Reciprocity

I

IN one of his less kindly caricatures, that universal favorite, Mr. Max Beerbohm, pays his respects to the artistic aspirations of the American people. It stings a bit, coming as it does from one to whom we Americans have been unfeignedly attached, but it is in the current English mode of fretting at this country, and, like any other spasm of bad taste, must therefore be understood and pardoned. Moreover, it is undeniably amusing.

The plate to which I refer is found in Things New and Old, and is entitled ‘Reciprocity.’ It represents Brother Jonathan — who, save for certain marks conventional among cartoonists, looks remarkably like John Bull — interviewing a withered beldame arrayed in ermine and rags. She is Dame Europa, who is supposed to have sold the American a large number of packing cases filled with oil paintings. These are labeled Constable, Gainsborough, Manet, Gauguin, Degas, and so on; and the old lady is saying to Jonathan, ‘And now, young man, now that you’ve bought up all my art products, I shall be happy to acquire all yours; and I am willing to pay a generous price.’ ‘Name it, marm,’ he replies. ‘Twopence halfpenny,’says the old lady. Brother Jonathan — continues Mr. Beerbohm — is slightly hurt, but, like a sensible fellow, closes with the offer.

Now it would be preposterous to ask a caricaturist for fair play. We do not expect Mr. Beerbohm to be fair; we only want him to be funny — and Mr. Beerbohm can be as deliciously ridiculous as anybody alive. In this case he did not perhaps realize quite how ridiculous he had been. Let us, as sensible fellows, inquire what the caricaturist means by ‘reciprocity.’ An Englishman seldom admonishes us without having something in mind besides a joke, something, as a rule, which he takes to be an idea. It is for us to strive to find out what the notion is. What, then, in the name of line art and literary history, is meant by reciprocity?

Mr. Beerbohm’s notion seems to be that, when the fine arts are concerned, a nation ought to do business on the principle of barter, and give in return as much as she receives. What a nation acquires by mere purchase can hardly, in any true sense, be considered hers. If she has nothing but her money, nothing with which to repay in kind those from whom she has drawn her ‘art products,’ — as Mr. Beerbohm chooses to call them, — she may as well admit that she is a poor thing, worth, at a generous estimate, 2½d.

Although we must not ask Mr. Beerbohm, when making fun of us, to use his reasoning powers, we, as good Americans and good merchants, may be pardoned for using our own. Indeed, we may feel the need of powers of derision equal to his own when we visit the National Gallery in London and find the paintings of Whistler and Sargent labeled ‘British School’ — an illustration of that acquisitive skill which has made England great among the colonizing nations. Reciprocity, quotha! Whistler and Sargent, it is true, lived long in Europe, a fact which might be cited as reciprocity of a sort; but we are hardly as yet disposed to yield them up to the British School, however much her faded glories may stand in need of them. But even if we leave these two out of the list of modern American painters, there remain Mr. Bellows, Mr. Hassam, Miss Beaux, Mr. Henri, Mr. Benson, and a dozen others whom England might be the better for knowing, and whom, for all that we can tell, she may one day be claiming. Meanwhile she remains contentedly ignorant of Inness in one field and Saint Gaudens in another. No specimen of their work is to be found in English galleries — perhaps because specimens are not to be purchased for twopence halfpenny.

II

But it is useless to recommend your own wares to a satirist who will only find you the bigger fool for taking the pains to do it. Best turn the tables. Well, then, to use his own arguments against Mr. Beerbohm, what evidence can be shown of a fine reciprocity in England? So far as he is concerned, it seems to consist largely of scolding at America for purchasing works of art made in Europe, and this at the very moment when England is opening a new wing at the Tate Gallery to receive pictures by Continental artists — Gauguin, Manet, and Degas among others. A few of Europa’s packing cases labeled with those names seem to be destined for England — to England’s immediate artistic advantage.

And does the current flow at times in the other direction? Does England repay in kind for what she receives from France and the Continent? As inveterate travelers, we Americans demand to know where on the Continent a great collection of British painting is to be found. Just where, that is, are we to go in Italy, France, or Germany, to examine the works of Raeburn, or Wilson, or Burne-Jones, or Augustus John? What impress has British painting left on the artistic life of The Hague or Paris or Budapest? The fact is that on the Continent British painting has not been wanted. It has received such a measure of neglect as our own has received from Great Britain. The chief admirers of British painting outside the island have been found in America.

