vided by unaccountable circumstances and it is sad to see the irreconcilability of two natures impelled by their very identity to view each other from opposite poles and without recognition of kinship. It may be said to those who believe that there is something to discover beside the already existing word, that no one who has faith in a formula believes in or desires to create a new value. For such a faith and an attempt to justify it one must turn to the artist in a mood in which he may be distinguished from the propagandist.
The artist turns back with a certain theoretical literality to a point which embraces all points, as permanent as eternity, since he returns to life itself. This is reasonable and theoretically sound; but to the man who is a logician art must be superfluous—at best a bastard and derived thing which would illustrate perfection with geometrically appropriate allegory. Nevertheless, the artist draws his inspiration from a life which evades categories. It is this return to impermanence which makes-art a disturbing element, and the purer the artistic feeling which inspires a work, the less it will smack of illusory discoveries contained in theories of rearrangement.
We examine Mr. Cannan's work and at a first glance are inclined to billet him with revolutionists incapable of sensing the new. Again and again he suggests to us that his new is a rearrangement of attitude toward the old. He wants us to believe that art is a speculation about life, a glorious affair of the moving-picture film or the laboratory. Philosophy in a dressing-gown! A modern morality play without the unconscious enhancements of the naive spirit. The tendency of his genius, to use, in a slightly modified sense, a term recently employed by Mr. Waldo Frank, is extroverted. His view of life inclines to be extensive rather than intensive, and as it is impossible to become one with a medium which preserves all of its spatial definitions, there is always an impression of Mr. Cannan's work as far from an immediate revelation of Mr. Cannan as a new theory of the solar system from the spirit of the astronomer who formulated it. You may select from one of Mr. Cannan's novels after another and find that all end on the speculative rather than the inevitable note. The artist in him—and there is an artist in him, as I shall point out later—is time after time subservient to the moralist.
For the reason that the publication of Mr. Cannan's books in the United States has been, chronologically, very erratic, it is impossible
