I
Moral earnestness? I use both words gladly, and without apology. Why should any one fear that two words so packed with meaning should breed ennui?
A curious fact about our contemporary criticism of art and literature is this: that a criticism which constantly declares itself to be courageous in all ways, and which really has proved itself to be courageous in many ways, often scurries away affrighted the moment it grazes the word moral. But why? Does it fear the lash of epithets such as Pharisee, Philistine, Victorian? The sting has long ago gone out of those hard names.
Over and over again, the critic will aim some well-considered attack upon a certain specified baseness that he perceives and abhors in literature or in art; and then, before he finishes his good work, (and you can see from his look that he believes it to be good work) he suddenly decamps, with the observation, “But this is not in the least a question of morals; it is a question of artistic taste.” Sometimes his reader cannot help thinking, by contrast, of that quick word of the old Greek dramatist, protesting against some of the lewd myths of his religion,
“Say not there be adulterers in heaven,
Nor prisoner gods and jailers:—long ago
My heart hath named it vile and shall not alter!”
If someone nowadays should speak like that, might it not clear the air? I mean, some valued critic of our arts and letters. As it is, we of today leave such work to the censor. And our democracy, avid for class distinctions, accounts the censor considerably lower than the angels. The censor, poor soul, might as well slink at once into the society of the executioner, that most dejected, most rejected figure in history. When the censor says, in his own way, “My heart hath named it vile,” nobody pays much attention. But the world might look up if some urbane and trusted critic would write with the moral earnestness of Euripides, dodging nothing. Kenyon Cox used to do so.
What I am driving at is this: Without moral earnestness, (very probably the French would call it seriousness) art cannot prosper in a strange country, under unnative sky. There would be no foundation for laying the cornerstones of art, let alone for building its high-erected arches. It is a solemn thought, is it not, that American sculptors are today placing their creations on soil that never before was moulded into forms of vivid art such as the Old World knew in the dawn of human culture? For with due regard to our ancient Aztec civilization from Zuñi to Cuzco, our pre-historic New World has nothing to show in any way comparable with those free forms sketched twenty thousand years ago on the walls of the paleolithic caverns in Southwestern Europe, in the very regions where the nineteenth century masters of sculpture were born. To this day, American artists have all the responsibility that comes with the beginnings and transplantings of culture. They are ancestors.