to be suitable 
 for the painter ; that, for instance, the hut-crowned hill 
 is as inspiring as if surmounted by a ruined Grecian or 
 Roman temple after the fashion of Claude, and that 
 willows and birches are as worthy of the brush as are 
 oaks and palms, and that rivers are as picturesque as 
 streams and brooks, and peasants as presentable as 
 shepherds and nymphs and fauns and the other acces- 
 
MODERN PAINTING 
 
 series of classical scenery, this school nevertheless 
 deemed animal life, and also man, to be essential to the 
 picture. 
 
 Next the landscape pure and simple, aye, for itself 
 alone that enigma, that elusive face of infinite nature 
 which perhaps the English painter Constable and then 
 Corot, the "poet painter," were earliest to see with 
 something of the new vision ! And this landscape was 
 to awaken in the modern painter a sense of mystery 
 vast and deep and inclusive as the world itself. How 
 should he interpret, how fix for other eyes some phase 
 of mystery that a hovering shade, or a shaft from the 
 riven clouds, had revealed on forest, on mountain, on 
 valley and plain? How should he fitly transfer to 
 canvas what the changing seasons were bringing to all 
 within the circle of his vision? The lowering, the 
 breaking, the passing storm leaving in its wake the 
 leaping torrent, the swollen river, the lifted ocean! 
 How should he in miniature indicate those? How 
 worthily make stable the delicate tints of daybreak, or 
 the lifting mists upon the morning's shrouded face? 
 How paint effectively the sun's red setting, or the 
 crimson afterglow that pales to orange and to violet 
 ere yet the Night, her brush dipped deep in fire, has 
 touched the blue expanse with myriad points of flame ? 
 
 This, and more, we deem the problem which, con- 
 fronting the modern painter, has eventuated in schools 
 
 14 
 
MODERN PAINTING 
 
 and cults. This search for the ide^l is to some extent 
 beneath every phase of that RejjJisjn which, as one 
 aspect o the revolt from CJassicjsm, soon succeeded 
 Romanticism and is its one excuse for being. 
 
 Having in mind our definition of form as that which, 
 further and further from the surface, more and more 
 shapes the world to the Divine Likeness, or Archetype, 
 we must consider the Realism peculiar to the school in 
 which Courbet that sometime follower but final repu- 
 diator of bavrtl is prominent, as theoretically, at least, 
 to be a shrinking back, a recession of the wave of 
 progress, though not necessarily the turn of the tide of 
 total advance. 
 
 Furthermore, we deem the word realism, as here 
 used, to be misleading since the reality of Nature and 
 her true color scheme are not discoverable by physical 
 sight, however keen through cultivation; neither is 
 Nature reproduced through photographic attention to 
 detail. The history of French Realism proves it to 
 have been opposed to things either literary or symbolic, 
 and, in fact, to have been an anti-intellectual movement 
 wherein the coarse, the lascivious, the bald, the petty, 
 the commonplace, and even the repulsive, were certain 
 of the pitfalls imperiling the path of its votaries. Still, 
 at its worst, French Realism had its office in that it 
 helped to turn the eye of the painter from the antique 
 to contemporary life, and from the petty and the pretty, 
 
MODERN PAINTING 
 
 and the stilted and the theatrical, to the natural. 
 Besides it taught him to avoid sentimentality, false 
 idealism, and the glossing over of what is not beauty. 
 
 While in Courbet, Realism had for its inception an 
 artist of peculiar limitations as a colorist and otherwise, 
 it had also one of almost retrieving qualities as exempli- 
 fied, for instance, in his handling of rhythmic line, the 
 absence of which is obvious in Millet. Largely self- 
 taught, not from lack of means and opportunity, but 
 from intense though narrow convictions, coupled with 
 an obstinate self-esteem which to him made his very 
 defects appear like excellencies, Courbet had turned 
 with contempt from teachers whose pupils were perpe- 
 trating the sentimental and inane. 
 
 Courbet the realist was in no way of the Millet type 
 of French peasant, but rather that antithesis which 
 the scalpel of Zola has dissected so unmercifully. 
 Without that imagination, thought, and poetic fervor, 
 which had lifted Millet above his birth and over those 
 of Barbizon to whom, nevertheless, he was held by 
 love's unbreakable bond, Courbet had chosen Paris as 
 his ideal, though quite incapable of conforming to its 
 polite requirements. 
 
 It may be said of Courbet that an insatiable craving 
 for prominence whether attained through art, or mere 
 personal eccentricity, or some offence against custom 
 together with an unflagging determination to be the 
 
 16 
 
MODERN PAINTING 
 
 center of a worshipping circle, was the mainspring of 
 his life and the energy behind his enormous output 
 of canvases wherein little sense of movement was 
 attained, and whose technique was their chief excellence, 
 and in which the camera had its forerunner. It 
 should not be supposed that the Apostle of Realism 
 could rise to any lofty aim, or, like Millet, await with 
 patience the sure yield of future years, for Realism is 
 of the soil and, with earthward look and impatient 
 voice, it demands a speedy harvest. 
 
 Because a phase of materiality, the absolute Realism 
 of Courbet afforded no goal for an art destined to 
 depart more and more from the depicting of form as 
 recognized by the eye. The first painter to make 
 noticeable this peculiar modern tendency was Daumjer 
 whose early work as a caricaturist had prepared him 
 for the innovation. It was the misfortune of the 
 caricaturist turned from his vocation through politi- 
 cal reasons that the serious output of his mature 
 years should be regarded by many as only another 
 phase of his youthful efforts. 
 
 Daumier was not a coloristj a successor of Delacroix ; 
 indeed his art was a reaction against the prettiness to 
 which contemporary use of color had come. Never- 
 theless, by constructing his figures first in tone, and 
 then causing his drawing to incorporate and unify both 
 form and shading, he discovered a means of increasing 
 
 17 
 
MODERN PAINTING 
 
 volume. Now while this procedure was not in accord 
 with that of Michelangelo in his emphasis of certain 
 parts of the human form, still the influence of the great 
 Italian is felt in Daumier's volumes. Moreover, the 
 light and shadow of Rembrandt were fraught with sug- 
 gestion to one who actually copied neither master. 
 
 Another phase of an art impelled toward the sub- 
 jective through contact with others moving in like 
 direction, is found in the essentially decorative, two- 
 dimensional art of Impressionism ; that foreshadowed by 
 Manet. This painter, who had revolted from academic 
 exactness, was the first to attempt economy and 
 simplicity by obscuring details. In him we see the 
 influence of Courbet to the extent that his subjects 
 were chiefly those tabooed by the inheritors of the 
 Davidian formulas which regarded the dignified and 
 the noble as alone fit for the canvas. On the other 
 hand, Manet's art was not realistic in at least this, 
 that anticipating modern methods it treated its subjects 
 aesthetically rather than pictorially. 
 
 As an imaginative painter, Manet found his means of 
 expression neither in the soil, nor in things related 
 thereto, but in the sky, or, more precisely, in light and 
 atmosphere. With these he gave to objects nearby, 
 or in the middle distance, or afar off, those correct 
 values which before his day were either unnoticed, or 
 else ignored. 
 
 18 
 
MODERN PAINTING 
 
 Manet has said: "The principal person in a picture 
 is trTe~light." Now it Is complained that, in his over- 
 attention to atmospheres, Manet never modeled to any- 
 thing like roundness, and so his figures seem flat and 
 the general impression is that of flatness, a defect 
 common to his school. Besides it should be noted 
 that, whereas ideas are permanent, pigments fade and 
 with that fading Us values and la tache those 
 excellencies obtained by obliterating half-tones and 
 obscuring details will have disappeared, thus making 
 prophetic the words of that real Impressionist Monet, 
 he whose style had been greatly influenced by Turner's 
 Rain, Steam and Speed and his ice and snow effects 
 and those of sunlight and mist: "Perhaps I sacrifice 
 too much to lightness and brightness, but these are 
 essentials of the landscape." 
 
 The la tache of Impressionism on the one hand, and 
 the microscopic attention to detail of the genre painter 
 Meissonier on the other, show what a gulf can sepa- 
 rate artists of one nation and time. Because when 
 not black from absorption of all sunlight, any natural 
 object refracts at least one of the seven spectrum 
 colors, and because when more than one are refracted, 
 their juxtaposition changes them to a variation of the 
 colors refracted, and because the hues of surrounding 
 objects modify that variation and are in turn modified 
 by it, Impressionism, as illustrated by Monet after he 
 
 19 
 
MODERN PAINTING 
 
 had gathered hints from the Turner paintings, attempts 
 the method of the sunlight. 
 
 The artist of this school employs only the seven 
 pure spectrum colors and, at times, white and black. 
 These he arranges in such juxtaposition that, seen 
 from the proper angle and distance, they produce to 
 the eye the chromatic tints of the external world, from 
 dazzling white to deepest shadow. Moreover, to be 
 faithful to nature, the Impressionist seizes upon some 
 hour of the sun's progress under skies cloudy or other- 
 wise, and imitates the colors which the sun as painter 
 then spreads upon the landscape. 
 
 Impressionism, as exemplified by Monet, owes much 
 to Japanese art, itself impressionistic and eminently 
 suggestive while showing no trace of the Western 
 schools. Native critics claim that the false perspective 
 and extravagant character of Japanese painting, as 
 indicated by Utamaro and continued by Toyokuni and 
 culminating in Yeizan, all of whom have influenced 
 modern French painting, is a decadence originating in 
 crude efforts to reproduce poor prints of European 
 pictures, especially those of the Dutch school. But 
 the real Impressionist of Japan was not one of these, 
 nor was he the prolific Hokusai, familiar to the Western 
 world through his book illustrations, but, in fact, 
 Hiroshige whose atmospheres antedated those of Manet. 
 In this connection let us add that Monet's idea of 
 
 20 
 
MODERN PAINTING 
 
 painting a single haystack in differing atmospheres 
 was derived from the Japanese. 
 
 Of Monet it has been well said that, while as regards 
 particulars he ignored the face of nature, he secured a 
 desired general effect by painting it, even as did Manet, 
 as if seen through eyes but half open. As result, 
 its parts were emphasized by the blending of details 
 in clusters of light and shade. Thus, it is claimed, 
 the resulting ensemble gives an impression of truth 
 more adequate than by any other means. Impres- 
 sionistic chiaroscuro, as exemplified by Manet, Monet, 
 and Pissarro, differs to some extent from that of former 
 schools and radically from that of the Dutch masters, 
 since its lights are not concentrated on the central 
 subject, but are distributed somewhat evenly over the 
 entire grouping. 
 
 As exemplified by the three masters above men- 
 tioned, Impressionism, while anti-intellectual, is also a 
 total severance from outworn traditions of color, form, 
 and value, and in fact it terminated an inadequate 
 past. To the cult, this breaking away meant progress 
 along all lines. Nevertheless, Impressionism must be 
 considered chiefly as the experiment of those who, 
 though never achieving form and linear rhythm, yet 
 cleared away much rubbish of convention, while stand- 
 ing on the shifting line between the old truth and the 
 larger yet to be. 
 
 21 
 
MODERN PAINTING 
 
 In certain of its tendencies, Impressionism easily 
 lends itself to mere exaggeration and so becomes a 
 retrograde art. Now when employed by a master, and 
 therefore judiciously, exaggeration heightens expres- 
 sion, but, in the hands of the incompetent, it is a clumsy 
 tool which they are prone to use. 
 ^ Ignoring the underlying and stable verities of nature, 
 Ihe Impressionist is enamored of the outward in its 
 /most fleeting appearance, that of atmosphere, for the 
 /landscape, however picturesque, is to him but a body 
 [to be clothed after the manner of his school. To 
 I center attention on color effects he distorts outlines. 
 I Because in a general survey the eye fails to grasp the 
 1 minutiae of nature, and even its correct outlines, he 
 [indicates objects, especially if in motion, by mere 
 J splashes of color. If an extremist, he utterly disregards 
 detail so that, aside from atmosphere, the result is 
 something unseen in nature save through the eyes of 
 one who yet prides himself on painting in the open, 
 rather than from memory in the studio. As a school, 
 though by no means as an influence, Impressionism is 
 fast disappearing from the land of its birth. 
 * So enamored were the Impressionists of their dis- 
 coveries in respect to light and atmosphere, that, as 
 already said, they overlooked, or sacrificed to these, 
 Doth form and linear rhythm. Thus resulted an art 
 palpably one-sided, but which some progressive genius 
 
 22 
 
MODERN PAINTING 
 
 would yet strive to make symmetrical. After 
 trials, this difficult task was accomplished by Renoii 
 who from Impressionism had grown into a larger view. 
 Linear rhythm he had acquired from Courbet an< 
 Delacroix, but only in later years did he wholly 
 triumph over the rigid and angular. Form he ulti- 
 mately achieved through an arbitrary dispersion of i 
 light which caused it to fall as points and spots on the 
 prominent parts of his figures and other object^ 
 Moreover, it was he who, though beginning with th< 
 use of black, so prominent in Courbet, afterwards 
 well-nigh discarded it, and so liberated future painters 
 from its traditional use in creating volumes and solidity 
 which now can be produced with pure color. Renoir, 
 the consummation of Impressionism, deserves much 
 more than passing notice, for he had assimilated the 
 teachings of many schools and in him even the art of 
 the far East is represented. 
 
 An artist at first influenced by Courbet and Dela- 
 croix, but afterward delving deeper into the problem 
 of color than did Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro, was 
 Cezanne. Observing carefully the color gradations 
 undergone by objects when curving away from the 
 direct sunlight, he reproduced their descent from 
 warm to cold, for instance, from yellow to blue, while 
 at the same time he modified that descending scale by 
 allowing for the effect of local color thereon. As 
 
 23 
 
MODERN PAINTING 
 
 f esult, the objects in his pictures preserve their relativity 
 in whatsoever light they are viewed. 
 
 While Manet and his school had represented nature 
 'in its ephemeral appearances, and without solidity and 
 depth, Cezanne's imitation of the behavior of natural 
 light in chromatic descent on a curving surface, was 
 virtually the creation of form plus the other two 
 desirable qualities absent from Impressionistic art. 
 Moreover, he conveyed the idea of solidity without 
 sacrificing mobility. Daumier had conceived drawing 
 and chiaroscuro simultaneously, but Ce'zanne was the 
 first painter to make form, chiaroscuro, and color 
 identical, even as united in Nature these appear to the 
 eye. 
 
 Comparing Cezanne's best work with that of the 
 masters of the old schools, one discovers that with 
 them drawing was the chief end and color but an 
 ornament, or else an intensifier of dramatic expression. 
 Comparing Cezanne with Renoir, we find that whereas 
 the latter completed and in a way separated each part 
 of a picture, the other subordinated parts to the whole. 
 Moreover, these parts are interrelated, and are treated 
 by a method analagous to that applied to the subject 
 and counter-subject of a fugue. Adverse critics con- 
 tend that Cezanne's distortion of figures was due to poor 
 eyesight, but his adherents claim this distortion to be 
 deliberate and for the sake of increasing his volumes. 
 
 24 
 
MODERN PAINTING 
 
 As a landscape painter, Ce'zanne never attempted 
 exactness ; the subjective in nature was what he strove 
 for. Though bringing the manipulation of light to 
 its logical conclusion, this painter was essentially a 
 delver, a discoverer, and experimenter, one bequeathing 
 to art what would be invaluable to painters of a future 
 day. Indeed, it is claimed that all would-be progressive 
 painting is traceable to him, or else it is sourced in that 
 return to the primitive toward which the Point- Aven 
 school led the way. As for Ce'zanne, he failed to 
 "realize," that is to say, he never gained absolute 
 fluency in manipulating the vast materials which his 
 deep investigations had revealed to him. And yet no 
 painter has attained more poise in the three dimensions. 
 Alter any portion, however small, and the whole of a 
 Cezanne picture must be conformed to the change. 
 
 The Pointillists, or, more precisely, the Neo-Impre.s- 
 sionists, whose representatives were Seurat and Signac, 
 thought fit to emphasize the chief end of Impressionism 
 without offering, as had Renoir and Cezanne, a remedy 
 for its deficiencies in respect to form and depth. Since 
 this emphasis was in effect but over-emphasis, we must 
 regard the movement as unprogressive and even deca- 
 dent, and its output as of only passing interest. The 
 Impressionists saw nature as a series of plains vibrant 
 with light. To imitate this light their surfaces, limited 
 to spectrum colors, consisted of minute round spots 
 
 2 5 
 
MODERN PAINTING 
 
 each absorbing or reflecting color to a degree peculiar 
 to itself. Of these spots, or points, the most luminous 
 may be likened to a musical theme and the others to 
 its variations. As for the Pointillists, they saw nature 
 as a maze of colored spots. 
 
