wearied of the old, the young fatigued by the garrulities of age. It is sad. It is wonderful. Brahms is of today. He is the scientist turned philosopher, the philosopher turned musician. If he were not a great composer he would be a great biologist, a great metaphysician. There are passages in his music in which I detect the philosopher in omphalic meditation. Brahms dreams of pure white staircases that scale the Infinite. A dazzling, dry light floods his mind, His magic and you hear the rustling of wings-wings of great, terrifying monsters; hippogrifs of horrid mien; hieroglyphic faces, faces with stony stare, menace your imagination. He can bring down within the compass of the octave moods that are outside the pale of mortals. He is a magician, spectral at times, yet his songs have the homely lyric fervour and concision of Robert Burns. A groper after the untoward, shudders at certain bars in his F sharp minor sonata and weeps with the moonlit tranquillity in the slow movement of the F minor sonata. He is often dull, muddy-pated, obscure, and maddeningly slow. Then a rift of lovely music wells out of the mist; you are enchanted and cry: "Brahms, master, anoint again with thy precious melodic chrism our thirsty eyelids!" Brahms is an inexorable formulist. His four symphonies, his three piano sonatas, the choral works and His thought chamber music-are they not all living testimony to his admirable management of masses? He is not a great colourist. For him the pigments of Makart, Wagner, and Théophile Gautier are as naught. Like Puvis de Chavannes, he is a Primitive. Simple, flat tints, primary and cool, are superimposed upon rhythmic versatility and strenuousness of thought. Ideas, noble, profundity-embracing ideas he has. He says great things in a great manner, but it is not the smart, epigrammatic, scarlet, flashing style of your little man. He disdains racial allusions. He is German, but a planetary Teuton. You seek in vain for the geographical hints, hintings that chain Grieg to the map of Norway. Brahms's melodies are world-typical, not cabined and confined to his native Hamburg. This largeness of utterance, lack of polish, and a disregard for the politesse of his art do not endear him to the

unthinking. Yet, what a master miniaturist he is in his little piano pieces, his Intermezzi. There he catches the tender sigh of childhood or the intimate flutterings of the heart stirred by desire. Feminine he is as no woman composer; and virile as are few men. The sinister fury, the mocking, drastic fury of his first rhapsodies-true soul-tragedies-how they unearthed the core of pessimism in our age. Pessimist? Yes, but yet believer; a believer in himself, thus a believer in men and

women.

He reminds me more of Browning than does Schumann. The full-pulsed humanity, the dramatic—yes, Brahms is dramatic, not theatric-modes of analysis, the flow, glow, and relentless tracking to their ultimate lair of motives is Browning; but the composer never loses his grip on the actualities of structure. After Chopin, Brahms? He gives us a cooling, deep draught in exchange for the sugared worm-wood, the sweet, exasperated poison of the Polish charmer. A great sea is his music, and it sings about the base of that mighty mount we call Beethoven. Brahms takes us to subterrane depths; Beethoven is for the heights. Strong lungs are needed for the company of both giants.

Brahms, the surgeon whose scalped pierces the aches of modern soul-maladies. Bard and healer. Beethoven and

Brahms.

LOOKING INTO PICTURES

By THE EDITOR

1

The uninstructed are likely to admire pictures for qualities and features not of prime concern to painters. In the art galleries In the art galleries the so-called emotion of recognition, which helps our literate age to read itself into novels, appears to be what visitors most enjoy. Paintings that represent in the traditional manner pleasing natural objects, particularly human beings, first catch the eye, while those that render the familiar human with a touch or a drenching of sentimentality draw the crowd. A girl by Greuze, a peasant mother by Israels, Rosa Bonheur's animals, Meissonier's charging men, the swimmers of Sorolla, the unmasked ladies of Sargent-all these recall the wonted world, yet deepen its paling romance or dignify it with perspective. As for landscape in painting, it seems to leave most people indifferent, as in its aesthetic aspects actual landscape leaves them unmoved in daily life. Human interest, whether romantically or realistically attained, is the instinctive general demand.

