We have our affections, in all this, for the fragmentary and ugly as for the abrupt small hideousness—oddly akin to virility—of gargoyles. We have our affections, too, for the rawest of our very raw realisms—for the maddest of our colourisms, the most idiosyncratic subtleties of our first introspectionists. Do we hesitate a little to ask something more of any of the poets whom we thus designate? What we fear is that in attempting to give us our something more, they will give us something less. What we want more of, what we see our contemporary poets as for the most part sadly deficient in, is “art.” What we are afraid they will lose, if we urge them in this direction, is their young sharp brilliance. Urge them, however, we must. What our poets need most to learn is that poetry is not merely a matter of outpouring, of confession. It must be serious: it must be, if simple in appearance, none the less highly wrought: it must be packed. It must be beautifully elaborate rather than elaborately beautiful. It must be detached from dogma—we must keep it away from the all too prevalent lecture platform.
What we should like to see, in short, is a fusion, of the extraordinary range of poetic virtues with which our contemporary poets confront us, into one poetic consciousness. Do we cavil too much in assuming that no one of our poets offers us quite enough? Should we rather take comfort in the hope that many of their individual “personalities” are vivid enough to offset their onesidedness, and in that way to have a considerable guarantee of survival? We have mentioned that possibility before, and certainly it cannot be flatly dismissed. But I think it cannot be contested that many of these poets already feel, themselves, a sharper responsibility, a need for a greater comprehensiveness, for a finer and richer tactile equipment, a steadier view of what it is that constitutes beauty of form. They are immeasurably distant from any dry, cold perfectionism, however; and if we cheer them in taking the path that leads thither, it is in the hope of seeing them reach the halfway house rather than the summit. For to go all the way is to arrive exhausted; to go half way is to arrive with vigour.... That, however, is to interpose our own view and to lose our detachment. We return to a reiteration of our conclusion that American poetry is at the moment extraordinarily healthy. Its virtues are the virtues of all good poetry, and they are sufficient to persuade us that the future of English poetry lies as much in America as in England. Its faults are the faults of a culture that is immature. But again, we reiterate that we have here many cultures, and if some are immature, some are not. Let those who are too prone to diagnose us culturally from “Spoon River Anthology” or “Smoke and Steel” keep in mind also Mr. Robinson’s “Merlin” and Mr. Frost’s “North of Boston”; Mr. Fletcher’s “Goblins and Pagodas” and Miss Lowell’s “Can Grande’s Castle.”
Conrad Aiken
ART
The problem of American Art is unlike that of any other country of the present or the past. We have not here the racial and historical foundation on which, until now, every art has been built and so our striving (it is far too soon to speak of success or failure) must be judged from another standpoint than the one to be taken in viewing an art that originates with its people or is directly transmitted from an older race. Egypt and ancient Mexico furnish examples of the first case, Italy and France of the second. When the latter countries were colonized by the Greeks, Phœnicians and others, they received a culture which could take on fresh vigour when grasped by a new race.
We did not start as a new race, but as Europeans possessing the same intellectual heritage as the men who stayed in the parent countries. Our problem was not one of receiving the ancient tradition from an invading or colonizing people who brought with them an art already formed. Ourselves the invaders and colonizers, our problem was to keep alive the ideas that we had had in Europe, or to take over those of our new home, or to evolve an art of our own.
To begin with the second possibility, the question of our relation to the ideas of the Indians may obviously be disposed of very briefly. The tribes encountered by the early settlers were in a state of savagery, and this fact, together with the constant warfare between the two races, is a sufficient explanation why we find no influence from the red men. Even where the Europeans encountered culture of a very high order, as in Mexico and Peru, the remoteness of the native ideas from those of the invading race prevented for centuries a just appreciation of the earliest and unquestionably the greatest art produced in the Western Hemisphere. It is only in quite recent years that we have realized its merit, and it is unlikely that even our present-day interest in the exotic arts will bring about any important influence from the Indians, although in regions such as our Southwest and the parts of Mexico where “Americanizing” has not yet killed their art-instinct, they are still producing beautiful work.
We have, of course, retained European ideals, but they have been conditioned by circumstances and we have not kept pace with Europe or even followed the course of the great art-movements until they were almost or quite superseded abroad. Our distance from the centres of ancient and modern culture on one hand, and the needs of building up the new continent on the other, combined to make our people lose interest in art, which, indeed, had never found a propitious soil among our British forebears. The case of literature is different. The love of it is an abiding one with the Anglo-Saxon race, and as Shakespeare and the Bible could be read in the frontier cabin almost as well as in London or Dublin, there was not the loss of knowledge of literature, the break in the production of it that we find in the case of the plastic arts.
It is easy to exaggerate on this score, however, forgetting that the art-instinct accumulated in a race for centuries is not to be lost by a period of neglect. When he goes to the museum, the American recognizes the same masters as does the European, but the smaller opportunity here to know the classic past has the double effect of keeping art-lovers in America in a far more reduced minority and at the same time of weakening the authority of tradition.
Not to speak of 17th or 18th century conditions, nor even of those of the 19th century, one need only consider the America of to-day to realize how little opportunity our people has to know art. In all but a few cities, Americans can learn only from reproductions and books, though even these are an immeasurably safer guide than the bad original works which are usually the first to arrive. When one thinks of the European countryside and the numberless small towns of all the old countries where there is no museum, one may be tempted to ask whether art conditions are so very different there. But they are different. There will be an old church, or some houses of a good period, or some objects in the houses, or—on the walls of the inn—some old prints handing on the tradition of the great religious pictures (such things were made quite commonly until recent times and have not entirely ceased to be produced); a tradition of construction and of colour makes the modern houses fit in quite acceptably with those of the past. The centuries have built up a sense of fitness and beauty in the making and wearing of costume; there will be some form of folk-singing or other collective action of an artistic character, and thus the exceptional individual, born with a strong instinct toward art, has surroundings and a foundation that are lacking here. A striking proof of the difference between the two continents is the effect of the war on art-interest: whereas in America public attention has been turned away from art to a most marked degree, Europe is producing and buying art with a fervour that can only be explained by the desire to get back to essentials after the years in which people were deprived of them.