The Arts in Renewal [Reprint 2016 ed.] 9781512814736

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction
From Revolt to Renewal
Beyond Revolt: The Education of a Poet
On Freedom in Music
The Conscience of the Contemporary Novel
The Old Theatre and the New Challenge

Citation preview

THE BENJAMIN FRANKLIN LECTURES OF THE

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA THIRD SERIES 1950

University Lecture Committee—1949-50 Sculley Bradley Clark M. Byse Edgar B. Cale W . Rex Crawford Eleanor M. Moore S. H . Patterson David M. Robb George O. Seiver Arthur P. Whitaker John M. Fogg, Jr.,

Chairman

University Editorial Committee W . Rex Crawford Raymond W . Foery Joyce Michell Robert C. Smith Sculley Bradley,

Chairman

The Arts in Renewal

THE BENJAMIN FRANKLIN LECTURES CHANGING PATTERNS IN AMERICAN CIVILIZATION by Dixon Wecter, F. O. Matthiessen, Detlev W. Bronk, Brand Blanshard, and George F. Thomas Preface by Robert E. Spiller

T H E F U T U R E OF DEMOCRATIC CAPITALISM by Thurman W . Arnold, Morris L. Ernst, Adolf A. Berle, Jr., Lloyd K. Garrison, and Sir Alfred Zimmern Introduction by S. Howard Patterson

T H E A R T S IN R E N E W A L by Lewis Mumford, Peter Viereck, William Schuman, James A. Michener, and Marc Connelly Introduction by Sculley Bradley

The Arts in Renewal by Lewis Mumjord

Peter Viereci{

William Schuman

Marc

Connelly

fames A. Michener Introduction

by Sculley

Bradley

Philadelphia U N I V E R S I T Y OF P E N N S Y L V A N I A P R E S S 1951

Copyright 1951 UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS Manufactured in the United States of America L O N D O N : GEOFFREY CUMBERLEGE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents INTRODUCTION

IX

SCULLCY BRADLEY F R O M R E V O L T TO R E N E W A L

1

LEWIS MUMFORD BEYOND R E V O L T : T H E E D U C A T I O N OF A P O E T .

.

.

.

32

PETER VIEREC\ O N FREEDOM IN M U S I C

67

William Schuman T H E C O N S C I E N C E OF T H E C O N T E M P O R A R Y N O V E L

.

.

107

fames A. Michener T H E O L D T H E A T R E AND T H E N E W C H A L L E N G E

Marc Connelly

. . .

141

Introduction HAT'S in a name?" In this ease enough to provide a significantly different title for the published volume of these lectures, first announced as a series on "Revolt in the Arts." The Lecture Committee foresaw this possibility in its original proposal to the invited speakers. The First World War interrupted, then stimulated a period of energetic revolt against traditional forms and subjects, while daring originality characterized the new. Will the second war produce its renaissance? The brief proposition of the Lecture Committee to the speakers noted the disillusioned intellectuality of the younger generation between wars, but concluded that "since about 1947 an increasing output of serious and dynamic work, spearheaded by men who saw active service in World War II, seems to indicate some kind of revolt. . . . There is vigor and idealism at the core of their work." The Committee had tacitly in mind a sort of revolt against revolt. Our large and well-pleased audiences became aware that the speakers pursued from different angles and along various paths an idea too wary to reveal its whole form to us at any one time, but at last we saw that Mr. Lewis Mumford had given us the word we needed, and that our title must become The Arts in Renewal. N o w "revolt" is a powerful accessory to human progress, but it is only a means, while "renewal" implies a primary IX

X

INTRODUCTION

change in the nature of things, a refreshment and empowering of the soul of man, the welling up of an invigorating source from which flow the waters of a new life, whether in revolt or in simple enrichment. What our speakers wanted to discuss was a spiritual phenomenon, not merely a change in the forms or the subject matter of the arts. Their compulsion is as significant as any indication could be of the nature of the human crisis in which we are now living, and of the differences between this present moment of history and those of the past half-century that may seem superficially to resemble it. If Mr. Mumford can be permitted to speak for the group, the arts have won their formal freedom, and already learned to employ the new technologies and science. What is now of importance is "a new direction and purpose . . . based on the restoration and renewal of man." In speaking like this—and they all do—these speakers are not expecting man to be saved by miraculous intervention or apocalyptic grace: they have put the question of his destiny squarely back in his own hands, where it always belonged; they have granted him the freedom of his will and choice; they have ceased to think of him as an alien in an unfriendly universe, his destiny determined by forces in nature over which he has no control. When these speakers do not say this in so many words, they imply it. Mr. Schuman takes it for granted that great music will arise only from the great and free creative spirit, and that it will represent the dignity and nobility of the

