kenzie in the front rank of contemporary novelists, this reviewer notes:

"In a survey of the tendencies of the more ambitious modern novel which the present reviewer wrote last July, he suggested three reasons for the failure of our young novelists to escape from the obsession of the social document, the crusade, the biological and scientific exposition and the imaginative history into the objective, impersonal and universal province of the work of art. These reasons

were, in the first place, autobiographical choice of material in which the novelist expressed life, not in the terms of its artistic valuation, but in the terms of himself; in the second place, the photographic method, in which the writer attempts to reproduce the exact lineaments of a social picture, not by husbanding, measuring and correlating his resources, but by flinging them on to his canvas in an uncritical bulk; and, in the third place, a formlessness which uses style not as a precise adjustment of language to mean

UFI ( 127 1

BUVILION DUVAL

KNATSCHKE IN PARIS Because he depicted German "Kultur" in this fashion, Hansi aroused a storm of protest, and was banished from Leipsig just before the war broke out.

ing, not as an integral and inevitable interpretation of the subject-matter, but decoratively as a kind of frill to the solid cutlet of realistic presentment. Now, Mr. Mackenzie, tho his work has gained vastly in sureness, distinction and delicacy of perception, has still left these problems sub judice. His style does indeed triumph over the immediate issue. But it is centripetal; it absorbs only the matter in hand; it works by a kind of relief system, passing disjointedly, like a commercial traveler, from one territory to another. It does not embrace a synthesis or illustrate the significance of an entity; and tho we may accept Michael as an objective reality, he is still unidentified with the cosmic truths and realities of life; he is still a projection of his crea

tor's personality; he is still a parochial figure, revolving within his own orbit."

K

Hansi's Satire on German Culture. ATE MELDRAM BUSS calls attention, in the new Cornhill Booklet, to Professor Knatschké, that amazing compatriot of Treitschke and Nietzsche, whose creator, Johann Jacob Waltz, better known as the Alsatian caricaturist "Hansi," narrowly escaped severe punishment in Leipsig just prior to the outbreak of the war for publishing his drawing of the professor and the latter's views on French culture. "Professor Knatschké," we are informed, is a near-sighted German pedagog's analytical summary of the French people, substantiated by a twodays' visit to Paris.

"Prof. Dr. Wilhelm Siegfried Knatschké-Koenigsberg writes of men and morals, of custom and tradition, of tendency and consummation, in deliciously naïve ignorance of any one of his subjects, and in utter disregard for the varying fillip of white grape and hop. To all appearances it is Professor Knatschké who is writing the book, not Hansi, and he condescends to publish his Germanically-tilted deductions for the enlightenment of his brothers in Alsace who persist in preferring Gallic foible to Teutonic perfection. He wanders about Paris, finding it, in so short a time as it takes to walk from the Madeleine to the Porte Saint-Martin,-depraved, impolite, and inefficient."

Hansi also includes in this volume, which is published by Floury (Paris), the diary of the professor's daughter on a visit to Alsatian relatives. So biting and so biased from the German point of view at least are the writings and drawings of Hansi that these books have been characterized as veritable prologs of the present rupture between France and Germany. "Mon Village" is said to be even more incendiary than "Professor Knatschké."

C

The Unique Outlook of Thomas Hardy. OINCIDENT with the actual production of "The Dynasts" on the stage under the direction of Granville Barker is the publication of Thomas Hardy's latest volume of verse, "Satires of Circumstance" (Macmillan). The title is typical of Hardy, recalling "Life's Little Ironies" and "Time's Laughingstocks" to a writer in the London Saturday Review. "We

enter at once into a world where some small fit of passion-the misdating or tearing of a letter, or some silly error in the place or time of a tryst-determines the tragedy or comedy of human lives." We are made to contemplate, the same writer points out, the freaks. of a destiny whose caprice is the result of an immense indifference. Life is cruel enough, Hardy seems to say in his old age, without man adding in

AS IT STRIKES HANSI The sentimentalism of academic art in Germany, as the Alsatian satirist sees it, can best be appreciated in this touching portrayal of a sick puppy.

"These 'Satires of Circumstance' are filled with regret for perished associations and opportunities. They lasted for a moment; were neglected or destroyed, and remembered ever after with regret. 'The pity of it, Iago; the pity of it!' threads these 'Satires' through and through. Mr. Hardy's cold nescience of all that comes before and after the lives of his people only makes their moral contacts more warm and close. There is another consequence, too. In the presence of a power which looks unmoved upon succeeding generations, life is necessarily reduced to an extreme simplicity. Mr. Hardy's tales are changes rung upon the themes of birth, marriage, death, the meeting and passing of lovers. Not half a dozen pages of this present book would remain were we to take out these elemental things. It is this more than anything else which distinguishes Mr. Hardy from his contemporaries. He has stood and lived apart from this clever and busy age, which handles all things and prys into the small detail of life. His work is essentially undated; and in that it is unlike the work of any living author."

