Chapter X: Part 10

What will be fairly obvious is that if we follow a little way any particular one of these critics, we shall find him attempting to urge our poetry in a particular direction, a direction which he prefers to any other direction, and analysing its origins in such a way, if he analyses at all, as to make plausible its (postulated) growth in that direction. This is the natural, even perhaps the best thing, for a participant critic to do--it contributes, certainly, an interest and an energy. But if in some freak of disinterestedness, we wish if for only a moment to see American poetry with no concern save that of inordinate and intelligent curiosity, then it is to all of these views that we must turn, rather than to any one, and to the obverse of each, as well as to the face. For if one thing is apparent to-day in a study of American letters, it is that we must heroically resist any temptation to simplify, to look in only one direction for origins or in only one direction for growth. Despite our national motto, American civilization is not so much one in many as many in one. We have not, as England has and as France has, a single literary heart; our literary capitals and countries are many, each with its own vigorous people, its own self-interest, its own virtues and provincialisms. We may attribute this to the mere matter of our size, and the consequent geographical sequestration of this or that group--that is no doubt a factor, but of equal importance is the fact that in a new country, of rapid and chaotic material growth, we must inevitably have, according to the locality, marked variations in the rapidity of growth of the vague thing we call civilization. Chicago is younger than Boston, older than San Francisco. And what applies to the large unit applies also to the small--if the country in general has not yet reached anything remotely like a cultural homogeneity (as far, that is, as we ever in viewing a great nation expect such a thing) neither has any section of it, nor any city of it. It is no longer possible, if indeed it ever was, to regard a section like New England, for example, as a definite environmental factor, say “y,” and to conclude, as some critics are so fond of doing, that any poet who matures there will inevitably be representable as “yp.” This is among the commonest and falsest of false simplifications. Our critics, frantically determined to find an American poetry that is autochthonous, will see rocky pastures, mountains and birches in the poetry of a New Englander, or skyscrapers in the poetry of a New Yorker, or stockyards in the poetry of a Chicagoan, as easily as a conjurer takes a rabbit from a hat.

What refuge we have from a critical basis so naïve is in assuming from the outset, toward contemporary American poetry, an attitude guardedly pluralistic--we begin by observing merely that American poetry is certainly, at the moment, if quantitative production and public interest are any measure, extraordinarily healthy and vigorous. We are accustomed to hearing it called a renaissance. The term is admissible if we carefully exclude, in using it, any implication of a revival of classicism. What we mean by it is simply that the moment is one of quite remarkable energy, productiveness, range, colour, and anarchy. What we do not mean by it is that we can trace with accuracy where this outburst comes from. The origins of the thing are obscure. It was audible in 1914--Mr. Edwin Arlington Robinson and Mr. Ezra Pound were audible before that; it burst into full chorus in 1915; and ever since there has been, with an occasional dying fall, a lusty corybantic cacophony. Just where this amazing procession started nobody clearly knows. Mr. Untermeyer would have us believe that Walt Whitman was, as it were, the organizer of it, Miss Monroe tries to persuade us that it was _Poetry: a Magazine of Verse_, But the facts, I think, wave aside either postulate. If one thing is remarkable it is that in this spate of poetry the influence of Walt Whitman--an influence, one would suppose, as toxic for the young as Swinburne--is so inconsiderable: if another is even more remarkable, it is that in all this chorus one so seldom hears a voice of which any previous American voice was the clear prototype. We have had, of course, our voices--of the sort, I mean, rich enough in character to make imitation an easy and tempting thing. Longfellow, Lowell, Bryant, Sill, Lanier are not in this regard considerable,--but what of Poe, whose influence we have seen in French poetry on Baudelaire, and in contemporary English poetry on Mr. Walter de la Mare? No trace of him is discoverable, unless perhaps we find the ghostliest of his shadows now and then across the work of Mr. John Gould Fletcher, or Mr. Maxwell Bodenheim, or Mr. Wallace Stevens, a shadow cast, in all these cases, amid much else, from a technical and colouristic standpoint, which would have filled Poe with alarm. And there is another American poet, perhaps as great as Poe, perhaps greater (as he in turn is perhaps greater than Whitman--as poet, though not as personality)--Emily Dickinson. Of that quietist and mystic, who walked with tranquillity midway between Blake and Emerson, making of her wilful imperfections a kind of perfectionism, why do we hear so little? Do we catch now and again the fleetingest glimpse of her in the early work of Mr. Robert Frost? If so, it is certainly nowhere else. Yet it would be hard to prove that she has no right to a place with Poe and Whitman, or indeed among the best poets in the language.

