Marsden Hartley used to be told that he looked like Ralph Waldo Emerson. But since I last saw him he has lost that look of strife with the flesh which gives all Emerson’s portraits a tortured undercurrent. What was before New England philosopher with a touch of the bird of prey is now Indian,—the old, rare, eagle-like Indian whom we have betrayed without counting the loss to the land whose life he knew back to Aztec days. On the card over Hartley’s door-bell some boy has drawn in pencil an Indian. It looks like him. He does not know if it were done to protect him from being taken for an Englishman, or as a portrait. It serves as both. The portrait I had seen of him when I was in Berlin two years ago was a dream he told me he had had. He had seen a pigeon tied by its feet to a great rock, struggling to get free. He watched it in torment; and saw finally how it flew off, leaving its feet bleeding upon the rock. And he has flown far. One canvas that he showed me was painted in June, 1914, before there had been the slightest whisper of war. It expresses his feeling of what he calls “ecstasy” on the part of the dragoons at the manoeuvers he had seen. A rising dome, the eternal symbol of endeavor weighted by the desires of the flesh, not able to cut clean like the triangle, the flame-sign of the Persians. And in this dome, and on either side, white horses, mounting, red trappings, white uniforms, and black boots; all of them pouring upward to a high point somewhere far outside of the painting itself. Here is the very spirit of Germany, proud of its display, not yet chastened by the grief of glory. He has caught Germany and America, and grappled with them in the depths of their own consciousness. Planetary things there are in his work, gracious and balanced, weird and restless—“sensations” he calls them for fear of intellectualizing the emotions he has. But it is all _his_ world. He does not pretend to share it with anyone, although he spreads it before you and listens, or half-listens, to your interpretation of circle and star and streaked skies. I do not pretend to understand even the theories of these new schools which burst out before the war; and I have no theory about Hartley’s paintings. I feel them, as I might feel a lyric from the Sanscrit if it were read me by one who knows that our modern speech is buried deep in this old language and must inevitably echo forth. When the rhythm swings round and round within the four sides of the frame, I know it as rhythm, although I might not be able to tell what begot it. When the motion set up by color and line goes sweeping out beyond the frame, beyond the walls of the room, beyond Berlin, and Europe, and the age we live in, I get the excitement of it, and I don’t mind the loss of breath. What Does It Mean? _Arthur Purdon, Livingston, Montana_: