Chapter IX: Part 9

So much for the conditions, or at least a few of them, that have prevented our literature from getting its head above water. If America is littered with extinct talents, the halt, the maimed and the blind, it is for reasons with which we are all too familiar; and we to whom the creative life is nothing less than the principle of human movement, and its welfare the true sign of human health, look upon this wreckage of everything that is most precious to society and ask ourselves what our fathers meant when they extolled the progress of our civilization. But let us look facts in the face. Mr. Sinclair Lewis asserts that we are in the midst of a revival and that we are too humble in supposing that our contemporary literature is inferior to that of England. That we are in the midst of a revival I have no doubt, but it is the sustained career that makes a literature; without the evidence of this we can hope much but we can affirm nothing. What we can see is that, with all its hope, the morale of the literary profession in this country is just what its antecedents have made it. I am reminded of the observation of a friend who has reason to know, that the Catholic Church in America, great as it is in numbers and organization, still depends on the old world for its models, its task-masters and its inspiration; for the American priest, as a rule, does not feel the vocation as the European feels it. I am reminded of the American labour movement which, prosperous as it is in comparison with the labour movements of Europe, is unparalleled for the feebleness of its representatives. I am reminded of certain brief experiences in the American university world which have led me to believe that the professors who radiate a genuine light and warmth are far more likely to be Russians, Germans, Englishmen, Irishmen, Dutchmen, Swedes and Finns than the children of ’76. That old hostility of the pioneers to the special career still operates to prevent in the American mind the powerful, concentrated pursuit of any non-utilitarian way of life: meanwhile everything else in our society tends to check the growth of the spirit and to shatter the confidence of the individual in himself. Considered with reference to its higher manifestations, life itself has been thus far, in modern America, a failure. Of this the failure of our literature is merely emblematic.

Mr. Mencken, who shares this belief, urges that the only hope of a change for the better lies in the development of a native aristocracy that will stand between the writer and the public, supporting him, appreciating him, forming as it were a _cordon sanitaire_ between the individual and the mob. That no change can come without the development of an aristocracy of some sort, some nucleus of the more gifted, energetic and determined, one can hardly doubt. But how can one expect the emergence of an aristocracy outside of the creative class, and devoted to its welfare, unless and until the creative class itself reveals the sort of pride that can alone attract its ministrations? “The notion that a people can run itself and its affairs anonymously is now well known to be the silliest of absurdities.” Thus William James, in defence of the aristocratic principle; and what he says is as applicable to literature as to every other department of social life. But he continues: “Mankind does nothing save through initiatives on the part of inventors, great and small, and imitation by the rest of us--these are the sole factors alive in human progress. Individuals of genius show the way, and set the patterns, which common people then adopt and follow.” In other words, as I understand it, and so far as literature is concerned, the burden of proof lies on the writer himself--which brings one back to a truism: it is not for the public or any aristocratic minority within the public to understand the writer, it is for the writer to create the taste by which he is understood. Is it not by this indeed (in a measure, at least) that we recognize the creator?

Certainly if our contemporary literature is not respected, if it has not been able to rally to its support the sensitive public that already exists in this country, it is partly because this literature has not respected itself. That there has been every reason for it makes no difference; that it has begun to respect itself again makes no difference either, for when a people has lost confidence in its literature, and has had grounds for losing confidence in it, one cannot be surprised if it insists a little cynically upon being “shown.” The public supported Mark Twain and Howells and the men of their generation, it admired them for what was admirable in them, but it was aware, if only unconsciously, that there was a difference between them and the men of the generation before them; and in consequence of this the whole stock of American literature fell. But those who insist in our day that America prefers European writers to its own, because America is still a colony of Europe, cannot ignore the significant fact that at a time when America was still more truly colonial than it is now American writers had all the prestige in this country that European writers have at present; and it is not entirely because at that time the country was more homogeneous. Poe and Thoreau found little support in the generation of which I speak, as Whitman found little support in the generation that followed it. On the other hand, there were no European writers (and it was an age of great writers in Europe) who were held in higher esteem in this country than Hawthorne, Emerson, Motley, and one or two others almost equally distinguished, as well from a European as from an American point of view; there were few, if any, European writers, in fact, who were esteemed in this country as highly as they. How can one explain it? How can one explain why, at a time when America, in every other department of life, was more distinctly colonial than it is now, American literature commanded the full respect of Americans, while to-day, when the colonial tradition is vanishing all about us, it so little commands their respect that they go after any strange god from England? The problem is not a simple one, but among the many explanations of it one can hardly deny that there were in that period a number of writers of unusual power, who made the most (who were able to make the most) of their power, who followed their artistic conscience (who were able to follow it) and who by this fact built up a public confidence in themselves and in the literature they represented. Does it matter at all whether to-day we enjoy these writers or not? They were men of spiritual force, three or four of them: that is the important point. If the emerging writers of our epoch find themselves handicapped by the scepticism of the public, which has ceased to believe that any good thing can come out of Nazareth, let them remember not only that they are themselves for the most part in the formative stage, but that they have to live down the recent past of their profession.

