Humanism and America

[45] Reprinted by permission of The Macmillan Company, Publishers.

[46] “If you disregard critical trivialities and didactic accessories, the entire æsthetic system of Croce amounts to a hunt for pseudonyms of the word ‘art,’ and may indeed be stated briefly and accurately in this formula: art = intuition = expression = feeling = imagination = fancy = lyricism = beauty. And you must be careful not to take these words with the shadings and distinctions which they have in ordinary or scientific language. Not a bit of it. Every word is merely a different series of syllables signifying absolutely and completely the same thing.”—G. Papini, Four and Twenty Minds, quoted by I. A. Richards, The Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), p. 255, note 4.

Mr. Richards adds: “It is interesting to notice that Croce’s appeal has been exclusively to those unfamiliar with the subject, to the man of letters and the dilettante. He has been ignored by serious students of the mind.... [Papini] has here rendered a notable service to those who have been depressed by the vogue of ‘Expressionism.’”

Cf. also the following from Gilbert Murray’s The Classical Tradition in Poetry (1927), p. 243: “Everything that a man does is self-expression. The way a man laces his boots, the way he writes, the way he says, ‘Good-morning,’ is probably different from the way followed by any other man, and is thus expressive of his personality. But it need not be good art for that reason. Imagine a pompous and egotistic man in a state of personal irritation, having to make an after-dinner speech. It would probably express him only too well, but it might not be a good speech.”

[47]A Survey of Modernist Poetry, by Laura Riding and Robert Graves, 1927, p. 125.

[48] From Harmonium, by Wallace Stevens, 1923. Reprinted by and with permission of and special arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., authorised publishers.

[49] For the sake of “communicative efficacy,” as the editors remind me, I should explain that transition is “an international quarterly for creative experiment,” edited in Paris by a group of young Americans and others.

[50] From Trivial Breath, by Elinor Wylie, 1928. Reprinted by and with permission of and special arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., authorised publishers.

[51] From Streets in the Moon, by Archibald MacLeish, 1926. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company, Publishers.

[52] From Tulips and Chimneys. Reprinted by permission of Alfred & Charles Boni, Inc., Publishers.

[53] For a more elaborate analysis of such effects in Mr. Cummings’s poetry, see Laura Riding and Robert Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, Chapter I.

[54] E. E. Cummings’s poem, previously referred to, is printed by him as follows (Tulips and Chimneys, New York, 1924, p. 78):

i was considering how

within night’s loose

sack a star’s

nibbling in-

fin

-i-

tes-

i

-mal-

ly devours

darkness the

hungry star

which

will e

-ven

tu-

al

-ly jiggle

the bait of

dawn and be jerked

into

eternity. when over my head a

shooting

star

Bur s

(t

into a stale shriek

like an alarm-clock)