There are some awkward and unmusical lines in this volume, the Chicago Evening Post notes, but Hardy is nevertheless the wisest, most seasoned and tenderest poet in England. It is a mistake to see in him only the disillusioned critic.

"Much, indeed, of life and illusion one must leave behind when entering Mr. Hardy's drab portal, but once through it, one gains a positive sense of beauty, a pervading atmosphere of quiet tenderness and a realization of human love-deep beyond sentimentality-that will more than solace the mind for the insubstantial bubbles that Mr. Hardy so gently, yet none the less fatally, pricks.".

M

OUR COMMERCIALIZED ART

AX EASTMAN, author of "The Enjoyment of Poetry," and editor of The Masses, has attempted a diagnosis of magazine art in America.

He blames the prevailing system of journalism and the tremendous dividends that accrue to the stockholders in the modern American magazines for the commercialization of magazine art. The artist, like the editor, says Max Eastman, is "economically determined." His diagnosis-we find it in The Masses -is this: "It is business art. It does not aim to achieve the beautiful, the real, the ideal, the characteristic, the

perfect, the sublime, the ugly, the grotesque, the harmonious, the symmetrical, or any other of those ends that various schools of art and art criticism have with similar merit set before them. It aims to achieve profits in competition. And any or all of those genuinely artistic aims are subordinated to that."

The artistic failure of magazine art is all the more lamentable, the editor of The Masses points out, because drawing ought to be the most democratic of the fine arts. The magazines are missing a fine opportunity. "Drawing is destined to a high place among the arts, for drawings, like music, can be adequately reproduced and widely distributed. And while this has appeared a detriment in the light of aristocratic ideals, in the light of democracy it is a fine virtue. The ideal of democracy has indeed given to many artists of our day a new interest in drawing. Some of the best painters in America would draw for the popular magazines if popular magazine editors had an interest in true art."

In support of his contention, Max Eastman examines the prevailing features of popular magazine art in America. The effort to please everybody a little and to displease none, he asserts, has resulted in the persistence of a childlike aim to be photographic.

"Magazine art tends to be photographic. By which I mean that it tries to reproduce every portion of a figure, as seen from a certain point, with mechanical preciseness -eliminating all those lights and shadows, emergings and recedings, suppressions and distortions of external reality which the individual human factor puts into a perception. The trained magazine artist has carefully destroyed all his own warm and lovable idiosyncrasies, and turned himself into a reproducing machine which can 'go over' a canvas from top to bottom, and 'put in' with unerring accuracy everything that ought to be there. He is a highly skilled person. He knows how to draw men, horses, buttons, pants, books, hatracks, seltzer bottles, shoes, shoestrings, cats, frowns, kisses, hot-water bottles, anything and everything, scattered

or combined; but how to draw a single human perception he has not the slightest idea.

"Nor does he need one, for his accurate

reproductions in skilful perspective give a certain rudimentary satisfaction to everybody the satisfaction, namely, of saying, 'My, ain't that a good likeness!'"

But human vision is not photographical. Real drawing, says Mr. Eastman, is a progress away from knowledge about things toward experience of things, away from abstraction toward concrete perception. The photograph, and photographic art, it appears, have little in common with actual human

vision. He explains:

"When we look at an object we allow our own character, our memories, preditermine what we shall see and how we lections, interests, emotions, ideas, to deshall see it. We do something. We go out and seize the salient details of the object, and we over-emphasize, and perfect, and condense, and alter, and mutilate, and idealize-in short, we perform the And when creative act of perception. artists draw creatively, when they draw with individuality, as we say, and with freedom, they are simply coming nearer to that natural act of ours. They are

coming nearer to real experience.

"Great artists have always drawn in this way. There is nothing modern that departs more freely from what we know the human proportions to be than the drawings of Michael Angelo. There is nothing less like a photograph than the sketches of Leonardo."

Obvious and conventional emotions of average and conventional folk ("with coins in their pockets"), these are the only feelings ever expressed in our more popular magazine drawings, declares Max Eastman. And he enumerates the few typical changes that are rung on the threadbare themes:

"Wistfulness in a pretty girl-indicated by arching her eyebrows clear up into her hair.

Adventurous altho stylish athleticism in a young man-indicated in the jaw and pants.

"Romance in the meeting of the twoindicated by his gazing upon the earth, she upon infinity.

