Gilbert Seldes

“ Fanny's refinement of technique is far beyond Jolson's; her effects are broad enough, but her methods are all delicate. The frenzy which takes hold of her is as real as his. With him she has the supreme pleasure of knowing that she can do no wrong—and her spirits mount and intensify with every moment on the stage. She creates rapidly and her characterizations have an exceptional roundness and fulness; when the demon attends there is nothing she cannot do. ”

“ It is a great pleasure to come upon an accredited masterpiece which preserves its authority, to mount the stairs and see the Winged Victory and know that it is good. But to have the same conviction about something finished a month ago, contemporaneous in every aspect yet associated with the great tradition of painting, with the indescribable thing we think of as the high seriousness of art and with a relevance not only to our life, but to life itself—that is a different thing entirely. ”

“ That relation is the thing which sets him so far above all the other one-man-show stars. Eddie Cantor gives at times the effect of being as energetic; Wynn is always and Tinney sometimes funnier. But no one else, except Miss Brice, so holds an audience in the hollow of the hand. The hand is steady; the audience never moves. And on the great nights when everything is right, Jolson is driven by a power beyond himself. One sees that he knows what he is doing, but one sees that he doesn’t half realize the power and intensity with which he is doing it. ”

“ The explanation is that few Europeans see our lively arts, which are almost secret to us, like the mysteries of a cult. Here the energy of America does break out and finds artistic expression for itself. Here a wholly unrealistic, imaginative presentation of the way we think and feel is accomplished. No single artist has yet been great enough to do the whole thing—but together the minor artists of America have created the American art. And if we could for a moment stop wanting our artistic expression to be necessarily in the great arts—it will be that In time—we should gain infinitely. ”

“ And all the more's the pity for the thinning out of our lives goes on from day to day and these lively arts are the only things which can keep us hard and robust and gay. In America where there is no recognized upper class to please, no official academic requirements to meet, the one tradition of gentility is as lethal as all the conventions of European society, and unlike those of Europe, our tradition provides no nourishment for the artist. ”

“ Whether, since the great arts are so capable of being practised to-day, it isn't sheer perversity to be satisfied with less. Whether praise of the minor arts isn't, at bottom, treachery to the great. I had always believed that there exists no such hostility between the two divisions of the arts which are honest—that the real opposition was between them, allied, and the polished fake. ”

“ He does more than make 'em laugh; he gives them what I am convinced is a genuine emotional effect ranging from the thrill to the shock. I remember coming home after eighteen months in Europe, during the war, and stepping from the boat to one of the first nights of Sinbad. The spectacle of Jolson's vitality had the same quality as the impression I got from the New York sky-line—one had forgotten that there still existed in the world a force so boundless, an exaltation so high, and that any one could still storm Heaven with laughter and cheers. ”

“ The poets, painters, composers who withdraw equally from the main stream of European tradition and from the untraditional natural expressions of America, have no sources of strength, no material to work with, no background against which they can see their shadows.
At the same time the contempt we have for the lively arts hurts them as much as it hurts us. We have all heard of the "great artist of the speaking stage" who will not lower himself by appearing on the screen; as familiar is the vaudevillian who will call himself an artist and has hankerings for the "legit" ”

“ For the most part the lively arts are inhibited by the necessity to provide "nice clean fun for the whole family"—a regrettable, but inevitable penalty for their universal appeal. For myself I should like to see a touch more of grossness and of licence in these arts; it would be a sign that the blood hadn't gone altogether pale, and that we can still roar cheerfully at dirty jokes, when they are funny.
What Europeans feel about American art is exactly the opposite of what they feel about American life. Our life is energetic, varied, constantly changing ”

“ There exists a small number of people who care intensely for the major and the minor arts and they are always being accused of "not caring really" for the lively ones, of pretending to care, or of running away from "the ancient wisdom and austere control" of Greek architecture or from the intense passion of Dante, the purity of Bach, the great totality of what humankind has created in art. ”

“ The truth is, of course, that when the mind isn't afflicted by a desire to be superior, it does nothing but multiply all the pleasures, and the intelligent spectator, in all conscience, feels and experiences more than the dull one. To such a spectator the lively arts have a validity of their own. He cares for them for themselves, and their relation to the other arts does not matter. ”

“ For all of our arguments that they won't work, break on the rock of the Utopian character which can make them work; and all our arguments that they are silly or trivial or inhuman are shattered by the direct rebuttal that the arguments only prove how much we are in need of Utopia. Of Mr Wells' Utopias it may always be said that they are not small private revenges, and I say this not from knowledge of him or of his private life, but from knowledge of his books. It is part of his pleasure in living to believe in perfectability through science ”

“ Miss Hilda Spong has been quite unintelligently criticized for over-acting. She is simply a perfect baroque, wholly in the tone of one side, the comic side, of the play. I have never seen Miss Le Gallienne play so well—although I wonder whether she does not err in the other extreme. It is all too tragic, too seriously conceived, too consciously the great young actress who can do second-rate poetic drama. She has a certain gift for comedy which she suppresses, in the interest not of the myth she creates, not of the character, but of herself. ”

“ Assuming that a blow from the butt of a revolver is not exactly artistic presentation, that "effectiveness" is not the only criterion, we have the beginning of a criticism of aesthetics. We know that the method does count, the creativeness, the construction, the form. We know also that while the part of humanity which is fully civilized will always care for high seriousness it will be quick to appreciate the high levity of the minor arts. ”