 Hence their spotty painting, every spot almost square 
 and usually too large for good results. Each spot was 
 opposed to the next according to a supposedly scientific 
 formula of complementary colors which often actually 
 neutralized each other and so produced a grey effect. 
 Between the spots, whose like were unseparated in 
 Impressionistic surfaces, were white bits of canvas to 
 brighten the total effect. Except for decorative painting 
 seen at a distance, the result was not happy and for 
 reasons too technical for our general survey. Suffice 
 it that the theories of color held by these painters were 
 derived from inaccurate writers. Then again, the cult 
 had peculiar notions in respect to the emotions caused 
 by straight lines at different angles, and they even des- 
 ignated the color appropriate to each line. 
 
 Had Seurat, the head and most talented member of 
 the cult, not died young, he might have modified into 
 something valuable to progressive art the Pointillism 
 which the talented but erratic Yan Gogh so absurdly 
 perverted in feverish desire for quick results. Unfor- 
 tunately for the cult, the Dutchman's paintings are 
 usually regarded as representative of their style. 
 
 26 
 
MODERN PAINTING 
 
 Pointillism soon reaching that extreme where reaction 
 was inevitable, the Post-Impressionistic or Point-Aven 
 school of illustration and decoration came into being 
 with Gauguin the painter of peaceful tropical scenes 
 and simple savage life as its founder and head. 
 The spotty work of the Impressionists and their direct 
 successors, from whose company Gauguin had sepa- 
 rated, was now discarded for gorgeous, oriental and 
 barbaric color in broad plains laid on with unmixed 
 pigments and with a stroke learned in part from 
 Van Gogh. Thus the problem of light was thrust 
 aside that a -sensuous revel in color might take its 
 place. 
 
 Soon, by his immediate circle the primitive and the 
 decorative in Gauguin's work was carried to the absurd 
 limit of resembling the untutored attempts of aboriginal 
 peoples for, like Bergson, the following held that evo- 
 lution is not always a direct onward movement, that at 
 times it should revert to the primitive and elemental 
 there to gain energy for a more vigorous thrust forward. 
 In opposition to the divisionist methods of the Neo- 
 Impressionists, they, as " Synthesists," used absolute 
 color in large, flat masses even as the Assyrian and 
 Egyptian mural decorators, thus, from absence ofjine 
 opposition, producing a too static effect. Inasmuch as 
 the cult never pondered over their painting, but, like 
 Van Gogh, worked during the first heat of enthusiasm, 
 
 2 7 
 
MODERN PAINTING 
 
 their merely inspirational efforts often degenerated to 
 the crude outlines and false proportions, in fact the 
 childish attempts, of the cave men. Of the cult, as a 
 whole, it may be said that desire for self-expression, 
 when little or no self exists, leads to results which 
 excite pity, or contempt, or mirth, according to the 
 temperament of the observer. 
 
 The barbarian, the Chinese, the Japanese, and what 
 not, of the Gauguinians having rendered an indirect 
 service to progressive art by effecting a break from 
 Impressionism, and the too coldly scientific Neo- 
 Impressionism, painters were now impelled to look in 
 any direction for that inspiration which Matisse -^as^a 
 colorist the continuation of Gauguin believed he 
 had found in Arabic and Moorish art. Influenced to 
 some extent by the Spanish painter Goya, Matisse, by 
 distinction the head of the Post-Impressionist move- 
 ment, deliberately distorted form, including the human 
 figure. This to express some peculiar idea, or for 
 mere novelty a reason derived from his study of 
 Goya or else to increase volume as did Daumier 
 before him, or, as in a less pronounced way, Michel- 
 angelo had done in his time. Nevertheless, Matisse's 
 figures are more subtle, and generally superior to the 
 flat and wooden of Gauguin. 
 
 Matisse, who like Gauguin has been called the wild 
 man, was an iconoclast willing to strip himself of every 
 
 28 
 
MODERN PAINTING 
 
 idea derived whether from education or observation. 
 In the interest of what he deemed real art, he would 
 burn all existing galleries of art. To his view, tech- 
 nique was an artificiality, a hindrance rather than a 
 help. He believed that the conventions of civilization 
 have reacted unfavorably on the painter, so that no 
 longer he sees nature as it should be seen by man, and 
 as it still is seen by the child who with open eyes gazes 
 wonderingly around. Though wholly sophisticated, as 
 evidenced by his philosophizing, he would gain the 
 virgin mind, the lost estate of childhood and of the 
 infant race. Now, in the nature of things, this cannot 
 occur ; if childishness be expressed by such a man, it 
 will prove the childishness of senile decay that ever 
 approaches imbecility. 
 
 Matisse had examined the rude wood carvings of 
 the Africans and the sculptures of both the South Sea 
 Islanders and the Central and South American Indians, 
 and, in their naive attempts at symmetry, he fancied 
 an excuse for his own distortions of the human form, 
 which Giotto drew so precisely. Eventually, the defi- 
 ciencies of Matisse were accentuated by imitators 
 devoid of his saving qualities, and so a quick deca- 
 dence ensued. However, the real Matisse cannot be 
 estimated aside from the influence which the delicate 
 but flat paintings of the ancient Persians exercised 
 upon his art. As a colorist, Matisse had experimented 
 
 29 
 
MODERN PAINTING 
 
 with Divisionist methods. Repudiating these, he tend- 
 ered toward both exaggeration of color and bizarre 
 effects. Still, his colors were as well-poised as those of 
 any predecessor and their use indicated deep reflection, 
 a quality absent from the daubs of the Point- Aven cult. 
 
 Painters from Manet to Matisse having supposedly 
 explored every mystery of color, nothing new in this 
 department seemed to remain. On the other hand, the 
 over-emphasis and even distortion of form instigated 
 by Daumier, and quite noticeable in Cezanne, and 
 increasingly so in Gauguin and Matisse, discovered 
 possibilities for an art tending from the purely objective 
 to the purely subjective wherein form, as seen in the 
 world, would no longer be presented. 
 
 In their attempts to enlarge volume, and at the same 
 time to impart an idea of subjectivity, the Cubists, of 
 whom Picasso is acknowledged leader, employ eccentric 
 methods. A figure having been blocked out and drawn 
 in, if the whole be cut into squares, parallelograms, 
 and triangles, and then arranged in an arbitrary way 
 allowing certain pieces to overlap and so partially 
 obscure others, results very like Cubism are obtained. 
 
 By this arrangement, or rather disarrangement, and 
 also by certain other means, yet to be explained, the 
 Cubist greatly augments volume and also would convey 
 to other minds what the outward symbolizes to his 
 inner artistic consciousness. While the adherents of 
 
 30 
 
MODERN PAINTING 
 
 Gauguin found grace in the flow of the rhythmic line 
 common to certain phases of primitive art ; the Cubists 
 find strength in angles to which, in way of contrast, 
 they oppose a few curves. 
 
 Now mere disarranging of objects of course fails to 
 suggest the subjective. Besides, the little of rhythm 
 discoverable in Matisse having been done away with 
 by the Cubists, their rigid geometrical figures and 
 angles, their absence of color, their formal planes, their 
 primitive bas-relief effects, and their inevitable lack of 
 poise, suggest only the static and material. 
 
 To understand better the Cubist's aims, we should 
 know his doctrine of " simultaneity," some idea of which 
 had occurred to Delacroix. This doctrine may be 
 epitomized thus : Haying. seen an object from different 
 angles, if one form a mental picture of it, his mind 
 refuses to restrict itself to a single view and exclude 
 the others ; in fact, to mental vision every view of an 
 object usually appears simultaneously. Cubism would 
 not reproduce such a composite picture, but would 
 convey an idea derived from it. Now, since neither 
 disarrangement of the model, nor "simultaneity "fully 
 explains Cubist art, something of the doctrine of elim- 
 ination not new, but carried to an extreme is 
 necessary to a clear comprehension of the matter. 
 When in a more and more marked way the Impres- 
 sionists and their successors distorted the model, they 
 
MODERN PAINTING 
 
 at the same time began to deem accessories unessential 
 and even redundant. Finally, the Cubists, who regarded 
 form merely as volume, discovered that, by disorgan- 
 izing the model, it could be made to fill the place of 
 these accessories. Evidently the application of this 
 questionable discovery results in synthesis through the 
 completion of elimination. Another matter demanding 
 notice is that the Cubist is free to ignore aerial and 
 linear perspective in favor of mental perspective. 
 When the latter is employed, the unimportant, though 
 in the foreground, is made little, whereas, however 
 small and wheresoever placed, the important is made 
 large and imposing. 
 
 By using only white, brown, and grey, in their reac- 
 tion from the colorists, the original Cubists deprived 
 themselves of a powerful, emotional element; hence 
 their work should be judged from a merely intellectual 
 viewpoint from which, however, it is evidently one-sided. 
 Awake to the importance of color, the latest following, 
 known as the Orphists,. no longer restrict themselves 
 to grey and white. Brilliant tints are now introduced 
 into their paintings. 
 
 Before passing to a consideration of Futurism, Vor- 
 ticism, and Synchromism, we will touch upon what is 
 known as the Pre-Raphaelite movement: Despite its 
 name, probably suggested by the German movement, 
 of which Cornelius and Overbeck were the leaders, 
 
 32 
 
MODERN PAINTING 
 
 Pre-Raphaelitism was not mediaeval. It did not disap- 
 prove of Raphael's work in the main, but it did make 
 issue with the absence of thoroughness elaboration 
 of detail common to his predecessors and the deca- 
 dence of his imitators of whom it should be said that, 
 when forsaking nature, the artist takes it second hand, 
 though from a master, inevitably he acquires much 
 of mere mannerism with but little of balancing 
 excellence. 
 
 Mere mannerism was the chief fault which the Pre- 
 Raphaelites would correct. Evidently, the movement 
 was not in line with French Impressionism which 
 minimized detail and magnified atmosphere. But, like 
 Impressionism, it was a protest, in its case against the 
 conventionality and pettiness and lack of spirituality 
 into which contemporary English painting had sunk. 
 
 Though Holman Hunt, John Millais, and Dante Ros- 
 setti, originated the movement, Hunt afterwards claimed 
 that he alone remained true to its first intent. Hunt 
 was really a painter of easel pictures, and an artist with 
 whom multiplicity of detail was a hobby. Whether in 
 in the background, or in the foreground, his detail, 
 always finished and often minute, was ever apparent. 
 Because too distinct, his distances seem falsely near, 
 while his horizons appear as if viewed through a field 
 glass. Hunt's detail proves his failure to learn the 
 lesson, which was to force itself on the French moderns, 
 
 33 
 
MODERN PAINTING 
 
 that the conveying of information is not the highest 
 purpose of painting. 
 
 Hunt had imbibed his naturalism from Ruskin ; from 
 him that notion of exactness, of so-called truth to 
 nature, which in practice becomes untruth. Because 
 without blurring, or that melting of objects one into 
 another which the normal eye finds in distances, Hunt's 
 canvases seem hard and unreal. Because destitute of 
 a definite color system, and because of the independ- 
 ence of elaborated parts, he usually lacks synthesis. 
 Requiring no insight, since conveying no subjective 
 impression, he is comprehensible at a glance and so 
 contains those essentials of popularity which make for 
 early but not lasting reputation. 
 
 Through Hunt's influence, Millais was brought to 
 adopt ideas and methods akin to his own, therefore, in 
 the landscapes of the latter, during that period of influ- 
 ence, every object was clear-cut as if the eye were 
 focussed on it alone. Of course this "truthfulness" 
 won the allegiance of Ruskin. To Millais' only normal 
 vision, a method proper to Hunt's unusual eyesight 
 would ere long become questionable, so, later, we find 
 Millais turning to a broader treatment wherein sugges- 
 tion to some extent took the place of the literalism of 
 the other. This, despite the fact that, in thus changing 
 his style, he incurred the denunciation of his former 
 eulogizer. 
 
 34 
 
MODERN PAINTING 
 
 This breaking from Hunt did not quite spell advance, 
 for it is admitted that, to no little extent, Millais then 
 began to popularize his work. That he lacked genuine 
 heart impulse is evidenced by the fact that his themes 
 never welled from a source central within him. Rather, 
 he resembled the ordinary workman who looks around 
 wondering what next he should do. In such an artist, 
 we expect neither heights of dramatic intensity, nor 
 deeps of moving tragedy. 
 
 As for the third member of this distinguished group, 
 Rossetti was a poet of mystical tendencies, a word- 
 painter of rare refinement, a colorist in whose poems a 
 hundred shades of language glowed and gloomed in 
 artistic arrangement. So, even as his eminent and 
 devoted disciple BurneTjpnes, he was instinctively 
 opposed to the literalism of his two colleagues and 
 could not but idealize in his painting. Enamored of 
 historical subjects, he treated them not in accordance 
 with fact, but as he would have them ; in other words, 
 he threw over them a poetical glamor the result of 
 which was a surface prettiness leaving the under- 
 currents of life unsounded. In respect to this phase 
 of artistic expression, the author of Rose Mary was a 
 better poet than painter. 
 
 In his first exhibition picture The Girlhood of Mary 
 Virgin, painted soon after the foundation of the brother- 
 hood, Rossetti had indicated the differences which more 
 
 35 
 
MODERN PAINTING 
 
 and more would separate him from Hunt and Millais. 
 Technically, Rossetti was inferior to these artists, but 
 he possessed in greater degree that sense of rhythm 
 which usually is denied to painters of English parent- 
 age. Rossetti always strove for color which he called 
 the physiognomy and the body of a picture, that by 
 which immediately it is known and loved. Delacroix 
 had made color a chief means to dramatic ends, but 
 Rossetti's use of it resulted rather in the sensuous. 
 To some extent, this caused the accusation that he 
 belonged to the fleshly school of painting and also to 
 that of poetry, in fact the school with which the early 
 Swinburne was identified. This accusation, easily 
 drawn from the staid and somewhat narrow British 
 public, would have been quite incomprehensible in the 
 land of De Maupassant and Zola and Manet. 
 
 Of the Pre-Raphaelites, Rossetti and Burn e- Jones 
 especially, it is curious that, while asserting the need 
 of a return to nature, they have chosen few subjects 
 from contemporary life. While in many ways akin to 
 Rossetti, though as a colorist inferior to him, Burne- 
 Jones proved himself worthy of place beside the three 
 leaders of the movement. So enamored of beauty for 
 itself was he that not to have lived in the middle ages 
 was his one regret. To dream beneath the domes and 
 in the shadows of their mighty erections, not as one 
 looking back from a material present, but as contem- 
 
 36 
 
MODERN PAINTING 
 
 porary with men whose ideals had flowered forth in 
 the grand, the stately, the majestic, the memorable, of 
 cathedrals and castles, yes, to dream thus seemed a 
 boon fit for one who, making subject to be the first 
 essential of his painting, turned to the Arthurian legends 
 and the Biblical narratives and the myths of classical 
 antiquity. 
 
 The art of Burne-Jones much lacked masculine 
 qualities. It held the mirror to nature only when 
 beauty was to be reflected, when, for instance, the 
 human face was smoothed of every emotion which 
 could distort its features. It was a pretty art that of 
 Burne-Jones, femininely pretty, but an art in which the 
 eye and the senses find reaction from the extremes to 
 which Modernism has arrived. 
 
 Though taking root in England, Futurism is not 
 indigenous thereto. It is an exotic from Italy whose 
 soil afforded no nourishing ingredients. The wizard 
 Marinetti produced that anomalous plant and nourished 
 it to flowers of strangeness, rather than beauty. 
 
 The viewpoint of art peculiar to the Futurist is one 
 which, for the ordinary mortal, is difficult of reach. In 
 expressing what is seen from that viewpoint, a Futurist 
 painting takes shape and color and proportion unlike 
 anything in this world. As the Futurist should best 
 understand his aims and ends, let the words of an 
 extremist of the cult elucidate them : " By means of 
 
 37 
 
MODERN PAINTING 
 
 contrasted color, form, lines, planes, and dimensions, 
 that in no way represent natural forms, it is possible 
 to create emotions infinitely more stimulating that any 
 created by duplicating nature." 
 
