For a man of culture, my friend Miro began his literary career in a
singularly unpromising way. Potential statesmen in log-cabins might
miraculously come in touch with all the great books of the world, but
the days of Miro’s young school life were passed in innocence of Homer
or Dante or Shakespeare, or any of the other traditional mind-formers
of the race. What Miro had for his nourishment, outside the Bible,
which was a magical book that you must not drop on the floor, or his
school-readers, which were like lightning flashes of unintelligible
scenes, was the literature that his playmates lent him--exploits of
British soldiers in Spain and the Crimea, the death-defying adventures
of young filibusters in Cuba and Nicaragua. Miro gave them a languid
perusing, and did not criticize their literary style. Huckleberry Finn
and Tom Sawyer somehow eluded him until he had finished college, and
no fresher tale of adventure drifted into his complacent home until
the era of “Richard Carvel” and “Janice Meredith” sharpened his wits
and gave him a vague feeling that there was such a thing as literary
art. The classics were stiffly enshrined behind glass doors that were
very hard to open--at least Hawthorne and Irving and Thackeray were
there, and Tennyson’s and Scott’s poems--but nobody ever discussed them
or looked at them. Miro’s busy elders were taken up with the weekly
_Outlook_ and _Independent_ and _Christian Work_, and felt they were
doing much for Miro when they provided him and his sister with _St.
Nicholas_ and _The Youth’s Companion_. It was only that Miro saw the
black books looking at him accusingly from the case, and a rudimentary
conscience, slipping easily over from Calvinism to culture, forced
him solemnly to grapple with “The Scarlet Letter” or “Marmion.” All
he remembers is that the writers of these books he browsed among used
a great many words and made a great fuss over shadowy offenses and
conflicts and passions that did not even stimulate his imagination with
sufficient force to cause him to ask his elders what it was all about.
Certainly the filibusters were easier.
At school Miro was early impressed with the vast dignity of the
literary works and names he was compelled to learn. Shakespeare and
Goethe and Dante lifted their plaster heads frowningly above the
teacher’s, as they perched on shelves about the room. Much was said
of the greatness of literature. But the art of phonetics and the
complications of grammar swamped Miro’s early school years. It was not
until he reached the High School that literature began really to assume
that sacredness which he had heretofore felt only for Holy Scripture.
His initiation into culture was made almost a religious mystery by the
conscientious and harassed teacher. As the Deadwood Boys and Henty
and David Harum slipped away from Miro’s soul in the presence of
Milton’s “Comus” and Burke “On Conciliation,” a cultural devoutness
was engendered in him that never really died. At first it did not take
Miro beyond the stage where your conscience is strong enough to make
you uncomfortable, but not strong enough to make you do anything about
it. Miro did not actually become an omnivorous reader of great books.
But he was filled with a rich grief that the millions pursued cheap and
vulgar fiction instead of the best that has been thought and said in
the world. Miro indiscriminately bought cheap editions of the English
classics and read them with a certain patient incomprehension.
As for the dead classics, they came to Miro from the hands of his
teachers with a prestige even vaster than the books of his native
tongue. No doubt ever entered his head that four years of Latin and
three years of Greek, an hour a day, were the important preparation he
needed for his future as an American citizen. No doubt ever hurt him
that the world into which he would pass would be a world where, as his
teacher said, Latin and Greek were a solace to the aged, a quickener
of taste, a refreshment after manual labor, and a clue to the general
knowledge of all human things. Miro would as soon have doubted the
rising of the sun as have doubted the wisdom of these serious, puckered
women who had the precious manipulation of his cultural upbringing in
their charge. Miro was a bright, if a rather vague, little boy, and a
fusion of brightness and docility gave him high marks in the school
where we went together.