Pictorial subject

This naive concentration upon those recognizable concrete forms which taken together he calls the subject of his picture moves the painter to a more or less good-natured contempt. A blindness in people to such things as lighting, atmosphere, composition, he allows for, but their specific praise or blame is a different matter. “What awkward hands-and they're green!" ventures someone, "But that lily is splendid—I could almost pick it from the canvas." "Did you ever freshly and clearly see anything?" the painter would like then to retort. "And in any case, my subject is of quite secondary importance to me, while as for faithful representation, actual imitation of nature, that is not the business of an artist." "But what, then, will you represent?" "I'll represent nothing-I'll paint what no one can see except with the eyes of the imagination!" From which it appears

that we need to enter the studio with the fewest possible preconceptions, while the painter in turn should explain his purposes.

It is obvious that as a pictorial subject neither Sleeping Beauty nor Mont Blanc nor the Holy Grail can lift a mean or bungling painter to artistic heights. On the other hand, the galleries prove that a Vollon, a Rembrandt, a Velasquez will be his great self with a subject called Pumpkins, Anatomy Lesson, or Court Dwarf. The hand prompted by imagination and skilled in line, color, and atmosphere can impart splendor and vitality to any substance. Yet both artist and layman may profit by the flat reminder that pictorial subject in the full sense consists not of the natural objects minutely or broadly imitated but of the something wrought out of nature at every stroke by the painter. Subject, in other words, is not something picked up and then drawn and painted: it comes into being only in the process of painting and it is expressive paint. A successful picture is organic, its subject a vital factor conditioning and in turn conditioned by the other factors and the artist himself.1

Pictorial

purpose

and

method

However one may state such things, there continues in this twentieth century among artists and critics a perplexing and even embittered contention as to the proper subject matter, purposes, and methods of painting. Shall painters offer us “a baubleworld to ape yon real," their work to be valued in proportion as it is faithful to experienced actuality? Or shall they

"The only beautiful things, as somebody once said, are the things that do not concern us. As long as a thing is useful or necessary to us, or affects us in any way, either for pain or for pleasure, or appeals strongly to our sympathies, or is a vital part of the environment in which we live, it is outside the proper sphere of art. To art's subject-matter we should be more or less indifferent. We should, at any rate, have no preferences, no prejudices, no partisan feeling of any kind."-Oscar Wilde, "The Decay of Lying."

Wilde's essay is of course purposely paradoxical and partially ironic. Art cannot draw its material from anything but nature, in the inclusive sense. But it must not be for the sake of its practical relations to us that the artist depicts any object, natural in the narrow sense, or human. And the more any object in nature or in art has of personal relationship to us, the more will its aesthetic effect be interfered with.

attempt imaginative interpretations of human life, of quiet hills and unquiet sea? Or try to reveal some hidden perfection, some archetypal pattern-a god's design within the welter of fair and foul particulars? Through forms of nature cunningly remoulded shall they rather express their own moods and personalities? Or refusing to deal with organized and natural forms at all, borrowing from materiality only tools and a shining medium, ought they to be content with nothing less than actual creation, the production of abstract form such as only music has hitherto achieved?

While such undertakings are not mutually exclusive, some thought of them is necessary if we are to appreciate the various kinds of paintings. Colors can be laid upon canvas for either of two principal ends: reproduction of things previously existent; production of newly conceived forms. In the first case, painting follows more or less accurately the forms of natural or of man-made objects; it is called representation or illustration. In the second, the painter so selects and remoulds the material, so organizes line and color in space as to create new patterns that have a charm independent of any likeness to recognizable things; he attains presentation or decoration. Now just as the particular tones wrought into a piece of music had no being until the composer heard them with inward ear and struck them upon his instrument, so the particular filaments and masses of color making up a painting spring into existence with that painting, and are themselves original and presentative. But the rhythm that melodizes or orchestrates the pictorial elements may either be taken over with the observed models and groupings, being thus representative, or be newly conceived and imposed upon the chosen materials, the work becoming in so far presentative, creative. Any successful painting, moreover, while it may illustrate familiar objects and incidents, does with its original modifications and arrangements of presentative elements appeal directly to sense and through it to our own creative imagination. Such combination of representative and presentative qualities, such appeal both human and aesthetic, may be found in pictures as unlike as Giorgione's "Venetian Pas