Teaching God

...Nowadays it is rather the rage...

...A bad book may be good enough for the author—at least it purges him...

...but it poisons or drugs the reader, and to that extent is false to life...

...The artist is assumed to be a builder of better worlds than the Creator himself: worlds of fancy which are at once a lesson and a reproach to reality and Providence...

...If God is conditioned by the individual as the very unit of his being, why may not human artistry teach divinity...

...A weapon against such realism strikes back at the too fervent advocates of romanticism themselves, who stand at the opposite pole...

...Atheists, for instance, make a god of godlessness and a religion of irreligion...

...Should he linger too long in the land of make-believe, his household effects may presently decorate the sidewalk...

...For example, it is easy, closing the eyes, to recall George Arliss as the rajah in The Green Goddess and hear him commenting on the starry illumination of the sky as "a little ostentatious...

...Sad indeed is the man who interprets life as a romantic dream and suddenly awakes to reality...

...God is the sum-total of the world's progress...

...As if fame were not essentially in relation to one's fellowbeings...

...Those who reject the battle," somebody has well said, "are more deeply wounded than those that take part in it...

...The facts of life, garnished, if you will, with romance, are normally the food for the normal man in his novel-reading...

...Not by beguiling us with tainted fancies, but by stimulating us with fact...

...From such gratuities, a belief in the preeminence of art readily buds...

...stand on their hind legs and talk right up at Him...

...Man can qualify to be His teacher...

...materialists have to add to matter all the powers they subtract from the deity...

...but, naturally, it is miles and miles from being proved...

...It must be anticipated that the individual who keeps cruising on the Argo and seeking the golden fleece will sooner or later lose his forty-dollar-a-week position...

...By ignoring or rejecting the absurdities flowing logically enough from his free assertions, he saves his academic skin...

...There is something sportive in a literary evolution that reached its best in Shakespeare over three hundred years ago and today, at its possible worst, talks about tutoring God...

...The stars—those gems of elusive perfection, no matter how "ostentatious" the rajah regarded them—smile down the while...

...but most of our up-to-date illuminati, too smart to be too inconsistent, prefer not to deny God but to be just foolish enough to tell Him a thing or two...

...The novel, and this is the literary form that the upholders of human blue-prints for God's enlightenment have mostly in mind, is an expression of life...

...Since each of man's senses illumines his brain, then each of God's creatures can enlighten the divine mind...

...Or has thou an arm like God...

...Life is to be lived and directed...

...No doubt some of the sky-lights are too dim and could well be supplemented with electricity...

...Perhaps the Creator is unaware that there is too much space wasted in the universe, or that the heavenly bodies might be more tidily arranged...

...This would sweep some of the world's most illustrious names in letters, which stand for realism, into the discard...

...the critic, as a teacher and rebuker of Providence, would now go so far as his theory...

...In this, art is super-divine, and God is grandly invited to learn from it...

...Thus the idea of man's genius as a model for God's mind to aspire after can be a bit explained...

...for a faithful presentation of life is necessarily illuminating and helpful...

...We should not be surprised soon to learn that self-confident bohemians are preparing a series of lectures for "the wide-eyed cherubim...

...But he insists that primarily the artist works to please himself—and gain undying fame...

...True, it is granted that there are other escapes...

...The test of a good book, as Doctor Johnson would have it, is its power to enable us to enjoy life or to endure it...

...God has much to learn and should go to school...

...What is progress anyhow, if its flow be backwards ? The immortal William could see something more than prideful display in the heavens "all inlaid with patens of bright gold," and much more than a trained monkey in the noble piece of creation that is man...

...More serious is the assumption, on which the idea of man's art as God's inspiration rests, that all great artists are romanticists...

...Declare, if thou hast understanding, who determined the measure thereof, if thou knowest...

...But not by stuffing us with idle dreams, so much as by awakening us to a realization of the truth of beauty and the beauty of truth...

...for misrepresenting the facts of life, they disqualify us to some degree for living...

...while the aurora borealis might be brought nearer to Boston where it would be appreciated...

...It can well afford to descend...

...Now, quite beyond the world of dreary reality and its lying side-lanes, the artist, with the magic of pen or brush, creates for us a land of illusion, overflowing with the milk and honey of adventure and romance...

...and all because the critic, over-enthusiastic for the romantic element, neglects the truth that more real gold may often be found in the mines of reality than in the realms of fancy, and that the doings in one's own backyard can be pictured with quite as colorful a fascination by the pen of genius, as the high seas or the renaissance Italy and Spain of Sabbatini...