No one ever doubted that these marks expressed Miro’s assimilation
of the books we pored over. But he told me later that he had never
really known what he was studying. Cæsar, Virgil, Cicero, Xenophon,
Homer, were veiled and misty experiences to him. His mind was a moving
present, obliterating each day what it had read the day before, and
piercing into a no more comprehended future. He could at no time have
given any intelligible account of Æneas’s wanderings or what Cicero was
really inveighing against. The Iliad was even more obscure. The only
thing which impressed him deeply was an expurgated passage, which he
looked up somewhere else and found to be about Mars and Venus caught
in the golden bed. Cæsar seemed to be at war, and Xenophon wandering
somewhere in Asia Minor, with about the same lengthiness and hardship
as Miro suffered in reading him. The trouble, Miro thought afterwards,
was that these books were to his mind flickering lights in a vast
jungle of ignorance. He does not remember marvelling at the excessive
dulness of the stories themselves. He plodded his faithful way, using
them as his conscientious teachers did, as exercises in language. He
looked on Virgil and Cicero as essentially problems in disentangling
words which had unaccountably gotten into a bizarre order, and in
recognizing certain rather amusing and ingenious combinations, known as
“constructions.” Why these words took so irritating an order Miro never
knew, but he always connected the problem with those algebraic puzzles
he had elsewhere to unravel. Virgil’s words were further complicated
by being arranged in lines which one had to “scan.” Miro was pleased
with the rhythm, and there were stanzas that had a roll of their own.
But the inexorable translating that had to go on tore all this fabric
of poetry to pieces. His translations were impeccable, but, as he never
wrote them down, he had never before his eyes the consecutive story.
Translations Miro never saw. He knew that they were implements of
deadly sin that boys used to cheat with. His horror of them was such
as a saint might feel towards a parody of the Bible. Just before Miro
left school, his sister in a younger class began to read a prose
translation of the Odyssey, and Miro remembers the scorn with which he
looked down on so sneaking an entrance into the temple of light. He
knew that not everyone could study Latin and Greek, and he learned to
be proud of his knowledge. When at last he had passed his examinations
for college--his Latin composition and grammar, his syntax and his
sight-reading, and his Greek composition and grammar, his Greek syntax
and sight-reading, and his translation of Gallic battles and Anabatic
frosts, and Dido’s farewell and Cicero’s objurgations--his zealous
rage did not abate. He even insisted on reading the Bucolics, while he
was away on his vacation, and a book or two in the Odyssey. His family
was a little chilled by his studiousness, but he knew well that he was
laying up cultural treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not
corrupt, neither do thieves break in and steal.
Arrived at college, Miro expanded his cultural interests on the
approved lines. He read Horace and Plato, Lysias and Terence,
impartially, with faithful conscience. Horace was the most exciting
because of the parodies that were beginning to appear in the cleverer
newspapers. Miro scarcely knew whether to be amused or shocked at “Odi
Persicos” or “Integer Vitæ” done into current slang. The professors,
mild-mannered men who knew their place and kept it, never mentioned
these impudent adventures, but for Miro it was the first crack in
his Ptolemaic system of reverences. There came a time when his mind
began to feel replete, when this heavy pushing through the opaque
medium of dead language began to fatigue him. He should have been able
to read fluently, but there were always turning up new styles, new
constructions, to plague him. Latin became to him like a constant diet
of beefsteak, and Greek like a constant diet of fine wheaten bread.
They lost their taste. These witty poets and ostentatious orators--what
were they all about? What was their background? Where did they fit
into Miro’s life? The professors knew some history, but what did that
history mean? Miro found himself surfeited and dissatisfied. He began
to look furtively at translations to get some better English than he
was able to provide. The hair-splittings of Plato began to bore him
when he saw them in crystal-clear English, and not muffled in the
original Greek. His apostasy had begun.
It was not much better in his study of English literature. Miro
was given a huge anthology, a sort of press-clipping bureau of
_belles-lettres_, from Chaucer to Arthur Symons. Under the direction
of a professor who was laying out a career for himself as poet--or
“modern singer,” as he expressed it--the class went briskly through
the centuries sampling their genius and tasting the various literary
flavors. The enterprise reminded Miro of those books of woollen samples
which one looks through when one is to have a suit of clothes made.
