That the United States of America is young is a truism which needs no stating, and unfortunately its youth is hopelessly fettered in the strings of tradition.
Ferrero says that aesthetic taste in America shows itself in bathrooms; and certainly in plumbing we do seem to have a taste above that of the rest of the world. In other things America fears originality and change far more even than England does. Miss Columbia is a bright girl, sitting in a schoolroom, with well-worn editions of the English classics on the book-shelves. Miss Columbia writes verses and stories following the most approved models; she succeeds rather well, but, after all, they are only school essays. It seems impossible for Americans to have the courage to admit that Life is as they see it. Hence the shallow and frivolous optimism which hangs like an obscuring fog over practically all our writing. It would be a convention were it not that we think we believe it; it would be a conviction only that we never look at it close enough to test it. The vogue, a year or two ago, of Mr. Robert Haven Schauffler’s Scum o’ the Earth is a case in point. It deals with the problem of immigration, not as it is, but as it might be if it were. The poem is imitative as art, and false as life, but it flatters an existing condition, and paints a sore to represent healthy flesh; wherefore America hails it with content. Americans are afraid of Life, in the Victorian manner. A Catholic said to me, some time ago: “Sex is dirty.” This sacrilege is a thoroughly Victorian sentiment, but sex alone does not come under the ban; pain, squalor, and, above all, the fact that virtue and effort frequently go unrewarded, are facts to which, in America, one must shut one’s eyes. Miss Columbia is very young, and her gold must be minted before she recognizes it; in the matrix it looks insignificant to her inexperienced eyes.
Style is not manner, but personality. And the fact that our poets and story writers keep to the old forms and expressions proves (does it not?) that they have no inward urging which makes them find old molds too cramping.
In a play of George Cohan’s, Broadway Jones, you have the best of middle-class America—its good points and its limitations. Perhaps this is even better brought out in his other play, Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford. “Crude,” you say; “childish!” Quite true, but entirely and absolutely America. For the United States is governed by the Great God: Mediocrity! The middle-class, or, as we call him, “the man in the street,” rules. Neither the gaunt simplicities of the lower class (although we talk a great deal about the lower class), nor the simplicities of the educated and intellectually alert, can leaven the lump of self-satisfied commonplaceness. Not only don’t we know, but we don’t want to know. An American writer, who had lived in Europe long enough to forget the peculiar American temper, was sufficiently ingenuous as to propose to the editor of one of our best-known magazines a series of three articles on six contemporary French poets. They were refused, because his clientèle did not care to read of things of which they knew nothing. “They will know less than I,” said the editor, “and I have only heard of two of these names.”
We are a little better off as regards our musical taste, because music is a universal language, and we can hear music in the “original,” so to say. In music, again, our output is more in accordance with the spirit of the whole world.
This does not mean that there are not good writers in America. There are. But most of them write “dans le goût d’avant-hier.” I am only telling you that Miss Columbia is in her artistic ’teens, and is as unimaginatively conventional as is the human animal at the same age. And, again like the human animal, she was not so childish when she was a baby. Paul Revere, riding across the Middlesex Fells to rouse the minute men, was like any adult man on a job which he shrewdly suspects will change the fate of nations. Poe and Whitman were not exactly childish. But were Poe writing today, he would be told that his subjects were “unimportant” and that he “lacked social consciousness.” For we in America are suffering from a pathological outlook on the world. Our activities function along the line of preventive medicine for communities. The richness and variety of personality is lost sight of in the lump. We forget that admirable truth set forth in the poem beginning “Little drops of water.”
And then, too, poor America is so many different kinds of persons and places. What we are going to be lies on the lap of the Gods. But it seems quite clear that, whatever it is, it will not be Anglo-Saxon.
Go to any vaudeville theatre and you will see Americans “turkey-trotting” to an intricately syncopated music we have dubbed “rag-time.” No European can dance it with just that zip and swing. It is a purely American thing. Stop a minute! Do you realize that this is America’s first original contribution to the arts! Low or high, that is not the point; it is America’s own product, and for that reason I regret to see the tango superseding it, although the tango is a better dance. I am told by those who know, that dancing is the first art practised by primitive peoples. I believe that in our “turkey-trotting” and “rag-time” we have the earliest artistic gropings of a new race. Our musicians scorn “rag-time,” and it takes the clear eye of a Frenchman to see its interest. Debussy has seen it in his Minstrels.
Amy Lowell.