Adventures in the Arts Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets

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                              ADVENTURES

                             IN THE ARTS



                               INFORMAL

                               CHAPTERS

                             ON PAINTERS

                              VAUDEVILLE

                              AND POETS



                                  BY

                           MARSDEN HARTLEY




                          BONI AND LIVERIGHT

                      Publishers        New York




                         COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY

                        BONI & LIVERIGHT, INC.

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PREFATORY NOTE


The papers in this book are not intended in any way to be professional
treatises. They must be viewed in the light of entertaining
conversations. Their possible value lies in their directness of
impulse, and not in weight of argument. I could not wish to go into
the qualities of art more deeply. A reaction, to be pleasant, must be
simple. This is the apology I have to offer: Reactions, then, through
direct impulse, and not essays by means of stiffened analysis.

MARSDEN HARTLEY.

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     Some of the papers included in this book have appeared in
     _Art and Archeology_, _The Seven Arts_, _The Dial_, _The
     Nation_, _The New Republic_, and _The Touchstone_. Thanks
     are due to the editors of these periodicals for permission
     to reprint.

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TO

ALFRED STIEGLITZ

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INTRODUCTION

TO

ADVENTURES IN THE ARTS


Perhaps the most important part of Criticism is the fact that it
presents to the creator a problem which is never solved. Criticism is
to him a perpetual Presence: or perhaps a ghost which he will not
succeed in laying. If he could satisfy his mind that Criticism was a
certain thing: a good thing or a bad, a proper presence or an
irrelevant, he could psychologically dispose of it. But he can not.
For Criticism is a configuration of responses and reactions so
intricate, so kaleidoscopic, that it would be as simple to category
Life itself.

The artist remains the artist precisely in so far as he rejects the
simplifying and reducing process of the average man who at an early
age puts Life away into some snug conception of his mind and race.
This one turns the key. He has released his will and love from the
vast Ceremonial of wonder, from the deep Poem of Being, into some
particular detail of life wherein he hopes to achieve comfort or at
least shun pain. Not so, the artist. In the moment when he elects to
avoid by whatever makeshift the raw agony of life, he ceases to be
fit to create. He must face experience forever freshly: reduce life
each day anew to chaos and remould it into order. He must be always a
willing virgin, given up to life and so enlacing it. Thus only may he
retain and record that pure surprise whose earliest voicing is the
first cry of the infant.

The unresolved expectancy of the creator toward Life should be his way
toward Criticism also. He should hold it as part of his Adventure. He
should understand in it, particularly when it is impertinent, stupid
and cruel, the ponderable weight of Life itself, reacting upon his
search for a fresh conquest over it. Though it persist unchanged in
its role of purveying misinformation and absurdity to the Public, he
should know it for himself a blessed dispensation.

With his maturity, the creator's work goes out into the world. And in
this act, he puts the world away. For the artist's work defines: and
definition means apartness: and the average man is undefined in the
social body. Here is a danger for the artist within the very essence
of his artistic virtue. During the years of his apprenticeship, he has
struggled to create for himself an essential world out of experience.
Now he begins to succeed: and he lives too fully in his own selection:
he lives too simply in the effects of his effort. The gross and
fumbling impact of experience is eased. The grind of ordinary
intercourse is dimmed. The rawness of Family and Business is refined
or removed. But now once more the world comes in to him, in the form
of the Critic. Here again, in a sharp concentrated sense, the world
moves on him: its complacency, its hysteria, its down-tending
appetites and fond illusions, its pathetic worship of yesterdays and
hatred of tomorrows, its fear-dogmas and its blood-avowals.

The artist shall leave the world only to find it, hate it only because
he loves, attack it only if he serves. At that epoch of his life when
the world's gross sources may grow dim, Criticism brings them back.
Wherefore, the function of the Critic is a blessing and a need.

The creator's reception of this newly direct, intense, mundane
intrusion is not always passive.