American Writers Come of Age

I

‘IT IS solely due to the critics, who in our times still praise rude, savage, and, for us, meaningless works of the ancient Greeks: Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus, and especially Aristophanes; or, of modern writers, Dante, Tasso, Milton, Shakespeare; in painting, all of Raphael, all of Michelangelo, including his absurd “Last Judgment”; in music, the whole of Bach, and the whole of Beethoven, including his last period, — thanks only to them have the Ibsens, the Maeterlincks, Verlaines, Mallarmés, Puvis de Chavannes, Klingers, Böcklins, Stucks, Schneiders; in music, the Wagners, Liszts, Berliozes, Brahmses, and Richard Strausses, etc., and all that immense mass of good-for-nothing imitators of these imitators, become possible in our day.’

Many people will remember how Tolstoy, in that very interesting, very odd, and certainly very misguided book, What Is Art? bitterly attacked modern art and letters, practically all of it, as antisocial, immoral, and decadent; and then endeavored to formulate in its stead a quasi-religious doctrine of art of his own, based on ‘the brotherly union of man.’

He was writing, of course, at a time which was later to be known, with some opprobrium, as fin de siècle; Russia, like the rest of the world, was beginning to react to the multiform ferment of French romanticism; and Russia, like the rest of the world, must at all costs be defended against this vile and insidious foreign infection. The notion of a ‘universal’ art was not new, nor did Tolstoy himself succeed in making a more plausible program for it, either as religion or as psychology, than his predecessors. More diverting for us, if only as a cautionary tale for prophets and politicians and literary captains, at a moment when clear-headedness is at a premium, to look over the actual names of that era which were so unreasonably hated by so great a man — not, by any means, that he restricted himself to that era alone. It is a handsome list — indeed, it is magnificent. If it had been Tolstoy’s intention to pick out, from among his contemporaries, those names which might survive, he could hardly have done better; it is doubtful if it was better done by anyone. And the list of contemporary painters with which he supplemented it was just as startlingly comprehensive. Monet, Manet, Renoir, Sisley, Redon, and Pissarro were condemned out of hand. Had Tolstoy known Cezanne and Van Gogh, we can be sure that they too would have been dismissed.

Taken altogether, this represents what is perhaps an all-time high, a locus classicus, of mistaken critical judgment; it remains, like a kind of wrecker’s beacon, as a warning to those who would mix sociology and morals with their æsthetics a priori. Certainly, one can think of no pronouncement by a writer of comparable stature which contains so many confessions of blindness. But if we can recover from our astonishment at its sheer stupendousness, there is something we can learn from it, particularly at this precise moment in our and the world’s history. That war renders a nation violently egoistic is a truism — Tolstoy himself had something to say about this, and we shall come to it later. Such egoism is inevitable; and it is necessary if a nation is to survive. But it is against its less desirable cultural by-products that we must learn to be on our guard; and it is already possible to see from what directions some of these might come.

One of these, for example, is our old friend, but now wearing a slightly different costume, the Cultural Protective Tariff. Never a very sound practice, but a comforting one, this took the form, during the lean years of our cultural adolescence, when the competition from abroad was too keen, of a kind of double standard in criticism. The critical tariff on imported works of art was kept high — was kept, as it were, up to international standards: an English poet or a French painter was to be judged and measured against the best of the whole present, the whole past. But of the domestic product the critics weren’t quite so exacting. It was a little too much to expect, surely, of a nation still expanding, still thrusting forward its frontiers, whether geographical or psychological or industrial, that it should be as richly nourished on tradition or speak with as complex and formed a language (that is, literature) as those parent: nations whose pioneering was long since done. And so, our good New England homespun, for instance, was unblushingly, if not indeed a little proudly, compared to foreign damask; and to be unostentatiously provincial was simply to continue those virtues of plain living and high thinking which had been common to the Puritans and — shall we say — the ‘ better ‘ of the Romans.