 As his name would indicate, the Futurist scorns every 
 harking back to the murals of dead and musty Egypt. 
 Rejecting the primitive archaism which appealed to the 
 Post-Impressionist, he looks, for instance, to London 
 and Chicago streets and to New York skyscrapers and 
 to factory chimneys and to Coney Island and what 
 ever is indicative of the rush and whirr of metropolitan 
 life. 
 
 Marinetti is an Idealist gone astray ; one in absolute 
 revolt from the Classicism of his native Italy. By 
 distorting or obscuring reality, he would suggest an 
 interior, a subjective form, one requiring intelligent 
 search, whereas, groping blindly, he seizes the merely 
 fantastic and presses it into his service. 
 
 Holding that, while seemingly quiescent, life has a 
 certain movement, even if only vibratory, and observ- 
 ing that in every activity of the body the eye gives 
 motion to what it contacts, the Futurist painter would 
 suggest these movements and thus make the beholder 
 a part of the picture by means of a multiplicity of 
 force-lines each, whether curving or straight, always 
 concordant or nearly so. In respect to curves, we should 
 add that the Futurist much prefers the straight line 
 
 38 
 
MODERN PAINTING 
 
 and the terminal. Since its force-lines convey no idea 
 of depth, Futurist art should be classed with the two- 
 dimensional work of the decorative schools. In passing 
 let us say that the Futurists have discarded the human 
 model and have criticised the Cubists for its use, even 
 when obscured after the manner of their cult. In 
 respect to line and its significance, the Futurists have 
 evolved a theory even more absurd than that of the 
 Neo-Impressionists. For instance, they hold that hori- 
 zontal lines, cutting into half-revealed faces, and then 
 into portions of irregular landscape, suggest one's 
 starting on a journey. 
 
 Jjeing motion, there is overmuch peculiar evidence of 
 journeying in Futurist paintings. Thus, the racing of 
 a horse, or the rushing of a railroad train, is indicated 
 by a multiplicity of outlines each indicating some 
 position which the one or the other of these would for 
 an instant occupy. 
 
 In another instance, Futurist motion is indicated by 
 the figure of a man in the street, then on the sidewalk, 
 and then entering his home. Inasmuch as the Cubists 
 achieved only the static, their latest idea of motion 
 by Futurist methods has resulted in such pictures as 
 Duchamp's celebrated Nude Descending the Stairs. Now, 
 since real motion results from rhythmic organization, 
 one suggesting continuous flow like that of a waterfall, 
 and since neither the Cubist nor the Futurist attain to 
 
 39 
 
MODERN PAINTING 
 
 such a result, the futility of uniting their methods 
 to indicate motion is apparent. 
 
 A series of similar lines or outlines indicates only 
 the successive points at which a moving object pauses 
 momentarily. In other words, such outlines are in 
 effect static and indicative merely of successive changes 
 of position. This is true of Nude Descending the Stairs^ 
 and also of the pictured man in the street and then on 
 the sidewalk and then entering his home. The latter 
 picture really creates the impression of three inde- 
 pendent views. 
 
 In an art which ever approaches subjective form, or, 
 rather, man's idea of that form which, because proper 
 to the Creative Word itself, is perhaps beyond his cog- 
 nition, Synchromism a child of American parentage 
 has taken the latest step. The Synchromists have 
 striven to make composition as intense as did Rubens, 
 while as colorists they have eschewed all but the 
 spectrum seven. Like Cdzanne, whose color scheme 
 they claim to have made abstract by rejecting his 
 local color which suggests natural objects, they have 
 achieved three-dimensional, organized and rhythmic 
 form by means of color. In fact, they claim to have 
 reached the goal of their art in the perfect poise of 
 every necessary of painting as expressed through their 
 scientific arrangement of warm and cold colors. 
 
 Now while Cdzanne's form was largely objective, 
 
 -r 
 
 40 
 
MODERN PAINTING 
 
 theirs would eliminate the idea of objectivity. Such 
 an abstract method allows immense latitude to the 
 artist. Let any number of Synchromists paint the idea 
 conveyed by a landscape, or a human figure, and no 
 two results will resemble each other. As demonstrated 
 by Synchromism, abstract form is not a haphazard 
 assembly of parts, but an organization constructed 
 much after the manner of a fugue. 
 
 In their attempted suggestion of the purely subjec- 
 tive by means of color organization, the Synchromists 
 knowingly or unknowingly have entered the domain of 
 metaphysics, or, more properly, that of Occultism 
 which holds that the hues of external nature are but 
 pale reflections of those proper to the super-sensible 
 world wherein, if one pierce deep enough, color becomes 
 not only intense and all-pervasive, but an evident cre- 
 ative potency. Indeed, an Occultist might argue that, 
 as an inner urge, color has been operative on the 
 theorizing painters since the advent of Delacroix. 
 
 The English Vorticists stand for the ultra-modern, 
 not only in painting, but in sculpture, poetry, and 
 music. In respect to painting, they, as colorists, have 
 reacted against the cold greys of Cubism, while carry- 
 ing organized form to a subjectivity comparable with 
 that of the Synchromists. With only spectrum colors, 
 the Vorticists would create a simply-organized color 
 arrangement capable of generating a subjective impres- 
 
MODERN PAINTING 
 
 sion, itself generating impressions even as a ball of 
 snow gathers bulk when in motion. Again, that original 
 impression may be compared to a vortex which gathers 
 to itself the surrounding waters. As painters, the cult 
 have yet to create simple impressions virile enough to 
 fulfill the duty which Vorticism requires of them. 
 
 II 
 
 In outlining the ideals and tendencies of modern 
 painting, we have refrained from the technical lan- 
 guage of the art critic and his nice discriminations, as 
 well as his wordy description of methods and details. 
 Our chief object has been to gain, from the essentials 
 of the schools and cults mentioned, a place of vantage, 
 and from it to discover perhaps the general trend of 
 painting toward some goal to which poetry and music 
 seem also directed. 
 
 As result of this outlining, we find in the art of 
 painting an impulse analogous to that which separated 
 philosophy into two great streams sourced the one in 
 Plato, and the other in Aristotle. Idealism and Realism 
 have maintained their respective claims since the days 
 of the Grecian Academy, and, down the centuries, each 
 has asserted its sole right to be. 
 
 The revolt of painting from the modern Pseudo- 
 Classicism of David, and its division into two streams, 
 
 42 
 
MODERN PAINTING 
 
 was in part due to the spirit of freedom animating the 
 works of the novelists, dramatists, and poets of the 
 new age. The art of Delacroix is the first moving 
 of the stream which tended towards pure subjectivity, 
 whereas, the realism of Courbet has corresponding place 
 in that stream which flows through the actual of the 
 visible world. As viewed by the Idealist, the esthetic 
 arts are branches of a parent trunk, so, to him, their 
 modern tendency is an increasing evidence of their 
 essential unity. As shown in the motif and fugue 
 effects of the Synchromist, the painter is more and 
 more striving for what was once deemed the sole 
 prerogative of poetry and music. Simultaneously, the 
 poet and the musician would enter the supposedly 
 exclusive territory of one or both of the others. 
 
 Of unadulterated Realism in painting, it is evident 
 that, while piercing no deeper than the externals of 
 truth, it does mean the honest use of one's eyesight 
 instead of those lenses which distort the image proper 
 to normal vision. The Realism of Courbet was the 
 inception of an art which, if not turned into the chan- 
 nels of mere novelty, would, because of its sincerity, 
 reach in straightforward course the goal of every art. 
 On the other hand, since the advent of Delacroix, the 
 Idealists have increasingly falsified the contour of 
 the human figure, not in an attempt to make it more 
 symmetrical, but because of secondary reasons, for 
 
 43 
 
MODERN PAINTING 
 
 instance, like Daumier to increase volume, and like 
 Matisse for mere novelty, and like Picasso because of 
 his perversion of Cezanne's dictum : " Treat nature 
 by the cylinder, the sphere and the cone; the whole 
 placed in perspective so that each side of an object 
 and of a plane directs itself toward a central point." 
 
 The sophistical excuse for the peculiar procedure of 
 the ultra-class of painters was that they subordinated 
 one truth to another and higher. So this subordinating 
 went on until the outcome was something unlike any 
 object or creature either in the heavens above, or in 
 the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth ; 
 while the final truth to which objectivity had been 
 wholly sacrificed was only rhythmically-balanced, 
 abstract form in three dimensions achieved by a cer- 
 tain placement of primary colors. Neverhejgs_s^ the 
 "progressives " of to-day see in this jxulcojoe but 
 ffie beginnings of a pure art, one Ion g^ prepared for, 
 and now for the first time fit to achieve the really 
 desirable. 
 
 Communing with Nature, the poet finds her wholly 
 adequate to arouse the emotions which impel him to 
 creative work. Still, because an Idealist, he sees the 
 face of the great common mother not as the ordinary 
 man satisfied with externals, but as one of penetrating 
 vision. So, beneath a visage at times rough and 
 seamed and even forbidding, he sees her eternal youth 
 
 44 
 
MODERN PAINTING 
 
 and fadeless beauty. Never ignoring external appear- 
 ance, he somehow softens it by an admixture of internal 
 reality, and the result is not hideous caricature, nor 
 repulsive malformation, but, rather, a veiled revelation 
 of that super-sensible world of the immortals to which 
 Hope and Faith with angel fingers have ever pointed 
 the human race. Now if an Idealist, how can the painter 
 repudiate the poet's conception of Nature unless, as 
 we are forced to believe, into every department of 
 modern esthetic art there have entered Idealists of two 
 kinds, the genuine and the spurious ? 
 
 If of the latter class, the painter will ignore the 
 truth contained in the words of Whitman : "the human 
 shape and face is so great that it must never be made 
 ridiculous," and he will reason thus : Since, for esthetic 
 ends, Michelangelo greatly emphasized certain parts 
 of the human anatomy, why should not the progressive 
 artist of a later day accomplish its distortion, or even 
 its arbitrary re-arrangement, especially since certain of 
 his eminent predecessors have in a lesser way set the 
 example ? So, having adopted capricious methods in 
 respect to the human form, it follows logically that he 
 should treat the background and the foreground of his 
 picture, as well as that of his pure landscape, with 
 equal freedom. 
 
 Because that Pseudo-Idealism which as we shall 
 see is invading poetry and music, has, in painting, 
 
 45 
 
MODERN PAINTING 
 
 culminated in Cubism and Synchromism, one is led 
 to believe that honest, straightforward Realism would 
 have reached no such empty goal. We hold that a 
 sound philosophy of esthetics should guide the artist, 
 especially if he attempt the subjective. When gained, 
 if ever, that goal of subjective art the interior model 
 or Archetype, will no doubt explain the outer and vice 
 versa. In other words, some resemblance between the 
 two will have been achieved. Because of this view, 
 we boldly make issue with those who declare that the 
 highest art has nothing to do with the objective world ; 
 and that form, however abstract, if only it be rythmi- 
 cally organized by means of color, has fulfilled every 
 essential of painting. 
 
 In estimating the worth of any school among those 
 here designated as pseudo-idealistic, for instance, the 
 school of Impressionism ; the crucial question is : What 
 new approach, if any, has it made towards final Truth ? 
 Now, Impressionism has rendered obvious what before 
 was largely ignored, or even unnoticed, namely, the 
 effect of reflected color, however transient, upon the 
 face of the landscape. To bring into deserved promi- 
 nence this external truth was an advance, since, to 
 probe Truth to the center, one must first develop 
 capacity to understand its surface. While Impres- 
 ionism was only a two-dimensional decorative art, its 
 discovery in respect to atmosphere and local color has 
 
MODERN PAINTING 
 
 in a way been accepted by many painters who abjure 
 the name Impressionist. 
 
 A defect of the Pre-Raphaelites, and especially of 
 Hunt, was that over-attention to detail which produced 
 a too general effect, thus leaving the painting devoid 
 of marked focal points. On the other hand, Manet 
 was a painter who in a noticeable way first began to 
 slur over details by blending them into clusters of light 
 and shadow. With more or less of modification, his 
 procedure is now followed by many painters without 
 regard to school. By copying the behavior of natural 
 light on a curving surface, Cezanne achieved form 
 having length and breadth and thickness. So he 
 rendered obsolete the spots of the Impressionists and 
 the Neo-Impressionists. Despite of the defects of 
 Pseudo-Idealism, this much of truth, together with the 
 local color of Impressionism, has been derived from its 
 methods. 
 
 When certain painters, eager to be thought original, 
 had considered that, after Michelangelo, little or nothing 
 was left to the portrayer of the human form as God 
 had fashioned it, they straightway conceived the idea 
 of improving on His handiwork. Now, of the great 
 public, the laity if you please not all fools, nor yet 
 like Carlyle's British public mostly fools it is safe 
 to affirm that never will they accept distorted or else 
 arbitrarily arranged form done in arbitrary colors ; 
 
 47 
 
MODERN PAINTING 
 
 never will they concede that art should so contradict 
 what with eyes of satisfaction they have daily looked 
 upon. No, never ! even though every foremost repre- 
 sentative of Pseudo-Idealism should dilate upon the 
 wonderful qualities of complex organization and subtle 
 rhythm and color arrangement and what not achieved 
 by modern methods. 
 
 It is of interest to the psychologist, and even to the 
 pathologist, when the works of Matisse who admitted 
 that he painted emotionally and without the aid of his 
 intelligence and when with these the bizarre canvases 
 of the crazy Dutchman, Van Gogh, are deemed mile- 
 stones in a progression from the Pseudo-Classicism of 
 David to the latest nondescripts of Synchromism. 
 
 For the artist who would adhere to normal methods, 
 and with them essay originality, it is perhaps unfor- 
 tunate that he came into the world after so many 
 eminent predecessors ; but genius often has achieved 
 the seemingly impossible and will do so again. As 
 for the Pseudo-Idealist, it is but just to say that in 
 attempting abstract form he regards the truth announced 
 by Pythagoras that the universe, or Macrocosm, was 
 constructed geometrically, and likewise man the micro- 
 cosm. Hence the Synchromist obeys geometry and 
 the law of rhythm as exemplified by the human body 
 in action. In fact, the majority of ultra-modern painters 
 have deemed it unwise to abandon the fundamentals 
 
MODERN PAINTING 
 
 of rhythmic organization as laid down by the early 
 schools. So, having placed one foot on the earth, with 
 the other they would touch the heavens, or, what is 
 more likely, they care nothing for the heavens toward 
 which, as a rule, they are as agnostic as were 
 De Maupassant and Zola. What then are they if not 
 mere displayers of perverted ingenuity by deviating 
 to the farthest from objective form, while never quite 
 losing touch with it ? 
 
 And so it has come to this, that we who, though not 
 painters, may yet have ideas of beauty and truth, are 
 asked to believe that the makers of geometrical puz- 
 zles gaudy with the colors in which the savage loves 
 to deck his person are the torch bearers of Art into 
 the future to be the original lights thereof, while, far 
 in the rear, a few flickering tapers almost burned out 
 and extinguished are the pale reminders of men once 
 the glory of awakened Italy, and of Spain and Flanders 
 and Holland and England. But why say more ? Why 
 enlarge on conditions outside our purview, since strictly 
 they come within the province of mental pathology ? 
 
 The placing of manner above matter is a shallow 
 doing common to the ambitious who yet are devoid of 
 originality, that which makes its possessor somewhat 
 indifferent to novel forms of expression. Originality 
 often bursts through convention into a larger, freer 
 form, but, like the musician Wagner, it first accom- 
 
 49 
 
MODERN PAINTING 
 
 plishes and then theorizes, hoping that the head will 
 verify the impulse of the heart. 
 
 It is lamentable that of late years the arts have 
 been invaded by those who, imagine that, unless one 
 is achieving the novel, his work is stagnant, or, more 
 likely, decadent. In our brief survey of modern tend- 
 encies in painting, we have discovered the attitude 
 of certain make-believe artists and the by-paths and 
 quagmires in which they have lost themselves. Now, 
 as we turn to modern poetry, and then to modern 
 music, we should be prepared for like results. 
 
 In passing let us say that, after Michelangelo, the 
 art of sculpture had no eminent exponents until, in 
 the eighteenth century, France and Denmark and Italy 
 produced Houdon and Thorwaldsen and Canova, all 
 artists of the classically beautiful after the Greek man- 
 ner of Phidias. Then came the nineteenth century 
 reaction toward Realism, led by such artists as Rodin 
 and that other Frenchman, Paul Dubois. Since the most 
 modern tendencies in sculpture exhibit the peculiarities 
 of Futurist and Cubist and Vorticist painting, let us, 
 without more than mentioning the fact, proceed to the 
 next division of our subject. 
 