Meanwhile, what constitutes a literature is the spiritual force of the individuals who compose it. If our literature is ever to be regenerated, therefore, it can only be through the development of a sense of “free will” (and of the responsibility that this entails) on the part of our writers themselves. To be, to feel oneself, a “victim” is in itself not to be an artist, for it is the nature of the artist to live, not in the world of which he is an effect, but in the world of which he is the cause, the world of his own creation. For this reason, the pessimistic determinism of the present age is, from the point of view of literature, of a piece with the optimistic determinism of the age that is passing. What this pessimistic determinism reveals, however, is a _consciousness of the situation_: to that extent it represents a gain, and one may even say that to be conscious of the situation is half the battle. If we owed nothing else to Mr. Dreiser, for instance, we should owe him enough for the tragic sense of the waste and futility of American life, as we know it, which his books communicate. It remains true that in so far as we resent this life it is a sign of our own weakness, of the harm not only that our civilization has done us but that we have permitted it to do us, of our own imperfectly realized freedom; for to the creative spirit in its free state the external world is merely an impersonal point of departure. Thus it is certain that as long as the American writer shares what James Bryce calls the “mass fatalism” of the American people, our literature will remain the sterile, supine, and inferior phenomenon which, on the whole, it is.

“What we want,” wrote Henry Adams in 1862 to his brother Charles, “is a _school_. We want a national set of young men like ourselves or better, to start new influences not only in politics, but in literature, in law, in society, and throughout the whole social organism of the country--a national school of our own generation. And that is what America has no power to create.... It’s all random, insulated work, for special and temporary and personal purposes. And we have no means, power or hope of combined action for any unselfish end.” _That is what America has no power to create._ But can it be said that any nation has ever created a school? Here we have the perfect illustration of that mass fatalism of which I have spoken, and Henry Adams himself, in his passivity, is the type of it. Secure as he was, uniquely secure, why did he refuse to accept the responsibility of those novels in which he expressed the contempt of a powerful and cultivated mind for the meanness, the baseness, the vulgarity of the guiding element in American society? In the darkest and most chaotic hours of our spiritual history the individual has possessed a measure of free will only to renounce it: if Henry Adams had merely signed his work and accepted the consequences of it, he might by that very fact have become the founder, the centre, of the school that he desired. But it is true that in that generation the impulses of youth were, with an extraordinary unanimity, focused upon a single end, the exploitation of the continent; the material opportunities that American life offered were too great and too all-engrossing, and it is unlikely that any considerable minority could have been rallied for any non-utilitarian cause. Sixty years later this school remains, and quite particularly as regards our literature, the one thing necessary; the reforestation of our spiritual territory depends on it. And in more than one sense the times are favourable. The closing of the frontier seems to promise for this country an intenser life than it has known before; a large element of the younger generation, estranged from the present order, exists in a state of ferment that renders it highly susceptible to new ideas; the country literally swarms with half-artists, as one may call them, men and women, that is to say, who have ceased to conform to the law of the tribe but who have not accepted the discipline of their own individual spirits. “What I chiefly desire for you,” wrote Ibsen to Brandes at the outset of his career, “is a genuine, full-blooded egoism, which shall force you for a time to regard what concerns you yourself as the only thing of any consequence, and everything else as non-existent.... There is no way in which you can benefit society more than by coining the metal you have in yourself.” The second half of this rather blunt counsel of perfection is implied in the first, and it connotes a world of things merely to name which would be to throw into relief the essential infantility of the American writer as we know the type. By what prodigies of alert self-adaptation, of discriminating self-scrutiny, of conscious effort does the creative will come into its own! As for us, weak as too many of us are, ignorant, isolated, all too easily satisfied, and scarcely as yet immune from the solicitations of the mob, we still have this advantage, that an age of reaction is an age that stirs the few into a consciousness of themselves.

VAN WYCK BROOKS

MUSIC

We spend more money upon music than does any other nation on earth; some of our orchestras, notably those of Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia, are worthy to rank among the world’s best; in the Metropolitan Opera House we give performances of grand opera that for consistent excellence of playing, singing, and _mise-en-scène_ are surpassed probably nowhere. Yet there has never been a successful opera by an American offered at that opera house, and the number of viable American orchestral works is small enough to be counted almost upon one’s fingers. We squander millions every year upon an art that we cannot produce.

