Chapter VIII

The difference in attitude which the Russians and the Americans have displayed in regard to faith and moral conduct--a difference which rests, as we have shown, on a power-property antithesis--corresponds also to a not less illuminating difference in the field of intellectual speculation, and the fine arts generally. Neither country, it may be noted, took any part in the intellectual and social movement that is known as the Renaissance. The average Russian of the ruling landowning aristocracy, was violently thrown from the Middle Ages into the state politics of post-Reformation Europe, thanks to Peter the Great’s reforms. The average American of the ruling New England mercantile caste began as post-Reformation Puritan of the English type, and steadily moved away from his early European environment into a primitive background of local politics that recalls the quarrels of the early Greek city-states.

Intellectual contact with Europe was begun and kept up at two removes in each case. In Russia as we shall see, European romanticism, in its cult of the Gothic and feudal, was the most powerful influence in precipitating a national literature; in America the same contact was kept up through the influence of the English eighteenth century moralists, such writers as Addison, Goldsmith, Dr. Johnson, Pope, finding abundant imitators and followers in the Colonies.

Before the problems of Europe, and indeed the problems of the world generally, the Russian is likely to ask the question, “Why is this?” while the American asks the question, “How did it come about?” It is obvious that both questions are necessary, and both are justified at their proper time and place. The normal, untaught human being, before undertaking any action, customarily and humanly asks “Why?” His interest is primarily in the value of an action as such, not in the means whereby it is to be performed. Then when he has decided on performing the action, he is able to ask “How?” and thereby acquire the full technique necessary to accomplish it. But the untaught Russian, by asking “Why?” after, as well as before, undertaking action, simply fosters his own attitude of nihilism and inertia; and that the Russian has literally to be driven into action by intolerable circumstances, and then generally goes too far, is the chief lesson to be derived from the perusal of Russian history. The American, on the other hand, by asking simply “How?” without examining beforehand the value of the act or its consequences, acquires a superior technical and executive skill at the expense of his ability to sort out what is worth undertaking from what is less worth undertaking. Neither regard “Why?” and “How?” as somehow complementary; neither are capable of the ordered development of investigation into causes combined with study of technique that goes on in European cultured circles.

The question “Why?” as opposed to the question “How?” when applied to life in the way that the Russians and the Americans apply them, leads, it is obvious, to diametrically opposing results. The Russian in his eagerness to find the underlying cause of every phenomenon, is apt to act, if at all, for a bewildering multiplicity of reasons; ranging from the desire to reform the world, or the desire to ensure his personal salvation, down to the mere desire to create mischief or relieve himself from boredom (like the heroes of Dostoevsky’s “Memories from the Underground” and Sologub’s “Little Demon.”) The American, in his hope to master the technique of every possible form of human activity, is apt to apply his question, “How is this done?” to a bewildering multiplicity of ends. So much is this the case, that nothing is commoner in American life than to find men who drift from one profession to another without mastering any. This is markedly the case even in American literature: Emerson transferred his activities from those of the pulpit to those of essay-writing; Mark Twain was pilot, gold-prospector, and author; Hawthorne and Melville were custom-house clerks, in their spare time, and so on--without any apparent loss of individuality. The versatility of the American mind, and its ability to turn from one thing to another, is perhaps its most outstanding quality.

