clear precursive signal. Little as it may comfort our fuglemen of the
autochthonous, we must, I think, look to Europe for its origins. This
is not, as some imagine, a disgrace--it would be a melancholy thing,
of course, if we merely imitated the European, without alteration. But
Browning would hardly recognize himself, even if he cared to, in the
“Domesday Book” of Mr. Edgar Lee Masters, Mallarmé and Rimbaud would
find Mr. Fletcher a mirror with an odd trick of distortion, Laforgue
would have to look twice at Mr. T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock” (for all
its Hamletism), M. Paul Fort would scarcely feel at home in Miss Amy
Lowell’s “Can Grande’s Castle,” Mr. Thomas Hardy and the ghost of
Tennyson would not quarrel much for the possession of Mr. Robinson’s
work, nor Mr. Chesterton and the author of “The Ingoldsby Legends”
for the lively sonorities of Mr. Vachel Lindsay. In such cases we
have not so much “influence” as fertilization. It is something of Mr.
Masters that “The Ring and the Book” reveals to Mr. Masters: something
of Miss Lowell to which M. Paul Fort offers her the key. Was it a
calamity for Baudelaire that he lived only by a transfusion of blood
from an American? Is Becquer the less Becquer or Spanish for having
fed upon the “Buch der Lieder”?... Culture is bartered, nowadays, at
open frontiers, and if to-day a new theme, chord, or colour-scheme is
French, German, or American, to-morrow it is international.
If we differ in this respect from any other country it is only that we
are freer to exploit, really exhaust, the new, because we hold, less
than any other, to any classical traditions: for traditions our poets
seldom look back further than the 19th century. We have the courage,
often indistinguishable from folly, of our lack of convictions. Thus it
comes about that as America is the melting-pot for races, so she is in
a fair way to become a melting-pot for cultures: we have the energy,
the curiosity, the intelligence, above all the lack of affiliations
with the past, which admirably adapt us to a task--so precisely
demanding complete self-surrender--of æsthetic experiment. Ignorance
has some compensations--I mean, of course, a partial ignorance. If Mr.
Lindsay had been brought up exclusively on Aristotle, Plato, Æschylus,
and Euripides, and had been taken out of the shadow of the church
by Voltaire and Darwin, perhaps he would not have been so “free” to
experiment with the “higher vaudeville.” It will be observed that this
is an odd kind of “freedom,” for it amounts in some ways to little
more than the “freedom” of the prison. For if too severe a training
in the classics unfits one somewhat for bold experiment, too little
of it is as likely, on the other hand, to leave one with an æsthetic
perceptiveness, a sensibility, in short, relatively rudimentary.
This, then, is something of the cultural _mise en scène_ for our
contemporary poetry. We have repeated waves of European suggestion
breaking Westward over our continent, foaming rather more in Chicago
than in New York; and we have our lusty young company of swimmers,
confident that they are strong enough to ride these waves farther than
any one in Europe rode them and with a more native grace. What is most
conspicuously American in most of these swimmers is the fact that
they rely not so much on skill and long training as on sheer energy,
vitality, and confidence. They rely, indeed, in most cases, on a kind
of exuberance or superabundance. Do we not feel this in the work of
Mr. Edgar Lee Masters--does he not try, in these many full books of
his, where the good is so inextricably enmeshed with the bad, simply
to beat us down as under a cataract? “Domesday Book” is, rather, an
avalanche. He never knows what to exclude, where to stop. Miss Lowell,
Mr. Fletcher, Mr. Carl Sandburg, and Mr. Lindsay are not far behind
him, either--they are all copious. I do not mean to imply that this
is a bad thing, at the moment--at the moment I am not sure that this
sheer exuberance is not, for us, the very _best_ thing. Energy is the
first requisite of a “renaissance,” and supplies its material, or,
in another light, its richness of colour. Not the beginning, but the
end, of a renaissance is in refinement; and I think we are certainly
within bounds in postulating that the last five years have given us
at the least a superb beginning, and enough more than that, perhaps,
to make one wonder whether we have not already cast Poe and Whitman,
Sidney Lanier, and Emily Dickinson, our strange little quartette, into
a shadow.
