the individuals who compose it. If our literature is ever to be
regenerated, therefore, it can only be through the development of a
sense of “free will” (and of the responsibility that this entails) on
the part of our writers themselves. To be, to feel oneself, a “victim”
is in itself not to be an artist, for it is the nature of the artist to
live, not in the world of which he is an effect, but in the world of
which he is the cause, the world of his own creation. For this reason,
the pessimistic determinism of the present age is, from the point of
view of literature, of a piece with the optimistic determinism of
the age that is passing. What this pessimistic determinism reveals,
however, is a _consciousness of the situation_: to that extent it
represents a gain, and one may even say that to be conscious of
the situation is half the battle. If we owed nothing else to Mr.
Dreiser, for instance, we should owe him enough for the tragic sense
of the waste and futility of American life, as we know it, which his
books communicate. It remains true that in so far as we resent this
life it is a sign of our own weakness, of the harm not only that our
civilization has done us but that we have permitted it to do us, of
our own imperfectly realized freedom; for to the creative spirit in
its free state the external world is merely an impersonal point of
departure. Thus it is certain that as long as the American writer
shares what James Bryce calls the “mass fatalism” of the American
people, our literature will remain the sterile, supine, and inferior
phenomenon which, on the whole, it is.
“What we want,” wrote Henry Adams in 1862 to his brother Charles, “is a
_school_. We want a national set of young men like ourselves or better,
to start new influences not only in politics, but in literature, in
law, in society, and throughout the whole social organism of the
country--a national school of our own generation. And that is what
America has no power to create.... It’s all random, insulated work,
for special and temporary and personal purposes. And we have no means,
power or hope of combined action for any unselfish end.” _That is what
America has no power to create._ But can it be said that any nation
has ever created a school? Here we have the perfect illustration of
that mass fatalism of which I have spoken, and Henry Adams himself, in
his passivity, is the type of it. Secure as he was, uniquely secure,
why did he refuse to accept the responsibility of those novels in
which he expressed the contempt of a powerful and cultivated mind
for the meanness, the baseness, the vulgarity of the guiding element
in American society? In the darkest and most chaotic hours of our
spiritual history the individual has possessed a measure of free
will only to renounce it: if Henry Adams had merely signed his work
and accepted the consequences of it, he might by that very fact have
become the founder, the centre, of the school that he desired. But it
is true that in that generation the impulses of youth were, with an
extraordinary unanimity, focused upon a single end, the exploitation of
the continent; the material opportunities that American life offered
were too great and too all-engrossing, and it is unlikely that any
considerable minority could have been rallied for any non-utilitarian
cause. Sixty years later this school remains, and quite particularly
as regards our literature, the one thing necessary; the reforestation
of our spiritual territory depends on it. And in more than one sense
the times are favourable. The closing of the frontier seems to promise
for this country an intenser life than it has known before; a large
element of the younger generation, estranged from the present order,
exists in a state of ferment that renders it highly susceptible to new
ideas; the country literally swarms with half-artists, as one may call
them, men and women, that is to say, who have ceased to conform to the
law of the tribe but who have not accepted the discipline of their
own individual spirits. “What I chiefly desire for you,” wrote Ibsen
to Brandes at the outset of his career, “is a genuine, full-blooded
egoism, which shall force you for a time to regard what concerns you
yourself as the only thing of any consequence, and everything else as
non-existent.... There is no way in which you can benefit society more
than by coining the metal you have in yourself.” The second half of
this rather blunt counsel of perfection is implied in the first, and it
connotes a world of things merely to name which would be to throw into
relief the essential infantility of the American writer as we know the
type. By what prodigies of alert self-adaptation, of discriminating
self-scrutiny, of conscious effort does the creative will come into its
own! As for us, weak as too many of us are, ignorant, isolated, all too
easily satisfied, and scarcely as yet immune from the solicitations of
the mob, we still have this advantage, that an age of reaction is an
age that stirs the few into a consciousness of themselves.
