I know of no American book like this one by Marsden Hartley. I do not believe American painting heretofore capable of so vital a response and of so athletic an appraisal. Albert Ryder barricaded himself from the world's intrusion. The American world was not intelligent enough in his days to touch him to an activer response. And Ryder, partaking of its feebleness, from his devotion to the pure subjective note became too exhausted for aught else. As a world we have advanced. We have a fully functioning Criticism ... swarms and schools of makers of the sonorous complacencies of Judgment. We have an integral body of creative-minded men and women interposing itself with valiance upon the antithesis of the social resistance to social growth. Hartley is in some ways a continuance of Ryder. One stage is Ryder, the solitary who remained one. A second stage is Hartley, the solitary who stands against the more aggressive, more interested Marketplace. You will find in this book the artist of a cultural epoch. This man has mastered the plastic messages of modern Europe: he has gone deep in the classic forms of the ancient Indian Dance. But he is, still, not very far from Ryder. He is always the child--whatever wise old worlds he contemplates--the child, wistful, poignant, trammeled, of New England. Hartley has adventured not alone deep but wide. He steps from New Mexico to Berlin, from the salons of the Paris of Marie Laurencin to the dust and tang of the American Circus. He is eclectic. But wherever he goes he chronicles not so much these actual worlds as his own pleasure of them. They are but mirrors, many-shaped and lighted, for his own delicate, incisive humor. For Hartley is an innocent and a _naif_. At times he is profound. Always he is profoundly simple. Tragedy and Comedy are adult. The child's world is Tragicomic. So Marsden Hartley's. He is not deep enough--like most of our Moderns--in the pregnant chaos to be submerged in blackness by the hot struggle of the creative will. He may weep, but he can smile next moment at a pretty song. He may be hurt, but he gets up to dance. In this book--the autobiography of a creator--Marsden Hartley peers variously into the modern world: but it is in search of Fairies. WALDO FRANK. _Lisbon_, June, 1921. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION BY WALDO FRANK _Foreword_ CONCERNING FAIRY TALES AND ME _Part One_ 1. THE RED MAN 2. WHITMAN AND CEZANNE 3. RYDER 4. WINSLOW HOMER 5. AMERICAN VALUES IN PAINTING 6. MODERN ART IN AMERICA 7. OUR IMAGINATIVES 8. OUR IMPRESSIONISTS 9. ARTHUR B. DAVIES 10. REX SLINKARD 11. SOME AMERICAN WATER-COLORISTS 12. THE APPEAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY 13. SOME WOMEN ARTISTS 14. REVALUATIONS IN IMPRESSIONISM 15. ODILON REDON 16. THE VIRTUES OF AMATEUR PAINTING 17. HENRI ROUSSEAU _Part Two_ 18. THE TWILIGHT OF THE ACROBAT 19. VAUDEVILLE 20. A CHARMING EQUESTRIENNE 21. JOHN BARRYMORE IN PETER IBBETSON _Part Three_ 22. LA CLOSERIE DE LILAS