# The Conservative (Lovecraft)/July 1923/In the Editor's Study

In the Editor’s Study
A desperate need of amateurdom today is an enlightened critical standard which shall save us from devotion to false, conventional, and superficial values, and blindness to all that is sincere, vital, penetrating, or genuinely ecstatic in art. The relative rarity of young blood has begun to give us a perilously Philistine bias, so that the path of the uncompromising artist in our midst is much thornier than it should be. These are times when a flash of subtle emotion or a colourful appeal to obscure and fantastic recesses of the imagination is likely to evoke a superior titter if the words sound in the least extravagant or unfamiliar to a mind bred on Dickens or the Saturday Evening Post. Good homely common sense, no doubt, but sadly disastrous to amateur literature.
It is time, The Conservative believes, definitely to challenge the sterile and exhausted Victorian ideal which blighted Anglo-Saxon culture for three quarters of a century and produced a milky “poetry” of shopworn sentimentalities and puffy platitudes; a dull-grey prose fiction of misplaced didacticism and insipid artificiality; an appallingly hideous system of formal manners, costume, and decoration; and worst of all, an artistically blasphemous architecture whose uninspired nondescriptness transcends tolerance, comprehension, and profanity alike.
​These reflections are elicited by the urbane warfare of Philistine and Grecian so opportunely precipitated by Mr. Michael White’s critique of Mr. Samuel Loveman’s poetry. Mr. White, taking his stand with the hard-headed and condemning an artist who employs such strange materials as ecstacy or imagination, has naturally aroused the opposition of certain ardent fantaisistes like Mr. Frank Belknap Long, Jun., whose impressionistic reply appeared in these columns. And now we find Mr. Long the recipient of some priceless comic-supplement sarcasm from the admirers of Mr. White, a typical Boston group to whom New England’s Puritan heritage has denied that touch of etheral madness which makes for the creation and appreciation of universal, fundamental art.
Just what do these mild hostilities signify? Should we after all denounce our Eminent Victorians merely because of their support of the critic who classifies Macaulay, Carlisle, (sic) Emerson, and Shaw as “great poets”, attributes unique limitations to the word chorus, and sits stolid in the beams of imaginative art? Is this protest of humorous, sensible clearness against symbolic, colourful intensity indeed a mark of Victorian obtuseness instead of a sane defense of tradition in the face of chaotic innovation? Certainly the position of Mr. White’s circle is flawless if we are to accept art as an affair of the external intellect and commonplace, unanalysed emotions alone. The Conservative dissents only because he believes with most of the contemporary world that the actual foundations of art differ widely from those which the prim nineteenth century took for granted.
What is art but a matter of impressions, of pictures, emotions, and symmetrical sensations? It must have poignancy and beauty, but nothing else counts. It may or may not have coherence. If concerned with large externals or simple fancies, or produced in a simple age, it is likely to be of a clear and continuous pattern; but if concerned with individual reactions to life in a complex and analytical age, as most modern art is, it tends to break up into detached transcripts of hidden sensation and offer a loosely joined fabric which demands from the spectator a discriminating duplication of the artist’s mood. The Philistine clamour for a literature of plain statement and superficial theme loses force when we assign to literature——especially poetry——its proper place in æsthetics, and compare it to such modes of expression as music and architecture, which do not speak in the language of primers.
The Conservative is no covert to Dadaism. Nothing, on the contrary, seems more certain to him than that the bulk of radical prose and verse represents merely the extravagant extreme of a tendency whose truly artistic application is vastly more limited. Traces of this tendency, whereby pictorial methods are used, and words and images employed without conventional connexions to excite sensations, may be found throughout literature; especially in Keats, William Blake, and the French symbolists. This broader conception of art does not outrage any eternal tradition, but honours all creations of the past or present which can show genuine ecstatic fire and a glamour not tawdrily founded on utterly commonplace emotions.
