soul, releasing therefrom some atavistic monster that otherwise would have slept on unaroused.

You see I pursue my ideal through all the changes of the world's panorama, using my powers of negation to foil the plan of the cosmic volition. I would reduce the world to the condition of the Witch's Walpurgis Night on the Brocken, when I revealed to Faust my ideal of the ugly, the vulgar and the abominable, like the witch's dance in "Tam O'Shanter:" the shapes arose of murder, disease, abortion and suffering. I was here in my element and reigned supreme in my kingdom of negation.

But according to my compact with Faust, I had to go with him through the classic Walpurgis Night wherein I was to be tortured by a vision of the Greek ideal beauty. As we moved on, the forms of ancient art were revealed, through which Faust advanced toward his ideal beauty and I toward my ideal ugliness. In the Archaic art of the Egyptians and the Assyrians and the primitive art of Greece, with its griffins and centaurs, Faust discerned the struggle of art to rise from the animal to the human form, giving a prophesy of the future ideal beauty. He was exalted and stimulated to pursue this ideal.

On myself, who was forced by my compact to journey with him through these realms of the antique, the effect was exactly the reverse. I saw in the part-bestial forms of the sphinxes and griffins a beginning of the realization of my ideal of ugliness and experienced a partial relief from the agony of contemplating the pure Greek forms; and I soliloquized thus:

And as among these fires I wander, aimless,
I find myself so strange, so disconcerted:
Quite naked most, a few are only shirted-
The Griffins insolent, the Sphinxes shameless,
And what not all, with pinions and with tresses,
Before, behind, upon one's eyesight presses!
Indecency, 'tis true, is our ideal,

But the Antique is too alive and real.

One must with modern thought the thing bemaster,
And in the fashion variously o'erplaster:
Disgusting race! Yet I, perforce, must meet them
And as new guest with due decorum greet them.

As we moved on through the world of antique art each one found something to his taste. Then we came to a most amazing revelation of the power of the Greek imagination. As we advanced, Faust toward his ideal of beauty, I toward my ideal ugliness, we came to the Sirens with their sharp talons. We saw Lilith, the female Vampire of the Hebrews; the Lamiæ, the witches of the Greek imagination; Empusa, the cannibal witch with one cloven foot who called me cousin. I acknowledged the relationship and admired her deformity. We passed others symbolic of nature and the elements, and finally arrived at the place of the Phorkyads, of the three grey sisters. They each had in common but one eye and one tooth, which they used alternately. They dwelt at the uttermost ends of the earth where neither sun nor moon beheld them. They represent the climax of all which the Greek imagination has created of the horrible and repulsive. I was consequently ravished with delight. I had found the ideal ugliness.

As I, myself the embodiment of ugliness, stood before these daughters of chaos, I broke into song:

I something see, and am dumbfounded!

Proud as I am, I must confess the truth:
I've never seen their like in sooth-

Worse than our hags, an Ugliness unbounded!
How can the Deadly Sins then ever be

Found ugly in the least degree,

When one this triple dread shall see?

We would not suffer them to dwell

Even at the dreariest door of Hell;

They stir, they seem to scent my coming;

Like vampire-bats they're squeaking, twittering, humming.

I then addressed them:

Most honored Dame! Approaching, by your leave,
Grant that your triple blessing I receive.

I come, though still unknown, yet, be it stated,
If I mistake not, distantly related.

Old, reverend Gods already did I see;

To Ops and Rhea have I bowed the knee;
The Parcæ even-your sisters-yesterday
Or day before, they came across my way;
And yet the like of you ne'er met my sight:
Silent am I, and ravished with delight.

I am amazed no poet has the sense

To sing your praises!-Say, how can it be

That we no pictures of your beauty see?

Should not, through you, the chisel strive to wean us
From shapes like those of Juno, Pallas, Venus?

My prayer has been answered by the modernistic degenerates in Art.

