the stars while they may? As the infant prodigy among races, there is much that we could inherit from these people if we could prove ourselves more worthy and less egotistic.

The artist and the poet of perception come forward with heartiest approval and it is the supplication of the poet and the artist which the redman needs most of all. Science looks upon him as a phenomenon; esthetics looks upon him as a giant of masterful expression in our midst. The redman is poet and artist of the very first order among the geniuses of time. We have nothing more native at our disposal than the beautiful creations of this people. It is singular enough that the as yet remote black man contributes the only native representation of rhythm and melody we possess. As an intelligent race, we are not even sure we want to welcome him as completely as we might, if his color were just a shade warmer, a shade nearer our own. We have no qualms about yellow and white and the oriental intermediate hues. We may therefore accept the redman without any of the prejudices peculiar to other types of skin, and we may accept his contribution to our culture as a most significant and important one. We haven't even begun to make use of the beautiful hints in music alone which he has given to us. We need, and abjectly so I may say, an esthetic concept of our own. Other nations of the world have long since accepted Congo originality. The world has yet to learn of the originality of the redman, and we who have him as our guest, knowing little or nothing of his powers and the beauty he confers on us by his remarkable esthetic propensities, should be the first to welcome and to foster him. It is not enough to admit of archaeological curiosity. We need to admit, and speedily, the rare and excellent esthetics in our midst, a part of our own intimate scene. The redman is a spiritual expresser of very vital issues. If his pottery and his blankets offer the majority but little, his ceremonials do contribute to the comparative few who can perceive a spectacle we shall not see the equal of in history again. It would help at least a little toward proving to the world around us that we are not so young a country as we might seem, nor yet as diffident as our national attitude would seem to indicate. The smile alone of the redman is the light of our rivers, plains, canyons, and mountains. He has the calm of all our native earth. It is from the earth all things arise. It is our geography that makes us Americans of the present, children. We are the product of a day. The redman is the product of withered ages. He has written and is still writing a very impressive autograph on the waste places of history. It would seem to me to be a sign of modernism in us to preserve the living esthetic splendors in our midst. Every other nation has preserved its inheritances. We need likewise to do the same. It is not enough to put the redman as a specimen under glass along with the auk and the dinosaur. He is still alive and longing to live. We have lost the buffalo and the beaver and we are losing the redman, also, and all these are fine symbols of our own native richness and austerity. The redman will perpetuate himself only by the survival of his own customs for he will never be able to accept customs that are as foreign to him as ours are and must always be; he will never be able to accept a culture which is inferior to his own.

In the esthetic sense alone, then, we have the redman as a gift. As Americans we should accept the one American genius we possess, with genuine alacrity. We have upon our own soil something to show the world as our own, while it lives. To restrict the redman now would send him to an unrighteous oblivion. He has at least two contributions to confer, a very aristocratic notion of religion, and a superb gift for stylistic expression. He is the living artist in our midst, and we need not think of him as merely the anthropological variation or as an archaeological diversion merely. He proves the importance of synthetic registration in peoples. He has created his system for himself, from substance on, through outline down to every convincing detail. We are in a position always of selecting details in the hope of constructing something usable for ourselves. It is the superficial approach. We are imitators because we have by nature or force of circumstance to follow, and improve upon, if we can. We merely "impose" something. We can not improve upon what the redman offers us in his own way. To "impose" something—that is the modern culture. The interval of imposition is our imaginary interval of creation. The primitives created a complete cosmos for themselves, an entire principle. I want merely, then, esthetic recognition in full of the contribution of the redman as artist, as one of the finest artists of time; the poetic redman ceremonialist, celebrant of the universe as he sees it, and master among masters of the art of symbolic gesture. It is pitiable to dismiss him from our midst. He needs rather royal invitation to remain and to persist, and he can persist only by expressing himself in his own natural and distinguished way, as is the case with all peoples, and all individuals, indeed.

WHITMAN AND CÉZANNE

It is interesting to observe that in two fields of expression, those of painting and poetry, the two most notable innovators, Whitman and Cézanne bear a definite relationship in point of similarity of ideals and in their attitudes toward esthetic principles. Both of these men were so true to their respective ideals that they are worth considering at the same time in connection with each other: Cézanne with his desire to join the best that existed in the impressionistic principle with the classical arts of other times, or as he called it, to create an art like the Louvre out of impressionism. We shall find him striving always toward actualities, toward the realization of beauty as it is seen to exist in the real, in the object itself, whether it be mountain or apple or human, the entire series of living things in relation to one another.

It is consistent that Cézanne, like all pioneers, was without prescribed means, that he had to spend his life inventing for himself those terms and methods which would best express his feelings about nature. It is natural that he admired the precision of Bouguereau, it is also quite natural that he should have worshipped in turn, Delacroix, Courbet, and without doubt, the mastery of Ingres, and it is indicative too that he felt the frank force of Manet. It was his special distinction to strive toward a simple presentation of simple things, to want to paint "that which existed between himself and the object," and to strive to solidify the impressionistic conception with a greater realization of form in space, the which they had so much ignored. That he achieved this in a satisfying manner may be observed in the best of his landscapes and still-lifes, and in some of the figure studies also. The endeavor to eliminate all aspects of extraneous conception by dismissing the quality of literature, of poetry and romance from painting, was the exact characteristic which made him what he is for us today, the pioneer in the field of modern art. It was significant enough when he once said to Renoir, that it took him twenty years to find out that painting was not sculpture. Those earlier and heavy impasto studies of his are the evidence of this worthy deduction. It was significant, too, when he said that Gaugin was but "a flea on his back," and that "he does nothing but paint Chinese images."

The phrase that brings these two strikingly original personages in art together is the one of Cézanne: "I remain the primitive of the way I have discovered"; and that