■ 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Journalism Versus Art 
 
By MAX EASTMAN 
 
 ENJOYMENT OF POETRY 
 POEMS 
 
 UNDERSTANDING GERMANY 
 JOURNALISM VERSUS ART 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2014 
 
THE MASK OF THE RED DEATH. BOARDMAN ROBINSON 
 
 Mr. Robinson was invited by the Century Magazine, under a former editor, to do a series of paintings illustrating 
 Edgar Allan Poe's stories. He made three, and they were all rejected because there was too much "horror" in them 
 for Century readers. It is a pity to reproduce this picture without color, but as an example of what magazine stand- 
 ards would do to art, and to literature, the anecdote cannot be passed. Mr. Poe would be invited to go home and take 
 some of the horror out of his stories, too, for circulation purposes. 
 
Journalism Versus Art 
 
 Max Eastman 
 
 Editor of "The Massed 
 Formerly Associate in Philosophy 
 at Columbia University 
 
 New York Alfred A. Knopf 1916 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY 
 ALFRED A. KNOPF 
 
 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
PREFACE 
 
 I dedicate this little book to the artists of The 
 Masses staff, including those who have withdrawn 
 and those who are to come. I do so in the mood of 
 a grateful if somewhat obstreperous pupil. 
 
 In the autumn of 1912 when our group happened 
 together and decided to bring out a magazine which 
 should publish art and literature without any canons 
 of good journalism, I was exceedingly rustic in the 
 appreciation of art. And my rusticity was consid- 
 erably enhanced by a thorough knowledge of the 
 "science of sesthetics." I had just come down from 
 the oracle on Morningside Heights, where I had con- 
 ducted, the previous winter, a course in the graduate 
 school on the philosophy and psychology of beauty. 
 In that course I had presented to my students some 
 twenty-three classical definitions of beauty, and then 
 proceeded to the best of my ability to annihilate 
 them all, and to show that we apply the word beauty 
 to objects so widely different externally, and so dif- 
 ferent also in their internal effects upon our organs, 
 
 7 
 
8 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 that a true definition of the term is impossible. I 
 taught that if we define the term beauty as a name 
 for the objectification of pleasures that we feel in the 
 act of perception, we shall come as near as possible 
 to including all its important uses. But even then 
 we shall find ourselves exaggerating a distinction 
 that is neither clear nor of profoundest importance. 
 For impressions that we quite passively receive may 
 be, and are, called beautiful, and there is no reason 
 in health or morals why they should not be. 
 
 Indeed the question whether we can define beauty, 
 is secondary to the question whether it is important 
 for us to do so. And it was my contention in those 
 lectures, that in making so much of an alleged dis- 
 tinction between sesthetic values and other immedi- 
 ate values, such as the pleasures of poignant reality, 
 of taste and touch and physical experiences, the phil- 
 osophers had put the whole cultivated world off on a 
 false track. The important distinction for us to 
 remember and refine and philosophize about, is the 
 distinction between all the immediate values, which 
 have their certification in themselves, and those me- 
 diate, or moral, or practical values which look to 
 some ulterior benefit to certify them. It seemed to 
 me that if the English language were wise, it would 
 contain a very eminent word (not altogether unlike 
 
PREFACE 
 
 9 
 
 beauty, although less aristocratic) to express the 
 whole range of things which are good simply because 
 they are chosen. And among these things we should 
 often find objects distinctly unbeautiful, and even 
 unpleasant, because life has a thirst after experience 
 which is very general, and is willing to suffer a good 
 deal of pain for the sake of tasting its reality. 
 
 This was the philosophy of sesthetics at which I 
 had abstractly arrived when I was elected, upon 
 quite other grounds, to become the editor and general 
 care-taker of a magazine whose pictorial destinies 
 were to be jealously watched over by a group of 
 "revolutionary" artists. It was a philosophy which 
 did not seriously unfit me for that responsible honor, 
 because it was so largely a mere liberation from un- 
 fruitful definitions. But still it was a philosophy, 
 and I am sure that if I had been suspected of possess- 
 ing such a thing, or of harboring however darkly in 
 my memory twenty-three definitions of beauty, I 
 would never have been elevated to that precarious 
 post. It was as a simple rustic, acquainted only 
 with some small matters of politics and literature, 
 that I was designated by these artists to see that the 
 spaces between their pictures were filled in with ade- 
 quately revolutionary reading matter. 
 
 And for that I am glad, because it put me in a 
 
lO 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 rather humble mood, and enabled me to receive at 
 their hands a very liberal education in the apprecia- 
 tion of art. I have learned to perceive a great many 
 qualities in pictures that I might never have known 
 to exist, and to discriminate one quality from another 
 as I could never have done except through the mi- 
 croscope of the artist's extreme love of his art. And 
 my reason for dedicating this book to those artists is 
 that, without the refining of my perceptions which a 
 friendly association with them has accomplished, I 
 should never have ventured to come down from that 
 abstract "philosophy of aesthetics," as I have in this 
 essay on magazine art, and enter the field of concrete 
 judgments. I think I may say that this essay re- 
 flects the feeling, and in some places even the 
 thought and language of the artists of The Masses^ 
 in criticizing the art of the popular commercial maga- 
 zine. I need not apologize, therefore, if I have 
 taken for illustrations of a more various and freer 
 art pictures most of which have been drawn by these 
 artists for The Masses. This does not imply that 
 our magazine itself intends to be an academy, or re- 
 gards itself as grown up and arrived at any exclu- 
 siveness. But it does imply that our magazine is the 
 only illustrated magazine in America which habitu- 
 ally declines to conciliate its readers, or to consider 
 
PREFACE 
 
 II 
 
 either the advertisers or the subscription lists in de- 
 ciding what art and what writing it shall publish. 
 The fact that nobody is trying to make dividends 
 out of The Masses, has given it a unique character, 
 has given it the freedom for a perfectly wilful play 
 of the creative faculties, such as would inevitably 
 produce unique works of art. 
 
 Some time ago the New York papers announced 
 a disagreement among the editors of The Masses, 
 and the resignation of one or two of its artists. And 
 they were happy to infer from this that the basic 
 principle upon which the magazine was conducted, 
 had proven Utopian and unworkable. As disagree- 
 ments and resignations frequently occur among their 
 own editors, whose principle is the very workable 
 one of publishing for profit, the inference was obvi- 
 ously a little extreme. But it seems important to 
 state, in contradicting them, just what question it 
 was upon which a division occurred among the ed- 
 itors of The Masses. 
 
 Some of the contributing editors, who are also 
 the owners of this magazine, desired to make The 
 Masses free, not only from any journalistic influ- 
 ence, but also from the influence of an editorial art. 
 They wished to conduct their magazine somewhat in 
 the manner of the new art galleries, in which each 
 
12 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 artist is given an opportunity, subject only to the 
 tolerance of his fellows, to exhibit at any given time 
 anything that he chooses. That is, they wished to 
 sacrifice the symmetry, completeness, order, timeli- 
 ness, unity in variety, and so forth, of the magazine 
 as a whole, to the ideal of unconditioned individual 
 expression. 
 
 To the majority, while this seemed a valuable 
 thing to do, it did not seem the best thing to do with 
 The Masses. They desired The Masses to have 
 form and policy, and they decided that the way to 
 make such a magazine free, is to give to an editor 
 a freedom of his own after the contributing artists 
 and writers have produced or designated in general 
 the material with which he is to work. It was 
 upon this question, and not upon the deeper prin- 
 ciple of freedom from journalistic standards, that 
 the division occurred. 
 
 For my part I am still in the mood of a humble, 
 although in this matter obstreperous, pupil to the 
 artists who have made pictures for The Masses^ and 
 it is with profound gratitude for my education that 
 I dedicate this little book to them. 
 
 Max Eastman. 
 
NOTE 
 
 These four essays have been published in maga- 
 zines: ''What Is the Matter with Magazine Art?' 
 in The Masses, ''Magazine Writing" in Vanity 
 Fair, "Lazy Verse" in The New Republic, and 
 "Why English Does Not Simplify Her Spelling" in 
 The North American Review, 
 
 13 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 Preface 7 
 
 I What Is the Matter with Magazine 
 
 Art? 21 
 
 II Magazine Writing 65 
 
 III Lazy Verse 8 'J 
 
 IV Why English Does not Simplify Her 
 
 Spelling lOJ 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 The Mask of the Red Death Frontispiece 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Nice Cool Sewer Arthur Young 29 
 
 A Drawing Rembrandt 33 
 
 A Drawing Maurice Becker 35 
 
 Josie's Eldest Singing, "None so Dauntless and 
 
 Free on Land or on Sea" Cornelia Barns 37 
 
 A Cartoon Robert Minor 43 
 
 *'Gee, Mag, think of us bein' on a magazine 
 
 cover I" Stuart Davis 47 
 
 A Portrait Pablo Picas so 55 
 
 The Oceanside Hotel 
 
 Reports a Cool Summer Maurice Becker 59 
 
 Washington Square Glenn 0. Coleman 62 
 
 The Orango-Tango John Sloan 71 
 
 Chinese Patrol Reconnoitring Honore Daumier 77 
 
A Drawing 
 A Melody 
 A Design 
 A Melody 
 A Husband 
 A Morning Stroll 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 K, R, Chamberlain 83 
 Arthur B, Davies 93 
 Arthur B. Davies 99 
 Arthur B. Davies 103 
 George Bellows 117 
 H. J. Glintenkamp 129 
 
 Philosopher on the Rock 
 The Goose Girl 
 
 George Bellows 135 
 Jean Frangois Millet 141 
 
WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH 
 MAGAZINE ART? 
 
Journalism Versus Art 
 
 WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH 
 MAGAZINE ART^ 
 
 DRAWING is destined to a high place 
 among the arts, for drawings, like music, 
 can be adequately reproduced and widely 
 distributed. And while this has appeared a detri- 
 ment in the light of aristocratic ideals, in the light of 
 democracy it is a fine virtue. The ideal of democ- 
 racy has indeed given to many artists of our day a 
 new interest in drawing. Some of the best painters 
 in America would draw for the popular magazines, 
 if popular magazine editors had an interest in true 
 art. 
 
 That the editors have not an interest in true art is 
 due, I suppose, not to any natural depravity in them, 
 
 21 
 
22 JOURNALISM VERSUS ART 
 
 but to their struggle for existence under the prevail- 
 ing system of journalism. And the system, briefly, 
 is this: 
 
 A publication is a piece of goods manufactured 
 and sold in competition with others for the benefit of 
 a stock company that owns it. The stockholders as 
 a group are interested in dividends. They hire an 
 editor to put out a publication that will sell, and they 
 pay him according to his success. Editors, like hu- 
 man beings, are prone to eat food, and beget fami- 
 lies, which is to say that their tastes and ideas are 
 subject to an economic interpretation. And so they 
 seek to mix into their publication a little bit of ev- 
 erything that will sell. The editorial art is the art 
 of ever attracting a new constituency without alien- 
 ating the old. The result, an insane passion for 
 variety, but a perfectly automatic toning down of 
 every variant that appears. A profitable mediocrity 
 — sometimes called a "golden mean" — is the edi- 
 torial ideal. 
 
 And artists, like editors, are "economically deter- 
 mined." They learn to draw pictures that will sell, 
 
MAGAZINE ART 
 
 23 
 
 pictures that will attract ever new constituents with- 
 out alienating the old. Or if their native impulse 
 to be an individual, an object of hate as well as of 
 love, is too strong — then they do not draw for publi- 
 cation at all, which comes to the same thing in its 
 effect upon magazine art. 
 
 This, then, is the diagnosis of published art in 
 America. It is business art. It does not aim to 
 achieve the beautiful, the real, the ideal, the charac- 
 teristic, the perfect, the sublime, the ugly, the gro- 
 tesque, the harmonious, the symmetrical, or any 
 other of those ends that various schools of art and art 
 criticism have with similar merit set before them. It 
 aims to achieve profits in competition. And any or 
 all of those genuinely artistic aims are subordinated 
 to that. 
 