But in this case, the student did not even have the pleasure of seeing
the suit of clothes. All that was expected of him, apparently, was
that he should become familiar, from these microscopic pieces, with
the different textures and patterns. The great writers passed before
his mind like figures in a crowded street. There was no time for
preferences. Indeed the professor strove diligently to give each writer
his just due. How was one to appreciate the great thoughts and the
great styles if one began to choose violently between them, or attempt
any discrimination on grounds of their peculiar congeniality for
one’s own soul? Criticism had to spurn such subjectivity, scholarship
could not be wilful. The neatly arranged book of “readings,” with its
medicinal doses of inspiration, became the symbol of Miro’s education.
These early years of college did not deprive Miro of his cultural
loyalty, but they deadened his appetite. Although almost inconceivably
docile, he found himself being bored. He had come from school a
serious boy, with more than a touch of priggishness in him, and a
vague aspiration to be a “man of letters.” He found himself becoming
a collector of literary odds-and-ends. If he did not formulate this
feeling clearly, he at least knew. He found that the literary life was
not as interesting as he had expected. He sought no adventures. When he
wrote, it was graceful lyrics or polite criticisms of William Collins
or Charles Lamb. These canonized saints of culture still held the field
for Miro, however. There was nothing between them and that popular
literature of the day that all good men bemoaned. Classic or popular,
“highbrow” or “lowbrow,” this was the choice, and Miro unquestioningly
took the orthodox heaven. In 1912 the most popular of Miro’s English
professors had never heard of Galsworthy, and another was creating a
flurry of scandal in the department by recommending Chesterton to his
classes. It would scarcely have been in college that Miro would have
learned of an escape from the closed dichotomy of culture. Bored with
the “classic,” and frozen with horror at the “popular,” his career as
a man of culture must have come to a dragging end if he had not been
suddenly liberated by a chance lecture which he happened to hear while
he was at home for the holidays.
The literary radical who appeared before the Lyceum Club of Miro’s
village was none other than Professor William Lyon Phelps, and it is
to that evening of cultural audacity Miro thinks he owes all his later
emancipation. The lecturer grappled with the “modern novel,” and tossed
Hardy, Tolstoi, Turgenev, Meredith, even Trollope, into the minds of
the charmed audience with such effect that the virgin shelves of the
village library were ravished for days to come by the eager minds upon
whom these great names dawned for the first time. “Jude the Obscure”
and “Resurrection” were of course kept officially away from the vulgar,
but Miro managed to find “Smoke” and “Virgin Soil” and “Anna Karenina”
and “The Warden” and “A Pair of Blue Eyes” and “The Return of the
Native.” Later at college he explored the forbidden realms. It was as
if some devout and restless saint had suddenly been introduced to the
Apocrypha. A new world was opened to Miro that was neither “classic”
nor “popular,” and yet which came to one under the most unimpeachable
auspices. There was, at first, it is true, an air of illicit adventure
about the enterprise. The lecturer who made himself the missionary of
such vigorous and piquant doctrine had the air of being a heretic, or
at least a boy playing out of school. But Miro himself returned to
college a cultural revolutionist. His orthodoxies crumbled. He did not
try to reconcile the new with the old. He applied pick and dynamite to
the whole structure of the canon. Irony, humor, tragedy, sensuality,
suddenly appeared to him as literary qualities in forms that he could
understand. They were like oxygen to his soul.
If these qualities were in the books he had been reading, he had never
felt them. The expurgated sample-books he had studied had passed too
swiftly over the Elizabethans to give him a sense of their lustiness.
Miro immersed himself voluptuously in the pessimism of Hardy. He fed on
the poignant torture of Tolstoi. While he was reading “Resurrection,”
his class in literature was making an “intensive” study of Tennyson.