All that our wonder can hope for is at best a very speculative answer.
If parallels were not so dangerous, we might look with encouragement at
that spangled rhetorical torrent which we call Elizabethan literature.
Ben Jonson did not consider Shakespeare much of an artist, nor did
Milton, and classicists ever since have followed them in that opinion.
If one can be the greatest of poets and yet not much of an artist, we
may here keep clear of the quarrel: what we get at is the fact that
Shakespeare and the other Elizabethans participated in a literary
movement which, like ours, began in energy, violence, and extravagance,
was at its best excessively rhetorical and given to unpruned
copiousness, and perished as it refined. Will a future generation see
us in a somewhat similar light--will it like us for our vitality, for
the reckless adventurousness of our literature, our extravagances, and
forgive us, if it does not precisely enjoy as something with a foreign
flavour, our artistic innocence? That is conceivable, certainly. Yet
the view _is_ speculative and we dare not take it too seriously. For if
we have kept hopefully and intelligently abreast of the contemporary we
have kept, none the less, our own very sufficient aloofness, our own
tactilism and awareness, in the light of which we are bound to have our
own scepticisms and self-distrust. I do not mean that we would perhaps
prefer something more classical or severe than “Spoon River Anthology”
or “The Congo” or the colour symphonies of Mr. Fletcher, merely on
the ground that it is the intrinsically classical and severe which we
most desire. What we seem to see in contemporary American poetry is a
transition from the more to the less exuberant, from the less to the
more severe; and what we most _desire_ to see is the attainment of
_that point_, in this transition, which will give us our parallel to
the Shakespearean, if we may hope for anything even approximately so
high; a point of equipoise.
This hope gives us a convenient vantage from which to survey the
situation, if we also keep in mind our perception of American cultural
heterogeneity and the rashness of any attempt to generalize about
it. The most exact but least diverting method would be the merely
enumerative, the mere roll-call which would put before us Mr. Edwin
Arlington Robinson and Mr. Ezra Pound as the two of our poets whose
public literary activities extend farthest back, and after them the
group who made themselves known in the interval between 1914 and 1920:
Mr. Robert Frost, Mr. Fletcher, Mr. Masters, Mr. Sandburg, Miss Lowell,
Mr. Lindsay, Mr. Alfred Kreymborg, Mr. Maxwell Bodenheim, Mr. Wallace
Stevens, “H. D.,” Mr. T. S. Eliot, and Miss Sara Teasdale. These poets,
with few exceptions, have little enough in common--nothing, perhaps,
save the fact that they were all a good deal actuated at the outset
by a disgust with the dead level of sentimentality and prettiness and
moralism to which American poetry had fallen between 1890 and 1910.
From that point they diverge like so many radii. One cannot say, as
Miss Lowell has tried to persuade us, that they have all followed one
radius, and that the differences between them are occasioned by the
fact that some have gone farther than others. We may, for convenience,
classify them, if we do not attach too much importance to the bounds
of our classes. We may say that Mr. Robinson, Mr. Frost, and Mr.
Masters bring back to our poetry a strong sense of reality; that Mr.
Fletcher, Mr. Pound, Miss Lowell, “H. D.,” and Mr. Bodenheim bring to
it a sharpened consciousness of colour; that Mr. Eliot, Mr. Kreymborg,
and Mr. Stevens bring to it a refinement of psychological subtlety;
Mr. Sandburg, a grim sense of social responsibility; Mr. Lindsay, a
rhythmic abandon mixed with evangelism; Miss Teasdale, a grace. The
range here indicated is extraordinary. The existence side by side in
one generation and in one country of such poets as Mr. Masters and
Mr. Fletcher, or Mr. Eliot and Miss Lowell, is anomalous. Clearly we
are past that time when a nation will have at a given moment a single
direct literary current. There is as yet no sign that to any one of
these groups will fall anything like undivided sway. Mr. Frost’s
“North of Boston” and Mr. Fletcher’s “Irradiations” came out in the
same year; “Spoon River Anthology” and the first “Imagist Anthology”;
Mr. Robinson’s “Lancelot” and Mr. Bodenheim’s “Advice.” And what
gulfs even between members of any one of our arbitrary “classes”!