 5 
 
MODERN POETRY 
 
MODERN POETRY 
 
 THAT the art of poetry has entered upon a period 
 of experiment and even of transition, perhaps a 
 notable period, is at least plausible. The pioneer of 
 this transition was, of course, Whitman the ridiculed 
 the tolerated, and finally the over-praised poet of 
 American democracy and universal fellowship and 
 goodwill. Whitman imagined himself a Realist, and, 
 obsessed by that belief, he carried Realism to its 
 extreme. Uncovering much that best were hidden, 
 even as Nature hides her dead and decaying things, 
 he laid himself open to misunderstanding and much 
 harsh as well as ignorant criticism. Only his all- 
 permeating Idealism, if any thing, will preserve Whitman 
 and his poems from the dust-heap of forgotten men and 
 their works. This, our candid opinion, is not that of 
 one always opposed to the method of the "good grey 
 poet," but is, in fact, that of one long since recovered 
 from serious Whitmania. 
 
 Without precedent in America, and uninfluenced by 
 any European poet, unless possibly William Blake, who 
 himself had come under the spell of the amorphous 
 Poems of Ossian, Whitman burst upon the public in a 
 manner startling to the vast majority of his readers, but 
 
 S3 
 
MODERN POETRY 
 
 welcome to the few, some of whom were but unreason- 
 ing admirers of novelty as such, even as were many 
 who had praised the spurious MacPherson productions. 
 As a realist, Whitman turned from well-nigh every 
 established canon of the poet's art. At the same time, 
 as Idealist, he sought a vehicle of literary expression 
 larger, more underlying, and less trammeled than any 
 before discovered. That absolute revolt from the 
 Greco-Latin manner of David and the Romanticism of 
 the Italo-French school of Barbizon which, as we have 
 seen, began with Corot and eventuated in Futurist and 
 Synchromist painting, was a series of departures, 
 whereas the breaking away, that resulted in the 
 Whitmanic chants, was sudden as it was radical. 
 
 Always the sincerity of the innovator is open to 
 question, and, concerning Whitman, it must be con- 
 fessed that, prior to his radicalism, his output was 
 commonplace enough. Given Swinburne's unparalleled 
 felicity in the manipulation of rhythms, and the archi- 
 tectonic ability of Milton and the other epic bards, 
 Whitman might have remained somewhat in line with 
 the usual. We qualify the statement because, after 
 throwing overboard much that his predecessors had 
 deemed of value and even indispensable, Whitman 
 made room for certain excellencies unique in poetry. 
 Here again he resembled certain modern exponents of 
 painting. 
 
 54 
 
MODERN POETRY 
 
 In fairness it should be said that, after just criticism, 
 there remains untouched in certain of the Whitmanic 
 lines a force as of the very elements, and even more that 
 his most successful imitators have never approached ; 
 but this excellence fails to make him the " Kosmos " 
 he once declared himself to be, nor does it arouse 
 " Cosmic emotion " outside his direct following. While 
 often Whitman heaps before us a huge bulk of mere 
 materials, unsystematized ideas, the loose lumber, so 
 to speak, of what should at least be the framework of 
 a poetical structure, again, at his best, there is in him a 
 virility and a largeness which, while the spell is on us, 
 make weak and dwarfish the work of all but the chief 
 masters of verse. No doubt the spell of these great 
 qualities that from which Emerson had freed himself 
 when he wrote his famous recantation was operative 
 on such men as Symonds and Burroughs, and, much 
 inhibiting their critical faculties, permitted them to 
 accept Whitman in toto. 
 
 Whitman is a mountain with vast depressions and 
 steep though short ascents ; a mass of inequalities 
 which alternately draw and repel. Only through the 
 softening vista of years can his true outline be descried. 
 To decide whether or not Whitman's art was progres- 
 sive or eccentric, we should determine the extent to 
 which his chosen form of expression vitalized or 
 vitiated his message. As for that message, the worth 
 
 55 
 

 MODERN POETRY 
 
 thereof will be tested by its suggestiveness to the 
 thinking mind, and by its ability to influence and even 
 mould the lives of his public to the standards he so 
 ardently announced. 
 
 Doubtless, that message was a trenchant criticism 
 of American civilization ; but, since our purpose is to 
 determine Whitman's influence on modern poetry, we 
 must refrain from an examination of the philosophy, 
 showing marked traits of Eastern systems, and the 
 religion, somewhat pantheistic, and the singleness of 
 aim and never-failing optimism through sickness and 
 poverty, of one that ironical Fate had decreed should 
 be the poet of the cultured in their mood of reaction, 
 rather than of the unlettered with whom he loved to 
 mingle. 
 
 To say that Whitman often unwittingly dropped 
 sheerly from the lofty to the commonplace, would 
 seem an insult to his intelligence. Still, the fact of 
 that quick descent is patent on many a page of Leaves 
 of Grass. Therefore we are forced to the verdict that 
 Whitman lacked correct estimate of literary values in 
 that he deemed the commonplace to be worthy of 
 insertion amidst the most vital fiber of his poems. 
 Because of this lack of discrimination, we do not, like 
 Burroughs, rank him with the prophets and seers. 
 Then again, as a rule, verbosity much weakens his 
 sentences. Rarely does he attain condensed expres- 
 
 56 
 
MODERN POETRY 
 
 sion. Nevertheless, at times his pictures are models 
 of graphic word-painting. 
 
 In announcing himself as pioneer and trail-blazer 
 toward the peaks of poetical supremacy, and also as 
 pattern for the American poet to come, Whitman little 
 realized that the presence of mere platitude in the body 
 of his verse, all of which had been pronounced excel- 
 lent by such eminent men as Symonds and Burroughs, 
 would encourage a crop of weaklings now inflicting their 
 vers libre on the public. The decadence of certain of 
 these is that of the mere copier to whose early demise 
 their own will compare. 
 
 No doubt, a number of such imitators have equalled 
 the platitudes referred to, but, thus far, few indeed 
 seem capable of rise from the bald and sterile. While 
 not deeming them wise, we do not in this condemna- 
 tion include certain of Whitman's contemporaries whose 
 admiration of certain passages in Leaves of Grass had 
 induced them to adopt somewhat of the methods of 
 one who, in his own manner, is at times unapproach- 
 able. As for vers libre, it is claimed that its inner 
 rhythm being more pronounced than the somewhat 
 lax rhythm of what is called poetical prose, such verse 
 demands for itself that line division which, when under- 
 stood, is felt to be not arbitrary, but natural. As for 
 definite form, it is admitted that, this achieved, vers 
 libre would belie its name. Then again, it is held that, 
 
 57 
 
MODERN POETRY 
 
 since modern expression tends toward individualism, 
 the poet is a law unto himself in many matters includ- 
 ing poetical form. 
 
 While the point is debatable, we grant that Whitman's 
 seeming formlessness was due neither to indolence, nor 
 indifference to established form. Still, we do maintain 
 that, searching for a vehicle of expression ample enough 
 for the future world poet, Whitman at his highest 
 attained to but the vast and shadowy outline of a form 
 perhaps beyond the seizing of any genius yet born. 
 When the spell of that nebulous shape is on the imagi- 
 inative reader, he becomes a collaborator adding many 
 a touch to the picture. To put it differently : in the 
 Whitmanic poems are many vital seeds which germi- 
 nate and flower in the receptive and fertile mind. 
 Perhaps to this excellence is due that over-valuation 
 which some of eminent name have placed on Whitman 
 as a whole. 
 
 Among the manufacturers of vers librc are the 
 American Imagists or Vorticists, who, discarding 
 meter, claim to base their verse on cadence. While 
 not ;strictly imitators of Whitman, especially in his 
 introspective moments and in his cosmic grasp, they 
 yet have taken their cue from him when an image- 
 maker, and especially when he finds worth in little 
 things usually deemed insignificant and otherwise 
 poor; therefore, the supposed beauties in a dust heap 
 
 58 
 
MODERN POETRY 
 
 are enough to fire the Muse of the Imagist to estatic 
 utterance. 
 
 That the modern French tendency in art, which often 
 expressed itself most strangely in painting, should at 
 the same time find another outlet in poetry, was, in 
 the nature of things, inevitable. Hence the arrival of 
 such Imagists as Verhaeren, the most prominent of the 
 group, and others of less calibre. All of these were to 
 some extent influenced by Whitman in whom, from the 
 first, both the French and the English saw America's 
 reatest poet. 
 
 The name vers librc, which originated in France, 
 and has come to mean any free verse, was first applied 
 only to the work of the French Imagists, for example, 
 to that of De Gourmont whose opinion of Imagism he 
 defined thus : " If we hold to its narrow and etymo- 
 logical sense Imagism signifies almost nothing; but 
 outside that it means independence in literature, liberty 
 in art, and avoidance of existing forms. Also it means 
 a tendency toward what is new, strange, and even 
 bizarre." Again he says : " One's only excuse for cre- 
 ative work is originality ; he should say things not yet 
 said, and in a form never before formulated." 
 
 Exactly ! but supposing one itching for notoriety has 
 nothing worthily original to communicate, then to him 
 Imagism must be a godsend, because, for sane reasons, 
 the strange and the bizarre were until lately but little 
 
 59 
 
MODERN POETRY 
 
 occupied fields wherein one could exhibit a forced or 
 even a spurious originality with some hope of audience. 
 Evidently, the American Imagist can claim two lines of 
 ancestry, that stemming from Verhaeren, and that from 
 Whitman. It were unjust to the French Imagists to 
 attempt in English their strange and bizarre " poems," 
 nor is this necessary, since the American following can 
 furnish every example indispensable to our initiation 
 into the methods of true art. 
 
 The Imagist cult holds that the chief office of the 
 poet is to suggest through an image which, for his 
 word-painting, takes the place of pigment. This image 
 should be the most intense and concentrated expres- 
 sion of the thing, by means of the art best adapted to 
 that expression. Thus the image becomes a magnetic 
 center to which, or a vortex into which, ideas are 
 drawn. Also, it is a prolific womb from which those 
 ideas emerge in amplified form. Thus, the Imagist or 
 Vorticist poet .virtually enters literary partnership with 
 the sympathetic reader who, in turn, usually supplies 
 mentally the filling in of what is but outlined or hinted 
 in the picture. That this is so the following from Miss 
 Amy Lowell well illustrates : 
 
 OMBRE CHINOISE 
 
 " Red foxgloves against a yellow wall studded with plum-colored 
 
 shadows ; 
 A lady with a blue and red sunshade ; Lo 6 5"" 
 
 60 
 
MODERN POETRY 
 
 The slow lap of waves upon a parapet. 
 That is all." 
 
 Facility of expression, that requisite of the best 
 prose, has always been demanded of the poet. His 
 "flowering forth in many a golden phrase " is true not 
 of Virgil alone. Such excellence is proper to every 
 greatj modern poet from Shakespeare to Tennyson 
 and Browning. To allow this flowering forth to occur 
 chiefly in the mind of the reader, is for the poet to 
 shirk a difficult though obvious duty which only he by 
 nature and cultivation is fit to perform. His public 
 cannot, in reason, be required to measure up to his 
 peculiar endowment. 
 
 Now, the Imagist cares no more for this flowering 
 forth than for the time-honored poetical forms which, 
 with a sneer, he leaves to the dilettante, because 
 Whitman has molded his opinion and expressed it 
 thus : 
 
 " What is this you would bring my America ? 
 Is it a mere tale ? a rhyme ? a prettiness ? 
 Has it not dangled long at the heels of poets ? 
 
 Certainly Whitman understood the value of antithe- 
 sis, and, having a large idea to express in his chosen 
 manner, he magnified that manner by minimizing 
 rhyme and meter of which, nevertheless, he has given 
 us several worthy examples. Although the Imagist is 
 
 
 61 
 
MODERN POETRY 
 
 agreed with Whitman in scorning rhyme and prettiness, 
 there are divergencies in the methods of the two, as 
 we shall see. 
 
 Whitman's interest was centered in man, the modern 
 man, of which in his chants he made himself the type, 
 for, has he not said 
 
 " I celebrate myself and sing myself 
 And what I assume you shall assume." 
 
 And again ? 
 
 " I will not make a poem, nor the least part of a poem, but has 
 
 reference to the soul. 
 Because, having looked at the objects of the universe, I find 
 
 there is no one, nor any particle of one, but has reference to 
 
 the soul." 
 
 Everywhere and always we discover Whitman seek- 
 ing to identify himself with his environment, and even 
 the world itself, as if, beneath the objective, he divined 
 some basic unity of all life. It is this idealistic attitude 
 which makes Whitman one of the most subjective of 
 poets, and also distinguishes him from the Imagist 
 who views man and the world objectively, and in fact 
 materially and superficially, and so avoids what he 
 deems over-emphasis of any component, whether it be 
 person or thing. This the Imagist does that he may 
 image individualism and maintain balance of parts. 
 
 62 
 
MODERN POETRY 
 
 The Imagist has formulated a creed, perhaps chiefly 
 that the old Adam of perversity in him may have 
 opportunity to disobey. One article of the creed 
 requires direct treatment of the " thing," whether sub- 
 jective or objective. Also, in disagreement with the 
 verbose method of Whitman, it requires the avoidance 
 of any word not contributing to the presentation. 
 Evidently, the poet must eschew decorative language 
 and literary transposition and confine himself to 
 straight, colloquial speech, in fact, to what a poet of 
 the cult has indicated thus : 
 
 " Little cramped words straggling all over the paper 
 Like draggled flies' legs." 
 
 Within the circle of a narrow vocabulary, employed 
 with the directness of common speech, effectiveness 
 requires a workman both skilled and virile ; hence the 
 Imagist often breaks for liberty, and celebrates his 
 release in extraordinary and amusing linguistic exhibi- 
 tions thus : 
 
 "Lacquered mandarin moments, palanquins swaying and bal- 
 ancing 
 Amid the vermillion panoplies, against the jade balustrades." 
 
 Another article of the creed insists that the Imagist 
 renounce the dilapidated and outgrown meters and 
 rhythms which, for lack of larger and more adequate 
 
MODERN POETRY 
 
 ones, have restrained the elder bards, and that, as 
 precursor of a better era, he produced new ones. With 
 the first of these requirements the Imagist cheerfully 
 complies, perhaps because it is the easiest way. As 
 for the second, it is plain that, either through incom- 
 petence or frowardness, he or she fails miserably as 
 evidenced in our first quotation, one from a poet much 
 above the average of the cult. 
 
 Here is another gem from the same source : 
 
 " My thoughts 
 
 Chink against my ribs 
 
 And roll about like silver hail-stones." 
 
 Whenever refraining from his " lacquered mandarin 
 moments," Mr. John Gould Fletcher descends to ordi- 
 nary language and gives us some such note-book 
 jottings as this snap-shot view of London from a 'bus 
 top : 
 
 " Black shapes bending, 
 
 Taxicabs crush in the crowd, 
 
 The tops are each a shining square." . . . 
 
 Another Imagist, one no less gifted, jots down and 
 measures off this impression of London by night : 
 
 " Into the sky 
 
 The red earthenware and the galvanized iron chimneys 
 
 Thrust their cowls. 
 
 The hoot of the steamers on the Thames is plain." 
 
MODERN POETRY 
 
 ? 
 
 The latest development of vers libre in America is 
 
 the " polyphonic prose " of Miss Amy Lowell who 
 derived the idea from the French of Paul Fort. Poly- 
 phonic prose allows cadenced verse, and lines in meter, 
 and even those with rhymed endings and also " orator- 
 ical prose." Each can be used alternately, or in any 
 way satisfying the artistic sense of the author. 
 
 Besides such Vorticists and Imagists as Ezra Pound, 
 John Gould Fletcher, and Miss Amy Lowell, there are 
 other manufacturers of vcrs librc, for instance, the 
 Italian Symbolist and Futurist Marinetti whom we 
 have introduced in our dealing with Futurist painting. 
 He it is whose poetical methods represent the ultimate 
 of radicalism, unless the palm be awarded to the ideo- 
 graphic poetry of Guillaume Appolinaire. 
 
