There's much to cover, and as usual, I'm a little behind. I've come to look forward to the end-of-the-month push to get all these posts out, even as it comes with its minor dread, too. Before dealing with the monthlies, though, I have to get the weekly out of the way. It is so hard not to fall behind The New Age.
As usual, I'll start with Beatrice Hastings' "Impressions of Paris," as Alice Morning. This week's is a portrait of deep wartime depression: "I am in a horrid state of soul, right down in a rut of the war, and hanging head downwards--your perfect egoist... There's such a state as bleeding without fighting at all. The universe seems only just as far away as Paris is, and not more worth going out to behold" (653). Mixing modes, as usual, she tells a parable, an anecdote from French literary history, and stories of things she's seen and of her past. I've been thinking about how cool it would be to gather together the "Impressions of Paris" and The Egoist's "Passing Paris" and "Fighting Paris columns by Muriel Ciolkowska, perhaps as a book, or--what about an audiobook organized chronologically, and released through Librivox? Maybe someday.
Someone, probably Beatrice Hastings, is continuing the satirical columns of Anastasia Edwardes. I think it must be Hastings, because they are similar in tone to her "Impressions." In the last Edwardes column, she was a satire of the New Woman, a faux intellectual flirt. This week, the column is more about her husband, a middle-aged solicitor, who wants to go to the war and instead plays soldier very assiduously. It's slapstick-funny.
Ramiro de Maetzu writes an essay "On Art and Luxury," which goes something like this: people are worried that the war will kill off the arts because it will damage the patronage networks that art relies upon. This is incorrect, because art does not rely on patronage. This gives de Maetzu a space to critique Oscar Wilde and Theophile Gautier, who he considers to have made an error in advancing a doctrine of art for art's sake, which he sees as really being art for luxury's sake. In rating art so highly, they began to lose touch with reality: "In his essay, 'The Critic as Artist,' [Wilde] goes the length of declaring resolutely that, “'As civilisation progresses and we become more highly organised, the elect spirit of each age, the critical and cultured spirits, will grow less and less interested in actual life, and will seek to gain their impressions almost entirely from what art has touched.' Both in life and in art his ideal was marginal,--luxury" (641). The saving grace of this error was that Wilde and company thought that luxury implied craftsmanship, and this led them to perfect their art--even though in reality, luxury is based on scarcity of materials and the amount of labor they represent, not craftsmanship, per se:
"The object of luxury resembles the object of art in that both are expressions of power; but, while the object of luxury is only the expression of property or monopoly, the work of art tells us, through the power of the means of expression, that man is the master of Nature. Craftsmanship means power. In the object of luxury the thing to be shown is the power of the proprietor. In the work of art the essential thing is the power of the artist."
This ends with Romanitic declarations of art's power to connect humanity to the infinite, etc. De Maetzu has fused Romanticism with Marxism in an attack on art as luxury.
Quick Notes:
Arthur Thorn's short story/dialog, "Discovering Drama" includes a discussion of the reasons for the cinema's popularity vs. drama.
C.E. Bechofer quotes at length from Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov.
Rebecca West appears in "Current Cant"'s crosshairs for representing Germany as a poor country.
And lastly, as my United Auto Workers chapter prepares for a strike for a new contract, a note on wartime dock worker's strikes in England, discussed in The New Age and the correspondence pages. The upshot is that in a time when shipowners are purposefully hiding their merchant vessels in neutral ports to keep them safe from being commandeered and sunk, the country is instead angry at dock workers who refuse to be exploited. The high-level traitors go unnoticed, while the low-level protesters are pilloried.
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