 section 14 of Mother Earth number 3. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Larry Wilson. Mother Earth number 3. Vital Art by Annie Molly Hicks. In order to estimate the value of any movement whether social, economic, ethical, or aesthetic, it must be studied in its relation and attitude to general progress. Its effectiveness should be judged by what it contributes to the growth of the universal conscience. That no man liveth unto himself alone is never so true as now, because now it is more generally realized. Therefore any expression which concerns itself solely with its own special field of action finds itself soon set aside, and presently becoming divorced from reality ends as a sporadic type. Any expression however which responds to the larger life gains a vitality which ensures its continuance. Thus the effort to apply certain truths not new in themselves is a tendency to work in harmony with progress. The effort to apply principle however imperfectly expressed is important not because of its results but because of the desire to relate theory and action in a conduct of life. Almost every type of expression is undergoing its phase of application. Aesthetics have somewhat aligned themselves to the others, but at last there is a movement known as the Arts and Crafts movement more properly called Applied Aesthetics, which is the effort to relate art to life. The old banality, art for art's sake, is obsolete, and the vital meaning of art is in a more rational and beautiful expression of life as it were the continent art of living well. This is the ideal and educational aspect of applied aesthetics. Within the limits of its exclusive circle and within the radius of its special activities there's a trend to contentment with the production of objects of worth and virtue. The object of luxury, which in fact has no vital meaning to either the producer or consumer, where the production of such things to be its only aim it would soon defeat its own end. But this movement has in reality wider and more democratic ideals. Because of its power to stimulate self-expression and the creative impulses its greatest and most vital influence is more social than artistic. It principally concerns itself with the desire of the worker to express in his work whatever impulse for beauty may be his. There is no sure way of feeling the pressure of present economic conditions. The value of applied aesthetics is as a medicine to stir up social unrest and discontent. Its key note is self-expression, and it is when men and women begin to think and act for themselves that they most keenly feel social and economic restrictions and are made to suffer under them. But if suffering is necessary to growth let us have it and have it over with by all means. No sane being will stand much of it without making an effort to get at its cause. It has been said that the most important part of progress is to make people think. It is vastly more important that they should feel. The average individual is not discontented with his surroundings else he would go to work to change them. As a product of them he is benumbed by their mechanical influence and consequently expresses himself within their limits. He is the mouthpiece of existing conditions and accordingly acts in law-binding fashion. The larger emotional life or inner social impulse emanates from those pioneers who living beyond existing conditions are the dynamics of society. Through them life pushes onward. The inner impulse becomes public opinion. Public opinion becomes custom. Custom crystallizes into law. Now the fresh impulse is needed for new growth. Where shall it be sought if not in the expression of the emotional life? What form shall the expression take unless it be the purest and most spontaneous form of art which is without purpose other than the expression of an impulse? This alone fosters the growth of the emotions. Art, like justice, has many crimes committed in its name and much called so that it is merely a methodical and imitative performance. It is in no wise that spontaneous expression of life which coming simply and directly as an impulse takes a decorative or applied form. All the beginnings of art grew up in this way. In primitive peoples it is the first expression of emotional life which comes after the material need is satisfied. The savage makes his spade or fish spear from the necessity of physical preservation. Thus from the joy of living he applies to it his feeling for beauty. The earliest forms of art were all applied. Stone carving was applied to architecture. Thus colored stones called mosaics as wall decorations. From these to the fresco. From the fresco to the pictorial form of painting. Today the final degeneration of art is in the easel picture which as an object detached and disassociated from its surroundings takes refuge in the storytelling phase to justify its own tetra. But alas for the easel picture alas also for the usual illustration without which most literature would be so difficult to understand. In each case the one is there to help out the other's deficiency. Two important expressions of