But nowhere in America can we find, for contemporary poetry, any clear precursive signal. Little as it may comfort our fuglemen of the autochthonous, we must, I think, look to Europe for its origins. This is not, as some imagine, a disgrace--it would be a melancholy thing, of course, if we merely imitated the European, without alteration. But Browning would hardly recognize himself, even if he cared to, in the “Domesday Book” of Mr. Edgar Lee Masters, Mallarmé and Rimbaud would find Mr. Fletcher a mirror with an odd trick of distortion, Laforgue would have to look twice at Mr. T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock” (for all its Hamletism), M. Paul Fort would scarcely feel at home in Miss Amy Lowell’s “Can Grande’s Castle,” Mr. Thomas Hardy and the ghost of Tennyson would not quarrel much for the possession of Mr. Robinson’s work, nor Mr. Chesterton and the author of “The Ingoldsby Legends” for the lively sonorities of Mr. Vachel Lindsay. In such cases we have not so much “influence” as fertilization. It is something of Mr. Masters that “The Ring and the Book” reveals to Mr. Masters: something of Miss Lowell to which M. Paul Fort offers her the key. Was it a calamity for Baudelaire that he lived only by a transfusion of blood from an American? Is Becquer the less Becquer or Spanish for having fed upon the “Buch der Lieder”?... Culture is bartered, nowadays, at open frontiers, and if to-day a new theme, chord, or colour-scheme is French, German, or American, to-morrow it is international.

If we differ in this respect from any other country it is only that we are freer to exploit, really exhaust, the new, because we hold, less than any other, to any classical traditions: for traditions our poets seldom look back further than the 19th century. We have the courage, often indistinguishable from folly, of our lack of convictions. Thus it comes about that as America is the melting-pot for races, so she is in a fair way to become a melting-pot for cultures: we have the energy, the curiosity, the intelligence, above all the lack of affiliations with the past, which admirably adapt us to a task--so precisely demanding complete self-surrender--of æsthetic experiment. Ignorance has some compensations--I mean, of course, a partial ignorance. If Mr. Lindsay had been brought up exclusively on Aristotle, Plato, Æschylus, and Euripides, and had been taken out of the shadow of the church by Voltaire and Darwin, perhaps he would not have been so “free” to experiment with the “higher vaudeville.” It will be observed that this is an odd kind of “freedom,” for it amounts in some ways to little more than the “freedom” of the prison. For if too severe a training in the classics unfits one somewhat for bold experiment, too little of it is as likely, on the other hand, to leave one with an æsthetic perceptiveness, a sensibility, in short, relatively rudimentary.

This, then, is something of the cultural _mise en scène_ for our contemporary poetry. We have repeated waves of European suggestion breaking Westward over our continent, foaming rather more in Chicago than in New York; and we have our lusty young company of swimmers, confident that they are strong enough to ride these waves farther than any one in Europe rode them and with a more native grace. What is most conspicuously American in most of these swimmers is the fact that they rely not so much on skill and long training as on sheer energy, vitality, and confidence. They rely, indeed, in most cases, on a kind of exuberance or superabundance. Do we not feel this in the work of Mr. Edgar Lee Masters--does he not try, in these many full books of his, where the good is so inextricably enmeshed with the bad, simply to beat us down as under a cataract? “Domesday Book” is, rather, an avalanche. He never knows what to exclude, where to stop. Miss Lowell, Mr. Fletcher, Mr. Carl Sandburg, and Mr. Lindsay are not far behind him, either--they are all copious. I do not mean to imply that this is a bad thing, at the moment--at the moment I am not sure that this sheer exuberance is not, for us, the very _best_ thing. Energy is the first requisite of a “renaissance,” and supplies its material, or, in another light, its richness of colour. Not the beginning, but the end, of a renaissance is in refinement; and I think we are certainly within bounds in postulating that the last five years have given us at the least a superb beginning, and enough more than that, perhaps, to make one wonder whether we have not already cast Poe and Whitman, Sidney Lanier, and Emily Dickinson, our strange little quartette, into a shadow.

All that our wonder can hope for is at best a very speculative answer. If parallels were not so dangerous, we might look with encouragement at that spangled rhetorical torrent which we call Elizabethan literature. Ben Jonson did not consider Shakespeare much of an artist, nor did Milton, and classicists ever since have followed them in that opinion. If one can be the greatest of poets and yet not much of an artist, we may here keep clear of the quarrel: what we get at is the fact that Shakespeare and the other Elizabethans participated in a literary movement which, like ours, began in energy, violence, and extravagance, was at its best excessively rhetorical and given to unpruned copiousness, and perished as it refined. Will a future generation see us in a somewhat similar light--will it like us for our vitality, for the reckless adventurousness of our literature, our extravagances, and forgive us, if it does not precisely enjoy as something with a foreign flavour, our artistic innocence? That is conceivable, certainly. Yet the view _is_ speculative and we dare not take it too seriously. For if we have kept hopefully and intelligently abreast of the contemporary we have kept, none the less, our own very sufficient aloofness, our own tactilism and awareness, in the light of which we are bound to have our own scepticisms and self-distrust. I do not mean that we would perhaps prefer something more classical or severe than “Spoon River Anthology” or “The Congo” or the colour symphonies of Mr. Fletcher, merely on the ground that it is the intrinsically classical and severe which we most desire. What we seem to see in contemporary American poetry is a transition from the more to the less exuberant, from the less to the more severe; and what we most _desire_ to see is the attainment of _that point_, in this transition, which will give us our parallel to the Shakespearean, if we may hope for anything even approximately so high; a point of equipoise.