Mr. Frost’s actualism is seldom far from the dramatic or lyric, that
of Mr. Masters seldom far from the physiological. Mr. Masters is
bitter-minded, tediously explanatory, and his passionate enquiries fall
upon life like so many heavy blows; his delvings appear morbid as well
as searching. Mr. Frost is gentle, whether in irony, humour, or sense
of pain: if it is the pathos of decay which most moves him, he sees it,
none the less, at dewfall and moonrise, in a dark tree, a birdsong.
The inflections of the human voice, as he hears them, are as tender as
in the hearing of Mr. Masters they are harsh. And can Mr. Robinson be
thought a commensal of either? His again is a prolonged enquiry into
the why of human behaviour, but how bared of colour, how muffled with
reserves and dimmed with reticence! Here, indeed, is a step toward
romanticism. For Mr. Robinson, though a realist in the sense that his
preoccupation is with motive, turns down the light in the presence of
his protagonist that in the gloom he may take on the air of something
larger and more mysterious than the garishly actual. Gleams convey the
dimensions--hints suggest a depth. We are not always too precisely
aware of what is going on in this twilight of uncertainties, but Mr.
Robinson seems to whisper that the implications are tremendous. Not
least, moreover, of these implications are the moral--the mirror that
Mr. Robinson holds up to nature gives us back the true, no doubt,
but increasingly in his later work (as in “Merlin” and “Lancelot,”
particularly the latter) with a slight trick of refraction that makes
of the true the exemplary.
We cross a chasm, from these sombre psycho-realists, to the colourists.
To these, one finds, what is human in behaviour or motive is of
importance only in so far as it affords colour or offers possibilities
of pattern. Mr. Fletcher is the most brilliant of this group, and
the most “uncontrolled”: his colourism, at its best, is a pure, an
astonishingly absolute thing. The “human” element he wisely leaves
alone--it baffles and escapes him. One is aware that this kaleidoscopic
whirl of colour is “wrung out” of Mr. Fletcher, that it conveys what
is for him an intense personal drama, but this does not make his work
“human.” The note of “personal drama” is more complete in the poetry
of “H. D.,” but this too is, in the last analysis, a nearly pure
colourism, as static and fragmentary, however, as Mr. Fletcher’s is
dynamic. Mr. Bodenheim is more detached, cooler, has a more conscious
eye for correspondences between colour and mood: perhaps we should
call him a symbolist. Even here, however, the “human,” the whim of
tenderness, the psychological gleam, are swerved so that they may
fall into a fantastic design. Miss Lowell, finally, more conscious,
deliberate and energetic than any of these, brilliantly versatile,
utterly detached, while she “sees” more of the objective world (and has
farther-ranging interests), sees it more completely than any of them
simply as raw colour or incipient pattern. If the literary pulse is
here often feverishly high, the empathic and sympathetic temperature is
as often absolute zero.
Mr. Pound shares with Miss Lowell this immersion in the “literary”--he
is intensely aware of the literary past, rifles it for odds and ends
of colour, atmosphere, and attitude, is perpetually adding bright new
bits, from such sources, to his Joseph’s coat: but if a traditionalist
in this, a curio-hunter, he is an experimentalist in prosody; he has
come far from the sentimental literary affectedness of his early work
and at his best has written lyrics of a singular beauty and transparent
clarity. The psychological factor has from time to time intrigued him,
moreover, and we see him as a kind of link between the colourists and
such poets as Mr. T. S. Eliot, Mr. Alfred Kreymborg, and Mr. Wallace
Stevens. These poets are alike in achieving, by a kind of alchemy, the
lyric in terms of the analytic: introspection is made to shine, to the
subtly seen is given a delicate air of false simplicity. Mr. Stevens is
closest to the colourists. His drift has been away from the analytic
and towards the mere capture of a “tone.” Mr. Kreymborg is a melodist
and a mathematician. He takes a pleasure in making of his poems and
plays charming diagrams of the emotions. Mr. Eliot has more of an
eye for the sharp dramatic gesture, more of an ear for the trenchant
dramatic phrase--he looks now at Laforgue, now at John Webster. His
technical skill is remarkable, his perception of effect is precise, his
range narrow, perhaps increasingly narrow.