art in a state of insubordination. It is the opera over again where music and drama keep up an undignified race for prominence. Supposing an illustration were decorative in character echoing in a minor manner the suggested theme. Would that not be a fitting background for the storytelling art? The Greeks knew very well what they were about when they introduced the relatively subordinate but decoratively important course into their dramas. This as well expresses their sense of relative proportion as does their sculpture and architecture. What is decorative art? If not a sense of beauty applied to objects of use. That these need the emotional element as well as their element of service is as essential as the life breath in the body. It is the spark of divine fire which relates the actual to the ideal resulting in the reality. It removes from our surroundings any influence which is solely mechanical. Applied art is alike because of its association with that which is necessary to life. The test is necessity not alone the physical but likewise the emotional necessity for all sides of our nature must be developed if life is to have full meaning and come to its maturity. The influence of applied aesthetics is more vital because it is unconsciously absorbed through constant association. Imagine surroundings where everything which did not have a distinct use were eliminated and where everything else was distinctly fitted to its use. If this were put into practice in the usual household a certain simplicity would be the result to say the least. Most things with which we surround ourselves are neither useful nor beautiful. They are either so absurdly over ornamented as to have their usefulness completely impaired or else they are the usual mechanical device equally complicated and hideous. Ornament is usually an anomaly added to cover structural defect if the relation of the parts to the whole is perfect beauty is there. But being accustomed to the over ornamented and wholly mechanical we do not resent their presence. For what indeed is habit not responsible even such innocent objects as pictures hang on our walls until they are scarcely noticed by us. Why not change them to suit our moods? Why not indeed? There are so many of them in the first place and one remembers the time and trouble even the family dissension which it took to hang them. But no one cares much no one is alive enough to care much. The economic struggle which deadens our other senses is responsible for this also. No unit of the social body can disentangle itself from existing conditions. Each is affected by all its influences. Some are more some less some are so much a part that they are not conscious. These last also suffer but without knowing why vital education would show them but the factory system pervades the school and art school as well as the factory. What if the underlying force of education were spontaneous expression instead of the limited method or system? The cry of the teacher is always it is very well to be spontaneous but we must deal with the child en masse. The remedy for that is simple because there is no real necessity to deal with children en masse. It is so much easier to apply the same system to each varied unit of en masse than to discover and help the individual expression of each. The basis of vital art of vital education is self-expression from it and through it comes self-control. Self-expression is as socially uneconomic as jails and standing armies. If instead of building prisons where human life is entombed libraries where literature molds museums where art becomes archaic why not establish centers of education where spontaneous expression is encouraged and where the soul mind and hand are simultaneously developed. Think of a state where each individual working out from its own standpoint truly without hypocrisy would contribute his quota of individual life to the life of the whole pleasing himself in his work without fear then would come the true democracy possible only under just economic conditions where each has equal opportunity for self-expression then can the higher emotional life develop necessary to all human growth. End of section 14. Section 15 of Mother Earth Number 3. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Larry Wilson. Mother Earth Number 3. Section 15. Christopher Henstein by Volterine de Clière. Of the Earth Unearthly. The sentence remained unfinished as I had written it two years and a half ago when disease laid its hand on me and all my manuscripts ended in a dash. It was a description of Christopher Henstein, an explanation of his work in Norway, and now that I'm ready to pick up the threads of life again. I read that he is dead. Of the Earth no more. He who hardly ever belonged to it. At this moment the most insistent memory I have of that delicate half aerial personality are the words, when the doctors told me that I might perhaps not live longer than spring, I thought, if I die what will become of anarchism in Norway? He had no other idea of his meaning in life than this. Somewhere fluctuating to my memory runs broken music. You have