Civilization in the United States: An inquiry by thirty Americans

by Unknown

Of those others what can we say, those others whose gifts have fitted them to be our leaders? Mr. Howells once observed of the American drama of the last few decades that “mainly it has been gay as our prevalent mood is, mainly it has been honest, as our habit is, in cases where we believe we can afford it.” In this gently ironical pleasantry one seems to discern the true spirit of modern American letters. But it was Howells himself who, in order to arrive at the doctrine that “the more smiling aspects of life are the more American,” deliberately, as he has told us, and professed realist that he was, averted his eyes from the darker side of life. And Mark Twain suppressed his real beliefs about man and the universe. And Henry Adams refused to sponsor in public the novels that revealed what he considered to be the truth about American society. Thus spake Zarathustra: “There is no harsher misfortune in all the fate of man than when the mighty ones of earth are not also the most excellent.” At its very headwaters, as we see, this modern literature of ours has failed to flow clear: the creative impulse in these men, richly endowed as they were, was checked and compromised by too many other impulses, social and commercial. If one is to blame anything for this it is the immense insecurity of our life, which is due to its chaotic nature; for one is not entitled to expect greatness even of those who have the greatest gifts, and of these men Henry Adams was alone secure; of Howells and Mark Twain, Westerners as they were, it may be said that they were obliged to compromise, consciously or unconsciously, in order to gain a foothold in the only corner of the country where men could exist as writers at all. But if these men were unable to establish their independence (one has only to recall the notorious Gorky dinner in order to perceive the full ignominy of their position), what must one expect to find in the rank and file? Great men form a sort of wind shield behind which the rest of their profession are able to build up their own defences; they establish a right of way for the others; they command a respect for their profession, they arouse in the public a concern for it, an interest in it, from which the others benefit. As things are, the literary guild in America is not respected, nor does it respect itself. In “My Literary Passions” Howells, after saying that his early reading gave him no standing among other boys, observes: “I have since found that literature gives one no more certain station in the world of men’s activities, either idle or useful. We literary folk try to believe that it does, but that is all nonsense. At every period of life among boys or men we are accepted when they are at leisure and want to be amused, and at best we are tolerated rather than accepted.” Pathetic? Pusillanimous? Abject? Pathetic, I suppose. Imagine Maxim Gorky or Knut Hamsun or Bernard Shaw “trying to believe” that literature gives him a certain station in the world of men’s activities, conceiving for a moment that any activity could exceed his in dignity! Howells, we observe, conscientious craftsman as he was, instinctively shared, in regard to the significance of his vocation, the feeling of our pragmatic philosophers, who have been obliged to justify the intellectual life by showing how useful it is—not to mention Mr. R. W. Chambers, who has remarked that writers “are not held in excessive esteem by really busy people, the general idea being—which is usually true—that literature is a godsend to those unfitted for real work.” After this one can easily understand why our novelists take such pains to be mistaken for business men and succeed so admirably in their effort. One can easily understand why Jack London preferred the glory of his model ranch and his hygienic pigsties to the approval of his artistic conscience.

So much for the conditions, or at least a few of them, that have prevented our literature from getting its head above water. If America is littered with extinct talents, the halt, the maimed and the blind, it is for reasons with which we are all too familiar; and we to whom the creative life is nothing less than the principle of human movement, and its welfare the true sign of human health, look upon this wreckage of everything that is most precious to society and ask ourselves what our fathers meant when they extolled the progress of our civilization. But let us look facts in the face. Mr. Sinclair Lewis asserts that we are in the midst of a revival and that we are too humble in supposing that our contemporary literature is inferior to that of England. That we are in the midst of a revival I have no doubt, but it is the sustained career that makes a literature; without the evidence of this we can hope much but we can affirm nothing. What we can see is that, with all its hope, the morale of the literary profession in this country is just what its antecedents have made it. I am reminded of the observation of a friend who has reason to know, that the Catholic Church in America, great as it is in numbers and organization, still depends on the old world for its models, its task-masters and its inspiration; for the American priest, as a rule, does not feel the vocation as the European feels it. I am reminded of the American labour movement which, prosperous as it is in comparison with the labour movements of Europe, is unparalleled for the feebleness of its representatives. I am reminded of certain brief experiences in the American university world which have led me to believe that the professors who radiate a genuine light and warmth are far more likely to be Russians, Germans, Englishmen, Irishmen, Dutchmen, Swedes and Finns than the children of ’76. That old hostility of the pioneers to the special career still operates to prevent in the American mind the powerful, concentrated pursuit of any non-utilitarian way of life: meanwhile everything else in our society tends to check the growth of the spirit and to shatter the confidence of the individual in himself. Considered with reference to its higher manifestations, life itself has been thus far, in modern America, a failure. Of this the failure of our literature is merely emblematic.

