It was Matthew Arnold, read and reverenced by the generation
immediately preceding our own, who set to our eyes a definition and a
goal of culture which has become the common property of all our world.
To know the best that had been thought and said, to appreciate the
master-works which the previous civilizations had produced, to put our
minds and appreciations in contact with the great of all ages,--here
was a clear ideal which dissolved the mists in which the vaguenesses of
culture had been lost. And it was an ideal that appealed with peculiar
force to Americans. For it was a democratic ideal; every one who had
the energy and perseverance could reasonably expect to acquire by
taking thought that orientation of soul to which Arnold gave the magic
name of culture. And it was a quantitative ideal; culture was a matter
of acquisition--with appreciation and prayerfulness perhaps, but still
a matter of adding little by little to one’s store until one should
have a vision of that radiant limit, when one knew all the best that
had been thought and said and pictured in the world.
I do not know in just what way the British public responded to Arnold’s
eloquence; if the prophetic wrath of Ruskin failed to stir them, it is
not probable that they were moved by the persuasiveness of Arnold. But
I do know that, coming at a time when America was producing rapidly an
enormous number of people who were “comfortably off,” as the phrase
goes, and who were sufficiently awake to feel their limitations, with
the broader horizons of Europe just opening on the view, the new
doctrine had the most decisive effect on our succeeding spiritual
history. The “land-of-liberty” American of the era of Dickens still
exists in the British weeklies and in observations of America by callow
young journalists, but as a living species he has long been extinct.
His place has been taken by a person whose pride is measured not by
the greatness of the “land of the free,” but by his own orientation in
Europe.
Already in the nineties, our college professors and our artists were
beginning to require the seal of a European training to justify
their existence. We appropriated the German system of education.
Our millionaires began the collecting of pictures and the endowment
of museums with foreign works of art. We began the exportation of
school-teachers for a summer tour of Europe. American art and music
colonies sprang up in Paris and Berlin and Munich. The movement became
a rush. That mystical premonition of Europe, which Henry James tells
us he had from his earliest boyhood, became the common property of the
talented young American, who felt a certain starvation in his own land,
and longed for the fleshpots of European culture. But the bourgeoisie
soon followed the artistic and the semi-artistic, and Europe became so
much the fashion that it is now almost a test of respectability to have
traveled at least once abroad.
Underlying all this vivacious emigration, there was of course a real
if vague thirst for “culture,” and, in strict accord with Arnold’s
definition, the idea that somehow culture could be imbibed, that from
the contact with the treasures of Europe there would be rubbed off
on us a little of that grace which had made the art. So for those
who could not travel abroad, our millionaires transported, in almost
terrifying bulk and at staggering cost, samples of everything that the
foreign galleries had to show. We were to acquire culture at any cost,
and we had no doubt that we had discovered the royal road to it. We
followed it, at any rate, with eye single to the goal. The naturally
sensitive, who really found in the European literature and arts some
sort of spiritual nourishment, set the pace, and the crowd followed at
their heels.
This cultural humility of ours astonished and still astonishes Europe.
In England, where “culture” is taken very frivolously, the bated
breath of the American, when he speaks of Shakespeare or Tennyson or
Browning, is always cause for amusement. And the Frenchman is always a
little puzzled at the crowds who attend lectures in Paris on “How to
See Europe Intelligently,” or are taken in vast parties through the
Louvre. The European objects a little to being so constantly regarded
as the keeper of a huge museum. If you speak to him of culture, you
find him frankly more interested in contemporaneous literature and art
and music than in his worthies of the olden time, more interested
in discriminating the good of to-day than in accepting the classics.
If he is a cultivated person, he is much more interested usually in
quarreling about a living dog than in reverencing a dead lion. If he
is a French _lettré_, for instance, he will be producing a book on
the psychology of some living writer, while the Anglo-Saxon will be
writing another on Shakespeare. His whole attitude towards the things
of culture, be it noted, is one of daily appreciation and intimacy, not
that attitude of reverence with which we Americans approach alien art,
and which penalizes cultural heresy among us.