This hope gives us a convenient vantage from which to survey the situation, if we also keep in mind our perception of American cultural heterogeneity and the rashness of any attempt to generalize about it. The most exact but least diverting method would be the merely enumerative, the mere roll-call which would put before us Mr. Edwin Arlington Robinson and Mr. Ezra Pound as the two of our poets whose public literary activities extend farthest back, and after them the group who made themselves known in the interval between 1914 and 1920: Mr. Robert Frost, Mr. Fletcher, Mr. Masters, Mr. Sandburg, Miss Lowell, Mr. Lindsay, Mr. Alfred Kreymborg, Mr. Maxwell Bodenheim, Mr. Wallace Stevens, “H. D.,” Mr. T. S. Eliot, and Miss Sara Teasdale. These poets, with few exceptions, have little enough in common--nothing, perhaps, save the fact that they were all a good deal actuated at the outset by a disgust with the dead level of sentimentality and prettiness and moralism to which American poetry had fallen between 1890 and 1910. From that point they diverge like so many radii. One cannot say, as Miss Lowell has tried to persuade us, that they have all followed one radius, and that the differences between them are occasioned by the fact that some have gone farther than others. We may, for convenience, classify them, if we do not attach too much importance to the bounds of our classes. We may say that Mr. Robinson, Mr. Frost, and Mr. Masters bring back to our poetry a strong sense of reality; that Mr. Fletcher, Mr. Pound, Miss Lowell, “H. D.,” and Mr. Bodenheim bring to it a sharpened consciousness of colour; that Mr. Eliot, Mr. Kreymborg, and Mr. Stevens bring to it a refinement of psychological subtlety; Mr. Sandburg, a grim sense of social responsibility; Mr. Lindsay, a rhythmic abandon mixed with evangelism; Miss Teasdale, a grace. The range here indicated is extraordinary. The existence side by side in one generation and in one country of such poets as Mr. Masters and Mr. Fletcher, or Mr. Eliot and Miss Lowell, is anomalous. Clearly we are past that time when a nation will have at a given moment a single direct literary current. There is as yet no sign that to any one of these groups will fall anything like undivided sway. Mr. Frost’s “North of Boston” and Mr. Fletcher’s “Irradiations” came out in the same year; “Spoon River Anthology” and the first “Imagist Anthology”; Mr. Robinson’s “Lancelot” and Mr. Bodenheim’s “Advice.” And what gulfs even between members of any one of our arbitrary “classes”! Mr. Frost’s actualism is seldom far from the dramatic or lyric, that of Mr. Masters seldom far from the physiological. Mr. Masters is bitter-minded, tediously explanatory, and his passionate enquiries fall upon life like so many heavy blows; his delvings appear morbid as well as searching. Mr. Frost is gentle, whether in irony, humour, or sense of pain: if it is the pathos of decay which most moves him, he sees it, none the less, at dewfall and moonrise, in a dark tree, a birdsong. The inflections of the human voice, as he hears them, are as tender as in the hearing of Mr. Masters they are harsh. And can Mr. Robinson be thought a commensal of either? His again is a prolonged enquiry into the why of human behaviour, but how bared of colour, how muffled with reserves and dimmed with reticence! Here, indeed, is a step toward romanticism. For Mr. Robinson, though a realist in the sense that his preoccupation is with motive, turns down the light in the presence of his protagonist that in the gloom he may take on the air of something larger and more mysterious than the garishly actual. Gleams convey the dimensions--hints suggest a depth. We are not always too precisely aware of what is going on in this twilight of uncertainties, but Mr. Robinson seems to whisper that the implications are tremendous. Not least, moreover, of these implications are the moral--the mirror that Mr. Robinson holds up to nature gives us back the true, no doubt, but increasingly in his later work (as in “Merlin” and “Lancelot,” particularly the latter) with a slight trick of refraction that makes of the true the exemplary.

We cross a chasm, from these sombre psycho-realists, to the colourists. To these, one finds, what is human in behaviour or motive is of importance only in so far as it affords colour or offers possibilities of pattern. Mr. Fletcher is the most brilliant of this group, and the most “uncontrolled”: his colourism, at its best, is a pure, an astonishingly absolute thing. The “human” element he wisely leaves alone--it baffles and escapes him. One is aware that this kaleidoscopic whirl of colour is “wrung out” of Mr. Fletcher, that it conveys what is for him an intense personal drama, but this does not make his work “human.” The note of “personal drama” is more complete in the poetry of “H. D.,” but this too is, in the last analysis, a nearly pure colourism, as static and fragmentary, however, as Mr. Fletcher’s is dynamic. Mr. Bodenheim is more detached, cooler, has a more conscious eye for correspondences between colour and mood: perhaps we should call him a symbolist. Even here, however, the “human,” the whim of tenderness, the psychological gleam, are swerved so that they may fall into a fantastic design. Miss Lowell, finally, more conscious, deliberate and energetic than any of these, brilliantly versatile, utterly detached, while she “sees” more of the objective world (and has farther-ranging interests), sees it more completely than any of them simply as raw colour or incipient pattern. If the literary pulse is here often feverishly high, the empathic and sympathetic temperature is as often absolute zero.