Mr. Mencken, who shares this belief, urges that the only hope of a change for the better lies in the development of a native aristocracy that will stand between the writer and the public, supporting him, appreciating him, forming as it were a cordon sanitaire between the individual and the mob. That no change can come without the development of an aristocracy of some sort, some nucleus of the more gifted, energetic and determined, one can hardly doubt. But how can one expect the emergence of an aristocracy outside of the creative class, and devoted to its welfare, unless and until the creative class itself reveals the sort of pride that can alone attract its ministrations? “The notion that a people can run itself and its affairs anonymously is now well known to be the silliest of absurdities.” Thus William James, in defence of the aristocratic principle; and what he says is as applicable to literature as to every other department of social life. But he continues: “Mankind does nothing save through initiatives on the part of inventors, great and small, and imitation by the rest of us—these are the sole factors alive in human progress. Individuals of genius show the way, and set the patterns, which common people then adopt and follow.” In other words, as I understand it, and so far as literature is concerned, the burden of proof lies on the writer himself—which brings one back to a truism: it is not for the public or any aristocratic minority within the public to understand the writer, it is for the writer to create the taste by which he is understood. Is it not by this indeed (in a measure, at least) that we recognize the creator?

Certainly if our contemporary literature is not respected, if it has not been able to rally to its support the sensitive public that already exists in this country, it is partly because this literature has not respected itself. That there has been every reason for it makes no difference; that it has begun to respect itself again makes no difference either, for when a people has lost confidence in its literature, and has had grounds for losing confidence in it, one cannot be surprised if it insists a little cynically upon being “shown.” The public supported Mark Twain and Howells and the men of their generation, it admired them for what was admirable in them, but it was aware, if only unconsciously, that there was a difference between them and the men of the generation before them; and in consequence of this the whole stock of American literature fell. But those who insist in our day that America prefers European writers to its own, because America is still a colony of Europe, cannot ignore the significant fact that at a time when America was still more truly colonial than it is now American writers had all the prestige in this country that European writers have at present; and it is not entirely because at that time the country was more homogeneous. Poe and Thoreau found little support in the generation of which I speak, as Whitman found little support in the generation that followed it. On the other hand, there were no European writers (and it was an age of great writers in Europe) who were held in higher esteem in this country than Hawthorne, Emerson, Motley, and one or two others almost equally distinguished, as well from a European as from an American point of view; there were few, if any, European writers, in fact, who were esteemed in this country as highly as they. How can one explain it? How can one explain why, at a time when America, in every other department of life, was more distinctly colonial than it is now, American literature commanded the full respect of Americans, while to-day, when the colonial tradition is vanishing all about us, it so little commands their respect that they go after any strange god from England? The problem is not a simple one, but among the many explanations of it one can hardly deny that there were in that period a number of writers of unusual power, who made the most (who were able to make the most) of their power, who followed their artistic conscience (who were able to follow it) and who by this fact built up a public confidence in themselves and in the literature they represented. Does it matter at all whether to-day we enjoy these writers or not? They were men of spiritual force, three or four of them: that is the important point. If the emerging writers of our epoch find themselves handicapped by the scepticism of the public, which has ceased to believe that any good thing can come out of Nazareth, let them remember not only that they are themselves for the most part in the formative stage, but that they have to live down the recent past of their profession.

Meanwhile, what constitutes a literature is the spiritual force of the individuals who compose it. If our literature is ever to be regenerated, therefore, it can only be through the development of a sense of “free will” (and of the responsibility that this entails) on the part of our writers themselves. To be, to feel oneself, a “victim” is in itself not to be an artist, for it is the nature of the artist to live, not in the world of which he is an effect, but in the world of which he is the cause, the world of his own creation. For this reason, the pessimistic determinism of the present age is, from the point of view of literature, of a piece with the optimistic determinism of the age that is passing. What this pessimistic determinism reveals, however, is a consciousness of the situation: to that extent it represents a gain, and one may even say that to be conscious of the situation is half the battle. If we owed nothing else to Mr. Dreiser, for instance, we should owe him enough for the tragic sense of the waste and futility of American life, as we know it, which his books communicate. It remains true that in so far as we resent this life it is a sign of our own weakness, of the harm not only that our civilization has done us but that we have permitted it to do us, of our own imperfectly realized freedom; for to the creative spirit in its free state the external world is merely an impersonal point of departure. Thus it is certain that as long as the American writer shares what James Bryce calls the “mass fatalism” of the American people, our literature will remain the sterile, supine, and inferior phenomenon which, on the whole, it is.

