Various

“ I have plugged through fifteen years in which every ideal of workmanship has sunk visibly in America until it can sink no lower. The great crowd is forgetting even how to read. It has lost the cohering line of expression—a series of broken pictures is enough to hold its eye. But the end is reached with the war—and the new generation which will witness the tragedy of greater human waste perhaps than the one before it, also contains the superb individuals—the few—such individuals as we never dreamed of in our twenties. ”

“ How, in the name of the mystery of genius, can criticism be anything else than an idolatry, a worship, a metamorphosis, a love affair! The pathetic mistake these people make is to fancy that the great artists only lived and wrote in order to buttress up such poor wretches as they are upon the particular little, thin, cardboard platform which is at present their moral security and refuge.
“No one has a right to be a critic whose mind cannot, with Protean receptivity, take first one form and then another, as the great Spells, one by one, are thrown and withdrawn. ”

“ Poetic Drama is extinct. And yet can Life be said to be even approximately mimicked by anything less than poetry? Emotions we have enough of and to spare—emotions and sensations! But these are not poetry. These are but the heavy, raw, crude, chemical protoplasm of poetry. Thus the only plays of our time which are beautiful and successful and true to the life-instinct are Farces. Farces need not be poetical. They represent the kicking up of satyr-heels round the outer circle of the Dionysian grove. They represent the insurgent rebellion of the humorous mob against all law or rule. ”

“ For seventeen years I have studied T. R. as representative of that America which has consistently betrayed the finer aspirations of our people, shamed the real workman, bewildered the young in millions with noise and show and shine, and unerringly dimmed for the many the approaches to the Real. He stands today for armament, against all that the New Spirit has shown us out of the bleeding heart of the world, against the plain fact of the war as the quickener of spiritual life, and against every dream that was ever born in the human breast out of the loss of the love of self. ”

“ Those who braved the wind and the rain to hear this well known writer and thinker talk about “Sex and Eugenics” were filled with sharp expectancy as she stepped forward to speak—a short woman about fifty years old, with iron gray hair cut close to her head, piercing blue eyes, eloquent hands and a low voice, wonderfully modulated and seemingly as tireless as her poised, vigorous body; yet expectation seldom fulfills the bright dreams it dangles before our eyes. We let ourselves be carried away with enthusiasm, and then are hurt because our visions lack fulfillment. ”

“ One Gregorian Harmony brings them into the circle of One Rhythm. Many and diverse are the offerings they offer up to that great Goddess. Some are wanton and capricious, some grave and solemn, some foreign and exotic, some native-born and natural, some from the market-places of this very city, some from the far-off land of the Goddess’s own engendering; some light as gossamer-seed, from no land at all, but from the kingdom of airy nothings, sans habitation, sans name, sans purpose! ”

“ We must make human breeding the test of effort. We must admit that the will is powerless without the hands. We must create our social tools to accomplish our social ends. We must forget the false distinctions between emotion and intellect, and use both for their common purpose. Let us not repudiate machinery because it has not yet been consciously directed to an end that is worth gaining. Modern civilization has spent its force developing in opposite directions—toward the brute and toward the god—and now we are amazed at the contradiction. ”

“ For Maurice Browne the whole world resolves itself into an act of worship. The thing worshiped we know nothing of, save in the eternal rhythm of life; and the “other worshippers” we know nothing of, save in the music which responds to that rhythm; but the whole drama—down the long desperate centuries—resolves itself into nothing less than an attempt to attune to reciprocity those two cadences—the voice of the Unknown World-Priest, intoning through the ages, and the voice of the innumerable generations answering! ”

“ No one who has a real insight into what Poetic Drama means—Poetic Drama the highest of all human Arts—can hesitate for a moment as to where The Little Theatre rises to a permanent and tradition-making height. It rises to such a height in its performance of The Trojan Women. And it does so because here and here alone, by reason of the universal nature of the subject—nothing less in fact than the incarnation of World’s Sorrow—every member of the company is touched and attuned and compelled and transfigured to the same ultimate Pity. ”