It was too much. Miro rose in revolt. He forswore literary courses
forever, dead rituals in which anæmic priests mumbled their trite
critical commentary. Miro did not know that to naughtier critics even
Mr. Phelps might eventually seem a pale and timid Gideon, himself stuck
in moral sloughs. He was grateful enough for that blast of trumpets
which made his own scholastic walls fall down.
The next stage in Miro’s cultural life was one of frank revolt. He
became as violent as a heretic as he had been docile as a believer.
Modern novels merely started the rift that widened into modern
ideas. The professors were of little use. Indeed, when Miro joined a
group of radicals who had started a new college paper, a relentless
vendetta began with the teachers. Miro and his friends threw over
everything that was mere literature. Social purpose must shine from
any writing that was to rouse their enthusiasm. Literary flavor was
to be permissible only where it made vivid high and revolutionary
thought. Tolstoi became their god, Wells their high priest. Chesterton
infuriated them. They wrote violent assaults upon him which began in
imitation of his cool paradoxicality and ended in incoherent ravings.
There were so many enemies to their new fervor that they scarcely knew
where to begin. There were not only the old tables of stone to destroy,
but there were new and threatening prophets of the eternal verities who
had to be exposed. The nineteenth century which they had studied must
be weeded of its nauseous moralists. The instructors consulted together
how they might put down the revolt, and bring these sinners back to the
faith of cultural scripture.
It was of no avail. In a short time Miro had been converted from an
aspiration for the career of a cultivated “man of letters” to a fiery
zeal for artistic and literary propaganda in the service of radical
ideas. One of the results of this conversion was the discovery that he
really had no standards of critical taste. Miro had been reverential
so long that he had felt no preferences. Everything that was classic
had to be good to him. But now that he had thrown away the books that
were stamped with the mark of the classic mint, and was dealing with
the raw materials of letters, he had to become a critic and make
selection. It was not enough that a book should be radical. Some of
the books he read, though impeccably revolutionary as to ideas, were
clearly poor as literature. His muffled taste began to assert itself.
He found himself impressionable where before he had been only mildly
acquisitive. The literature of revolt and free speculation fired him
into a state of spiritual explosiveness. All that he read now stood out
in brighter colors and in sharper outlines than before. As he reached a
better balance, he began to feel the vigor of literary form, the value
of sincerity and freshness of style. He began to look for them keenly
in everything he read. It was long before Miro realized that enthusiasm
not docility had made him critical. He became a little proud of his
sensitive and discriminating reactions to the modern and the unsifted.
This pursuit had to take place without any help from the college.
After Miro graduated, it is true that it became the fashion to study
literature as the record of ideas and not merely as a canon of sacred
books to be analyzed, commented upon, and absorbed. But no dent was
made upon the system in Miro’s time, and, the inventory of English
criticism not going beyond Stevenson, no college course went beyond
Stevenson. The Elizabethans had been exhumed and fumigated, but the
most popular attention went to the gallery of Victorians, who combined
moral soundness with literary beauty, and were therefore considered
wholesome food for young men. The instructors all remained in the state
of reverence which saw all things good that had been immemorially
taught. Miro’s own teacher was a fragile, earnest young man, whose
robuster parents had evidently seized upon his nature as a fortunate
pledge of what the family might produce in the way of an intellectual
flower that should surpass in culture and gentility the ambitions of
his parents. His studiousness, hopeless for his father’s career as
grocer, had therefore been capitalized into education.
The product now shone forth as one of the most successful and
promising younger instructors in the department. He knew his subject.
Card-indexes filled his room, covering in detail the works, lives,
and deaths of the illustrious persons whom he expounded, as well as
everything that had been said about them in the way of appreciation or
interpretation. An endless number of lectures and courses could be
made from this bountiful store. He never tried to write himself, but he
knew all about the different kinds of writing, and when he corrected
the boys’ themes he knew infallibly what to tell them to avoid. Miro’s
vagaries scandalized his teacher all the more because during his first
year in college Miro had been generally noticed as one with the proper
sobriety and scholarly patience to graduate into a similar priestly
calling. Miro found scant sympathy in the young man. To the latter,
literary studies were a science not an art, and they were to be treated
with somewhat the same cold rigor of delimitation and analysis as
any other science. Miro felt his teacher’s recoil at the idea that
literature was significant only as the expression of personality or
as interpretation of some social movement. Miro saw how uneasy he
became when he was confronted with current literature. It was clear
that Miro’s slowly growing critical sense had not a counterpart in the
scholastic mind.