INTRODUCTION

XI

human soul. Mr. Viereck, Mr. Michener, and Mr. Connelly all express and imply the same attitude. After more than a half-century when our most respected artists have remained in the gloomy shadows of materialistic determinism, regarding man as the helpless creature of his heredity and fate, and interpreting history as the evidence of his helplessness, we have come upon an age that once again recognizes the individual man as a force in himself. It is quite natural, therefore, that each speaker emphasized the artist's responsibility both to himself and to the society which he expresses. Wherever individualism and responsibility are joined there are bound to be great results for the spirit and creations of man. As Emerson said a long while ago, "Wherever a man comes, there comes revolution. . . . G o alone. Refuse good models." Emerson in 1838 stood in Harvard Divinity School talking back to Orthodoxy; today he would be talking back to Darwin, or to those who translated Darwin's proven concepts of animal determinism into the supposition that the human spirit is similarly bound by forces outside its control, against which the will has little chance of prevailing, either for the individual man or for the society in which he lives. Here we come upon what is perhaps the principal cause for the hopelessness and the general absorption with human degradation that has pervaded our arts and much of our thinking in the period between wars, and caused many artists of great power to realize their potentialities only within a very narrow range of life. T h e causes for this

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INTRODUCTION

naturalistic pessimism arc too many, and probably too familiar, to merit discussion here. Besides the concepts of social Darwinism, there was of course the great expansion of industry, of territory, of the vast cities, and of the range of man's life, so that social abuses or lapses occurred more rapidly than they could be cared for, while the incredible development of science exalted the material universe, and the worst wars of history invited the brute. Little wonder, when the idealism of a generation was shattered by the outcome of the First World War, that intellectuals and artists fell into the mood that Lewis Mumford sees as dramatized by the great art of Picasso—a shocking comment upon "the ultimate tendency of our whole civilization, denuded of all human values other than the exploitation of power," a world to which "only symbols of disintegration will do justice." The typical new writers of the twenties, for example, were alert to the abuses of society, exposed them, and often clamored for their correction, but the reader is nearly always aware of an underlying hopeless conviction that improvements will not prevail ultimately against the destructive forces imbedded in the race. Many and revealing were the literary reactions, and great are the names that recall them to us. Ejeiser embraced with revulsion the law of survival and made ironic studies of the industrial exploiter in The Financier and The Titan. His example was followed at many levels, including that of the hardboiled cynicism of the jazz age, reflected in Fitzgerald, O'Hara, and many other writers. James Joyce realized

INTRODUCTION

XUl

that if the current materialism were set down just as it appeared it would need no comment, and many, such as Dos Passos and the early Hemingway, followed his example. Later Hemingway, and such others as Faulkner and the poet Jeffers, mingled their anger with Spartan resignation. Still others attempted salvation by escape. Some adjusted themselves, as Santayana did, to concepts of animal faith; others, like the Southern "fugitives," escaped to the past; others escaped to Freud or Marx or to the ivory towers of their minds; and T. S. Eliot shook the dust of The Waste Land from his feet and escaped to his own heaven in his Tour Quartets. Many others, particularly the poets, uttered hurt cries, but few had any real or ultimate hope. Maxwell Geismar sums up the period by saying, "the entire literary movement of the American twenties, fresh and promising, varied in talent and bold in achievement, seems to end everywhere on a note of negation and exhaustion." Yet this is not altogether true, since a number of authors, and among them the greatest, persisted in believing that a man—and Mankind—had a chance in the unequal battle. For such artists the concept of heroism was what it always had been—only the dragons were different, and unquestionably actual. These writers continued to pay reverence to what Eugene O'Neill called Man's "glorious, self-destructive struggle to make the Force express him, instead of being, as an animal is, an infinitesimal incident in its expression." This faith in man is the essence of drama, and the important playwrights of the nineteen-