 For the edification and enlightenment of the reader, 
 let us condense a few utterances taken from the 
 manifestos of Marinetti. To begin with, all ancient 
 monuments and every work of art over twenty years 
 old should be destroyed, and living artists and poets 
 for that matter should be restricted to not more than 
 twenty years of productivity. Only by these drastic 
 measures can the world escape the obsession of Antiq- 
 uity and Classicism. The Symbolist poet abhors details, 
 analogies, explanations, but he admires abbreviation, 
 summary, synthesis. 
 
 Disregarding syntax and eliminating adjectives, and 
 
 65 
 
MODERN POETRY 
 
 even punctuation, the Symbolist should hurl at the 
 reader a confused medley of sensations and impressions 
 in words necessary only to render all the shocks and 
 vibrations of his ego. If able, he should create an 
 immense web of analogies, and whatever this means 
 he should reproduce telegraphically the analogical 
 basis of life. Always he will be as laconic as possible, 
 that so he may be in tempo with an age of speed. In 
 these days of wireless telegraphy, his images and 
 analogies should be expressed in disjointed words arid 
 without the connecting wires of syntax. 
 
 The Symbolist should omit qualifying adjectives, 
 since they hinder the reader's intuition. He should 
 prefer the infinitive of the verb, for it indicates endless 
 motion as of a wheel, whereas, ordinary verbs are 
 squares and triangles, or, at best, ovals. To bind his 
 sentences he should use brief mathematical and musical 
 signs and, wjth the latter, he will indicate the tempo of 
 any part of his poem. He should make and unmake 
 words by cutting down or lengthening them, and so 
 shall he have a new orthography, in fact free expres- 
 sion. Finally, to avoid a typographical sameness of 
 the printed page, he should use ink in several colors 
 and type of perhaps twenty sizes and kinds. 
 
 From this heaped up nonsense, it is almost a relief 
 to turn to such writers as James Oppenheim and 
 Edgar Lee Masters and certain others, for these have 
 
 66 
 
MODERN POETRY 
 
 refrained from the limit of lawlessness. Masters hav- 
 ing come into prominence through his Spoon River 
 Anthology, let us without choosing produce extracts 
 from a few sample " poems " of the two hundred and 
 fourteen between the covers of that book : 
 
 CHASE HENRY 
 
 " In life I was the town drunkard ; 
 
 When I died the priest denied me burial in holy ground. 
 
 The which redounded to my good fortune, 
 
 For the Protestants bought this lot, 
 
 And buried my body here, 
 
 Close to the grave of the banker Nicholas, 
 
 And of his wife Priscilla." 
 
 Now from an Imagist poem that well fulfils the 
 requirements : 
 
 MRS. SIBLEY 
 
 " The secret of the stars, gravitation. 
 The secret of the earth, layers of rock. 
 The secret of the soil, to receive seed. 
 The secret of the seed, the germ. 
 The secret of man, the sower. 
 The secret of woman, the soil." 
 
 Now let the poet, Masters, of course, indicate his 
 dislike of the usual in poetry : 
 
 PETIT THE POET 
 
 " Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick, 
 
 Tick, tick, tick, like mites in a quarrel. . . . 
 
 6 7 
 
MODERN POETRY 
 
 Triolets, villanelles, rondelles, rondeaus, 
 
 Ballades by the score with the same old thought. . . . 
 
 Triolets, villanelles, rondelles, rondeaus, 
 
 Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick, 
 
 Tick, tick, tick, what little Iambics, 
 
 While Homer and Whitman roared in the pines ! " 
 
 The brutal straightforwardness of Chase Henry, and 
 many similar productions in the Anthology, is an extreme 
 protest against the insipid and petty of much current 
 minor poetry which yet shows mastery of mere tech- 
 nique. As a movement, vers libre is comparable to the 
 reaction of French Realism against the older schools 
 of painting, and, like that Realism, vers libre will pass on 
 and out whenever its mission of protest is accomplished. 
 
 We mistrust that in Mrs. Sibley our author imagined 
 himself profound, but then, in respect to his most 
 inconsequential sayings, even Whitman evidently fell 
 into like error. In Petit the Poet, Masters hints at, or 
 else takes for granted, a similarity between Whitman 
 and Homer. Now, the hexameter of the old Greek 
 poet was the culmination of, rather than the breaking 
 from, an evolution of rhythm and meter requiring for 
 its perfection perhaps more centuries than are reckoned 
 from Chaucer to Tennyson, whereas, one may look in 
 vain for the exact prototype of the Whitmanic lines, 
 those which Swinburne labelled " sham Pindarics." 
 
 Of that ultra phase of poetry vers libre, or, as some 
 
 68 
 
MODERN POETRY 
 
 prefer, " unrhymed cadence " or, what is more impres- 
 sive, " polyrhythmical poetry," its disciples and advo- 
 cates claim that, prior to contemporary times, it existed 
 as Imagist verse in the rhythmical prose of many a 
 writer never regarded as a poet. As we have endeav- 
 ored to make plain, vers libre opposes a determined 
 front against rhyme, and even against rhythm as 
 understood prior to the appearance of Leaves of Grass. 
 
 Purporting to incorporate the great natural rhythm 
 of ocean continually advancing, retreating, and the 
 forest music of winds subdued to zephyrs, or lifted to 
 tempests, and even the dithyrambic heart-eloquence of 
 Adamic man who talked with angels, and held con- 
 verse with God his maker, vers libre voices, instead, 
 the croak of the raven, the caw of the crow, and the cry 
 of the screech owl. Moreover, in lieu of the primeval 
 eloquence of one fashioned in the Divine Likeness, is 
 heard the " barbaric yawp " of the savage, and the 
 mutterings and stutterings as of some unfortunate 
 deficient in mind and puny in body. 
 
 Should it be asked why from certain quarters the 
 present clamor against rhyme and meter, the reply is 
 that rhyme always hampers free expression, and that 
 rhythm, as heretofore understood, has been an equal 
 hindrance, that together they shape to their own sec- 
 ondary ends the thought, the idea, in passage from the 
 brain to paper. 
 
MODERN POETRY 
 
 Against this contention we in turn contend. The 
 technique of his chosen instrument is no hindrance 
 to the skilled performer, nor does the florid or the 
 chromatic bar the trained singer from his triumph. 
 Technique is, in fact, the obedient servant and the 
 powerful ally of either artist. Without technique, he 
 would find his level in the ranks of the mediocre. The 
 poet who neglects preparation, who shirks the tech- 
 nique of his art, is unworthy of name and fame. He 
 must be content with such crumbs thereof as the flattery 
 of friends and the questionable praise of the ignorant. 
 To this poetaster, vers libre offers plausible excuse for 
 his constitutional laziness; so, by sophistical arguments, 
 the weakling is led into the net of mere license. Fur- 
 thermore, though his crude attempts at subtile rhythm 
 fail to convince the trained ear, the poetaster has at 
 command another resource. By arbitrarily breaking 
 the whole into lines of varying length, as in Master's 
 Spoon River Anthology ', perhaps the " poem " will shape 
 to the eye even as the real article. While knowing this 
 last is deemed an ignorant criticism, we nevertheless 
 believe it one that analysis of such productions will 
 justify. 
 
 The perpetrators of vers libre among whom are 
 certain ones calling themselves Post-Impressionist 
 poets scorn the technique above spoken of, for, like 
 the Post-Impressionist painters, they are enamored 
 
 70 
 
MODERN POETRY 
 
 of the primitive, the untutored aboriginal attempts of 
 those in whom brawn predominated at the expense 
 of brain. Into this folly these exponents of vers libre 
 are led largely by their great prototype Whitman who 
 often confounded mere physical robustness with true, 
 manly power. 
 
 As offset to a freedom often leading to the verge 
 of lawlessness, Whitman had somewhat of the cos- 
 mic touch, and, it is claimed, he had attained to Cosmic 
 Consciousness. This attainment was, no doubt, a 
 matter of philosophy more than of actual experience 
 since Cosmic Consciousness is that rounded excellence 
 which precludes such inequalities as abound in Leaves 
 of Grass. Having found his vehicle, the weakling 
 aspires to the Whitmanic standard. He too would be 
 Cosmic, but the pitiful result of his attempts to fill the 
 Whitmanic matrix proves him fit not for the large, but 
 in fact only for the infinitesimal. Furthermore, the 
 manufacturers of vers libre and kindred products act 
 on the theory, derived primarily from French realistic 
 art, and secondarily from Whitman, that whatever exists 
 is worthy of their treatment; that, to the poet, both 
 noble and ignoble are meaningless words, that to him 
 the New York skyscraper and the Chicago stock 
 shamble and the packing house should be as inspiring 
 as the Parthenon and the grove of the Academy. Even 
 the intelligent journalist, who never aspired to poetry, 
 
MODERN POETRY 
 
 has discovered that very many matters and things are 
 unworthy of his ordinary prose. 
 
 From every external and internal evidence at our 
 command, we contend that, but for Whitman, and the 
 French Radicals and, lastly, Marinetti, neither Imagism, 
 Vorticism, Post-Impressionism, nor Symbolism with 
 its verbs restricted to the infinitive and its plus and 
 minus signs in lieu of adjectives nor any other 
 departures from the normal of poetry, would have 
 come into ephemeral being and unwarranted notice. 
 Nevertheless, the disciples of vers libre think other- 
 wise, and would trace its inception to the Shakespearian 
 plays and the general structure of the Samson Agonist es 
 of Milton. 
 
 In the evolution of the Shakespearian blank verse 
 toward a larger and freer rhythm, its end-stopped lines, 
 very numerous in the early plays, are superseded 
 gradually by run on lines which reach their maximum 
 of frequency in such plays as Tempest. To these late 
 lines we cannot apply the usual rules of scansion, 
 since the accent would then fall on unimportant words. 
 In the Samson Agonistes, that product of the author's 
 maturest period, run on lines and lines of unequal 
 length, together with variable feet, are rather the rule 
 than the exception. 
 
 Our modern experimenters in poetry usually proceed 
 on the theory that the momentary expression must 
 
 72 
 
MODERN POETRY 
 
 correspond with the momentary thought. If Post- 
 Impressionist poets, they probably derive this notion 
 from French Post-Impressionist painting. Now we 
 contend that the evolution of the Shakespearian and 
 the Miltonic blank verse was toward "unrhymed 
 cadence " as a highly-evolved creation whose sponta- 
 neity was that of art which mostly conceals itself ; 
 whereas, because of inability, or what is more prob- 
 able because of a perverse theory, the momentary 
 expression of the experimenters is that of the raw 
 beginner, and exactly corresponds with his raw 
 momentary idea. Below the consummate reach of a 
 Shakespeare or a Milton lies the locality of these 
 poetasters, and, between the two orders, yawns a pro- 
 found and impassible gulf. 
 
 Near the opening of our discourse, we defined the 
 primal Creative Trinity, or Word, as Sound, Color, and 
 Form. Also, we emphasized the importance and the 
 place of the modifications of the three in the arts to be 
 examined. From what we have gleaned concerning 
 modern, poetical tendencies, it is too evident that the 
 new cults are reducing poetical form to a chaos corre- 
 sponding with that of the unshapen world, the nebulous 
 mass ere yet the Divine Architect commanded it into 
 that which we now behold. 
 
 In concluding this division of our subject, let us 
 add that a cult like that of Imagism, or Futurism, or 
 
 73 
 
MODERN POETRY 
 
 whatever folly is to succeed it, in short, a cult whose 
 standards make few and slight demands and eventually 
 none whatever on the poet, would be acclaimed with 
 joy by those who, ambitious of distinguishing them- 
 selves in literature, are yet incapable of reaching the 
 goal of a sound school of poetry. What could be more 
 decadent than cults like these mentioned? What 
 more indicative of a transition period in which Art 
 approaches the as yet Undefined whose every mirage 
 cheats the untried sailor, and where, to his imagination, 
 every bare rock-island hides, behind its curtain of ocean 
 mist, perhaps a continental shore ? 
 
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MODERN MUSIC 
 
 IN the Cosmic scheme of things, the first manifestation 
 of the Creative Word was Sound the correspondent 
 of Life. Next appeared Light, or Color, the correspond- 
 ent of Love. At Creation's beginning, Sound was one 
 concentrated, unvarying tone the Synthesis of all tones, 
 even as the white sunlight is the synthesis of all colors. 
 Then that shaping intelligence Mind divided both 
 Sound and Light each, broadly, into three primaries, 
 and then subdivided these two classes of primaries 
 each into seven which, for Light, are the seven basic 
 colors, all of them beyond human vision. In the seven 
 of Sound, as in the seven of Color, were contained 
 infinite possibilities of further subdivision. Certain of 
 these subdivisions or octaves are within the narrow 
 grasp of our human faculties, but the vastly greater 
 number lie outside. 
 
 As an aspect of the primal Word, one which, though 
 far removed from the original, is yet of divine origin, 
 music contains sound as its chief component. Now, 
 while the eye perceives the white sunlight as the syn- 
 thesis of the color spectrum, the ear in its province is 
 not so capable. The audible sounds in nature, and 
 
 77 
 
MODERN MUSIC 
 
 those produced artificially, are but subdivisions of the 
 synthesis of Sound. Hence music, as known to ter- 
 restrial beings, can originate only in a systematic 
 arrangement of these subdivisions. This arrangement 
 is that graded scale of ascending and descending tones, 
 which has undergone numerous transformations in 
 many times and countries. With this preliminary, we 
 may now inquire into the origin of all music whatsoever. 
 
 In descending manifestation, having reached the 
 level of human comprehension, the Creative Word 
 gives itself to man for his betterment. Should he be 
 a musician, his intelligence subdivides and systematizes 
 the sound aspect of the Word into the materials of his 
 art. Next, his love draws from the color aspect of 
 the Word that which beautifies sound till it becomes 
 melody, or harmonic combination. Meanwhile, his 
 intelligence draws from the form aspect of the Word 
 the shape, the matrix, in which his art is to be cast. 
 
 Since music had its remote beginning, the problem 
 of the musician has been to divide and subdivide tones 
 and to color and shape them into euphonious art. The 
 results may be enumerated thus : The almost tuneless 
 but perhaps rhythmic attempts of barbarous peoples, 
 the extinct music of ancient Egypt and contempo- 
 rary nations, the discoveries of Pythagoras, touching 
 the relation of music to the Creative Word discov- 
 eries soon lost because never made public the bardic 
 
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MODERN MUSIC 
 
 improvisations of Homer's time, the Greek modes and 
 the music proper thereto, the church chants of Ambrose 
 and Gregory, the blind gropings of the middle ages 
 toward that which is revealed in the sacred music of 
 Palestrina, the almost wholly intellectual polyphony 
 of the Flemish composers, the culmination of counter- 
 point in the grand though severe beauties of Bach, the 
 departure toward that freer expression which exists in 
 the work of the classical school, the further departure 
 known as Romanticism, then the advent of Wagner 
 with new dreams and visions concerning music in 
 conjunction with the other arts, then, in these times, 
 the arrival of Strauss as apostle of Futurism, and 
 now the new French school of Debussy, and the ultra- 
 German of Schonberg. 
 
 Ah, what Protean shapes has music worn down the 
 centuries even to this the twentieth, perhaps for tonal 
 art the most revolutionary and even iconoclastic that 
 it may become the most progressively upbuilding ! 
 Music had beginning, no doubt, in the crude rhythms 
 of the savage dance, the refinements of which have 
 been shaped gradually in many molds including that 
 of the March. Meanwhile, the human voice has had 
 its office of barbaric song, refined gradually through 
 ancient, historic times. Then, in centuries more recent, 
 was evolved such vocal or else instrumental music 
 as the Glee, the Madrigal, the Motet, the Mass, the 
 
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MODERN MUSIC 
 
 Cantata, the Fugue, the Opera, the Oratorio, the Sonata, 
 the Symphony, and, lastly, the Music Drama. Are 
 these, together with certain minor forms, not enough 
 for the creative musician? or do more compelling 
 shapes of grandeur and beauty yet hide and bide and 
 mature in the womb of the years ? 
 