 At this point, certain persons whom I should wish 
 to have disagree with me throughout life and liter- 
 ature, will chime in with, "Yes, you're right. The 
 trouble is that the people don't want true art, and 
 the magazines have to give the people what they 
 want." 
 
24 JOURNALISM VERSUS ART 
 
 The trouble is not so simple. It would not take 
 "the people" long to discover and express their lik- 
 ings for true art, if enough true art, enough kinds of 
 true art, were offered them. Only they would not 
 all discover likings for the same kind. And that is 
 what makes competitive business so incompatible 
 with the artist's ideal. True art is not one and in- 
 divisible, the same to-day, yesterday, and forever. 
 Indeed, the more highly evolved a group of art 
 works is, the more do individual specimens differ, and 
 the more certain it is that some people will definitely 
 dislike some specimens. And so it falls out that, al- 
 though plenty of people would like true art, still the 
 effort to please a great many people all the time and 
 never to displease any, results in a drab and mediocre 
 semblance of art. 
 
 Might we not almost define good art — braving the 
 learned dogmas of the schools — as art which gives a 
 high degree of satisfaction to those who like it? 
 And does it not almost follow that it will give equal 
 dissatisfaction to those who do not like it? But the 
 aim of a money-making magazine is to give neither 
 
MAGAZINE ART 25 
 
 intense pleasures nor intense displeasures to a few, 
 but to please everybody a little all the time — 
 namely, about ten or fifteen cents' worth. Then 
 only can the editors feel steadfast and sure in regard 
 to those dividends. 
 
 Let us consider the prevailing features of maga- 
 zine art in America, and judge if they do not sus- 
 tain this diagnosis. We shall find that they each 
 arise out of the desire to please everybody a little 
 and displease none. 
 
 I 
 
 Magazine art tends to be photographic. By which 
 I mean that it tries to reproduce every portion of a 
 figure, as seen from a certain point, with mechanical 
 preciseness — eliminating all those lights and shad- 
 ows, emergings and recedings, suppressions and dis- 
 tortions of external reality which the individual hu- 
 man factor puts into a perception. The trained 
 magazine artist has carefully destroyed all his own 
 warm and lovable idiosyncrasies, and turned himself 
 into a reproducing machine which can "go over" a 
 
26 JOURNALISM VERSUS ART 
 
 canvas from top to bottom, and "put in" with un- 
 erring accuracy everything that "ought to" be there. 
 He is a highly skilled person. He knows how to 
 draw men, horses, buttons, pants, books, hatracks, 
 seltzer bottles, shoes, shoestrings, cats, frowns, 
 kisses, hot-water bottles, anything and everything, 
 scattered or combined; but how to draw a 
 single human perception he has not the slightest 
 idea. 
 
 Nor does he need one, for his accurate reproduc- 
 tions in skillful perspective give a certain rudimen- 
 tary satisfaction to everybody — the satisfaction of 
 saying, "My, ain't that a good likeness!" 
 
 We have the authority of Aristotle that this — "the 
 pleasure of recognition" — is most fundamental and 
 universal of the aesthetic pleasures. But we do 
 not need any authority, for every honest person — 
 even the pastmaster of futurism — will have to con- 
 fess that still the child in him takes a rudimentary 
 satisfaction in this feat when it is well done. 
 
 At the time when I grew beyond a purely childish 
 interest in pictures, I formed the habit of looking 
 
MAGAZINE ART 
 
 27 
 
 through the comic weeklies for drawings by Art 
 Young. If any one then had asked me why I liked 
 these drawings better than others, I should have said : 
 "I don't know — they're so funny looking." But I 
 could say more than that now. I could say that 
 Art Young was almost the first popular draughts- 
 man in America to quit drawing standard types, 
 pictures of pictures of pictures of people, and be- 
 gin drawing people — the people around him the way 
 they look through his eyes. And that they look 
 "funny," and look as they never looked before and 
 never will again, was not a discovery peculiar to 
 me. 
 
 Consider his "Nice Cool Sewer" picture from The 
 Masses for May, 1913. A critic on the Evening 
 Mail declares that this drawing is "already a classic" 
 — but I find people who do not like it. They think 
 it is not "done." "Why, his hands look like mit- 
 tens I" they say. "They're not hands !" 
 
 No — they are not hands, not objective hands, 
 hands in the abstract, hands from a hand factory. 
 They are a certain peculiar individual's perception of 
 
28 JOURNALISM VERSUS ART 
 
 the hands of a certain peculiar man, a tired man, a 
 man sunk onto a chair at the end of a dirty day's 
 work, a man who feels bad and smells bad to him- 
 self, and wishes he were abed. 
 
 However, there is no entering a brief for the pic- 
 ture, no judging its artistic merit. The final truth 
 about its merit is that some people will see the pic- 
 ture, and some will not, but those who see it will 
 see it with great joy, for it is not a picture of a pic- 
 ture, nor yet even a picture of a man, but a picture 
 of a perception of a man. 
 
 The difference between drawing a man and draw- 
 ing a perception of a man, is akin to the difference 
 between knowledge and experience. The thing an 
 artist has to do is to transcend his knowledge and 
 win his way back to experience. Take a 
 crude illustration. If you, being as stupid 
 about these things as I am, set out to draw 
 a man going east, you would do it the first 
 time in this fashion: 
 
 That would be a poor picture of a man going east, 
 and you would decide that you know very little about 
 
MAGAZINE ART 
 
 31 
 
 physiognomy. On the contrary, however, you know 
 too much. Your knowledge is what got in your way. 
 You know, for instance, what is the shape of a man's 
 eye, and you drew a picture of your knowledge in- 
 stead of drawing the looks of an eye. 
 Empty yourself of that knowledge, and 
 you will draw it this way: Somewhat 
 the way it looks. 
 
 I here reach the limit of my artist- 
 training, but no more is needed to show the usual 
 progress toward real drawing. It is a progress away 
 from knowledge about things toward experience of 
 things, away from abstraction toward concrete per- 
 ception. 
 
 And when we pass beyond the photographic, or 
 kodak, style of art, we are only taking further steps 
 in the same direction. For, strangely enough, a pho- 
 tograph is a good deal more like knowledge than it is 
 like perception. It has perspective, to be sure, but 
 that is all it has that resembles visual experience. 
 When we look at an object we allow our own charac- 
 ter, our memories, predilections, interests, emotions. 
 
32 JOURNALISM VERSUS ART 
 
 ideas, to determine what we shall see and how we 
 shall see it. We do something. We go out and 
 seize the salient details of the object, and we over- 
 emphasize, and perfect, and condense, and alter, and 
 mutilate, and idealize — in short, we perform the cre- 
 ative act of perception. And when artists draw cre- 
 atively, when they draw with individuality, as we 
 say, and with freedom, they are simply coming nearer 
 to that natural act of ours. They are coming nearer 
 to real experience. 
 
 Great artists have always drawn in this way. 
 There is nothing modern that departs more boldly 
 from what we know the human proportions to be, 
 than the drawings of Michael Angelo. There is 
 nothing less like a photograph than the sketches of 
 Leonardo. 
 
 But most magazine illustrators have never caught 
 the fever of individual being. They have never de- 
 clared themselves free and independent of custom- 
 ary knowledge; they have never gone beyond cater- 
 ing to the rudimentary pleasure of recognition. And 
 in a commercial way it is well for them, because if 
 
MAGAZINE ART 33 
 
 they should put their own individual vision strongly 
 into a picture, a great many people to whom their 
 
 A DRAWING BY REMBRANDT 
 
 individuality is uncongenial, would dislike the pic- 
 ture, whereas the mere act of easy recognition pleases 
 everybody a little. 
 
34 JOURNALISM VERSUS ART 
 
 II 
 
 When magazine art is not photographic, it makes 
 up for that by being neat and "slick." Perhaps 
 chique is the technical word. I mean that if there is 
 anything omitted or varied by the individual mind of 
 the artist, the variation is so definite, arbitrary, and 
 regular, as to carry us still farther away from a real 
 perception instead of nearer to it. No one could 
 accuse the usual magazine poster prodigy of being 
 photographic. On the contrary, it is nothing but a 
 pattern, a conventionalized symbol, a deft mechan- 
 ically cut and trimmed diagram remotely suggest- 
 ing a young lady in the agonies of fashionable at- 
 tire. 
 
 Let us compare with it a drawing which is still 
 less photographic. I choose one that was exhibited 
 at the McDowell Society in New York a while ago. 
 One of the chief virtues of this drawing, in compari- 
 son with the usual poster is that it is not a drawing 
 of a girl. But that is not the virtue I mean to point 
 out. I mean to point out that here is a drawing 
 
MAGAZINE ART 
 
 35 
 
 even more abbreviated, more incomplete, less filled 
 up with meat, but which comes right back to reality, 
 instead of going farther away from it. For those 
 
 2 S 
 •a 
 
 i 
 
 I : ^ ~ ? ^ 
 
 'KIP 
 
 iil i 2 s ^ 
 
 A DRAWING BY MAURICE BECKER 
 
 who can see it, this is a most true, intimate, and final 
 picture of a certain dog — sketched with unerring 
 loyalty to the eye, and sketched, moreover, with liv- 
 
36 JOURNALISM VERSUS ART 
 
 ing sympathy and emotion. For those who see it, it 
 is exquisite, but for those who do not, it is only a 
 piece of old newspaper — the last thing in the world 
 to pay money for. And so it is not a magazine draw- 
 ing, while the chique young lady of the poster decid- 
 edly is. For neatness of execution — no matter how 
 inhuman and foolish the subject matter — pleases 
 everybody a little. Sometimes we call it "decora- 
 tive" — and sometimes it is ! 
 
 Ill 
 
 When magazine drawings express feeling, the feel- 
 ings they express are only the obvious and conven- 
 tional ones of average people with coins in their 
 pockets. 
 
 Wistfidness in a pretty girl — indicated by arching 
 her eyebrows clear up into her hair. 
 
 Adventurous although stylish athleticism in a 
 young man — indicated in the jaw and pants. 
 
 Romance in the meeting of the two — indicated by 
 his gazing upon the earth, she upon infinity. 
 
MAGAZINE ART 
 
 39 
 
 Pathos of old age — indicated with bending knees 
 or a market basket. 
 
 Sweet and divine innocence of children — usually 
 indicated in the stockings. 
 
 These are the principal sentiments appealed to. 
 And I would not suggest that these sentiments are of 
 any less intrinsic worth than others, only why ding 
 dong upon them perpetually, page after page, and 
 month after month — except because they are the ob- 
 vious and rudimentary sentiments which everybody 
 feels, and all feel in substantially the same way, and 
 all like to see expressed^ Whereas, if you delve 
 down into those passions which are deep and elemen- 
 tal, you find thousands who will resent your manner 
 of expressing them; and if you drift out into those 
 veins of feeling which are high-wrought, and subtle, 
 and not to be named with names, you will find that 
 people differ so much in these feelings that one will 
 be attuned to one picture and another to another, and 
 there is danger of losing the old constituency while 
 you are attracting the new. And thus it is more 
 profitable to hammer away upon the tonic chord of 
 
40 JOURNALISM VERSUS ART 
 
 ordinary humane feeling, where we are all alike, and 
 will go patiently out and pay down our fifteen cents 
 for the same old song. 
 
 IV 
 
 When magazine art expresses ideas, these are 
 the ideas most obvious and most current among those 
 who can afford to buy. 
 