XIV

INTRODUCTION

twenties—such as Anderson, Rice, Howard, and Green— stood boldly against the prevailing currents of determinism, however vitriolic and deserved their criticism of social abuses. Ellen Glasgow discovered the Vein of Iron in human character, and the great novels of Willa Cather continued to exalt the nobility of man and woman. Sandburg, and our two greatest modern poets, Robinson and Frost, kept the faith, although Robinson especially had to wrestle for it. Yet they were a minority, and generally neglected amid the lamentation. By and large, through the nineteen-twenties, the most critical and powerful of the younger artists wore out their spirits upon a concept as bleak as the puritan concept of natural depravity, and as unfavorable to the hope that men might some time on this earth build a society fitted for their souls. A reaction began to be seen some time before the crisis of the Second World War, with which the lectures in this volume deal. It is one the ironic jests of history that our literature, so pessimistic during the apparent prosperity of the post-war boom, acquired a new social optimism during the "bust" of the great depression, in a time of cruel economic hardship. A President of the United States told his people, "The only thing we have to fear is Fear," at just about the time when a number of younger writers began to write with a new faith in mankind. These new authors —such as Steinbeck, Caldwell, or Farrell—wrote ironically or angrily about social abuses, but they did not seem to regard them as incorrigible, and certainly not as determined by the scheme of nature.

INTRODUCTION

xv

Steinbeck, Caldwell, and Thomas Wolfe rediscovered in the common people, even among primitives, the integrity and robust love of life that our forefathers knew them to possess. In various words, MacLeish, Wolfe, Hart Crane, and Stephen Benêt all asserted that "America was promises," and that these promises could still be fulfilled. Poets, novelists, and historians began to reinterpret the meaning of the long American experience, while the presses bulged with books devoted to concepts of "planning" for what was called "a more abundant life." Curiously enough, the desperate years of the Second World War did not reverse this current, but gave it weight and direction. The physical attacks upon democracy, during and since the war, have caused a widespread revaluation of the American past, some acknowledgment of the sins of democracy, and a general reaffirmation of its fundamental tenets as the world's "best hope." Along with the determination to reform and improve domestic institutions came the decline of self-centered isolationism and the concept of the "one world" publicized by the late Wendell Willkie. The postwar threat, represented by the Russian situation, has thus far served only to strengthen American determination and character. What made a best-seller of Toynbee's Study of History in 1947—when it was abbreviated to readable size—was the tribute that it paid to the will of man and his ability to control his own destiny; for in explaining the survival of successful civilizations, the author emphasized the capacity of a society to

XVI

INTRODUCTION

meet and conquer the challenges that would otherwise destroy it. The literary renaissance—if we are to have one—is still in the making, yet it is amazing to realize how many young writers, already among us, are writing in the spirit designated by the foregoing analysis. The younger novelists, says Mr. Michener, "are rebelling against the intellectual and moral poverty of the nineteen-twenties. . . . They are fighting for the conscience of the world." Mr. Viereck insists that the poet also must have a sense of social responsibility, while Mr. Mumford notes what could be called a growing social humanism among artists in every field, including architecture and community planning. Because of their insistence on the artist's responsibility, at least three of these speakers take their stand against the obscurity and privacy that have become characteristic of so much of modern expression, especially in poetry and painting. This widespread tendency alienated the public from its artists, and set those artists, as a class, apart from a society in which they should be leaders. If such specialized art provides the artist with an escape into "self-expression," it is also an escape from his natural responsibilities in the whole function of society. That the pubic conscience has long been quickened to this danger is perhaps demonstrated in the sense of outrage that swept through the country when the first Bolligen Award went Ezra Pound in 1948. Attacks on the award naturally centered upon the question of Pound's loyalty, but there was also

INTRODUCTION

xvii

present a vast resentment against the sort of arrogant obscurity that is to be found in much of the poetry of the Cantos. Perhaps it is a tribute to the unquestionable genius and enormous influence of T . S. Eliot that he was made the defendant in the case against escapism by three of the four speakers who touched on this question. It is not likely that any of these speakers would deny the greatness and authority, among Eliot's poems, of at least The

Waste

Land and Four Quartets. Yet the well-deserved recognition of the poet, together with the natural tendency of his works to speak only to a strictly selected audience, for a time diminished the audience for poetry by encouraging the fallacy that good poetry must have a limited appeal, thus discouraging younger writers who might otherwise have employed poetry as well as fiction to communicate with a large audience. But there is something else. In the present reaction against Eliot one feels the widespread recognition of a danger in the direction of his thought, for which he alone is responsible. Mr. Michener puts his finger on it precisely when he warns against the "core" of reaction still active in contemporary thought—a tendency toward authoritarian and aristocratic ideas of culture and government which, as Mr. Michener warns, are an inviting trap for society whenever "the going is rough." This danger is obviously of great concern also to Mr. Viereck and to Mr. Connelly. In this respect they represent the majority of the younger writers who appeared during the last war and subsequently. Similar tendencies are dom-

