_aggressive_ absence. The values need not be individually acquired. They
may be traditional, unconscious. They are not necessarily linked to
personal traits like morality and learning. The Negro peasant in the
Alabama black belt is illiterate and often drunk. But in his native
state, he draws from the soil and sky in whose cycles he is seasoned, a
grace which is refinement even if it be unconscious like the grace of a
flower. Perhaps he is transplanted to some crude mining suburb of
Birmingham. Probably, then, he loses his refinement. But if the loss
remain passive, if it be not aggressive, he is not yet vulgar. Give him
now a shrewd head by means of which he pushes north and lands in Harlem.
Teach him that he is a free-born, American citizen on whom it is
incumbent to amuse himself in metropolitan fashion. Hand him a little
money and a good dose of our contemporary eighteenth-century notion of
Equality. Now, his absence of refinement will grow aggressive. He will
be vulgar.
We all came from Europe with a modicum of refinement. And the collateral
descendants of our forebears have it still in the mines and farms of
Britain, in the towns of Germany and Italy, in the ghettos of Galicia.
No natural peasant of Europe is quite without it. For this refinement is
almost as widespread as vegetation—as perishable, as passive.
Transplanted, we lost this leguminous bloom. But we were not vulgar
until we had grown conscious of being great. American vulgarity is the
sum of our spiritual loss and of our assertive energy. Were we less
lordly, our lack of spiritual values would not make us vulgar. And were
we spiritually full, our assertiveness might prove a virtue. Vulgar
people exist everywhere. We are perhaps the only nationally vulgar
people. And therein dwells not alone our predicament, but our hope.
Surely, this vulgarity is clear in all our words and acts, from Maine to
Texas! In my optimism, I would have it no less than universal. I would
not be cheated of finding it, wherever America and Americanism wave.
Politicians of other lands may be merely corrupt or dull: ours are
vulgar. There is naught vulgar about the servant of a European lord. But
there is naught more vulgar than an American lackey at post before the
barracks of Park Avenue—save the barracks themselves, and the
millionaires they house. Our newspapers are vulgar. But so are many of
our churches. Witness their aggressiveness, their display of results,
their want of the sanctity of silence. Our evangelists are vulgar, being
void of vision and full of advertising. But the Menckenites who rail
against them are no less vulgar—for the identical reason. Chicago is
doubtless vulgar: but so is Ben Hecht who hates Chicago. And the whole
land has turned the motorcar into vulgarity’s badge: since it has become
an instrument of display, a means of elocuting at so many miles per hour
the owner’s social status up and down the country.
Now, if you analyze this universal vulgarity of ours, you will discover
in it a constant element of _misplaced effort_. The European servant may
be quite as spiritually void as ours; but he is less vulgar because he
is less striving: what he lacks is precisely the unfounded aspiration
which makes our lackey vulgar. Our advertisements are vulgar because
they strive so commonly to be something beyond the nature of
advertisements—sermons or homilies, editorials or art. Our newspapers
are vulgar because they presume to be arbiters of taste and morals; and
our churches are vulgar because they labor for results of the spirit
with methods of factory and salesroom.
Run down the list, and it will bear me out. This vulgarity of ours means
no intrinsic lack of spiritual will and energy; it means the failure of
that good will and energy. We dwell in a confusion of impulses and
forms. The spirit is exiled from the deed. The deed hungers vainly for
justification by the spirit. That is why we are aggressive. And the
spirit lacks body. That is why we are wistful, credulous, neurotic. High
energy we have—energy of the kind known as religious. It vaporizes for
lack of a container; or it is misapplied in the pushing of old creeds no
longer fit to house it. Emptiness grows emphatic because it strives to
be full.
Now, all this is the due consequence of our past. For more than three
centuries, old forms of thought and life—for the most part hostile to
each other—were dumped upon our soil. Not until about 1860 had they all
rotted enough to begin to come together; rotted enough for the first
tender shoot of a true America to rise from the fecundity of decay. In
our outward life, we are still committed to forms of living which our
nascent spirit has rejected. We lug around the archaic body of
theological pioneers; and by means of it we attempt to stammer out the
rounded New World vision of a Whitman. The result, of course, is a
botch. The result, also, is a promise. This madness of ours, finding
symbols in motors, dramas in football games, art in advertisements,
morality in statutes, and sermons in tabloid papers, lacks only a
working method to become supremely sane. Deflect this misplaced will to
unity into some channel that will hold it; and we shall see how the
energy which mothers American vulgarity and American folly can father
greatness.
