Marin, Juan Gris, Rivera, Orozco, is not alone an age of art: it is an
age of classical and of religious creation. Only the labelmakers, the
“wordmen” are lacking, in order that we may know it. These artists are,
if anything, too somberly intent upon their basic purpose. Were the
saints more pure to their ideal? Man Ray extracts the essential line of
jazz, and has no time for dancing. Picasso establishes the formal
counterpoint in a woman’s body, and has no eye for the woman. Brancusi’s
Bird is the bird at its height: a sort of hero-bird which neither mates,
sleeps nor builds its nest—a bird, a bird which soars, which is sheer
soaring. One and all, these men make a demand on nature as heroic as
their own temper of salvation. One and all, they seem to say: “You,
bird; you, woman; you, farm; you, landscape—you are doomed: all of our
glamorous dream of earth, sky, men is doomed. Unless you are
transfigured—unless you will permit that our spirit of the god burn you
pure of your phenomenal dross—of your associations of sentiment, of
hierarchy—unless you go to your allotted place as parts of an essential
Whole, you are doomed. For we assure you, O bodies and sights of
nature—you do not exist save in that Whole. The old men who sought to
build up their Whole, by adding you together one by one, as you appeared
to yourselves, were wrong. You’ve crumbled and disappeared. The very
atoms of your bodies—the very words of your consciousness, have
vanished. All that remains is God. If we can reinterpret our tragic
memory of you—O bodies and colors of existence—in terms of God, perhaps
we can bring you back to life.”
Of course, I am saying this in words: the painters are creating this in
paint. Spaniards, Frenchmen, Rumanians, Americans, Orientals, all are
tending toward a single declaration. And it would be a shallow error to
believe that this symphonic kinship is due simply to the influence of
the schools or of certain men in Paris. Paris for fifty years has been
the focus of so much modern art, because men from all the world _were
looking in one direction_. Paris is not an influence, it is a
confluence. The reason why Cézanne rediscovered El Greco, and why French
Colonials brought African sculpture to their metropolis, is aside my
point. The significant is that the arabesque or body-language of
Picasso, the plastic lyres of Maillol and Brancusi, the mosaics of
Braque and of Marin, the rituals of O’Keeffe, the revelations of Julia
Codesido and Sonia Brown, the mass equations of Derain and Walt Kuhn,
and the instinct rhapsodies of Walkowitz and Epstein, are so many
personalized departures from a common experience and toward a common
purpose.
The common experience is that the old static formulas and bodies wherein
Western civilization dwelt are gone; that only relations and the
movements of relations are real and are immortal. The common purpose is,
to produce from these immediate experiences of relation new bodies
(unities) and new forms (faiths and ideas) wherein mankind may dwell and
thrive again. And the achievement is already of sufficient stature to
presage a modern classic art.
_1926_
6. THE ARTIST IN OUR JUNGLE
Gilbert Seldes has revived what might be called the classic debate of
American culture: Should an American artist stay at home? Mr. Seldes
holds that the artist is at home wherever he chooses to settle. And he
cites instances in favor of his contention. He is indirectly seconding
Edmund Wilson who reproached Van Wyck Brooks for writing an admirable
book about Henry James without more than a word about the novelist. Mr.
Brooks, of course, was writing about Henry James the exile; and employed
him as a symbol in his own thesis which is contrary to that of Mr.
Seldes. It seems to me that the considerations and examples presented by
both sides have suffered, because they were neither specific nor general
enough. Perhaps the exiles of Joyce, Stravinsky, Picasso, were
successful; perhaps the pilgrimage of Henry James meant failure. If a
law or a rule is to be sketched from these instances, the elements that
enter into them should be essentially understood. One might study the
basic idiom of the arabesque which Picasso brought with him from Málaga,
or the basic folk voice with which Stravinsky came away from Russia; and
plot the intellectual transfiguration of these primary materials by the
schools of Paris. Or one might attempt to correlate the chaste designs
which Henry James desired to produce, and the American chaos from which
he escaped in order to produce them. One might at the end decide that
James was a shrewd tactician, saving his art by retreat; or that Picasso
was a brilliant culturist, enhancing his art by transplantation. Yet the
general and haunting problem of the artist in America, which
unconsciously inspires all these arguments, would be as untouched as
ever.