 Many years back, for example, Life has been 
 profiting upon pictures in ridicule of the idea of 
 woman suffrage, and the feminist movement in gen- 
 eral. But after Mrs. Pankhurst woke up the press, 
 and through that the world, to the biological signifi- 
 cance and power of the change in women, the profit 
 upon female ridicule dwindled. The idea of the 
 Eternal Feminine as a Perfect Lady grew a little 
 less obvious than it used to be. And so Life one day 
 graciously persuaded itself to bring out a "Pro-Suf- 
 frage Number," advertising among its artists for pic- 
 tures expressing the values of a real woman. Now 
 this little gamble on opinions is only a kind of frivol- 
 ous example of the general art policy I have outlined 
 
MAGAZINE ART 
 
 41 
 
 — to attract ever a new constituency and yet not al- 
 ienate the old. I believe that Life could profit now — 
 just because people are beginning to acquire a degree 
 of mercy toward men almost equal to that they feel 
 toward animals — by dropping anti-vivisection and 
 bringing out a Pro-Jewish number. And doubtless the 
 artists would excel, as they did in the Pro-Suffrage 
 number. For obviously no true works of expressive art 
 can be created when the thing to be expressed is deter- 
 mined, not by the naturally unconventional prompt- 
 ings of native inspiration, but by an editor scared into 
 a mania for the obvious. However, the very trick of 
 cartoon expression, the graphic representation of an 
 idea — any idea that is not radically displeasing in 
 itself — gives a slight pleasure to almost anybody. 
 
 V 
 
 Magazine art is monotonous. Well, everything 
 there is much of is monotonous. But magazine art 
 makes an ideal of monotony. "The Gibson Girl," 
 'The Christy Girl," "The Stanlaws Girl," "The 
 Harrison Fisher Girl" — these are features to be ad- 
 
42 JOURNALISM VERSUS ART 
 
 vertised on the front cover. And yet what is the 
 advertisement, but an obituary notice of these men 
 as artists? It certifies that they have given up their 
 profession of realizing in line the varieties of life's 
 experience, and gone into the manufacturing busi- 
 ness. They are now turning out an article that 
 will sell widely in competition, because it is modelled 
 strictly on the lines here indicated; and while they 
 may find it profitable to vary the model a little from 
 year to year, as progressive manufacturers do, the 
 main lines were laid down in the first big sale, and 
 no risks will be taken. 
 
 I do not want to lessen the glory that naturally 
 adheres to these men for having created these types. 
 Charles Dana Gibson is the original discoverer of 
 the psycho-physical law that an anatomically impos- 
 sible amount of space between the eye and the eye- 
 brow of the female produces a romantic reaction in 
 the male. This was a big discovery in every way. 
 It was long known that certain slight physical ab- 
 normalities are a sex stimulus. We found that out 
 almost as soon as we came down from the trees, and 
 
"your honor, this woman gave birth to a naked child! 
 
 robert minor 
 
MAGAZINE ART 
 
 45 
 
 we used to get the girls to alter themselves a little 
 instead of just altering their pictures. At least so 
 the anthropologists tell us. But, at any rate, the art 
 was forgotten, and the rediscovery of its charm was 
 altogether a new thing and a big thing. 
 
 So big, in fact, that it seemed to overwhelm the 
 artist, and he stopped there, and went into the busi- 
 ness of manufacturing paper ladies — a business 
 which quite wrecked his art, so far at least as the 
 youthful female is concerned. In the characterizing 
 of the male and the elderly female, Gibson has al- 
 ways been an artist, has always enjoyed within nat- 
 ural limitations of feeling, the varieties of life. 
 He is the best magazine artist who ever learned the 
 trick of pleasing everybody a little. Perhaps, how- 
 ever, his naturally not very wide range of feeling — 
 never transcending a genial and humane interest — 
 has made this possible. So that even in these re- 
 spects in which he is a true artist, Gibson is still an 
 example of the monotony that is inevitable in pleas- 
 ing everybody a little. Descend to the imitators — 
 the millions of manufacturers of the girl of the far- 
 
46 JOURNALISM VERSUS ART 
 
 away-look — and we find monotony so idealized, en- 
 trenched, and confirmed by commercial success, that 
 we cannot characterize their separate styles at all. 
 We can only say that the thought of a magazine 
 cover makes us tired. 
 
 VI 
 
 One kind of variety, indeed, has been found profit- 
 able by all editors — and that is variety in the shape 
 of pictures and their disposition upon the page. 
 And this variety has been cultivated as carefully as 
 monotony in the pictures themselves. The principal 
 function of the art-editor is to fix a magazine so that 
 when it is held loosely in the left hand, and the pages 
 run off rapidly by the right thumb, a sort of kaleido- 
 scopic motion-picture results. Black spots and queer 
 blotches are seen dashing from one part of the page 
 to another, and the,^ effect is quite stimulating to the 
 curiosity. This is no proof that after the purchase 
 is made, any one enjoys reading type which jumps 
 across, over, under and around the misshapen angles 
 of an extraneous insert. It is no proof that any one 
 
MAGAZINE ART 
 
 49 
 
 enjoys looking at pictures which are jumped across, 
 and poked into, by fragments of irrelevant letter- 
 press. No — ^merely that this "variety of make-up" 
 has the look of a circus as you pass by. And you 
 never remember how you are fooled. You bite again 
 at the next flutter. 
 
 This may be an extreme statement, but I doubt if 
 anybody really likes a picture of a horse-race with 
 the rear-end of a horse racing off one page, and the 
 forward quarters racing onto the other, and a half- 
 inch white margin intervening. It is impossible to 
 put much speed into such a picture. It is impos- 
 sible to put much heart into the creation of a picture 
 that is to be so treated. 
 
 VII 
 
 Besides being mutilated and vivisected, magazine 
 drawings are belittled. And this is one thing that 
 cannot happen to a story. A story may be lost in 
 the scramble for advertising. It may be given a 
 fairly formidable appearance at the front of the 
 magazine, and then peter out into a long, dreary little 
 
50 JOURNALISM VERSUS ART 
 
 tail coiling its way among tomato cans, and tobacco, 
 and beer, at the back. But the story must needs be 
 legible, if it is worth printing at all. And if it is 
 legible, then it exists as a work of art. But not so 
 the pictures. A picture may exist at eight-by-twelve 
 inches, and be absolutely annihilated in the reduction 
 to one-and-a-half-by-two. We might say that the 
 average picture in our popular magazine is about 
 half alive. The vigor is squeezed out of it by the 
 engraver; and even then it is given no margin, no 
 space in which to breathe. 
 
 All of which is but a further evidence of the com- 
 mercial idealism that determines and controls this 
 art. A magazine which is "chuck full of pictures 
 and stuff" seems to be a fat bargain. No matter 
 whether the pictures really exist or not — they look 
 as though they did, and the number is large, and it 
 takes a long time to crowd one's way through the 
 magazine, and one feels as though he were getting his 
 money's worth. And while this may be a small satis- 
 faction for so much trouble, it is a satisfaction that 
 everybody enjoys a little. 
 
MAGAZINE ART 
 
 51 
 
 VIII 
 
 Magazine drawings are mainly "illustrative." 
 Their creation is usually initiated and accomplished 
 somewhat in the following manner : 
 
 The editor hands a manuscript to a poor man who 
 is — metaphorically at least — hungry. "We want 
 two illustrations for this," he says, "and we must 
 have them by the fourteenth — play up the woman." 
 
 The artist goes home and reads the story. He 
 does not enjoy it, and he has no desire to illustrate 
 it. He probably never had a desire to illustrate any 
 story. Neither did the author have a desire to have 
 anybody illustrate his story. Neither does the ed- 
 itor have any desire to see an illustration of the story. 
 Neither does the reader consider the illustration an 
 addition to the story. 
 
 All the reader cares about is that the magazine 
 should not look dull when he approaches it; all the 
 editor cares about is that the reader should be led 
 to approach it; all the author cares about is that 
 he should have a popular artist's name attached to his 
 
S2 JOURNALISM VERSUS ART 
 
 story; and all the artist cares about is that he should 
 sufficiently conform to the business standard of art 
 so that the editor will give him a full, or at least 
 a half-page, and pay him a full or at least a half- 
 price. 
 
 Of course, these statements are sweeping and not 
 strictly true. But they are more true than any other 
 sweeping statements you could make about the popu- 
 lar art of illustrating stories. Except at those times 
 when an artist and an author spontaneously discover 
 in themselves a real harmony of inspiration — and 
 those times are rare — we may say that the illus- 
 trator's business is but an adventitious appendage to 
 a real art. But it is an easy way to promote that 
 variety of physical make-up which furnishes a slight 
 pleasure to everybody and no great displeasure to 
 any. 
 
 It would be agreeable to dwell in anticipation upon 
 the nature of magazine art in the distant future, 
 when the ideals of the business office have ceased to 
 reign supreme ; but it would be impossible. For one 
 
MAGAZINE ART 
 
 53 
 
 cannot describe a thing whose very excellence shall 
 consist in continual and surprising variation. 
 Magazine art will be true art, and every work of 
 true art is unique. The only way, therefore, in 
 which it can be described in general is to say that it 
 will be free from the tyranny of this demand that 
 everybody be pleased with it — free to make enemies 
 as well as friends. 
 
 Such art can never flourish under the commercial 
 editor. To say nothing of the strain put upon his 
 business by publishing something shockingly but 
 surely great, he must also be ready to take chances 
 upon that which is shocking but not surely great. 
 Like the artist himself, or the poet, he must live the 
 experimental life. Fear and a failure of the spirit 
 of adventure are the death of art. Recklessness is its 
 life. And if ever there appears on this earth such 
 a thing as an editorial art, it will be when commer- 
 cial timidity is removed from the inner office and a 
 spirit of free and genuine sport is enshrined there. 
 
 We can perhaps point out, in conclusion, one or 
 two little things that the true magazine art of the 
 
54 JOURNALISM VERSUS ART 
 
 future will not be, and this will help people to recog- 
 nize it when it begins to appear. 
 
 It will not be carelessness of technique taking the 
 place of carefulness. No artist is free whose hand 
 is not wholly under the dominion of his feeling or 
 his idea. 
 
 It will not be an imitation of foreign monstrosi- 
 ties supplanting the native monstrosities of America. 
 Art need have no national boundaries, but this does 
 not mean that the imitation of Germans or French- 
 men is any more inspiring than the imitation of the 
 folks at home. 
 
 It will not be realism supplanting idealism. It 
 will not be love of the poignant supplanting love of 
 the perfect, nor any one artistic ideal supplanting 
 any other. They are all human and they are all 
 divine, those ideals of art. And the important thing 
 is that the appreciator — and here again, the editor — 
 shall know how to judge each work by its own 
 standard, and not by the standard of something else. 
 The function of the critic — if he has any — is to en- 
 courage every creator to be himself at his best. 
 
A PORTRAIT. PABLO PICASSO 
 
MAGAZINE ART 
 
 57 
 
 It will not be drawings of the ugly and disgust- 
 ing, the slops and drippings of a miserable civiliza- 
 tion, supplanting the drawings of the festive and 
 beautiful. A little while ago, a paragraph in Col- 
 lier's Magazine presumed to denounce from the 
 standpoint of morality some of the young artists 
 of our times, and I quote it : 
 
 Many of the stern young moralists who are winning 
 fame by their pictures In our magazines seem (to paraphrase 
 a homely proverb) to have the same bad smell up their nos- 
 trils. Their people are gawky, greasy, febrile, and mean; 
 they are doing contemptible things in a graceless, animal 
 sort of fashion; their backgrounds are dingy, tawdry, and 
 slovenly or unsanitary. Life Is shown In the guise of the 
 thriftless seeker after low pleasures. And yet these artists 
 are Intelligent, educated, alive, with the artists' deft hand 
 and trained eye. They prove it by drawing a revolting 
 bunch of cats and dogs prowling about some overturned 
 garbage cans ! 
 
 The life of a great and eager city is all about them 
 — you can see courtesy in the subway and devotion to duty 
 in many a dingy shop, but they prefer the manners 
 and labors of the roof garden. One may see men stopping 
 in the street to stare up at the amazing beauty of our 
 tall buildings against the misty blue of the September 
 
58 JOURNALISM VERSUS ART 
 
 sky, but these are not artists, only low fellows whose im- 
 migration hither should have been prevented by law! 
 