The European may be enthusiastic, polemic, radiant, concerning his
culture; he is never humble. And he is, above all, never humble before
the culture of another country. The Frenchman will hear nothing but
French music, read nothing but French literature, and prefers his own
art to that of any other nation. He can hardly understand our almost
pathetic eagerness to learn of the culture of other nations, our
humility of worship in the presence of art that in no sense represents
the expression of any of our ideals and motivating forces.
To a genuinely patriotic American this cultural humility of ours is
somewhat humiliating. In response to this eager inexhaustible interest
in Europe, where is Europe’s interest in us? Europe is to us the land
of history, of mellow tradition, of the arts and graces of life, of the
best that has been said and thought in the world. To Europe we are the
land of crude racial chaos, of skyscrapers and bluff, of millionaires
and “bosses.” A French philosopher visits us, and we are all eagerness
to get from him an orientation in all that is moving in the world of
thought across the seas. But does he ask about our philosophy, does
he seek an orientation in the American thought of the day? Not at
all. Our humility has kept us from forcing it upon his attention, and
it scarcely exists for him. Our advertising genius, so powerful and
universal where soap and biscuits are concerned, wilts and languishes
before the task of trumpeting our intellectual and spiritual products
before the world. Yet there can be little doubt which is the more
intrinsically worth advertising. But our humility causes us to be taken
at our own face value, and for all this patient fixity of gaze upon
Europe, we get little reward except to be ignored, or to have our
interest somewhat contemptuously dismissed as parasitic.
And with justice! For our very goal and ideal of culture has made us
parasites. Our method has been exactly wrong. For the truth is that the
definition of culture, which we have accepted with such devastating
enthusiasm, is a definition emanating from that very barbarism from
which its author recoiled in such horror. If it were not that all our
attitude showed that we had adopted a quite different standard, it
would be the merest platitude to say that culture is not an acquired
familiarity with things outside, but an inner and constantly operating
taste, a fresh and responsive power of discrimination, and the
insistent judging of everything that comes to our minds and senses. It
is clear that such a sensitive taste cannot be acquired by torturing
our appreciations into conformity with the judgments of others, no
matter how “authoritative” those judgments may be. Such a method means
a hypnotization of judgment, not a true development of soul.
At the back of Arnold’s definition is, of course, the implication
that if we have only learned to appreciate the “best,” we shall have
been trained thus to discriminate generally, that our appreciation of
Shakespeare will somehow spill over into admiration of the incomparable
art of Mr. G. Lowes Dickinson. This is, of course, exactly to reverse
the psychological process. A true appreciation of the remote and
the magnificent is acquired only after the judgment has learned to
discriminate with accuracy and taste between the good and bad, the
sincere and the false, of the familiar and contemporaneous art and
writing of every day. To set up an alien standard of the classics is
merely to give our lazy taste a resting-point, and to prevent forever
any genuine culture.
This virus of the “best” rages throughout all our Anglo-Saxon campaign
for culture. Is it not a notorious fact that our professors of English
literature make no attempt to judge the work produced since the death
of the last consecrated saint of the literary canon,--Robert Louis
Stevenson? In strict accordance with Arnold’s doctrine, they are
waiting for the judgment upon our contemporaries which they call the
test of time, that is, an authoritative objective judgment, upon which
they can unquestioningly rely. Surely it seems as if the principle of
authority, having been ousted from religion and politics, had found
a strong refuge in the sphere of culture. This tyranny of the “best”
objectifies all our taste. It is a “best” that is always outside of
our native reactions to the freshnesses and sincerities of life, a
“best” to which our spontaneities must be disciplined. By fixing our
eyes humbly on the ages that are past, and on foreign countries, we
effectually protect ourselves from that inner taste which is the only
sincere “culture.”