This problem of the artist is, after all, not unrelated to the question
of his materials. In some manner, the successful creator organizes a
fusion between what we call his will, his vision or his experience, on
the one hand, and what we call life, on the other. Both the creative
will and the workable objective material must exist, else there will be
no art. Now with this simple idea to illumine us, let us venture into
the specific dilemma of the American artist and the American world.
The first thought to occur is that this material of ours is still
inchoate; it has not been digested by the conceptual activity of
previous generations of American artists and thinkers; and in this it is
abysmally apart from the native material of the European. The arabesque,
for instance, has been an essential form in Andalusian life for so many
ages that Picasso must have absorbed it as instinctively as he did his
language. Ages of cultural selection have simplified the expressional
background of European peoples; these simplifications beget traits and
provide tools for the European artist which he can take with him:
moreover, the relation between these concepts in different European
countries is so close that deeply a European artist remains at home,
wherever he is, in Europe.
A concept is an essence; and it can be transported. Or, to shift the
figure, if one belongs to a world which has culturally refined its gold,
one can leave that world yet take the gold along. But if one has had the
fortune—good or ill—to be born upon the scarce-scratched surface of an
unmined treasure, and if one indeed wants that treasure for his
own—then, it is necessary to get down and dig.
This, it seems to me, is the very human crux of our classic problem:
Should an American artist stay at home? The answer may be left to him.
He will seek the material fitted for his creative will. To the peculiar
will of Henry James, of Whistler, of Ezra Pound, it seems clear that the
right material was best available abroad. The point of vision of these
artists was static; they required a fixed focus wherefrom to trace in
leisured sureness the Apollonian intricacies of their designs.
The creator who yearns to weave ever more intricate glosses upon a given
fundamental statement of life is fortunate if he is born across the
water. France, for instance, will provide him with a completely
conceptualized experience which he can build on and variate forever. And
if such a man is born in America and yet feels drawn to the, after all,
not too-distant cultures of Europe, it is idle to begrudge his
departure.
But there is another kind of artist: he who rejects the fixed limits of
any established cultural status, and whose will it is to forge the
parabolas of chaos into unitary form. This creator might broadly be
termed the religious artist, in so far as his purpose is to bind
together what appears confusion, and to make whole what strikes the
sense as multiform and diverse.
If an artist of this kind is born in America, he is fortunate indeed.
For he inherits a world particularly apt for his purpose. The _life_ of
America is a stupendous symbol of the human chaos which such an artist
beholds in all life ere the transfiguring magic of his unitary vision
has been worked upon it. And yet the implicit _idea_ of America is
symbolic of just such a unitary will. America, in other words, is a
multiverse craving to become One; it both challenges and invites the
purpose of the religious artist.
This American will to be One is manifest in every noble chapter of our
history. More encouraging still, it is the very theme of our follies,
the essence of our most ignoble social acts. It is the ideology
shallowly applied, of our bar on immigration. It is the unconscious
factor in our sumptuary laws, in our pathetic efforts to legislate
uniformity of morals. We are not One; and we desire to be One. The whole
American scene is, hence, a symbol on a human plane of the sort of
activity which takes place in the mind of the religious artist. It
provides him with the challenging material; it energizes him toward
creation.
[Illustration: © _Robert Dudley Smith, R. I. Nesmith Associates_]
The Middle Ages in central Western Europe established a similar apt
symbol for the religious artist. Europe was a turbulent chaos in
material and fact. Yet it possessed in the ideal Body of the Catholic
Church a unitary will. It was this marvelous conjunction of material and
will in the objective world, with material experience and will within
the artist, that made possible the success of Dante, of Aquinas, of the
Gothic architects, of the polyphonists—a success not equaled in the
modern European epochs, whose art has been for the most a wistful echo
or a frustrate fragmentation of that last great Synthesis.
The American artist whose will is to join in the tristful litany over
the dissolving body of European culture does well, like T. S. Eliot, to
live abroad. The American artist who feels within himself the power to
add to the intricate glosses of that culture does well, like Ezra Pound
or Henry James, to live abroad. But the artist who is tempted to the
task of forging new organic life from chaos may bless his stars if
America is his home. For in all the world there is no symbol of this
chaos so potent and so pregnant as our American jungle.
