“the immaculate
conception
of the inaudible bird
occurs
in gorgeous reticence.”
Gorgeous reticence is perhaps preferable to gorgeous loquacity.
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.