with it
what the athletic artist does with the meat and lymph and bone of God
himself? The artist mines from the earth and smelts with his own fire.
He is higher brother to the toilers of the soil. The critic takes the
products of the creator, reforges, twists them, always in the cold.
For if he had the fire to melt, he would not stay with metals already
worked: when the earth's womb bursts with richer.

When the creator turns critic, we are certain of a feast. We have a
fare that needs no metaphysical sauce (such as must transform the
product of the Critic). Here is good food. Go to it and eat. The
asides of a Baudelaire, a Goethe, a Da Vinci outweight a thousand
tomes of the professional critics.

* * * * *

I know of no American book like this one by Marsden Hartley. I do not
believe American painting heretofore capable of so vital a response
and of so athletic an appraisal. Albert Ryder barricaded himself from
the world's intrusion. The American world was not intelligent enough
in his days to touch him to an activer response. And Ryder, partaking
of its feebleness, from his devotion to the pure subjective note
became too exhausted for aught else. As a world we have advanced. We
have a fully functioning Criticism ... swarms and schools of makers of
the sonorous complacencies of Judgment. We have an integral body of
creative-minded men and women interposing itself with valiance upon
the antithesis of the social resistance to social growth. Hartley is
in some ways a continuance of Ryder. One stage is Ryder, the solitary
who remained one. A second stage is Hartley, the solitary who stands
against the more aggressive, more interested Marketplace.

You will find in this book the artist of a cultural epoch. This man
has mastered the plastic messages of modern Europe: he has gone deep
in the classic forms of the ancient Indian Dance. But he is, still,
not very far from Ryder. He is always the child--whatever wise old
worlds he contemplates--the child, wistful, poignant, trammeled, of
New England.

Hartley has adventured not alone deep but wide. He steps from New
Mexico to Berlin, from the salons of the Paris of Marie Laurencin to
the dust and tang of the American Circus. He is eclectic. But wherever
he goes he chronicles not so much these actual worlds as his own
pleasure of them. They are but mirrors, many-shaped and lighted, for
his own delicate, incisive humor. For Hartley is an inno