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CANADIAN   JEWISH   REVIEW
Ephraim Moses Lilien is one of those masters who by contributing not to galleries but to, books, magazines and bookplates, has brought art nearer to every-clay life. Restricting himself to black-and-white he has minimised the difference between his original touch and its mechanical reproduction, so that a Lilien postcard has more value than many a pretentious oil painting. Indeed it was through a postcard that I first became acquainted with his genius. It was the design dedicated to the Fifth Zionist Congress at Basic.
At the first glimpse it was impossible not to think of Aubrey Beardsley. The same black-and-white effects as in the English artist, the same instinct for the decorative, the same singing lines, the same contrast of masses, the same poetry of space. The same, but how differently applied! For what in Beardsley was frequently used to express decadence here served to promote renaissance. I felt as when I hear the epigrammatic turns of Oscar Wilde in the mouth of Chesterton, that militant Christian, who, with no less wit than the notorious immoralist, has harnessed paradox- and fantasy to the chariot of orthodoxy.
And when I came to know Lilien in the flesh, as I had known poor Beardsley, I was struck by the same contrast between the healthy, sturdy product of the Galician Ghetto, and the consumptive-looking Brightonian, doomed to die at Mentone at the age of twenty-six. It throws a curious light upon the ingenious hypotheses that seek to explain artists by their milieu, that of the two young men driven by their genius to express themselves with artificial elegance, the one was born in a great ugly British seaside resort, and the other in an atmosphere of salt and petroleum in the dismal industrial town-let of Drohobyez, amid the monotonous steppes to which the gaunt Carpathians slope.
Whether Beardsley had any influence upon the efflorescence of Lilien I do not know. The English designer was born in 1872, only two years before Lilien, and marvellously precocious though he was, his work could scarcely have had time to penetrate to Cracow in whose art academy Lilien made his first studies, though possibly, if only through imitators, it may have reached Munich or Berlin, to which the Galician youth subsequently migrated. Or perhaps both artists learnt from the Japanese. In any case, the self-inspiration of Lilien is the dominant fact of his development. A lad, who despite obscurity, poverty and even hunger, forces his way up from sign-painting to world-fame, is explicable only by himself. The factors of genius have never yet been fixed by any eugenic formula, though it may perhaps account a little for Lilien that his father was a turner, accustomed in his humbler function to shape and plane reality. Craftsmanship may sire Art, as talent�especially in music� frequently sires genius. But why not invariably? There were other turners even in the Ghetto. Why only one Lilien?
And why even one Lilien? Captain Peter Wright, a British Commissioner to Poland, could see in its Jewry only an uncouth and exotic survival, an ignorant and inartistic mass against which pogroms and boycotts were not unintelligible. Yet it is from villages unknown to Western Europe even by name, that emerge the Rubinsteins and the Liliens.
I have characterized the note of Lilien as "artificial elegance," but it is in no depreciatory sense As Goethe said, "we call Art Art, because it is not Nature." It is the business of the artist to express a personal vision of the universe, and in the interests of this vision�which, if it be not stimulating, 13 not Art�to alter, add, or eliminate with the free creativeness of Nature herself.   Nobody expects music to re-
duplicate the sounds of Nature�and Walter Pater said that all the arts should tend to music. I have already spoken of Lilien's "singing lines," and there is hardly one of his designs but gives the exhilaration of music. I have before me a volume of reproductions from many artists, but though it contains the work of more famous masters, none of their pictures, as therein reproduced, give as great an uplift as the least of Lilien's book-plates. It is because Lilien is a master of what Berenson called "space-composition," so that each line is lyrical, and each design symphonic.
