AT a time when so many new ideas about the humanities are flooding
America it is not surprising that among our ambitious and intelligent
young men of the first generation of culture are many whose
intellectual methods show more eagerness than measure. With no
traditions behind them they do not realize how necessary are humility,
repose, and care to sound ripening of the perceptions and the judgment.
As their fathers struggled for academic education and for material
ease, the sons make a struggle and an excitement of ideas on art.
They over-emphasize what they get hold of, from a deficient sense of
permanent values. Though this spectacle has been seen at other times,
probably never before was so large a mass of new ideas thrown to so
hungry a public.
The men of whom I speak are more occupied with the idea of
enlightenment than with the things which give light. Americans give too
much importance to intellectual things, it is frequently said. Riper
intelligence puts less emphasis on itself. When we first see beyond
others about us we are dazzled by the idea of our own advancement.
Because we have discarded some errors or removed some ignorance we
rejoice in our grasp of truth. This often makes us set ourselves
up as enemies of the Philistines and of all their ways. Seeing the
futility of their labor we assume opinions on subjects over which we
have not labored. Seeing the uselessness of much acquired fact we are
content with superficial knowledge. We smile in satisfaction over the
radicalness of our point of view, and because we know the deadness of
some conventions we think that a thing is true because it is new. The
established is commonplace. What is known to all or felt by all is
unimportant. Distinction consists in seeing and believing novel things.
“I the heir of all the ages
In the foremost files of time.”
Most often these victims of their own progress are our college men.
Indeed in a confused way the mass of our half-educated people who
distrust the influences of our colleges have such products in their
minds. Of course, however, the fault is not with our institutions, but
with a hasty civilization. In an American college to-day altogether
too much interest is taken in shallow modernity, but our colleges, on
the whole, send their students away with less of the bigotry of new
knowledge than they had on entrance. Steadily assertion of intellectual
heterodoxy, contempt for the conventional, is becoming less a source
of general interest in our educational institution; steadily it
is coming to be seen as a crudity. So many youths have flaunted
end-of-the-century banners that the device is already almost worthless,
and it is not so much the graduate of to-morrow as the graduate of
ten years ago, who is the centre of the admiring little circle which
pins its faith in an enlightened life on some arbitrary and confident
preacher of new things. The gospel of the prophet may be Japanese art;
it may be the necessity of living in Europe; or it may be the futility
of thinking anything is better than anything else. This American
phenomenon is found in abundance in all of our cities, but if he can
get away he lives in an European art centre, an essential part of no
life except that of his apostles.
That these persons may be regarded as a class is proved by their
surprising agreement of opinion. For instance, of the young art
prophets whom I know, all Americans, some living in Europe, some by
necessity in America, every one thinks that the others are so shallow
that what influence they have is surprising; each thinks that the
only art of to-day is French or Japanese; that there has never been
any art in England; that the most advanced literature of the world is
the realism of the younger men in Paris; that Oscar Wilde is the most
intelligent of British writers; that the admiration of Shakespeare is
a superstition; that there is much less beauty in nature than in art;
that work in any unartistic employment is a waste of life; and that
it is impossible for an intelligent man to be contented in America.
When so many radical ideas are held in common there must be some way
of generalizing about the individuals holding them. They are alike,
also, not only in their opinions, but in their fields of ignorance.
They are fond of talking about atavism, for instance, and cannot
state exactly any one of the conflicting theories of heredity. They
ostensibly treat art scientifically, psychologically, and do not know
the simplest facts of experimental physiological psychology. They
generalize about movements and periods after reading a few books about
each. The saying that the French would be the best cooks in Europe if
they had any butcher’s meat, modified by Mr. Bagehot into the aphorism
that they would be the best writers of the day if they had anything to
say, applies also to these critics who make such striking theories out
of so little. They accuse of ignorance all who lack knowledge in their
fields; all knowledge outside of their field they look upon as pedantry.
