Obscurity in Modern Art

[This is another article giving expression to "The Younger Point of View," and providing an opportunity for our readers under thirty to express their views, which are not necessarily those of the

Spectator.—En. Spectator.] IN newspapers and reviews we constantly see articles on the outspokenness of the present age. Its equally irritating secretiveness escapes notice, perhaps because the fault is underlined, not by the lip-stick, but by the pen and paint-brush. Nowadays an obscure atavism —mostly negroid—and platitudes inarticulately expressed obtain a good hearing.

I fear, however, I am only amused by the polyrhytlunic cacophonies of Stravinski and Scriabine ; and I sympa- thize with the young man, hearing Antheil's symphony for forty pianolas at the Carnegie Hall, who "rose to his feet . . . . during the long ringing of the electric bells in the Ballet Mecanique, and shaking his head like a tormented bull stumbled blindly out over the feet beyond him." Philis- tine, too, I would rather remain than bother to construe the syncopated opinions of such a music critic as this : 44 • • • • in Stravinski's Harmusication occurs Ilithertooze, in normalcyairgulpings of waneMatmity'sclutchatdiatoney Youthunintresting sough-frequency, Rummage-dash- . giddy Polyton In and Aboutisms . . • . Contrast here Antheil's Death of Machines sonata (this, merely his first uniPersonal Achieve) – – in one Dervflash Arpeggio Taken out of his context of Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Gallic misprints, in Transition no. 13, Mr. A. Lincoln Gillespie, Jnr., seems a poor exponent of a bad system of speedwriting. If questioned, he might well reply in Steme's words, "Ask my pen ; it governs me ; I govern not it." And his neologism, about ism, is an excellent term for his own style. Like so many aesthetic hypocrites, he has read the anagrammatic patchworks of James Joyce ; and failing to appreciate what method there is in Joyce's madness, he has uttered his shrill blasphemy against reason without even the pretext of a purpose.

Mr. R. H. Wilenski has shown that the modern" archi- tectural artist," if he is confronted with a cottage, an oak tree, and a sky behind, will oust from his mind the various associations—technical as well as sentimental—that would have stirred the old naturalistic painter. He dis- misses all ideas connected with the forms themselves— that "the cottage happens to be his home or. . . . has an old-world character," that the oak tree sometimes bears acorns, and stands perilously near the cottage. He treats (concludes Mr. Wllenski) not the forms that compose the subject, but the relation between those forms. "Eventu- ally he has in his mind a series of symbolic fragments which he fits together like a jigsaw puzzle to create a single symbol for his general perception of formal- relations."

The same process has been applied to words and_ phrases, notes and tunes. Joyce takes his words, not as the mechanical components of a sentence, fettered to one place and meaning by the syntax ; he seeks to regard them as symbols, capable of shifting their position and adapting their form to the pleasure of the writer, just as the modernist painter shifts and adapts his forms until their interrelation makes the composite symbol he desires. But where in a picture the result is at least a pattern, in writing it becomes a blur of confused suggestions.

Picasso and James Joyce have had parallel careers as evolutionary stylists in their gradual secession to a world apart. Beginning with conventional caricatures like those of Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso has ended by arriving at a seemingly arbitrary scheme of lines and dotted planes : what appears to be a pea above a dental plate roughly sketched, now satisfies him as a portrait. His admirers pretend to see him advancing towards his artistic goal, but I fear I see him studiously moving away from it. Joyce started with the reasonable "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," followed it with the less intelli- gible "Ulysses," and continues with "The Work in Progress," a potpourri of contrasting sensations and sug- gestions. I have said that there was method in the mad- ness of Joyce ; but the method is too infantile to justify the ravages of the madness. It may be summed up as an attempt to get five meanings into four letters." Several sindays after whatsintime." " Thanacestross mound has swollup them all." Even when you do unravel sin and Sunday, Whitsun and what's in time, ancestor and pre- sumably, thanatos and albatross, swollow and wollup, you will find the threads no more homogeneous than the texture. The final effect is a bad burlesque of Lewis Carroll's beamish and frabjous burlesques.

Each artist has his own symbolic code. Miss Stein's seems to be repetition for emphasis, and repetition for eye-wash. She can say quite simply, "A book attaching importance to English and French names." But when she has nothing to say, she says, "Expect pages and by word of mouth. Who won won. Who won one. Mrs. kisses. Mrs. misses kisses, misses kisses most." Peter piper picked a peck of pickling pepper. . . ." She is the nursery poet of our age.

Miss Sitwell does not find the epithets of each sense sufficient to themselves, and has to transpose them :— " The morning light creaks down again."

Here she gives the symbol of the ear to the eye. Al- ternatively :— "The Fair's tunes like cherries and apricots

Ripened."

And of course her church bells are vermilion—not to look at, but to hear.

The composer uses often a theme from—say—a folk- song, and by altering it in rhythm and context, perhaps by a fugal treatment, finds his composite symbol. Mr. 1'. S. Eliot tries the same process in his poetry, mauling a quotation thus :— " . . . and yet there the nightingale

Filled all the desert with inviolable voice And still she cried, and still the world pursues, Jug Jug ' to dirty ears."

But I feel it would be more tasteful to daub clowns' faces on an empty canvas than to paint a red nose on the Mona Lisa. And though he has said that he employs obscure foreign words, like shantih and dayadhvam, as much for the sound as the meaning, Mr. Eliot thinks it necessary as it is) to provide a big glossary on "The Waste Land." Yet he congratulates Crashaw on needing no notes, in his essay on that poet, and upbraids Shelley because he him- self cannot imagine what silver sphere it is that

la

• • • • narrows

In the white dawn clear."

But at least Mr. Eliot thinks. The rest follow the Thele- mite creed, "Pais ce que vouldras." And we are left to ask with Epictetus : "To us, then, was reason given by the gods for our misfortune and misery ? "

JONATHAN CURLING.