XV111

INTRODUCTION

inant among younger musicians, as Mr. Schuman noted, although he obviously believes that the musician is by nature more bound by his own subjective inclinations and deviations than creative artists in other fields are compelled to be. Yet Mr. Schuman emphasizes not only the increasing social awareness of the younger musicians, but also the responsibility for communication between artist and audience that rests heavily on the entire institution of music. As for the younger writers, whatever may be thought of any one of them as an artist, it is overwhelmingly clear that as a group they are bent upon the objectives that have been analyzed here. In general they have rejected the extremities of determinism; they believe that the recurrent corruptions of society can be successfully confronted by the good will of mankind, that the soul of man is an actuality superior to biological determinants, and that the standards of what I have called social humanism can provide a new era of human progress. There is a new spirit in the attacks on abuse to be found in such novels as Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, or in The Hucksters, or the writings of Norman Mailer and John Home Burns. Thomas Heggen in Mr. Roberts, like Mr. Michener in his own South Pacific sketches, captivated both readers and theatre audiences by showing us people who are common and typical, yet by no means puppets of blind chance, and very well able, whenever occasion demands such exertion, to take their destiny in their own hands. The popularity of books such as The Lost Weekend and The Snake Pit

INTRODUCTION

xix

suggests that the public also may be fed up with fatalistic defeatism, while, to take just one compelling social issue, the question of intolerance and race was presented with hopeful vitality in Gentleman's Agreement and in the play Deep Are the Roots. The daily heroisms of simple people are no longer ridiculous or foredoomed in the plays of Tennessee Williams, especially in A Streetcar Named Desire or The Glass Menagerie; or in Miller's The Death of a Salesman; or in The Member of the Wedding and the stories by its author, Carson McCullers. The greatest appeal of that remarkable comic epic by Ross Lockridge, Raintree County, lay in the author's rediscovery of the good land and the continuity of life. The Big S\y, by A. B. Guthrie, had a similar appeal for readers, while recalling with convincing reality and without Hollywood glamour the rugged vitality and optimistic self-confidence of the men who conquered the American frontier and deserved better children than weaklings. The attack upon authoritarian injustice inherent in a number of these books was made explicit in the novels of John Hersey, who also, perhaps better than anyone else, quickened the world-consciousness of his readers in Hiroshima and The Wall. Among the younger poets the same changes are abundantly evident. The snivelers and defeatists are few, while the vital spirit of Whitman moves among those who have spoken most impressively, albeit often in language quite different from the ample orotundities of "the good gray." It seems that Karl Shapiro expresses the prevailing spirit when he remarks in a preface, "Certainly our contempo-

XX

INTRODUCTION

rary man should feci divested of the stark attitudes of the last generation." John Berryman rejoices in "Knowing what every man must one day know. . . . How to stand up"; while Muriel Rukeyser, emphasizing the responsibility of man for his destiny, sees "Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision," and she craves to be "threatened alive, in agonies of decision." As for social responsibility, Delmore Schwartz entitled his first volume In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, while his most recent volume, Genesis, is motivated by man's conflict with the sense of determinism in his struggle to maintain selfhood. Randall Jarrell's lyric anger at the waste of war found compensation in the discovery of the heroism of the average man, his fierce hunger for spiritual identity, his unquenchable will to be. In much the same way Mr. Viereck as poet is able to take the Kilroy (who "was here") in the Second World War—the expendable everyman G. I. Joe—and to identify him with such undaunted personalities as Ulysses, Marco Polo, or the lusty individualists who went "on pilgrimage" with Chaucer. Wherever one turns among our artists, indeed, a new spirit is abroad in the land. What Mr. Mumford calls for has perhaps already begun to be: for it seems that the younger generation has rediscovered the loftiness of the human personality and dedicated itself to the reconstruction of dismembered man—"not merely his instincts and reflexes and mechanical responses and physical needs, but all that makes him fully and eloquently human: above all, his capacities for understanding, sympathy, and love."

