Horace Holley

“ A man's life is a rhythm. Eating, sleeping, working, playing, loving, thinking—everything. And when we live so that each activity comes at the right interval, we gain power. When one interrupts another, we lose. Weakness is merely the thrust of one impulse against another, instead of their combined thrust against the world. When I came here, feeling like a criminal, I was obeying the one right instinct in a welter of emotions. ”

“ I perceived that the "read-aloud" play has a distinct character and function of its own. In the long run, everything human rises or falls to the level of speech. The culminating point, even of action the most poignant or emotion the most intimate, is where it finds the right word or phrase by which it is translated into the lives of others. Every literary form has always paid, even though usually unconscious, homage to the drama. But the drama as achieved on the stage includes, for various reasons, only a small portion of its own inherent possibility. ”

“ THE TELEGRAM
Perron, a stout, middle-aged figure, is seated in front of his watchmaker's establishment near the Place St. Sulpice. The awning sags, and the shop wears an air of sober discouragement. Whatever expression the years have left Perron's round face capable of is concentrated upon the changing scenes cinematographed to his mind's eye by some strong and unusual emotion. Alexandre, a tall, stooped man, with a flowing black tie, bows in passing with old-fashioned punctiliousness to Perron, who apparently is unaware of his presence. Suddenly Perron starts, rubs his eyes, and glares about. ”

“ Vera
Jean!
Jean
You read a play by Strindberg, and you say it's very strong, very artistic, but all the while you believe it is only the nightmare of a diseased mind. It's just a play—you shut the book and return to "real" life, thankfully. Well, the Strindberg play has been my real life, and real life my play, my impossible dream. You can't imagine how terrifying it is to feel the situation develop around you. Two bodies caught naked in an endless wilderness of thorns. Every movement one makes to free the other only wounds him the more. ”

“ For love there is neither here nor hereafter, but the realization of love is ever according to his triumph. This has come to me suddenly, a light in the darkness, and I have won the truth by supreme pain.
The Woman
That, too, Paul. Pain.... I have been weak. I gave way to my nerves, but now in your presence I am strong again, and I shall not fail you.
The Voice
My presence is where your love is, and as your love so my nearness. Love me as I love you now, and I shall be more real to you than your hands and your eyes. ”

“ Joe
Art changes as life changes. Art has always changed. If it didn't, why isn't your Japanese art just like Greek art? And Greek art like the Italian?
Mr. Wentworth
Oh, in that way, of course. But all the great masters obey the eternal laws of beauty!
Joe
There aren't any eternal laws of beauty! There's only the eternal impulse to create. Every artist has to express himself in his own way. What you call the "eternal laws" are merely the particular expressions your own favorite painters happened to work out in their time. ”

“ To think that you, a watchmaker and a petit bourgeois, should experience what many a saint has died without realizing! I salute you, mystic, descendent of prophets and seers!
Perron
But what was it then?
Alexandre
What was it? A mystical experience, an experience of the highest order, like unto Saint Therese, though in symbols of mundane things. But that is the fault of the age more than yourself. With more practise your mind will exhibit even greater power. You must continue in the path. ”

“ Uncle Richard
Richard, a man begins by working for himself alone, then he works for the woman he marries, but even that is not enough. One by one I have seen every motive that ever impelled or guided me grow insufficient and have to be replaced. Ambition and love, once satisfied, point forward. We must always have a future before us, Richard, unless we are willing to become machines of habit. At one point or another most men do become machines. Thank heaven, I never could. In these last few months I have begun to realize.... It was your Aunt Ethel's tragedy that she had no children. ”

“ On my way back to town I happened to think of my last visit with you, and my state of mind returned, my feeling of dependence and the gloomy Thanksgiving dinner. The shock of contrast between my old and my new self stopped me short in the road. In a flash I saw the lying materialism on which the world is based, the curse of dollar worship that keeps opportunity away from the young, at the same time it keeps the old in a prison of loneliness and suspicion. ”