 If this paragraph had been written from the stand- 
 point of art, it would be but another proof of the 
 fact that anything strong makes enemies as well as 
 friends. But the paragraph was written from the 
 standpoint of morality. And I have to say that it is 
 a queer morality which can escape the grip of the 
 tragic problems of our time by turning the eyes in 
 another direction. If there is a tendency among 
 free and democratic artists to linger among destitutes 
 and prostitutes and those whom exploitation has 
 driven to vagrancy and crime, this is not because 
 these seem truer subjects of art, but because they are 
 subjects of art which have so long been unrecognized. 
 They are problems of moral reflection, moreover, 
 which have too long been unstudied. It may, in- 
 deed, be true that freedom to see and sing these reali- 
 ties has turned the heads — or the hearts — of some 
 poets and artists. They may have fallen a little in 
 love with the sordid for its own sake, but certainly 
 
THE OCEANSIDE HOTEL REPORTS A COOL SUMMER. 
 
 MAURICE BECKER 
 
MAGAZINE ART 
 
 61 
 
 they are upon the heights both of health and virtue, 
 when they are compared with those moralists who 
 solve the profoundest questions of our civilization 
 by the simple device of looking up into the sky where 
 the clouds are floating so sweetly over the tall build- 
 ings. They may be "stern" — these young artists — 
 but if the world, like the writer of that paragraph, 
 proves too frivolous to face them, then it will be so 
 much the worse for the world. 
 
 It is my part, however, to point out that not the 
 painting of any particular truths will distinguish the 
 art of the future, but the freedom to paint them all — 
 a freedom which carries untold possibilities and un- 
 told dangers. If the new love of this freedom has 
 arisen in artists who are big enough to stand it, then 
 we are on the verge of a great era in popular art. 
 But if these artists prove only little bantams, who 
 have their heads turned the first time they find out 
 they can crow — it is vain to hope for anything but a 
 new series of monomanias. The fetters are removed 
 — the wings are free — there is room for untram- 
 melled and universal genius. But self-infatuation. 
 
62 JOURNALISM VERSUS ART 
 
 attitudinizing, artificiality of technique, erotic at- 
 tachment to a queer subject matter, these internal 
 
 WASHINGTON SQUARE. GLENN O. COLEMAN 
 
 fetters are as quick and sure death to liberty 
 academic custom or ancestor worship. 
 
MAGAZINE ART 
 
 63 
 
 If intelligence is given its sovereignty, and if men 
 of universality arise, the twentieth century will see 
 an age of art and poetry surpassing that of Elizabeth, 
 because to the splendid paganism and great gusto of 
 the free in those days will be added the ideals and 
 the achievements of science and democracy. But if 
 intelligence is renounced for temperament, if Art and 
 not Life becomes the center of interest, if men prove 
 too little for the adventure — then debauchment and 
 dementia prsecox are the harvest, and the hope is 
 postponed. 
 
MAGAZINE WRITING 
 
MAGAZINE WRITING 
 
 HAT is the matter with magazine 
 writing^" said the editor: "We 
 want two thousand words." 
 
 "What will you pay me per word*?" said I. And 
 in that question I stated, better than two thousand 
 words can tell, what is the matter with magazine 
 writing. 
 
 Magazine writing is professional. It is work and 
 not play. And for that reason it is never pro- 
 foundly serious or intensely frivolous enough to cap- 
 tivate the spirit. It lacks abandon. It is simply 
 well done. 
 
 To me, I confess, it is amazingly well done. The 
 quantity and fluency and consummate skill of these 
 multiplying pages is one of the wonders of our age. 
 I find myself dreading lest the mere number of 
 things and combinations of things that can be, or 
 
 67 
 
68 JOURNALISM VERSUS ART 
 
 happen, or be imagined on the surface of a small 
 planet will give out, and the magazines have to quit 
 because it is all done. But they come right along, 
 crowded with clever and lucid and entertaining and 
 perfectly satisfactory sentences and paragraphs. 
 They have the trade of literature polished and refined 
 to the last item. 
 
 But it does not captivate us. Professional excel- 
 lence never does. 
 
 The desire to support oneself, and if possible one's 
 family, is a civilized expression of that instinct of 
 self-preservation which lies at the heart of all ani- 
 mal and vegetable life. And this desire is so funda- 
 mental, so strong, and so accustomed to bend all 
 other passions, whims, caprices, energies and ideas, 
 to its service, that when it is once aroused and func- 
 tioning, nothing else in us can withstand it. A man 
 is either living, or earning his living. He is never 
 doing these two things, purely, at once. 
 
 And the literature we love is the literature whose 
 motive is pure living. It is the utter and extreme 
 play of the central nervous system in an organism 
 
MAGAZINE WRITING 69 
 
 tragically committed by its heredity to the continual 
 performance of work. In that play alone are the 
 serious things born — the things of impersonal and 
 universal import. In that play alone is the heart 
 altogether gay and inconsiderate. 
 
 Perhaps you will think that if gayety and serious 
 passion are really captivating, they ought to sell at 
 a high price, and therefore the commercial motive 
 ought to reinforce instead of damping them. But 
 for a peculiar reason you are wrong. The business 
 motive is to please as many readers as possible^ and 
 to of end none. That is what the editor is hired by 
 the stockholders to do, and that is what the editor 
 hires the writer to do. And the writer cannot do 
 that by allowing himself to flow into his pen, for 
 then, though he will captivate those who like that 
 kind of a self, he will offend those who do not. In 
 order to please everybody and offend none, he must 
 eliminate all these warm and spontaneous impulses 
 that are his very own, whatever they be, and con- 
 fine his efforts to the creation of superficially and 
 obviously "pleasant" qualities, like fluency, and wit. 
 
70 JOURNALISM VERSUS ART 
 
 and the glamor of sexuality and money, and a few 
 touches of pathos and purity, and no difficulties for 
 the understanding. Everybody likes this a little, 
 and nobody dislikes it much. Therefore it sells as 
 widely as it is advertised. But as soon as anyone 
 cuts loose, and lets riot his own unique forms of 
 recklessness or religion, his writing gets a strong raw 
 flavor that those who like it may like very much, but 
 those who hate it will abhor. It might sell, but that 
 would be an accident, and one can not support a 
 family on accidents. 
 
 The manner in which this commercial preoccupa- 
 tion passes along the editor's nerves and outward to 
 the brains of his contributors is sometimes very 
 subtle. Young writers are told they must "come to 
 New York and get the hang" of the profession. At 
 other times, however, it is not subtle at all. One 
 of our esteemed illustrators in a moment of abandon 
 painted a girl with a puppy in her arms for a maga- 
 zine cover. The editor sent it back and asked him 
 to change the puppy, because they had tried a puppy 
 before, and found that their readers "didn't like to 
 
THE ORANGO-TANGO. JOHN SLOAN 
 
MAGAZINE WRITING 73 
 
 see a girl's affections wasted on an animal." This 
 courteous consideration of editors for their readers' 
 feelings comes nearer to Christian charity than any- 
 thing else we have. 
 
 Another audacious person wrote a story for the 
 Atlantic Monthly with an uproarious boarding- 
 house celebration in it. Somebody yelled "Who 
 swiped my beer?" which, being passed through the 
 editor's commercial refining-mill, came out in the 
 magazine, "Please pass the fudge!" 
 
 You will believe these stories if you are a maga- 
 zine writer. And you will believe them if you are 
 a magazine editor, and know what it is to see sitting 
 like a barometer of calamity over your desk, super- 
 vising every stroke of the blue pencil, that fluctuat- 
 ing subscription list. 
 
 Sometimes it is subtle, and sometimes it is obvi- 
 ous, but always it is true, that magazine literature 
 is presided over by the monotonous desire to do busi- 
 ness. Magazine literature contains no accidents. 
 It takes no chances. It is never cracked up the 
 middle. It is never fragmentary. It is never 
 
74 JOURNALISM VERSUS ART 
 
 mussy with the individual finger-prints of him who 
 loved it too hard. It is never queer; it is never 
 grotesque; never alien, or exaggerated, or sublime. 
 It has always the professional finish, the smooth 
 round regular decorated mechanical perfection 
 characteristic of all goods that are turned out in 
 large quantities to sell. 
 
 The reason I understand this thing so well is that 
 in a small way I have been through it. It has been 
 the inflexible rule of my life never to try to earn 
 money by writing. The last time I broke this in- 
 flexible rule was when I wanted to go to Europe to 
 see the war. I did not want to go as a war-corre- 
 spondent, but merely as a human being who can see 
 things to be as stupid as they are without starving 
 to death. So I decided to earn my expenses before 
 I started. I approached one of our popular-maga- 
 zine editors and said: "Here, I want to write so 
 many dollars' worth of article for you on such and 
 such a subject, which I happen to know about, and 
 I will write it to your order, any way you want. 
 I will write it first, and submit it, and you will tell 
 
MAGAZINE WRITING 75 
 
 me what is the matter with it, and I will go home 
 and write it over again, and so on until you get 
 exactly what you want. I guarantee satisfaction." 
 
 He accepted my offer, and I wrote an article and 
 read it to him. He told me it was "no good," and 
 told me why. I threw it away and wrote another 
 on the same subject. He liked one or two para- 
 graphs. I saved those and wrote another article 
 around them. He liked all but a few paragraphs. 
 I cut those, and wrote more to his order. He 
 accepted my article, and I took my money and 
 left. 
 
 When I came home from Europe my friends 
 gathered round with a sad expression, and asked me 
 what was the matter with my writing. 
 
 'That article doesn't have any quality," they 
 said. "It is just well written." I told them that 
 I had learned the trade. 
 
 There are people who have a genius so uni- 
 versally charming that it rides over all these auto- 
 matic tendencies to a triumph at once literary and 
 professional — people like Peter Dunne. Let us not 
 
76 JOURNALISM VERSUS ART 
 
 bother with these exceptions. We are talking 
 about the generality of gifted young men and 
 women who aspire so nobly to the literary art, and 
 fall so automatically into the magazine trade. And 
 we are talking also about some exceptional in- 
 dividuals, whose fall was more distinguished. 
 Elbert Hubbard, Gouverneur Morris, Robert W. 
 Chambers, Jack London — but why reproach all the 
 many writers, who themselves know that profession- 
 alism has blighted the excellent genius of which they, 
 and we, had once such illuminating hopes? Let us 
 only reproach those four I 
 
 Was it not better for literature in the days when 
 they paid too little to entice many of us to write for 
 a living? Charles Lamb was a wise man. He 
 waited around an accountant's office long enough 
 to draw a little pay-envelope, and then slipped 
 quietly home and wrote whatever he pleased. And 
 the result was individual, exquisite perfection — un- 
 saleable at large, but adored in bliss by those who 
 love it. 
 
 Perhaps it was still better in the earlier days when 
 
MAGAZINE WRITING 79 
 
 princes would pay a poet just for existing, and let 
 him compose at his fancy. But I do not believe so. 
 Art is always in danger of removing itself from real 
 life; and the dominant feature of real life is the 
 pressure of necessity; and the artist, the writer, 
 ought to taste that, and taste it strong. Only he 
 ought not to create under the impulse of that pres- 
 sure for an insanely competitive market. Charles 
 Lamb was a wise man. He took life on its own 
 tragic terms, and he settled the bill. His office 
 work was tedious, but his art was the pure play of 
 a complete spirit. 
 
 So what magazine writing needs to-day is a 
 standard of amateurism. That is what all art 
 needs. We cherish that standard in sport, where; 
 it does very little good and quite an amount of 
 harm. We deprive an Indian youth of the Olym- 
 pian medal for all-round athletics, because somebody 
 digs up a stale memory that he once played baseball 
 in a bush-league for money, as he had to. That is 
 idealism of a kind. It is misplaced idealism. It 
 ought to be placed in the world of art, where it 
 
8o JOURNALISM VERSUS ART 
 
 would just save art from that professional standard- 
 ization which continually kills it. 
 