INTRODUCTION

xxi

T h e editor takes pleasure in acknowledging that he was greatly assisted in analyzing the general theme of these lectures and in seeing their significance as a whole by the thoughtful study of the manuscripts by the Lecture Committee, and by the valuable advice which each member was enabled to give from his knowledge and experience in a specialized field. For the text itself the editor is solely responsible, and its shortcomings of judgment or opinion should not be attributed to Professors W . Rex Crawford, Raymond W . Foery, Joyce Michell, or Robert C. Smith. It should be emphatically said, also, that the Benjamin Franklin Lecture Committee is profoundly grateful to Mr. Marc Connelly for his willingness to appear at the last minute to substitute for Mr. Maxwell Anderson, who was taken ill. Mr. Connelly's interesting address was a remarkable impromptu performance, drawn from the rich store of his long experience with the stage and his ready knowledge of its literature. These lectures were delivered during the winter of 1950 as the third annual series of Benjamin Franklin Lectures at the University of Pennsylvania. Each speaker met on the day following the lecture for a round-table discussion of the topic with the graduate students' club and the faculty members of the Department of American Civilization and related departments. It is the intention of these Franklin Lectures to foster the spirit of inquiry, the interest in human society, and the belief in public discussion that characterized the man in whose honor they are n a m e d — characteristics which led, through his agency, to the found-

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INTRODUCTION

ing of the University and the first learned society in the American Colonies—the American Philosophical Society —at Philadelphia. To the lecturers who so generously and ably responded to the Committee's invitation on behalf of this project, we here extend our sincere appreciation. SCULLEY BRADLEY

The Arts in Renewal

From Revolt to Renewal Lewis Mum ford series of Benjamin Franklin Lectures, my special function, I take it, is to call attention to certain underlying tendencies in the mainstream of our civilization, which help account for the general direction of the current, as well as more immediate eddies and whirlpools, when we examine the work of our contemporaries in the arts. Like Carlyle's mouthpiece in Sartor Resartus, I am professor of things-in-general; and my duty is to tear down the fences and the "No Trespassing" signs that keep people from taking advantage of wider views and more significant prospects. Now, in every part of our civilization today, to take a look at the situation from the highest possible vantage point, it is plain to all who are sufficiently awakened, at least, that mankind is on the brink of a great change; though we do not know yet whether that change will save our present civilization from an all but final catastrophe, or enable our descendants to pick up the pieces afterward, as the transformation of classic Roman culture into Christianity enabled the survivors of the Dark Ages to rebuild their lives on a different plan. T o a generation that has been bred on the notion of change, and that has even, with John Dewey's followers, largely defined edu1

I

N THIS

2

THE ARTS IN RENEWAL

cation as adaptation to change, this may not seem a particularly new situation. But there is something new in the present posture of things; and this is the fact that a change sufficient to ward off or overcome the catastrophes that now threaten the world will involve a radical breach and discontinuity with the changes that have taken place during the last three centuries. It will, first of all, be an inner change, a change of direction and purpose, not just a change of speed and quantity; and instead of being based on the continued conquest of nature, it will be based on the restoration and the renewal of man—that poor bewildered creature, man, who in our day has become an impoverished exile, a displaced person cut off both from the native land he has left and from a N e w W o r l d of mechanism that refuses to recognize his existence. This change in the direction of our civilization has long been overdue; and the proof that it is overdue lies in the wholesale miscarriage of human hopes and plans that has taken place during the last fifty years: a miscarriage that has caused the Century of Progress, as people fondly called the nineteenth century, to give way to half a century of savage regression. I need hardly call to your minds the too-familiar proofs of this fact: the glaring paradoxes of starvation in the midst of plenty, of increased impotence through the magnification of power, of brutality and barbarism through the one-eyed devotion to truth, of the threatened extermination of man, either slowly and indirectly, or swiftly and overwhelmingly, as the result of our total commitment to the machine, and of our childish

FROM REVOLT

TO RENEWAL

3

failure to exercise control over the n i g h t m a r i s h inventions we have created. In a brief thirty years, punctuated by t w o world wars and a series of almost equally grisly revolutions, we have prematurely wiped out between

forty

and fifty million lives, on the most conservative calculation. W e now begin to realize perhaps why the very signs that the nineteenth century took as proofs of inevitable progress—men shall run to and f r o and k n o w l e d g e shall be increased—were regarded by the writer of the B o o k of D a n i e l as a sign of the last days. T h e fact is that it is not ignorance and poverty and weakness, those old enemies of m a n , that threaten W e s t e r n civilization; just the reverse: it is knowledge of godlike dimensions, wealth on a scale that m a n k i n d has never enjoyed before, and p o w e r of the most titanic order, all the goals W e s t e r n

man

has pursued so single-mindedly the last three centuries, that have brought this civilization to the b r i n k of disintegration. T h a t road has not merely proved a blind alley: it may well be a death trap. If we m o v e further along that road, we shall be fatally c a u g h t : hence the task of our generation is to retrace our steps, to reorient ourselves, and to discover alternative courses. W e must r e e x a m i n e man's needs and reestablish more h u m a n goals than those we have mistakenly pursued: we must choose the road to life, w h i c h of old was called the road to salvation, and which n o w is also the road to survival. W e need m o r e knowledge still, but of a different k i n d f r o m the f r a g m e n tary, uncoordinated t r i u m p h s of m o d e r n specialists; w e need m o r e wealth, but a wealth measured in terms of life