But if, like music, he departs from Nature, he never leaves her utterly-behind.   Visual art cannot be as independent of the representative element as auditory.   Its essential existence is in Space, not in Time, and it cannot escape its category.   By the-Futurists-� who are perhaps already passes�we are confronted with an art, which seems almost  like  a  return  to  the Second Commandment,   with   its   prohibition against making a likeness to anything that is on the earth below or the heavens above or the waters under the earth. The argument put  forward  by these eccentrics is that their art is not representative but  dynamic, that it paints not the external world but the -inner world of their emotions.   These artists can hardly ever paint, but they can never reason.    They  forget  that  the  right artistic medium for the expression of emotion is the art-form free from objective representation, to wit,  Music, and that if they are unable to express themselves <"n it, they must remain as dumb   as   Nature   has   made   them. Painting is the idiom of the eye.   The reason why human faces cannot be represented by cubes or other monstrous adumbrations  of  reality  is  that   the faintest effort towards a face�even a baby's attempt at a circle with dots� recalls a real face, and the discordance between a real face and a face made out of cubes produces a horrible jar.   It is only when the visual design is limited to imaginary conformations that  the jarring reality is not recalled, and in such designs we merely get back to the arabesques by which Islam evaded the Second Commandment.   But arabesques too, cannot escape the obligation to be beautiful,   whereas  the   bulk   of   the Futurists, even when they refrain from reminding us of reality, create, whether by   wilfulness   or   impotence,  designs which depress and confound, instead of stimulating.   They tell us that we must apply ourselves to learn the language in which they express themselves.   It is a forbidding task when one is not sure that what they have to say in their argot is worth deciphering; and when the classical languages of art already contain so much to engross our attention.   Of many modern works it may be said, in short, that if they recall Nature they shock us by their unlike-ness to her, and if they do not recall her, they repel us by their ugliness.
In the work of Lilien on the other hand we have the arabesquien in all its flowing beauty, combined with the representative element in all the beauty.of efficient reproduction. As when Pachman strikes a black or white key, the piano sings, so does the paper sing when the pencil of Lilien passes over it. Being able to draw, he is not driven to new art-theories to cover over incompetence. He has not to babble and scribble�to draw suffices. "If Art could be talked," says a character in my art-novel, The Master, "it would not need to be painted." Conversely, if Art is painted, it does not need to be talked.
It is not that Lilien has less imagination than these loquacious free lances of the brush. In the realm of the fantastic and the grotesque he moves as assuredly as in the simpry poetic But he can be grotesque without being absurd, and fantastic without being ridiculous. And
All the appeals made to the British government in behalf of Dr. Oscar Levy by famous British artists and scholars have proved to be of no avail.  Dr. Levy was expelled from England after he had resided in the country for more than thirty years.   His daughter, a girl of twelve, was permitted to stay in,the country.   As soon as the final decision of the British government was published.in the press, a Paris telegram in which it was told that the French government would not object, to Dr. Levy's settling  in  France,  was also published.  One can thus easily imagine that if Dr. Levy had been guilty of pro-German propaganda during the war, the French government would be the last to permit him on French soil.   The insinuation of British officials that Dr. Levy was active in German propaganda during the war was forced to the ground. Besides, Dr. Levy was in Germany during the war and as a German citizen it would not be queer if he had been active in  German  propaganda.    Yet he was not, because he was not the friend of Kaiserism and militarism and all that goes with it.   Now the British officials argue that his expulsion was justified by the fact that he believes in Nietzsche's theories.   Dr. Oscar Levy is the translator and editor of Nietzsche's work in English but all the men of letters in the Anglo-Saxon countries have been obligated and grateful to him for this great service he has rendered to English literature.   Whether he is personally an adherent of Nietzsche or not, we do not knowr.   We have reason to believe that he is not a fanatic Nietzsche believer  but  that  he  rather takes a critical attitude to Nietzsche's  philosophy.   But suppose that he is an adherent   of   Nietzsche?    What   of   it? Since.when is the persecution of a harmless man of letters permitted ethically or politically because cf his views and theories?  Since when is the punishment of men of letters justified because of abstract   thoughts   which   are   mostly metaphysical and have no bearing on life?    We know of only one country which  used  to punish  men  for their thoughts.   That was Spain during the Inquisition.     Is  post-bellum   England
even when he has something profound to say, he can be as decorative as these modernists at their shallowest and most immoral. You may ransack the world's art in vain to find a lovelier design than his "Isaiah" or the Zionist postcard which introduced me to him. Perhaps in his illustrations to the Bible, this glamorous or fairy-tale quality is a, little out of place. Yet here, too, there is strength amid the beauty, as in his figures of Moses, or of Jacob struggling with the angel. Thus, whether we ask for image or emotion, for strength or delicacy, for thought or beauty, for grottsquerie or grace, Lilien has the wherewithal to satisfy us.