Even so rapid and superficial a survey cannot but impress us with the
essential anarchy of this poetic community. Lawlessness has seemed
at times to be the prevailing note; no poetic principle has remained
unchallenged, and we have only to look in the less prosperous suburbs
and corners of this city to see to what lengths the bolder rebels,
whether of the “Others” group or elsewhere, have gone. Ugliness and
shapelessness have had their adherents among those whom æsthetic
fatigue had rendered momentarily insensitive to the well-shaped;
the fragmentary has had its adherents among those whom cynicism had
rendered incapable of any service, too prolonged, to one idea. But
the fetichists of the ugly and the fragmentary have exerted, none the
less, a wholesome and fructifying influence. Whatever we feel about
the ephemerality of the specifically ugly or fragmentary, we cannot
escape a feeling that these, almost as importantly as the new realism
or the new colourism, have enlarged what we might term the general
“poetic consciousness” of the time. If there was a moment when the
vogue of the disordered seemed to threaten, or predict, a widespread
and rapid poetic decadence, that moment is safely past. The tendency
is now in the other direction, and not the least interesting sign is
the fact that many of the former apostles of the disordered are to-day
experimenting with the things they yesterday despised--rhyme, metre,
and the architecture of theme.
We have our affections, in all this, for the fragmentary and ugly
as for the abrupt small hideousness--oddly akin to virility--of
gargoyles. We have our affections, too, for the rawest of our very raw
realisms--for the maddest of our colourisms, the most idiosyncratic
subtleties of our first introspectionists. Do we hesitate a little to
ask something more of any of the poets whom we thus designate? What
we fear is that in attempting to give us our something more, they
will give us something less. What we want more of, what we see our
contemporary poets as for the most part sadly deficient in, is “art.”
What we are afraid they will lose, if we urge them in this direction,
is their young sharp brilliance. Urge them, however, we must. What
our poets need most to learn is that poetry is not merely a matter of
outpouring, of confession. It must be serious: it must be, if simple in
appearance, none the less highly wrought: it must be packed. It must
be beautifully elaborate rather than elaborately beautiful. It must be
detached from dogma--we must keep it away from the all too prevalent
lecture platform.
What we should like to see, in short, is a fusion, of the extraordinary
range of poetic virtues with which our contemporary poets confront
us, into one poetic consciousness. Do we cavil too much in assuming
that no one of our poets offers us quite enough? Should we rather take
comfort in the hope that many of their individual “personalities” are
vivid enough to offset their onesidedness, and in that way to have a
considerable guarantee of survival? We have mentioned that possibility
before, and certainly it cannot be flatly dismissed. But I think it
cannot be contested that many of these poets already feel, themselves,
a sharper responsibility, a need for a greater comprehensiveness, for
a finer and richer tactile equipment, a steadier view of what it is
that constitutes beauty of form. They are immeasurably distant from
any dry, cold perfectionism, however; and if we cheer them in taking
the path that leads thither, it is in the hope of seeing them reach
the halfway house rather than the summit. For to go all the way is to
arrive exhausted; to go half way is to arrive with vigour.... That,
however, is to interpose our own view and to lose our detachment. We
return to a reiteration of our conclusion that American poetry is at
the moment extraordinarily healthy. Its virtues are the virtues of all
good poetry, and they are sufficient to persuade us that the future
of English poetry lies as much in America as in England. Its faults
are the faults of a culture that is immature. But again, we reiterate
that we have here many cultures, and if some are immature, some are
not. Let those who are too prone to diagnose us culturally from “Spoon
River Anthology” or “Smoke and Steel” keep in mind also Mr. Robinson’s
“Merlin” and Mr. Frost’s “North of Boston”; Mr. Fletcher’s “Goblins and
Pagodas” and Miss Lowell’s “Can Grande’s Castle.”
