III
For a long time, and without conspicuous success, Mr. Howells tried to show his friends the beauty of Russian realism. Apparently much of the American appreciation that did not go out to Turgenev was being saved for Chekhov, and for those later realists whose writings chime with the discords and disillusions of the “expressionism” now making itself felt in various arts. Both here and in England, the Russian influence is visible in literature. But sculpture is slower than literature to accept the exotic; sculpture’s magisterial weight and bulk, and its supposed permanence, help to make it more self-contained and less mercurial in its reactions. And indeed all the Russian influence our sculpture has hitherto met has been of the Gallic variety; Troubetskoy’s brilliant pleinairiste modeling is as French as Marie Bashkirtseff’s painting. Meanwhile, Russian peasant drama is having its brightly colored successes here, in our richest of American cities, especially among those of our intelligentsia who can afford the price of admission, or who as critics make their living by appraising novelties in art. Since American criticism is often created by youth and for youth, its various impregnable positions shift with a rapidity that has a certain advantage for a listening public; no one who is guided by a youthful Mentor needs to remain long in any one error. But Heaven forbid that youth, and most of all opinion-shaping youth, should abandon a generosity of outlook toward foreign products of the mind!
To speak seriously, it will be interesting to know just how the increasing Slavic element in our population will influence our country’s arts in general, and our self-contained art of sculpture in particular. When a teacher of art remarks, in some dubiety, “So many of our students have names that end in ‘sky’,” the only gallant retort is, “It is our business to be sure that they make no worse end than that.” Not the least of art’s problems here in America is that universal American problem of the unassimilated alien. Optimists and pessimists can unite in one opinion; that our latest immigrants, no less than those of the Mayflower, have certain native qualities that need alteration for the benefit of the human race. The Puritan has altered for the better. Later comers must do likewise. Some of these have a far harder task than the Puritans, with less ability to perform it; but they have infinitely more help.
Mr. John Corbin, in one of his penetrating studies of dramatic art, has pointed out “two stages of American provincialism.” One stage rejects all foreign culture; the other embraces anything foreign, provided that it is abundantly subversive of domestic ideals and labors and attainments. Both stages are hostile to truth and to progress, and to the only freedom there is, freedom of the spirit. The first type wilfully stunts growth; the second invites destruction of growth already accomplished by costly effort. Surely American sculpture, which has borrowed eagerly abroad and developed soundly at home, should not fall into either of these degenerate modes of thinking.
“Quid quisque vitet,” says Horace, with his canny Roman philosophy,—“What hourly to avoid is known by none.” What hourly to accept is our modern question. Since a man’s foes may be of his own household, what if our own home-grown materialism were after all the worst enemy of our art? It will do little good to fly feverish alien contacts if at the same time things of the spirit are allowed to languish at our own ancestral firesides. Sometimes the firesides themselves seem less frequent, as ancestors diminish in the world’s esteem. True, our tawdry and vehement self-advertising has its magnificent dreams, and our childlike faith in the dollar its occasional glorious hour of justification; we cannot help seeing that some of our transatlantic co-workers in art and letters come among us remembering those things. And it is a healing principle of civilization that we shall borrow our light from one land, and divide our loaf with another; even though loaves are wasted thereby. Every lover of our country will wish its culture to remain at once hospitable and self-respecting; both characteristics may dwell harmoniously together.
In spite of superficial indications such as those offered by the names in a city telephone directory, the core and nucleus of general culture in the United States remains English-speaking; more, it remains true to ideals of human conduct and human responsibility that have been fruitfully developed and cherished by the English-speaking peoples. Whatever lightly-accepted beliefs there may be in regard to this matter, I am persuaded that the broad basis of American culture is and will be our Puritanism. Not the narrow, mote-seeking Puritanism of past story, but an enlightened, liberating Puritanism, with perceptions and pardons for others, and with questionings as to its own supposed superiorities; a Puritanism that has gained in grace and goodness through native development and happy alien contacts. How often we have mumbled an ancient shibboleth to the effect that art and morality have nothing in common! On the contrary, they have the one supreme aspiration of human beings in common; the benefit of the race. It is the little artist who proclaims himself different from other men, and so not subject to their laws; the great artist strives to bring his personality and his work into harmony with the best that he knows of human effort. Magnanimous men and women unconsciously reveal their longing that their work may live after them for the happiness of mankind. Ward on his death-bed, finally assured that all is well with the great equestrian that had engaged his last thoughts, whispers to his wife, “Now I can go in peace.” Saint-Gaudens in the later pages of his Memoirs writes of the knowledge of the beautiful: “I know it is a question whether such a knowledge increases the general happiness and morality of a community. I firmly believe it does, as I believe that any effort to do a thing as well as it can be done, regardless of mercenary motives, tends to the elevation of the human mind.”
VICTORY
BY AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS
THE GILLISS PRESS