heard it? An ineffectual angel beating his luminous wings within the void. Something like that. Words descriptive of Shelley. They haunt me whenever I would recall Christopher Henstein. Perhaps to those who had known him in his youth before his body was consumed, like a half-spent taper, he might have seemed less spirit-like. But when I met him three years ago this coming August, his eyes were already burning with ethereal fires. The pallor of waste was on the high, fine forehead. The cough racked him constantly, and there was upon the whole being the unnameable evanescence of the autumn leaf. Only his autumn came in summer. The utter incapacity of the man before the common practical requirements of life would have been irritating to ordinary individuals. The getting of a meal, or the clothing of the body with reference to the weather, were things that he thought of vaguely, uncomfortably, only with forced attention. What he saw clearly in trance by the vision was the future, the free future. He had been touched by the man wizard of Oliver Shiner's Dream of Wild Bees, and the idea was real to him. The things about him, other people's realities, were shadows, oppressive shadows, indeed, but they did not concern him deeply. It was the great currents of life he saw as real things, and among all the confusion of world movements he could trace the shiny stream that ran towards liberty. And with his hectic face and burning eyes he followed it, torn by the cough and parts by the fever. The Hennsteins are a well-known family in Norway, clever and often eccentric. Christopher's aunt, Ous the Hennstein, at the time of my visit, an old lady over eighty, had been fought many a battle for the equality of women, both in Norway and America. Artists linguist and literary woman of marked ability. But after the manner of her contemporaries, rather outlandish and even outrageous, in her attacks on masculine prerogative, she is a target of satirists and wits, few of whom, however, approach her virility of intellect. Her father, Christopher's grandfather, was an astronomer and mathematician. In his youth Christopher had gone afoot through the dals of Norway, and when he took me through the art galleries of Christiana he was a most interesting guide, through his actual acquaintance with the scenes and the characters of the Delsmann depicted. He knew the lights upon the snow and rocks, just what time of year shown on the leaves. Where the woodpads wound, the dim glories of the mist upon the fjords, the mountain stairways in their craggy walls, and the veiled colors of the summer midnight. And he knew the development of Norwegian art life and literary life as one who wonders always in those paths mysteriously lit. Our hours of fraternalization were few but memorable. He was a frequent visitor at the house of Olaf Gringen, the editor of the Daily Social Democrat, a big kindly Norseman who had remembered me from America and who had defended me in his paper against the ridiculous charge in the ordinary press that I had come there to assassinate Kaiser Wilhelm. Through the efforts of Hanstein and the kindliness and large heartedness of Gringen and his socialist comrades, I spoke before the Socialistic League of Youth in their hall in Christiana. The hall was crowded, over eight hundred being present, and there was some little money in excess of expenses which was given to me. I shared it with Hanstein, and he looked up with a bright flash in his dark eyes. Now, he said, Till Freyhet will come out one month sooner. Till Freyhet, towards freedom, was his paper. And would you know how it came out? He set it up in his free moments. He did the mechanical work, and then being too poor to pay for its delivery through the post, except the few copies that were sent abroad. He took it from house to house himself over the hills of Christiana. He, a consumptive, the cough rending him. There was a driving rain the night I left the city. He wore no rubbers or gumcoat. I was in hopes that he might think the propaganda deserved that its one active worker should get a pair of rubbers, since he must carry papers through the rain. I reminded him that he should keep his feet dry. He only glanced at them as if they were no concern of his. And Till Freyhet will come out one month sooner. It was in Till Freyhet that he had been guilty of high treason. It happened once that King Oscar, in temporary retirement from public king business, had left over to the ground prince the execution of certain matters, which according to the ground law of Norway, could not be so left, whereupon Comrade Hanstein printed an editorial saying, Oscar has broken the ground law, and there is no more a king in Norway. For this he was charged with high treason, and to escape imprisonment he went to England, where he remained about a year among the London Comrades. When he returned there was some thread of carrying out the prosecution, but probably to avoid wider publication of the king's treason, the matter was dropped. Previous to that, Comrade Hanstein had had experience of prison life. In a May Day procession, ostensibly to include all