Moreover, the failure of artists of this high aim heretofore in our land
need dishearten no one. It is true that the athletic will of Poe was not
supported by a consonant strength of nerves. It is true that Melville
broke down. It is true perhaps that Whitman sounded little more than a
summons. But failures of a kind so heroic—and all within a century—will,
we may be sure, discourage only those whose intimate desire it is, for
their own comfort’s sake, to be discouraged.
_1925_
7. THE MACHINE AND METAPHYSICS
At first thought there seems an insoluble difference between the machine
and the tool. The tool is passive in the hand of the workman, and by
that fact comes to express his will both intimately and directly. The
tool is, indeed, an extension of the hand. The crude laborer has a crude
tool and does crude work. The subtle craftsman becomes an artisan, an
artist: the tool holds close to his nature and works his will in ways so
immediate that the instinctive love attaching limb to mind goes over,
consciously, into the brush, the knife, the hammer.
With the machine, this alchemy inspiriting a thing of wood or stone is
gone. The machine is set in motion and achieves therewith a somewhat
autonomous life. Moreover, the nature of this life does not depend upon
the man who works it. Its qualities and its powers are fashioned for it
and are inevitably determined, at a source to which the machinist has no
access. An inventor, abstracted from his products, designs their future
acts. The machines go forth. And the mechanic by a series of rote
behavior sets them going, runs them, stops them without for an instant
coming into creative contact with the thing by which he lives. A crude
man may work at a delicate machine: a blind or illiterate man may print
a book: a man with no sense of texture or design may run a machine which
manufactures lace or turns out decorations. And conversely, the delicate
man—the creative man—can find no immediate channel for his will in
running a machine. Whatever creativeness or delicacy it possesses has
been ordained for it and is aloof. He cannot swerve it from its stubborn
independence. All he can do is care for it. Attendant, doctor,
nurse—however you look at it, he is the slave of a creation which in its
act and its idea remains beyond him.
Now all this is clear enough and from it philosophers deduce our woes,
rightly—and wrongly our despair. If this state of things were final, we
might forsee man’s downgoing in sterile servitude to a too-exterior,
too-permanent grandeur. For, indeed, much of our common misery has
sprung from man’s loss of tools which were his own and through which in
myriad ways he did express himself. With the tool came beauty, because
it was a subtly extended and yet obedient hand bringing between subject
and object that harmony which is beauty’s norm. With the tool came
contentment, because by means of it the humblest worker put his seal on
his craft; and came pride and those births of pride—morality and
value—since the work of the tool was the man himself, and so must be
good, and so must be regarded. Finally, with the tool came fullness: for
that man alone is unified and full who has spent himself in
self-expressive labor. And by contrast, the man is empty and disrupted
who has been spent in labor which excludes his deep co-operation. Thus
far the pessimists of the machine are right. But here their rightness
ends. Could they look back upon what must have been the experience of
man ere he mastered the tool, they might more sanguinely look forward.
The primitive man, wielding an artifact, paddling a dugout or making an
instrument of a horse, had to undergo a profound psychological
revolution ere this element in his hands, stone or wood or flesh, could
become an extension of his personal will. He had to grow. How far he had
to grow you can see symbolized for yourself by comparing your own hand
with the paw of a dog. The step was inscrutably vast: so vast that once
man made it, he dared not look back, and soon he forgot—and still he
fights to forget. Who shall say what tragic ages went to the transition?
to what insanities and despairs men plunged with the strange tool in
their bewildered hands, with a wild horse beneath them? Surely, those
unmastered weapons must have committed follies; must have broken the
measure of men’s life; must have inspired the wiseacres of that day to
gloomy forecasts. We do not know the names of the Rousseaus of these
desperate generations in which man’s brain had not yet instinctively
grasped the tool. But nothing is more certain than that they existed.
Now, with the machine, we are once more primitive. The tool is ours: we
have tamed it and made it part of our dominion by a step in
consciousness. Before the machine, we are still barbarian or savage even
like early man before a horse or a stone. Through a failure to make a
certain further step in consciousness, before the machine we are still
external.