Thus the shrill laughter of the thin-blooded literalist at the ecstatic artist is founded mainly on one-sidedness and conventionality of background; the scoffer being nearly always a follower of an obsolete tradition, steeped in the orthodox English literature of the middle nineteenth century rather than immersed in the universal stream which knows neither time nor country. Such a sage, like the proverbial homo unius libri, may prove a formidable and witty antagonist; but his parochial limitations obviously unfit him for anything like an authoritative pronouncement on laws touching the entire human spirit. “Les esprits mediocres,” says La Rochefoucauld, “condumnent d’ordinaire tont ce qui passe leur partee.” Before intelligently approaching a work of art a critic must absorb at least the rudiments of the background from which it was developed——which takes us back to the problem of dealing with the Victorian scolding and giggling which bid fair to discourage sincere æsthetic endeavor in amateur journalism.
The Conservative would unassumingly urge a slight course of literary research upon those critics who are hurling the English 19th century in our faces with as much gusto, finality, and drollery. Without wishing to emulate their own fetching pageantry of mighty names across the learned page, he would bid them consider such titans as Walter Pater, Lafcadio Hearn, Arthur Symons, Arthur Machen, Wilde, Gautier, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarme, Laforgue, D’Annunzio, or Croce——titans about whom much may be learnt even through reviews. Once really aware of the existence of this wider field, and of the extent to which it has influenced contemporary ideas of art, our conscientious Philistines could not but enlarge their horizons of tolerance. How much they might actually understand or sympathise, is a temperamental matter alien to the problem.
Mr. Charles A. A. Parker, with characteristically sprightly wit, remarks on the loyalty shown toward royalty in distress. At least, this is what we believe he means, although the colloquial operation of Grimm’s philological law has somewhat enriddled the text. He is to be congratulated upon his able exemplification of his paragraph, as shown by a nobly satiric scorn of all foes of the snowy Archangel Michael.
Mr. H. A. Joslen’s Gipsy is an unique and by no means unwelcome addition to amateur journalism, supplying the place of the long-departed Les Mouches Fantastiques. In his valiant attempt to break away from mediocrity and imitative stupidity, the editor shows a healthy artistic instinct. It must now be his care to avoid the excess of sheer revolt for revolt’s sake, and the vulgarity sometimes resulting from an anti-Puritanism itself Puritanical in seriousness. Beauty, lightness, delicacy, and just a touch of irony——these are the marks of a true art independent of social or ethical barnacles, and founded on a just conception of life’s essential triviality and futility.
The appearance of a book by an amateur is always an occasion for legitimate rejoicing in our circle; and when the author can count no less thin 92 years to his credit, we may be pardoned something like positive jubliation. Such is the case this month, which brings to view the complete Poetical Works of Jonathan E. Hoag, carefully edited and fittingly bound. Since Mr. Hoag is still writing with undiminished fecundity, we may expect another volume from him as he becomes a centenarian.
Few literary recommendations are more apt than that of Mr. Edward H. Cole in the Hub Club Quill, whereby we are advised to read the periodical essays of the eighteenth century. In many respects this glittering, cynical, rational period is closer to our own disillusioned time than any other; for it represents a dominant intellectualism and critical and analytical spirit exactly paralling this era of Anatole France, Cabell, and the columnar sophisticates. Just as the post-Renaissance world as a whole is nearer classical antiquity than the Middle Ages, so is our 20th century much nearer the 18th than the intervening 19th century. It has long been the opinion of The Conservative that the 18th century marked a glorious apex of many kinds of taste; ​notably that in prose style and in all ordinary forms of architecture, furniture, and decoration. The correctness of this view seems rather pleasingly confirmed by the return to Colonial patterns now practised by American home-builders and city-planners, and we may hope for further confirmation in the literary field.