“What we want,” wrote Henry Adams in 1862 to his brother Charles, “is a school. We want a national set of young men like ourselves or better, to start new influences not only in politics, but in literature, in law, in society, and throughout the whole social organism of the country—a national school of our own generation. And that is what America has no power to create.... It’s all random, insulated work, for special and temporary and personal purposes. And we have no means, power or hope of combined action for any unselfish end.” That is what America has no power to create. But can it be said that any nation has ever created a school? Here we have the perfect illustration of that mass fatalism of which I have spoken, and Henry Adams himself, in his passivity, is the type of it. Secure as he was, uniquely secure, why did he refuse to accept the responsibility of those novels in which he expressed the contempt of a powerful and cultivated mind for the meanness, the baseness, the vulgarity of the guiding element in American society? In the darkest and most chaotic hours of our spiritual history the individual has possessed a measure of free will only to renounce it: if Henry Adams had merely signed his work and accepted the consequences of it, he might by that very fact have become the founder, the centre, of the school that he desired. But it is true that in that generation the impulses of youth were, with an extraordinary unanimity, focused upon a single end, the exploitation of the continent; the material opportunities that American life offered were too great and too all-engrossing, and it is unlikely that any considerable minority could have been rallied for any non-utilitarian cause. Sixty years later this school remains, and quite particularly as regards our literature, the one thing necessary; the reforestation of our spiritual territory depends on it. And in more than one sense the times are favourable. The closing of the frontier seems to promise for this country an intenser life than it has known before; a large element of the younger generation, estranged from the present order, exists in a state of ferment that renders it highly susceptible to new ideas; the country literally swarms with half-artists, as one may call them, men and women, that is to say, who have ceased to conform to the law of the tribe but who have not accepted the discipline of their own individual spirits. “What I chiefly desire for you,” wrote Ibsen to Brandes at the outset of his career, “is a genuine, full-blooded egoism, which shall force you for a time to regard what concerns you yourself as the only thing of any consequence, and everything else as non-existent.... There is no way in which you can benefit society more than by coining the metal you have in yourself.” The second half of this rather blunt counsel of perfection is implied in the first, and it connotes a world of things merely to name which would be to throw into relief the essential infantility of the American writer as we know the type. By what prodigies of alert self-adaptation, of discriminating self-scrutiny, of conscious effort does the creative will come into its own! As for us, weak as too many of us are, ignorant, isolated, all too easily satisfied, and scarcely as yet immune from the solicitations of the mob, we still have this advantage, that an age of reaction is an age that stirs the few into a consciousness of themselves.

Van Wyck Brooks

MUSIC

We spend more money upon music than does any other nation on earth; some of our orchestras, notably those of Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia, are worthy to rank among the world’s best; in the Metropolitan Opera House we give performances of grand opera that for consistent excellence of playing, singing, and mise-en-scène are surpassed probably nowhere. Yet there has never been a successful opera by an American offered at that opera house, and the number of viable American orchestral works is small enough to be counted almost upon one’s fingers. We squander millions every year upon an art that we cannot produce.

There are apologists for the American composer who will say that we do produce it, but that it is strangled at birth. According to their stock argument, there are numberless greatly gifted native composers whose works never get a hearing, (a) because Americans are prejudiced against American music and in favour of foreign music, and (b) because the foreigners who largely control the musical situation in this country jealously refuse to allow American works to be performed. This would be impressive if it were consistent or true. As far as concerns the Jealous Foreigner myth—he does not dominate the musical situation—I have never noticed that the average European in this country is deficient either in self-interest or tact. He is generally anxious, if only for diplomatic reasons, to find American music that is worth singing or playing. Even when he fails to find any that is worth performing, he often performs some that isn’t, in order to satisfy local pride. Moreover, Americans are no more prejudiced against American musicians than they are against other kinds. As a matter of fact, if intensive boosting campaigns produced creative artists, the American composer during the past decade should have expanded like a hot-house strawberry. We have had prize contests of all kinds, offering substantial sums for everything from grand operas to string quartettes, we have had societies formed to publish his chamber-music scores; publishers have rushed to print his smaller works; we have had concerts of American compositions; we have had all-American festivals. Meanwhile the American composer has, with a few lonely exceptions, obstinately refused to produce anything above the level of what it would be flattering to call mediocrity.