VAN WYCK BROOKS
MUSIC
We spend more money upon music than does any other nation on earth;
some of our orchestras, notably those of Boston, Chicago, and
Philadelphia, are worthy to rank among the world’s best; in the
Metropolitan Opera House we give performances of grand opera that for
consistent excellence of playing, singing, and _mise-en-scène_ are
surpassed probably nowhere. Yet there has never been a successful opera
by an American offered at that opera house, and the number of viable
American orchestral works is small enough to be counted almost upon
one’s fingers. We squander millions every year upon an art that we
cannot produce.
There are apologists for the American composer who will say that we
do produce it, but that it is strangled at birth. According to their
stock argument, there are numberless greatly gifted native composers
whose works never get a hearing, (a) because Americans are prejudiced
against American music and in favour of foreign music, and (b) because
the foreigners who largely control the musical situation in this
country jealously refuse to allow American works to be performed.
This would be impressive if it were consistent or true. As far as
concerns the Jealous Foreigner myth--he does not dominate the musical
situation--I have never noticed that the average European in this
country is deficient either in self-interest or tact. He is generally
anxious, if only for diplomatic reasons, to find American music that
is worth singing or playing. Even when he fails to find any that is
worth performing, he often performs some that isn’t, in order to
satisfy local pride. Moreover, Americans are no more prejudiced against
American musicians than they are against other kinds. As a matter of
fact, if intensive boosting campaigns produced creative artists, the
American composer during the past decade should have expanded like
a hot-house strawberry. We have had prize contests of all kinds,
offering substantial sums for everything from grand operas to string
quartettes, we have had societies formed to publish his chamber-music
scores; publishers have rushed to print his smaller works; we have had
concerts of American compositions; we have had all-American festivals.
Meanwhile the American composer has, with a few lonely exceptions,
obstinately refused to produce anything above the level of what it
would be flattering to call mediocrity.
No. If he is not heard oftener in concert halls and upon recital
platforms, it is because he is not good enough. There is, in the
music of even the second-rate Continental composers, a surety of
touch, a quality of evident confidence in their material and ease in
its handling that is rarely present in the work of Americans. Most
American symphonic and chamber music lacks structure and clarity. The
workmanship is faulty, the utterance stammers and halts. Listening to
an average American symphonic poem, you get the impression that the
composer was so amazed and delighted at being able to write a symphonic
poem at all that the fact that it might be a dull one seemed of minor
importance to him. When he isn’t being almost entirely formless he is
generally safely conventional, preferring to stick to what a statesman
would call the Ways of the Fathers rather than risk some structural
innovation what might or might not be effective. Tschaikovsky’s
variation of the traditional sequence of movements in the _Pathétique_
symphony, for example--ending with the slow movement instead of the
march--would scandalize and terrify the average American.
This feebleness and uncertainty in the handling of material makes
American music sound more sterile and commonplace than it really is.
The American composer never seems certain just what, if anything, he
wants to say. His themes, his fundamental ideas, are often of real
significance, but he has no control over that very essence of the
language of music, mood. He lacks taste. The fact that an American
composition may begin in a genuinely impressive mood is no guarantee
at all that inside of twenty-four bars it may not fall into the
most appalling banalities. We start with lyric beauty and finish in
stickiness. The curse of bathos is upon us. We lack staying power. Just
as so many American dramatists can write two good acts of a three-act
play, so many American novelists can write superb opening chapters, so
do American composers devise eloquent opening themes. But we all fail
when it comes to development. The train is laid, the match is applied,
and the spectators crowd back in delighted terror amid tremendous
hissings and sputterings. But when the awaited detonation comes, it is
too often only a pop.
Such failure to make adequate use of his ideas is partially
attributable to the American musician’s pathetically inadequate
technical equipment. Generally speaking, he doesn’t know his business.