Reciprocity! It is not in her name that nations can transact their artistic business. To pay in kind as you take from others has been no principle of æsthetics. What British sculpture is worth twopence halfpenny in comparison with the Elgin marbles, which are the proudest possession of the British Museum? Has payment in kind been made for the Italian marbles in the South Kensington Museum? Are Thornycroft, Bacon, Nollekens, Leighton, and G. F. Watts to be offered in exchange for Donatello and Desiderio da Settignano? What possible offering of England to the Continent is to be judged as a fitting return for the French paintings in the Wallace Collection?

Thanks be to Apollo and all the Muses, no nation is compelled to pay her artistic debts. It is comforting to reflect that no nation has ever paid, or can pay, her artistic debt to Greece, or, for that matter, to Venice or to Florence or to Paris, or to any other pulsing centre of artistic life, save by that finest tribute of continuing the tradition. In this realm we might almost reverse the rule of the Gospel, and contend that it is more blessed to receive than to give.

Remembering this, we will not, as Americans, feel hurt by British captiousness. It is conceded, even by Mr. Beerbohm, that Americans are ‘sensible fellows,’ and we may assure him that Jonathan will buy Max’s pictures as fast as they come on the market. If Dame Europa expects to retain any of them, she had better hustle them into museums as fast as ever she can.

III

The doctrine of reciprocity, however, is related to another heresy perhaps equally erroneous. Although one may admit that a nation has an inalienable right to purchase as much of the beauty of the Old World as she finds offered for sale, one may still feel that the only true art of a people is its indigenous product and not the reflection or imitation of that of other nations. When the British grumble over the departure of Gainsborough’s ‘Blue Boy’ from their shores, they are not indignant because we fail to offer them a Stuart or a Saint Gaudens in return, but are, quite naturally, distressed to lose a masterpiece of their national school, the particular lack of which all the treasures of foreign galleries cannot make good.

Why, they ask, cannot a great people be content with their own art, and leave Dame Europa to enjoy her own? Are not Americans tacitly admitting that they have nothing of their own with which they can remain content?

This question Mother England is never tired of asking us, and the question has somehow got very deep under our skin.

‘This art of yours, Jonathan,’ says the old lady, ‘is all very well, but is it yours or an imitation of mine?’

Let Mr. Beerbohm make a cartoon of that! And let him follow it, in one of his incomparable series, with a picture of Jonathan waiting — into the second century — for the great American novel. And then let him show us Jonathan studying the verses of Mr. Vachel Lindsay, in a quandary as to whether that gentleman is sufficiently poetical as well as sufficiently American to be put forward as the typical lyrist of our age and our nation.

Is our art indigenous? Is it ours? This is the suppressed query that is running through most American criticism at the moment.

Mr. Untermeyer, for instance, is very much distressed about the present state of Mr. Lindsay’s poetry. Mr. Untermeyer used to think that Mr. Lindsay’s ‘native urge’ promised fine things. Mr. Lindsay was unabashed, American. His feet were in the road that leads to immortality. But the poet’s latest volume disappoints the critic. It is still sufficiently American, but something is lacking.

Suppose that Mr. Lindsay and his native urge should fail us after all? Suppose, in short, that there were to be no indigenous poetry — none, that is, with any readers? We have an architecture that is all our own. We have given to the world a kind of building, soaring, incredible, American, that serves as an emblem of our very soul. Is it impossible that we should strike out an American poetry that is as incontestably our own?

This notion that the genuine literature is of an indigenous sort is widespread to-day. It is not only in America that the gospel is heard. Long since Ireland led the way in this passionate quest of a national school; and if her prospects of a glorious achievement. in the Irish tongue have grown a little misty, there is still the English vernacular to retire upon. The desire for Home Rule in the poetical realm has spread to Scotland, and it would seem that we are to hear much in future about a Scottish Renaissance. Mr. Edwin Muir, who is one of its prophets, tells us about it in the Saturday Review: —

The idea of a Scottish literary revival was first publicly advanced by Mr. M’Diarmid’s friend and colleague, Mr. C. M. Grieve, about three years ago. It was associated at first in the Scottish Nation, a weekly journal, with a political policy of Home Rule for Scotland. The Scottish Nation was shortlived; the writers whom Mr. Grieve expected to arrive did not appear, and the public was cold. The Scottish Chapbook, a monthly miscellany of Scottish poetry, ran the same course and had to be discontinued at the same time. ... It was redeemed by the occasional appearance of Mr. Grieve’s prose, of poems by Mr. M’Diarmid, and of various contributions by Mr. J. R. Malloch. These represent thus far the net literary achievement of the Renaissance.