Mr. Pound shares with Miss Lowell this immersion in the “literary”--he is intensely aware of the literary past, rifles it for odds and ends of colour, atmosphere, and attitude, is perpetually adding bright new bits, from such sources, to his Joseph’s coat: but if a traditionalist in this, a curio-hunter, he is an experimentalist in prosody; he has come far from the sentimental literary affectedness of his early work and at his best has written lyrics of a singular beauty and transparent clarity. The psychological factor has from time to time intrigued him, moreover, and we see him as a kind of link between the colourists and such poets as Mr. T. S. Eliot, Mr. Alfred Kreymborg, and Mr. Wallace Stevens. These poets are alike in achieving, by a kind of alchemy, the lyric in terms of the analytic: introspection is made to shine, to the subtly seen is given a delicate air of false simplicity. Mr. Stevens is closest to the colourists. His drift has been away from the analytic and towards the mere capture of a “tone.” Mr. Kreymborg is a melodist and a mathematician. He takes a pleasure in making of his poems and plays charming diagrams of the emotions. Mr. Eliot has more of an eye for the sharp dramatic gesture, more of an ear for the trenchant dramatic phrase--he looks now at Laforgue, now at John Webster. His technical skill is remarkable, his perception of effect is precise, his range narrow, perhaps increasingly narrow.

Even so rapid and superficial a survey cannot but impress us with the essential anarchy of this poetic community. Lawlessness has seemed at times to be the prevailing note; no poetic principle has remained unchallenged, and we have only to look in the less prosperous suburbs and corners of this city to see to what lengths the bolder rebels, whether of the “Others” group or elsewhere, have gone. Ugliness and shapelessness have had their adherents among those whom æsthetic fatigue had rendered momentarily insensitive to the well-shaped; the fragmentary has had its adherents among those whom cynicism had rendered incapable of any service, too prolonged, to one idea. But the fetichists of the ugly and the fragmentary have exerted, none the less, a wholesome and fructifying influence. Whatever we feel about the ephemerality of the specifically ugly or fragmentary, we cannot escape a feeling that these, almost as importantly as the new realism or the new colourism, have enlarged what we might term the general “poetic consciousness” of the time. If there was a moment when the vogue of the disordered seemed to threaten, or predict, a widespread and rapid poetic decadence, that moment is safely past. The tendency is now in the other direction, and not the least interesting sign is the fact that many of the former apostles of the disordered are to-day experimenting with the things they yesterday despised--rhyme, metre, and the architecture of theme.

We have our affections, in all this, for the fragmentary and ugly as for the abrupt small hideousness--oddly akin to virility--of gargoyles. We have our affections, too, for the rawest of our very raw realisms--for the maddest of our colourisms, the most idiosyncratic subtleties of our first introspectionists. Do we hesitate a little to ask something more of any of the poets whom we thus designate? What we fear is that in attempting to give us our something more, they will give us something less. What we want more of, what we see our contemporary poets as for the most part sadly deficient in, is “art.” What we are afraid they will lose, if we urge them in this direction, is their young sharp brilliance. Urge them, however, we must. What our poets need most to learn is that poetry is not merely a matter of outpouring, of confession. It must be serious: it must be, if simple in appearance, none the less highly wrought: it must be packed. It must be beautifully elaborate rather than elaborately beautiful. It must be detached from dogma--we must keep it away from the all too prevalent lecture platform.

What we should like to see, in short, is a fusion, of the extraordinary range of poetic virtues with which our contemporary poets confront us, into one poetic consciousness. Do we cavil too much in assuming that no one of our poets offers us quite enough? Should we rather take comfort in the hope that many of their individual “personalities” are vivid enough to offset their onesidedness, and in that way to have a considerable guarantee of survival? We have mentioned that possibility before, and certainly it cannot be flatly dismissed. But I think it cannot be contested that many of these poets already feel, themselves, a sharper responsibility, a need for a greater comprehensiveness, for a finer and richer tactile equipment, a steadier view of what it is that constitutes beauty of form. They are immeasurably distant from any dry, cold perfectionism, however; and if we cheer them in taking the path that leads thither, it is in the hope of seeing them reach the halfway house rather than the summit. For to go all the way is to arrive exhausted; to go half way is to arrive with vigour.... That, however, is to interpose our own view and to lose our detachment. We return to a reiteration of our conclusion that American poetry is at the moment extraordinarily healthy. Its virtues are the virtues of all good poetry, and they are sufficient to persuade us that the future of English poetry lies as much in America as in England. Its faults are the faults of a culture that is immature. But again, we reiterate that we have here many cultures, and if some are immature, some are not. Let those who are too prone to diagnose us culturally from “Spoon River Anthology” or “Smoke and Steel” keep in mind also Mr. Robinson’s “Merlin” and Mr. Frost’s “North of Boston”; Mr. Fletcher’s “Goblins and Pagodas” and Miss Lowell’s “Can Grande’s Castle.”