4

THE ARTS IN RENEWAL

rather than profit and prestige; we need more power, too, the human power to control, to inhibit, to direct, to restrain, to withhold, in direct proportion to our augmented physical power to explode and destroy. These words may well fall with an ominous sound on the ears of a generation schooled to look upon all changes as progressive, upon all mechanical inventions as desirable, upon all inhibitions and controls as frustrating; people who, even when they were not Marxists, regarded history and culture as a sort of assembly-line process, in which man himself could play no decisive part, except possibly to retard or accelerate the inevitable movement of impersonal forces. Such people used to sum up that strange conviction by saying: You cannot turn the hands of the clock backward. But as a matter of demonstrable fact, that is neither practically nor metaphorically true. Our generation has repeatedly seen the hands of the clock turned backward for evil and villainous purposes, purposes that have made slavery and the butchery of innocent people commonplaces of totalitarian government; and this horrible negative example should convince us that the hands of the clock may be turned backwards, perhaps, for good purposes too, provided that sane good men, who believe in the democratic and rational processes, know their minds as well as the brutal and demented ones do. So, instead of furthering the present processes of automatism, instead of submitting to a love-denying and lifestrangling routine, our hope lies in restoring to the very center of the mechanical world the human personality,

FROM REVOLT

TO RENEWAL

5

now lost and bewildered and hungry in the jungle of mechanisms it has created. Where our ancestors sought power alone, we must seek control; where our predecessors were interested only in causes and means, we must become equally interested in purposes and goals. That is why art and religion and ethics have a significance for the present generation that they did not enjoy even a decade ago; and that is why the arts themselves, precisely because they are among the central expressions of the personality, have a peculiar importance in helping us to understand our present predicament and to find a way out of it. It is against this broad general background that I should like to place the more immediate problems with which this series of lectures has attempted to deal. Already, through the artists, we begin to catch a gleam, if only from a distance, of new manifestations of life, warmed by a humanity we were almost ashamed to confess, guided by ideals that had long been deflated and cast aside. If the changes we have been discussing were only a minor eddy, only a passing fashion, it is probable that the mood of the new generation, with its fresh respect for the traditional, the classical, the intelligible, the communicable, with its acceptance of ethical norms and civic responsibilities, with its unabashed embracement of emotions it had hitherto concealed as if shameful—if these changes were only on the surface, they would probably be followed by another outbreak of revolt. But if a much more sweeping redirection of human life actually impends, then perhaps

6

THE ARTS IN

RENEWAL

the new movement will become even more central, because it will help, in time, to redefine the nature of the creative act, and will, by example, unite men in a common effort to make the expression of love and beauty, significance and order, the core of all human endeavor. In a somewhat weakly retrospective, if not reactionary, form, we have long seen this change taking place in older writers like Aldous Huxley and T. S. Eliot, who were among the first to explore the bleak wasteland of the soul left at the end of the first World War. T h e younger artists who are now carrying their example even farther, in taking a more responsible attitude toward their audience; in accepting, in the spirit of Sophocles, the arduous duties of citizenship; in cleaving to the great ethical issues of our time, will in turn find their intuitive attitudes confirmed by a more conscious formulation of our common problem. For the last three centuries Western man has been remolding his outer and his inner world with the aid of the machine, and increasingly in the image of the machine; in his preoccupation with the conquest of nature, he has increasingly lost sight of the human, the cosmic, and the divine. The ultimate source of this change was, without doubt, the scientific revolution that took place in the seventeenth century, a reaction against the tendency of the Christian church to identify its own limited human province with the omniscience and the omnipotence it postulated for its God. Science, turning its back upon the claims of Christian theology to have direct revelation of all knowledge significant to man, occupied