This technical versatility not only explains America’s undoubted primacy in the field of public works and of engineering, but it also provides an explanation for the complete lack of moral sense now and then shown by Americans; a lack which, on the face of it, strongly contradicts the lip-service which America still largely pays to the Mosaic and the Puritan code. Take for example, the notorious murder which agitated the American press a few years ago, when two youths, undoubtedly responsible for the murder of a friend, declared they had done it as an experiment, in order to see how it felt to be a murderer! These youths were only carrying to its logical extreme a tendency far too common in American life as a whole. The leading impulse of the American is to want to try something, to start something, to play at being something. It is for this reason that so many Americans start in life as desiring to be authors or artists, only to find the attempt far beyond their capacity, and to realise later that they are better equipped as business men. For technical capacity alone, divorced from all preoccupation with ulterior aims, tends merely to exalt the executive faculties above the creative; it helps to make the majority of men into business men. The creative artist, equipped as he is with the imagination that concerns itself primarily with elemental cause and effect, learns his difficult technique by mastering the resources of his given material. The business man denying as he does any underlying purpose in himself or others except the purpose of making profits, applies to the whole of human life the prevailing standard of an easy and simple technique. And because this technique is simple and easily acquired, it becomes increasingly popular, so that the development of the arts and culture suffers from lack of those who will apply themselves to them.

It is for this reason that American life appears so standardized to foreign observers. This standardization is due to the fact that very few Americans are concerned with the question of the thing to be done, and most are concerned with the question of the technique of doing; and the simplest and easiest technique to master in America is that of making money. As regards the value of the money, once made, Americans have no more conception of that than they have of the value of most things. In their lavishness and prodigality, they deserve to be called, for the most part, the spendthrift nation of the world. But having mastered the technique that is appropriate to their position as inhabitants of an economically prosperous country, they are as yet unwilling to master the technique that would make them great in other fields. And this concentration on the technique of money-making which has led to so much of America’s standardization--and incidentally also to so much of its recent crime and moral callousness--is powerfully upheld by the present mechanical industrial epoch, with its decline in handicrafts, and the opportunities it offers to any business man to become the possessor, simply by buying a few specimens, of the best that the art of the past has already produced. It is for this reason that the average American tourist sees in Europe, not Europe’s intensely persistent energy, nor the vitality of her ideas, nor the continual conflict between tradition and innovation, but only her cash value as a market for antiques.

2

The Russian attempt to find a single central idea to explain the universe, leads naturally to the exaggerated respect in which the Orthodox Church has been and is still largely held among a great many Russians--a respect which it took a Tolstoy to question, and which far surpasses the respect shown to the Roman Catholic Church even in the most Catholic countries. For the Orthodox Church represented a central idea, hallowed by tradition, and fortified by all the apparatus of miracle-working superstition. Most of Russian literature has been, however, the product of minds that are, consciously or unconsciously, in revolt from the Orthodox idea, and determined to find a central idea outside of it, in some reconciliation with European tradition, or in some reversion to Asiatic atavism. In this respect it is perfectly just to apply to the whole Russian intelligentsia class the epithet that Dostoevsky applied to the Western wing of it, the epithet of “uprooted.”

This uprootedness, this inability to find a fixed centre, leads not only to the fantastic nihilism of much Russian literature and thought, but to its prevailing tone of tension and cruelty. It is a common complaint among European readers that Russian literature is morbid and gloomy. This complaint is, however, ill-founded. A reading of such European pessimists as Lucretius, Leopardi, Schopenhauer, or Thomas Hardy, reveals depths of accepted despair unknown to the Russian soul. But Russian literature and thought is intensely direct and cruel, as all great metaphysical dialectic is cruel. The monstrous pantheon of Indian divinities and the pessimistic nihilism of the Upanishads is something not foreign to the Russian, as it is foreign to the European mind. Above all, Russian thought tends to display itself in startling contrast; to paint in bright, glaring primary colors. Here we have again an Oriental trait, and a strongly marked one. There are few nuances in Russian literature, and the writers who showed themselves masters of the nuance are, like Tchekhov and Turgenev, more highly appreciated abroad than at home.