"Pathos of old age-indicated with bending knees or a market basket.

"Sweet and divine innocence of children-usually indicated in the stockings.

"These are the principal sentiments appealed to. And I would not suggest that these sentiments are of any less intrinsic worth than others, only why ding-dong upon them perpetually, page after page, and month after month-except because they are the obvious and rudimentary sentiments which everybody feels, and all feel in substantially the same way, and

117

all like to see expressed? Whereas, if you delve down into those passions which are deep and elemental, you find thousands who will resent your manner of ex

pressing them; and if you drift out into those veins of feeling which are highwrought, and subtle, and not to be named with names, you will find that people differ so much in these feelings that one

will be attuned to one picture and another to another, and there is danger of losing the old constituency while you are attracting the new. And thus it is more

profitable to hammer away upon the tonic chord of ordinary humane feeling, where we are all alike, and will go patiently out and pay down our fifteen cents for the same old song."

But if the magazine art of the present has sunk into the depths of commercialism, the art of the future-and the future never surrenders interest for the editor of The Masses-will possess all those admirable qualities that are missing in the magazines of to-day. And to bring about this ideal state, editors no less than artists must change their point of view. Editors will live "the experimental life." "Fear and a failure of the spirit of adventure are the death of art. Recklessness is its life." Editorial art is to arise and cast out the spirit of commercial timidity. The spirit of free and genuine sport is to prevail in editorial sancta. The revolutionary editor concludes:

"It is our part, however, to point out that not the painting of any particular truths will distinguish the art of the future, but the freedom to paint them alla freedom which carries untold possibilities and untold dangers. If the new love of this freedom has arisen in artists who are big enough to stand it, then we are on the verge of a great era in popular art. But if these artists prove only little bantams, who have their heads turned the first time they find out they can crow-it is vain to hope for anything but a new series of monomanias. The fetters are removed the wings are free-there is room for untrammeled and universal genius. But self-infatuation, attitudinizing, artificiality of technique, erotic attachment to a queer subject matter, these internal fetters are as quick and sure death to liberty as academic custom or ancestor worship.

"If intelligence is given its sovereignty, and if men of universality arise, the twentieth century will see an age of art and poetry surpassing that of Elizabeth, because to the splendid paganism and great gusto of the free in those days will be added the ideals and the achievements of science and democracy. But if intelligence is renounced for temperament, if Art and not Life becomes the center of interest, if men prove too little for the adventure-then debauchment and dementia praecox are the harvest, and the hope is postponed."

F

UTURISM is not a thing of the past. The Great War has given Marinetti and his followers an opportunity for renewed activity and more manifestoes. They lost no time in violating Italian neutrality by declaring themselves uncompromizingly against Germany. A manifesto entitled "Il vestito antineutrale" was issued from their headquarters in the Corso Venezia in Milan shortly after the outbreak of hostilities. Marinetti, Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo and Piatta were jailed for this. audacity; but from the prison they issued a "futurist synthesis of the war" in which Servia, Belgium, France, Russia, England, Montenegro, Japan and Italy were diagrammatically declared to be "eight poets against their pedantic critics"-the latter being Germany and Austria. "Old cathedrals do not interest us," these futurists shouted in type, "but we deny to medieval, plagiaristic, stupid Germany-lacking creative genius-the futuristic right to destroy works of art. The right belongs solely to the Italian creative genius, capable of creating a new and greater beauty on the ruins of antique beauty."

This "new and greater" beauty with which the futurists are ready to build new cities on the ruins of those destroyed by the war is well illustrated in the manifesto on futurist architecture by Antonio Sant' Elia. Signor Sant'Elia is prepared to design whole futurist cities. His preliminary designs are strangely American in spirit, altho he disclaims and combats "all the pseudo-architecture of the advanceguard Austrian, Hungarian, German, and American." He is equally opposed to all classical architecture; the recon

THE FUTURIST CITY

There is something essentially American in the architecture of Sant' Elia. He depicts the buildings of the future not only scraping the sky but piercing the earth. Featured in this design are external elevators, galleries, covered passageways, and roadways in three levels, one for cars, one for automobiles, one for pedestrians. A wireless telegraph station is another essential provision.

struction and the reproduction of the palaces of antiquity; to perpendicular and horizontal lines, cubic and pyramidic forms, because they are static instead of dynamic; and to the use of

(TUTTE LE FORZE

TUTTE LE DEBOLEZZE

DEL GENIO

CONTRO

MARINETTI

BOCCIONI

CARRA

RUSSOLO
PIATTI

Dal Cellulare di Milano, 20 Settembre 1914

DIREZIONE DEL MOVIMENTO FUTURISTA: Carso Venezia, 61 MILANO

jail.

massive, voluminous, durable, antiquated, or costly materials of construction. He insists upon the abolition of the decorative in architecture. Buildings of cement, of glass, of steel, without pictorial or sculptural decoration, rich only in the beauty that grows out of their own lines and their own mass, "extraordinarily brutal in their mechanical simplicity, higher and broader than is necessary and not in conformance with municipal laws, they ought to soar toward the sky out of a tumultuous abyss." The street itself is to sink into the depths of the earth by several planes in order to accommodate metropolitan traffic, and connected by "very swiftly-moving escalators."