There are apologists for the American composer who will say that we do produce it, but that it is strangled at birth. According to their stock argument, there are numberless greatly gifted native composers whose works never get a hearing, (a) because Americans are prejudiced against American music and in favour of foreign music, and (b) because the foreigners who largely control the musical situation in this country jealously refuse to allow American works to be performed. This would be impressive if it were consistent or true. As far as concerns the Jealous Foreigner myth--he does not dominate the musical situation--I have never noticed that the average European in this country is deficient either in self-interest or tact. He is generally anxious, if only for diplomatic reasons, to find American music that is worth singing or playing. Even when he fails to find any that is worth performing, he often performs some that isn’t, in order to satisfy local pride. Moreover, Americans are no more prejudiced against American musicians than they are against other kinds. As a matter of fact, if intensive boosting campaigns produced creative artists, the American composer during the past decade should have expanded like a hot-house strawberry. We have had prize contests of all kinds, offering substantial sums for everything from grand operas to string quartettes, we have had societies formed to publish his chamber-music scores; publishers have rushed to print his smaller works; we have had concerts of American compositions; we have had all-American festivals. Meanwhile the American composer has, with a few lonely exceptions, obstinately refused to produce anything above the level of what it would be flattering to call mediocrity.

No. If he is not heard oftener in concert halls and upon recital platforms, it is because he is not good enough. There is, in the music of even the second-rate Continental composers, a surety of touch, a quality of evident confidence in their material and ease in its handling that is rarely present in the work of Americans. Most American symphonic and chamber music lacks structure and clarity. The workmanship is faulty, the utterance stammers and halts. Listening to an average American symphonic poem, you get the impression that the composer was so amazed and delighted at being able to write a symphonic poem at all that the fact that it might be a dull one seemed of minor importance to him. When he isn’t being almost entirely formless he is generally safely conventional, preferring to stick to what a statesman would call the Ways of the Fathers rather than risk some structural innovation what might or might not be effective. Tschaikovsky’s variation of the traditional sequence of movements in the _Pathétique_ symphony, for example--ending with the slow movement instead of the march--would scandalize and terrify the average American.

This feebleness and uncertainty in the handling of material makes American music sound more sterile and commonplace than it really is. The American composer never seems certain just what, if anything, he wants to say. His themes, his fundamental ideas, are often of real significance, but he has no control over that very essence of the language of music, mood. He lacks taste. The fact that an American composition may begin in a genuinely impressive mood is no guarantee at all that inside of twenty-four bars it may not fall into the most appalling banalities. We start with lyric beauty and finish in stickiness. The curse of bathos is upon us. We lack staying power. Just as so many American dramatists can write two good acts of a three-act play, so many American novelists can write superb opening chapters, so do American composers devise eloquent opening themes. But we all fail when it comes to development. The train is laid, the match is applied, and the spectators crowd back in delighted terror amid tremendous hissings and sputterings. But when the awaited detonation comes, it is too often only a pop.

Such failure to make adequate use of his ideas is partially attributable to the American musician’s pathetically inadequate technical equipment. Generally speaking, he doesn’t know his business. He has been unable, or hasn’t bothered, to learn his trade. Imagine if you can a successful dramatist who can neither read nor write, but has to dictate his plays, or a painter who can only draw the outlines of his pictures, hiring some one else to lay in the colours, and you have something analogous to many an American “composer” whose music is taken seriously by Americans, and who cannot write out a playable piano part, arrange a song for choral performance, or transcribe a hymn tune for a string quartette. Such elementary work he has to have done for him, whenever it is necessary, by some hack. This, to say nothing of the more advanced branches of musical science, like counterpoint, fugue, orchestration. Though it is risky to generalize, it is probably safe to say that among Americans who write music, the man who can construct a respectable fugue or canon or score a piece for full orchestra is decidedly the exception. In Europe, of course, any man who did not have these technical resources at his fingertips would have to be a Moussorgsky to be taken seriously as a composer at all.

It is not entirely the American’s fault that he is so ill-equipped. Much of his comparative musical illiteracy, true, is the result of his own laziness and his traditional American contempt for theory and passion for results. On the other hand, the young American who honestly desires a good theoretical training in music must either undertake the expensive adventure of journeying to one of the few cities that contain a first-class conservatory, or the equally expensive one of going to Europe. If he can do neither, he must to a great extent educate himself. Some kinds of training it is nearly impossible for him to obtain here at any price. Orchestration, for instance, a tremendously complex and difficult science, can be mastered only by the time-honoured trial and error method, i.e., by writing out scores and hearing them played. How is our young American to manage this? Granted that there is a symphony orchestra near him, how can he get his scores played? The conductor cannot be blamed for refusing. He is hired to play the works of masters, not to try out the apprentice efforts of unskilled aspirants. What we need so badly here are not more first-class orchestras, but more second-rate ones, small-town orchestras that could afford to give the tyro a chance.