When Miro and his friends abandoned literary studies, they followed
after the teachers of history and philosophy, intellectual arenas of
which the literary professors seemed scandalously ignorant. At this
ignorance Miro boiled with contempt. Here were the profitable clues
that would give meaning to dusty literary scholarship, but the scholars
had not the wits to seize them. They lived along, playing what seemed
to Miro a rather dreary game, when they were not gaping reverently at
ideas and forms which they scarcely had the genuine personality to
appreciate. Miro felt once and for all free of these mysteries and
reverences. He was to know the world as it has been and as it is. He
was to put literature into its proper place, making all “culture”
serve its apprenticeship for him as interpretation of things larger
than itself, of the course of individual lives and the great tides of
society.
Miro’s later cultural life is not without interest. When he had
finished college and his architectural course, and was making headway
in his profession, his philosophy of the intellectual life began to
straighten itself out. Rapid as his surrender of orthodoxy had been,
it had taken him some time to live down that early education. He found
now that he would have to live down his heresies also, and get some
coherent system of tastes that was his own and not the fruit of either
docility or the zeal of propaganda.
The old battles that were still going on helped Miro to realize his
modern position. It was a queer, musty quarrel, but it was enlisting
minds from all classes and of all intellectual fibers. The “classics”
were dying hard, as Miro recognized whenever he read, in the magazines,
attacks on the “new education.” He found that professors were still
taken seriously who declared in passion that without the universal
study of the Latin language in American schools all conceptions of
taste, standards, criticism, the historic sense itself, would vanish
from the earth. He found that even as late as 1917 professional men
were gathering together in solemn conclave and buttressing the “value
of the classics” with testimonials from “successful men” in a variety
of vocations. Miro was amused at the fact that the mighty studies once
pressed upon him so uncritically should now require, like the patent
medicines, testimonials as to their virtue. Bank presidents, lawyers,
and editors had taken the Latin language regularly for years, and had
found its effects painless and invigorating. He could not escape the
unconscious satire that such plump and prosperous Americans expressed
when they thought it admirable to save their cherished intellectual
traditions in any such fashion.
Other conservatives Miro saw to be abandoning the line of opposition
to science, only to fall back on the line of a defensive against
“pseudo-science,” as they seemed to call whatever intellectual
interests had not yet become indubitably reputable. It was a line which
would hold them rather strongly for a time, Miro thought, because so
many of the cultural revolutionists agreed with them in hating some of
these arrogant and mechanical psychologies and sociologies that reduced
life to figures or organisms. But Miro felt also how obstructive was
their fight. If the “classics” had done little for him except to hold
his mind in an uncomprehending prison, and fetter his spontaneous
taste, they seemed to have done little more for even the thorough
scholars. When professors had devoted scholarly lives to the “classics”
only to exhibit in their own polemics none of the urbanity and
intellectual command which were supposed by the believer somehow to
rub off automatically on the faithful student, Miro had to conclude an
absence of causal connection between the “classics” and the able modern
mind. When, moreover, critical power or creative literary work became
almost extinct among these defenders of the “old education,” Miro felt
sure that a revolution was needed in the materials and attitudes of
“culture.”
The case of the defenders was all the weaker because their enemies were
not wanton infidels, ignorant of the holy places they profaned. They
were rather cultural “Modernists,” reforming the church from within.
They had the classic background, these young vandals, but they had
escaped from its flat and unoriented surface. Abreast of the newer
objective, impersonal standards of thinking, they saw the weakness of
these archaic minds which could only appeal to vested interests in
culture and testimonials from successful men.