Salient, however, as are the weaknesses of these unformed prophets
they do have their attractive side. They have enthusiasm about things
of the mind, they have indignation for what they deem Philistinism,
and with their love of prominence in the world of ideas is mixed some
genuine respect for truth. Are our American workers in the world of
ideas to be permanently open to the charge of over-emphasis, of lacking
distinction, finish, wholeness? Most of us believe not. We believe that
the prominence of cleverness, rather than of soundness, just now is a
temporary thing, like our social crudities, from which later the powers
of a race will free themselves.
In the meantime, we have in an impressive form the first crop of the
literature of the future. Journals are founded all over the country
which, in an average life of a few months, express the opinions and
reveal the art of a few young men who think they are ahead of their
times. Just now the main characteristic of this literature is that it
suggests as often as it can the art of painting. It calls itself by
the name of a color—yellow, green, purple, gray. Constant use is made
of the slang of art. Indeed their only way of appearing artistic seems
to be to make their writing as far as possible remind the reader of
the plastic arts. Art is ostentatiously opposed to everything else,
especially to scholarship, morality, and industry. The idea seems to
be that art is made by talking about art, or by talking about life in
terms of art. Equally noticeable is the instinct that in making one
special quality conspicuous by neglecting others, they are showing
originality. They do not see that in an artist great enough to give
a large man the feeling of life there are too many elements for any
detail to be conspicuous. The work of this artist will be life-like;
commonplace, unless seen by an eye to which common life reveals its
interests. Edmond de Goncourt can see nothing in “The Scandinavian
Hamlet.” He prefers Père Goriot, who is newer, he thinks, and more
real. Edmond de Goncourt is an admirable example of the attitude of
a few men in Paris who have largely influenced some of our tawdry
literature. In one of his journals he remarks sadly that in a certain
conversation about abstract things, general human points of view, he
failed to shine, and he asks plaintively why it is that men who “on all
other subjects” find original things to say are in these generalities
on a footing with the rest of the world,—which means to him, flat.
Readers of the eight volumes of the journal may smile at the “all other
subjects,” but it is at least true that on certain narrow topics of
which few persons know anything he could feel more profound than he
could on subjects of universal human interest. His test of Shakespeare,
by the way, is an apt one. It does not condemn a man that he does not
find Hamlet interesting. Many intelligent men do not. Any man however,
who infers, from his lack of appreciation that Shakespeare is not a
great artist is deficient in critical intelligence and in understanding
of the value of evidence. And when a man remarks that Raphael,
Beethoven, or Shakespeare, was a great man in his time, but that the
world has progressed, and that, as we stand on the shoulders of our
predecessors, the Balzac of this century sees more than the Shakespeare
of two centuries earlier, we have a subject for comedy. Artists, except
the very highest, are likely to be as critics arbitrary and intolerant,
though often acute and original, and these hangers-on of the art-world
have the arbitrariness without the compensating exact knowledge.
That any critic who seriously treats with contempt any man or any
institution that has a high place in the general world of ideas is
shallow, an avoider and not a solver of questions which confront a man
of mature culture and broad mind, is almost axiomatic. When we hear
so many critics to-day expressing scorn of whole nations, saying of
England, perhaps, that she has no art, of Germany, that she has only
dull learning, of America that she is Philistine; when we see these
critics surrounded by groups of followers, do we not wish, with some
reason, that we had a Molière to-day? What a play he could make of “Les
Critiques Ridicules;” or of “L’Ecole des Aesthètes,” or of “L’Amèricain
Malgré Lui.” The poems of Mr. Gilbert and of Punch are pleasing
within their range, but the subject deserves to be treated in one of
the world’s comedies. The scientific art criticism of men who know of
art and science nothing except the jargon makes one sometimes doubt
the value of the general spread of ideas. Lombroso, Nordau, even parts
of Spencer, not to speak of the mass of inferior generalizing of wide
scope, would have brought a sad smile to the face of the real scientist
who spent seven years studying earth-worms alone.