CONRAD AIKEN

ART

The problem of American Art is unlike that of any other country of the present or the past. We have not here the racial and historical foundation on which, until now, every art has been built and so our striving (it is far too soon to speak of success or failure) must be judged from another standpoint than the one to be taken in viewing an art that originates with its people or is directly transmitted from an older race. Egypt and ancient Mexico furnish examples of the first case, Italy and France of the second. When the latter countries were colonized by the Greeks, Phœnicians and others, they received a culture which could take on fresh vigour when grasped by a new race.

We did not start as a new race, but as Europeans possessing the same intellectual heritage as the men who stayed in the parent countries. Our problem was not one of receiving the ancient tradition from an invading or colonizing people who brought with them an art already formed. Ourselves the invaders and colonizers, our problem was to keep alive the ideas that we had had in Europe, or to take over those of our new home, or to evolve an art of our own.

To begin with the second possibility, the question of our relation to the ideas of the Indians may obviously be disposed of very briefly. The tribes encountered by the early settlers were in a state of savagery, and this fact, together with the constant warfare between the two races, is a sufficient explanation why we find no influence from the red men. Even where the Europeans encountered culture of a very high order, as in Mexico and Peru, the remoteness of the native ideas from those of the invading race prevented for centuries a just appreciation of the earliest and unquestionably the greatest art produced in the Western Hemisphere. It is only in quite recent years that we have realized its merit, and it is unlikely that even our present-day interest in the exotic arts will bring about any important influence from the Indians, although in regions such as our Southwest and the parts of Mexico where “Americanizing” has not yet killed their art-instinct, they are still producing beautiful work.

We have, of course, retained European ideals, but they have been conditioned by circumstances and we have not kept pace with Europe or even followed the course of the great art-movements until they were almost or quite superseded abroad. Our distance from the centres of ancient and modern culture on one hand, and the needs of building up the new continent on the other, combined to make our people lose interest in art, which, indeed, had never found a propitious soil among our British forebears. The case of literature is different. The love of it is an abiding one with the Anglo-Saxon race, and as Shakespeare and the Bible could be read in the frontier cabin almost as well as in London or Dublin, there was not the loss of knowledge of literature, the break in the production of it that we find in the case of the plastic arts.

It is easy to exaggerate on this score, however, forgetting that the art-instinct accumulated in a race for centuries is not to be lost by a period of neglect. When he goes to the museum, the American recognizes the same masters as does the European, but the smaller opportunity here to know the classic past has the double effect of keeping art-lovers in America in a far more reduced minority and at the same time of weakening the authority of tradition.

Not to speak of 17th or 18th century conditions, nor even of those of the 19th century, one need only consider the America of to-day to realize how little opportunity our people has to know art. In all but a few cities, Americans can learn only from reproductions and books, though even these are an immeasurably safer guide than the bad original works which are usually the first to arrive. When one thinks of the European countryside and the numberless small towns of all the old countries where there is no museum, one may be tempted to ask whether art conditions are so very different there. But they are different. There will be an old church, or some houses of a good period, or some objects in the houses, or--on the walls of the inn--some old prints handing on the tradition of the great religious pictures (such things were made quite commonly until recent times and have not entirely ceased to be produced); a tradition of construction and of colour makes the modern houses fit in quite acceptably with those of the past. The centuries have built up a sense of fitness and beauty in the making and wearing of costume; there will be some form of folk-singing or other collective action of an artistic character, and thus the exceptional individual, born with a strong instinct toward art, has surroundings and a foundation that are lacking here. A striking proof of the difference between the two continents is the effect of the war on art-interest: whereas in America public attention has been turned away from art to a most marked degree, Europe is producing and buying art with a fervour that can only be explained by the desire to get back to essentials after the years in which people were deprived of them.

Another phenomenon to be noted at this point is the dominance of women in American art-matters. It is unknown in any other country. The vast majority of American men are engrossed in the drive of work, their leisure goes to sport and to the forms of entertainment that call for the smallest amount of mental effort. The women, with their quicker sensibility and their recognition of art as one of the things that mark the higher orders of life, take over the furnishing of the home and through this and the study that their greater leisure permits them, exert a strong influence on the purchase of art-works for private collections and even museums. The production of the American painter and sculptor is also much affected as a consequence, and in the direction of conventionality. I do not claim that the level of art in America would be greatly improved at present if it were the men instead of the women who took the lead; perhaps, in view of the state of appreciation in our people, it would be lowered; but I maintain that the fact that art is so much in the hands of women and the suspicion among men that it carries with it some implication of effeminacy are among the indications of American immaturity in art-appreciation. We cannot expect an art really representative of America until there is a foundation of regard for his work that the artist can build on. In the old civilizations the artist was meeting an active demand on the part of his people; in America, he has to seek desperately for a living. Albrecht Dürer summed up the difference between the two states of civilization when he wrote from Venice to a friend in the young Germany of his day: “Oh, how I shall freeze for this sun when I get home; here I am a gentleman, at home a parasite.”