All of which was harmless enough, and perhaps in its season even useful, protecting as it did those tenderer shoots which a severer exposure might have killed. But one had thought, and hoped, that this was a thing of the past. Was it not, in fact, finished in 1919-1920? The famous mass migration of our literary expatriates to Europe at the end of the First World War has by some been taken to signify a lack or weakness in our own ‘scene’; and their mass return, a decade later, somewhat bedraggled, as a confession of that weakness in themselves, or an awakening to something in America which they had previously overlooked or ignored.

But this, I think, is to miss the point entirely — and it is a point of paramount importance. For it was precisely at the moment when the American avant garde artists were ready and willing to admit that Europe had something to teach them that, culturally, America grew up. This was the exact minute when the cultural protective tariff went down. From now on the American ‘scene’ was confessedly and functionally to be no longer the isolated and provincial ‘independent’ show it had always somewhat braggingly been, but a part of the world picture; it was ready for its natural inheritance of the whole tradition of man’s past, no matter from what country or what century it might come. This humble migration in search of knowledge (it was our Grand Tour) marked our coming of age. And this modest preparation for a genuine internationalism of the arts was something precious which we must now — above all, now — try to remember and cherish.

Tolstoy’s extraordinary blindness to what was excellent and life-giving in contemporary European art had two obvious causes. One of these was mere insularity — unacknowledged, to be sure, but insularity just the same. It was the age-old defensive suspicion of anything that was foreign. But even more blinding to him was his naïve — morally naïve — fear of anything that was new. No such good European as Turgenev (that great expatriate), and with no such ordered sense of historical and cultural perspective, Tolstoy was jealous, unconsciously, for Russia’s backwardness. Inevitably irritated and perplexed by the rapidity, vehemence, and brilliance with which European art was advancing and changing, he was too fixed to be willing to understand it, too religious (in his own queer social sense) to have any longer the capacity for understanding it; and therefore it must be destroyed. To attack it merely because it was not Russian was impossible for him, even had he been aware that this was one of his motives; for this would have been to fly against his own theory of universal or international art. But he could and did attack it on the ground that it was meaningless, frivolous, and socially irresponsible, — spiritually ugly and hyperæsthetic, — in short for its decadence. Out it must go, every bit of it, lock, stock, and barrel. And not only the moderns, not only Mallarmé and Baudelaire, but Milton, Goethe, and Shakespeare as well. Only Uncle Tom’s Cabin, like a sort of brave Noah’s Ark, was permitted to survive the flood.

II

Two recent books by American critics make one wonder, with some uneasiness, whether we too are not to be treated to some such anachronistic purge: The Opinions of Oliver Allston, by Van Wyck Brooks, and Intellectual America, by Mr. Oscar Cargill. Mr. Brooks, as we know, and much as we admire him (and indeed we have long been greatly in his debt) is an implacable enemy of the American expatriate and all his works. Was it his own brief taste of the Lotus — at least, the English Lotus — that has embittered him? For one can have little doubt that his judgment of Henry James, and especially of those wonderful ‘late’ novels, is more than Tolstoyan in its parti pris recklessness; nor that the opinions of Oliver Allston, as of his ventriloquist, on Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce, to mention only a few, will not one day seem just as surprisingly wrongheaded. As Tolstoy sought his universal, misguidedly, in a kind of lowest common denominator of the arts which any peasant could grasp — sacrificing at one stroke both the great and the subtle — so Mr. Brooks and Mr. Cargill, with pretty much the same intention, might be described as Two Critics in Search of the Wholesome. Mr. Brooks makes the really startling admission that he prefers Snow-Bound to The Waste Land; and at this rate it cannot be long before some even bolder champion of the autochthonous will publicly prefer Little Women to James Joyce’s Ulysses. Mr. Cargill, for his part, displays an almost Comstockian zeal in hunting out decadents — he finds decadents everywhere, and tears them to pieces with a relish which looks decidedly suspicious. Evidently, as Gypsy Rose Lee said of men, he ‘prefers them monstrous’: he likes his decadence ‘high.’

