Really you are too naive. They are merely reacting to the American atmosphere—It is their work that counts. And besides a virtuoso is not really creative in any serious sense. Would a great artist, say Kandinsky—? In any case it all seems to preoccupy you so, and in a book about America, really—
Take their work. I resent it all. I hate every symphony, every opera as much as a nigger should hate Il Trovatore. Not perhaps hate it in a purely aesthetic sense but from under. It is an impertinence. Where in God's name is our Alexander to cut, cut, cut, through this knot.
Europe is nothing to us. Simply nothing. Their music is death to us. We are starving—not dying—not dying mind you—but lean-bellied for words. God I would like to see some man, some one of the singers step out in the midst of some one of Aida's songs and scream like a puma.
But you poor fellow, you use such inept figures. Aida has been dead artistically in Munich for fifty years.
Wagner then—Strauss. It is no difference to me. Tear it all apart. Start with one note. One word. Chant it over and over forty different ways.
But it would be stupid—
It would, if it were what I mean—it would be accurate. It would articulate with something. It would signify relief. Release I mean. It would be the beginning.
Do not imagine I do not see the necessity of learning from Europe—or China but we will learn what we will, and never what they would teach us. America is a mass of pulp, a jelly, a sensitive plate ready to take whatever print you want to put on it—We have no art, no manners, no intellect—we have nothing. We water at the eyes at our own stupidity. We have only mass movement like a sea. But we are not a sea—
Europe we must—We have no words. Every word we get must be broken off from the European mass. Every word we get placed over again by some delicate hand. Piece by piece we must loosen what we want. What we will have. Will they let it go? Hugh.
I touch the words and they baffle me. I turn them over in my mind and look at them but they mean little that is clean. They are plastered with muck out of the cities.—