“ He detested the stupidity of wealth and poverty, he rebelled against laws that aren't laws, but only interests enforced by authority, he fought against the sheer deadness of prejudice. How he hated all that! And why not? You see, Vera, he was sensitive to it not only as a thinker, but as a musician, too. It was all a part of the discord, and what I used to think his wasting himself was really an effort to create a larger harmony. He used to say that the beauty of music is only the image of beauty in life, and that life must come first. ”

“ If we worshipped life instead of metal disks, we would see that the young are not really the heirs of the old, but the old are heirs of the young. Then and there I vowed to keep myself clear of the whole wretched tangle, even if I had to carry laundry all my life, so that if any one ever tried to fetter me I could fling his words back in his face! ”

“ Vera
People wondered. The first time I met Paul—
Jean
What do you feel?
Vera
I wondered, afterward, what it really was. He seemed to impress me like a powerful motor car stalled in a muddy road.
Jean
Ah. I know!
Vera
Poor child.
Jean
No. You don't understand, I was unhappy, in the ordinary sense, unbelievably so. But that wasn't all. I was alive! I lived as the man lives who faints in the dark mine underground, and I lived as the aviator lives, thrilling against the sun, and as the believer in a world of infidels. That was what he did for me. ”

“ I learned that "good" is the rhythm of the man's personal nature, and that "evil" is merely the confusion of the same impulses. As time went on it became instinctive to live for and by the rhythm. Everything about my life here was caught up and used in the vision of power—drawing water, cutting wood, digging in the garden, dawn. It was all marvelous—I couldn't help writing those poems. They are the natural joys and sorrows of ten years. As a matter of fact, though, I grew to care less and less about writing, as living became fuller and richer. People write too much. ”

“ A man who has lived it all through, you know, and found out something real about it; and he sits there calm and strong, something like a tree himself; and every once in a while somebody comes along—a boy, you know,—and the boy talks to him all about himself, just as we imagine we'd like to with our fathers, if they weren't so busy, or our teachers, if they didn't depend so much upon books, or our ministers, if we thought they would really understand,—and the old man doesn't say much maybe, but the boy goes away much stronger and happier.... ”

“ But what is art, if the Louvre isn't?
Silvia
Don't you see, Mr. Wentworth? If you could only get for a moment into the stream of experience where Joe and the others brought me! A picture is art as long as it's alive—as long as it can give back the fresh, first-hand impulses that were put into it. After that—when life has flowed on and set up new impulses requiring a different expression—then a picture drops back upon a lower level. What Joe calls history.
Joe
Like everything else.
Mr. Wentworth
But you put art on the same plane as invention. An improved motor car scraps the old model. ”

“ Walter.
I suppose I ought to say that I want to be an artist rather than a builder's draughtsman, but that isn't really it. I mean that behind the brain I think with every day there is another brain, bigger and wiser, that keeps asking the chance to show the rest of me what and how to act. In ordinary things the everyday mind gets along by itself all right, but I feel the other self there all the while, wanting me to begin something different, something to let it escape from dreaming to doing. ”

“ Don't imagine that only the hermits, like me, live instinctively. It can be done in New York, too, only one mustn't be so sensitive to others.... After all, friend, we were wrong in saying that this power lies outside the world of skyscrapers and business. It doesn't lie outside nor inside. It cuts across everything. Do you see? For it's all a matter of the man's own soul.
The Boy
Then?
The Man
We can't live in a vacuum. The more you feel the force, the more you must act. The more you can act. And in the long run it doesn't matter what you do, if you do what your own instinct bids. ”

“ Joe
It isn't only what you call the "younger Frenchmen and Russians" who are learning how to paint—the modern movement has spread all over.
Mr. Wentworth
Of course, I don't pretend to be an artist myself, but I have always studied and loved pictures, and when you say "learning how to paint"—
Joe
That's exactly what it is. Learning how to paint. Learning what art is. Getting life into it instead of abstract ideas.
Mr. Wentworth
Art? But art is beauty! Eternal beauty. You can't change art over night, like a fashion! ”