 II 
 
 An examination of the ideals and tendencies of 
 modern music requires that we begin with the work 
 of Hector Berlioz, a composer greatly esteemed by his 
 critical contemporaries in Germany and Russia, but, 
 at the same time, one of little repute in France, and 
 especially in his beloved Paris. A pronounced musical 
 Impressionist before the coming of the Impressionist 
 painters, Berlioz seemed only a maker of bizarre and 
 extravagant effects to the gay and superficial Parisians 
 whose criterions in music were Rossini the florid and 
 sweetly melodious and Meyerbeer the panderer to 
 popular taste. Of his own music Berlioz says : " Its 
 dominant qualities are passionate expression, internal 
 fire, rhythmic animation and unexpected change." 
 Again he says : " My style is in general very daring, 
 but it has no tendency to destroy any constructive 
 element of art. Rather, I seek to increase the number 
 
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MODERN MUSIC 
 
 of those elements. I have not dreamed of writing music 
 without melody as have certain ones in Germany. I 
 have not taken short melodies as themes, but have 
 invested my works with a wealth of melody of large 
 dimensions." 
 
 Berlioz was a marvelous colorist who employed 
 every tint, from black to white, in every way possible 
 to the orchestra of his day, nevertheless, it must be 
 admitted that his musical ideas were important and 
 almost epoch-making because of their clothing, rather 
 than of their intrinsic worth. In fact, Berlioz was 
 largely a creator of atmospheres. So, to his art, 
 might, with some warrant, be applied Burne-Jones' 
 criticism of the French Impressionists : " they paint 
 atmospheres and that is not very much." His merits 
 and demerits considered and both were indeed 
 marked Berlioz is valuable to progressive musical 
 art in that he discovered and made passable the road 
 whereon Wagner and Strauss attain to those colossal 
 things which, to him, were but ambition unrealized. 
 
 One article of the creed by which, as a German, 
 Wagner ordered his daily walk, required him to dislike 
 everything French. In that dislike was of course 
 included the music of Berlioz to whom, nevertheless, 
 he as an orchestral composer owed much. Moreover, 
 as a maker of Program Music, for instance, the Faust 
 Overture, Wagner could look for chief precedent to 
 
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 the Frenchman, some of whose larger works were 
 included in this class ; one unfortunately open to the 
 charge of charlatanism. 
 
 As a revolutionist and reformer in art, Wagner 
 opposed certain conventions, for example, the canons 
 of musical form obtaining until his day. With philo- 
 sophical acumen, Wagner searched deep for the source 
 of musical forms, and discovered them to be wholly 
 subjective, whereas, their outward expression was 
 largely artificial. In accord with Schopenhauer, his 
 accepted master in philosophy, Wagner held that 
 subjective and wholly ideal form was proper to music 
 alone. On the other hand, those exponents of modern 
 painting and poetry, the Cubists, the Futurists, and the 
 Synchromists, together with the poets of vers libre, 
 demand for themselves forms as fluid as any to which 
 music has yet been shaped. 
 
 It was because the chief component of music is that 
 impalpable one, sound, that Wagner demanded for 
 music a more elastic form than those he deemed nec- 
 essary to the free expression of the other arts. To his 
 view we must take exceptions, and for several reasons. 
 To assert that by nature sound is more impalpable 
 than either color or form, is to judge from the view- 
 point of material limitations. To beings unhampered 
 by these, sound may be as palpable as are color and 
 form to us. Color and sound are but rates of vibration 
 
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MODERN MUSIC 
 
 which owe their seeming unlikeness to the limitations 
 of our physical sense organs. 
 
 A progressive art must necessarily outgrow its exter- 
 nal shaping, and, from time to time, require a larger 
 and in other ways more adequate one. Because modern 
 music is based on not more than the twenty-four semi- 
 tones of the modern scale, and because the great 
 melodists had well-nigh exhausted the possibilities of 
 originality in mere melody, and because skilled and 
 ingenious harmonists had discovered almost every 
 possibility of agreeable combination, and moreover, 
 because music had been cast in such a variety of 
 molds, Wagner held that, unless the composer boldly 
 entered the field of mere formlessness and cacophony, 
 originality within the province of music by itself was 
 no longer possible. To further the progress of art, 
 Wagner therefore undertook the union of music and 
 poetry. These, in conjunction with painting and sculp- 
 ture, would form one great and unified art form, in 
 fact, the Music Drama. 
 
 Constructing this art work, Wagner, as composer, 
 gave to music a form and a rhythm more flexible than 
 those before employed in Opera. Also, he enlarged 
 the possibilities of the recitative till it included, as 
 almost free improvisation, what before had been mel- 
 ody shaped in approved patterns. Nevertheless, in his 
 capacity as poet, Wagner did not break with many 
 
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 established poetical forms. To the advocates of 
 vers libre this must seem an inconsistency warranting 
 the belief that here the poet lacked the resource of the 
 musician. 
 
 Like many progressives and would-be progressives 
 in the mixed company of modern, creative artists, 
 Wagner as a musician sought unadulterated truth in 
 the primitive. It seemed to him that this truth was 
 found in the artless but rhythmic vocal improvisations 
 of the Greek bards when chanting their poems of war 
 and adventure. That the poetical form they employed 
 was far from extemporaneous, being in fact the fin- 
 ished and well-defined hexameter, may have influenced 
 Wagner the poet in his adherence to usual forms. 
 
 Wagner's opinion that music and poetry apart had 
 reached their limit of normal expression, was a benefit 
 to art in that it made necessary the Music Drama ; still, 
 that opinion revealed the over-zealous reformer whose 
 biased opinion would have little weight with the musi- 
 cian, or the poet, of a later time whenever the desire 
 to compose only in his chosen province was urging his 
 pen. 
 
 Far be it from us to intimate that the marriage of 
 Music and Poetry in the Music Drama was not vindi- 
 cated as the result of that profound analysis into which 
 Wagner once entered, for, as we have already said, 
 he first achieved and then theorized. Wagner argued 
 
MODERN MUSIC 
 
 that, in their construction, modern languages reveal 
 the very beginnings of human speech to have been a 
 sort of singing. With this idea the present writer is 
 in accord, he having elsewhere endeavored to show 
 that language originated in the sound aspect of the 
 Creative Word ; and that, in the most primitive attempts 
 at speech, only vowels were at first employed ; the broad 
 sound of A and the long sound of O being the most 
 frequent, while the voice dwelling on these made a sort 
 of singing. Gradually the consonants came into use. 
 Meanwhile, sound as a language was colored and 
 shaped by the other two components of the Creative 
 Word. In making music and poetry an inseparable 
 unity, Wagner would return them to their primal con- 
 dition plus that rich development, which, through count- 
 less centuries, they had undergone as separate arts. 
 
 The natural bent of Wagner's mind caused him, 
 both as poet and musician, to approach and illuminate 
 his subject from the interior. Always in the Music 
 Drama he was more or less the psychologist, and, in 
 fact, his deliberate choice of the legend and the myth, 
 as alone suited to his artistic treatment, originated 
 in his habit of exploring that subjective world of causes 
 which determines the activities of man's outward 
 existence. 
 
 In both the legend and the myth, the actors stand 
 forth shorn of the commonplace and the minutiae of 
 
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MODERN MUSIC 
 
 daily life. Interest is now centered mainly in these 
 actors as doers of great deeds, while yet they are 
 beings not wholly unlike ourselves. In choosing such 
 for his dramas, Wagner the poet could devote himself 
 chiefly to a revelation of the complex mental states 
 beneath the simplified action which the drama required. 
 Next it was incumbent on Wagner the musician to 
 illustrate musically those mental states as, for instance, 
 in the marvellous Love Death in Tristan. 
 
 Wagner once confessed that his approach to that 
 fullness of subjective detail which, as poet, he gave 
 to the composer of Tristan, was but a gradual one 
 begun with the Flying Dutchman where, with but a few 
 general outlines, the poet indicated the work of the 
 composer. Reviewing the work which filled the stormy 
 and stressful years of his life, Wagner could, without 
 much exaggeration, affirm that through his Music 
 Dramas, as an entirety, he had revealed a subjective 
 world worthy to compare with that more tangible one 
 toward which the indomitable Genoese navigator had 
 steered his prow. 
 
 Wagner's theory and practice having finally united 
 in Tristan^ no new phase of development could be 
 expected in the great Ring Trilogy much of which 
 was written before Tristan and certainly nothing 
 new should be hoped of Parsifal which shows the 
 composer as now past his meridian of achievement. 
 
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 Since the beginnings of musical Romanticism, and 
 especially since the great piano compositions of Chopin, 
 the conclusion has been forced more and more on the 
 musician that the group of acknowledgedly related 
 keys has been much too limited. Weighty evidence in 
 support of this conviction exists in the fact that modu- 
 lations and transitions, once condemned as harsh and 
 violent, were afterwards accepted without a murmur. 
 On no modern composer had this conviction pressed 
 so heavily as on Wagner when seeking the musical 
 equivalents of the subjective in his dramatic poems. 
 
 Necessarily, Wagner sought to establish among the 
 twenty-four keys, possible to the modern scale, a larger 
 grouping than the most radical musician had before 
 conceived of. Moreover, he employed many effects 
 which he excused in these words : " When occasion 
 required I could venture terrible things in music since 
 the action rendered them comprehensible, but which, 
 apart from the drama, should not be risked lest they 
 become grotesque." In dealing with music since 
 Wagner, we shall keep well in mind the warning con- 
 tained in this saying of the greatest of the moderns. 
 
 An individuality compelling as that of Wagner, could 
 not but influence certain contemporary composers who 
 yet would not accept him in toto. Thus, when past the 
 usual period of production, Verdi developed certain 
 Wagnerian tendencies. As for his younger country- 
 
MODERN MUSIC 
 
 men, the crossing of the Music Drama with the Italian 
 Opera has resulted in but a hybrid incapable of repro- 
 ducing itself. 
 
 Wagner had gone far, but it remained for another, 
 in another generation, to duplicate or perhaps exceed 
 his methods. That this successor would be forthcoming 
 was probable since no man, however eminent, in passing 
 leaves a total void. Somewhere, someone is training 
 to occupy his place, if not to fill it. Accordingly, in 
 due season, appeared another Richard purporting to 
 be of the same high lineage, that of the prophets, and 
 concerning whose credentials let us now inquire. If 
 mere precocity were sure indication of the future, 
 superiority should be accorded to Strauss, a musician 
 by birth and sprung from a father musically eminent. 
 As a youth, Strauss, then a composer of the somewhat 
 conventional, had won the notice and even the praise 
 of such musicians as Von Bulow, whereas, at a corre- 
 sponding period, Wagner's mind seemed in a nebulous 
 and almost chaotic condition. What with musical and 
 literary absurdities inspired by doubtful talent inherited 
 from no revealed source, Wagner seemed of that unfor- 
 tunate type which, because of some mental defect, is 
 always attempting great things, but accomplishing 
 nothing. 
 
 Strictly speaking, Strauss is the successor of Liszt 
 more than of Wagner who doubted the ability of 
 
 88 
 
MODERN MUSIC 
 
 instruments alone to express much that Liszt, through 
 the program music of his Symphonic Poems, would 
 make obvious. Speaking of this music, Liszt says that 
 a program should be a foreword couched in intelli- 
 gible language and preceding some purely instrumental 
 work, to prevent its arbitrary interpretation, and to 
 direct attention to the poetical ideas to be expressed. 
 Evidently, the methods which Strauss has carried to at 
 least their logical conclusion are Lisztian, rather than 
 Wagnerian. In shaping their divergent theories of 
 Music as a progressive art, neither Wagner the poet 
 composer, nor Liszt the piano virtuoso, could avoid 
 the conclusions which his bent imposed upon him. 
 
 Adopting the Lisztian theory, Strauss abandoned the 
 manner of his apprentice years and entered a province 
 toward which not only Liszt, but also Berlioz, had 
 directed him. Thus Strauss, in Zarathrusta, has not 
 attempted to philosophize as did Wagner in Tristan 
 and Rhincgold, but rather to convey, through instru- 
 mental music alone, an idea of the development of the 
 human race from the atom to superman. A stupendous 
 undertaking, but not wholly a successful one as may be 
 taken for granted. Concerning this attempt of Strauss, 
 we shall hold, in the face of every criticism, that it is a 
 legitimate one and known as such to his inner self for, 
 as Wagner has affirmed, the inspired musician speaks 
 truth in a language which his mere reason fails to 
 
MODERN MUSIC 
 
 understand. As we have already said, after countless 
 modifications, Sound, as an attribute of the Creative 
 Word reaches down to mortal comprehension, and by 
 man is shaped into music, its highest terrestrial expres- 
 sion. Why then should the musician halt at the task 
 of depicting the creative and evolutionary processes in 
 the external world ? or, for that matter, in the subjec- 
 tive world of causes also ? 
 
 If our position be tenable, we must nevertheless 
 allow that, as the externalization of interior potencies, 
 both sound and color, and also form, have experienced 
 many restrictions. Desire to determine these for music, 
 painting, and poetry, in order to achieve every possi- 
 bility within legitimate bounds, is the incentive beneath 
 all modern experiments in those arts. 
 
 As already explained, original harmonious Sound, 
 together with Color and Form, was the vibratory power 
 which shaped the world to that ideal form, the sphere. 
 Contrawise, discordant sound, together with darkness 
 and formlessness, was the primal chaos. As in the 
 beginning, so now; the essential nature of both har- 
 mony and dissonance obtains forever throughout their 
 manifestations. 
 
 To the musician, tonal harmony means vastly more 
 than a simple succession of closely-related chords. To 
 him a Bach Fugue, a Beethoven Symphony, a Chopin 
 Ballade, or a Wagnerian Music Drama, are as harmo- 
 
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MODERN MUSIC 
 
 nious as are the intricate processes of world-building 
 to the geologist. On the other hand, mere dissonance, 
 whether in the natural world or in that of the musician, 
 corresponds with disintegration and return perhaps to 
 confusion. It corresponds with what the normal mind 
 contemplates with regret, unless when, for instance, 
 the demolition of a fine structure or a stately column 
 means that its place is to be better filled. 
 
 For reasons which to him seem justified, Strauss, 
 having crossed the borderland of harmony as defined 
 by the moderns, has boldly entered the domain of 
 mere cacophony with its quagmires and pitfalls fit to 
 undo the most wary. As a cacophonist, Strauss can 
 be empty, or petty, or even wholly ugly, as are certain 
 paintings of the French Realists. Again his cacophony 
 is of terrible dramatic intensity. As a whole, he exhib- 
 its inequalities comparable to those of the poet Whitman, 
 for whom a mountain peak meant a valley hard by. 
 
 Strauss' art shows far less of height and much more 
 of depression than Wagner's, but both arts lack com- 
 pression. Even in his great music dramas, Wagner 
 may be likened to the orator so enamored of his abili- 
 ties that he forgets that, if too protracted, eloquence 
 may be wearisome. As for Strauss, in the midst of 
 torrents of cacophony, he fails to consider that the ears 
 of even his most inured admirers have their limit of 
 endurance. 
 
 9 1 
 
MODERN MUSIC 
 
 In the art of instrumentation, Strauss is without an 
 equal. His contributions to orchestral effects are 
 many and unique. To this extent, at least, he is a 
 progressive. Learning from Berlioz and Wagner and 
 Liszt, he in turn will impart to future composers for 
 grand orchestra. 
 
 Mere mechanical dexterity is not musicianship, but 
 only natural aptitude developed by practice. So it 
 is only a somewhat higher correspondent of the apti- 
 tude and development of the skilled artisan. Mere 
 dexterity in orchestral writing is but a more intellectual 
 correspondent of the other two. A Chopin endowed 
 with a wealth of musical ideas, but exhibiting little or 
 no capacity for orchestral scoring, may be a far greater 
 genius than a Strauss. As in estimating a man his 
 garb means but little, so, in the final estimate of a 
 musician, the intrinsic worth of his ideas, and not their 
 mere clothing, will alone have weight. In original 
 ideas do we not find a touchstone to decide whether 
 the metal of Strauss be gold, or alloy, or only some 
 baser material ? 
 
 In a symphony, or a sonata, or any other form of 
 absolute music, the merit of an idea is easily determined. 
 Now, by natural bent, Strauss is a maker of program 
 music wherein he illustrates a literary theme. In this 
 illustration, ideas purely musical give way to those 
 based on considerations perhaps quite complex. In 
 
 92 
 
MODERN MUSIC 
 
 program music, Strauss has far outstripped Lizst and 
 also Wagner whose art theories actually taboo such 
 program music as the Faust Overture, Tannhauser's 
 Pilgrimage, the prelude to Lohengrin, the Ride of the 
 Valkyries, and certain other specimens scattered through 
 his works. 
 