7

FROM REVOLT TO RENEWAL

itself with the piecemeal examination of external nature. In the effort to achieve verifiable knowledge, science isolated quantities from qualities, objective data f r o m subjective data, the measurable from the incommensurable, the simple part from the complex w h o l e ; and by that act it thrust aside as unreal the world of the artists: the world arising out of emotion and desire, the world of the qualitative and the subjective, the world whose complex patterns b e c o m e meaningless as soon as they are reduced to mere fragments. T h i s deliberate depersonalization and dehumanization of k n o w l e d g e gave the physical scientist a great tool for investigating the forces of nature; but at the same time it reduced half of h u m a n life, the subjective half, the inner half, to a state of insignificance, if not actual nonexistence. N a t u r a l l y enough, those w h o brought about this change did not fully understand

what they were d o i n g ;

like

Descartes they even hid this heresy f r o m their own eyes by c o n s i g n i n g the soul to the C h u r c h , while everything they regarded as of rational importance they reserved for science. B u t in the course of three centuries marked by the increasing intellectual and practical achievements of the physical

sciences, the ultimate results of

Galileo's

original formulation of the procedures of science became, at l o n g last, fully visible: science has not merely eliminated a thousand irrelevant fantasies and wishful projections that had kept m a n from understanding

the nature of

the

physical w o r l d ; but it also has undermined man himself, and all but eliminated f r o m every department of life the

8

THE ARTS IN RENEWAL

essential concepts of purpose, value, and quality. Man's autonomous inner world, the impulses and urges he projects and realizes in the forms of art, were foreign to science and completely irrelevant to its aims. In the ideal world that the scientist was creating, machines increasingly took the place of men, and men themselves were tolerated only to the extent that they took on the attributes of machines, free from passion and emotion, indifferent to values, unconcerned with any ends except those derived from the immediate job or process. Since man is himself part of the order of nature, he learned much about his own nature and his circumstances from this new method of thought; but at the same time he forgot many truths about his constitution and aptitudes that religion and art had always abundantly recognized. Only in the final stages of mechanization, the stage we are now entering, could the essential nature of what went before be fully discerned; and it was not until our own day that the artist surrendered to the forces that, in the end, were to overwhelm the human personality. Before that happened, the artist in fact fought a long, rear-guard action against the encroachments of the machine. The banner under which this rear-guard fight was waged was that of Romanticism; an attempt to reassert the validity of the organic, as against the mechanical, of the individual personality as against the statistical aggregate, of the instinctual and traditional and historical as against the purely rational and measurable. Those who served under this banner were plainly unfit to take part

FROM REVOLT

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in the grand march of science and invention; and they fell quickly out of the procession—the Rousseaus who denied that man had improved under civilization, the Blakes who passionately denounced "single vision and Newton's sleep," the Ruskins who hated the dark relentless mills of the new industry, the Hugos and Dostoevskis and Tolstois, the Delacroixs and the Van Goghs, who proclaimed that the new civilization coming into existence under the impetus of science, capitalism, and mechanical invention was actually working to produce barbarism of the most inhuman and damnable sort. Whereas the poet and the artist had served willingly, yes joyfully, under the Christian Church, even during periods when it was most inimical to fresh thoughts and feelings, there is scarcely an outstanding talent after the middle of the eighteenth century who is unqualifiedly on the side of the new forces: even poets like Emerson and Whitman, who most readily accepted the machine and hoped most from the applications of science, counterpoised that acceptance by a new demand for the personal. Whitman uttered that demand, with great clarity, in his Democratic Vistas, and even provided a grand outline of a new personalism that was to become the crown and justification of all the inordinate material triumphs of the nineteenth century. At the same time, the darker alternatives were equally clear. In his Letters from the Underground, Dostoevski's Hitlerian spokesman actually prophesied that if man continued on the path that seemed, to the nineteenth century, the inevitable and the progressive one, the human spirit, if it

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could not assert itself in any other way, would do so by crime, in deliberate outbreaks of torture and sadism, rather than in sweetness and light. Dostoevski saw, with what now almost seems clairvoyance, that the cult of the machine, pushed to the extremes of impersonality, might summon up from the depths of the human unconscious the demonic and the primitive: elements of violence and irrationality that would bring the whole structure toppling to the ground. Those prophetic observations perhaps give us an insight—I may point out in passing—why in practical life the country that had exploited to the fullest degree the sources of science, Germany, turned so easily to the irrationalities of Fiihrer worship and the infamy of the extermination camps; just as, in the realm of art, it perhaps explains why the wholly depersonalized art of the cubists and the suprematists was followed by the largely infantile or neurotic art of the surrealists, since it was only in the underworld of the unconscious that the human personality still maintained a foothold. F r o m that vantage point, while it could no longer control life, it could make obscene sallies into the public world and at least call attention to the personality's existence by committing a nuisance. T h e rear-guard action of the Romanticists was a losing one: year by year, they were forced to give up more ground to the enemy. But as long as the survivals of a pre-machine culture were still confidently robust, as long as traditional morals still guided conduct, as long as a religious sense in transcendental goals that outlasted the