Like most Jewish artists he began by Hellenic assimilation, yet his characteristic grace, his clear-cut melody of line, scarcely exists in his early drawings in Jugend with their somewhat spotty technique, any more than in his illustrations to Von Wildenradt's novel, The Revenue Officer of Klausen, in which he aped the old German wood-cut. It was only when his art became saturated with Hebraism that it became creatively Hellenic. Fortunately the bulk of his output responds to his inmost /essence. It was in his illustrations to Jude ami to Morris Rosenfeld's Song of tfu Ghttto, that Lilien found himself. And of the influence of Zionism upon his development, his picture of "The Creation of the Post," bears eloquent witness. For the harp-bearing angel in attendance is no other than Dr. Herzl. the Assyrian - bearded founder' of the movement! '
In Lilien in fine, the Hebrew's quest for spirituality is fused with the Greek quest of beauty. It is a reconciliation which is the world's main need. That is why Lilien's place in contemporary art is as important as it is unique.
anxious to share the glories of Sp*i# during the Inquisition?  Since when atfe. British officials experts on philosophy and in a position to judge'which philo* sophy is dangerous and w,bich is notf? It may be interesting for them to. Idarh that Nietzsche's predecessor in thought. was an Englishman by the name *>f Carlyle and that Nietzsche was .mofc inspired by English life with its individualistic aspects than by Germari )\(4, ' Abstractedly and sociologically hb w�s much   more   English   than   Germain, But it would be too stupid to assume that   Dr.   Levy   was   expelled   from England because of his beliefs.   He was probably expelled on the denunciation of an anti-Semite and ordered to leave the country; the English officials would not admit that they were wrong and insisted on the carrying out of the order of expulsion.   All the excuses given by British officials for this brutal act are only after-thoughts and not the motives of the expulsion order.
BRANDEIS'  DAUGHTER GETS IMPORTANT APPOINTMENT
New York (J. C. B.)�Miss Susan Brandeis, daughter of Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, has been appointed special assistant to the United States District Attorney, with an assignment to investigate the conditions of the building trades in New York. Miss Brandeis graduate^ from the law course at Radcliffe College, studied subsequently in the University of Chicago, and has been practicing law in this city for several years.$
STRAUS, ELKUS, ROSALSKY, SAMUEL SCHULMAN JOIN SOKOLOW RECEPTION COMMITTEE
New York (J. C. B.)�Led by Samuel Untermyer, a Reception Committee has arranged for the first public appearance of Mr. Nahum Sokolow, head of the Zionist Delegation from Europe, and his colleagues at the .Hotel Astor on Sunday evening, November 13th. The visitors will be entertained at dinner by one thousand hosts, including Mr. Untermyer, Louis Marshall, Senior Abel, Isaac Allen, Sholom Ash, Dr. S. Bender-ly, Rabbi Meyer Berlin, Joseph Baron-dess, Reuben Brainin, David A. Brown, Hermann Conheim, Judge Henry J. Dannenbaum of Texas, William Edlin, Hon. Abram Elkus, Harry Fishel, Ab. Goldberg, Judge Gustave Hartman, Leo Kamaiky, Prof. Mordecai M. Kaplan, Dr. Nathan Krass, Hon. Adolf Kraus of Chicago, Sam C. Lamport, Rabbi B. L. Levinthal of Philadelphia, Dr. I. H. Levinthal, Judge Aaron J. Levy, Adolph Lewisohn, Sam A. Lewisohn, Louis Lip-sky, Jacob D. Lit of Philadelphia, Dr. J. L. Magnes, Joseph S. Marcus, Rabbi M. S. Margolies, Rabbi H. Masliansky, Benj. F. Miller, Emanuel Neumann, David Pinski, Louis Robison, B. G. Richards, Judge- Otto A. Rosalsky, Judge Bernard A Rosenblatt, Dr. Simon Rotnenberg, Reuben Sadowsky, Ezek-iel Sarasohn, Rev. Dr. Samuel Schulman, Peter J. Schweitzer, Bernard Semel, Representative Isaac Siegel, Franklin Simon, Mrs. Israel Unterberg, � Dr. Meyer Waxman, Morris Weinberg, Yehoash, and others.^
"ICA" DECISION RECEIVED WITH JOY IN BERLIN
Berlin(J. T. A.)�The decision of the Emigration Conference in Paris that the "ICA" work conjointly with the Emigration Committee recently formed in Prague, wa9 received with much satisfaction here. The general consensus of opinion here is that the emigration work will proceed, with more chspatch and more systematically. Dr. Held, the , representative of the American "Hias," and members of the Prague Executive, are in session now to consider the new situation created by this decision.
A Hebraic Artist Dr.
By Israel Zangwill
Copyrighted by J wish Correspondence Bureau, 1(21