 In his Symphonic Poems really program music 
 Strauss feels justified in employing effects which Wagner 
 allowed only in the Music Drama, and for reasons made 
 plain in the quotation already given : " When occasion 
 required I could venture terrible things in music, since 
 the action rendered them comprehensible, but which, 
 apart from the drama, should not be risked lest they 
 become grotesque." This quotation defines sharply 
 the line of cleavage between Wagnerian and Straussian 
 methods. Our personal opinion is that while Wagner 
 was somewhat circumscribed by his theories, the quo- 
 tation yet contains a warning which, to some extent, 
 Strauss should heed. 
 
 In an attempt to determine the actual worth of 
 Strauss' ideas, if we turn from the flaring tone-colors 
 of his grand orchestra to his songs with piano accom- 
 paniment, and there inspect ideas clothed only with such 
 color as the human voice and the pianoforte can give, 
 what is the result of an impartial estimate if not a few 
 lyrics worthy of the best song writers, and many more 
 decidedly commonplace, or almost empty, and certain 
 
 93 
 
MODERN MUSIC 
 
 others that are actually ugly? The surest test of a 
 melodist is his ability to compose a simple song that 
 reaches the heart. In the Lieder we have Strauss at 
 his simplest, the musician stripped of every glittering 
 accessory, and the result, considered as a whole, is 
 poverty, or almost that. 
 
 The time was when for their author such defects 
 meant speedy oblivion, but, fortunately for Strauss, he 
 lives in an era when, like the Athenians who listened 
 to Paul's preaching, people are eager for some new 
 thing. Because novelty now gains a ready hearing, 
 manner has an opportunity almost equal with matter. 
 The manner of Strauss is the most pronounced of any 
 composer thus far, and this manner blinds his admirers 
 to the comparatively insufficient matter in his orchestral 
 numbers. In fact, the baldness of many of his themes, 
 when reduced to piano music, makes evident their 
 inferiority to those of Wagner. 
 
 Manner being his chief end, we can well understand 
 Strauss' bold excursions into the desert of mere dis- 
 sonance. We grant that his gigantic tone-structures 
 require materials of all kinds including some never 
 before used, but we do insist that mere cacaphony is 
 a material of which it were wise to make no great 
 show. As the most pronounced realist and mannerist 
 who ever invaded the realms of tone, Strauss is bent 
 chiefly on the novel and the startling; moreover, the 
 
 94 
 
MODERN MUSIC 
 
 true goal of the musician is not for such as he. While 
 harmony was within his reach, cacophony was nearest 
 and so, even before the composition of Zarathrusta , 
 he chose the one at hand, the one most useful to his 
 purpose. 
 
 Concerning Strauss, a query, not unlike that induced 
 by the inequalities of Whitman, demands answer. This 
 demand is emphasized by the fact that, whereas, in 
 times past the great artists in every department had 
 their dull moments, it was impossible for them wholly 
 to leave the heights and drop to mere platitude, or 
 turgidity, or some other fault of the talentless ; and yet 
 all this too often is true of certain among the eminent 
 moderns. The anomaly suggests several answers, one 
 of which is that the religious, the scientific, the politi- 
 cal, the social, and the economic conditions of to-day 
 have psychological effect on the creative artist, and 
 therefore upon his art in its every fibre. 
 
 Now, while the painter of the merely conventional, 
 and the poet of the birds and the flowers, and the 
 composer of superficial salon music, are almost outside 
 the current of the potent but subtle influences ema- 
 nating from the complex activities of our times, it is 
 for the artist, bent on novel and notable things, to feel 
 the full sweep of that current. Therefore is he even 
 as a man standing on a tall column where, to be safe, 
 one should be well-poised and strong throughout. Like 
 
 95 
 
MODERN MUSIC 
 
 that man, this artist is subject to many forces, and, 
 because of certain defects in him, these tend to disturb 
 and upset his unstable equilibrium. 
 
 That the compositions of Strauss, his music dramas 
 included, contain many passages of great beauty, or 
 else of real dramatic power, it were bigotry to deny. 
 Nevertheless, no work of any author, not even of 
 Strauss, can hold together longer than its weakest 
 parts permit. This means that of some, and perhaps 
 of not a few, of Strauss' most vaunted tone-poems and 
 music dramas, only fragments will be preserved to 
 future generations, as is the case with Handel's operas. 
 
 Even should the work of Strauss be known to after 
 times only through excerpts, or should his tone-poems 
 survive merely as musical curiosities, their author nev- 
 ertheless has done much toward furthering musical 
 progress. In defiance of the limitations wherewith the 
 theorizing Wagner had hedged instrumental music 
 round about, Strauss has opened a new field for its 
 enlargement. This, independent of his success or non- 
 success therein. Furthermore, in his symphonic poems 
 he has evolved a freer and more ample art form 
 than the conservative Brahms could have discovered 
 from the enclosure which the leaders of the classical 
 school had marked out for him. 
 
 While of Berlioz, and of Liszt, and even of Wagner, 
 it is true that his place in progressive art has been 
 
MODERN MUSIC 
 
 well-defined and is now accepted by the musical pub- 
 lic, it must be confessed that, to estimate Strauss, 
 we have crossed the boundaries of settled opinion and 
 have entered a region of conjecture. Therein, if at all, 
 we shall deal with such moderns as Debussy, Ravel, 
 Cyril Scott, Scriabine, Stravinski, Max Reger and 
 Schonberg. 
 
 In support of these composers, their adherents 
 advance a certain argument, one echoed in somewhat 
 faint and timid way by those who halt between two 
 opinions, either because undecided which way to turn, 
 or else fearing that decision will mark them as too 
 radical, or else too conservative. 
 
 This argument is based on the fact that nearly all 
 innovators in art have been misunderstood and some- 
 times maligned and persecuted. Thus, Haydn was 
 accused of daring to found a new school of music, 
 nor did the lucid Mozart escape censure, and when, 
 having shaken off the tradition of Haydn and Mozart, 
 Beethoven had entered on his period of individuality, 
 many contemporary critics deemed him more than 
 eccentric. Especially was this true in his latter period. 
 Afterward we find Mendelssohn condemning many 
 harmonic progressions in the great piano-forte compo- 
 sitions of Chopin. Then came the fierce outburst 
 against the Wagnerian departures, and because Wagner 
 was a strong and determined fighter, the conflict waxed 
 
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MODERN MUSIC 
 
 hot and furious with stroke and parry and counter-stroke 
 until ended by the defeat of his opponents. 
 
 Now the argument referred to may be stated thus : 
 Because later times have proved that such critics as 
 we have mentioned were, at best, short-sighted, and 
 some of them were even stumbling blocks in the way 
 of progress, it follows that failing to accept in toto 
 whatsoever the modern composer chooses to offer, we 
 join fellowship with the ultra-conservatives and the 
 dullards of yesterday. 
 
 Surely it is a long road that has no turning, and 
 the mere fact that certain composers of past times were 
 in the straight way of progression appearances to 
 the contrary notwithstanding is no guarantee that 
 all others to come will be so fortunate. In fact, we 
 have no right to assume for these an unfailing instinct, 
 or a guiding star. 
 
 In this age of striving after the new, what more 
 natural than that attempters other than Strauss should 
 be in the musical field ? Might not some arrangement 
 of tones, constituting a radical departure from the mod- 
 ern scale of twelve semi-tones, form a basis whereon 
 to build a novel art, one not necessarily superseding 
 the old, but, no doubt, an agreeable divergence from 
 it ? The thought was parent of the deed, and so the 
 whole tone scale came into being. 
 
 That the whole tone scale or, more precisely, 
 
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MODERN MUSIC 
 
 scales are of limited use appears from the fact that, 
 whereas, from the twelve semi-tones of the modern 
 scale, twelve major and twelve minor scales are con- 
 structed, these semi-tones admit of but two whole tone 
 scales; that from C to C, and that from C sharp to 
 C sharp. To one familiar with the archaic Greek 
 modes, the origin of these two scales is obvious. They 
 represent a return to the primitive corresponding with 
 the return of the Post-Impressionist painters to the 
 ideals of Egyptian and Assyrian mural painting. 
 
 That the Post-Impressionist musicians did not return 
 to the Egyptian and the Assyrian tonal systems, may have 
 been for the sufficient reason that the music of those 
 nations has vanished, and only vague conjecture could 
 have aided such return. Having neither beginning, 
 middle, nor end, the whole tone scales are adapted to 
 vague and shadowy effects. They represent more of 
 super-refinement than of strength, and more of caprice 
 than of progress. 
 
 Although the ultra-modern French composers are 
 using the whole tone-scales, the credit if that be the 
 word of first employing them, belongs perhaps to 
 the Russian composer Moussorgski, a man of unusual 
 natural ability, but one impatient of system and, in 
 fact, one whose Realistic and even Nihilistic tenden- 
 cies were reflected in his music before the advent of 
 Strauss. As an entirety, Moussorgski's career was a 
 
 99 
 
MODERN MUSIC 
 
 failure, but his whole tone scales have survived in the 
 music of Claude Debussy and his school. 
 
 Debussy's music is a unique but skillful blending of 
 the archaic Greek modes, the whole tone scales, the 
 duodecuple scale to be explained later and an 
 ultra-modern use of the over-tones based on the notes 
 of these scales. This use of over-tones requires some- 
 what of explanation, thus, if, in the key of C, the tonic 
 triad C, E, G, be sounded, the chord by itself is satis- 
 fying and so demands no resolution. Now, since with 
 this chord are heard such over-tones of C as B flat, 
 the yth over-tone, D the 9th, and F sharp the nth, to 
 say nothing of the over-tones of E and G, Debussy 
 would hold that the triad and over-tones, if struck 
 together, would, like the triad, be satisfying and so 
 demand no resolution. 
 
 Since music requires more or less of chord progres- 
 sion, let us see what are certain of the over-tones up to 
 the nth of our triad, and also of the chord B, D, G, 
 to which we will resolve it. Omitting the octave over- 
 tones, those of C are G the 3rd, E the 5th, B flat the 
 7th, D the Qth, and F sharp the nth. Those of E are 
 B the 3rd, G sharp the 5th, D the yth, F sharp the 9th, 
 and A sharp the nth. From the ;th upward, these 
 over-tones are proper to the whole tone scale begin- 
 ning on C. The over-tones of G are D the 3rd, B the 
 5th, F the yth, A the gth, and C sharp the nth. From 
 
 100 
 
MODERN MUSIC 
 
 the ;th upward, all are proper to the whole tone scale 
 reckoning from D flat, or C sharp. 
 
 The total of varying notes in the triad and its 
 over-tones are therefore, C, E, G, B flat, D, F sharp, 
 
 B, G sharp, A sharp, F, A, and C sharp. In the 
 chord B, D, G, the over-tones of B are F sharp the 3rd, 
 D sharp the 5th, A the yth, C sharp the gth, and E 
 sharp the nth. From the ;th upward, all are proper 
 to the whole tone scale reckoning from C sharp. For 
 D the over-tones are A the 3rd, F sharp the 5th, A the 
 6th, C the yth, E the Qth, and G sharp the i ith. From 
 the 7th, all are proper to the whole tone scale reckoning 
 from C. The over-tones of G we have already men- 
 tioned. The total of varying notes in the two resolved 
 notes of the chord, together with their over-tones, are 
 therefore B, D, F sharp, D sharp, A, C sharp, E sharp, 
 
 C, E and G sharp. 
 
 From this exposition we discern that, in the resolu- 
 tion of the tonic triad, G and its over-tones D, B, F, A 
 and C sharp are stationary, while E and its over-tones 
 B, G sharp, D, F sharp and A sharp, resolve to D and 
 its over-tones A, F sharp, C, E, and G sharp, while C 
 and its over-tones G, E, B flat, D, and F sharp, resolve 
 to B and its over-tones F sharp, D sharp, A, C sharp, 
 and E sharp. 
 
 If, from one of the simplest chord progressions, 
 together with its struck or otherwise sounded over-tones, 
 
 101 
 
MODERN MUSIC 
 
 such strange clashings are obtained, what must result 
 from chord progressions in the whole tone scales and 
 the archaic modes? Our question pertains only to 
 possibilities, for, though the simultaneous use of all 
 over-tones is warranted by his theory, Debussy rarely 
 proceeds to such lengths. If, by nature or through 
 cultivation, Debussy's ear is super-sensitive to the 
 over-tones in chord progression, it does not follow that 
 he should inflict them on the musical public. It is 
 safe to contend that if, in the development of music 
 during the modern centuries, the over-tones had been 
 considered, a way would have been devised to make 
 their succession somewhat euphonious. Against this 
 contention it will be asserted that the major triad, with 
 octave, yth, and 9th, was built up gradually from the 
 over-tones of the root, and that the moderns have 
 only enlarged the chord. 
 
 As we have said in a previous chapter, Holman Hunt 
 was a painter whose backgrounds were finished with 
 the same minutiae as were his foregrounds. Thus his 
 pictures convey little or no idea of distance. This 
 defect in his art was due to a seeming excellence in 
 himself. To his keen and far-reaching vision, distances 
 meant but little. In fact, he painted the landscape as 
 he saw it. We hold that, because of his phenomenal 
 ear, Debussy is at least as unfortunate as was Hunt. 
 On the other hand, Debussy's admirers behold in him 
 
 102 
 
MODERN MUSIC 
 
 the forerunner of musicians equally sensitive to the 
 over-tones. He is compared to Manet and Monet 
 whose sensitiveness to color caused them to paint 
 atmospheres rather than objects. 
 
 As a painter of musical atmospheres, Debussy 
 excludes nearly everything that enlisted the energies 
 of Bach the contrapuntist, and of Beethoven whose 
 harmonies prove his consummate mastery of melodic 
 voice progression^ In lieu of consecutive ideas appeal- 
 3th the heart and the intellect, Debussy, by 
 means of unrelated chords, gives impressions which 
 appeal to the merely emotional nature. It is interest- 
 ing to note that, while the Impressionist painters seek 
 entrance to the musician's domain, Debussy would 
 become a musical painter. His detached chords cor- 
 respond with the divided colors of the Impressionist 
 painters, and, as when viewed from a certain position, 
 these colors blend in a harmonious whole, so Debussy's 
 characteristic progressions are supposed to merge in 
 one closely-woven concord provided the hearer is 
 in receptive attitude. 
 
 On its face, this assumption seems ridiculous; but 
 that such an effect has been produced, much senti- 
 mental gush over Debussy's music amply proves. The 
 mood necessary to the transformation of his cacophony 
 is the mood inducive of a self-hypnotism which quite 
 subverts the critical judgment. By the way, a key to 
 
 103 
 
MODERN MUSIC 
 
 many singular doings of such musical Impressionists 
 as Debussy, is found in this their favorite formula : 
 should any chord, however dissonant, convey a desired 
 sensation, that sensation is emphasized if, instead of 
 resolving it, the chord be repeated on various degrees 
 of the scale. *- 
 
 It is a defect of the ordinary church hmn tune, 
 that stanzas embodying diverse sentiments must adapt 
 themselves to it. The same is true of any melody 
 written for one stanza of a series. This defect, so 
 pronounced in Italian Opera, Wagner remedied by 
 a compromise between melody and free recitative. 
 Debussy has carried this reform perhaps beyond its 
 logical conclusion. Every suspicion of melody is 
 banished from the vocal score of his operas, but, to 
 some extent, the compromise exists in the orchestral 
 score. 
 
 Because of the vagueness of Debussy's chord move- 
 ments, the point and impressiveness obtainable only 
 through a definite tonal progression which acknowledges 
 a tonic center, is absent from his figures and motifs. 
 If these be performed piano, or, better, pianissimo, 
 their lack is less apparent; but, if blared forth after 
 the manner of Wagner or Strauss, they reveal them- 
 selves as mere empty noise. Perhaps such a test is 
 not wholly just, because any theme from any master 
 of the classical or the romantic school loses much, 
 
 104 
 
MODERN MUSIC 
 
 though not all distinction, if performed with a stress 
 and in a tempo quite foreign to it. 
 
 A fair estimate of Debussy's music, one that after 
 times will endorse, is not an easy matter. No doubt, 
 he should be judged in the large, rather than by certain 
 admired passages either in his operas, or his songs, or 
 his piano pieces. Usually these excerpts little repre- 
 sent the radical composer but, instead, his leaning 
 toward conventional melody and harmony. Debussy's 
 writing down of over-tones seems to us whimsical, 
 seeing that these have their unwritten over-tones. 
 This much suggests the query : may not his musical 
 impressionism be a super-refined estheticism induced 
 and fostered by an environment of ultra-modern French 
 theory and practice of poetry and painting ? 
 