Because of their lack of technical skill many composers in this country never venture into the broader fields of composition at all. As a class, we write short piano and violin pieces, or songs. We write them because we do earnestly desire to write something and because they do not demand the technical resourcefulness and sustained inspiration that we lack. Parenthetically, I don’t for a moment mean to imply that clumsy workmanship and sterility are unknown in Europe, that we are all mediocrities and they are all _Uebermenschen_. As a matter of fact, we have to-day probably much more creative musical talent, if less brains, than Europe; but, talent for talent, the European is infinitely better trained. This, at least in part, because he respects theory and has a desire for technical proficiency that we almost totally lack. Then too, the European has some cultural background. There is a curious lack of inter-communication among the arts in this country. The painter seems to feel that literature has nothing direct to give him, the writer, that music and painting are not in his line, and the musician--decidedly the worst of the three in this respect--that his own art has no connection with anything.

The American composer’s most complete failure is intellectual. The fact that he writes music seldom warrants the assumption that he has the artist’s point of view at all. He is likely to be a much less interesting person than one’s iceman. Ten to one, he never visits a picture gallery or a sculpture exhibition, his taste in the theatre is probably that of the tired business man, and what little reading he does is likely to be confined to trade papers, _Snappy Stories_, and best-sellers. He takes no interest in politics, economics, or sociology, either national or international (how could they possibly concern him?), and probably cannot discuss even music with pleasure or profit to anybody.

The natural inference that might be drawn from this diatribe--that the composing of music in this country is confined exclusively to the idiot classes--is not strictly true. Plenty of American musicians are intelligent and cultured men as well; but that is not America’s fault. She is just as cordial to the stupid ones. And the widespread impotence and technical sloppiness of American music is the inevitable result of the American attitude toward music and to the anomalous position the art occupies in this country.

Let me be platitudinous in the interest of clarity and point out what we so often forget: that our nation, unlike most of the others, is not a race as well. We have common wellsprings of thought, but--and this is significant and ominous--none of feeling. Sheer environment may teach people to think alike within a generation; but it takes centuries of common emotional experiences to make them feel alike. Any average American, even of the National-Security-League-one-hundred-per-centum variety, may have in his veins the blood of English, French, Italian, and Russian ancestors, and there is no saying that his emotional nature is going to find many heart-beats in common with some equally average neighbour, whose ancestry may be, say, Irish, Danish, and Hungarian. What national spirit we have has been determined, first, by the fact that the ancestors of every one of us, whether they came here twenty years ago or two hundred, were pioneers. Every one of them left a civilization whose cultural background had been established for centuries, to come to a land where the problem of mere existence was of prime importance. Again, many of them were religious fanatics. In the life of the pioneer there was little room for art of any sort, and least for music. What he demanded of music, when he had time to spare for it, was that above all things it distract him from the fatigue and worry of everyday life, either by amusing him or by furnishing a sentimental reminder of old ways. To the Puritan, music, both for its own sake and as entertainment, was anathema. As sensuous beauty it was popish, and as entertainment it was worldly pleasure, and therefore wicked. To be tolerated at all, it must be practical, i.e., perform some moral service by being a hymn tune. And what the American pioneer and the American Puritan asked a few generations back, the average American asks to-day whenever he is confronted with any work of art: Does it point a moral? If not, will it help me to kill time without boring me?

Instruction, release, or amusement: that, in general, is all we want of art. The American’s favourite picture is one that tells a story, or shows the features of some famous person, or the topography of some historic spot. Fantastic pictures he likes, because they show him people and places far removed from his own rather tedious environment, but they must be a gaudy, literal, solid sort of fantasy--Maxfield Parrish rather than Aubrey Beardsley. If he can’t have these, he wants pretty girls or comics. Purely decorative or frankly meaningless pictures--Hokusai and Whistler (except, of course, the portraits of Carlyle and his mother)--do not exist for him. Sculpture--which he does not understand--is probably his favourite art-form, for it is tangible, three-dimensionable, stable. He doesn’t mind poetry, for it, too, gives him release. He likes novels, especially “glad” ones or mystery stories. He even tolerates realism if, as in “Main Street,” it gives him release by showing him a set of consistently contemptible and uncultured characters to whom even he must feel superior. His architecture he likes either ornate to imbecility or utilitarian to hideousness.

In other words, the typical American goes to an art-work either frankly to have his senses tickled or for the sake of a definite thing that it says or a series of extraneous images or thoughts that it evokes--never for the _Ding an sich_. Of pure æsthetic emotion he exhibits very little. To him, beauty is emphatically not its own excuse for being. He does not want it for its own sake, and distrusts and fears it when it appears before him unclothed in moral lessons or associated ideas. In such a civilization music can occupy but a very unimportant place. For music is, morally or intellectually, the most meaningless of arts: it teaches no lesson, it offers no definite escape from life to the literal-minded, and aside from the primitive and obvious associations of patriotic airs and “mother” songs, it evokes no associated images or ideas. To love music you must be willing to enjoy beauty pretty largely for its own sake, without asking it to mean anything definite in words or pictures. This the American hates to do. Since he cannot be edified, he refuses to be stirred. There is nothing left for him, therefore, in music, except such enjoyment as he can get out of a pretty tune or an infectious rhythm.

