Adventures in the Arts: Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and PoetsHartley, Marsden
History
Adventures in the Arts: Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets
Hartley, Marsden
Art; Literature, Modern -- History and criticism; Vaudeville
But all these suggestions recall for me once more what such things
mean to a people like the French, or, let one say, Europeans as well.
I wonder what poetry or even painting will do, if they shall rise to
such a state in this country that we shall find our masters of
literature holding audience with this degree of interest like Fort, or
as did all the great masters of literature in Paris, hold forth in the
name of art, a divine Tuesday set apart for the admirable worship of
poetry, or of things esthetic. I can imagine Amy Lowell doing
something of this sort after the custom of those masters she so
admires, with her seemingly quenchless enthusiasms for all that is
modern in poetry. I think we shall wait long for that, for the time
when we shall have our best esthetics over the coffee, at the curbside
under the trees with the sun shining upon it, or the shadow of the
evening lending its sanction, under the magnetic influence of such a
one as Paul Fort or Francis Jammes, or Emile Verhaeren--as it was once
to be had among such as Verlaine, Baudelaire and that high company of
distinguished painters who are now famous among us.
The studio of Gertude Stein, that quiet yet always lively place in the
rue de Fleurus, is the only room I have ever been in where this spirit
was organized to a similar degree, for here you had the sense of the
real importance of painting, as it used to be thought of in the days
of Pissarro, Manet, Degas, and the others, and you had much, in all
human ways, out of an evening there, and, most of all, you had a fund
of good humour thrust at you, and the conversation took on, not the
quality of poetic prose spoken, as you had the quality of yourself and
others, a kind of William James intimacy, which, as everyone knows, is
style bringing the universe of ideas to your door in terms of your own
sensations. There may have been a touch of all this at the once famed
Brook Farm, but I fancy it was rather chill in its severity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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