Unusual interest attaches to the prospective volume of the late Mrs. Jennie E. T. Dowe’s collected Irish verse, to be issued next autumn by Mr. Charles A. A. Parker for sale at a dollar and twenty-five cents per copy. It is possible that this may be the forerunner of many similar volumes of the work of amateur poets; an event of the greatest possible benefit to amateurdom, and one which would enshrine Mr. Parker as a Prince of Pioneers.
A news note of more than passing amateur interest is furnished by Mr. Alfred Galpin Jun.’s receipt of a Graduate Service Scholarship in the University of Chicago, for the year 1923–24. Our erstwhile infant prodigy will not only study, but teach 80 hours per quarter; thus early arriving at an academic distinction always predicted by those who unqualifiedly consider him the greatest intellectual ever connected with amateur journalism.
The subtly mirthful commentator E. M., in L’Alouette, curiously mistakes a Swinburnian scream for a groan; and expresses doubt as to the identity of the “Amateur Humorist” described in Frank Belknap Long’s recent critical phantasy. Speaking of doubt, The Conservative presumes it is Mr. White’s scholarly article which E.M. means, in alluding to something whose value equals “ooooOO” minus the rims.
Among the interesting problems raised by the current Philistine-Grecian controversy in amateurdom, is one which both concerns and contains humor——the problem of when and when not to laugh in dissecting an unusual literary production seriously offered by an author whose general achievements set him definitely above the throng of the inept and the extravagant. To many, and especially to the older critics, the answer would appear farcially simple; and would involve an amused insistence on the right of a Cheshire cat to exercise his hereditary perogative on all occasions, thus establishing the inference that possible ludicrousness in writing, if unintentional, is always unconscious, and therefore a fatal artistic defect.
This ordinary attitude is at first sight of such weight that the merest questioner exposes himself to a share of its possessors’ cachinnations. Examples of really hilarious gravity are so prevalent that their recollection overshadows all the nuances of the ultimate problem. But a dispassionate view, free from the glare of the obvious, reveals one important modifying consideration in the fact that comicality always depends wholly on the system of thought and values held by the perceiver; that, in short, ridiculousness is relative, and conditioned by the truth, inflexibility, or paramountcy of certain common ideas which are absolute to the multitude yet merely virtual to the closer inquirer. Intelligence and education, as they open new fields of risibility, close old ones; so that the laughing-stock of one stage of culture is often the gospel of the next, and vice versa.
Remembering these things as we turn to literary criticism, we perceive the difficulty of laying down permanent laws of laughter in an age where all standards are plastic. Much of the serious and accepted literature of the past, especially where human motives and cosmic purposes are involved, in broadly comical to the mind informed in contemporary and absurd philosophy; and much in modern writing, where the conceptions touch on the subjective and imaginary instead of the real world, is screamingly funny to the mind accustomed to nothing but literal reality and inherited beliefs.
Thus it would seem wise to look before you laugh. A subtle writer’s imagery often takes a turn which has its conceivably comic side, yet which is not only admissible but sometimes powerfully original when viewed as part of a fabric as exotic, individual, subjective, and essentially decorative as the pictured phantasmata of Sime or Beardsley. Such an artist is not unconscious of the humorous interpretation which prosaic literalism may give his occasional bizarreric—often he laughs himself—but he retains his quaintly carven Buddhas and Sivas just as zealously, knowing that they fit his far, strange realm of alien moonlight and incense-perfumed dream, however odd or ludicrous they may appear in the workaday sunshine of Main Street.
Far be it from The Conservative to decry humor in amateur journalism. High Pegana knows how badly we need the genuine article! But are there not times when its judicious discipline augments our power of creation and appreciation in certain fields? Who will say that lord Dunsany’s delicate Arabesque touch has not suffered as his wit has become less and less detached from it, or that Arthur Machen is not the stronger for the childlike naivete of his outlook on the dream-world? And is it not possible that some of the Philistine hyperticklishness at unaccustomed whimsies springs from a lack of that deeper and more pervasive humor which sees in all human life and effort an ironic comedy? Verily, laughter is an art for the discriminating!