“ It is a great event to discover a singing artist, for when the lack is neither a matter of intelligence nor of intensity, it often happens that the musician uses a voice that could never perjure itself as beautiful. Julia Claussen gives a feeling of utter security. No sensibility is wounded or left asleep.
Samaroff is not to be blamed, individually; although what she represents is not an art, but a menace, for it is always applauded, copied, and taught to the youth. Sonority and power in tone-masses are never obtained by blows upon the piano-keys, or by waving the arms over the head. ”

“ Actually the law is the artist, and if left to itself it would make an efficient application of itself to produce the highest creative effect of which fluid motion is capable. Such is the unconscious method of using the law. The artist uses it not because he can or will but because he must. His picture producing is a work that can only be done in one way, not by thought and reason, not by compulsions and restraints, but through the livingness of free energies left free to find their own expressions through their own channels. ”

“ In no way are his sex studies propagandic—they are a tremendous reservoir of static power. It has been for his wife and co-worker, she of independent mind and high purpose, to take all this vast collection of scientific information in her small hands, crush out the sordidness, the misery, the heart-sickening perversions and distortions of human lives and holding up the bright ideals, fling them out to her listeners in phrases burning with hope for both men and women and faith that true love will make everything whole. ”

“ If the artist’s hands are guided by a mysterious agency it is not a mechanical process any more than the guiding of a plant into leaves, blossom, and fruit is one. The artist is really guided by that which is a part of his higher self. He surrenders himself to the guidance of a spirit which is his own, the spirit of Art. And in doing so he achieves his highest destiny. For in the complete surrender to Art lies the affirmation of Art. ”

“ Those hampered by conventions and shackled by fear of the truth must be born again into the beauty and holiness of every side of human life before they can even see the heights whereon Mrs. Ellis stands. Let those who would find happiness for themselves and a happy issue out of the sufferings of the men and women and children and unborn babes, look into their own hearts and bravely face what is there.
Women have always run away from anything sexual as unwomanly. She must face her own nature; she must learn that to most women “the sex impulse is the hunger of her soul” ”

“ What they are really doing is living in the atmosphere and the temper of ‘the grand style’—and that is why they are so irritating and so provocative! To them the most important thing in the world is to realize to the fullest limit of their consciousness what it means to be born a Man. The actual drama of our mortal existence, reduced to the simplest terms, is not enough to occupy their consciousness and their passion. In this sphere—in the sphere of the ‘inevitable things’ of human life—everything becomes to them a sacrament. ”

“ They will not be built, they are not being built, according to the fierce fanaticism of any particular School or Cult or Pass-word. The sub-soil of their tradition has been watered by no tears but those of Humanity, and will be sown with no harvest but the harvest of Humanity. If they are more Greek, or more Hebraic, than anything else, that is only because to the Greeks and the Jews rather than to the rest it has been allowed to sweep the unessential absolutely aside and return with clear-eyed innocence to the main facts. Maurice Browne is not the slave of Euripides—though, by God! ”

“ If one might guess, she is a little impatient with laws and quite out of sympathy with those who, knowing but little themselves, try to bind others by rules and regulations which often defeat the very ends for which they were made. “What we want is more eugenics by education, and less eugenics by legislation” she cried; and what she implied many times was that when we come to regard sex love as one of the greatest manifestations of the soul—not one of the offensive expressions of the body—then and then only shall we have eugenic babies and happy men and women. ”

“ It is because so many of us are so limited in our capacity for ‘variable reaction’ that there are so few good critics. But we are all, I think, more multiple-souled than we care to admit. It is our foolish pride of consistency, our absurd desire to be ‘constructive’ that makes us so dull. A critic need not necessarily approach the world from the ‘pluralistic’ angle; but there must be something of such ‘pluralism’ in his natural temper, or the writers he can respond to will be very few!
“Let it be plainly understood. It is impossible to respond to a great genius half way. ”