He has been unable, or hasn’t bothered, to learn his trade. Imagine if
you can a successful dramatist who can neither read nor write, but has
to dictate his plays, or a painter who can only draw the outlines of
his pictures, hiring some one else to lay in the colours, and you have
something analogous to many an American “composer” whose music is taken
seriously by Americans, and who cannot write out a playable piano part,
arrange a song for choral performance, or transcribe a hymn tune for
a string quartette. Such elementary work he has to have done for him,
whenever it is necessary, by some hack. This, to say nothing of the
more advanced branches of musical science, like counterpoint, fugue,
orchestration. Though it is risky to generalize, it is probably safe
to say that among Americans who write music, the man who can construct
a respectable fugue or canon or score a piece for full orchestra is
decidedly the exception. In Europe, of course, any man who did not
have these technical resources at his fingertips would have to be a
Moussorgsky to be taken seriously as a composer at all.
It is not entirely the American’s fault that he is so ill-equipped.
Much of his comparative musical illiteracy, true, is the result of
his own laziness and his traditional American contempt for theory and
passion for results. On the other hand, the young American who honestly
desires a good theoretical training in music must either undertake
the expensive adventure of journeying to one of the few cities that
contain a first-class conservatory, or the equally expensive one of
going to Europe. If he can do neither, he must to a great extent
educate himself. Some kinds of training it is nearly impossible for
him to obtain here at any price. Orchestration, for instance, a
tremendously complex and difficult science, can be mastered only by
the time-honoured trial and error method, i.e., by writing out scores
and hearing them played. How is our young American to manage this?
Granted that there is a symphony orchestra near him, how can he get
his scores played? The conductor cannot be blamed for refusing. He
is hired to play the works of masters, not to try out the apprentice
efforts of unskilled aspirants. What we need so badly here are not
more first-class orchestras, but more second-rate ones, small-town
orchestras that could afford to give the tyro a chance.
Because of their lack of technical skill many composers in this country
never venture into the broader fields of composition at all. As a
class, we write short piano and violin pieces, or songs. We write them
because we do earnestly desire to write something and because they do
not demand the technical resourcefulness and sustained inspiration
that we lack. Parenthetically, I don’t for a moment mean to imply that
clumsy workmanship and sterility are unknown in Europe, that we are all
mediocrities and they are all _Uebermenschen_. As a matter of fact,
we have to-day probably much more creative musical talent, if less
brains, than Europe; but, talent for talent, the European is infinitely
better trained. This, at least in part, because he respects theory
and has a desire for technical proficiency that we almost totally
lack. Then too, the European has some cultural background. There is a
curious lack of inter-communication among the arts in this country.
The painter seems to feel that literature has nothing direct to give
him, the writer, that music and painting are not in his line, and the
musician--decidedly the worst of the three in this respect--that his
own art has no connection with anything.
The American composer’s most complete failure is intellectual. The
fact that he writes music seldom warrants the assumption that he has
the artist’s point of view at all. He is likely to be a much less
interesting person than one’s iceman. Ten to one, he never visits a
picture gallery or a sculpture exhibition, his taste in the theatre
is probably that of the tired business man, and what little reading
he does is likely to be confined to trade papers, _Snappy Stories_,
and best-sellers. He takes no interest in politics, economics, or
sociology, either national or international (how could they possibly
concern him?), and probably cannot discuss even music with pleasure or
profit to anybody.
The natural inference that might be drawn from this diatribe--that
the composing of music in this country is confined exclusively to the
idiot classes--is not strictly true. Plenty of American musicians are
intelligent and cultured men as well; but that is not America’s fault.
She is just as cordial to the stupid ones. And the widespread impotence
and technical sloppiness of American music is the inevitable result of
the American attitude toward music and to the anomalous position the
art occupies in this country.