To the reader of Jules Verne and some of the earlier romances of Mr. Herbert George Wells, it is a difficult task to consider Signor Sant' Elia's futuristic architecture very seriously, but it is impossible not to admire his imagination. He is sanguine enough to present a drawing in detail for a proposed aeroplane and railway station. He reveals an amazing-and perhaps peculiarly Italian-admiration for elevators. Elevators, he claims, ought not

to be relegated "like solitary worms" to the enclosures of stairways. Stairs having become useless, the elevators ought to be placed boldly, like huge serpents of iron and glass, along the façade. The futurist building should resemble some gigantic machine, dynamic in all its elements. As opposed to the architecture of the past, Signor Sant' Elia boldly proclaims the elements of the futuristic architecture in the following manner:

"That futurist architecture is the architecture of calculus, of bold temerity and of simplicity-the architecture of reinforced concrete, of steel, of glass, of prepared board, of textile, and of materials substituted for wood, stone, and plaster, will permit us to obtain the maximum of lightness and elasticity;

"That futurist architecture is not thereby an arid combination of practicality and utility but remains art, synthetic and expressive;

"That oblique and elliptical lines are dynamic, and by their inherent nature have an emotive power a thousand times superior to those of the perpendicular and horizontal . . . ;

"That decoration, as something superimposed on architecture, is an absurdity, and that only upon the use and original disposition of the elementary materials, either as they are or violently colored depends the decorative value of futurist ar'chitecture;

"That, as the ancients drew the inspiration for their art from nature, we-ma

STEVENSON INDICTED

terially and spiritually artificialought to find our inspiration in the novel

mechanical

world we have created, of which architecture ought to be the finest expression, the most complete synthesis, the most efficacious artistic integration.

"Architecture ought to mean the ability to harmonize man with his environment, freely and boldly, and thus rendering the world of things a direct projection of the world of spirit.

"From the architecture thus conceived, plastic and linear habits cannot be born, because the fundamental character of futurist architecture will be its caducity and transitory character. Houses will last only during our own lives."

119

I

LITERARY ARTIST?

to accuse Stevenson of practically killing romance as a true art of fiction. As the leading admirer of the over-neglected George Gissing, Mr. Swinnerton emphasizes the importance of the ideas contained in a work of fiction as opposed to the manner of expressing these ideas. The ultimate and authentic aim of the artist should be to express ideas. Stevenson, we are told, toyed with fiction he was lacking in any great ideas.

"We find that Stevenson, reviving the never-very-prosperous romance of England, created a school which has brought romance to be the sweepings of an old costume chest. I am afraid we must ad

mit that Stevenson has become admittedly

a writer of the second class, because his

ideals have been superseded by other ideals and shown to be the ideals of a day, a season, and not the ideals of an age. We may question whether Stevenson did not make the novel a toy when George Eliot had finished making it a treatise. . . .

"It is no longer possible for a serious. critic to place him among the great ters-except in the boy's book and the writers because in no department of letshort story-has he written work of firstclass importance. His plays, his poems, his essays, his romances

- all are

seen

...

nowadays to be consumptive. What remains to us, apart from a fragment, a handful of tales, and two boy's books is a series of fine scenes-what I have called 'plums'-and the charm of Stevenson's personality."

It is to be doubted, however, whether Swinnerton is justified in attributing what he deems Stevenson's literary failure to poor health. Tuberculosis, it is claimed, was the malign influence in his work. It made him timid and over-cautious. "He was obliged to take care of himself, to be home at night, to allow himself to be looked after. Was not that the greatest misfortune that could have befallen him? Is the work that is produced by nervous reaction from prudence ever likely to enjoy an air of real vitality? In the versatility of Stevenson we may observe his restlessness, the nervous fluttering of the mind which has no physical health to nourish it."

If Swinnerton's criticism seems to be too astringent, one reason for it may doubtless be found in the idolatrous attitude that has been too common among many of Stevenson's admirers and that has perhaps been overcultivated in