It will seem to many that even such famous words should not be repeated in a country where art is so often mentioned in the papers, where museums are springing up in large numbers, where unheard-of prices are paid for the work of famous men, and where even those who take no interest in art will accord it a sort of halo. But the very fact that it is relegated to the class of Sunday things instead of entering into everyday life shows that our colonial period--in the cultural sense of the word--is not yet passed. This should not be looked on as discouraging; it is natural that the formation of character and ideas should require time and I shall endeavour to show that the development is really a rapid and healthy one. The mistake Americans are most prone to, that of imagining the country to have reached a mature character and a valid expression, shows their eagerness to advance, and explains their readiness to tear down or to build up.

In the presence of such a spirit, one must see the mistakes of conservatism or of ignorance in due perspective. However trying to those who suffer from them at the time, they cannot fatally warp the growth that is going on. For years we retained a tariff that obstructed the coming into the country of works of art. That is a thing of the past, and as one of the reasons used to defend it was that it protected American artists against the foreigner, so, with the abolition of the tariff, there has been more of a tendency to judge works of art for their own qualities, without question of their nationality and without the puerile idea of nurturing the American product by keeping out work from abroad. How far this mistake had gone may be judged from the fact that in a certain city of our Far West a group of painters made a protest against the attention given by a newspaper to an exhibition sent out from New York, raising no question of the quality of the work, but merely demanding that local men be spoken of when art was discussed in the paper--which promptly acquiesced, and removed the critic from his position. The case may seem an extreme one, yet it illustrates the attitude of many of our collectors and even our museum authorities who, in the name of Americanism, are “helping to fame many, the sight of whose painting is a miseducation,” to use a phrase that Mr. Berenson has applied to another matter.

There is no question to-day but that America must evolve along the lines of contemporary thought throughout the civilized world. There will be a local tang to our art. Certain enthusiasms and characteristics, as we develop them, may give emphasis to special phases of our production, but there is no longer the possibility of an isolated, autochthonic growth, such as seemed to be forecast up to about the time of the Revolution. The 18th century in America with its beautiful architecture, its fine craftsmen, and its painting, is only less far from the America of to-day than is the art of the Indians. We still put up buildings and make furniture in what is called the Colonial style, but so do we follow the even more remote Mission style of architecture in our Western States, and attempt to use Indian designs in decoration. The usual fate of attempted continuings of a bygone style overtakes all these efforts. Our materials are different, our needs are different, our time is different. A glance at two houses, as one speeds by in an automobile, tells us which is the real Colonial architecture, which the imitation. At the Jumel Mansion in New York it is easy to see which are the old parts, which the restorations, although enough time has passed since the latter were made to weather them to the tone of the original places.

In painting, the change that occurred after we became a republic is even more unmistakable. The English School underwent considerable modification when its representatives here began to work for themselves. Where Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Lawrence were consulting the old masters with such studious solicitude, Sir Joshua especially pursuing his enquiry into the processes of Titian, men like Copley and Blackburn were thrown back on such technical resources as they could find here and had to depend for progress on tightening their hold on character. Copley has the true note of the primitive in the intensity with which he studies his people, and must be reckoned with portraitists of almost the highest order.

What a change in the next generation! The more independent we are politically the more we come out of the isolation that gave us quiet and freedom to build up the admirable style of pre-Revolutionary days. And then there was so much to be done in getting our new institutions to work and our new land under cultivation, there was so much money to be made and so much to import from Europe. It is significant that the best painter of the period is John Vanderlyn, who had been sent to Paris to study under Ingres. Fine artist that Vanderlyn was, and informed by a greater tradition than Copley knew, he never reached the impressiveness of the latter.

I shall not attempt to describe at any length the various steps by which we rose from the artistic poverty which was ours in the earlier decades of the 19th century. My purpose is not to write even a short history of American art, but to enquire into its character and accomplishment. The test of these is evidently not what each period or school meant to the American artists before or after it, but how it compares with the rest of the world’s art at its time. The thought occurs to one forcibly on hearing of the wildly exaggerated esteem--whether measured by words or by money--in which the more celebrated of American artists are held; one asks oneself how the given work would be considered in Europe by competent men. Few indeed are the reputations that will stand the test; and we do not need to go abroad to apply it, for the galleries of our large cities supply ample opportunity for the comparison.

Beginning with the landscape artists who are the earliest of the modern Americans to be looked on as our possible contribution to art, one’s most impersonal observation is that in point of time, they, like their successors in this country, follow the Europeans of the school to which they belong by something like a generation. Now, art-ideas moved very rapidly in the 19th century, and--however mechanical an indication it may appear at first sight--it is almost a sure condemnation of a European painter to find him in one period trying to work with the formula of the generation before him. In America this test does not apply so well, for we must allow for the effect of distance and compare the American with his immediate contemporaries abroad only in proportion to the advance of time--which is to say in proportion to the convenience of travel to Europe and the possibility of seeing contemporary work here.