Mr. M’Diarmid is the expectancy and rose of this new movement, for he has fearlessly dedicated his talents to the native Muse, and is, we must all agree, very Scotch. Mr. Muir quotes some of his verses for us. Among them are these: —

In commenting on Mr. M’Diarmid’s poetry, Mr. Muir continues: —

It is written in Scots, and it has the best of justifications: it is perfectly original. That is to say, it could have been written by no one but Mr. M’Diarmid, by no poet of any nationality other than the Scottish, and in no language save that language.

Here, too, I suspect that many will be found in full agreement with Mr. Muir. Whatever we may think of the critical conclusions, there can be no reason for missing the idea in Mr. Muir’s mind. It is bell-like in its clarity: true poetry is a home-grown product, and intended largely for home consumption.

Well, this desire for a Scottish Renaissance must be reassuring to one who is experiencing great concern about the future of American poetry or the arrival of the great American novel. Other nations are having their difficulties, too. Hope deferred maketh the heart sick. Perhaps, in time, we may come to suspect that all this Simonpure nationalism is, so far as literature is concerned, a little silly. One would like to introduce it into some American version of Through the Looking-Glass. To wit: —

‘But then,’ said Alice, ’we have a very nice literature of our own.’ ‘Oh no, you have n’t, ’ said the Pennsylvania Dutchman. ‘Oh no, you have n’t. Literature, you know, is like lettuce.’ ‘ Oh,’answered Alice, ‘I had n’t thought of that.’ ‘No, I suppose you had n’t thought of it,’ said the Dutchman, ‘but you must think of it now. Lettuce, you see, must not be eaten unless you grow it in your own garden.’

IV

If critics were at all inclined to study present conditions in the light of literary history, they would come to doubt the value of a perfect nationalism of expression. The great writers of the past have been freebooters rather than patriotic stay-at-homes. What they wanted in the way of foreign material, that they went and took, unblushingly.

The English poets have never, thank God, cared to be exclusively English. They have helped themselves liberally to the good things of their neighbors and to the wisdom of their ancestors. They have brought home booty from Troy and have filched from the troubadours. They have read Homer and the Old Testament, and have drawn off the old wine into English bottles. Horace and Boccaccio, Saxo Grammaticus and Omar Khayyám, are among the sponsors at the baptism (by immersion) of the English poets.

Verily there can hardly be more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in the philosophies of outpoets. They fetch their wares from the East and from the West, from the isles of the seas and from the rolling spheres of heaven. Even in the most English of them the indebtedness to other lands and other times is conspicuous, because England has arisen upon the foundations laid by other peoples. England has no exclusive, no lion’s share in the sources which inspired Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Byron, Browning. The voice is, no doubt, English, but the words are Venetian, Roman, Athenian, what not.

Even the novelists, who are often thought of as uncompromisingly British, acknowledge, in one way or another, their debt to the Continental. Harry Fielding, for example, ‘the full-blooded, clear-eyed Englishman,’ avowed, on the title-page of Joseph Andrews, his first novel, that it was ‘written in imitation of Cervantes,’ and in a famous passage in Tom Jones he enumerated Aristophanes, Lucian, Cervantes, Rabelais, Molière, Shakespeare, Swift, and Marivaux as the sources of his inspiration and his method.

And what shall be said to those Northern critics who are waiting to confront us with the name of Robert Burns? Merely this — that Burns at every moment of his career deliberately challenged comparison with the English poets. He was proud of Scots poets who had attained fame in England, and meant to emulate them. He lauded the poet Thomson, a Scot who, like Smollett, had renounced the vernacular and submitted himself to the literary standards of the English metropolis. Burns himself imitated Thomson and Shenstone and Gray and Collins and Goldsmith, and, though he never ceased to write verse in his native dialect, increasingly tended toward English as a medium; and it is because he is at least partially intelligible to English-speaking folk everywhere that he has ever been regarded as something other than a merely local poet, a writer of verses significant only in the provinces.