Of course, there are differences. And it is precisely they which point
to a new departure in man’s life. If the machine were merely a more
complex tool, there would not be this new element to our exciting day.
The machine is a new part of nature: one which did not, like the stone
or the horse, exist before. There is in the machine a marriage of what
we call the old elements and what we call the human. The domestic
animal, in this sense, was a tool: its elements were outside of human
nature. In dominating it, as with any other tool, we mastered a part of
external nature. And this was comparatively simple, since in our use of
the tool we did not come in conflict with any human will. But if we
dominate the machine—make it part of ourselves—we shall have won control
over a realm of nature which includes mankind; for man’s will, other
men’s wills, are constant and determining factors of the machine. We
shall have won a victory of consciousness not merely over the nature of
the external world—but over our own nature.
The problem was one of consciousness in the days of the stone artifact;
and it is again of consciousness today. It is a problem profound as
human destiny, inscrutably complex. Yet I think the heart of it can be
thus simply stated. The animal, so far as we can see, is incapable of
the idea of any part of nature becoming part of itself. Man, with the
tool, achieved this: fused unto himself the animal and the stone. Call
the process what you may, this attitude of his toward portions of the
physical world was metaphysical. And no savage could paddle a canoe
without this metaphysical inheritance, made instinct.
We flounder before the machine, we are features more or less groveling
of its external life, because we lack an instinctive metaphysical
consciousness to make us master and absorb it—to fuse the machine with
all its elements of will and act into our own expression. Such
consciousness, of course, must be evolved vastly beyond the childish
metaphysics beneath the use of a tool. In the machine are adumbrated the
will of the inventor, the will of the owner, the will of many workers,
the will, indeed, of an age and of a world. Only when the individual
worker experiences that these wills are not alien to him; that these
elements of life contained in the machine fuse, in a higher synthesis,
together with his own, into a unitary act—only then will his spirit in
participation be able to go out through the machine, so that it and the
whole mechanized world may once again, in his joy, in his beauty, in his
human pride, express him.
But such a mechanic would possess the consciousness of a Spinoza? No
less! No less is needed, in order that the human world may not go down
before this new Nature—the free-spawning mechanical invention. The
modern machine converges with the wisdom of the ages to force man ahead.
From India, from Judea, from Greece, from Germany, has come the single
canon: that life is unitary, that experience is One, and that the human
consciousness in one form or another must know and be this One. The
machine will compel us, at this human crisis, to experience what
heretofore merely great men have known. The machine again makes
metaphysics man’s most practical engagement.
_1925_
THREE: BOOKS
I. POE AT LAST
Perhaps the classic figures of American literature should be regarded
chiefly as actors in the epos of the American birth. With one or two
exceptions, they did not produce great books. Yet all of them were
heroes; were characters who in their defeats as in their victories
fleshed and fixed features of our nascent world. Their lives—like the
careers of the patriarchs of Genesis—may prove more current in our
future mind than any of their works.
This certainly will be the case with Poe. Despite his influence abroad,
despite the range of his activity, he wrote neither verse nor prose
intrinsically great. His significance is not to be extracted from his
situation. And the construction of the creative Poe—the _true_ Poe—has
lagged, precisely because this situation was misunderstood. Poe paid
bitterly for his youthful Byronism. From his neighbors and the
Bostonians, it shrouded him in sentimental horror; from us, it has
quarantined the man in an equally blinding sentimental glamour. His
first biographer, Griswold, was incompetent. And Professor Woodberry
inherited this incompetence for all his scholarly good will since
crucial features of Poe’s life were hidden and since without them Poe’s
work, unlike organic great art, lacked an entire dimension.
There has now been published a sheaf of letters[7] which will mark the
true birth of Poe as an authentic, working figure in our cultural world.
For the most part, they are notes written by Poe to his foster father,
with brief notations or replies by Mr. Allan. They give us at last the
young Poe, the crucial Poe, and the world which he went forth to live in
and to conquer. The first of them dates from the University of Virginia
which the poet entered at seventeen; the last reveals him, seven years
later, abandoned for the final time by Mr. Allan who has remarried and
is soon to die. The years—from seventeen to twenty-four—are the years of
Poe’s confrontation with America. Prior to them, he was a child—what
manner of child, nurtured and spoiled in the Richmond mansion of the
Allans, his words reveal. And after them, there come the open pages of
his books, of his trafficking with editors, of his relations with Mrs.