 It is appalling to reflect what the mere necessity of 
 earning a living can do to an English prose style. 
 If you were offered $5.00 a paragraph, would you 
 divide your paragraphs in the broad, logical manner 
 of Macaulay? Well, for five cents a word, you 
 will not write words with the weighty brevity of 
 Emerson or Epictetus. You will write like an in- 
 dictment clerk. Here is an example of the way an 
 indictment clerk writes: 
 
 "The specific charge against Mrs. Mohr was that 
 she 'did feloniously and with malice aforethought 
 aid, assist, abet, counsel, hire, command and pro- 
 cure Cecil Victor Brown, George W. Healis and 
 Henry W. Spellman to feloniously and with malice 
 aforethought kill and slay C. Franklin Mohr.' " 
 
 And the reason an indictment clerk writes that 
 way, is that in the old English law-courts they used 
 to pay the professional scribes so many pennies per 
 folio for copying legal documents. It was not that 
 any lawyer ever wanted to express anything clearly 
 
MAGAZINE WRITING 81 
 
 or unmistakably. It was simply that professional 
 scribes had to make a living by the word, and the 
 more words there were, the larger the living they 
 made. A similar, although more subtle employment 
 of English is being automatically forced upon the 
 magazine writers of America by the present method 
 of estimating literary values in a commercial office. 
 
 The worst thing we can say about popular maga- 
 zine editors is that they are corruptors of youth. 
 The whole commercial magazine system is, in fact, 
 bent upon the spiritual ruin of talented young peo- 
 ple with a beautiful ambition. Here is a sensitive 
 young man from Tioga, Pennsylvania, who grew up 
 on a farm, working around the barn for his living, 
 but spending the whole strength of his spirit for 
 perhaps ten years producing and perfecting a novel 
 that is an intense and compelling work of art. He 
 sends it to a publisher, and it is bought and issued, 
 and wins its way with the public. Inside of five days 
 this innocent youth receives a letter from a magazine 
 man offering to pay his expenses down to New York 
 to talk business. He comes, of course. He is 
 
82 JOURNALISM VERSUS ART 
 
 excited and happy. He never had any money. 
 What he had was high feeling, patience, persistence, 
 a love of perfection, a spirit tuned to make melodies 
 in its contact with reality. This magazine man 
 grabs hold of him, stuns him with a point-blank offer 
 of a larger sum of money than he ever knew how 
 to think about, and proceeds to force him to sit 
 down and turn out another novel inside of ten 
 months, the first three chapters to be delivered a 
 week from next Wednesday! That is the way in 
 which our magazine system is corrupting the literary 
 art of this period. Commercial mediocrity, com- 
 mercial mutilation,^ commercial timidity, commer- 
 cial "finish," commercial dilution, and above all 
 
 iWhen this essay was published in a popular magazine the en- 
 tire rhythmical force and meaning was removed from its concluding 
 paragraph by the magazine-man in order to make room for a 
 picture of a female middle wearing an "abdominal reducer" and a 
 pair of "girdle pants" made out of rubber, and for sale at $6.00 
 and $25.00 a pair respectively. And yet the editor of that magazine 
 had spontaneously asked me to write the article as an attack on 
 this custom of buying literature by the yard, and cutting and filling 
 holes with it as though it were a string of homogeneous cheese- 
 cloth. What hope is there of the other magazine editors? 
 
A DRAWING BY K. R. CHAMBERLAIN 
 
MAGAZINE WRITING 8j 
 
 the commercial tempo are incompatible with the 
 very spirit of creative art. 
 
 Barring the hope of some profound revolution, 
 which may give us all a chance to earn a quiet, use- 
 ful living in a reasonable number of hours without 
 frenzy, I see no glories ahead for magazine litera- 
 ture. It will continue to be as it is. The big cir- 
 culation-getters with a gift for keeping everything 
 interesting though ordinary, will continue to buy up 
 and dilute the best talents of the country; a few 
 amateur magazines, which can not afford to pay for 
 anything, will continue to exhibit a lower average of 
 talent, but a more poignant variety of art; every once 
 in a while a native popular genius will ride over all 
 these tendencies of the time; and so on, until some 
 deeper change than any of us can imagine. 
 
LAZY VERSE 
 
LAZY VERSE 
 
 JOURNALISM is the unique literary achieve- 
 ment of this age. And journalism has 
 brought some benefit to the literary tradition. 
 It has elevated lucidity and human interest to the 
 high place of esteem where in a democratic society 
 they belong. It has made the laborious task of im- 
 itating library echoes, in order to get into the Atlan- 
 tic Monthly^ unnecessary. It has rendered book-fed 
 and literarious writers as obscure as they are tire- 
 some. But journalism is not literature; it is busi- 
 ness. And with some accidental exceptions the tend- 
 ency of journalism to insert itself into the place of 
 literature is a disaster to the art of writing. I am 
 thinking of the new dilute variety of prosy poetry 
 which is watering the country, and in order to sep- 
 arate myself from those who have any conventional 
 or technical prejudice against composing poetry 
 without meter I call it Lazy Verse. 
 
90 JOURNALISM VERSUS ART 
 
 Amazing are the metaphysical theories which 
 those who produce this material put up to jus- 
 tify their professional incapacity for the intense 
 rhapsodies of art. I am not going to dispute those 
 theories, for of all obvious rationalizations of per- 
 sonal inclination, the so-called "sciences" which an 
 artist constructs about his art are the most obviously 
 unscientific. When a man starts a school of poetry, 
 you can be sure that he has an impulse to create 
 something unique, but lacks the energic capacity to 
 sit down and do it. Every great poem is a school of 
 poetry, but it does not issue circulars about itself. 
 Futurism, Imagism, Vorticism, the "Sceptric 
 School," Polyrhythmic Poetry — all these names, and 
 the others, are efforts to compensate a sense of crea- 
 tive inferiority. So let them pass. 
 
 But that poetry is more and more being written 
 without meter, and that in consequence more and 
 more poetry is being written, and that those who so 
 write are most of them convinced that they have 
 gained in freedom and power to convey realizations 
 to the imagination, is a fact which any true science 
 
LAZY VERSE 
 
 91 
 
 of poetry will have to consider. It will have to es- 
 timate the motives, and weigh the values of the "free- 
 verse" tendency in general. I am going to make 
 a beginning in that direction by pointing out that in 
 the majority of cases a mere lack of energetic idle 
 time, or the habit of intense concentration, is the 
 motive to free verse, and the only value gained is 
 the journalistic dilution which enables poetry to ex- 
 pand and multiply and cover space, as all the rest 
 of our writing does in this day of the innumerable 
 magazines and the enormous newspaper. 
 
 To read William Blake's poem "To the Evening 
 Star," or to read passages of the Psalms, or Song of 
 Solomon in the English Bible, or of Tagore's 
 or Giovannitti's poems, is enough to prove to any 
 one that realizations of the utmost poignancy can 
 be conveyed without meter by the poetic use of 
 names. Perceptible forms too can be engendered 
 in that exaltation in which qualities of thought or 
 passion have as clear definition as qualities of sound. 
 Even the very absence of form, and often of inten- 
 sity itself, can have poetic value in so unique an 
 
92 JOURNALISM VERSUS ART 
 
 achievement as Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass." 
 It was necessary that some miraculously powerful 
 poet should burst up through the fine pages of re- 
 corded high passion with the uncouth realities of the 
 hours of a man's every-day life. This could only 
 be done with the every-day manners of language. It 
 could only be done irregularly, verbosely. It could 
 only be done unsatisfactorily^ for if it were satisfy- 
 ing it would not be the unqualified and incommen- 
 surable reality that was required. But persons who 
 have drunk the whole draught of Walt Whitman's 
 poetry and realized that it is an eternal achievement 
 in literature, and persons who think the English 
 Bible and many other unmetrical visions are exalted 
 poetry, are still entitled to find the general tendency 
 of modern "Free Verse" dissolving and wearisome 
 in an extreme degree. 
 
 There are two kinds of people who become in- 
 fected with journalistic free-verse — poets and prose- 
 writers. The motive which brings prose-writers to 
 this form is the same as the motive which makes 
 magazine editors fill prose full of paragraphs, and 
 
LAZY VERSE 
 
 95 
 
 little sub-heads that have nothing to do with the 
 subject of discussion. It is a business of "breaking 
 up the type." It is a part of the new art of dis- 
 play-advertising. It makes the prose easy to read. 
 And the necessity of that is a direct outcome of the 
 fatness of the Sunday newspaper. We live under 
 the weight of so much printed material, for the daily 
 absorption of which we feel responsible, that every 
 effort must be made to tickle us and kick us and jog 
 us along so we will get through anything to the con- 
 clusion. So far from being a return to primitive, 
 naive or simple styles of writing, this breaking up 
 of continuity in lines neither demanded by me- 
 chanics nor suggested by music, is the height of 
 effort at sophisticated stimulation of a jaded per- 
 ception. 
 
 Poets write the new free verse for a more com- 
 plicated series of reasons, the matrix of which is 
 indeed primitive. It is the aboriginal indolence, 
 which if it had been one ounce heavier would have 
 eliminated the necessity of our writing poetry at all, 
 or doing anything else that pertains to energic civ- 
 
96 JOURNALISM VERSUS ART 
 
 ilization. I am speaking now of the poets who have 
 passion and talent enough to produce in their life- 
 times a few gems of concentrated expression, but 
 who have fallen in with the flow of the magazines, 
 and accepted their fatal facility as the type of lit- 
 erature in our time. Another side of this question 
 is presented by the fact that free-verse advertises the 
 chance of poetic creation to many persons who ache 
 with feelings but lack the agility of wit that metri- 
 cal and rhymed excellence demand. They have 
 gained confidence to express themselves in poetry, 
 and for that all wise lovers of the art will be thank- 
 ful. But even for them, now they have made the 
 venture, it may be that a more rigorous self-disci- 
 pline, though it should not produce so many poems 
 that were "all right," would produce lines and 
 passages more adequate to their passion, and more 
 stimulating than mere "acceptableness" to those who 
 read them. At least it is of dubious benefit to an 
 art that more people should undertake it merely 
 because its difficulties have been relaxed by an easier 
 convention. It used to require a very high combi- 
 
LAZY VERSE 
 
 97 
 
 nation of faculties of heart and brain, with strong 
 concentration added to these, to make a poem which 
 would endure reading it all. To-day all one has to 
 do is to say something. And any one who has some- 
 thing to say can do that. 
 
 A person whom I suspected of trying to propagate 
 one of those self-advertising schools of poetry, by 
 calling some free-verse effluvium "polyrhythmics," 
 once mailed me at my request a loose-sheet note- 
 book, and I submit my response as a proof of this 
 statement. 
 
 I like this end-opening note-book. 
 
 I would like a side-opening note-book too. 
 
 I find them so yielding to poetry, 
 
 So yielding also to prose, 
 
 Ay, even to polyrhythambics, the songs of the parrot-cage, 
 So yielding and so sweet to the assaulting pen. 
 In hyper-dactyls and duck-billed trochaics I will sing — 
 If you can call that song which is the very soul 
 Of loose-necked indolence and club-headed slothfulness of 
 being — 
 
 Yes, even in these vegetable polypods of prosic poetry 
 I will put forth small buds of thought and feeling. 
 I will celebrate the paper that I sing them on, 
 
98 JOURNALISM VERSUS ART 
 
 And ask you, by the muse of mussiness and paleness and de- 
 cline, 
 
 To send me on another note-book, open at the side, 
 
 And measuring ten by eight ; for ten is not too many inches, 
 
 Nor is eight too few, 
 
 To plant these boneless syllables, these molluscs of mute 
 
 nature, on. 
 These water-fat amorphous multitudes, 
 In copulating rows that shall regenerate unto infinity, 
 And crowd the world with stringy puddles of inarticulation, 
 Until red hells of vengeance like the flames of poetry 
 Arise in revolutionary number. 
 