In a word, — though it be a word that gives offense to many,— Burns has triumphed over provinciality. He has escaped from the remote and the unintelligible line of Scots poets, Dunbar, Lyndsay, Douglas, Fergusson, Ramsay, and the rest, whose history has been written by Mr. Henderson, and whose race Mr. M’Diarmid wishes to see perpetuated in modern times. Burns is no more to be confounded with such local predecessors and contemporaries than Dante is to be confounded with the horde of theologians and poets out of which he rose. Fergusson and the others are among the glories of Scotland, but Burns is one of the glories of the world.

Such universality has been a mark of poetry throughout the ages. It has never been conceived of as local or indigenous, but as a living growth whose branches roof the world. Its ‘progress,’ about which poets used to write in the eighteenth century, was as majestic as the thunderous history of Christendom.

For its origin poetry acknowledged the ‘harmonious springs’ of Parnassus. ‘Deep, majestic, smooth, and strong,’ that stream of music had rolled through the Grecian world, and then poured its fertile waves over the Roman world. With the rebirth of learning, the entire Italian peninsula partook of its influence, and thence, in an ever-widening stream, it entered France. Westward the course of this poetic empire took its way, and in two enormous tides flooded England with glory, culminating in the spacious times of great Elizabeth. The broad river had gathered tributary waters from a thousand streams. Hence its rolling force. It acknowledged no allegiance and no nationalities, for its function was to unite the present with the past, the West with the East, and the traditional with the modern, in the creation of an art which could, in some sense, resist the very decays of Time.

Certain poets in the eighteenth century believed that this stream of influence was destined to pass to the Western main. Goldsmith, in a burst of prophecy and allegory near the close of The Deserted Village, described the Muse herself as embarking for America. It could never have occurred to Goldsmith, it could hardly have occurred to one of the radicals in all the agonies of Romanticism, that a new, indigenous, and wholly original poetry would arise in the West to express the native genius of the New World. It would be as futile to invent poetry anew as to create a new language or reconstruct Christianity. And though both a new language and an unrecognizable Christianity have arisen in our midst, they are not perhaps to be conceived as our peculiar glories.

Language, religion, poetry, and such ultimate things, whose origin is lost in the dark backward and abysm of time, were always, and quite inoffensively, deemed to be supranational. Some things man may inherit humbly from the past; some things he must learn to be beyond his power to reconstruct without destroying them. Most persons find it a sobering experience, at a certain age, to renounce the attempt to change human nature, as Margaret Fuller experienced a certain spiritual settling when she decided to accept the universe.

V

Our American poets will one day wake from their dream of a sublime poetry which smacks of Americanism and owes nothing to Europe, — not even the English language, — and will soberly accept the ancient doctrine of the progress of poetry, even as their rude forefathers of the Concord School accepted it in the last century. Happily that acceptance need be neither deliberate nor even conscious. The slow processes of nature spare us much mortification that arises from a sudden shift of position. Gradually we shall hear less of ‘the American language,’ whatever that may be, of the ‘seven lively arts of America,’ and of poetry purely native in origin. They will have no ‘progress,’ but will fall before the assault of newer heresies. When we have stopped talking about them, perhaps England will cease admonishing us to cultivate them, and permit us to enjoy, as she has done, the common literary inheritance of the chief nations of the Western world.

If, then, as a nation, we are destined to increase still more the waters of that vast poetic stream, our contribution will, without special thought on our part, be sufficiently American. No one will fail to recognize it as ours. Who has ever been in doubt about the American complexion of Poe’s work, or Hawthorne’s, or Emerson’s? Perhaps none is more American than that nervous Briton by late adoption (at his own request), Mr. Henry James. We need never fear that we shall get away from our own shadow, or that we shall persuade the British to believe that there is no important difference between them and us. American poets of the future will, we may be confident, feel no disposition to limit themselves to the sentiments of the province in which they were born or sing the war songs of their tribe to the exclusion of all other lyrics. There is certainly no lack of patriotism in claiming one’s right to the common inheritance of Christendom. To know it through its long history, to enjoy it forever, and to add to it if possible — this is surely no unworthy aim for any national movement or literary renaissance, and to realize the aim is to discharge in full the manifold duties of reciprocity.