And that, despite our admirable symphony orchestras and our two superb permanent opera companies (all run at a loss, by the way), is about all that music means to the average American--amusement. He simply does not see how an art that doesn’t teach him anything, that is a shameless assault upon his emotions (he makes no distinction between emotions and senses), can possibly play any significant part in his life. So, as a nation, he does what he generally does in other matters of art, delegates its serious cultivation to women.

Women constitute ninety per cent. of those who support music in this country. It is women who attend song and instrumental recitals; it is women who force reluctant husbands and fathers to subscribe for opera seats and symphony concerts; the National Federation of Musical Clubs, which works throughout the country to foster the appreciation of music, is composed entirely of women; at least two-thirds of the choral organizations in the United States contain women’s voices only. It is no disparagement of their activities to say that such a state of affairs is unhealthy. This well-nigh complete feminization of music is bad for it. After all, art, to be alive, must like any other living thing be the result of collaboration. Women have undertaken to be the moral guardians of the race, and no one can deny that they guard, upon the whole, as well as men could; but their guardianship is a bit too zealous at times, and their predominance in our musical life aggravates our already exaggerated tendency to demand that art be edifying. One of the conditions of the opera contest conducted by the National Federation in 1914 was that the libretto must contain nothing immoral or suggestive (I paraphrase). Now music is, after all, an adult occupation, and it might be assumed that a composer competent to write an opera score might have taste and intelligence enough not to be vulgar--for, surely, vulgarity was all they wanted to guard against. If the clause were to be interpreted literally, it would bar the librettos of _Tristan_, _Walküre_, _Carmen_, _Pelléas et Mélisande_, and _L’Amore dei Tre Re_--a supposition quite too unthinkable. The feminine influence helps to increase the insularity of our musicians. Women are more chauvinistic in art matters--if possible--than men, and among the women’s clubs that are trying to encourage the American composer there is a tendency to insist rather that he be American than that he be a composer. Since it is women who support our recitals and concerts it is they who must assume responsibility for our excessive cult of the performer. This land is certainly the happy hunting-ground of the virtuoso, be he singer, player, or conductor. What he chooses to sing, play, or conduct is comparatively unimportant to us. Our audiences seem to gather not so much to listen as to look; or if they do listen, it is to the voice or the instrument rather than to the music. The announcement, “Farrar in _Carmen_” will pack the Metropolitan to the doors; but if the bill be changed, and _Zaza_ be substituted at the last moment, who cares? Indeed the ticket agencies, knowing what people really attend opera for, frankly advertise “tickets for Farrar to-night.” Rachmaninoff is a great pianist, and Rachmaninoff playing an all-Chopin programme could fill Carnegie Hall at any time. But Rachmaninoff playing a programme of Czerny’s “Exercises for the Beginner” could fill it just as well. Announce an all-Chopin programme without naming the pianist, and see how much of an audience you draw. The people who go to hear Galli-Curci sing the shadow-song from _Dinora_ do not go to hear music at all. They go as they would go to see Bird Millman walk a slack wire; they go to hear a woman prove that, given a phenomenal development of the vocal cords, she can, after years of practice, perform scales and trills _in altissimo_ very nearly as well as the union flute-player who furnishes her obligato. All this is to a certain extent true elsewhere, of course. It is natural that if one person can sing or play better than another, audiences should prefer to hear him rather than another. But this worship of the performance rather than the thing performed, this blind adoration of skill for its own sake, is cultivated in America to a degree that is quite unparalleled.

Many American cities and large towns hold annual musical festivals, lasting from two days to a week or more, and these are often mentioned as evidence of the existence of a genuine musical culture among us. Are they? What happens at them? For one thing, the local choral society performs a cantata or oratorio. This is more than likely to be either _The Messiah_ or _Elijah_, works which through long association have taken on less the character of musical compositions than of devotional exercises. Edification again. Soloists are engaged, as expensive and famous as the local budget allows, and these give recitals during the remaining sessions of the festival. The audiences come largely to see these marvels rather than to hear music, for after the annual spree of culture is over they return home contentedly enough to another year void of any music whatever. Hearing a little music is better than hearing none, but the test of genuine culture is whether or not it is an integral part of life rather than a vacation from it. By this test the annual festival would seem to exert about as much permanent cultural influence as a clambake.

