You are a play-goer: do you believe the newspaper dramatic critics? You are a student of literature: do you accept the mouthings of their literary critics or even look to them for advice? You are an artist or a lover of art: do you follow the newspapers for anything more than the barest intelligence as to the whereabouts of anything artistic? I doubt it. And in regard to politics, finance, social movements and social affairs, are they not actually the darkest, the most misrepresentative, frequently the most biased and malicious guides in the world of the printed word? Newspaper criticism, like newspaper leadership, has long since come to be looked upon by the informed and intelligent as little more than the mouthings or bellowings of mercenaries or panderers to trade; or, worse still, rank incompetents. The newspaper man, per se, either does not know or cannot help himself. The newspaper publisher is very glad of this and uses his half intelligence or inability to further his own interests. Politicians, administrations, department stores, large interests and personalities of various kinds use or control or compel newspapers to do their bidding. This is a severe indictment to make against the press in general, but is it not literally true?
Take again the large, almost dominant religious and commercial organizations of America. What relationship, if any, do they bear to a free mental development, a subtle understanding, art or life in its poetic or tragic moulds, its drift, its character? Would you personally look to the Methodist or the Presbyterian or the Catholic or the Baptist church to further individualism, or freedom of thought, or directness of mental action, or art in any form? Do not they really ask of all their adherents that they lay aside this freedom in favor of the reported word or dictum of a fabled, a non-historic, an imaginary ruler of the universe? Think of it! And they are among the powerful, constructive and controlling elements in government—in this government, to be accurate—dedicated and presumably devoted to individual liberty, not only of so-called conscience, but of constructive thought and art.
And our large corporations, with their dominant and controlling captains of industry so-called; what about their relationship to individuality, the freedom of the individual to think for himself, to grow mentally? Take, for instance, the tobacco trust, the oil trust, the milk trust, the coal trust—in what way do you suppose they help? Are they actively seeking a better code of ethics, a wider historic or philosophic perspective, a more delicate art perception for the individual, or are they definitely and permanently concerned with the customary bludgeoning tactics of trade, piling up fortunes out of which they are to be partially bled later by pseudo art collectors and swindling dealers in antiques and so-called historic art and literature? Of current life and its accomplishments, what do they actually know? Yet this is a democracy. Here, as in no other realm of the world, the individual is supposed to be permitted, even compelled, to seek his own material and mental salvation as best he may. Yet one trouble with a democracy, in so far as art and individual intelligence is concerned, as opposed to an autocracy with a line of titled idlers, is that the latter permits at least the gift of leisure and art indulgence to a few and there usually is a central force or group to foster art, to secure letters and art in their inalienable rights, to make of superior thought a noble and a sacred thing. I am not saying that democracy will not yet produce such a central force or group. I believe it may or can. It is entirely possible that when the time arrives it may prove to be better than any form of hereditary autocracy. But I am talking about the mental, the social, the artistic condition of America as it is to-day.
To me it is a thing for laughter, if not for tears; one hundred and twenty million Americans, rich (a fair percentage of them, anyhow) beyond the dreams of avarice, and scarcely a sculptor, a poet, a singer, a novelist, an actor, a musician, worthy the name. One hundred and forty years (almost two hundred, counting the Colonial days) of the most prosperous social conditions, a rich soil, incalculable deposits of gold, silver and precious and useful metals and fuels of all kinds, a land amazing in its mountains, its streams, its valley prospects, its wealth-yielding powers, and now its tremendous cities and far-flung facilities for travel and trade—and yet contemplate it. Artists, poets, thinkers, where are they? Has it produced a single philosopher of the first rank—a Spencer, a Nietzsche, a Schopenhauer, a Kant? Do I hear some one offering Emerson as an equivalent? Or James? Has it produced a historian of the force of either Macaulay or Grote or Gibbon? A novelist of the rank of Turgenev, de Maupassant or Flaubert? A scientist of the standing of Crookes or Röentgen or Pasteur? A critic of the insight and force of Taine, Sainte-Beuve or the de Goncourts? A dramatist the equivalent of Ibsen, Chekhov, Shaw, Hauptmann, Brieux? An actor, since Booth, of the force of Coquelin, Sonnenthal, Forbes-Robertson or Sarah Bernhardt? Since Whitman, one poet: Edgar Lee Masters. In painting a Whistler, an Inness, a Sargent. Who else? (And two of these shook the dust of our shores forever.) Inventors, yes; by the hundreds, one might almost say thousands; some of them amazing enough, in all conscience, world figures, and enduring for all time. But of what relationship to art, the supreme freedom of the mind?
The most significant, and to me discouraging, manifestation in connection with the United States to-day is the tendency to even narrower and more puritanic standards than have obtained in the past. I am constantly astonished by the thousands of men, exceedingly capable in some mechanical or narrow technical sense, whose world or philosophic vision is that of a child. As a nation we accept and believe naïvely in such impossible things. I am not thinking alone of the primary tenets of all religions, which are manifestly based on nothing at all and which millions of Americans, along with the humbler classes of other countries, accept, but rather of those sterner truths which life itself teaches: the unreliability of human nature; the crass chance which strikes down and destroys our finest dreams; the fact that man in all his relations is neither good nor evil, but both. The American, by some hocus pocus of atavism, has seemingly borrowed or retained from English lower middle-class puritans all their folderol notions about making human nature perfect by fiat or edict—the written word, as it were, which goes with all religions. So, although by reason of the coarsest and most brutal methods we as a nation have built up one of the most interesting and domineering oligarchies in the world, we are still not aware of the fact.
