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Gertrude Stein's What Are Master-Pieces And Why Are There So Few Of Them

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In the essay, “What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them” by Gertrude Stein, the concept discussed is why there are so few masterpieces and original ideas as a result of ideas becoming so interwoven that they are no longer inimitable and therefore not true masterpieces. A big part of why there are so few masterpieces is depicted with an example: “The painter can no longer say that what he does is as the world looks to him because he cannot look at the world any more, it has been photographed too much and he has to say that he does something else. In former times a painter said he painted what he saw of course he didn’t but anyway he could say it, and now he does not want to say it because seeing is not interesting” (Stein 133). …show more content…

From employing military virtues, “[From] coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dish-washing, clothes-washing, and window-washing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas” implies the central idea of the text of finding something rigorous and unifying, save from something as drastic as war, to promote mandatory collective national service for youth. This would lead to such military virtues, as the aforementioned, becoming societal trends without the presence of war and the manual labor of such tasks would be the programs needed to uphold such virtues. Enacting such programs will ensure that we keep progressing as a society and further innovating, as opposed to running. Save for militarism, the problem we face is finding a comparable method of promoting civil virtues. In essence, James is telling his audience that there are many ways of peacefully developing and maintaining these human virtues in society through other means of innovation besides

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