 Purging space and holy nature of this slow and sleep-en- 
 gendering gangrene, 
 
 And sending down to violent oblivion and intense decay. 
 
 With one last heaven-searching scream that shall alone re- 
 main in memory, 
 
 Their pusillanimated authors. 
 
 It is not only the ingenuity of mind demanded to 
 construct, without awkwardness and artificiality, the 
 compelling forms of poetry, that is lacking in these 
 journalistic poets; it is that rhapsodic trance of the 
 whole being which makes those forms savagely as- 
 pired to as a war-dance or a hypnotic drug. People 
 who declare that there are "no new rhythms" pos- 
 
LAZY VERSE 
 
 lOl 
 
 sible in metric poetry, are people so neuralized with 
 effete parlor civilization that their vital organs are 
 incapable of resounding to the fundamental trance- 
 engendering stroke of the tom-tom. They are in- 
 capable of hypnosis. They are incapable of naively 
 falling asleep to dream. They do not know what 
 fundamental rhythm is. If they did, they could 
 not but distinguish that in their minds from the 
 superficial forms of phrasal music which an artist 
 inevitably superimposes upon it, and they would 
 know that just as many phrasal patterns are possible 
 in a fundamental rhythmic trance, and a great many 
 more probable, than in the state of hyper-sophistical 
 intellectual preciosity which they have found out 
 how to exploit as primitive and free. Too much 
 neural excitation and too little of the booming 
 pulse of the blood is what distinguishes this freedom 
 from the freedom of the poet who is lost in a rhap- 
 sody of song. It is easy to be free by simply de- 
 clining to engage a medium offering a resistance of 
 its own; but to be free by virtue of the power to 
 conquer with your passion everything that stands 
 
102 JOURNALISM VERSUS ART 
 
 against it in the genuine utilities of an art, is a free- 
 dom worthy of the boast. 
 
 To use line division at all is to acknowledge the 
 organic value to imaginative realization of the semi- 
 regular recurrent stimulus, out of which in aboriginal 
 recitative the forms of poetry arose. To use it with 
 arbitrary opportunism, so that no judgment or 
 choice, human or superhuman, not even your own, 
 could ever put your poem together again if it fell 
 apart, is neither primitive nor free, nor interesting, 
 but simply obtuse. It reveals a lack of sensibility to 
 the real quality of the thing. 
 
 In all arts it is the tendency of those who are un- 
 grown to confuse the expression of intense feeling 
 with the intense expression of feeling — which last is 
 all the world will long listen to. The journalistic 
 vogue of free- verse encourages this kind of confusion 
 in poetry. It gets people to spend an entire literary 
 life cultivating an emotional personality instead of 
 cultivating an art, because there is not enough re- 
 sistance in the medium of the art to make it worth 
 going up against. In order to produce anything 
 
LAZY VERSE 105 
 
 which will compel attention beyond the vogue of the 
 Sunday paper and the every-day magazine, it is nec- 
 essary to concentrate attention upon the making of 
 something, more even than upon the passion out of 
 which it is made; and that is one thing that the 
 forms of rhythmic poetry compel us to do. Having 
 the habit of such effort, it is not impossible that we 
 might on some occasion achieve one of those formless 
 forms, like Blake's, that are so rare as to be remem- 
 bered through the centuries. It is not impossible 
 that we might subdue the listener to our passion 
 without form as well as without metrical music. 
 Nothing can be declared impossible to the whims of 
 the artistic impulse. But the general deliquescence 
 of all high-strung and concentrated expression which 
 the journalistic commerce of our time is accomplish- 
 ing can be declared incompatible with the whole 
 spirit of art. And that any writer living in this 
 wide stream of watery verbal emotion can learn to 
 produce great poetry by pouring these long verses 
 into that stream, can be declared tragically doubtful. 
 
WHY ENGLISH DOES NOT SIMPLIFY 
 HER SPELLING 
 
WHY ENGLISH DOES NOT SIMPLIFY 
 HER SPELLING 
 
 SOME people like to reform everything they 
 can get their hands on. Others want to fold 
 away and worship whatever is presented to 
 them by the caprice of history. The world is pretty 
 evenly divided between these two. And if only 
 Creation had thought to make all the radicals red and 
 all the conservatives white, it would have been a great 
 convenience. For there is no use in trying to estimate 
 a man's opinions until you discover to which of these 
 fundamental schools he belongs. If he belongs to 
 the reds, you take everything that he says with a 
 grain of salt, and make up for not following his 
 advice by enjoying his company. If he belongs to 
 the whites, you take what he says (with all due re- 
 spect for his gray hair and family connections) with 
 a grain of pepper. Perhaps the drift of these re- 
 
no JOURNALISM VERSUS ART 
 
 marks will reveal the fact that I am a red. I like 
 to meddle and tinker. I would rather go from bad 
 to worse than let well enough alone. I belong to 
 that disreputable class damned by Tacitus (or Cicero, 
 or somebody who understood both Latin and human 
 nature) as "desiring a revolution for its own sake." 
 To such persons everything very obviously needs 
 a change, and the only question with them is 
 whether they have time to give the revolution their 
 personal supervision. Instead of introducing my- 
 self, therefore, as the other debaters upon simplified 
 spelling do, by wagging a long tail of university de- 
 grees, I give this more relevant information that 
 I am a red, and that what I say about anything 
 organized or established is generally taken at a con- 
 siderable discount. 
 
 Such being my nature, I instinctively defend the 
 Simplified Spelling Board. Its critics ought to re- 
 member that its motives are complex, like the motives 
 of human beings. It is not reforming the language 
 with a special view to spelling-books, or printing- 
 presses, or international diplomacy, or phonetics, or 
 
SIMPLIFIED SPELLING in 
 
 logic, or historic truthfulness; it is moved by all 
 these considerations at once. To reform a thing 
 means to make it better than it was ; and in order to 
 make a language better, it is necessary that all human 
 interests be considered. The Spelling Board is try- 
 ing to consider them all. Somehow it has got stuck 
 in the popular mind that the chief purpose of this 
 reform is to make it easy for the Germans to learn 
 our language, so that we will not have to learn 
 theirs. That is one very important consideration; 
 but there are others just as important. "Historical 
 Propriety, Scientific Regularity and Practical Econ- 
 omy," says their last bulletin. These three. And 
 the greatest of these is Practical Economy — which 
 divides itself into economy in printing and writing 
 and typewriting (five per cent, of our letters being 
 considered superfluous), economy of eye-strain, econ- 
 omy of paper, economy of time spent by teachers and 
 pupils (generously calculated at about a year for 
 every pupil). We can save a good deal of money 
 out of what we are spending for education and put 
 it into battleships. Practical Economy is the chief 
 
112 JOURNALISM VERSUS ART 
 
 motive. But the others are there — ''Historical Pro- 
 priety," which some think is the only valid reason 
 for anything, and "Scientific Regularity," which will 
 make it possible for a child to reason out his own 
 spellings. He will not so soon get the idea that 
 education consists of being told. That is, to my 
 revolutionary mind, the most important argument in 
 favor of rationalizing our spelling. But no one of 
 these arguments does all the work. The members 
 of the Committee use them all. They try to strike 
 a liberal attitude which will yield the highest values 
 in each direction. When "Practical Economy" gets 
 tired, they fall back on "Historical Propriety." 
 When that wears out, they hitch up "Scientific Reg- 
 ularity." So you can generally suspect, when you 
 see one of these arguments laid off, that the others 
 are working. 
 
 It was a great joke, I thought, that the Board 
 should fancy they were simplifying things when they 
 took a few verbs that ended in ed in the past tense, 
 and changed that ending to /. When you once learn 
 that English verbs form their past in ed, it is no sim- 
 
SIMPLIFIED SPELLING 113 
 
 plification to have to remember that some of them 
 cut it down to /. Ending in ed in the past was about 
 the only consistent and respectable thing that English 
 verbs ever did. Now that is gone, and we have a 
 new exception on our hands. It used to be very 
 smart to laugh at this "simplification" — but that 
 was before you read the bulletins. After you read 
 them, you found out that "Scientific Regularity" 
 was not on the job there at all. It was "Practical 
 Economy" — eye-strain, ink, paper, typewriters' 
 fingers, proofreaders' nervous system — with "His- 
 torical Propriety" bossing the reform. 
 
 Of course it is a little amusing to the man who is 
 not doing the work, to see a reformer get into trouble. 
 After they get all those 900 long-tailed preterites in 
 ed docked, then they have to go to work and lay out 
 a new museum of exceptions. 
 
 "Verbs that end in -ce {-ace, -ice, -ance, -ence, etc.) in the 
 infinitive cannot have the d in the preterit ending -ced sim- 
 pUfied to t, because the resuhant sequence -ct would be 
 abnormal for the sound intended. 
 
 "The -ed cannot be spelled -t when the infinitive con- 
 tains a long vowel written a — e (bake), e. .e (eke), etc., etc." 
 
114 JOURNALISM VERSUS ART 
 
 These exceptions make you sick with the old black- 
 board sickness. This is where the language kicks 
 back. It won't rationalize. Nothing will. It is 
 the same way with the universe. Every once in a 
 while a philosopher sets out to reform the universe, 
 and, for every new rule he puts up, the universe comes 
 back with another batch of exceptions. The raw 
 material can always raise you one higher, so to say, 
 and that gives zest to the intellectual game. So 
 it is with these grammatical exceptions. You could 
 not eliminate them entirely, even if you had the 
 remodelling of the human gullet. The object is, 
 however, to reform the universe just all it can stand, 
 but never forget that it was there first and you 
 have to keep your eyes open. 
 
 Now there is one direction in which the Simplified 
 Spelling Board has not kept its eyes open. One 
 vital human interest, their bulletins of apology and 
 exegesis never mention. I am not excited about it 
 because I believe it will take its revenge. It will 
 reform the reformation. But I take pleasure in 
 pointing it out, because this is the first time I ever 
 
SIMPLIFIED SPELLING iij 
 
 discovered in my own mind anything like a conserva- 
 tive bias. 
 
 In an age which reduces all things to the so-called 
 "practical test," we are prone to forget that a thing 
 is practical only because it leads to an increase of 
 some value which is not practical, but enjoyed for 
 its own sake. If we are going to make our language 
 practical, we change it in such a way as to make 
 it more useful to us in getting those things which 
 we want, not because they are useful, but just be- 
 cause we want them. There is no use saving money 
 on schools, for instance, unless we can use it for 
 something that we like better. And one of the things 
 that we like, not because it is useful, but just be- 
 cause we like it, is literary art. A great many of 
 the truest and best Americans are vitally interested 
 in literary art. To them words have a value, not 
 for what they can do only, but for what they are. 
 As one of the chief values in literary art is variety 
 (in the sound, appearance and associations of words), 
 and as the work of the Spelling Board is an assault 
 on the unparalleled varieties of the English language, 
 
ii6 JOURNALISM VERSUS ART 
 
 it is right for artists to demand that the Board have 
 an eye to this interest. Looking through their pub- 
 lications, however, I find not the scantest allusion 
 to the subject. 
 
 In one of their circulars, after congratulating them- 
 selves upon the support of scientists, they proceed as 
 follows : 
 
 "On the other hand, the most vociferous of our oppo- 
 nents have been men of letters. It is pleasant to record that 
 many of the foremost figures of contemporary American 
 literature can be counted as ardent advocates of our cause. 
 But it is indisputable also that some writers of prominence 
 have revealed themselves as tied fast in the bonds of prej- 
 udice and as glorying in their enslavement. Perhaps, how- 
 ever, this is to be wondered at less than it is to be deplored, 
 since it is the duty of the lyrists and of the romancers to 
 use the language as best they can, and they are under no 
 obligation to acquaint themselves with its history or with 
 the principles which govern its growth." 
 
