Expressionism

“ The Expressionist is, then, triumphantly right in the stress he lays on emotion; but he is not right if he limits life to certain of 236its more elementary manifestations; and still less is he right, to our minds, in making life and art in any sense coextensive. Art, as we have seen, sustains and invigorates life, but only does it by withdrawal from these very same elementary forms of life, by inhibiting certain sensuous reactions.
In another matter one section of Expressionists, the Futurists, are in the main right. ”

“ And the need of self-expression felt by all those who have not the gift of communicating themselves fully and easily in speech or manner, a strong need in her case, from her having so much to express, was the spur that drove her to seek and find the mode of so doing in art. ”

“ A regard for reason, a sense of order, a disposition to keep every thing within measure, is a marked characteristic. Their sense of form—including a perception of beauty, and of harmony and proportion—made them in politics and letters the leaders of mankind. "Do nothing in excess," was their favorite maxim. They hated every thing that was out of proportion. Their language, without a rival in flexibility and symmetry and in perfection of sound, is itself, though a spontaneous creation, a work of art. ”

“ I limit myself to repeating, that the great law which governs all others, is expression. Every work of art that does not express an idea signifies nothing; in addressing itself to such or such a sense, it must penetrate to the mind, to the soul, and bear thither a thought, a sentiment capable of touching or elevating it. From this fundamental rule all the others are derived; for example, that which is continually and justly recommended,—composition. To this is particularly applied the precept of unity and variety. ”

“ For what is bombast but a force of expression too great for the magnitude of the ideas embodied? All that may rightly be inferred is, that only in rare cases should all the conditions to effective expression be fulfilled. ”

“ When each new speaker strikes a new light, emancipates us from the oppression of the last speaker to oppress us with the greatness and exclusiveness of his own thought, then yields us to another redeemer, we seem to recover our rights, to become men. O, what truths profound and executable only in ages and orbs, are supposed in the announcement of every truth! In common hours, society sits cold and statuesque. We all stand waiting, empty,—knowing, possibly, that we can be full, surrounded by mighty symbols which are not symbols to us, but prose and trivial toys. ”

“ In an age in which culture is mainly scholarly and imaginative, and science and criticism are only nascent, the tendency will go far to colour all literature ; and, as innovation goes on in form with little or no deepening of thought, the licence of expression goes from bad to worse, poetry giving place to pedantry and technicality and verbal metaphysic, till the test of skill has come to be strangeness of expression, and polite literature in general is become a masquerade, remote from all actuality of feeling and conduct. ”

“ And the voices get louder and louder, as the disputants proceed to pick the character to pieces, speech by speech, and action by action, till, nothing being left, each finally subsides somehow, each confirmed in his own opinion, each convinced that the main purpose of literature—Realism—has either been served, or not served, by the author under discussion. ”

“ The graces taught in the schools, the costly ornaments and studied contrivances of speech, shock and disgust men, when their own lives, and the fate of their wives, their children, and their country hang on the decision of the hour. Then words have lost their power, rhetoric is in vain, and all elaborate oratory contemptible. Even genius itself then feels rebuked and subdued, as in the presence of higher qualities. ”

“ Might I, an unlettered man, venture to prescribe bounds to the latitude of criticism, I should exclude, in estimating the merit of such a production, all rules drawn from the ancient or modern literature of Europe, all references to such sentiments or manners as are become the standards of propriety for opinion and action in our own modes, and, equally, all appeals to our revealed tenets of religion and moral duty. ”

“ This harmonizing of the forces having been once accomplished, little time is required to keep in tune this harp of the soul; while the broader culture and the higher realization of all meanings that can be expressed are constantly sought in such discipline of the mind itself as shall secure the activity of its highest powers. The whole aim is to secure the development of character by the expression of the highest elements of character. ”

“ These are the artists, the orators, the leaders of society. The power to detach, and to magnify by detaching, is the essence of rhetoric in the hands of the orator and the poet. This rhetoric, or power to fix the momentary eminency of an object, — so remarkable in Burke, in Byron, in Carlyle, — the painter and sculptor exhibit in color and in stone. ”

“ No sentences ever coined in the mint of human speech have held such magic power over such large numbers of men and women of so many diverse races and creeds. As a literary production, the Manifesto bears the unmistakable stamp of genius. ”

“ Such are our habits and traditions that even now, when liberty of expression in almost all forms is established as a panacea and has perhaps produced some disease, a drama, which was designed to set forth and recommend a particular opinion on some topic agitating the public mind at the moment, would probably not be popular ”

“ Have you addressed the public in a language which has a wide human appeal? Are you, in fact, a master of that higher technique which implies an understanding, not only of the fine essences of truth, but the broad, common facts of human nature? It is just because they are not masters of this higher technique that many exponents of so-called "intellectual fiction" and "intellectual drama" are doomed to failure. ”

“ Let no man, then, aim at the cultivation of style for style’s sake, independently of ideas, for all such aims will result in failure. To suppose that noble or impressive language is a communicable trick of rhetoric and accent, is one of the most mischievous of fallacies. Every writer has his own ideas and feelings,—his own conceptions, judgments, discriminations, and comparisons,—which are personal, proper to himself, in the same sense that his looks, his voice, his air, his gait, and his action are personal. ”