Thus when we consider that Inness, Wyant, and Martin were born about a generation after the Barbizon men and very nearly at the time of the French Impressionists, we shall not say that it was to the latter school that the Americans should have belonged. Whereas the European followers of Corot and Rousseau were merely _retardataires_ who had not the intellectual power to seize on the ideas of their own day, the Americans could feel a little of the joy of discoverers through having themselves worked out some of the ideas of naturalism in their evolution from the earlier landscape painting in this country. And so if they add nothing to what the Frenchmen had done already--with an incomparably greater tradition to uphold them--our trio of nature-lovers expressed genuine sentiment, and Homer Martin pushed on to a quality of painting that often places him within hailing distance of the classic line which, in France, kept out of the swamps of sentimentality that engulfed the followers of Wyant and Inness here.

The cases of Winslow Homer and Albert P. Ryder have an interest aside from the actual works of the two painters. They are doubtless the strongest Americans of their time--and the ones who owe the least to Europe. It must be men of such a breed who will make real American art when we are ready to produce it. In any case their work must rank among our permanently valuable achievements: Homer’s for the renewal of the sturdy self-reliance that we noted in Copley, Ryder’s for the really noble design he so often obtained and for the grand and moving fidelity to a vision.

If their independence is so valuable a factor in both men’s work, there is also to be noted the heavy price that each paid for having been reared in a provincial school. With a boldness of character that recalls Courbet, Winslow Homer fails utterly to hold a place in art analogous to that of the French realist, because all the power and ability that went into his work were unequal to compensating for his lack of the knowledge of form, of structure, of optical effect that Ingres and Delacroix, among others, furnished ready to the hand of Courbet. Thus Homer’s painting goes on throughout his lifetime quite innocent of any real concern with the central problems of European picture-making and owes most of its strength to the second-rate quality of illustration. One hesitates to say that Ryder would have gone farther had he been born in France, yet the fact of his labouring for ten or fifteen years on many a small canvas, the very limited number of his works which has resulted from the difficulty he had in saying the thing that was in him, are marks of a bad training. His range is not a wide one, but the deep beauty he infused into his pictures is one of our chief reasons for confidence in the art-instinct that lies dormant in our people.

None of the men in the next group we must consider, the artists who enter fully into European painting, have the foundation of talent that Ryder had. Whistler is, of course, the painter to whom most Americans pin their faith in searching among their compatriots for an essential figure in 19th-century art. But take the first opportunity to see him with the great Frenchmen of his time: beside Degas his drawing is of a sickly weakness but slightly relieved by his sense of rhythm in line and form; beside Manet his colour and painting seem even more etiolated, and to save one’s feeling for him from utter demolition one hastens to the usual American refuge of the sentiment and--in the etchings--to the Yankee excellence of the craftsmanship. The nocturnes really do have a felicity in their rendering of the poetry of the night that would make us regret their loss, and when the unhappy Whistlerian school has been forgotten (an artist must take _some_ responsibility for his followers) we shall have more satisfaction in the butterfly that Whistler knew himself to be, since he adopted it as his signature. It is merit of no such slightness that we love in Ryder, and yet when we reach Chase and Sargent we find even less of basic talent, for which their immersion in the current of European painting could have furnished a finely tempered instrument of expression. Both men show the natural bent for painting that is often a valuable asset and often--as in their case--a source of danger. They do not enrich our annals by any great works, but they do the country an immense service when they cause its students and collectors to take one of the final steps in the direction of the live tradition of Europe. They never appreciated what was greatest among their contemporaries, and failing to have this grasp of the creative impulse and of the new principles that were at work in Paris, they offered clever manipulations of the material as a substitute. Feeling the insufficience of this, Sargent has tried the grave style of the early Italians in his decorations at the Public Library in Boston. But his Biblical personages get him no nearer to the essentials of art than the society people of whom he has done so many likenesses. In Boston, it is Chavannes who shows which is the great tradition of the period and how it accords with the classic past. Sargent is perhaps most American in his unreadiness to perceive the immense things that Europe, modern and ancient, had to offer him.

Even so, with Chase and Sargent we find ourselves far nearer the period when American artists shall partake in art-ideas during their moment of full fertility. Our Impressionists are only a decade or two behind the Frenchman, and while one must not slip into a too easy trick of rating talent by the time of its appearance, one cannot fail to be struck by the fact that John H. Twachtman and J. Alden Weir approached the quality of their French preceptors with far greater closeness than that with which the Inness-Wyant group followed the Barbizon men. Much as there is of charm and sound pictorial knowledge in Twachtman’s work and Weir’s, one feels that they are not yet deep enough in the great tradition to go on to an art of their own creation, and we have to content ourselves with giving them a place among the Impressionists of secondary rank.

An interesting case among the Americans who made the serious study of European art that began soon after the middle of the 19th century, is that of John La Farge. We know the history of his seeking, his copying, his associations, speculations, and travels. All his life he is the man from the new country asking the dead and the living representatives of the classic tradition for help. How little we see of the man himself in the mosaic of charming things that make up his art. Winslow Homer exists as a personality, ill-educated and crude, but affirmative and arresting. La Farge disappears in the smoke of the incense that he burns before the various shrines to which his eclecticism led him.