 That paragraph is not very profound. Men of 
 letters are just as prejudiced as, and perhaps a little 
 more ignorant, than, anybody else; but they are 
 human beings too, and as such the prime fact about 
 
A HUSBAND. 
 
 "by god, MARIA, I BELIEVE WEVE BUSTED THIS UMBRELLA ! 
 
 GEORGE BELLOWS 
 
SIMPLIFIED SPELLING 119 
 
 them is that they are interested in their own inter- 
 ests. They are under no obligation to acquaint 
 themselves, it says, with the history of the language 
 or the principles that govern its growth. Indeed, 
 they are not; and neither is any scientist, or type- 
 writer, or proofreader, or schoolma'am, or steel 
 manufacturer, or politician — nobody, in fact, but a 
 few blue-spectacled lexicographers and close-eyed 
 root-ferrets who make their living that way. They 
 can't reform the language. The language will be 
 reformed, if it is reformed, by a great army of per- 
 sons whose differing interests are all subserved by the 
 change, and the "Historical Propriety" people are an 
 exceedingly insignificant squad in that army. Men 
 of letters — especially the more subtle — do not be- 
 long to that army, because they are (like men of 
 everything else) "tied fast in the bonds of prejudice" 
 in favor of the things that they like best. 
 
 Men of letters are not, as a rule, primarily in- 
 terested in any one of those reliable old shifts — 
 scientific regularity, historical propriety, or practical 
 economy. They are working a different vein. They 
 
120 JOURNALISM VERSUS ART 
 
 make their living, if they can, out of psychological 
 variety, and that is what they are hunting for. To 
 condemn them because they are not interested in 
 extricating European immigrants from the spelling- 
 book, or smoothing down typewriters, or saving 
 school money in order to emphasize the gestures of 
 our navy, is as irrational as to condemn a natural- 
 born red for wanting to revolutionize the language. 
 They can't help it. 
 
 Now, to be fair to that quotation, I will explain 
 what the writer meant by saying that literary objec- 
 tors are tied fast in the bonds of prejudice and glory- 
 ing in their enslavement. He meant that they are 
 unwilling to give up the word-values and word-as- 
 sociations which they like, simply from habit, for 
 others which are just as good, but which are un- 
 familiar to them. For instance, if you are a literary 
 man, the word debt (spelled with a ^) will have a 
 special value for you and a great many rich associa- 
 tions. You have got used to the and the word 
 will not fit comfortably into a page without it. It 
 will not have just the same feeling- tone. But the 
 
SIMPLIFIED SPELLING 121 
 
 Spelling Board believes it is your duty, in the in- 
 terests of other trades, to drop the b and get used to 
 the new form, which is just as good in itself, and 
 which will soon begin to carry all the associations 
 that the old one carried. In that particular case the 
 Spelling Board may be right. A great deal of the 
 opposition to any reform arises from the selfishness 
 of people who refuse to change their old habits for 
 new ones that are just as good for them, and better 
 for somebody else. On the other hand, it is very 
 difficult to decide, in a given case, whether you are 
 objecting to a new form just because it does not bear 
 the old associations yet, or because it is by its in- 
 trinsic nature not fit to bear them. It is difficult to 
 say whether passiv (with that abrupt and g}^mnastic 
 ending) is unfit for the poetic representation of in- 
 activity, or whether it merely seems unfit because we 
 are accustomed to slide off on an -ive. It is difficult 
 to distinguish the judgments of custom from the 
 judgments of reason, but this is a very general in- 
 firmity, and it is not, like ignorance, peculiar to 
 men of letters. 
 
122 JOURNALISM VERSUS ART 
 
 A man of letters, essaying to write gruesome poety, 
 who should leave the h out of ghost and aghast and 
 ghastly and ghostly^ and the w out of wraith, and 
 change the re of spectre to an er would be a fool. 
 He would deservedly die of starvation. A ghost 
 without an h is little better, for the purposes of 
 poetry, than a goat. The h not only is connected 
 by custom with the breathless and visionary moment, 
 but for obvious reasons it ought to be. The word 
 ghost is not at present associated with post and most 
 and roast and toast, and a host of daylight experi- 
 ences, and it is essential to the literary art that it 
 should not become so. It is, with one or two others, 
 a word by itself — a strange word, essentially unpro- 
 nounced, unmuscularized, supernatural. 
 
 A member of the Simplifying Board brings for- 
 ward, with the gusto of a bull routing the antiques 
 out of a china-shop, a long parade of words that con- 
 tain a needless A, thrust in by Caxton "after a Dutch 
 fashion" — ghuest, ghittar, ghospel, ghossip, etc. — 
 triumphantly pointing to the fact that we have got 
 rid of this "awkward squad," and apparently won- 
 
SIMPLIFIED SPELLING 123 
 
 dering why ghost and its companions remain. Per- 
 haps if the writer had a little more sympathy with 
 the growers of language, with some less knowledge 
 about its growth, he would be just as wise. "In 
 Italian," he says, " 'hard' g before e or i is written 
 gh^ in French gu; but these devices are not needed in 
 English." If they are not "needed," it is the more 
 creditable to the artists, the true developers of the 
 written language, that they were retained. It is the 
 more creditable to them that they could tell the es- 
 sential difference between a gossip and a ghost. 
 "After a Dutch fashion," says he, with fine scorn. 
 Whereas it is the pride and glory of the old Anglo- 
 Saxon drift that it knew just where and when to 
 borrow a jewel and slough off a scab. Every Con- 
 tinental nation has been robbed of its most intimate 
 peculiarities. Asia and the treasuries of Ind have 
 been levied upon. There is that word wraith^ a 
 jewel to me since childhood, a word to whose his- 
 torical propriety and scientific regularity and prac- 
 tical economy I dwell in a most serene and blissful 
 indifference, but a word borrowed, I know, by the 
 
124 JOURNALISM VERSUS ART 
 
 happy genius of the English people from some travel- 
 ling caravan of foreigners or fates. The man that 
 desecrates such a syllable, a unity and a symbol of 
 evanescence, like the half-uttered breath of a spirit, 
 is the mortal enemy of all artists. Be he red or 
 white, their ways part before the altar of poetry. 
 
 Not only is that word a jewel because of its sug- 
 gested sound and its appearance, both essentially 
 depending upon the w, but it is precious for two 
 other reasons. One of these is its uniqueness. 
 There is nothing else in the world like it, and there 
 shall never be. The other reason is that its verbal 
 and literal associates are totally different from what 
 they would be if the w were omitted. It would be 
 one of a vulgar company — raU, raid, rain, etc. — 
 without its unutterable beginning, whereas with that 
 beginning it is as little like any of those words as 
 the vision itself might be. It is potentially asso- 
 ciated with why and whither and where, words of 
 hesitation and wonder. 
 
 To many who cannot feel a word, or who feeling 
 it cannot believe that their feeling depends upon such 
 
SIMPLIFIED SPELLING 125 
 
 trivial things, these will seem the refinements of 
 decadence. The sound of a word, they will think, 
 ought to be enough to satisfy a healthy poet. That 
 the sound is by no means unique in importance, how- 
 ever, any one may demonstrate to himself by com- 
 paring the flavor of two such words as rough and ruff. 
 Not only the appearance, either, determines the dif- 
 ference, but very largely the muscular sensations of 
 the throat and mouth. I venture to say that, were 
 our ears subtly aware of the finest overtones, we 
 should find those words differently pronounced. Our 
 muscular sense is aware of the finest overtones. 
 Rough is a very different word from ruff, aside from 
 its meaning, to the most practical man. To me, as 
 it happens, rough is more sharply distinguished from 
 ruff than it is from bough, the appearance being 
 more effective in that case than the sound. 
 
 As the name of so fine and healthy an artist as 
 Mark Twain is advanced upon the side of simplifi- 
 cation, I appeal upon the question of the importance 
 of these subtleties to a literary man of our times who 
 almost rivalled him in popularity — Robert Louis 
 
126 JOURNALISM VERSUS ART 
 
 Stevenson. I can find nothing to quote which quite 
 indicates his views on a spelling reform; but I take 
 that essay, "On Some Technical Elements of Style 
 in Literature," for assurance that he believed in 
 the indispensability of subtle differences, not only in 
 the sounds of words, but in their shape, and alpha- 
 betic associations, and size, and velocity, and grace. 
 I quote a few significant, although not strictly ap- 
 posite, words. The whole essay is apposite enough 
 in the subtle perceptions which it reveals. 
 
 "And you will find another and much stranger circum- 
 stance. Literature is written by and for two senses: a sort 
 of internal ear, quick to perceive 'unheard melodies'; and 
 the eye, which directs the pen and deciphers the printed 
 page. Well, even as there are rhymes for the eye, so you 
 will find that there are assonances and alliterations. . . . 
 Here, then, we have a fresh pattern — a pattern, to speak 
 grossly, of letters — which makes the fourth preoccupation 
 of the prose-writer, and the fifth of the versifier. At times 
 it is very delicate and hard to perceive, and then perhaps 
 most excellent and winning." 
 
 For further evidence that the perception of these 
 hues and flavors is not an hypertrophy of the literary 
 
SIMPLIFIED SPELLING 127 
 
 organ, observe this remark of an artist in another 
 field: 
 
 "And if we have lost so many things, which in some 
 cases are lost forever, of what seemed to the makers of 
 works of art in the past the very essence of their difference 
 from other people, what other things do we not lose when, 
 for example, in poetry the exact quality of a single vowel, 
 its shading in the scale of sound, has so much expression, 
 so much importance to us*? Think of all the combinations 
 of these simple elements in the style of a great poet. Each 
 syllable has a personality of its own. . . ." * 
 
 Even a person of "scientific regularity" is con- 
 strained to recognize the visual and kinetic values 
 of words, as appears in this passage from a recent 
 work upon the "Psychology of Beauty" : 
 
 "Manifold may be the implications and suggestions of 
 even a single letter. Thus a charming anonymous essay 
 on the word 'grey.' 'Grey is a quiet color for daylight 
 things, but there is a touch of difference, of romance even, 
 about things that are grey,' etc." 
 
 Without looking farther for proofs of good health 
 and sanity, I will endeavor to set forth, with what 
 
 *John La Farge, "Considerations on Painting." 
 
128 JOURNALISM VERSUS ART 
 
 scientific regularity I can myself muster, the various 
 effects of the proposed simplification upon the lan- 
 guage as artistic material. 
 
 The first of these effects is the mutilation of many 
 words which have a precious character by virtue of 
 silent, or so-called "superfluous" letters, (i) These 
 may be precious because their present form is like 
 their meaning: 
 
 fragile 
 
 fragil 
 
 thumb 
 
 thum 
 
 numb 
 
 num 
 
 scimitar 
 
 simitar 
 
 scythe 
 
 sithe 
 
 harangue 
 
 harang 
 
 solemn 
 
 solem 
 
 kissed 
 
 kist 
 
 gazelle 
 
 gazel 
 
 
 
 (I choose a few of these published changes at 
 random, and, while some of them may represent per- 
 sonal prejudice, a universal truth remains. For in- 
 stance, the c in scythe and scissors and scimitar is 
 to cut with.) 
 