The older critics had long since disavowed the intention of
discriminating among current writers. These men, who had to have an
Academy to protect them, lumped the younger writers of verse and prose
together as “anarchic” and “naturalistic,” and had become, in these
latter days, merely peevish and querulous, protesting in favor of
standards that no longer represented our best values. Every one, in
Miro’s time, bemoaned the lack of critics, but the older critics seemed
to have lost all sense of hospitality and to have become tired and a
little spitefully disconsolate, while the newer ones were too intent on
their crusades against puritanism and philistinism to have time for a
constructive pointing of the way.
Miro had a very real sense of standing at the end of an era. He and his
friends had lived down both their old orthodoxies of the classics and
their new orthodoxies of propaganda. Gone were the priggishness and
self-consciousness which had marked their teachers. The new culture
would be more personal than the old, but it would not be held as a
personal property. It would be democratic in the sense that it would
represent each person’s honest spontaneous taste. The old attitude was
only speciously democratic. The assumption was that if you pressed
your material long enough and winningly enough upon your culturable
public, they would acquire it. But the material was something handed
down, not grown in the garden of their own appreciations. Under
these conditions the critic and appreciator became a mere impersonal
register of orthodox opinion. The cultivated person, in conforming his
judgments to what was authoritatively taught him, was really a member
of the herd--a cultivated herd, it is true, but still a herd. It was
the mass that spoke through the critic and not his own discrimination.
These authoritative judgments might, of course, have come--probably
had come--to the herd through discerning critics, but in Miro’s time
judgment in the schools had petrified. One believed not because one
felt the original discernment, but because one was impressed by the
weight and reputability of opinion. At least so it seemed to Miro.
Now just as the artists had become tired of conventions and were
breaking through into new and personal forms, so Miro saw the younger
critics breaking through these cultural conventions. To the elders
the result would seem mere anarchy. But Miro’s attitude did not want
to destroy, it merely wanted to rearrange the materials. He wanted no
more second-hand appreciations. No one’s cultural store was to include
anything that one could not be enthusiastic about. One’s acquaintance
with the best that had been said and thought should be encouraged--in
Miro’s ideal school--to follow the lines of one’s temperament. Miro,
having thrown out the old gods, found them slowly and properly coming
back to him. Some would always repel him, others he hoped to understand
eventually. But if it took wisdom to write the great books, did it not
also take wisdom to understand them? Even the Latin writers he hoped
to recover, with the aid of translations. But why bother with Greek
when you could get Euripides in the marvellous verse of Gilbert Murray?
Miro was willing to believe that no education was complete without at
least an inoculation of the virus of the two orthodoxies that he was
transcending.
As Miro looked around the American scene, he wondered where the
critics were to come from. He saw, on the one hand, Mr. Mencken and
Mr. Dreiser and their friends, going heavily forth to battle with
the Philistines, glorying in pachydermatous vulgarisms that hurt the
polite and cultivated young men of the old school. And he saw these
violent critics, in their rage against puritanism, becoming themselves
moralists, with the same bigotry and tastelessness as their enemies.
No, these would never do. On the other hand, he saw Mr. Stuart P.
Sherman, in his youthful if somewhat belated ardor, revolting so
conscientiously against the “naturalism” and crude expression of
current efforts that, in his defense of _belles-lettres_, of the
fine tradition of literary art, he himself became a moralist of the
intensest brand, and as critic plumped for Arnold Bennett, because that
clever man had a feeling for the proprieties of human conduct. No, Mr.
Sherman would do even less adequately. His fine sympathies were as
much out of the current as was the specious classicism of Professor
Shorey. He would have to look for the critics among the young men who
had an abounding sense of life, as well as a feeling for literary form.
They would be men who had not been content to live on their cultural
inheritance, but had gone out into the modern world and amassed a fresh
fortune of their own. They would be men who were not squeamish, who did
not feel the delicate differences between “animal” and “human” conduct,
who were enthusiastic about Mark Twain and Gorki as well as Romain
Rolland, and at the same time were thrilled by Copeau’s theater.