Nor must we forget that all these forms of life in which today we
express vulgarity, because they are not proper conduits for the
clamorous spirit with which we endeavor to infuse them, are not American
at all—are European. We may produce 90 per cent of the motors of the
world; we may measure our progress by our physical power: but the
machine and the gold-and-iron standard of value are fundamentally and
historically of Europe. Our contribution has been not in the form, but
in the spirit which _deforms_ it. We have not made the machine: we have
made of the machine the carrier of a Dream. Mr. Henry Ford may be more
vulgar than M. Citroën of Paris, because he is a tuppenny prophet: but
it is the prophet in him, not the mechanic, which is of our land.
The world wistfully senses this. Europe reads the book of Henry Ford and
studies the vulgarest of American expressions through a deep instinct
and a mastering hunger. It seeks new spiritual gold. It knows—although
it may not analyze the knowledge—that our vulgarity is an ore which
holds it.
_1926_
2. THE MOVIES AND THE MASSES
The American motion picture is a truly popular art. It has more than one
audience, of course: Broadway patronizes it, and Europe, and Africa and
Asia. But whereas it could get along without these more decorative
plaudits, it depends vitally on the American masses. A film that will
please only the capitals and languish in the locals, means little to
Hollywood’s master minds. It is the people who count: the workers.
It is, hence, fair to say that the sentiments, attitudes and dreams of
the American masses will find, if not flattery and full reflection, at
least some harmonious note on the American screen. The makers of our
movies are, of course, high middle class, with all the ideals and
prejudices of wealth. You may accuse them of “putting across” their
standards in their work. But you give them a heroism which they lack, if
you suggest that they would go to the length of imbuing their wares with
unpopular ideas, just because they believed them. Much as they love
success and armies, the makers of the movies would refrain, no doubt,
from confessing their weakness in public, if such confession weakened
their incomes. After all, these men have made money because they have
pleased the public. They will keep their money only so long as they hold
off from antagonizing their public. If you find in our motion pictures a
set of standards, a gamut of values, not only bourgeois, but actually
oligarchic, military, antiproletarian, the reason must be, not alone
that these suit the bourgeois fashioner of the films, but as well that
they do not too radically displease the proletarian patrons.
What the tastes and standards in the movies are, is plain enough. Films
devoted to the depiction of labor or rural life are extremely rare. High
life is the average film life. Or life in the rising provincial class
which begins with a Ford and attains a Packard. Alternate with this is
the romantic cowboy world of the West. But such tales are no more
proletarian than those of Wall Street. Here also is a realm of the
picaresque, sentimental, admittedly mythic, and aspiring to the one True
Value: the money and position of the middle class.
Run over in your mind the movies you have seen in a year. How many dealt
honestly with the life of a farmer, of a carpenter, of a factory hand?
If the hero began as a mechanic, was he not an automobile manufacturer
at the end? If he was a stableboy at the outset, did he not own the
stable or marry the girl who owned it, at the fade-out? If Reel One
found him a country bumpkin, was he not a magnate ere you left the
theatre?
Our movie world, like any theatre of its audience, is a confessional of
the masses. And what it seems to mirror very plainly, indeed, is that
the achievement of bourgeois status is the heart’s desire of the average
toiling man and woman in our country.
This is nothing new. But the obvious conclusion, that this is what the
masses really and positively value, is the conclusion we do not wish to
make. Worship of big guns, military, financial, social, on which the
American movie thrives, is indeed the tonal will of the moviemakers.
This is what really moves the businessmen and women who distribute,
produce, direct, compose and act our movies. But the true reason why the
masses—above all, the plastic sons and daughters of the masses—accept
such values is that they have not received a set of values of another
kind.