...At first, it seems odd that any serious publisher or magazine would sponsor, except as a satire on the mind of Greenwich Village, a conceit which, however smart in sound, absurdly makes the Potter beholden for knowledge and inspiration to the clay...

...And strangest of all seems the fact that, producing works which even they themselves must know to be imperfect and below the standards of past masters, they should even think of teaching and directing Him who in the whirlwind demanded: "Where wast thou when I laid the foundation of the earth...

...not, as the present-day romantic critic believes, to escape it...

...Why not...

...but the upto-date artist-critic endows himself—as much beneath Shakespeare, perhaps, as Shakespeare was below the moon—with a mind to give God pointers...

...If he chooses Helen of Troy for his affinity, the far less lovely wife of his bosom will proceed to demonstrate that "hell hath no fury like a woman scorned...

...If the title of artist were withheld from the extreme realist whose specialty is mire and whose descents are as faithless to life as the flights of the extreme romanticist, it would be well...

...To be sure, the critic, loyal to the American dollar, if to nothing else, hastens to admit that, over and above the satisfaction of self-expression, a little compensating cash is always acceptable: to which the shades of Samuel Johnson and Charles Dickens would strenuously agree...

...Weakened for living by his diet of romance, he sees that such fancies as Medusa, and Scylla, and the Sirens who leave only the bones of their victims to bleach in the sun, have become facts...

...Peter Pan is for children, old and young...

...not escaped...

...But if there is no such Being at all and religion amounts, according to Mencken, merely to "one of the greatest inventions ever made on earth," then what a waste of energy and ink the critics of divinity keep making I However, the idea of God appears to be to the mind what air is to the body...

...If ours is a world of duty and destiny, novels that usurp the purposes of poetry and dishonestly draw our thoughts and interests too far from reality may not be called the best...

...They may and should and must...

...And, too, the joy of release which the champion of art stresses is largely a fiction...

...Yet the most yawning student of Elizabethan literature recalls that the Bard of Avon wrote with an eye keen to the pleasure of his public and, when he could afford it, pleased himself by retiring and giving his talent a good rest: nevertheless the modern creation is a pigmy alongside Lear and Macbeth...

...And canst thou thunder with a voice like Him...

...One cannot get away from it and, breathing it out, immediately experiences the necessity of somehow drawing it back in...

...Art is interpreted as a golden release from the gloom called life...

...After delivering himself of the extravagance of teachership to God, he conveniently inclines to forget it and to hold that your artist creates, neither for divine or human benefit, but always to please himself...

...Not that novels may not expand or exalt the mind and heart...

...Nothing can conquer a sense of mediocrity and puff a man up more surely than the art of giving pointers to the Supreme Being...

...Passing strange it is, in fine, that romanticists who can weave whole tapestries with their imaginations, are unable to behold more in the world of reality than "a gray and monotonous corridor...

...but it would also be a boomerang...

...To paint the picture too drably or too fancifully is to trifle perhaps brilliantly, but still to trifle...

...As a form and exercise, if not an evidence, of superiority, criticism is perfect and hence will always be popular...

...Ah, no...

...and Zola, at his worst, for pathologists...

...but all save art are the paths of dalliance, leading only to disappointment and regret...

...or suavely declaring, "Think of the' Maharajah up yonder who night after night whistles up his glittering legions and puts them through their deadly punctual drill, as much as to say, 'See what a devil of a fellow / am!' " That remark is typical of a thought-trend which one finds repeatedly in our present literary output...

...Still stranger it is that they can bring themselves to forget it is out of the fibre of reality that their talent draws the manycolored threads of which literary Gobelins are made...

...To the many who mistake philosophers for philosophy, philosophy for theology, Darwin for Genesis, the Being of Beings must be growing and developing all the time, just like man, His miniature...

...But then, in partial understanding, one hastens to recollect that, outside Catholic and orthodox Protestant circles, God is Evolution, the Great Unachieved, and the Future Perfect...

...and live we must, until that only real escape, known as death, presents itself...

...Such discrepancies, however, are rather slight in a mentality that presumes to start out only a little higher than Olympus...

...A humble modern poet was reverently impressed that only God could make a tree...

...Realism, in the hands of a genuine artist, may attain to transcendence...

...Writers who lead the adult mind too far into the land of the lotus may be traitors...