H.L. Mencken

Baltimore Evening Sun/February 12, 1916

§1.

The Province of Art.—The common notion that it is the function of art to represent nature is quite as hollow as most other common notions. The true function of art is to criticize, improve and edit nature. The sounds in a Beethoven symphony (or even, for that matter, in a Tschaikowsky symphony) are infinitely more orderly, varied and beautiful than those of the woods. The worst flute is never as bad as the worst soprano; the best cello is better than the best tenor. . . . Even the most respectable music suffers, of course, by the fact that it is performed by human beings; the performance one actually hears is no more than a sorry burlesque upon the composition imagined by the composer. Some day the natural clumsiness and imperfection of fingers, lips and gullets will be overcome by mechanical devices, and we shall have Beethoven in such wonderful and perfect beauty that he will stagger us. If half so much ingenuity had been lavished upon music machines as has been lavished upon the telephone, the steam engine and the repeating rifle, we would have had mechanical orchestras long ago, and the drink evil would have ceased to corrupt the tone art. . . . When that change comes, of course, it will rob the performance of music of the charm of personality. But the charm of personality does not help music; it hinders it. It is not a reinforcement to music; it is a rival. When a beautiful singer comes upon the stage two shows, as it were, go on at once: the first, the music show, and then the arms, shoulders, neck, nose, ankles, eyes and ruby lips—in brief, the sex-show. The second of these shows, to the majority of persons present, is more interesting than the first—to the men because of the sex interest, and to the women because of their professional or technical interest—and so music is forced into the background. What it becomes, indeed, is no more than a half-heard accompaniment to an imagined anecdote, just as color, line and mass become mere accomplishments to an anecdote in a picture by an English academician, or, to be strictly neutral, by a sentimental German of the Boecklin kidney.

§2.

This purified and dephlogisticated music, to be sure, will never appeal to the mob, which will keep on demanding its chance to gloat over gaudy, voluptuous women, and fat, scandalous tenors. The mob, even disregarding its insatiable appetite for the improper, is a natural hero worshiper. It loves, not the beautiful, but the strange, the unprecedented, the astounding. A soprano who can gargle her way up to G sharp in altissimo interests it almost as much as a contralto who has been third wife to a grand duke. IF it cannot get the tenor who receives $3,000 a night, it will take the tenor who fought the manager with bungstarters last Thursday. But this is merely saying that the tastes and desires of the mob have nothing to do with music as an art. For its ears, as for its eyes, it demands anecdotes—on the one hand the Suicide Symphony, “The Forge in the Forest” and the general run of opera, and on the other hand such things as “The Angelus,” “Playing Grandpa” and the so-called “Mona Lisa.” It cannot imagine art as devoid of moral content, as beauty pure and simple. It always demands something to edify it, or, failing that, to shock it. . . .

(Impropriety, of course, is a concept that belongs exclusively to persons obsessed by ethical ideas. All improper art is addressed to them, and the pleasure they get out of it arises out of the universal human desire to break bonds, the yearning for freedom, the will to power. The man who has risen above petty ethical superstitions gets little pleasure out of impropriety, for very few ordinary phenomena seem to him to be improper. Thus a Frenchman, viewing the nude statues which bedizen his native art galleries, either enjoys them æsthetically—which is seldom possible—or not at all, but to the visiting American Sunday-school school superintendent they offer a veritable debauch of naughty recreation.)

§3.

The New Painting.—For the first time in history there is now in progress a revolt against the anecdote in painting. I do not refer here to the revolt of the so-called impressionists, nor to that of the later cubists and vorticists, for these fellows, after all, attempt nothing really new: the only thing they venture is to do an old thing in a somewhat new way. I mean the rebellion of the synchromists, who happen, by the way, to be chiefly Americans. These heretics propose to abolish subject in painting altogether and to achieve beauty by a mere arrangement of colors, and through them, of lines and forms. What they aim at, in brief, is to make painting as pure an art as music is in such a composition, say, as Schubert’s C major symphony. They hold that the eye is sufficient unto itself, that it can be charmed to distraction without the help of sobs, melodrama or sex appeal. They argue that the best conceivable painting of a definite object or group of objects can be no better, at bottom, than the best conceivable color photograph, and that it is thus useless to waste time acquiring a technical dexterity which may be rendered quite useless by some improvement in color photography tomorrow….

Here, of course, they are partly right and partly wrong. They are right when they argue that subject hampers and vulgarizes painting, that a thing cannot be truly beautiful which makes the gross emotional appeal of a street fight, a Presidential harangue for votes or a college yell; but they are wrong when they argue that the best conventional painting is no more than hand-made color photography. As a matter of fact, even the worst painting, supposing it to show any technical skill at all, is an attempt to criticize, improve and edit nature. The painter does not show us the thing as it actually exists, but as he himself (either consciously or subconsciously) wishes it existed. He always adds something or takes away something, if only from the rate of vibration of a shadow. . . .