 The English language is especially rich in such 
 words — termed "onomatopoetic." As words were 
 many of them born of the perception of such analo- 
 gies, so many of them have been retained or altered 
 
SIMPLIFIED SPELLING 131 
 
 by the same instinct. This accounts for untold 
 "superfluous" or "illogical" letters. Buz is very 
 good logic, but very poor poetry compared with buzz. 
 The b in dumb and lamb, so the Historical Propriety 
 man tells us, is "original" ; the ^ in thumb and numb 
 was inserted. But the reason why all four ^'s are 
 there now, is one and the same reason — namely, that 
 each is, in a most delicate way, congruous with the 
 meaning of its word. It is difficult to estimate things 
 that are so unseizable as these, their elusiveness be- 
 ing the essence of their value. Like happiness it- 
 self, and like the motes before your eyes, when you 
 look straight at them they run away into a corner 
 and are not. But such gypsy things are most pre- 
 cious. In these ways our spelling is superior to the 
 spelling of French and of German, and far superior 
 to the spelling of Italian and Spanish. The practi- 
 cal economy man calls it "vicious." "It is unworthy 
 of a practical people." "No better example could 
 be found of the inconsistency of human nature," 
 says he, "than the fact that the most businesslike of 
 races has been so long content with the most unbusi- 
 
132 JOURNALISM VERSUS ART 
 
 nesslike of orthographies." There is nothing incon- 
 sistent about the practical economy man, however. 
 He is practical from the front end of his pamphlet 
 to the back. It is possible that he sees the Anglo- 
 Saxon race under the shadow of his own nose. It 
 is possible that, if he would look beyond his own 
 age and province, he would find the Anglo-Saxon 
 more notably artistic and intellectual than business- 
 like. There is a race or two here that competes with 
 us successfully in business. There is none in litera- 
 ture. And if he should find any further evidence of 
 this unpractical bent, then the spelling could line up 
 on the same side of the argument. The Anglo-Saxon 
 race might thus prove almost as consistent as the 
 economy man, for there is no written language more 
 worthy of an artistic people. 
 
 (2) The destroyed words may be precious be- 
 cause their present form makes them unique, whereas 
 the change reduces them to vulgarity. 
 
 nitre niter sylvan silvan 
 
 mould mold rhyme rime 
 
 although altho autumn autum 
 
SIMPLIFIED SPELLING 133 
 
 build bild 
 choir quire 
 guardian gardian 
 
 campaign campam 
 league leag 
 
 Let autumn stand for a thousand tone-poems that 
 the proposed reform would destroy. Literature will 
 never relinquish autumn. 
 
 (3) Words may be precious, by virtue of "super- 
 fluous" or "illogical" letters, because these letters de- 
 termine valued associations and prevent disastrous 
 ones. 
 
 limb Urn 
 courtesy curtesy 
 tongue tung 
 
 sovereign soveren 
 lamb lam 
 
 The words that find themselves, one way or another, 
 in this list are innumerable. You can do what you 
 like with phthisis, and eggs, and cyclopczdias, and 
 hcematins (whatever they are), but when you try to 
 make courtesy into an American there is a kind of 
 folly in the effort. Courtesy belongs to the leisure 
 of the court; it would die after two days in a curt 
 atmosphere. No music would ever flow from a 
 
134 JOURNALISM VERSUS ART 
 
 tung; it could proceed as well from the lung^ and 
 it never has in the history of metaphor. And when 
 it comes to trying to make a lamb lam^ all poetry and 
 religion protest. A lamb can't lam. He is too 
 blunt. You might as well try to make a cow scream 
 as to make a lamb lam. 
 
 It will be noticed, further, that most of the words 
 quoted belong to more than one of these three lists. 
 Some belong to all three. And in this connection I 
 cannot forbear to return to the word choir. "Where 
 the stars choir forth eternal harmonies" — sings to me 
 from an old translation of Bruno, a phrase of which 
 choir is the vital spirit. Choir is a word, so far as I 
 can remember, absolutely unique, a word without any 
 poor relations. Quire, on the other hand, besides a 
 distinctly papery feeling of its own, has a whole rab- 
 ble of disreputable low Latin verbs coming after it. 
 The stars could never stoop to it. "Choir," says 
 the historical propriety man, "is one of the worst 
 spellings in the English language. It is a blunder- 
 ing mixture of the modern French spelling chceur 
 with the real English spelling quire'' Let us thank 
 
PHILOSOPHER - ON " THE " ROCK: " GOSH, BUT LITTLE KIDS IS HAPPY WHEN 
 THEy's young!" GEORGE BELLOWS 
 
SIMPLIFIED SPELLING 137 
 
 God that we are blundering Anglo-Saxons. We do 
 not see the English language through propriety spec- 
 tacles, but with the ignorant prejudice of an out- 
 door eyesight. I could almost wish I were a man of 
 letters, I am so glad that I am not the historical 
 propriety man. Choir stays in my vocabulary. 
 
 But to proceed with scientific regularity, there is 
 another effect (4) which simplified spelling has upon 
 the literary material : it improves certain words in 
 the same three ways I have mentioned. 
 
 riskt risked 
 stampt stamped 
 
 gipsy gypsy 
 dipt clipped 
 
 I do not classify these examples and spread them out 
 and make a show of them, partly because I have de- 
 veloped a prejudice against the Simplifiers since I re- 
 called their last desecration, and partly because there 
 are not enough examples. It is obvious that a move- 
 ment toward uniformity will tend to destroy rather 
 than enhance associations and individualities; and 
 it is obvious to one who knows how much onoma- 
 topoeia has influenced the development of our Ian- 
 
138 JOURNALISM VERSUS ART 
 
 guage that any logical and economical reprisals upon 
 it would tend to destroy these cherished fabrics. In 
 those words ending in / the gains and losses are about 
 even. For instance, Whitman (who will not be ac- 
 cused of super-refinement) gained a similar flavor by 
 writing, "Hush'd be the camps to-day." The hush 
 actually occurs at that moment. And so it is with 
 dipt and dipt^ etc.^ But kist is altogether 
 wrong. It would do for a parlor encounter with an 
 aunt. 
 
 In poetry sometimes we linger and sometimes we 
 jump, but in "practical economy" we are always on 
 the jump. A spare and naked line has a unique 
 beauty — a line like this one of Shelley's, without a 
 superfluous ounce for the eye or ear: 
 
 "But list, I hear 
 The small clear silver lute of the young spirit 
 That sits on the morning star." 
 
 1 From a literary standpoint it is desirable, within limits, to have 
 a choice between two or more forms, and especially has this been 
 appreciated in the case of past tenses. Keats uses the / and the *d 
 and the ed, and it is undoubtedly a gain to be set more free in this 
 respect by the Simplifiers. 
 
SIMPLIFIED SPELLING 139 
 
 But a language that was committed throughout to 
 that style would be poor indeed : 
 
 "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness !" 
 "Seson of mists and mello f rutfulness !" ^ 
 
 (5) The final, and possibly most important, effect 
 of the simplification would be the loss of variety it- 
 self. The eccentricity of a given word, such as 
 through or enough^ may seem to have little intrinsic 
 merit, but it is of general value to the literary artist 
 that his material be diversified by these venerable 
 prodigies. They help him to endow every phrase 
 with a separate character. For every wild word or 
 bundle of words that is trimmed down and fitted into 
 a group, another resource is lost to the poet. 
 
 We boast that our language is not second to Greek 
 in its power of conveying subtle impressions; and a 
 great part of this power rests in the infinite number 
 of phrase combinations possible. The Simplifiers aim 
 to injure this power. An irreducible conflict there- 
 fore subsists between their practical, scientific and 
 commercial interest and the art interest in our lan- 
 guage, and that is why men of letters have been "the 
 
HO JOURNALISM VERSUS ART 
 
 most vociferous opponents." That they are not only 
 "the most vociferous," but that they will prove also 
 the most effective, remains to be pointed out. 
 
 It has already been stated that aesthetic judgment 
 was the sovereign power in developing and control- 
 ling our language. Nothing else could have steered 
 us through the Norman period, the season of our wild 
 oats, the ecclesiastical oppression, the barbaric influ- 
 ence of scholars and propriety men, of pedants and 
 scientific regulars, of King Charles's French peacocks, 
 and of the modern utility people. It is the exquisite 
 sensibility of the English folk that has conveyed to 
 us through all these hideous onslaughts "a veritable 
 power of expression, such as perhaps never stood at 
 the command of any other people." I quote from 
 Jacob Grimm. "In wealth, good sense and closeness 
 of structure, no other of the languages at this day 
 spoken deserves to be compared with it." But if the 
 controlling interest has been aesthetic in the past, it 
 is safe for the hopeful to assert that it will continue 
 so in the future, and that, therefore, those who de- 
 sire that English should become the great language 
 
SIMPLIFIED SPELLING 143 
 
 of the earth do not begin wisely by making an as- 
 sault upon its wealth.* 
 
 The impulse of ordinary childlike people is to cling 
 to that thing which is not good for something, but 
 good in itself. And that is why I believe that the 
 artistic interest will reform the reformers. A few of 
 their expedients will be chosen, are half chosen al- 
 ready; others will remain long as alternative forms; 
 the language will clear itself and limber itself some- 
 what in response to the mania of expediteness that 
 besets its American cultivators. The age will leave 
 a characteristic mark ; but it will leave, roughly speak- 
 ing, only what is an addition to the wealth and not 
 to the practical economy of its inheritance. A type 
 of the usual arguments against simplification is that 
 one which asserts that the forms of words are historic 
 records significant of the interests of different ages, 
 and that therefore we should leave them as they are. 
 But if anything could be a better historic record, or 
 more significant of this age, than the marks of vio- 
 
 * "English is remarkable for the intensity and variety of the color 
 of its words. No language, I believe, has so many words specifically 
 poetic." — George Santayana, in "The Sense of Beauty." 
 
144 JOURNALISM VERSUS ART 
 
 lence left by its attempt to make the language prac- 
 tical we have yet to be informed of it. Such marks 
 will undoubtedly be left upon the language; but 
 they will be subservient to that general aesthetic de- 
 velopment which so envelops the Simplifiers that 
 they remain totally incognizant of its existence. 
 The real treasurers of the language are and always 
 have been the knowers of its immediate beauty. 
 
 This is so certain that, but for the satisfaction of 
 showing hands on the victorious side, it were futile 
 to argue about it. With entire truth the Simplifiers 
 point out that their critics have advanced no reason 
 or valid argument against them. This may be be- 
 cause the lovers of poetry are too sure of her power to 
 enter the lists. It may be because they are but 
 dimly conscious of the reasons for their choice, and 
 are confused between the values that they perceive 
 to arise from habit and those which they know to 
 inhere in the nature of the words. But, whatever 
 the cause of their silence, it is clear that their opposi- 
 tion to the movement is arbitrary and self-justified 
 and unanswerable. It is a difference of wish. 
 
SIMPLIFIED SPELLING 145 
 
 There is, however, an allied reason for opposing 
 the simplification which is based upon an interest 
 common to all parties. It is the interest in demo- 
 cratic culture. You can deduce from the examples 
 and quotations given, that our inheritance of poetry 
 and excellent literature will either survive in the old 
 spelling or suffer immense mutilation. Reverence 
 for the classics is the prime conservative element in 
 the growth of language. And I believe that the 
 classics will resist an arbitrary and extensive change 
 in their spelling; they will not be profitably pub- 
 lished in the revised forms. If I am right, it is ob- 
 vious that a great change in the common usage would 
 at once set these monuments aloft and apart from our 
 everyday life. Our best literature could no longer 
 flow in the minds of the people. It would be a 
 written language, the genius of which would have to 
 be learned. Therefore, it would belong to the 
 scholars and the leisure class, as Chaucer already 
 does. That this alienation of literature from lively 
 speech is a peril always imminent, needs no proof. 
 But the recasting of our commercial language by a 
 
146 JOURNALISM VERSUS ART 
 
 committee of persons who acknowledge nowhere a 
 tittle of the claims of art, is a direct invitation of the 
 peril. This is proven when it is confessed that the 
 Committee is chiefly opposed by men of letters. 
 Either we will mutilate our inheritance or it will re- 
 cede from us; a lover of poetry and democracy can- 
 not accede to either alternative. And that dilemma, 
 added to an estimation of the immediate values to 
 be lost, leads many even of those who are blessed 
 with an irreverent and meddlesome nature, to turn 
 their backs upon this ill-considered revolution. 
 
"Borzoi" stands for the best in litera- 
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 Borzoi Books are good books and there 
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