Our cultural humility before the civilizations of Europe, then, is the
chief obstacle which prevents us from producing any true indigenous
culture of our own. I am far from saying, of course, that it is not
necessary for our arts to be fertilized by the civilizations of other
nations past and present. The culture of Europe has arisen only from
such an extensive cross-fertilization in the past. But we have passed
through that period of learning, and it is time for us now to set up
our individual standards. We are already “heir of all the ages” through
our English ancestry, and our last half-century of European idolatry
has done for us all that can be expected. But, with our eyes fixed
on Europe, we continue to strangle whatever native genius springs
up. Is it not a tragedy that the American artist feels the imperative
need of foreign approval before he can be assured of his attainment?
Through our inability or unwillingness to judge him, through our
cultural humility, through our insistence on the objective standard,
we drive him to depend on a foreign clientèle, to live even in foreign
countries, where taste is more confident of itself and does not require
the label, to be assured of the worth of what it appreciates.
The only remedy for this deplorable situation is the cultivation of
a new American nationalism. We need that keen introspection into the
beauties and vitalities and sincerities of our own life and ideals that
characterizes the French. The French culture is animated by principles
and tastes which are as old as art itself. There are “classics,”
not in the English and Arnoldian sense of a consecrated canon,
dissent from which is heresy, but in the sense that each successive
generation, putting them to the test, finds them redolent of those
qualities which are characteristically French, and so preserves them
as a precious heritage. This cultural chauvinism is the most harmless
of patriotisms; indeed it is absolutely necessary for a true life of
civilization. And it can hardly be too intense, or too exaggerated.
Such an international art exhibition as was held recently in New York,
with the frankly avowed purpose of showing American artists how bad
they were in comparison with the modern French, represents an appalling
degradation of attitude which would be quite impossible in any other
country. Such groveling humility can only have the effect of making us
feeble imitators, instead of making us assert, with all the power at
our command, the genius and individuality which we already possess in
quantity, if we would only see it.
In the contemporary talent that Europe is exhibiting, or even in the
genius of the last half-century, one will go far to find greater poets
than our Walt Whitman, philosophers than William James, essayists
than Emerson and Thoreau, composers than MacDowell, sculptors than
Saint-Gaudens. In any other country such names would be focuses to
which interest and enthusiasms would converge, symbols of a national
spirit about which judgments and tastes would revolve. For none of
them could have been born in another country than our own. If some of
them had their training abroad, it was still the indigenous America
that their works expressed,--the American ideals and qualities, our
pulsating democracy, the vigor and daring of our pioneer spirit, our
sense of _camaraderie_, our dynamism, the big-heartedness of our
scenery, our hospitality to all the world. In the music of MacDowell,
the poetry of Whitman, the philosophy of James, I recognize a national
spirit, “l’esprit américain,” as superbly clear and gripping as
anything the culture of Europe has to offer us, and immensely more
stimulating, because of the very body and soul of to-day’s interests
and aspirations.
To come to an intense self-consciousness of these qualities, to
feel them in the work of these masters, and to search for them
everywhere among the lesser artists and thinkers who are trying to
express the soul of this hot chaos of America,--this will be the
attainment of culture for us. Not to look on ravished while our
marvelous millionaires fill our museums with “old masters,” armor, and
porcelains, but to turn our eyes upon our own art for a time, shut
ourselves in with our own genius, and cultivate with an intense and
partial pride what we have already achieved against the obstacles of
our cultural humility. Only thus shall we conserve the American spirit
and saturate the next generation with those qualities which are our
strength. Only thus can we take our rightful place among the cultures
of the world, to which we are entitled if we would but recognize it. We
shall never be able to perpetuate our ideals except in the form of art
and literature; the world will never understand our spirit except in
terms of art. When shall we learn that “culture,” like the kingdom of
heaven, lies within us, in the heart of our national soul, and not in
foreign galleries and books? When shall we learn to be proud? For only
pride is creative.