The total unconsciousness on the part of his fellow-countrymen that art is related to life, a sense of futility and unreality, is what makes the lot of the musician in America a hard one, and is responsible for his failure as an artist. If people get the kind of government they deserve, they most certainly get the kind of art they demand; and if, comparatively speaking, there is no American composer, it is because America doesn’t want him, doesn’t see where he fits in.

Suppose most American music is trivial and superficial? How many Americans would know the difference if it were profound? The composer here lives in an atmosphere that is, at the worst, good-natured contempt. Contempt, mind you, not for himself--that wouldn’t matter--but for his very art. In the minds of many of his compatriots it ranks only as an entertainment and a diversion, slightly above embroidery and unthinkably below baseball. At best, what he gets is unintelligent admiration, not as an artist, but as a freak. Blind Tom, the negro pianist, is still a remembered and admired figure in American musical history; and Blind Tom was an idiot. To an American, the process of musical composition is a mysterious and incomprehensible trick--like sword-swallowing or levitation--and as such he admires it; but he does not respect it. He cannot understand how any normal he-man can spend his life thinking up tunes and putting them down on paper. Tunes are pleasant things, of course, especially when they make your feet go or take you back to the days when you went straw-riding; but as for taking them seriously, and calling it work--man’s work--to think them up ... any one who thinks that can be dismissed as a crank.

If the crank could make money, it might be different. The respect accorded to artists in our country is pretty sharply graded in accordance with their earning power. Novelists and playwrights come first, since literature and the stage are known to furnish a “good living.” Sculptors have a certain standing, on account of the rumoured prices paid for statues and public memorials, though scenario writers are beginning to rank higher. Painters are eyed with a certain suspicion, though there is always the comfortable belief that the painter probably pursues a prosperous career of advertising art on the side. But poets and composers are decidedly men not to be taken seriously. This system of evaluation is not quite as crass as it sounds. America has so long been the land of opportunity, we have so long gloried in her supremacy as the place to make a living, that we have an instinctive conviction that if a man is really doing a good job he must inevitably make money at it. Only, poetry and music have the bad luck to be arts wherein a man may be both great and successful and still be unable to look the landlord in the eye. Since such trades are so unprofitable, we argue, those who pursue them are presumably incompetent. The one class of composer whom the American does take seriously is the writer of musical comedy and popular songs, not only because he can make money, but because he provides honest, understandable entertainment for man and beast. That, perhaps, is why our light music is the best of its kind in the world.

The self-styled music-lover in this country too often brings little more genuine comprehension to music. He is likely to be a highbrow (defined as a person educated beyond his intelligence), with all the mental obtuseness and snobbishness of his class. He divides music into “popular”--meaning light--and “classical”--meaning pretentious. Now there is good music and bad, and the composer’s pretensions have little to do with the case. Compare, for example, the first-act finale of Victor Herbert’s _Mlle. Modiste_ with such vulgar rubbish as _Donna è mobile_. Yet because the latter is sung by tenors, at the Metropolitan, the highbrow solemnly catalogues it as “classical,” abolishing the work of Herbert, Berlin, and Kern, three greatly gifted men, with the adjective “popular.” In general, he is the faithful guardian of the Puritan tradition, always sniffing the air for a definite “message” or moral, seeking sermons in tones, books in running arpeggios. It never occurs to him that just as words are the language of intellect, so is music the language of emotion, that its whole excuse for existence is its perfection in saying what lies just beyond and above words, and that if you can reduce a composer’s message to words, you automatically render it meaningless.

Music criticism in America is amazingly good in the cities. The system under which the critics must work, however, whereby they are supposed to “cover” everything (in New York this theoretically entails making some sort of critical comment upon every one of three or four hundred events in a single season) is so impossible that much of their work is inevitably scamped and perfunctory. Elsewhere throughout the country criticism is handed over to reporters, who generally avoid trouble by approving of everything. There is a tendency toward the double standard--holding the stranger strictly to account, especially the foreigner, and being “nice” to the native--that produces demoralizing results.

Of real musical journalism we have none. There is _The Musical Quarterly_, good of its kind, but rather ponderous and making no pretence to timeliness. The monthlies are chiefly for the teacher. The weeklies are in general frankly “shop” organs, devoted to the activities of the performer and filled with his advertisements, portraits, and press notices. There is no medium for the exchange of contemporary thought, for the discussion of topics having a non-professional cultural interest. Music publishing here is an industry, conducted like any other industry. The Continental type of publisher, who is a scholar and a musician, and a gentleman who is conscious of a duty to music as well as to the stockholders, is almost unknown here. To our publishers music is a commodity, to be bought cheap and sold dear, and most of them will publish anything that looks profitable, regardless of its quality. Their typographical standards are higher than those anywhere in the world, except Germany.

