lines and delicate shading. The same is true of the Golden Cups of Vaphio and the Mycenaean dagger, depicting a lion-hunt. When, however, early art turns to the portrayal of men and gods it is under the sign of the characteristic, usually in its more grotesque forms. Examples are: the hideously fat Venus found in Austria, the African drawings of men and women, the Cretan Vase of Reapers, the Mexican God Quetzalcoatl, the Hindu god Siva, and the Nike of Delos. It is not sufficient to say that these misshapen humans embody a primitive ideal of personal beauty, for there is conscious exaggeration, often along the line of the sexual. In such instances the aesthetic ideal of woman has not yet become differentiated from the sex ideal. When the exaggeration is not sexual, as in the clay vessels of Peru and old Swedish rock carvings, (large eyes and mouth, ridiculously short bodies, feet that look like rakes, huge hands), part of the explanation is to be found in certain religious beliefs, part in a naive technique dealing with difficult human material, part in a delight in human grotesquerie. Again, the visual representation of gods and goddesses reflects a crude world with the ugly and the terrifying always close at hand, and a crude symbolism. The gods of myth-making man came by their beauty even later than they came by their goodness.

In modern art there is much deliberate use of the characteristic. Conservatives insist that it means disordered vision, emotional perversions, inability to render form, pose, egotism, réclame. There may be such a taint in individual cases, but there is much to be said in favor of even an extreme use of the characteristic. It is in response to healthy impulses that art freshens itself by experiment and turns to a tonic of bitter taste. The experimentation may produce nightmare shapes, but these often mark the transition to new themes and undreamed of values. Think of Whitman's vision of the diverse American scene, Carl Sandburg's

Poems of Steel, Pennell's etchings of shipyards, Meunier's sculptured miners and factory workers, revolutionary expressionistic stage settings! The difficulties of material and technique alike act as a tonic and strengthener of art. The man who contends that the sole concern of art is with the narrow rose-strewn path of beauty is like the old lady who wished geraniums planted along the rim of the Grand Canyon to have it less desolate. Art is, after all, a reflection of life. If it is not to die of a languid aestheticism, it must occasionally turn to the harsh, the acrid, the poignant, the ugly. It then acquires a gaunt strength and a hardfistedness; to give it that strength is the mission of the characteristic.

It may seem strange to find that the characteristic plays a small part in purely naturalistic art. Naturalism in its extremest forms, it is true, makes use of repulsive material and employs a technique marked by vigor, harshness, and starkness. But it lacks what is always present when there is a bold and extensive use of the characteristic:-the motif of idealization. This motif can be traced in primitive sculpture and in modern expressionistic art. Very little of the oldest, and even less of the newest art is naturalistic in inspiration and manner of rendering.

This idealization shows itself through distortion-a deliberate moving away from natural appearance. The distortion is idealistic in purpose in one or all of three ways.

1

First, objects are reshaped for the sake of creating forms which are more purely and insistently expressive. This is done by simplifying; by exaggerated stress on this or that quality; by the use of force-lines; and by tensional energy in the arrangement of compositional values. Grigorieff's 1 portraits deviate from the natural, and they have about them a great expressiveness and forcefulness. Expressive simpli1 The works of art referred to may be seen in Cheney's Primer of Modern Art.

fication at the cost of lifelikeness marks Derain's Italian Woman, Pechstein's Woman with the Cat, Van Dongen's Portrait, Walt Kuhn's Caucus, Barlach's figures of old men done in wood-and creates new values in art. Force-lines are seen in extreme dominance in Pechstein's Boat; Barlach's Panel; and in Hodler, Marc, and Soutine. Tensional organization is revealed in the art of Cézanne, Maillol, Whitman, Vachel Lindsay, and Grigorieff.

The second use of the characteristic in modern art is in extending the range of materials utilized and of organized and significant forms without the heavy price paid by extreme naturalism of a loss in imaginative force. Sandburg is not a naturalistic poet. Even when he moves closest to crudely expressive, common speech and crass actuality he is saved from prosiness by the creative virility and sweep of his imagination. The expressionistic drama in no sense aims at normal beauty. It does not shrink from the ugly:-Toller in Hinkemann takes the acrid stuff of life; and makes a searching tragedy from materials to which the common response would be ribald laughter. Modern painting seeks new effective patterns far beyond the facile pleasingness of the beautiful.

The third use is bound up with what has been called a spiritual rebirth of art. If "mixed" materials are to be moved within the task of art they must be redeemed imaginatively by original and stimulating workmanship, and by new visions. Among these visions the one that counts, as none other does, is that of the spirituality of nature—not in the old sense of a refuge and a solace, but as something which stretches sympathetic effort to the point of pain-something that lives gropingly in us and possessively in the life that lays hands on us. Painters have confessed to this mysticism; poets have voiced it; and it lives strongly in the work of Toller, Werfel, and Kaiser. Gothic conceptions of Christ were uncompromisingly spiritual. Something of a return to

their intensity is to be seen in Nolde's Prophet, Lehmbruck's Mother and Child and Mestrovic's Mother.

The characteristic demands a toughmindedness and a far-flung sympathy which not every one has or can summon. But to exclude it from art because one has not a taste for it is to cut down the range and dwarf the growth and meaning of art to a narrow and delicate beauty, or an amiable pleasingness.

THE SUBLIME

Nature rather than art furnishes the easiest approach to the problem of the sublime. Not only is the sublime a rarer artistic phenomenon than either the beautiful or the characteristic, but it is overwhelmingly present in nature—in the human drama and its cosmic setting. The very term hints that the response the feeling of sublimity—is the important thing; but so commonly is this feeling provoked by certain objects and experiences that a preliminary list may be drawn up, with little danger of cavil or disagreement. Sublime are: the starry heavens; the endless stretching of the years; the expanse of the desert or the ocean; an earthquake or a tidal wave; wind driven clouds; beetling cliffs; the Grand Canyon; a lofty tower; a volcano; a storm at sea; a plunging cavalry charge with flashing sabres and thunder of hoofs; a blast furnace; a sunrise; some great human achievement or sacrifice; an exceptionally noble purpose; a blast from the hell of human desires. This varied assemblage may be made to yield certain recurrent types; and they in turn may be used to open the way to the sublime in art, and to the many delicate psychological problems which are bound up with the appreciation of sublimity.

THE TYPES OF THE SUBLIME

THE SUBLIME OF SPACE

Space has been recognized by Longinus, Vischer, Volkelt, and others as one of the chief sources of the sublime. Our glance travels along the horizontal plane of desert or ocean, along the vertical plane of tower or chasm. In neither case