But what is interesting, and indeed disturbing, is that both critics, like Tolstoy, single out with a practically unerring eye the best, the most deeply creative writers of our time, not for praise, but for ridicule and dismissal. Mr. Brooks dismisses them as ‘escapists’ and ‘coteries’; Mr. Cargill, with a handful of loose labels, bundles them together more or less indiscriminately and inaccurately as Freudians, Intelligentsia, or Decadents: he is a kind of grocercritic, and weighs ‘content’ as one might weigh sugar. Both critics betray a marked, though occasionally ambiguous, animus towards modern psychology — towards Freud and the notion of the unconscious in particular; and for both the idea of the ‘death-drive,’ Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (which Santayana wittily called ‘a long way round to Nirvana’), is, at any rate as embodied in contemporary poetry and fiction, the very last word in defeatism, unwholesomeness, and decay.

Now what is really being proposed here, let us be in no doubt about it, is a moral, or social, intrusion into the world of letters: the world of letters, that is to say, has become a moral peril, and must be regenerated. And the step that is suggested, at any rate by implication, is that, if we are to recover that most priceless element in a work of art, the will (by which is no doubt meant the will to goodness, or the will to wholesomeness), we must begin, as Tolstoy began, by simply shutting the door to pretty much everything else. Above all, now that the world is at war, and when cultural interchange between the nations is so difficult (thus runs a common argument), now is the very time for a complete retreat, a return to our own inexhaustible inner resources, our own beautiful and inviolate regionalism and national purity. Let us therefore close the doors once again on these ‘foreign’ ideas, these naughty, and alien, and for us so insoluble poisons. In short, let us now be good wholesome Americans and have a good wholesome American art. The time for decadence is past — and it was never really natural to us, anyway.

Leaving aside the somewhat frightening vision of what this ‘wholesomeness’ would lead us to in literature, — with its prototypical Horatio Algers and Pollyannas, its rural innocence and regional Arcadias, — it is perhaps more useful to take a good look at the notion of ‘decadence.’ First of all, let us note that decadence is always a relative thing: it is not an absolute, or definable as such, but merely and always a something which follows a something else — a something else to which it is assumed to be inferior. Nor is it quite as simple as that, either — for we must remember that if this decadence follows something, it also precedes something. It is no more an end than it is a beginning: in fact, it is an organic and living part of a constantly changing and evolving continuum. And this continuum is nothing less, in turn, than the whole evolution of man’s awareness. Literature, the plastic arts, the sciences — everything comprised in our cultural and intellectual evolution — are these not, insofar as they represent the steady advance in human awareness, completely identifiable with the evolution of man’s ‘mind’ — his capacity to feel, perceive, and understand?

And has this not been so from the very beginning? The inventors of the first words, the inventors of language — and these were our first poets — were, like the inventors of the other arts and the sciences, biological ‘sports’; they were variants on the norm; it would not be amiss, perhaps, to say that they were our first decadents. As in every evolutionary process, the sieve of selective survival chose from among them those whose inventions were acceptable to the majority: these became leaders and priests, their teachings or discoveries being incorporated in the main stream of man’s social growth; while those others, whose contributions were less generally suitable, were forgotten. In this trial-and-error evolution of consciousness, a new word meant, to all intents, a new feeling; a new cluster of words meant a new complex of feelings; and in each item it could perhaps properly be said that this new perception or feeling represented a splitting and refinement of the coarser and simpler perceptions which had preceded it. Practically, in short, refinement and decadence are the same thing. Parts were substituted for wholes, shades and discriminations for the more vigorous but less exact holophrases which they replaced. The evolution of form proceeded from the large to the small, from the single and simple to the comprehensive and complex; and analogously from the energetic to the subtle.

And in this evolution of language, which is also the evolution of literature and consciousness, it must be borne in mind that the process has always been a strictly individualist and minority affair, a game of follow-my-leader. There has never been, so far as we know, a ‘whole-society’ art — the arrangement of society in the past has been just exactly as pyramidal, in its distribution of consciousness, as it is today. The very conscious have always been the very few: the comparatively unconscious the comparative majority. In any evolutionary process this condition must be inevitable. The artists, the poets, the scientists, these are the advance guard who explore or invent new mental hinterlands, which the rest of mankind adopts and validates as it can and will.