The people must love, must worship, something. What school and church
provide them, as substance for their dreaming, has gone so dim that it
disappears in the brash glamour of our jungle. The movie gives an
idealization of the powers and hungers of daily American life. Empty the
people go from church and schoolroom. But the press agent of the silver
screen needs only to give a twist to the actual presences of the busy
street in order to make the shopgirl a lady and the laborer a
millionaire.
The corruptly glamorous values of an exploiting class are absorbed by
the people, not because the people are corrupt, but because they lack
values and glamour of their own. They have no ethos, they have no myth,
they have no simplest story in which the elements of the laboring life
take on essential and intrinsic worth. Lincoln, let it not be
overlooked, became a corporation lawyer—like any movie hero. And Whitman
has not yet been translated into American speech. But when a poet does
arise, inspired to sing, as Burns did for his people, the values and
virtues of laboring men as men, rather than as aspirants to wealth, the
masses will follow him—even in the movies.
It is significant that no one has yet given the movie audience a set of
values other than the prevailing. Has anyone tried? We suspect that such
a poet would not languish in the anterooms of all the movie magnates.
And one reason for our confidence is the unique case of Charlie Chaplin.
The average moviegoer does not love Chaplin more than he does Doug
Fairbanks or Harold Lloyd or Lon Chaney because he thinks that Chaplin
is a greater artist. The average movie fan believes that the high art of
the screen is in such stars as Swanson or the Gishes. He is likely to be
a bit ashamed of his love for Charlie. There are a dozen more “admired”
actors. But the average American loves Chaplin most tenderly because
Chaplin on the screen is so often a poor cuss of the people who remains
one: and who “puts it over,” not by becoming a millionaire, but by
remaining a human being. Charlie as waiter, bricklayer, fireman, bank
sweeper, pawnbroker’s assistant, convict, is not at the tale’s end and
in accordance with film formula, the owner of the restaurant, the
contractor, the fire commissioner, the banker, the police lieutenant. He
remains, fragilely, wholly, triumphantly, of the people. (“The Gold
Rush,” in which Charlie strikes gold, is an exception.) He is the frail
and unutterably sweet beginning of a movie mythos in which the common
man may absorb poetic values not by changing his class, but _by becoming
himself_. And this is the true reason why the common man adores him.
Here is a first step in our American labor and farmer movement which
remains to be taken. It consists in the creating of living values within
the life of laborer and farmer. Only so will the extrinsic values of
“getting ahead” and of “getting into another class” be displaced. When
such living values exist, the radical movements organized to put labor
into power will have something to work with.
_1927_
3. THE COMEDY OF COMMERCE
Industrialism’s mood is tragic. In the early years, men’s wonder gave to
it the glamour of romance. Something of the delicious terror
memorialized in “The Castle of Otranto” went to men’s consideration of
these new giants fleshed of iron and belching steam. But the monsters’
bite was too hard; too dolorous was the displacement which they brought
to good men’s lives. These were no proper prodigies like the “Gothic,”
avenging merely wrongs and rescuing the noble. So the romantic mood grew
swiftly dark. With the early socialists and anarchists, it took on the
Doom note of prophecy. Zola made it tragic. In the muckraking days of
our magazines, the tales of factory and mill were grey and ominous. They
were, indeed, replicas of the infernos of our industrial towns.
Laughter, like the hero-workman’s little girl, languished and died in
those swart caves whose breath was a blast and whose light was a sear of
fire.
[Illustration: A busy, historical black and white photograph of a stock
exchange trading floor, with men in suits reading papers amidst
scattered ticker tape on the ground.]
But as industrialism became more the usual circumstance, we began to
react against it. And our reaction, having as its aim recovery, was
comedic. That particular response to the grim industrial glower, which
is the Comedy of Commerce, has found perfection in America. In England,
the monsters’ bite has been too cruel. There are no spirits left, there
is no energy, for the recovering laugh. In the Latin countries, the
monsters’ sway is not bitter enough as yet to have provoked a systematic
answer. (There are signs of it in France.) In Germany, as soon as
industrialism flourished, the Teuton genius turned not to a balance of
frolic or of smiles, but to an ideal compensation. The machine was
drafted by neo-Hegelian argument into the soldierly service of Kultur.
