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Correspondence from John Quinn to Aleister Crowley
November 22, 1915.
My dear Crowley:
I am glad to hear from you. I enjoyed your letter of the 31st. I think you are right about the exhibition. I never saw but one and that was the one in Buffalo. I avoided the "great" Chicago exhibition of 1893 and the St. Louis exhibition of 1900. They are a weariness of the flesh and a discouragement of the soul.
I agree with you about art largely, but I can't agree that "beauty is a side producer". An artist must have something to say and then must know how to say it. I can't stand Mathew Arnold's theory of poetry, but it isn't so irritating to me as the theory of Stopford Brooke and the Dowden school, who are always claiming that "to be a great poet one must be a great and good man". It is of course damn nonsense. The goodness or the greatness of the poet or artist hasn't a damn thing to do with his technique or emotion. I have known good men who either were no poets or rotten poets and there are many great poets who must have been rotten men from the Stopford Brooke and Edward Dowden point of view. Catallus, for example, and Villon and Verlaine. The thing is that a poet or an artist must know his trade, must be the master of the technique of his art, and then he must be profoundly moved, and then there may be fine art and if the theme is great it may be great art.
Whistler did many pleasant things but he wasn't a great artist. One feels constantly that he was a Western reflection of the Japanese.
I have never been in San Francisco. They used to be proud of their Bohemia. I am told that the big trees and the Yosemite are disappointing but that the Grand Canyon of the Colorado is really superb.
There is nothing new here. This damn stupid war has almost killed art and is hard on writers, sculptors, painters and other artists. At present Germany is on top. I fear she will remain on top. France is the one bright spot. A nation that was supposed to be hysterical and decadent has shown itself to be much less hysterical than the English and the Germans and man to man as efficient as the Germans and has earned its right to live for a thousand years.
We probably have entered upon a greater era of conquest than the Napoleonic era, and the things that we are witnessing may change the face of the world for a thousand years. The stupidity of the English, soldiers, diplomats, Cabinet and all can best be illustrated by the way Greece has fooled them. They say England has made three separate loans to the Greeks. Why, God damn it, the third assistant clerk in the foreign exchange department in any first class New York bank wouldn't be deceived by the Greek Minister and Chargé D'Affaires of by seventy-five Greeks or by the whole Greek Cabinet, for fifteen minutes. He simply wouldn't trust them. The third assistant clerk in any foreign exchange department has some horse-sense. He perhaps didn't go to Oxford or Cambridge or to Sandhurst and he would probably be a German or a Jew or a Frenchman.
I hope this will find you less depressed than when you wrote your letter. You must have liked writing it for I enjoyed reading it.
I don't imagine your present journey will take you back into Mexico. But wherever it takes you I hope you will have a satisfactory time.
Sincerely yours,
John Quinn
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