However, the synchromists and their fellow-iconoclasts are right in rating his work rather cheaply, for whatever his efforts to edit nature, he still clings to her visible forms very closely, at least so long as he offers an anecdote, and he is thus to be fairly judged by his success at reproducing her beauty, either directly or by paraphrase. Everyone knows that he seldom succeeds very well, that his picture, as a representation of nature, is almost always inaccurate, and often quite libelous. The mob makes a saying of his inevitable failure: “’Tis a picture no artist can paint.” Who has ever put upon canvas the exquisite luminosity of a woman’s flesh? The fire in a patriot’s eye? The haze upon a valley meadow at dawn? . . . The painter of pictures is thus in the same boat with the composer of program music. He does not improve nature, nor even represent nature fairly; he merely makes a mock of nature, like a bull-fiddler tackling the Kreutzer sonata. He is thus a brother to the stonecutter, the hairdresser, the popular novelist and the ox. . . . Let him, for his pains, have a kick in the pantaloons. . . .

§4.

The Duelists.—A poet is usually a very incompetent critic of his own work. And a critic is often even worse.

§5.

The Opera of the Future.—What I have been saying about the bad influence of the performer upon music contains nothing new. Many other men have pondered the question, and some of them have even sought a solution. For example, Richard Strauss. His new ballet, “The Legend of Joseph,” first produced in Paris just before the war, is an attempt to write an opera without singers. All of the music is in the orchestra; the folks on the stage merely go through a pantomime. (The name ballet is misleading: there is really no dancing, but only silent acting.) Thus, the amorous sentiments of Joseph are announced, not by some stall-fed tenor, bur by the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth violins (it is a Straus score!), with the incidental help of the rest of the strings, the wood-wind, the brass and the percussion. The next step will be the substitution of marionettes for actors. The removal of the orchestra to a sort of trench, out of sight of the audience, is already an accomplished fact at Munich. The end will be pure music, perhaps with the cavortings of the marionettes transferred to a cinema screen. . . .

Strauss always looks ahead. He sees around corners. His Alpine symphony forecasts the sentimental reaction that the war is bound to produce in Germany. It is program music of the most infantile variety: one imagines him snickering as he wrote some of it. The Pastoral contains no more naif representation of stage thunder. . . . But here and there! Ah, here and there Strauss spits on his hands!

§6.

The Artist Himself.—Sitting the other evening at the Biertisch, empty and easy in mind, I was startled by the news, issuing from a comrade in arms, that the late Johannes Brahms, for all the masculinity of his music, said his say to the world in a high, piping, adenoidish voice, not unlike that of a cracked clarinet. I had imagined him bawling like a fishmonger, almost like an evangelist. Other details were less horrible: he always wore shoes run down at the heel, his waistcoat hung half way to his knees, he affected a faded bowler hat, he died worth 350,000 marks. But, after all, such things are not surprising. The late John Millington Synge lived in a hotel in Paris of the sort that even the French police occasionally look to, and wore a celluloid collar all his days. He wrote “Riders to the Sea” on a second-hand American typewriter. Like Whistler, he clung to detachable cuffs. Worse, he read the New York Herald. . . . Imagine Brahms singing the second subject of the slow movement of his Fourth symphony! Imagine Synge making notes for “The Playboy” on those cuffs! . . .

§7.

Dreiser at the Stake.—The newspaper reviews of Theodore Dreiser’s last novel, “The ‘Genius,’” are characteristically American. That is to say, they apply strictly moral criteria to a work of art, and denounce the novelist as a bad artist because his hero happens to be a loose liver. In dozens of them this hero, Eugene Witla by name, is depicted as a sort of Americanized Don Giovanni, a wholesale voluptuary, a slave to desire. The truth is, of course, that he is much less a slave to desire than a slave to sentiment. The number of women in his life is actually much less than the number in the life of the average vestryman. The thing he really seeks in his lifelong quest is affection: he has an insatiable craving for woman’s petting, woman’s soothing; he is a sentimentalist of the most arrant type, and in the end he is led by the noise by a flapper of 17 or 18. Don Juan was no such mushy fellow. The essence of the true Don Juanean character is that it scarcely differentiates woman from woman—surely an absurd thing to charge against so soft a fellow as Witla. . . . Dreiser himself has helped along the common misunderstanding of his books by calling the series of which “The Financier” and “The Titan” are parts “a trilogy of desire.” The corn-fed critic, always a Puritan and hence obsessed by sex fears, reads “desire for women,” “desire of the flesh.” But Cowperwood, for all his light polygamy, is anything but a mere woman-chaser. The huge desire that really moves him, even in his love affairs, is a desire for power, der Wille zur Macht, our old friend out of Nietzsche. Women, to him, are merely so many little forts to be laid siege to and taken—not grand fortresses and intrenched camps, remember, but merely minor redoubts in the outskirts. True enough, one of them comes near ruining him at the outset of his career, but that is no more than a reminder that a small boy with a squirrel gun killed General Ross. In the end Cowperwood conquers the sex and reduces it to a sort of slavery. . . . In brief, he represents an attempt (and a very successful one) to picture a first-rate man. The story of Delilah belongs to myth. Second and third rate men are destroyed by women, but not first-rate ones. . . .

§8.

Incidentally, it is curious (and highly diverting) to observe Dreiser being mauled on the ground that he is a German, and hence accursed. To the moral balderdash which poisons American criticism now add patriotic fustian. The fair critic of one journal (the Chicago Tribune, which modestly calls itself “the world’s greatest newspaper”) solemnly warns American parents to be prepared to shed their last drop of blood defending their children against such abhorrent agents of Kultur! . . . Eheu, some loud laughing will be done in the not-distant future, and it will not be at the expense of the Dreisers!