American literature and thought, on the other hand, being largely concerned with technique, is apt to respond not to the idea, but to the formula. The figure of Sam Slick, the Yankee clockmaker and peddler, who certainly never thought for one moment whether clocks were of much use to his customers, but who knew all about how they were made, and could take them apart and put them together better than anyone, inevitably recurs to the memory when we try to envisage the typical American mind. How much of American political theory and activity, North and South, how much of the truly American passion for local laws, state and city ordinances, constitutional amendments, legal innovations, has been due to this passion for meddling and tinkering--to this intensive study of technique! And the same passion reappears in the field of literature. In this respect the figure of Poe is particularly noteworthy. We can scarcely classify Poe as one of the greatest forces in American literature, because philosophically he had nothing whatever to say that had not already been said before him by the English romantics and the New England transcendentalists. But if we regard him as a virtuoso pure and simple, a virtuoso of technique, he immediately becomes perhaps the most important of all American authors. Poe was so intensely concerned with technique and technique alone, that he broke new literary ground in half-a-dozen different directions, without saying anything essentially new. He developed the lyrical refrain to a point unknown before his day. In “Ulalume” and “The Raven” he practically invented symbolism. He transformed the experimentally onomatopœic prose of De Quincey into the perfect prose poem. He invented the detective story. In his “Voyage of Arthur Gordon Pym” and other pseudo-scientific tales, he became the father of the scientific phantasy later developed by H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, and others. In his “Eureka,” he even tried to reconcile scientific cosmogony and myth-making--a daring attempt that had to wait till the post-Einstein period before it found imitators. It was this despised American hack whom most of the New England leaders of thought considered as a charlatan, who became the technical teacher of the whole generation of later symbolists and æsthetes in France and England; just as it was the purely moral and non-technical influence of Tolstoy that helped to produce much of the anti-æsthetic literature of the ‘social document’ type (Zola, Romain Rolland), later throughout Europe.

Poe was, however, not the only example of an American author concerned with formulæ. The prevalence of manner over matter may be observed in most American authors, and becomes overwhelmingly important when we turn from the field of literature proper to the field of public debate and political oratory. This field has been practically unknown in Russia, thanks to the activities of the censorship, and the general suppression of free speech, but such documents as have come down to us, such as for example, Dostoevsky’s celebrated Pushkin speech, or Lenin’s speeches, do not reveal any very great oratorical ability. Compare them with the rolling periods of Webster or even with such comparatively simple efforts as Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, and the contrast is flagrant. The difference is that the Russian makes only a single vast generalisation, that the Russian is omni-human in destiny and is appointed by God to reconcile all the nations of the earth, and attempts to illustrate it prosaically by carefully chosen selections from Pushkin’s or Marx’s works.

But in the case of Webster, or of the Gettysburg Address, the whole speech is more or less a tissue of highly poetical generalisations. Specific argument there is little or none--the less the better. The influence of such oratory in its substitution of the telling phrase, the resounding but intellectually empty statement, upon social life in America is much more vast than can ever be imagined by most Europeans, and has been an almost unmixed evil. Its pernicious effects were again seen in the recent tragedy of President Wilson when confronted with the realities of the European situation, and the still more obvious, but lesser known, tragedy of the whole public and private career of the late William Jennings Bryan. This oratorical temperament which is so common in America, attempts to heal profound and rooted differences of race, religion, politics, society, by the application of a few telling phrases, a handful of brilliant slogans. The few great public speakers that Russia has produced, such as Lenin, have made no such fatal mistake. Their efforts, however lacking in the wholly technical qualities that sweep audiences off their feet, were masterpieces of close realistic, _terre-à-terre_ argument.

3

America has already had three well-marked cultural and intellectual periods, each followed by a corresponding decline. The first--if we exclude, as we have a right to do, the stirrings of intellectual life in the Mathers and other purely colonial figures--began about the middle of the eighteenth century, culminated in the Revolution, and produced its last figures in Irving and Cooper. It was predominantly political and rationalistic. The second, beginning about 1840, the year before the publication of Emerson’s first series of Essays, reached its climax in the years immediately preceding the Civil War, and died away in the seventies. It was romantic and sentimental. The third, stirring the dry bones of respectability with the wind of a new realism about 1890, is still continuing at the present day. In each case, the movement towards culture was halted by an external war, and dissolved later in a period of growing financial prosperity. The first period came to a full close by 1830, though Irving and Cooper were to survive it; the second stage was virtually at an end in 1875, when the growing power of industrialism took the stage, challenging Emerson, Whitman and Melville; the third epoch may have already reached its culmination in the years following on the Great War. In each case, the successful wars in which America engaged, the Revolution and the War of 1812, the Mexican and Civil Wars, the Spanish War and the European War, diverted energy from American culture, and transferred it to the commercial, financial, and industrial field.