 While it is true that the old modes at times reappear 
 fragmentarily in the masterpieces of the contrapuntal 
 and the classical schools which, of course, are based 
 on the diatonic scale, we yet contend that well-nigh 
 complete return to those modes, by means of the whole 
 tone scales, and analogous methods, is the opposite of 
 progress, because the diatonic scale was an improve- 
 ment of its predecessors. 
 
 While Debussy is enamored of the archaic as 
 expressed in the six-tone scales, those without tonic or 
 dominant, beginning, middle, or end, and while the 
 Russian composer Scriabine uses a six-tone scale 
 
 I0 5 
 
MODERN MUSIC 
 
 slightly different, because formed of the 8th, gth, 
 loth, nth, i3th, and i4th harmonics, we discover the 
 antithesis of these men in Max Reger who admits 
 the validity of only one scale, that of twelve semi-tones, 
 all of equal value, in fact the duodecuple scale, one 
 not to be confounded with the chromatic scale, that 
 modification of the diatonic. While Max Reger's scale 
 acknowledges a tonic, we find Debussy oftentimes 
 leaving the cramped circle of his whole tone scales for 
 the larger duodecuple scale in which he abjures the tonic. 
 
 It would be deeply interesting and very enlightening 
 could we determine to what extent the unrest of mod- 
 ern life has found lodgment in the susceptible artistic 
 mind, to be reflected forth in its creations. That this 
 unrest is approaching a pathological condition seems 
 more than a surmise, but so insiduous and gradual is 
 the approach and so potent is the spell of that condi- 
 tion, that, because born into the change, the present 
 generation seems quite unaware of any departure from 
 the normal. 
 
 An eminent exponent of modern musical theory if 
 that which savours chiefly of caprice can be termed 
 theory has expressed belief that, ere long, one about 
 to perform diatonic music must first apologize for his 
 act. Now, while acknowledging that the diatonic scale 
 is open to certain criticisms which the adherents of 
 other scale systems have not failed to voice, we yet 
 
 1 06 
 
MODERN MUSIC 
 
 contend that whereas, the modes and their modern 
 substitutes, the whole tone scales and certain others of 
 recent date, are defective, the duodecuple scale also 
 has its shortcomings, one of which is the absence of 
 a real dominant. True, its defenders have generally 
 agreed upon a sort of dominant, the augmented 4th, 
 or its equivalent the flatted 5th ; the F sharp reckoning 
 from C. Still, the result is vagueness, uncertainty, 
 restlessness ; admirable as the expression of a mood, 
 but quite unfit to color a composer's work, unless he 
 be a hypochondriac or a pessimist. 
 
 Certain versatile composers of former times having 
 employed with discrimination not only the modes, but 
 also the chromatic scale using it duodecuply, there- 
 fore we hear that the new school is based on the 
 bed-rock from which the old arose. And so we must 
 needs have a cult of late comers adopting as a rule 
 what before was an exception. Not only this, but 
 many expounders of musical theory those whose 
 immediate predecessors had frowned on such trifles as 
 open, consecutive perfect 5ths are straining them- 
 selves in an effort to conform their teachings to the 
 wider and wider departures of the new school, many 
 of whose representatives have wholly renounced tradi- 
 tional methods. 
 
 Unresolved and unresolvable cacophony has resulted 
 from the doings of a group of ultra composers each a 
 
 107 
 
MODERN MUSIC 
 
 little more daring because of the boldness of the 
 others ; and yet, modern tendencies in harmonic treat- 
 ment began in what now would be deemed a mild way. 
 
 Among the earliest innovations are found numerous 
 scale progressions of open, perfect 5ths and their inver- 
 sions, perfect 4ths, all used to insure that vagueness 
 for which originally they were condemned. Also, for 
 vagueness, were omitted those intermediate chords 
 which otherwise bind and clarify the harmony. Then 
 came open 5ths and 4ths in skips; also scale move- 
 ment of tonic chords in their first position ; also chords 
 of the yth and the gth progressing in scale movement 
 or otherwise ; also the yths and the Qths of these joined 
 to their roots as major 2nds and used in skips, or in 
 scales both diatonically and duodecuply; also there 
 were numerous attempts at greater sonority by means 
 of the major 2nd in almost any chord; also there 
 came into use chords composed of mixed intervals, or 
 of unequal 4ths and 5ths, or else of such equal inter- 
 vals as minor or major 4ths or 5ths, whereas, in the 
 older system, only major and minor 3ds were so used. 
 Meanwhile the new school Impressionists were build- 
 ing chords without regard to a scientific basis, and 
 sometimes piling them to enormous proportions. 
 
 Contemporaneous with this desperate striving for 
 the unusual, the use of major 3rds and 6ths progress- 
 ing by whole tones led to the adoption of whole tone 
 
 1 08 
 
MODERN MUSIC 
 
 scales on which, as we have seen, Debussy and his 
 kind built their system of over-tones. It was now 
 customary to close on some chord or note once con- 
 sidered quite foreign to the tonic, or the dominant, or 
 the sub-dominant. This and more was but an applica- 
 tion of the saying that scales are artificial, since tonality 
 alone is real. Then came chords without other than 
 Impressionist significance and used singly, or in 
 sequence ; also chords altered chromatically until they 
 defied analysis. 
 
 Evidently, it was no longer an innovation to use 
 any succession of mixed chords without regard to the 
 satisfactory disposition of other than the keenest dis- 
 sonance in each. Such procedure as we have outlined 
 also allowed any discord to move directly to the tonic 
 harmony, and almost any succession of single notes 
 or harmonies to move in conjunction with a figure in 
 another key, provided the figure was first established 
 in the mind. Also, modern procedure allowed not 
 merely the free entrance, but even the free exit of any 
 harmonies moving against a pedal chord. Not to go 
 further into details necessary to an understanding of 
 the situation, composers were now prepared for cacoph- 
 onies of the rankest kind wherein almost every note of 
 the duodecuple scale would sound simultaneously. 
 
 The method, peculiar to the new French school, of 
 mirroring chords by an exact reversal of their intervals, 
 
 109 
 
MODERN MUSIC 
 
 works well in the whole tone system, but is productive 
 of queer results in the diatonic. Thus C, E, G, B flat, 
 if mirrored, give C, A flat, F, D, while the old method 
 of reversion gives C, G, E, and the B flat below the C, 
 or the E. Whereas, by sounding together the two 
 chords according to the new method and then those 
 produced by the old, we discover to what extent 
 euphony is being sacrificed to mere musical mathe- 
 matics. When, as numerous examples attest, the 
 mathematical phrase is joined to the harmonic sys- 
 tem, and a free Impressionism, the result is actual 
 incoherence. 
 
 So methodical has been the departure to the patho- 
 logical that such cacophonists as Strauss, Debussy, 
 Ravel, Cyril Scott, Stravinsky, Scriabine, and Schonberg, 
 perceive either beauty or dramatic truth in what to the 
 unsophisticated is only disagreeable noise. So obsessed 
 by theory are they that not one realizes to what extent 
 the hideous exists in certain of his creations. How- 
 ever, the point where the disagreeable in any art begins 
 will depend upon the peculiarities of the individual. 
 
 Ill 
 
 In our survey of modern painting and poetry, we 
 saw the Futurism of Marinetti rejected by his Italian 
 countrymen, but afterwards encouraged, and even 
 
 no 
 
MODERN MUSIC 
 
 gaining disciples, in the art circles of Great Britain. 
 Meanwhile, in America, a nation new to the fine arts, 
 we found the Synchromists developing the latest phase 
 of Modernism in painting, while the makers of vcrs 
 libre were enjoying a mushroom growth. What wonder 
 that the musical Impressionism of the new French 
 composers, and even the outre of their contemporaries 
 in Russia and Germany, should break out in England ! 
 Already Cyril Scott and some others are badly infected, 
 but let us hope the disease will not become epidemic. 
 
 As for Max Reger, that thoroughly German illustrator 
 of modern methods, at first sight he seems a more 
 complex Bach ; but, while Bach's most intricate coun- 
 terpoint is always logically clear, that of the other 
 often degenerates to the obscure and the turgid. This 
 because, in the place of modulation, his duodecuple 
 theory allows abrupt transition to almost any key. As 
 a whole, Max Reger's compositions show head effort 
 rather than heart impulse. Still, his avoidance of sheer 
 cacophony is almost a virtue in these days of abrupt 
 surprises and violent shocks to the auditory nerves. 
 
 While we cannot dispute that war has given to 
 mankind the Iliad of Homer and many another mas- 
 terpiece of poetry, both ancient and modern, and while 
 we grant that war often has inspired both the painter 
 and the sculptor, and that it has incited music fiery 
 as that wherewith the Marseillaise roused the French 
 
 in 
 
MODERN MUSIC 
 
 Revolutionists to even greater frenzy, we nevertheless 
 contend that neither on war nor unrest, but only on 
 peace, can a rounded art be based. 
 
 Peace being the normal condition of man, it alone 
 favors the normal development of his higher faculties, 
 including imagination. War is a stimulant which gives 
 to the artistic output the quality of vehemence, or it is 
 an intoxicant rendering that output coarse, or brutal, 
 or incoherent. Vehemence is a compelling quality 
 in the work of poet, painter, or musician ; but its 
 prominence means the subordination of certain other 
 qualities essential to a symmetrical whole. 
 
 Because it is an abnormal condition, restlessness is 
 not a begetter of qualities ; in fact, it admits of no 
 concentrated effort essential to their birth and develop- 
 ment. Rather it is a deteriorator of qualities, and this 
 for art means decadence. That in certain quarters the 
 spirit of restlessness is infesting art is obvious enough ; 
 but, at bottom, this restlessness is of a world-wide kind 
 and portends some profound change for the better 
 let us hope in the conditions of human society. 
 
 For the real exposition of this matter, let it be 
 understood that the Creative Word, of which music is 
 an expression, has a negative or destructive potentcy, 
 as well as a positive or creative one. Strauss' employ- 
 ment of this negative potency too often depicts the 
 vehement and brutal spirit of destructive war, whereas, 
 
 112 
 
MODERN MUSIC 
 
 Debussy and Ravel's use of it depicts the restlessness 
 of the sentimental, sighing being, whose only source of 
 disquiet is mental and bodily weakness. While Debussy 
 and Ravel depict individual, feminine restlessness, 
 Max Reger sometimes depicts masculine restlessness. 
 At other times his pretentious works depict the larger 
 world restlessness. 
 
 Though the poet is a conscious seer, the musician 
 is an unconscious one who, in his moments of inspira- 
 tion, enters the world of causes to project outward, by 
 means of his art, those events which as yet have not 
 materialized to the ordinary eye. Unknown to himself, 
 the world war existed in the cacophony of Strauss 
 years before the events which precipitated the conflict. 
 To-day that cacophony is not only tolerated, but has 
 actually found admirers for the basic reason that what 
 in tone's mysterious language was there foretold, is now 
 with us. 
 
 Moreover, the individual and world restlessness 
 which preceded and is now accompanying the war, 
 even as clouds precede and accompany the storm, is 
 the inner incentive of those musicians who employ a 
 system of tonality requiring no tonic repose. This 
 also is true of those who habitually employ abrupt 
 transition instead of modulation. Therefore the music 
 of both Claude Debussy and Max Reger is acceptable 
 to-day whereas, for specific reasons, a pure polyphony 
 
MODERN MUSIC 
 
 in the time of Bach, and a pure classicism in the time 
 of Mozart, and a departure toward Romanticism in the 
 time of Schumann and Chopin, were the ideals which 
 met general requirements. 
 
 As the latest tonal expression of chaotic conditions 
 created by the present world upheaval, listen to the 
 efforts of Schonberg that riddle of the serious musician, 
 inasmuch as he would be taken seriously, even as 
 would the Cubist painters and the Symbolist poets 
 who themselves are the product and expression of 
 abnormal world conditions. 
 
 Because of our interpretation of causes, we grant to 
 Schonberg, even when his seemingly unrelated har- 
 monies move together, a seriousness perhaps incom- 
 prehensible from any other viewpoint. Heard in the 
 usual way, this composer's rhythmless cacophony seems 
 destitute of ideas as are the ravings of the madhouse ; 
 but, to hear Schonberg aright, one is supposed to sep- 
 arate mentally the harmonic streams which, in different 
 keys, clash and grind in utmost dissonance. 
 
 To separate mentally these harmonic streams, we 
 are told to acquire the habit of what is called hori- 
 zontal listening. In hearing any ordinary counterpoint, 
 we consider the individual parts both singly and in 
 their harmonic relation to the others. This act may be 
 named horizontal and perpendicular listening. Now we 
 are assured that if, in estimating the new composers, we 
 
 114 
 
MODERN MUSIC 
 
 forego perpendicular listening and concentrate on hori- 
 zontal listening, the clashing and grinding of different 
 keys will not offend the ear. Granting this brings us 
 only to the decisive question : Is the result worth the 
 effort? Judging by such examples of Schonberg's 
 work as have come to our notice we must reply in the 
 negative. 
 
 As Schonberg has his followers, they, if sincere, 
 must somehow have gained his peculiar outlook. In 
 justice to this composer, we will say that many of his 
 simultaneous chords, though seemingly independent, 
 are built up from a common root. Possibly Schonberg 
 has adopted methods analogous to those of certain 
 ultra schools of poetry. Perhaps his chords should be 
 regarded as symbols, or else as images supposedly able 
 to stimulate the listener to a mental filling in of what 
 is absent from the printed score. 
 
 After Schonberg what? In other words, after the 
 world war what road will music find open to itself, 
 either as a progressive art or a decadent one ? Should 
 that time mean a surface peace, one hiding but not 
 quenching the old fires of jealousy and hatred, then 
 no good course can be prophesied for music, or any 
 other art able to epitomize world conditions : but if, as 
 we believe, an era of human brotherhood more sincere 
 and general than any heretofore known, is to come 
 from the crucible of war, we may predict for the fine 
 
 "5 
 
MODERN MUSIC 
 
 arts a turning from the pathological toward the sane 
 and wholesome. 
 
 The words sane and wholesome are indefinite, but 
 we may perhaps narrow their scope to something like 
 exactness. Wars have come and gone and the shadow 
 of their darkest hours has often obscured the sun of 
 world progress, but never, for a moment, has such an 
 eclipse retarded its passage to the calmer and clearer 
 regions of a higher shining. Since modern composers 
 are striving with might and main to break from the 
 diatonic system, it is possible that a scale more sub- 
 divided than the duodecuple, and of which the Orient has 
 taught us something, will prove the means toward the sane 
 and wholesome which that loftier light is to illuminate. 
 
 That future composers cannot return to Bach is 
 certain. Even to us his music does not convey just 
 what it did to his contemporaries in their quaint semi- 
 mediaeval world. Nor are the methods of the grand 
 old master pliant to modern improvement. The unfor- 
 tunate attempts of Max Reger, who would be a more 
 learned and recondite Bach, go far toward warranting 
 the contention that the contrapuntal school has finished 
 its work. The goodly company of the classical com- 
 posers, their mission also accomplished, has moved on 
 with Brahms lagging much in the rear. Those of the 
 Romanticist group, fantastic at first appearance, then 
 interesting, then adorable, are thus far perhaps the 
 
 116 
 
MODERN MUSIC 
 
 last rightful children of the Muse ; but these alas ! 
 have joined the great fellowship of those whose destiny 
 it was to enlarge the boundaries of their chosen art. 
 
 No effort born of sincerity can in all ways be useless. 
 No belief based on honest conviction but contains a 
 nucleus of truth for those who can discover and appro- 
 priate it. In the sincere effort and in the kernel of 
 truth discernible in certain of such recent experiments 
 in painting as Impressionism, Neo-Impressionism, Post- 
 Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Synchromisin, and 
 in the better poetry of vers libre, and in the best work 
 of Debussy and other late composers, is found their 
 sufficient excuse for being, and their ability to con- 
 tribute to a composite art of which music may become 
 the magnetic center. 
 
 While such a mere external as fashion in dress moves 
 almost in a circle, we cannot admit this purposelessness 
 in the deep and high things of life. Religion, Philos- 
 ophy, Art, and Science, demand at least a spiral at 
 whose top is the ultimate end, perhaps a unification 
 as incomprehensible to man's at present undeveloped 
 higher senses as would be the merging of every note 
 of the duodecuple scale in one concentrated tone 
 comparable to the synthetic white of the sun. 
 
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