it that produced the Spanish manifesto and Spanish war? The American war! What was it that armed forty-two thousand men in Ireland with the arguments carried on the points of forty thousand bayonets? The American war! For what are we about to incur an additional debt of twelve or fourteen millions? This accursed, cruel, diabolical American war!

CHARLES J. Fox.

CHAPTER II

INTERPRETATION AND ART

Interpretation and Art. "Common reading," what you hear in the fourth grade and from all people who have not learned anything new about reading since leaving off their reading lessons, has little relation to art or to the artistic. Interpretation, on the other hand, is artistic. The difference is the same as that found between a scared boy picking individual words off the page with neither sense, wit, nor understanding and the actor thrilling his audience with keenness of insight, the sting of emotion, and the light of human sympathy. The printed page is after all nothing but the agitator, the inspirer, of some human being; reading from the page can be as lively and rich as that human is. It cannot be more; but at any rate it can be all of that. So interpretation as an art should be as rich an art as life itself.

What do we mean by art? Not a few of us think it is something rather silly, for the weak and "washy" but hardly for persons of bone, sinews, and strong stomachs. Yet the artist does not have to be what we can call "arty." Your "arty" person is likely to be dandified, simpering, mushy, and self-centered; whereas your real artist is just as like as not to be uncouth, brash, hard, and not at all in love with his own picture. Art is a strenuous taskmaster and toughens its disciples. It hardly flourishes amidst attar of roses, Turkish divans, and costume parties. Leave that to the "arty" people. Art comes more often from garrets, amidst wrecks of furniture, and on a diet of crackers and cheese. The worst "arty" matter in the world comes from our modern spirit of jazz. Jazz will never have much to do with art because it asks no

heavy price: morons can do it and "get" it better than highgrades. No struggle-no art, is a safe rule.

For what we mean by art after all is merely doing something well, or a something well done. As almost anything can be done well or done ill, we have art of many and diverse kinds: architecture and cooking, painting and fox-trotting, acting and plumbing, writing and diving, sculpture and flycasting. Do anything better than mediocre and you are flirting with art. There can even be art in athletics, campus politics, and student activities. You can hardly be sincere and do your work with a touch or a flare and escape the feelings and promptings of the artist, however fearful you may be of contact with the "arty" ones or scornful of other people's attempts to be skillful. As a matter of fact, if you have not a touch of the artistic urge toward doing something well, however commonplace or simple, be it only making up a complexion or coloring a pipe, you are hardly worth keeping.

But this does not tell us what art is. Will it help to say that it is being artistic? Probably not much, because that merely says again that art is based upon doing things in an artistic manner, and this constitutes a case of faulty definition. Will it help to test the meaning of art in terms of certain words that sound very much like it? That sounds hopeful. Let us try it.

First take the word artful. If this word means "full of art," then what is art? Something clever? A sly trick? Something to put over on people? Not exactly, yet that is about what "artful" means. And the meaning is not hard to appreciate when you understand that art is after all some sort of trick, just a bit of deceit and fraud. For you know the paint on the canvas simply is not a landscape or a man's head, and the piece of marble is not a man throwing a discus, and the acting on the stage is not done by people who are angry or in love or perplexed or saintly or villainous-in just the way they seem to be. These are all tricks played upon the observer. But they are art-and the artist who made them was artful. Take next the word artifice. Again we are dealing with

deceit. A back drop is an artifice, as is a steeple on a church, also the up-and-down stripes on a plump woman's dress, the green jacket on a red-headed girl, the elephants pushing the books together on the reading table, and the stream-line of an automobile body. These are all devised to make something seem to be just a little different from what it actually is. An artifice is always figured out with an intent to gloss something over or to hide what is not to be noticed. Shall we say then that an artificer is one who deals in artifices? Yes, in plain. truth; for your true artificer makes bronze into a Winged Mercury which is not-bronze, or glass into flowers which are not-glass, or wool into broadcloth which is not-wool. But is an artificer an artist?

This leads easily to the word artificial. The artificial is by definition opposed to the natural, the genuine, the honestto-goodness reality. What has art to do with the artificial, most especially the art of giving voice to the thoughts of others as found on the printed page? At first glance the mere suggestion seems quite scandalous; for interpretation must of all things be genuine, honest, sincere, and real. It must be even more: it must be "natural." At least we hear that interpretation and artificiality have simply nothing to do with each other. But not so fast; there is a certain artificiality to all art if artists are artful and if all art uses artifices. So if interpretation is to be classed as an art, it cannot be altogether "natural."

Art is Never "Natural." Art never is natural; it only seems to be. The very core and heart of artistry is the creating of illusion, making things appear to be different from what they are. A Venus de Milo-in marble-never occurred in nature and never will. She had to be made in an artificial way by an artificer who knew what he was about and who purposely used subtle artifices. An Unfinished Symphony never in the world could happen in nature, however much it simulates the soothing and sleep-producing sounds of wind, forest, and stream. A Hamlet never happened in life and nobody ever spoke Hamlet's language naturally: he had to be made by a

master technician. Not even acting and play production is natural; it is all make-believe, pretence. There is not a natural object on the stage; at least not any used in a natural way. Even pianos, chairs, lamps, doors, and windows are used according to the schemes of an artist or artificer intent on producing an artificial situation in order to seem to be what it is not: to deceive the audience into believing that a woman who has been divorced three times is a maiden, that a man with an inferiority complex is a tyrant king, that love is ideal, that virtue is always triumphant, and that life amidst beautiful furniture and fine clothes is all sparkle and joy. The very lines of the manuscript are artificial for in making the acted story seem real they have to be artificially and artfully-contise, artificially brilliant, artificially couched in the best-or worst-of English, and artificially pronounced according to the best stage standards. Yet the drama is the form of art nearest to what we think of as natural; with the possible exception of that one phase of the drama known as interpretation of the lines, the subject of this study.

No, art is always in a measure artificial because in good art everything is wittingly planned to produce just the right effect. A genuine artist knows ahead of time what he wants to produce and he plans accordingly. Not a thing is left to chance if he is really an artist and not a mere blunderer or extemporizer. Imagine building a cathedral by mere inspiration and an outpouring of the soul. It simply is not done. Nor is it done in actuality even in so immediate and unpremeditated an art as improvising on a piano or an organ; for into what is passed off as improvisation goes much of one's past, laborious, and everlasting training. Try improvisation from a novice and you get the idea; what you have will be highly "natural" and quite terrible. So with any art, even the art of talking or speaking in public. Most speakers are by nature awkward and halting, or else glib, rambling, and generally not equal to being a public show. Set them before an audience and ninety-nine out of a hundred, if told to be natural, will