So the American composer in America works more or less in a vacuum. He is out of things, and he knows it. If he attempts to say something, through his art, that will be intelligible to his countrymen, he is baffled by the realization that his countrymen don’t understand his language. This particular difficulty, this sense of inarticulateness, probably weighed less heavily upon the last two generations of American composers; for they were, most of them, virtually German composers. In their time a thorough technical education in music was so nearly unobtainable here that it was simpler to go abroad for it. So, from Paine to MacDowell, they went to Germany. There they learned their trade, and at least learned it thoroughly; but they learned to write, not only music, but German music. To them, German music was music. Their songs were _Lieder_; their symphonies and overtures were little sinister sons of Beethoven, Raff, and Brahms. So completely Teutonized did our musical speech become that we still find it hard to believe that French music, Spanish music, Russian music is anything but an imperfect translation from the German. A few went to Paris and learned to write with a French accent. MacDowell was, and remains, our best: a first-rank composer, who died before his work was done. His earlier music was all written, performed, and published in Germany, and it is as _echt Deutsch_ as that of Raff, his master. Not until he approached middle life did he evolve a musical idiom that was wholly of MacDowell, the American. Most of the rest came back to spend their days fashioning good, honest, square-toed _Kapellmeistermusik_ that had about as much genuine relation to their America as the Declaration of Independence has to ours. They might feel this lack of contact, but at least they had the consolation of knowing that there were people in the world to whom what they said was at least intelligible.

The American of the present generation has no such consolation. He has probably not been trained abroad. He wants to write music, and being human, he wants it understood. But the minute he tries to express himself he betrays the fact that he does not know what he wants to express. Any significant work of art is inevitably based on the artist’s relation and reaction to life. But the American composer’s relation to the common life is unreal. His activities strike his fellows as unimportant and slightly irrational. He can’t lay his finger upon the great, throbbing, common pulse of America because for him there is none. So he tries this, that, and the other, hoping by luck to stumble upon the thing he wants to say. He tries desperately to be American. Knowing that the great national schools of music in other countries are based upon folksong, he tries to find the American folksong, so as to base his music upon that. He utilizes Negro tunes, and when they fail to strike the common chord he devises themes based upon Indian melodies. What he fails to see is that the folksongs of Europe express the common _racial_ emotions of a nation, not its geographical accidents. When a Frenchman hears _Malbrouck_ he is moved by what moved generations of long-dead Frenchmen; when a Russian hears _Dubinushka_ he is stirred by what has stirred Russians for centuries. But even if some melody did stir the pulse of Geronimo, the mere fact that he was a former resident of my country is no proof that it is going to stir mine. If you insist that Negro music is the proper basis for an American school of composition, try telling a Southerner that when he hears _Swing Low, Sweet Chariot_, he is hearkening to the voices of his ancestors!

A curious symptom of this feeling of disinheritance is the tendency of so many Americans to write what might be called the music of escape, music that far from attempting to affirm the composer’s relation to his day and age is a deliberate attempt to liberate himself by evoking alien and exotic moods and atmosphere. The publishers’ catalogues are full of Arab meditations, Persian dances, Hindu serenades, and countless similar attempts to get “anywhere out of the world.” The best work of Charles Griffes, whose untimely death last year robbed us of a true creative talent, was his symphonic poem, “The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan,” and his settings of Chinese and Japanese lyrics in Oriental rhythms and timbres. Not that the mere choice of subject is important; it is the actual mood and idiom of so much of this music that is significant evidence of the impulse to give up and forget America, to create a dream-world wherein one can find refuge from the land of chewing gum and victrolas.

These same victrolas, by the way, with their cousin, the player-piano, which so outrage the sensibilities of many a musician of the elder day, are a very real force in helping to civilize this country musically. The American is by no means as unmusical as he thinks he is. His indifference to art is only the result of his purely industrial civilization, and his tendency to mix morals with æsthetics is a habit of thought engendered by his ancestry. The Puritan tradition makes him fearful and suspicious of any sort of sensuous or emotional response, but it has not rendered him incapable of it. Catch him off his guard, get him away from the fear of being bored, and he is far from insensitive to music. He buys victrola records because he is a hero-worshipper, because he wants to hear the expensive Caruso and Kreisler and McCormack; but inevitably he is bound to take some notice of what they play and sing, and to recognize it when he hears it again. In spite of himself he begins to acquire a rudimentary sort of musical background. He begins by buying jazz rolls for his player-piano, and is likely in the long run, if only out of curiosity, to progress from “blues” to Chopin, via Moszkovski and Grainger.