“ Most of the great works of art have reference to our time only indirectly—as they and we are related to eternity. And we require arts which specifically refer to our moment, which create the image of our lives. ”

“ I take for example a sport instead of an art. Nothing about baseball interests me except the newspaper reports of the games, so I speak without prejudice. In the days of Babe Ruth I took the sun in the bleachers once and saw that heavy hitter do exactly what he had to do on his first appearance for the day—a straight, business-like home run, much appreciated by the crowd, as any expert well-timed job is appreciated by Americans. ”

“ Their appearance of ease is a delight, there is no strain, no swelling muscles, no visible exploitation of strength. The Hellenic philosopher who held that the arrow shot from the bow is never in motion, but at rest from second to second at the succeeding points of its trajectory, might have seen some ancient forerunners of these athletes, for each of their movements seems at once a sculptured rest and a passage into another pose. ”

“ The reference in a great work of art is to something more profound; and no trivial theme has ever required, or had, or been able to bear, a high seriousness in treatment. Avoiding the question of creative genius, what impresses us in a work of art is the intensity or the pressure with which the theme, emotion, sentiment, even "idea" is rendered. ”

“ ONE man on the American stage, and one woman, are possessed—Al Jolson and Fanny Brice. Their demons are not of the same order, but together they represent all we have of the Great God Pan, and we ought to be grateful for it. For in addition to being more or less a Christian country, America is a Protestant community and a business organization—and none of these units is peculiarly prolific in the creation of demoniac individuals. ”

“ I do not mean that there are no satisfactory performances; nor that there are many unsuccessful attempts at great acting. What I mean is that on the strict and legitimate stage the effort to act is rapidly disappearing. I have never seen Duse; but even if every report about her excellence were misleading, there could be no question of her intention, of her style. She is, by every account, an actress; and the necessity to be an actress, or an actor, is one of those compulsions which civilization, or something, has considerably relaxed. ”

“ In addition to them—in addition, not in place of them—we must have arts which, we feel, are for ourselves alone, which no one before us could have cared for so much, which no one after us will wholly understand. ”

“ Naturally the presentation of the actual world is done with greater vigour, with more gusto, than the presentation of the ideal which lacks savour entirely. It is a beautiful, well-ordered, purposefully-striving universe contrasted with our world of chaos, selfishness, and trust in God or Competition or Evolution. ”

“ Conflict exists in this Utopia—conflict with the still unsubdued forces of nature. But there is no struggle of man against his fellow. There is scope for the great ambition to acquire and to use knowledge. There is room even for martyrdom.
The civilization of this Utopia is based upon Five Principles of which the first is the principle of Privacy, the second that of Free Movement, the third, Unlimited Knowledge, the fourth, that Lying is the Blackest Crime. Here Mr Wells interrupts the list ”

“ That the bogus arts are easier to appreciate, appeal to low and mixed emotions, and jeopardize the purity of both the great and the minor arts.
That the lively arts as they exist in America to-day are entertaining, interesting, and important. ”

“ There are some twenty workers in literature, music, painting, sculpture, architecture, and the dance who are doing this for us now—and doing it in such a manner as to associate our modern existence with that extraordinary march of mankind which we like to call the progress of humanity. ”

“ Quite to that point Fanny Brice hasn't reached. She hasn't, to begin with, the physical vitality of Jolson. But she has a more delicate mind and a richer humour—qualities which generally destroy vitality altogether, and which only enrich hers. She is first a great farceur; and in her songs she is exactly in the tradition of Yvette Guilbert, without the range, so far as we know, which enabled Mme Guilbert to create the whole of mediaeval France for us in ten lines of a song. ”

“ In spite of gentility the lively arts have held to something a little richer and gayer than the polite ones. They haven’t dared to be frank for a spurious sense of decency is backed by the police, and this limitation has hurt them ”

“ And the popular substitutes for these arts are so much under our eyes and in our ears that we fail to recognize them as decent contributions to the richness and intensity of our lives. The result, strange as it may appear to devotees of culture, is that our major arts suffer. ”

“ In the thirty-odd remaining numbers there are still some dreadfully soft spots, rapturously acknowledged by the audience (as is the Garden of Kama in the Greenwich Village Follies by an audience which underrates the fine macabre work of the Two Briants and the other excellent acrobats there) . Even apart from these spots Mr Ziegfeld's offering is not enough of a climax to be a farewell. For one thing there isn't enough humour, nor are there enough good songs. ”

“ More than that I am convinced that if one is going to live fully and not shut oneself away from half of civilized existence, one must care for both. It is possible to do well enough with either, and much depends on how one derives pleasure from them. ”

“ It will be seen that three of these five are governmental, that only the first and the fourth involve the individual, and the best thing about the others is that two of them are negative, are inhibitions against excessive interference with the private life. In other words, an enlightened liberalism could do much for this Utopia. Even the first principle is meagrely taken:
"All individual personal facts are private between the citizen and the public organization to which he entrusts them, and can be used only for his convenience and with his sanction. ”

“ The novelty of the book is in presenting the right wing—the group of modern men and women who reject the Utopia into which they are flung. The politician, the priest, the philosopher, the millionaire, the fool (aesthetes are fools as in Shaw) the silly women, present with a specious appearance of fairness the case against Utopia, and in a sense, the case for the present. ”