THE STATE

Columbia, South Carolina, U.S.A.

7 December 1913

ALEISTER CROWLEY HAS LITTLE GOOD TO SAY

OF AMERICAN ART BUT LOOKS AHEAD.

Special to the State.

London, Nov. 19.—What do you know about Aleister Crowley? Ever heard of him before? Neither had I until I found an article by him on “Art in America” in the current English Review, cheek by jowl with one by Israel Zangwill on “The Militant Suffragettes.” Since then I have looked Crowley up in “Who’s Who,” but without finding him so much as mentioned therein, and all that I know about him now, apart from the fact that he doesn’t consider that America has produced any art or that Americans have any real culture is (and this I read in The Times) that he was the ringleader of those who removed the coverings that the French authorities caused to be placed over Jacob Epstein’s now famous memorial to Oscar Wilde in Pere Lachaise cemetery the other night, without, apparently, getting any thanks for so doing from the sculptor thereof.

However, since he is welcomed to the pages of the periodical which publishes Masefield, Hewlett, and, incidentally, John Heiston, one supposes that Aleister Crowley must have some standing in the literary world, though it is worth noting that the editor of The English Review is careful to remark that Crowley’s opinions are not necessarily those of the periodical. The fact is that Crowley is the superior person in excelsis, yet this article on “Art in America” contains some thought and its author reveals a wider reading of American literature than most natives can claim. He says, too, that he has lived on the prairie, and he glories in the grandeur of American scenery.

“Of American culture,” he says, “I have one perfect sample. Traveling from Nagasaki to Hong Kong, two mature maidens from Massachusetts discovered that I sometimes wrote and ‘took me up.’ ‘And who,’ I asked, ‘is your favorite poet?’

“A warm flush overspread each sallow cheek as the two thin mouths exclaimed ‘Rossetti!’ ‘And which’ (I tactlessly pursued) ‘which of his poems do you like the best?’

“This remark closed the conversation. They had put the name Rossetti down in a notebook, and right there ‘culture’ ended.

“This I found characteristic of many American women. I have seen American girls in Italy laboriously writing down the names of more painters than I shall ever know, without any further comment than the dates at which they painted. To ask a single question on the broadest lines was to court silence. In fact, it became the most useful method in my daily life and conversation.”

Crowley concedes greatness to Walt Whitman, less to Poe and still less to Emerson, and these, to him, comprised American literature. “Most of Longfellow,” he declares, “is pop-gun loaded with pop-corn. Bryant is, on the whole, even more spectacled than Longfellow; and Whittier is little better than Moody and Sankey.”

Canada, one gathers, Crowley esteems even less than her great neighbor. “Toronto,” he says, “makes a Sunday in a Scotch village seem like a hasheesh dream!”

Even this writer, however, is hopeful of America, and his article is not wholly a “roast.” “The Himalayas,” he remarks, “are too big for any one to sing, and America is all Himalayas of one kind or another.”

“No doubt,” he concludes, “when immigration stops, when the negro problem, and the Japanese problem, and the labor problem and the political problem, and all the rest of the problems are solved, when a class arises which has time to reflect upon life instead of living it, American art will lead the world.”