Where was a better program for culture, for any kind of literary
art? Culture as a living effort, a driving attempt both at sincere
expression and at the comprehension of sincere expression wherever it
was found! Appreciation to be as far removed from the “I know what
I like!” as from the textbook impeccability of taste! If each mind
sought its own along these lines, would not many find themselves
agreed? Miro insisted on liking Amy Lowell’s attempt to outline
the tendencies in American poetry in a form which made clear the
struggles of contemporary men and women with the tradition and
against “every affectation of the mind.” He began to see in the new
class-consciousness of poets the ending of that old division which
“culture” made between the chosen people and the gentiles. We were
now to form little pools of workers and appreciators of similar
temperaments and tastes. The little magazines that were starting up
became voices for these new communities of sentiment. Miro thought that
perhaps at first it was right to adopt a tentative superciliousness
towards the rest of the world, so that both Mr. Mencken with his
shudders at the vulgar Demos and Mr. Sherman with his obsession with
the sanely and wholesomely American might be shut out from influence.
Instead of fighting the Philistine in the name of freedom, or fighting
the vulgar iconoclast in the name of wholesome human notions, it might
be better to write for one’s own band of comprehenders, in order that
one might have something genuine with which to appeal to both the mob
of the “bourgeois” and the ferocious vandals who had been dividing
the field among them. Far better a quarrel among these intensely
self-conscious groups than the issues that had filled _The Atlantic_
and _The Nation_ with their dreary obsolescence. Far better for the
mind that aspired towards “culture” to be told not to conform or
worship, but to search out its group, its own temperamental community
of sentiment, and there deepen appreciations through sympathetic
contact.
It was no longer a question of being hospitable towards the work of
other countries. Miro found the whole world open to him, in these
days, through the enterprise of publishers. He and his friends felt
more sympathetic with certain groups in France and Russia than they
did with the variegated “prominent authors” of their own land. Winston
Churchill as a novelist came to seem more of an alien than Artzybashev.
The fact of culture being international had been followed by a sense of
its being. The old cultural attitude had been hospitable enough, but it
had imported its alien culture in the form of “comparative literature.”
It was hospitable only in trying to mould its own taste to the orthodox
canons abroad. The older American critic was mostly interested in
getting the proper rank and reverence for what he borrowed. The new
critic will take what suits his community of sentiment. He will want
to link up not with the foreign canon, but with that group which is
nearest in spirit with the effort he and his friends are making. The
American has to work to interpret and portray the life he knows. He
cannot be international in the sense that anything but the life in
which he is saturated, with its questions and its colors, can be the
material for his art. But he can be international--and must be--in the
sense that he works with a certain hopeful vision of a “young world,”
and with certain ideal values upon which the younger men, stained and
revolted by war, in all countries are agreeing.
Miro wonders sometimes whether the direction in which he is tending
will not bring him around the circle again to a new classicism. The
last stage in the history of the man of culture will be that “classic”
which he did not understand and which his mind spent its youth in
overthrowing. But it will be a classicism far different from that which
was so unintelligently handed down to him in the American world. It
will be something worked out and lived into. Looking into the future
he will have to do what Van Wyck Brooks calls “inventing a usable
past.” Finding little in the American tradition that is not tainted
with sweetness and light and burdened with the terrible patronage of
bourgeois society, the new classicist will yet rescue Thoreau and
Whitman and Mark Twain and try to tap through them a certain eternal
human tradition of abounding vitality and moral freedom, and so build
out the future. If the classic means power with restraint, vitality
with harmony, a fusion of intellect and feeling, and a keen sense of
the artistic conscience, then the revolutionary world is coming out
into the classic. When Miro sees behind the minds of _The Masses_ group
a desire for form and for expressive beauty, and sees the radicals
following Jacques Copeau and reading Chekhov, he smiles at the thought
of the American critics, young and old, who do not know yet that they
are dead.