All men, in the mind of the unthinking American, are still free and equal. They have in themselves certain inalienable rights; what they are when you come to test them no human being can discover. Life here, as elsewhere, comes down to the brutal methods of Nature itself. The rich strike the poor at every turn; the poor defend themselves and further their lives by all the tricks which stark necessity can conceive. No inalienable right keeps the average cost of living from rising steadily, while most of the salaries of our idealistic Americans are stationary. No inalienable right has ever yet prevented the strong from tricking or browbeating the weak. And although by degrees the average American is feeling more and more keenly the sharpening struggle for existence, yet his faith in his impossible ideals is as fresh as ever. God will save the good American and seat him at His right hand on the Golden Throne.
With one hand the naïve American takes and executes with all the brutal insistence of Nature itself; with the other he writes glowing platitudes concerning brotherly love, virtue, purity, truth, etc., etc. A part of this right or left hand tendency, as the case may be, is seen in the constant desire of the American to reform something. No country in the world, not even England, the mother of folderol reforms, is so prolific in these frail ventures as this great country of ours. In turn we have had campaigns for the reform of the atheist, the drunkard, the lecher, the fallen woman, the buccaneer financier, the drug fiend, the dancer, the theatergoer, the reader of novels, the wearer of low-neck dresses and surplus jewelry—in fact every taste and frivolity, wherever sporadically it has chanced to manifest itself with any interesting human force. Your reformer’s idea is that any human being, to be a successful one, must be a pale spindling sprout, incapable of any vice or crime. And all the while the threshing sea of life is sounding in his ears! The thief, the lecher, the drunkard, the fallen woman, the greedy, the inordinately vain, as in all ages past, pass by his door and are not the whit less numerous for the unending campaigns which have been launched to save them. In other words, human nature is human nature, but your American cannot be made to believe it.
Personally my quarrel is with America’s quarrel with original thought. It is so painful to me to see one after another of our alleged reformers tilting Don Quixote-like at the giant windmills of fact. We are to have no pictures which the puritan and the narrow, animated by an obsolete dogma, cannot approve of. We are to have no theaters, no motion pictures, no books, no public exhibitions of any kind, no speech even, which will in any way contravene his limited view of life. Finally we even contrived a President who was to have no more war! A few years ago it was the humble dealer in liquor whose life was anathematized and whose property was descended upon with torch, axe and bomb. A little later, our cities growing and the sections devoted to the worship of Venus becoming more manifest, the Vice Crusader was bred, and we now have the spectacle of whole areas of fallen women scattered to the four winds and allowed to practice separately what they cannot do collectively. Also came Mr. Comstock, vindictive, persistent, and with a nose and taste for the profane and erotic such as elsewhere has not been equaled since. Pictures, books, the theater, the dance, the studio—all came under his watchful eye. During the twenty or thirty years in which he acted as a United States Postoffice Inspector he was, because of his dull charging against things which he did not understand, never out of the white light of publicity which he so greatly craved. One month it would be a novel by d’Annunzio; another, a set of works by Balzac or de Maupassant, found in the shade of some grovelly bookseller’s shop; the humble photographer attempting a nude; the painter who allowed his reverence for Raphael to carry him too far; the poet who attempted a recrudescence of Don Juan in modern iambics, was immediately seized upon and hauled before an equally dull magistrate, there to be charged with his offense and to be fined accordingly. All this is being continued with emphasis.
Then came the day of the armed White Slave Chasers, and now no American city and no backwoods Four Corners, however humble, is complete without a vice commission of some kind, or at least a local agent or representative charged with the duty of keeping the art, the literature, the press and the private lives of all those at hand up to that standard of perfection which only the dull can set for themselves. When the White Slave question was at its whitest heat the problem of giving expression to its fundamental aspects was divided between raiding plays which attempted to show the character of the crime in too graphic a manner, and licensing those which appealed to the intelligence of those who were foremost in the crusade. Thus we had the spectacle of an uncensored, but nevertheless approved, ten-reel film showing more details of the crime and better methods of securing white slaves than any other production of the day, running undisturbed to packed houses all over the country; while two somewhat more dramatic but far less effective distributors of information via plays were successfully harried from city to city and finally withdrawn.
Shakespeare has been ordered from the schools in some of the States. A production of “Antony and Cleopatra” has been raided in Chicago. Japanese prints of a high art value, intended for the seclusion of a private collection, have been seized and the most valuable of them destroyed. By turns, an artistic fountain to Heine in New York, loan exhibits of paintings in Denver, Kansas City and elsewhere, scores of books by Stevenson, James Lane Allen, Frances H. Burnett, have been attacked, not only, as in the case of the latter, with the airy weapons of the law, but in the case of the former with actual axes. A male dancer of repute and some artistic ability has been raided publicly by the Vice Crusaders for his shameless exposure of his person! No play, no picture, no book, no public or private jubilation of any kind is complete any more without its vice attack.