labor reform or revolutionary parties, he, declaring that anarchists should be given place to, marched, carrying a red flag. The chief of police directed a subordinate to take the flag away from him. Easily enough done, but not as an evidence of unwilling submission, before he had struck the official in the face with his hand. That little hand weak and delicate as a woman's. An ordinary man would have pushed it aside like a feather, and thought no more of it. But the official paid tribute to the big will behind the puny flesh, by sentencing him to seven months in prison. My ignorance of Norwegian prevents my giving any adequate idea of his work. I know that he was the author of a little pamphlet, D. Free Asunfinn, Free Society, and that he had translated and published when a Kreptokken's works. Whether the State or the Conquest of Bread, I do not now remember, which he had issued in a series of installments intended ultimately to be bound together. As I recall the deep earnestness of his face in speaking of the difficulties he had had in getting it out, and the unsolved difficulties still facing its completion, I find myself wanting to pray that he saw the precious labor finished. It was so much to him, and I prophesied that the time will come when young Norwegians will treasure up those sacrificial fragments as dearer than any richer and fuller literature. They are the heart's blood of a dying man, the harbinger of the anarchistic movement in Norway. I cannot say goodbye to him forever without a word concerning his personal existence, as incomprehensible to the practical as his social dreams perhaps. He had strong love of home and children, and once he said, the tone touched with melancholy. It used to pain me to think that I should die and have no son, but now I am contented that I have no son. One eut was the wrenching cough that made him contented. A practical man would have rejoiced to be guiltless of transmitting the inheritance, but one could see the dream regreed. His eyes would grow humid looking at his little daughters, and indeed they were bright beautiful children, though not like him. In the early wanderings he had met and loved a simple peasant woman, unlettered, but with sound and serviceable common sense, and with the beauty of perfect honesty shining in her big Norse blue eyes. It was then, and it is now, wonder to me, how in that mystical brain of his, replete with abstractions, generalizations, idealizations, he placed his love for wife and children, strong and tender as it was, one could appreciate at once that he had no sense of the burden of practical life, which his wife seemed to have taken up as naturally hers. The whole world of the imagination wherein he so constantly moved seemed entirely without her can, yet this did not seem to trouble either. Nor did the fact that his unworldliness doubled her portion of responsibility seemed to cause him to reflect that she was kept too busy, like Martha of Old, to choose that good part which he had chosen. Thinking of it now still with some sense of puzzlement, I believe his love for human creatures, and especially within the family relation, were of that deep still yearning kind we feel towards the woods and hills of home. The silent, unobtrusive present fills us with rest and certainty, and we are all unease when we miss it, yet we take it for granted and seldom dwell upon it in our active thoughts, or realize the part it plays in us, it belongs to the dark wells of being. Dear falling star of the Northland, so you have gone out, and it was not yet morning. Please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Nemo. In former years, the studio building had been quite fashionable and respectable. There is hardly a painter of reputation in New York today, who has not, once in his life, occupied a room on the top floor. But in these days of modern improvements, of running water and steam heat, of elevators and electric lights, it has lost its standing, and is inhabited by rather precarious and suspicious clan of pseudo-artists. Mount Bonks, who vegetate on the outskirts of art, Buckeye painters, who turn out a dozen, 20 by 30 canvases a day, for the export trade to Africa and Australia, unscrupulous fabricators of carose and delpignets, and picture drummers, who make such rascality profitable, illustrators of advertising pamphlets, and so called fresco painters, who ornament ceilings with sentimental clouds, with two or three cupids thrown in according to the price they extort from ignorant parvenues. And yet, no matter on what byroads these soldiers of fortune wanted to earn their dubious livelihood, they all respected the white-bearded tenant in his Chevy gray suit, a suit which he wore at all seasons, and which time seemed to be treated just as unkindly as the bent and emaciated form of its wearer. Old Melville gave offense to nobody, and always had a pleasant word for everybody. But as he was not talkative, and the other tenants were too busy to bother an old man painting, nobody knew much about his mode of living, the standard of his art, or his past history. Very few have ever entered