Thus man gets his ‘universal’ in art, willy-nilly; but he gets it from the top, invariably, never from the bottom. And if we realize that this vital competitive hierarchy in levels of consciousness is indispensable to the continuation of a healthy and normal renewal and growth in man’s awareness, then we can begin to see how mistaken was Tolstoy, for example, when he proposed to reduce all art to the level of understanding of the simplest peasant. At the drop of a hat, this would achieve that wholesale degradation of cultural energy (which Henry Adams foresaw) to a sterile uniformity. The creative principle of discrimination abandoned, all that marvelous process of exfoliation by which meaning has constantly given way to the more comprehensive on the one hand and the subtler on the other— the endless refinement of man’s mind as externalized in his arts and sciences — all this would be at an end. For a faint notion of what it would lead to, one has only to consider the average total radio program of any given day. This is the field in which the Tolstoyan doctrine is most nearly applied.

And this, whether they know it or not, is exactly what the advocates of ‘nationalism,’ ‘wholesomeness,’ and ‘the closed door’ are up to. They want to turn back the clock; and clearly they mean to do it if they can. At the very moment when America has reached her cultural majority, and when she is able to give the world artists and writers of the first rank, these critics propose once more to close America in, to make her once again provincial; and they begin with a threat of moral censorship on precisely those gifted writers who, in our time, have established themselves as ‘world’ citizens, and are of international importance. We must have no decadence, they say, whether domestic or imported

— no escapists, no coteries. Yet it was Baudelaire, a decadent on their own admission, who did most in the last century to restore to French poetry its greatness, giving it a power, a richness, and a beauty, which it had never known before. And how few poets and artists in the history of mankind cannot be said to have been escapists, or members of a coterie! Is not art itself an escape, a sublimation — an escape upward?

Such mere name-calling will not stay the living forces of literature, nor reëstablish outmoded customs barriers; nor can the complex, by a mere effort of the will, turn itself back into the simple, for those who fear it. At best, it will become the faux bon, the faux naïf; at worst, the sentimental. The process of refinement

— of ‘decadence’—has already gone too far. For every Henry James we get, every Proust or Eliot or Joyce (those dreadful fellows, who by some miracle of logic are ‘empty formalists’ on the one hand and purveyors of ugliness and the ‘ death-drive ‘ on the other), the less likely are we ever again to have anything as genuinely naïve as Snow-Bound or Little Women; and certainly the less likely are we to mistake an Uncle Tom’s Cabin for a Moby Dick. Even in our much discussed ‘regionalism,’ what we are witnessing, one suspects, is the last stand of the naïf, the final rear guard action of a ‘Little America’ isolationism: for they too, the regional centres, are now fully and inescapably in the midstream of the one great human ‘thing,’ from which there is no longer any turning back.

It is no use fearing the complex or chaotic merely because we see all values so visibly and violently in the meltingpot— surely that is no reason for squeamishness, or timidity, or for not facing even the most disagreeable facts in human nature. Man has built himself churches in the past, and of humbler materials; he can build them again, and build them better. No, we must be open to all influences, all knowledge, all speculation, all the winds of doctrine. The arts must be free. For better or worse, American literature is henceforth a part of world literature; and to aim now at a self-conscious and limited ‘Americanism’ would be nothing less than cowardice. The time for that sort of protective tariff, as for a limited-objective moral censorship, is past.

And we have a high responsibility. For if, at the moment, America is the arsenal of democracy, she is also the laboratory of the arts and sciences. Heir to all that is best in the history of mankind, let us hope that we can use our inheritance wisely, and that it can be said of us, as Sainte-Beuve said of Goethe, that he ‘assimilated not merely tradition, but all traditions, and that without ceasing to be a modern of moderns; he keeps watch for every new sail on the horizon, but from the height of a Sunium. He would use the larger background and perspective to round out and support his individual insight, and so make of the present what it should be — not a servile imitation, nor yet a blank denial, of the past, but its creative continuation. “To the errors and aberrations of the hour” — he says—“we must oppose the masses of universal history.” ‘ And as a salutary reminder, let us add to this Tolstoy’s footnote to patriotism: ‘This disposition of preference for one nation over all others, like egoism, can in no wise be good.’