“ But let us suppose that our language remains a living and a literary language and so preserves its literature; what sort of literature can that be, the literature of a people without political independence? What does a sensible writer want, and what can he want? ”

“ Think what a glorious power is that of expression: and what responsibility follows the man who possesses it. That grace of language which can make even commonplace things beautiful, throwing robes of the poorest texture into forms of all-attractive loveliness: why does it not expend its genius on materials that would be worthy of the artist? ”

“ And, universally, a good example of this social force, is the veracity of language, which cannot be debauched. In any controversy concerning morals, an appeal may be made with safety to the sentiments, which the language of the people expresses. ”

“ The "Evolution of Expression" does not offer art criteria by which the work of an orator is to be measured; it presents rather a system of education by which one may attain the plane of art in expression. The teacher or student who desires a formulation of laws which afford a standard of art criticism is referred to the four volumes of "The Perfective Laws of Art," the text-book succeeding the "Evolution of Expression." ”

“ Without such ideas all attempts to construct a national literature must end in abortions like the monster of Frankenstein, things with forms, and the instincts of forms, but soulless, and therefore revolting. We cannot have expression till there is something to be expressed. ”

“ A criticism that should be founded on the principle of expression, would somewhat derange, it must be confessed, received judgments, and would carry some disorder into the hierarchy of the renowned. We do not undertake such a revolution; we only propose to confirm, or at least elucidate our principle by an example, and by an example that is at our hand. ”

“ At the same time this very imperfection of speech, and the struggle of primitive thought to express itself in language sometimes creates, as it were by accident, the very flower of strength and vividness in picturesque description, and the interpretation of emotion as the most skillful art has been unable to do. ”

“ But will can only be exhibited to us faithfully, or as a real existence, when we see it exercising a consummate mastery over all its materials, the feelings, the passions, and above all the language of humanity—voluntarily, and for the sake of declaring its own reality, multiplying the difficulties of the latter, and at the same time preserving all its proper usages entire. But now, in perverting the idiom of speech, the artist has broken through this contract. ”

“ Tradition and the building up of sentiments and ideals, together with the symbols by which they are known and familiarized, are very largely, if not exclusively, the work of the written word. But Literature and the Press are themselves governed by their past history, and by traditions and conventions that have been gradually built up from a few fundamental ideas, however diversified they may eventually have become; and these ideas, in their turn, owe their origin to the passions and sentiments of the race as a whole. Even the work of genius has its roots in the ideas of the past. ”

“ To this the citizen replied: "The Genius talks words, and the Critic follows after, and, as the words fall from the lips of Genius, the Critic picks them up with the tongs of contempt and burns them in the brazier of public opinion."
"But why," asked Gud, "do the words of the Genius make a stench in their burning?" ”

“ The impulse to expression is cosmic and eternal. But even in the homeliness and familiarity of our life from day to day the need of expression is there, whether we are entirely aware of it or not; and we are seeking the realization and fulfillment of ourselves through the utterance of what we are. A few find their expression in forms which with distinct limitation of the term we call works of art. Most men find it in their daily occupations, their profession or their business. ”

“ That great principle, the necessity of a moral tendency or of some doctrine useful to mankind in the whole of an epic performance, admitted, are we therefore to sacrifice the uniformity of its parts, and thus to lose that credibility which alone can impress us with the importance of the maxim that dictated to the poet narration and to the artist imagery? Are the agents sometimes to be real beings, and sometimes abstract ideas? ”

“ Hence men, even in the infancy of society, observe a certain order in their words and actions, distinct from that of the objects and the impressions represented by them, all expression being subject to the laws of that from which it proceeds. But let us dismiss those more general considerations which might involve an inquiry into the principles of society itself, and restrict our view to the manner in which the imagination is expressed upon its forms. ”

“ When temperament seeks restraint in technique, and policy, whether business or social, seeks freedom in service, then shall we have that balanced expression in art, in society, and in trade which should proceed from the American personality and distinguish American life. ”

“ Because you know only the wealthy and the noble, you come to deal with them exclusively in your art works, you interpret their feelings, and behold life from their point of view. All critics unite in declaring that this is Reality, this is Nature, this is Art; while to object to this, and voice any other point of view, is Idealism, Preaching, and Propaganda. ”

“ Why not also study the noble and most desirable art of framing our thoughts, opinions, sentiments, tastes, into free, familiar, and appropriate speech?
But here I fancy you may meet me with a question,—Is it, after all, so desirable an art, and one well worth the learning? I have, it is true, given you credit for coveting earnestly a greater facility of speech; and yet you may have become more reconciled to your deficiency than you like to acknowledge, through the influence of certain popular maxims and fallacies. ”

“ Since expression involves the employment of so many different powers at one time, a mastery of the art of expression is much harder to acquire, than a mastery of merely the mechanical side of reading. ”

“ Contrast this counsel of perfect originality with the counsels given in our own day, in which the aim of originality is directed to appearing original—you will be brought, thereby, face to face with still another key-idea of Culture, the relation of Appearance to Reality. All these exercises in culture are elementary, however, in comparison with the master-problem of “disinterestedness.” No word in the English language is more difficult to define or better worth attempting to define. ”

“ To know a man's work for this, to have divined the direct relation between his utterance and his living soul, is criticism: to make that relation between one's own soul and one's speech direct and true is creation. ”