his studio. He had neither patrons nor intimate friends, and very likely they would not have enjoyed their visit. A peculiar, gloomy atmosphere pervaded the room, almost sickening in its frugality, and as its skylight lay north the sun never touched it. It had something chilly and uncanny about it, even in summer. The floor was bare, furniture there was none, except an old worn-out kitchen table and chair, an easel, and an old box which served as a bookcase for a few ragged unbound volumes. The comfort of a bed was an unknown luxury to him. He slept on the floor, on a mattress which in daytime was hidden with his scant wardrobe and cooking utensils in a corner he had a gray-faded curtain. His pictures, simple pieces of canvas with tattered edges, nailed to the four walls, leaving hardly an inch uncovered, were the only decoration and furnished a most peculiar wallpaper which heightened the dreariness of the room. There was, after all, a good deal of merit to old Melville's landscapes. On an average there are much better than many of those hung on the line. The only disagreeable quality was their somberness of tone. He invariably got them hopelessly muddy in color despite their resembling the color dreams of a young Impressionist painter at the start. He worked at them so long until they became blurred and blotchy, dark like his life, a sad reflection of his unprofitable career. It was nearly thirty years ago that he had left his native town and had come to New York as a boy of sixteen. He already knew something of his life then. At an early age he had been obliged to help support his family and had served in apprenticeship as printer and sign painter. In New York he determined to become an artist, a landscape painter, who would paint sunshine as had never been done before. But many years elapsed before he could pursue his ambition. Any amount of obstacles were put in his way. He had married and had children and could only paint in leisure hours, all his other time being taken up in the endeavor to provide for his family by inferior work, inferior decoration, etc. Not before years of incessant vicissitudes heart-rending domestic troubles and sorrow, not before his poor wife had died of consumption, that awful day when he had to run about all day in the rain to borrow money enough to bury her. And his children had been put in a charitable institution. He took up painting as a profession. Then the hard times, which are proverbial with struggling artists without means, began. Only they were easier to bear as he was suffering alone. In days of dispossesses and starvation he had at least his art to console him. And he remained true to her in all those years of misery and never degraded himself again to pot-boiling. In hours of despair he had also tried his hand at it, but simply couldn't do it. Now and then he had a stroke of luck, a moderate success, but popularity and fame would not come. His pictures were steadily refused by the academy. Every year he made a new effort, but in vain. One day, when one of his large pictures was exhibited in the show window of a fashionable art store, a rich collector stepped out of his carriage and entering the store asked, How much do you want for the inness you have in the window? The picture-dealer answered, It is no inness, but just as good a piece of work. No, inness, ejaculated the man who wanted to buy a name, then I don't want it. It abruptly left the store. The event, trifling as it was, threw a pale halo over old Melville's whole life and gave him strength to overcome many a severe trial. He hoped on, persevering in his grim fight for existence, despite failures and humiliation. But the years passed by and he still sat there in his studio, and in its emptiness its walls covered with his dark and unsold pictures, whose tones seemed to grow darker with every year. He was one of those sensitive beings who continually suffer from the harsh realities of life who are naïve as children and therefore as easily disillusioned and nevertheless cannot renounce their belief in the ideal. Not a day passed that he did not sit several hours before his easel, trying to paint sunshine as it really is. Nobody in this busy world, however, took notice of his efforts or comprehended the pathos of old Melville's life, those fifty years of bad luck, and yet such martyr-like devotion to art, such a glorious lifelong struggle against fate and circumstances, is so rare in modern times that one might expect the whole world to talk about it, an astonished admiration. And how did he manage to get along all this time, these twenty-five years or more since potboiling had become an unpardonable crime to him? Now and then he borrowed a dollar or so that lasted him for quite a while, as his wants were almost reduced to nothing. Of course he was always behind in the rent, but as he sometimes sold his sketch he managed somehow to keep his studio. He did not eat more than once a day. Too much eating is of no use, he consoled himself, and in this respect he had many colleagues in the fraternity of art. His more than one half of our artists do not manage to get