The astounding revelation to me was the range of the Greek mind invoking the absolute in the two opposite poles of the ideals of beauty and ugliness. I who had striven with all my powers and that of the fallen angels for the ideal of ugliness was now confronted with a creation that eclipsed our utmost efforts. Here in the remotest ends of the earth, in eternal blackness of darkness, the Greek imagination placed the symbol of absolute negation, even as they had approached the ideal of absolute beauty, thus reaching the limit of the two opposing powers.

But they kept their ideal of ugliness chained in perpetual darkness. No expression in their art ever betrayed its existence, but this monster of negation stood on the threshold of every Greek imagination. Jupiter, Apollo and the Venus de Milo had gazed into the horror of it-on all the faces of their Gods and Heroes there is a trace of the haunting terror of that contact. You cannot imagine one of those visages of divine beauty breaking into a smile. With unfathomable, eternal

repose they register their condemnation of ugliness and the triumph of their ideal beauty.

CHAPTER XVIII

INDEPENDENCE IN ART AND THE "SALON DES INDÉPENDANTS"

IN PARIS AND NEW YORK

Appeared in the May, 1917, issue of "The Art World"

WHEN Mme. Roland at the foot of the guillotine cried "Oh, Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!" she uttered a profound truth applicable both to the political and artistic worlds.

When, at the birth of Modern art, through the rebellion in 1804 of Baron Gros, Géricault and others, against the "tyranny" of David and the classic school, certain artists launched the cry "Liberty in Art!" which became the slogan of the romantic movement, little did they dream that the "stream of tendency" which they started would widen out and end in that mad-house barracks called "Le Salon des Indépendants," a quarter of a mile long, built of cheap slats, canvas and sawdust, winding its way like a fakir's fair along the banks of the Seine and filled with now senile, now weird, now monstrous art creations. Thither the common-sense Frenchmen go only to laugh, as they do at their annual "Foire aux Jambons" or "Ham-Fair," where one munches and laughs at all sorts of sausages made from all sorts of meats, from goat's to mule's meat!

The origin of the Salon of the Independents goes back to the "Salon of the Refused" of 1863, when the Jury of that year unceremoniously kicked out the works of a number of artists who had ceased to be simply Modern and had become "modernistic," which means-romantic art run to seed. True, their modernisticness-ness-ness was only slight compared with the joyous modernistism of today. But still they were not "independents" then, they were rejected beggars for medals and honors, who had raised such a row because their

works has been thrown out as unfit for even exhibition-and more unfit for ribbons and medals which they so yearned for. Napoleon III, then feeling his throne shaky, to placate these rioters, ordered the Fine Arts Department to give them at least a place in which they could exhibit their works, and in the same building which housed the official Salon. This has been known since as the "Salon of the Refused." It was the last one of these independent Salons until a certain number of other disgruntled artists rebelled against the official Salon, seceded and organized a new one, and abolished the system of giving medals; but they raised a no less effective barrier against incompetent or insane art by electing to their number only such artists as agreed with them; they allowed only such to exhibit. They called this the "National Salon," and this is now as much despised by the license-loving "modernists" as was the old official Salon. These two Salons were housed in the magnificent Fine Arts Palace, on the Champs Elysées.

Shortly after this, a gnawing hunger "to get into the limelight" took possession of thousands who, by virtue of incompetence could go only so far in art, but yearned nevertheless to exhibit their more-or-less childish or over-radical creations, somewhere, somehow. This effervescence of egotism, finally crystallized in the opening of the "Salon of the Independents" —with no jury, no medals and free for all and welcome!

It was really a joke, played on the whole world, by the jocose and delightful Parisian leaders of French commerce, bent on keeping Paris the center of the world of art at all hazards, because Germany was making herculean efforts to transfer this center to Berlin. If successful, that would have been injurious to French commerce, and these Parisians are past masters in the application of the philosophy of our own Barnum-that every man loves to be humbugged at least once in his life-if only to know how it feels-and each one in his turn! Did not Emerson say:

The finished man of the world should have tasted of every apple at least once.

It is safe to say the world never saw such a ham-fair of æsthetic monstrosities. And all Paris shed tears of laughter, for weeks, and all the world came to see this new cuttle-fish in