But the greatest present-day force for good, musically, in this country, is the large motion-picture house. Music has always been a necessary accompaniment to motion pictures, in order to compensate for the uncanny silence in which these photographic wraiths unfold their dramas. Starting with a modest ensemble of piano and glass crash, the motion-picture orchestra has gradually increased in size and quality, the pipe organ has been introduced to augment and alternate it, so that the larger houses to-day can boast a musical equipment that is amazingly good. A few years ago S. L. Rothafel devised a glorified type of entertainment that was a sort of combination picture-show and “pop” concert. He built a theatre, the Rialto, especially to house it, containing a stage that was little more than a picture frame, a large pipe organ, and an orchestra platform large enough to hold seventy or eighty players. He recruited a permanent orchestra large enough to play symphonic works, and put Hugo Riesenfeld, an excellent violinist and conductor, who had been trained under Arthur Nikisch, in charge of the performances. These, besides the usual film presentations, comprised vocal and instrumental solos and detached numbers by the orchestra. All the music played at these entertainments was good--in what is known in this country as “classical.” Riesenfeld devised a running accompaniment to the films, assembled from the best orchestral music obtainable--a sort of synthetic symphonic poem that fitted the mood and action of the film presented, and was, of course, much too good for it.

This new entertainment form was instantly successful, and is rapidly becoming the standard offering at all the larger picture houses. It is a significant step in our musical life, for it is the first entirely successful attempt in this country to adapt art to popular wants. At last the average man is going of his own accord into a public hall and hearing music--real music--and discovering that he likes it. The picture house allows him to pretend that he is going solely to see the films, and needn’t listen unless he wants to. He finds that “classical” music is not nearly so boresome as many of its admirers. Freed from the highbrow’s condescension, unconscious of uplift, he listens and responds to music like the prelude to _Tristan_, the _Walkürenritt_, the _New World_ symphony, Tschaikovsky’s _Fourth_, and the _Eroica_. Theodore Thomas rendered no more valuable service to music in America than have Samuel Rothafel and Hugo Riesenfeld.

We are still far from utopia, however. In one of his essays upon communal art Henry Caro-Delvaille speaks of “the true Mediterranean _esprit_, the viable art philosophy of the French race, which is essentially plastic, accepting and delineating life, free alike from dogmatism and mysticism.” Try to frame a sentence like that about America. Try to make any generalization about the American spirit without using “liberty,” “free institutions,” “resourcefulness,” “opportunity,” or other politico-economic terms, if you would know what confronts the American artist, above all the American musician, when he attempts to become articulate to his countrymen. We simply have no common æsthetic emotions. No wonder our music flounders and stammers, and trails off into incoherence!

Wagner wrote _Die Meistersinger_ in a deliberate effort to express the German artistic creed; Verdi wrote consciously as an Italian; Glinka founded an entire school of composers whose sole aim was to express Russia. Such a task is beyond the American. The others were spokesmen for a race: he has no race to speak for, and the moment he pretends that he has, and tries to speak for it, he becomes conscious and futile. To speak of American music, in any ethnic sense, is naïve; you might as well speak of Baptist music. No. The American must accept his lot. There is but one audience he can write for, and that is himself. John Smith, American composer, dare not say: “I write to express America.” He can only say: “I write to express John Smith. I accept my life because, after all, it is mine, and I interpret my life because it is the only life I know.” And because John Smith is an American, and because somewhere, remote and inarticulate, there must be an American soul, then perhaps, if he does honest work and is true to himself, he may succeed in saying something that is of America, and of nowhere else, and that other Americans will hear and understand.

DEEMS TAYLOR

POETRY

There are many fashions, among contemporary critics, of regarding American poetry, each of them perhaps of equal helpfulness, since each is one facet of an imaginable whole. There is the view of Mr. John Middleton Murry, an English critic, that it depends perhaps a shade too much on narrative or dramatic interest, on bizarrerie (if I may very freely elaborate his notion) or, in general, on a kind of sensationalism, a use of superficially intriguing elements which are not specifically the right--or at all events the best--elements of poetry. There is the view of Mr. Louis Untermeyer, one of the ablest of our own critics and also one of the most versatile of our parodists and poets, that our contemporary poetry is good in measure as it comes in the direct line from Whitman: good, that is to say, when it is the voice of the poet who accepts, accepts joyously and largely, even loosely, this new world environment, these new customs, social and industrial, above all, it may be, the new sense of freedom which he might, if pressed, trace back to Karl Marx on one hand and Sigmund Freud on the other. There is again the view of Miss Amy Lowell that our poetry is good, or tends to be, precisely in proportion as it represents an outgrowing, by the poet, of his acute awareness of a social or ethical “here and now,” and the attainment of a relatively pure pre-occupation with beauty--the sense of freedom here exercising itself principally, if not altogether, with regard to literary tradition, especially the English: once more, I dilate the view to make it the more broadly representative. And there is, finally, the view of the conservative, by no means silent even in this era, that what is good in contemporary American poetry is what is for the moment least conspicuous--the traditional, seen as it appears inevitably in America to be seen, as something graceful, sentimental, rightly ethical, gently idealistic.