Clemm and with his wife, Virginia. These letters form the link that
makes the whole. Their appearance is a major event in American letters.
The career of Poe becomes a scene in a symbolic drama. He is creative
will, nakedly let loose upon the American world. Who shall say America
did not summon him? He rises like an impulse from this land which cannot
act him out. Between America and Poe, as between Poe and his foster
father, are the chains of a need unrecognized. Without his adopted son
whom he bred to hyperesthesia and left to starve, whom he set high and
then cast down, John Allan would be a clod. And without John Allan, Poe
would have been altogether disembodied. In the tortuous recriminations
of these letters, there is the plea for love as well as bread. Transpose
the family quarrel into general terms, and you have the full years of
Poe: Poe, the most highly potential intellect of a land whose hour of
realization had not struck.
In this failure there is no object lesson, no call for a morality. It is
too inevitable and too right. It is true that, with the intellectual
range of a Goethe, Poe gave forth but a few shriveled and glittering
pages. And yet, in his hour and for his hour, he gave the ultimate,
since he gave a Symbol. An imagined Poe, petted to old age in the rich
library of an adoring foster father, would have been less—far less—than
the frail, fierce, frustrate Poe we have.
Unarmed, unguided, he went forth to create in the American desert. His
masterful will found no immediate object upon which to work. He had
absorbed haphazard the philosophers, the metaphysical poets, the
occultists and seers of the Kabala, the chroniclers of exotic journeys.
But he did not stay in _their_ world. His constant effort was to refocus
and apply this chaos of ideas to some absolute experience of life.
Witness his treatment of the values of poetry and music: his making
metaphysics out of the relation of facts or out of the forecast of
facts: his use of the machine, or airships, of mesmerism, of physiology
and mechanical contrivance, to express the widening consciousness of the
human soul. Even the wanderings of Arthur Gordon Pym end in a
revelation. Of course, Poe failed. Grub Street in Baltimore and New
York—this remained the stage for his apocalypse. And the hazard crumbs
from the intellectual banquets of Asia and of Europe were but manna, in
no wise transfiguring the Wilderness which for forty years he wandered.
Yet the lofty impulse of his work is lodged, forever. Poe’s theory of
pure poetry holds the intuition of a great esthetic. His “Eureka” gives
the glimpse of a vision deep as that which is imagined in the Kalpa and
the Brahma of the Hindus. A half dozen of his tales, “Eleonora,”
“Ligeia,” “Morella,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” etc., are
variants of a single theme which envisions the mystery of the Person as
close as any prophecy of Blake. Hard, shut, shrunken work it is: and yet
it holds a vaster sense of life than do the amplitudes of Whitman or of
Emerson. Holds it, however, as a seed the tree. In Whitman and Melville
there is life’s blossoming. Poe belongs less with the creators of art
than with its prophets.
His creative impulse, first to last, was metaphysical and religious.
Behind these horrid trips to Ulalume and Usher, these dogmatic
repetitions of telltale hearts and reincarnate lovers, is the man’s will
for a world timeless and absolute. That his materials were the shoddy
“seconds” of the romantic Gothic, we may leave to the pedants to assure
us. Poe’s impulse was no more romantic than was Goethe’s. He had a flair
for the Real: he lacked the power to establish this reality from the
world about him. Hence his defeated flights to other realms. But in his
Poetics and in “Eureka,” it stands proved that the glancings-off which
constitute his “works” were but his trial flights: that Poe was resolved
to found his revelation within the visible, audible, beating world.
Unlike the Bostonians, Poe was no transcendentalist by choice or reason.
The confrontation of experience and then the act of alchemy upon it, by
virtue of his vision, was beyond his powers. And was beyond him not, as
seemed manifest, because of his harried and brief life: was beyond him
symbolically, inevitably, since it was beyond the America of which he
was so high, so near, so unachieved an impulse.