“ At first sight it appears to be a step in the right direction, one leading away from the fallacy or blindness, which led the old masters to turn out wonderful patchworks by giving each object in their canvases a structural unity of its own. Indeed it looks as though these painters have mastered the secret of binding a composition together by a unified design springing from a central note that expands by spontaneous motion till it not only fills the canvas but passes out of it on a very wide sweep, and having order, intelligibility, and coherence in all its parts. ”

“ With “courage, sanity, and cleanliness” in our hearts we must “cease to regard sex as mere animalism,” and must “forge passion into power.” “The sex function is divine fire,” it is “as much an affair of the soul as of the body” and “it is no more disgraceful to function on the sex plane than on the hunger plane or on the thirst plane.” She sees that only in the economic independence of women can sex relations be righted—love and money must be completely divorced. Any form of barter, whether lawfully within marriage or unlawfully outside of marriage, is fatal to the free giving of love. ”

“ If they have a life principle in them it is carefully concealed, for they suggest no power of infinite growth. It would seem indeed as though art-expression, during civilized times, has reached a deadlock. For it is noticeable that throughout all the great periods of art-expression, artists have expressed the same things. In the canvases of the old masters a flow of solids manifests itself with depressing regularity. Time, one might think, would have lifted the soul of the artist out of solid space. ”

“ The creative critic cannot possibly build his house of illumination without the essential fundamental materials. And these the artist must provide. He cannot illuminate the non-existent. And if there are no creative elements to work upon criticism is bound to fall and remain far below the creative standard. It will be uncertain and chaotic in its judgments. History says it is so, and not without proof. It shows us that the art judgment of one age has been sufficient to reverse the art judgment of a previous age. Yet Art itself does not change. ”

“ Those who found the lecture vague and unsatisfactory must increase their knowledge, not expect a woman to tell in thirty-five minutes all she has learned in thirty-five years. Was it not enough for her to confess that we must engage in the sex relation with a “fine passionateness and spiritual deviltry”? Was it not enough for her to set up the ideal that the sex function is the “great spiritual enterprise”? Was it not enough for her to set before men and women the highest ideals that the human mind had yet conceived? ”

“ What we want is not the formulating of new Critical Standards, and the dragging in of the great masters before our last miserable Theory of Art. What we want is an honest, downright and quite personal articulation, as to how these great things in literature really hit us when they find us for the moment natural and off our guard—when they find us as men and women, and not as ethical gramophones.... ”

“ To regard each day, as it dawns, as a ‘last day,’ and to make of its sunrise, of its noon, of its sun-setting, a rhythmic antiphony to the eternal gods—this is to live in the spirit of the ‘grand style.’ It has nothing to do with ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ Saints may practise it, and sometimes do. ”

“ In that hour—in that “Judgment”—happy will those citizens of Chicago be who have prepared the way, and not laid themselves down in the way, of the builders of the Abbey of Thelema!
What The Little Theatre is doing is nothing less than a restoration to the worship of the Eternal Gods of an Institution which has been bastardized, perverted and profaned! Think what the Drama in our days has become! Think what “buyers and sellers” have set up their “tables” in the Lord’s House! The Theatre, in our generation, is no more that sacred stage where Life is purged and winnowed and heightened ”

“ Here is no prima donna, but an artist who sings. Her voice is a brimming-over of loveliness; her emotional power becomes inevitable, for she sings in phrases of beauty—a living beauty that moves to tears. Hers is an art that pervades and satisfies ... ”

“ When, in the future, Poetic Drama once more attains the position to which the self-preservative instincts of humanity entitle it, it will be recognized for what it is—the true religious focussing of man’s permanent protest against Fate—lifted above the dust of all ephemeral questioning. It will then be seen that in Poetic Drama, rather than in the noblest sacraments of Religion, the race must find its orchestral unity, the rhythm of its natural and Tragic breathing. ”