enough to eat, which fact may explain why many paint so insipidly. A few days before his sudden death, an old gentleman, a chance acquaintance, was talking with him about the muddy coloring of the pictures. Old Melville's eyes wandered over the four walls representing a life's work. At first he ardently argued in their favor, but finally gave in that they, perhaps, were a little bit too dark. Why do you not take a studio where you can see real sunlight? There is one empty now with southern exposure right in this building. Old Melville shook his head, murmuring some excuses of can't afford it, of being used so long to this one. But his visitor insisted. He would pay the rent and fix matters with the landlord. The good soul did not understand much about painting, about tones and values, but merely wanted to get the old man into a more cheerful room. It was difficult for Old Melville to take leave of his studio, in which he had seen a quarter of a century roll by, which he had entered as a man in the best years of his life, and now left as an old man, but when he had moved into the new room, the walls of which were an agreeable gray, he exclaimed, how nice and light. After arranging his few earthly possessions, he brought out a new canvas, opened a side window, sat down once more before his easel, engaged intently at the sunshine, streaming in and playing on the newly painted and varnished floor. Four years he had wheeled the brush every day, but on this day he somehow could not paint. He could not find the right harmony. He at first attributed to a cold which he had contracted, but later on irritated and somewhat frightened, he mumbled to himself, I fear I can't paint in this room. And thus he sat musing at his easel, with a blank canvas before him, blank as was once his youth had been, full of possibilities of a successful career, when suddenly an inspiration came upon him. He saw before him the orchard of his father's little Canadian farm, with the old apple trees and bloom, bathed in the sweet and subtle sunlight of spring, a scene that for years had laid hidden among the faint, almost forgotten memories of his childhood days. But now, by some trick of memory, was conjured up with appalling distinctiveness. This he wished to realize and paint, and should he perish in the effort. Feverishly, he seized his palette from brushes, for hours and hours he painted. The sunlight had long vanished from his studio floor. A chill wind blew through the open window and played with his gray locks. When the brush at last glided from his hand, he had accomplished his lifelong aim. He had painted sunshine. Slowly he sank back in his chair. The arms hanging limp at his sides, and as his chin falling at his chest, an attitude a painter might adopt gazing at a masterpiece he had just accomplished. In this case, old Melville's painting hours were over, forever more. His eyes could no longer see the colors of this world. Like a soldier, he had died at his post of duty, and serene happiness over this final victory lay on his features. In every life, some ideal happiness is hidden, which may be found, and for which we should prospect all our days. Old Melville had attained his little bit of sunshine rather late in life, but he had called it his own, at least for however short a moment, while most of us, others, whom life treats less scurverly, blinded by foolish and selfish desire, cannot even succeed in grasping material happiness, which crosses our roads quite often enough and stands at times right near us without being recognized. And the fate of old Melville's pictures? Who knows if they may not someday, when their colors of melody be discovered in some garret and re-enter the art world in a more dignified manner. True enough, they will not set the world on fire, yet they may be at least appreciated as the sincere efforts of a man who loved his art above all else, and despite deficiencies, had a keen understanding for nature and considerable ability to express it. Whatever their future may be, his work has not been in vain. It is the cruel law of human life that hundreds of men must drudge their whole lives away in order that one may succeed. Not a bit better than they, in the same way in art, hundreds of talents must struggle and suffer in vain that one may reach the cloud-wrapped summit of popularity and fame. And that road is sure to lead over many corpses, and many of the nobler altruistic qualities of man have to be left far behind in the valley of unknown names. Life was brutal to you, old Melville, but this way or that way what is the difference? There was a time when in the name of God and of true faith in him men were destroyed, tortured, executed, beaten in scores and hundreds of thousands. We, from the height of our attainments, now look down upon the men who did these things. But we are wrong. Amongst us there are many such people. The difference lies only here, that those men of old did these things then in the name of God and of his true service, whilst now those who commit the same evil amongst us do so in the name of the people, for the true service of the people.