“ Moreover, by deliberately setting out for a drama independent of the stage, a drama involving only the intimate circle of studio or library, I feel that an entire new range of experiences is opened up to literature itself. Nothing is more thrilling than direct, self-revealing speech ”

“ Afterward Aunt Ethel and I talked in the living room while I waited for the train. She seemed ill at ease. She alluded to your affairs once or twice, saying that you were quite embarrassed by the state of politics, and how sad it was that people couldn't do all they wanted to in this world for others.
Uncle Richard, when Joseph came with the carriage, Aunt Ethel kissed me, cried, and gave me—a twenty dollar bill. Good God! ”

“ Everybody has difficulties, troubles, and I believe in helping a fellow every time. Life piles up too high against one sometimes, but a little shove from the other side will move it away. I never believed in the devil take the hindmost, at all. ”

“ Joe
I mean that it's a disgrace that Americans only study and only buy old masters. It's a burning shame that all they know about art is what they have been taught in books. They let their own artists starve—they make them come over here—while they bid up a Raphael like a block of shares. What good does it do Raphael? ”

“ Here's Rex! Rex, know my good friend. I know you will like him. Rex always cares for the people I do, don't you, Rex?
The Boy
Of course, I see one thing: it's the people nearest one that make the most difference. Mother, now, she will understand.... You don't believe in marrying, though, do you? ”

“ I admit there are dead pictures, too many of them, but they are the canvasses that were still-born. The masterpieces in the Louvre still give out impulses—beautiful impulses—to many of us, thank heaven!
Silvia
But that's just it! The impulses you mean aren't those of art at all. They—
Joe
Those pictures don't give out impulses to the artist. The impulses they do give out are only the emotions that satisfy the student who has learned some rules and then sees the rules worked out. The artist produced the rules as a side issue, but you are trying to make the rules produce the artist. ”

“ I had no idea of this when I came and—but you see, it's not only the studio an artist requires, it's atmosphere, the atmosphere of enthusiasm and feeling. You might as well give a business man a brand new office equipment and turn him loose on the Sahara desert as to shut a painter up in a town like this and expect him to create. Artists need atmosphere just as business men need banks. It's the meeting of like forces that makes anything really go.
Uncle Richard
But we are not wholly barbarous here, Richard. This, for example, and no first-class New England city lacks culture. ”

“ Thus I entertain the hope that others will take up the method of this book, the method of natural, intimate, heart-to-heart dialogue carried on in a suitable setting, and with attendant action as briefly indicated; for the discovery awaits each one that speech, independent of the tradition of the stage, has the power of rendering old themes new and vital, as well as suggesting new themes and situations. ”

“ Lots of us are cursed with the same instinct. I am, and sometimes I believe your father is, too. It ought to be that when one sees a thing clearly in his own mind, and knows it is best, others—at least those near to him—should somehow be aware of it. But they usually are not.
Walter
No. And it's those nearest one that it's hardest to say things to. But to-night, somehow, I don't feel that way.
Mrs. Everitt
Tell me.
Walter
It's this architecture. You remember when I used to play with water colors all the while, and say I was going to be an artist? ”

“ What I can't understand is how nowadays people seem more grown up and competent than those men were, in a way, and we do such wonderful things—skyscrapers and aeroplanes—and yet we aren't half so wonderful as they were in the Old Testament with their jugs and their wooden plows. ”

“ He said afterward that she started in flattering him and asking him to play for her some time.... Then Sbarovitch rushed in, seizing the woman and cursing Paul with mouthfuls of Slavic hate. So that dream ended!
Vera
But why? Was it Sbarovitch's wife?
Jean
No, worse luck—it was his mistress. Ah, you can't imagine the re-action from such disappointments! The long, slow warming to the full possibility of the occasion, until the artist's mind and body become one leaping flame—and then the sudden fall into icy water. It takes months to work up to the same pitch again.... And then Rome. ”