Copyright, 1921, By
Boni & Liveright, Inc.
The papers in this book are not intended in any way to be professionaltreatises. They must be viewed in the light of entertainingconversations. Their possible value lies in their directness ofimpulse, and not in weight of argument. I could not wish to go intothe qualities of art more deeply. A reaction, to be pleasant, must besimple. This is the apology I have to offer: Reactions, then, throughdirect impulse, and not essays by means of stiffened analysis.
Marsden Hartley.
Some of the papers included in this book have appeared inArt and Archeology, The Seven Arts, The Dial, TheNation, The New Republic, and The Touchstone. Thanksare due to the editors of these periodicals for permissionto reprint.
Perhaps the most important part of Criticism is the fact that itpresents to the creator a problem which is never solved. Criticism isto him a perpetual Presence: or perhaps a ghost which he will notsucceed in laying. If he could satisfy his mind that Criticism was acertain thing: a good thing or a bad, a proper presence or anirrelevant, he could psychologically dispose of it. But he can not.For Criticism is a configuration of responses and reactions sointricate, so kaleidoscopic, that it would be as simple to categoryLife itself.
The artist remains the artist precisely in so far as he rejects thesimplifying and reducing process of the average man who at an earlyage 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 thevast Ceremonial of wonder, from the deep Poem of Being, into someparticular detail of life wherein he hopes to achieve comfort or atleast shun pain. Not so, the artist. In the moment when he elects toavoid by whatever[xii] makeshift the raw agony of life, he ceases to befit to create. He must face experience forever freshly: reduce lifeeach day anew to chaos and remould it into order. He must be always awilling virgin, given up to life and so enlacing it. Thus only may heretain and record that pure surprise whose earliest voicing is thefirst cry of the infant.
The unresolved expectancy of the creator toward Life should be his waytoward Criticism also. He should hold it as part of his Adventure. Heshould understand in it, particularly when it is impertinent, stupidand cruel, the ponderable weight of Life itself, reacting upon hissearch for a fresh conquest over it. Though it persist unchanged inits rôle of purveying misinformation and absurdity to the Public, heshould know it for himself a blessed dispensation.
With his maturity, the creator's work goes out into the world. And inthis act, he puts the world away. For the artist's work defines: anddefinition means apartness: and the average man is undefined in thesocial body. Here is a danger for the artist within the very essenceof his artistic virtue. During the years of his apprenticeship, he hasstruggled to create for himself an essential world out of ex