Like America, Russia has had three periods of culture. The first, under the leadership of Pushkin and Gogol, began with the Napoleonic struggle and ended about 1836--though Gogol himself was to survive it for a few years. It was predominantly romantic and revolutionary. The second began approximately with the Crimean War of 1854, culminated in the liberation of the serfs in 1861 and went on through the seventies. Its leaders were Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. It was predominantly realistic and political. The third, beginning about 1890, has continued down to the present day. It is almost entirely symbolical in feeling.

In each case, Russia’s foreign campaigns, whether successful or not, seem to have shaken up her pervading inertia and spiritlessness. The struggle with Napoleon gave rise to the brilliant generation of Pushkin; the Crimean War inspired Dostoevsky and Tolstoy; the building of the Transsiberian Railway and consequent Japanese-Russian War, may be said to have created the school of the symbolists, which, as Prince Mirsky has said, dominated the first decade of this century. By the fluctuations of campaigns fought at a distance, as opposed to civil wars, Russia has been bettered: America has been spoiled by them, and has never stood so high in culture as she did during the brief years of her own civil war. That is because war abroad enlarges man’s horizon, war at home limits it. The Russian type, prisoner to its own centrality, requires to escape continually from its petty and hampering environment; the American type, boldly going forth from itself into ever new regions, needs some force that will hold it at home and make it create a local centre of indigenous culture.

One can trace the same characteristics in the strong centralisation of Russian literary and spiritual culture, as opposed to its boundless diffusion in America. In Russia, all intellectual movements have gravitated from the beginning to Moscow and to Petrograd; in America, Concord, Richmond, Charleston, San Francisco, Chicago, Nashville, have all promoted new movements, each in a sense more important than anything achieved by New York. New York has been only a market-place, a place where literary people may come together and drift apart, a temporary haven for those wearied of provinciality and wishing to assert their cosmopolitanism. American culture, in order to be itself, to find spiritual roots, has to flee from the mock cosmopolitan Europeanism of its capitals and to become provincial, rooted in the backwoods, solitary and remote, as were Thoreau and Hawthorne. Russian culture, on the other hand, in order to be itself, has to tend towards a definite centre. The European is freed from these distressing choices; the division between city-dweller and country-dweller is for him less sharp and severe. He is, if highly cultivated, a member of a mystic body which ignores national boundaries and has, in the largest sense, unity of purpose. He absorbs a certain quantity of American and Russian culture, but only to produce, under normal circumstances, its cleverly-compounded antidote.

From the centralised condition of Russian culture, and its opposite in America, it follows that the cultivated Russian who lives abroad, tends to become more democratic in his outlook, while the cultivated American under similar circumstances, tends to become more aristocratic. A centralised culture is impossible without an aristocracy to support it. Unless the ranks of society are graded and defined from above, the meanest workman can become, economically and socially, the equal, if not the superior, of the finest scholar, the highest creative artist. Such a condition is what America definitely aspires towards. The condition which Russia tends to create is that no one, not the greatest artist, nor the finest scholar, should ever consider himself the equal of the mysterious ruler who, deriving his power from heaven alone, sits apart in the Kremlin. In America, the will being free, the quality of thought does not matter; in Russia, the will being subordinate, all can aspire to be thinkers. When a Russian goes abroad, the resultant liberation of his will enables it to act in harmony with his mind for the first time, so that he becomes an advanced radical; when an American takes up his residence in Europe, the freeing of his thought that takes place limits for the first time his boundless will, so that he usually becomes a traditional conservative.