If not to be admired as a great artist, he was a man of great gifts and a genuine appreciator of the masters. Therefore, he is not to be confused for a moment with the ignoble _pasticheurs_ who achieve office and honours in the anæmic institutions with which we imitate the academies and salons of Europe. These are among the youthful errors I mentioned on an earlier page--depressing enough when one sees the acres of “decorative” abominations which fill our state-houses, courts, and libraries, but in reality of no great importance as a detriment to our culture. Like the soldiers’ monuments, the dead architecture, the tasteless manufactured articles of common use, they sink so far below any level of art that the public is scarcely affected by them. Only the persons trained in schools to admire the painting of a Mr. E. H. Blashfield or the sculpture of a Mr. Daniel C. French ever try to think of them as beautiful; the rest of the public takes them on faith as something that goes with the building, like the “frescoed” cupids to be found in the halls of apartment houses or the tin cupolas and minarets on the roof. The popular magazine-illustrators, poor as they are, have more power to mislead than our quasi-official nonentities.

Between the pseudo-classic decorators and the frankly “lowbrow” artists of the commercial publications, the posters, and the advertisements, there is the large class of men whose work is seen at the annual exhibitions, the dealers’ galleries, and the American sections of the museums. They partake of the vice of each of the other two classes: the easily learned formula for their product being a more or less thorough schooling in some style derived from the past, plus an optimistic or “red-blooded” or else gently melancholy attitude toward the subject. Velasquez has been the main victim of their caricature in the later years, but a little Chinese, Florentine, Impressionist, or even Cubist style will often be added to give a look of “modernity” to the work. As long as there is a recognizable proficiency in drawing and painting (it is of course only for the cheaper trade that the picture has to be guaranteed as done by hand), the erudite patron or museum trustee is assured of the seriousness of the artist’s intentions, while to make the thing take with the general buyer, the most important matter is judgment as to the type of American girl, the virile male, or the romantic or homely landscape that our public likes to live with.

The only excuse for mentioning such things in an essay on American art is that they help to define it by contrast--for these pictures are neither art nor American. The disease of which they are an outward sign infects Europe almost as much as it does our own country, and there is hardly a distinguishing mark to tell whether the Salon picture was done in Madrid, Berlin, or Indianapolis. A sentence from an eminent American critic, Russell Sturgis, gives the key to the situation. He said, “The power of abstract design is lost to the modern world,--we must paint pictures or carve expressional groups when we wish to adorn.” In the half generation that has passed since these words were spoken, the French have proven by several arts based entirely on abstract design that the power for it was not lost to the world and that men still know the difference between expression by form and colour and expression by concrete ideas.

Throughout this survey I have taken painting as the index to the art-instinct of America, and as we glance again at even our best painters we see that it is on concrete ideas that they have built: on character in portraiture with Copley, on romantic vision with Ryder, on observation of appearances with Homer. Precisely the reason for Whistler’s great success among his countrymen was the promise of release he afforded by his reaching out for the design and colour of the Orient, with which one associates also his spoken words, offering us “harmonies” and “symphonies” in place of the art built on intellectual elements that we had had before. The fact that Whistler himself was not strong enough in his grasp of tradition, or of a nature to achieve an important result along the lines he pointed to, does not change the issue. We had begun to be aware of the repression of instinct that was marking American life. We had recognized that the satisfaction of the senses, quite as much as intellectual pleasure, is to be demanded of art. Puritan morality and Quaker drabness had turned us away from any such conception, and when they took notice of art at all, it was for its educational value, either to inculcate religious or patriotic ideas, or for its connection with the classic past.

Add to this the utilitarian needs of a country that had to build rapidly, caring for cheapness more than for permanence (so little of the building, in fact, was intended to be permanent), and one has an explanation of the absence of architectural quality in the American houses of the last hundred years. The characteristic of building in the time is seen in the lifeless blocks of “brownstone fronts,” in the apartments that have so little of the home about them that in the restlessness of his search for a place to live satisfactorily, the American of the cities has earned the name of the “van-dweller,”--one sees the thing again in the abject monotony of farm-houses and country residences. Their spirit, or lack of it, is continued in furniture and decoration. One understands why Europe has been the magic word for countless thousands of Americans. Perhaps it was the palaces and museums that they set out to see and that they told about on their return, but more impressive to them--because more satisfying to their hunger for a beauty near to their daily lives--was the sight of an Italian village built with love for hillsides and with understanding of the forms of the hill and of the type of construction that would suit it. Or was it the cheeriness of the solid Dutch houses whose clear reds and blacks look out so robustly through the green of the trees that border the canals? The bright-coloured clothing of the peasants became delightful to the traveller, even if he still gave it a pitying smile when he saw it again on the immigrant here; and the humble foreigner, anxious to fit in to his new surroundings, hastened to tone down the vivacity of his native costume to the colourlessness of the American farmer’s or workman’s garb. In place of the gay pink or green stucco of his cottage at home, the immigrant got more or less of sanitary plumbing, higher wages, and other material benefits, to recompense him for the life he had left behind.