Let me be platitudinous in the interest of clarity and point out what
we so often forget: that our nation, unlike most of the others, is not
a race as well. We have common wellsprings of thought, but--and this
is significant and ominous--none of feeling. Sheer environment may
teach people to think alike within a generation; but it takes centuries
of common emotional experiences to make them feel alike. Any average
American, even of the National-Security-League-one-hundred-per-centum
variety, may have in his veins the blood of English, French, Italian,
and Russian ancestors, and there is no saying that his emotional
nature is going to find many heart-beats in common with some equally
average neighbour, whose ancestry may be, say, Irish, Danish, and
Hungarian. What national spirit we have has been determined, first,
by the fact that the ancestors of every one of us, whether they came
here twenty years ago or two hundred, were pioneers. Every one of them
left a civilization whose cultural background had been established for
centuries, to come to a land where the problem of mere existence was
of prime importance. Again, many of them were religious fanatics. In
the life of the pioneer there was little room for art of any sort, and
least for music. What he demanded of music, when he had time to spare
for it, was that above all things it distract him from the fatigue
and worry of everyday life, either by amusing him or by furnishing a
sentimental reminder of old ways. To the Puritan, music, both for its
own sake and as entertainment, was anathema. As sensuous beauty it was
popish, and as entertainment it was worldly pleasure, and therefore
wicked. To be tolerated at all, it must be practical, i.e., perform
some moral service by being a hymn tune. And what the American pioneer
and the American Puritan asked a few generations back, the average
American asks to-day whenever he is confronted with any work of art:
Does it point a moral? If not, will it help me to kill time without
boring me?
Instruction, release, or amusement: that, in general, is all we want
of art. The American’s favourite picture is one that tells a story, or
shows the features of some famous person, or the topography of some
historic spot. Fantastic pictures he likes, because they show him
people and places far removed from his own rather tedious environment,
but they must be a gaudy, literal, solid sort of fantasy--Maxfield
Parrish rather than Aubrey Beardsley. If he can’t have these, he wants
pretty girls or comics. Purely decorative or frankly meaningless
pictures--Hokusai and Whistler (except, of course, the portraits of
Carlyle and his mother)--do not exist for him. Sculpture--which he
does not understand--is probably his favourite art-form, for it is
tangible, three-dimensionable, stable. He doesn’t mind poetry, for it,
too, gives him release. He likes novels, especially “glad” ones or
mystery stories. He even tolerates realism if, as in “Main Street,” it
gives him release by showing him a set of consistently contemptible
and uncultured characters to whom even he must feel superior. His
architecture he likes either ornate to imbecility or utilitarian to
hideousness.
In other words, the typical American goes to an art-work either frankly
to have his senses tickled or for the sake of a definite thing that it
says or a series of extraneous images or thoughts that it evokes--never
for the _Ding an sich_. Of pure æsthetic emotion he exhibits very
little. To him, beauty is emphatically not its own excuse for being.
He does not want it for its own sake, and distrusts and fears it when
it appears before him unclothed in moral lessons or associated ideas.
In such a civilization music can occupy but a very unimportant place.
For music is, morally or intellectually, the most meaningless of arts:
it teaches no lesson, it offers no definite escape from life to the
literal-minded, and aside from the primitive and obvious associations
of patriotic airs and “mother” songs, it evokes no associated images or
ideas. To love music you must be willing to enjoy beauty pretty largely
for its own sake, without asking it to mean anything definite in words
or pictures. This the American hates to do. Since he cannot be edified,
he refuses to be stirred. There is nothing left for him, therefore, in
music, except such enjoyment as he can get out of a pretty tune or an
infectious rhythm.
And that, despite our admirable symphony orchestras and our two superb
permanent opera companies (all run at a loss, by the way), is about all
that music means to the average American--amusement. He simply does not
see how an art that doesn’t teach him anything, that is a shameless
assault upon his emotions (he makes no distinction between emotions
and senses), can possibly play any significant part in his life. So,
as a nation, he does what he generally does in other matters of art,
delegates its serious cultivation to women.