But in thus entering upon and attempting to define the influence America and Russia have had on the whole field of intellectual and æsthetic effort we are at once challenged by more important distinctions. American thought tends to the rounded and static, Russian thought tends to lose itself in the eternal flow of harmony. Now if we try to make a scheme of the arts according to those which are more plastic and those which are more harmonic in their outlook on reality, we will get a figure somewhat as follows:

Plasticity -------- Harmony
|
Ritual
(under which comes dancing)
Painting Drama
Sculpture Literature
Architecture Music

Unless we do construct such a scheme in our minds, we can have no clear conception of what art is. For no other human concept has been so badly handled and blunderingly misunderstood as has this concept of art; and by none more than by the æstheticians. One is almost tempted to retort to the followers of Croce, who declare that all art is a pure abstract intuition of the artist, a reality apart from physical fact, that, on the contrary, art as an abstract concept has no reality, and that there is no such thing as art, there are only arts, each being a synthesis of certain aspects of objective reality. Art synthesises reality, as science analyses it; and the synthesis alters in outlook whether we see it from the aspect of time (which in the arts is music and corresponds to pure mathematics in the sciences) or from the aspect of space (which in the arts is architecture and corresponds to physics in the sciences). Which of the arts we take as more fundamental or important than any other depends, after all, on the quality of our psychological outlook, not on the degree of our æsthetic appreciation. There can be no doubt that in an ordered state, the arts progress from the space organisation of architecture to the time organisation of music; just as in a disordered state, the fact that all the arts tend towards music is taken by æsthetic theorists to mean that music is the greatest of all arts.

It is interesting to attempt some application of this classification to the phenomena we have been discussing, of Russia and America. In these countries the art of ritual, which we have set at the summit of our pyramid, inasmuch as it contains elements of all the other arts and depends on them all for its own existence, stood at opposing poles from the very outset. There can be no two types of religious service more opposed in essence than the Orthodox Russian communion service and the Congregational, Methodist or Baptist “Sunday meeting.” The one culminates in the invisible priest’s taking of the sacrament behind the closed and veiled iconostasis, while the congregation without humbly wait on their knees; the other, culminating in sermon and offertory, is an act taken part in by the whole congregation, to whose willingness the minister is entirely subsidiary. How far these two types of ritual have affected the arts of America and Russia is a question that only future manuals of æsthetics can settle. For the need of the moment is an æsthetic based on fruitful psychological principles, and not a purely theoretic æsthetic such as Croce offers us. But for this we may have to wait for another century.

Neither America nor Russia has been able to express to the full their native genius; they could only have done so had the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars been followed by a complete collapse of Europe. But it is probable that the direction of the American genius lies towards architecture, sculpture, and painting; the direction of the Russian genius lies towards drama, literature and music. Thus does art attempt to redress the balance which the social organisation overweights in the opposing direction. For the American continually tends to disintegrate, to be individualised, to evade the centre; while the Russian continually tends to reintegrate, to become centralised and feel the appeal of the universal. Art, seeking for a strongly-opposed principle of spiritual unity in each case, in America finds a plastic motive in organised space-architecture; in Russia it finds a dynamic motive in the harmonic time-rhythm of folk-song. Anyone who has seen an American skyscraper or who has heard a well-trained Russian choir sing, will realise more fully than my words can tell him the implications of this statement.

The most characteristic new American contribution to art is probably the recessed skyscraper, of which an archetype was already produced before the white man saw the American continent, by the Pueblo Indians. The most characteristic new Russian contribution to art is probably the ballet, a mingling of movement and song, of which the archetype was to be found in the fairs and local feast days of old Russia. In both countries the connection between the arts, and notably between literature and painting, is closer than elsewhere. A Tolstoy could justify the increasing ethical tone of his art by an appeal to the practice of such painters as Jules Breton or Defregger; a Whistler could defend the increasing æstheticism of his by a passionate appeal to what is essentially literature and poetry. Neither country has arrived at the extreme limit of sophisticated culture to be found in Europe, with its chatter of vapid specialists.

