Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1914 (Heft 47))

TWO-NINE-ONE—A LONDONER’S VIEW

Two-Nine-One made me think of many things. Perhaps that is Two-
Nine-One’s main function—to make people think. Merely to be a place
wherein the emotions are agreeably stirred was not, as I understand him,
what Two-Nine-One’s founder intended it to be. My conception of the
Little Gallery is that it was meant less as an exhibition room in which we
might wallow in the waves of Beauty sent forth from the pictures on the
walls than as a treasure-chamber where—while deriving the sensuous pleasure
obtainable from abstract loveliness—we might enrich ourselves also from a
hoard of ideas which would be the capital of enterprises quite concrete and
not a bit “soulful” in the outcome.
When I came over to New York for a short trip from London I observed
that the chief difference, on the face of it, between America and Europe is
that the former is enthusiastic and the latter isn’t. In Europe we are tired
of enthusiasms, even tired of art. This is a shocking thing. We might as
well say we are tired of being alive. But, however shocking, it is true—for
indeed we are not very much even alive. It is especially amongst literary
and artistic people that this tiredness is noticeable. We have a class here
who, if they are interested in anything, are interested in literature—but to
all intents and purposes have given up reading books. We have the picture-
lovers—who never go inside a gallery. We have the drama-connoisseurs:
it is only with infinite labour that they can be coaxed into a theatre, and
when you have got them there you only bore them. The bookman reads
nothing but reviews; the pictureman scrutinizes nothing but the script of
the Private View cards stacked on his desk; the playgoer sees nothing but
the critiques in the papers.
This sounds like simply stating that we are blase. And we are blase.
However, the blaseness is but a symptom of a deeper disease, the disease of
inertia. We don’t care—and we don’t care largely because, having over-
indulged our emotions when we first awoke to art, literature, the drama, etc.,
we did not simultaneously check all those emotions by the light of reason.
Had we—instead of passively enjoying beauty like animals enjoying being
tickled—kept our intellectual faculties hard at work also, we should still have
been alive. As it is, we have hardly any life left, and even the subtlest
tickling cannot make us twitch.
So we look across at America a little superciliously, perceiving the Ameri-
can still able to purr or weep or go into ecstasies1 in response not only to
skilled tickling but to almost any tickling. The superciliousness is silly: is
indeed a European vice, a priggishness for which alone we deserve our fate
of fatigue. Myself, I admired, in America, that aliveness which makes for
every kind of generous appreciation, even of the emptier performances in the
arts. For I had rather a man indulged in the most sentimental emotionalism
than that he were too dead to savour any emotions, too paralytic to “feel.”
But it soon became evident to me that although New York was enormously
more alive in such respects than London, even in New York there had begun to
appear considerable signs of that tiredness-amongst-the-cultured which makes
art such an affair of yawnings in certain apparently artistic circles in London.

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