In America, we had no such metaphysical bent. The best we could do with
our industrial tragedy was to cover it up with a surface, coruscating
and comedic.
The symbol of this new comedy is the electric light on Broadway. It is,
of course, commercial and of industrial antecedents. It is bright,
dazzlingly. It displays power and wealth, yet it does not reveal.
Instead it covers, with its hard cold beams, the rather shoddy
buildings. It distracts the eye from the beholding of sources. It is a
light that blinds. Any artist will assure you that the electric light is
_false_—in the sense that it deforms.
But thanks to such enterprise, it will soon be inexact to speak of our
“industrial cities.” Industry must continue, of course, to have its
home. But industry will not continue to control the tone and nature of
our dwellings. It will be disguised or hidden. It will become as the
kitchen or the plumbing system of our social house, as the bowels of our
social body. And we will be outwardly bedecked and bedizened in an
obtrusive laughter the ingredients of which, indeed, will be the results
of industry, and the purpose of which will be to deny its parent.
Already, not alone New York among our splendid cities has cloaked this
tragic source of its greatness in the comedy of commerce. Forget the
blare of the Broadway lights, and think of the shop windows. How gaily
drugstores, hardware stores, delicatessens, shine with their myriad
cavorting forms and colors. Think of the newspapers whose columns of
dour news are plentifully (and profitably) balanced with the comedic
patter of the advertisements. In our popular magazines, the reaction is
complete. The mill town is disappearing from them; the honest workman’s
daughter languishes less in print. It is the doughty salesman, the
go-getter of commerce, with his steed a motor and his muse a flapper,
who commands the pages not already commandeered by “National
Advertisers.” Our more sophisticated books reveal the same aversion. Our
“first-line” critics must, above all, be comic—if not clowns. They must
provide the sedative of laughter. And the books they tout do likewise.
Tragedy is _nefas_. The tragic stuff about us has cowed our spirit from
the enterprise of making it a means for that joyous confrontation of
truth which is tragedy. We glance off into comedy—if not farce. And the
cleverism, the anecdote, the epigram, the swift cartoon—so close to the
heart of the salesman—clutter as well the minds of our intellectual
classes.
It is so with the theatre. In such a typical success as “The Show-Off”
(called our best comedy by many of the reviewers) a minor role fell to
Industry. Not the boy mechanic who actually _invents_ is the hero; but
the salesman, the show-off, the man who by empty bluff and in utter
ignorance of the product he is pushing, _puts over_ the invention. The
industrial source of wealth remains wistfully indulged and sedulously
hidden beneath the noisy comedy of commerce.
[Illustration: © _Ernst W. von Seckendorff_]
The comedy of commerce is a comedy of display. It is a denial of the
industrial gloom by a boast of brightness. And yet its materials and its
very rhythms are conditioned tragically by the tragic world it aims to
deny. It is only a disguise; often frenetic, often wistful, never more
than momently successful. Nowhere is this more plain than in the music
of the comedy of commerce—Jazz. I do not desire to discuss the music
roots of jazz: whether they lead you back to the Barbary Coast of San
Francisco or to the Argentine or to the Congo. The product we have
naturalized is the song of our reaction from the dull throb of the
machine. Jazz syncopates the lathe-lunge, jazz shatters the
piston-thrust, jazz shreds the hum of wheels, jazz is the spark and
sudden lilt centrifugal to their incessant pulse. Jazz is a moment’s
gaiety, after which the spirit droops, cheated and unnurtured. This song
is not an escape from the Machine to limpid depths of the soul. It is
the Machine itself! It is the music of a revolt that fails. Its voice is
the mimicry of our industrial havoc.
You will find this irony in all corners of our successful world.