4

When America and Russia started on their course as independent entities--which process beginning about 1688, only reached its consummation in a century--the style of architecture which prevailed in both countries was remotely akin. The Russian style had previously been the Byzantine as modified by Levantine and Swedish influences. The American style, if we omit the Mayas, began as the colonial baroque, as developed by the architects who followed Sir Christopher Wren. Peter the Great, however, built his new capital in the baroque style, the style of Versailles and The Hague, and his influence contributed towards the relegation of Byzantine influence to the hinterland. It is this link of Baroque architecture that bridges a great gap between the mind of Russia and that of America.

Baroque architecture has been called by an English critic the “architecture of Humanism.” It might equally be called the architecture of absolutism. For its leading æsthetic aim, which was, in the words of the same critic, to convey a sense of overflowing and exuberant strength, might be used, and in fact was used by two widely different political parties. It might convey a sense of overflowing and exuberant strength on the part of an oligarchical but popular republic, as in the case of the Salute at Venice; of a dramatic but popular creed, as in the case of the Church of St. Peter’s; of a corrupt but prosperous administration as in the case of the houses of the great Whigs who ruled England. Or it might convey monastic seclusion, absolute obedience, complete autocracy, as in the case of the Jesuit churches, the Escorial Palace, or Louis XIV’s palace at Versailles.

The later classical revival under the Empire, too, was double-sided. It might signify the sternness of unbending republicanism, or the dictatorship of Cæsarism. It was the former aspect that appealed to America; the classic there quickly overbore the baroque, and has persisted down to this day. On the other hand, the craze for baroque ornament and decoration persisted in Russia down to the time of the Great War. The early stage sets for the Russian ballet, notably the work of Benois and Bakst, are its last expression.

If we pass from architecture to painting, we get another set of contrasts. The ideal of Russian painting up to the close of the nineteenth century seems to have been the great historical panorama (Repin, Vereshchagin). On the other hand, the ideal of American painting has been since the days of Stuart, the portrait. Here we have again the contrasted principles of anarchic autocracy and republican individualisation that we find elsewhere. That neither Russian nor American painting amounted to much proves nothing, nor can we gain a point by saying that neither was highly aware of what was going on in Europe. American painters proved themselves to be good characterisers, but bad decorators; Russian artists had the will and desire to execute great decoration, but character was beyond their grasp. Similarly Russian sculpture tends to the eccentric, the unbalanced; American to the static and commonplace.

The contrast is still more marked when we come to the art of literature. Throughout Russian literature the noblest character is frequently shown as doing the weakest and most ignoble things. American fiction, on the other hand, tends to exalt the ignoble, to give the most dignified actions to the character one would suppose least capable of them. This will appear more fully in the later analysis.

In drama the taste of the American public has always been for melodramatic situations and broad handling; in Russia for inconclusive and complex situations and subtle handling. One need only compare the spectacular heaviness of the later O’Neill plays with the extreme subtlety of Tchekhov.

To conclude with the art of music, we may say that in America the composer has tended to construct well, but to characterise poorly; in Russia to construct badly but to characterise well. All these differences in art-practice arise from the fact that in both countries the system of society is greater than the will of any individual to support it. But the system itself in Russia is autocratic, centralised, bureaucratically ordered; therefore the individual who revolts from it, revolts upon impulse. He is instinctively an anarchist; his protest is of the heart, not the reason. The system in America is anarchic, decentralised, dependent solely on individual enterprise; therefore the individual who revolts, acts upon reflection, he is intellectually and spiritually an aristocrat (even when he calls himself a radical), his protest is one of reason and commonsense humanity. Thus we see that art in both countries exists not as an expression of tradition, but as a protest against a political and social tradition that is felt in some way hostile to life. For this reason art in both countries is in essence revolutionary; it does not aim at correcting and changing tradition so much as destroying it.