CONRAD AIKEN
ART
The problem of American Art is unlike that of any other country of
the present or the past. We have not here the racial and historical
foundation on which, until now, every art has been built and so our
striving (it is far too soon to speak of success or failure) must be
judged from another standpoint than the one to be taken in viewing an
art that originates with its people or is directly transmitted from
an older race. Egypt and ancient Mexico furnish examples of the first
case, Italy and France of the second. When the latter countries were
colonized by the Greeks, Phœnicians and others, they received a culture
which could take on fresh vigour when grasped by a new race.
We did not start as a new race, but as Europeans possessing the same
intellectual heritage as the men who stayed in the parent countries.
Our problem was not one of receiving the ancient tradition from an
invading or colonizing people who brought with them an art already
formed. Ourselves the invaders and colonizers, our problem was to keep
alive the ideas that we had had in Europe, or to take over those of our
new home, or to evolve an art of our own.
To begin with the second possibility, the question of our relation to
the ideas of the Indians may obviously be disposed of very briefly.
The tribes encountered by the early settlers were in a state of
savagery, and this fact, together with the constant warfare between
the two races, is a sufficient explanation why we find no influence
from the red men. Even where the Europeans encountered culture of a
very high order, as in Mexico and Peru, the remoteness of the native
ideas from those of the invading race prevented for centuries a just
appreciation of the earliest and unquestionably the greatest art
produced in the Western Hemisphere. It is only in quite recent years
that we have realized its merit, and it is unlikely that even our
present-day interest in the exotic arts will bring about any important
influence from the Indians, although in regions such as our Southwest
and the parts of Mexico where “Americanizing” has not yet killed their
art-instinct, they are still producing beautiful work.
We have, of course, retained European ideals, but they have been
conditioned by circumstances and we have not kept pace with Europe or
even followed the course of the great art-movements until they were
almost or quite superseded abroad. Our distance from the centres of
ancient and modern culture on one hand, and the needs of building
up the new continent on the other, combined to make our people lose
interest in art, which, indeed, had never found a propitious soil among
our British forebears. The case of literature is different. The love
of it is an abiding one with the Anglo-Saxon race, and as Shakespeare
and the Bible could be read in the frontier cabin almost as well as in
London or Dublin, there was not the loss of knowledge of literature,
the break in the production of it that we find in the case of the
plastic arts.
It is easy to exaggerate on this score, however, forgetting that the
art-instinct accumulated in a race for centuries is not to be lost by a
period of neglect. When he goes to the museum, the American recognizes
the same masters as does the European, but the smaller opportunity here
to know the classic past has the double effect of keeping art-lovers
in America in a far more reduced minority and at the same time of
weakening the authority of tradition.
Not to speak of 17th or 18th century conditions, nor even of those
of the 19th century, one need only consider the America of to-day to
realize how little opportunity our people has to know art. In all but
a few cities, Americans can learn only from reproductions and books,
though even these are an immeasurably safer guide than the bad original
works which are usually the first to arrive. When one thinks of the
European countryside and the numberless small towns of all the old
countries where there is no museum, one may be tempted to ask whether
art conditions are so very different there. But they are different.
There will be an old church, or some houses of a good period, or some
objects in the houses, or--on the walls of the inn--some old prints
handing on the tradition of the great religious pictures (such things
were made quite commonly until recent times and have not entirely
ceased to be produced); a tradition of construction and of colour makes
the modern houses fit in quite acceptably with those of the past. The
centuries have built up a sense of fitness and beauty in the making and
wearing of costume; there will be some form of folk-singing or other
collective action of an artistic character, and thus the exceptional
individual, born with a strong instinct toward art, has surroundings
and a foundation that are lacking here. A striking proof of the
difference between the two continents is the effect of the war on
art-interest: whereas in America public attention has been turned away
from art to a most marked degree, Europe is producing and buying art
with a fervour that can only be explained by the desire to get back to
essentials after the years in which people were deprived of them.