Women constitute ninety per cent. of those who support music in this
country. It is women who attend song and instrumental recitals; it
is women who force reluctant husbands and fathers to subscribe for
opera seats and symphony concerts; the National Federation of Musical
Clubs, which works throughout the country to foster the appreciation
of music, is composed entirely of women; at least two-thirds of the
choral organizations in the United States contain women’s voices only.
It is no disparagement of their activities to say that such a state
of affairs is unhealthy. This well-nigh complete feminization of
music is bad for it. After all, art, to be alive, must like any other
living thing be the result of collaboration. Women have undertaken
to be the moral guardians of the race, and no one can deny that they
guard, upon the whole, as well as men could; but their guardianship
is a bit too zealous at times, and their predominance in our musical
life aggravates our already exaggerated tendency to demand that art be
edifying. One of the conditions of the opera contest conducted by the
National Federation in 1914 was that the libretto must contain nothing
immoral or suggestive (I paraphrase). Now music is, after all, an adult
occupation, and it might be assumed that a composer competent to write
an opera score might have taste and intelligence enough not to be
vulgar--for, surely, vulgarity was all they wanted to guard against.
If the clause were to be interpreted literally, it would bar the
librettos of _Tristan_, _Walküre_, _Carmen_, _Pelléas et Mélisande_,
and _L’Amore dei Tre Re_--a supposition quite too unthinkable. The
feminine influence helps to increase the insularity of our musicians.
Women are more chauvinistic in art matters--if possible--than men,
and among the women’s clubs that are trying to encourage the American
composer there is a tendency to insist rather that he be American than
that he be a composer. Since it is women who support our recitals and
concerts it is they who must assume responsibility for our excessive
cult of the performer. This land is certainly the happy hunting-ground
of the virtuoso, be he singer, player, or conductor. What he chooses
to sing, play, or conduct is comparatively unimportant to us. Our
audiences seem to gather not so much to listen as to look; or if
they do listen, it is to the voice or the instrument rather than
to the music. The announcement, “Farrar in _Carmen_” will pack the
Metropolitan to the doors; but if the bill be changed, and _Zaza_ be
substituted at the last moment, who cares? Indeed the ticket agencies,
knowing what people really attend opera for, frankly advertise “tickets
for Farrar to-night.” Rachmaninoff is a great pianist, and Rachmaninoff
playing an all-Chopin programme could fill Carnegie Hall at any
time. But Rachmaninoff playing a programme of Czerny’s “Exercises
for the Beginner” could fill it just as well. Announce an all-Chopin
programme without naming the pianist, and see how much of an audience
you draw. The people who go to hear Galli-Curci sing the shadow-song
from _Dinora_ do not go to hear music at all. They go as they would go
to see Bird Millman walk a slack wire; they go to hear a woman prove
that, given a phenomenal development of the vocal cords, she can, after
years of practice, perform scales and trills _in altissimo_ very nearly
as well as the union flute-player who furnishes her obligato. All
this is to a certain extent true elsewhere, of course. It is natural
that if one person can sing or play better than another, audiences
should prefer to hear him rather than another. But this worship of the
performance rather than the thing performed, this blind adoration of
skill for its own sake, is cultivated in America to a degree that is
quite unparalleled.
Many American cities and large towns hold annual musical festivals,
lasting from two days to a week or more, and these are often mentioned
as evidence of the existence of a genuine musical culture among us. Are
they? What happens at them? For one thing, the local choral society
performs a cantata or oratorio. This is more than likely to be either
_The Messiah_ or _Elijah_, works which through long association have
taken on less the character of musical compositions than of devotional
exercises. Edification again. Soloists are engaged, as expensive and
famous as the local budget allows, and these give recitals during the
remaining sessions of the festival. The audiences come largely to see
these marvels rather than to hear music, for after the annual spree of
culture is over they return home contentedly enough to another year
void of any music whatever. Hearing a little music is better than
hearing none, but the test of genuine culture is whether or not it
is an integral part of life rather than a vacation from it. By this
test the annual festival would seem to exert about as much permanent
cultural influence as a clambake.