Industry is the source of our power and of our sorrow. We are ashamed of
its ugliness, hurt by its cruelties. We will employ the power it gives
us to escape the sorrow. We seem so adept! We have ten thousand gay
contrivances, all born of industry, to hide it. But all of them are like
that paragon, the motor. Its chief purpose, of course, is to carry us
away from factory smoke: ourselves figuratively, and the laborers whose
Fords stand parked outside the mill, literally, when the day’s work is
done. But alas! the machine that carries us away from industrialism
carries its spirit along. The clever story in the _Satevepost_, the
bungalow, the radio, the song and dance—all the little acts of the
comedy of commerce—hold the bitter taste, essentialize the spirit and
the forms of the industrial discomfort they are supposed to combat.
The Comedy of Commerce is a failure. It is an antidote brewed of the
poison it would save from. We must go deeper for a healing laughter.
Laughter that heals must come from health, not from the disease. It must
spring from the whole vision and whole experience of life, not from a
mere shrewd juggling and twisting of any of life’s products.
_1925_
4. JAZZ AND FOLK ART
In “The Comedy of Commerce,” I referred to jazz, not in uncomplimentary
terms, but critically as an instance of the art of a commerce- and
industry-ridden people. Many readers gave protest. So far as I could
see, the chief point against me was that I had dared be critical of a
folk art. Jazz, went their sentimental plaint, was the expression of a
people. (I had not denied it.) Hence, hands off! Hence, down on
worshipful knees!
There has, indeed, been abroad for a full century the curious notion
that folk art—as once the king—can do no wrong: that folk art is
necessarily good art: that the critic who dares to question folk art
commits the unpardonable sin.
This is a point I would examine briefly, forgetting jazz as the mere
pretext for it. The notion, to begin with, seems to be quite modern.
Before Rousseau, folk art was known, of course; was appreciated; was,
indeed, taken for granted. It was neither idealized nor despised. It was
the art of the folk: the elite regarded it with the same relative eye
with which they looked upon the people. The people was the mass, the
soil, the loam, whence they had sprung; the body, if you will, for the
aristocratic spirit. It was indispensable and it was causally, if not
finally, good. No tyrant could think otherwise, without deleting the
very substance of his power. Molière, in the first act of “Le
Misanthrope,” expressed the common philosophic attitude toward folk art.
To excoriate the precious nonsense of Oronte, Alceste quotes a popular
Parisian ditty, and declares it vastly better than the sophisticate’s
sonnet. He shatters the courtier with a point which today would be
altogether lost. For he is uttering a paradox. Here, in our language, is
the gist of his attack: “This popular Parisian song—you know its
class—may not be much; but it _is_ sincere, sweet, lovely. And your
sonnet, M. Oronte, which should of course be an improvement on such
primitive traits, shows but their total loss.”
The crowning of folk art is a corollary from Rousseau who preached a
“return to Nature”—as if civilized man were somehow miraculously out of
nature; and “a return to infancy”—as if his own doctrines had not been
the dream of a weary adult. If you accept the Rousseauistic premise, the
modern notion follows about art. The best art, then, will be the least
cultured, the most primitive, the most childlike. And poor man, addicted
hopelessly to beauty, had best pursue his weakness in the art of folk
who, thinking least, are least attainted. If, however, you reject the
creed of Rousseau—which does not mean that you deny his value and his
genius; if it seems clear to you that civilized man belongs as much to
nature as a tree does, and that man’s need to live well, to know true,
to aim high, is as healthy and as natural a function as the tree’s to
grow good roots and blossom, then this indiscriminate adoring of folk
art, merely because it _is_ folk art, is nonsense.
Dante was once ten years old. He was a remarkable child. He babbled
sonnets and rondeaux which revealed his nature. Do you put the
prattlings he produced at ten before the “Divina Commedia” he composed
at fifty? If you are the usual folk-art worshiper, why not? Were those
lyric works of Dante’s youth not the pure Dante? the untrammeled sign
and substance of his soul? Were they not Dante’s folk art? And the
“Divina Commedia”! what alien and sophisticate and unoriginal matters
dulled the raptures of his early years to this! Aristotle, Aquinas,
Virgil, the apocalypses of Jerusalem, the pseudo epigraphia of
Alexandria—the whole theology and logic of the school-men had to
“debauch” the pure Dante, ere he was ready to write his intricate,
conscious poem. If you are a real lover of art, surely you will turn
with mild disgust from the “Commedia” to his childhood singing.