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lifetime of any single individual or nation kept operative, as long as a thousand habits and beliefs kept man's funded values intact, the artist was not altogether a disinherited or unemployed man. When the writer spoke up in behalf of the human spirit, as Dickens did in Hard Times, against the compulsive inhumanity of Gradgrind, Bounderby, and M'Choakumchild, he could still address a responsive audience: men and women who had not yet fully submitted to the metaphysics and theology of the machine, people who still felt that man was the measure of all things, including the machine, and that God, that force and spirit both in the cosmos and in man himself which transcends the human, was the final goal of all true development. But these funded values, this sense of the dignity of the human personality and the essential mission of man, the sense that the existence of this sentient creature, with his almost infinite capacity for suffering and joy, makes a difference in the constitution of the universe itself, since thought and feeling add a new dimension to existence that outweighs the importance of stellar systems where life itself has not yet developed and thought has not yet come to life—all these ancient foundations of man's very humanity have been shaken to their depths by the same general process that has undermined the arts. If only the external world and mechanical processes are real, then man himself has standing and status simply as a thing, not as a person. This false metaphysics was reinforced and confirmed by the dismaying experience of the generation that fought

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the first World War. Wholly unprepared for its ordeals, they found themselves, at the end, in a state of disillusionment, bitterness, and emptiness. No Romantic defiance, of the Byronic or Emersonian kind, was left in them. Feeling that the old theological and humanistic foundations had finally crumbled, the artist of that generation turned for support to the very ideas and institutions against which he had for so long been in blind, instinctive rebellion: at least the machine seemed to know its mind! This acceptance of the machine was not altogether an unhealthy symptom, although it was certainly a somewhat belated response. For the weakness of the Romantic movement lay in the fact that it had looked backward, rather than forward, and it had rejected in any form the new instruments of thought and action that science had provided. Not that this mistake was a universal one. Early in the nineteenth century, in his Defense of Poetry, Shelley had suggested that one of the tasks of the artist in his day was to absorb the new knowledge of science and assimilate it to human needs, color it with human passions, transform it into the blood and bone of human nature. And that injunction had not been altogether unheeded by the poets of the nineteenth century: the belief in its possibility probably was one of the underlying bonds of sympathy between Tennyson, the author of Lockjley Hall, and Whitman, the author of Passage to India. These poets felt, and felt rightly, that the new truths of science had a positive contribution to make to human life; so positive that one who respected them and took refuge in archaic feel-

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ings and images, was forfeiting a valuable part of his inheritance. There was, accordingly, something healthy and self-respecting, in the effort, from 1910 onward, to establish the artist as a willing participant in the new world of the machine; and in the fresh will to make use of new materials, new processes, new images, new rhythms: Duchamps' brilliant anticipation of stroboscopic photography in his painting of a Nude Descending a Staircase, Brancusi's transpositions of a bird in flight into a smoothly sinuous metal abstraction, Leger's conversion of the human body and other organic forms into cylinders and pistons, Gabo's translation of the exquisite materials and processes of modern technology into symbolic sculptures of metal, glass, and plastics, even the chaste if absurdly empty abstractions of Mondrian—all these efforts not merely extended the esthetic horizon, but reclaimed, for human consumption and enjoyment, large tracts of human experience that had hitherto been cultivated for purely practical purposes. The merely useful now became esthetically significant. This awakening to the values inherent in the machine was the positive side of the new movement in the arts during the last generation, a movement that, to reinforce its claims and bolster up its self-confidence, revolted against the traditional forms of the past, against classic conceptions of human beauty, and proclaimed that the machine formed a self-enclosed and self-sufficient world of its own. In order to make sure of this advance, the artists who worked out its strategy blew up all communi-

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cations lines, bridges, and ammunition dumps in the rear, and thus endangered their own position; but the movement was long overdue, and nothing I shall say by way of pointing out its limitations, should lead you to disparage or despise this very real achievement. It was important to realize, first with Louis Sullivan—or with Horatio Greenough long before him—that the machine, properly used, could be an agent of human order no less noble, indeed no less humane, within its own proper limits, than the traditional forms of handicraft. It was important to carry this intuition further, with Le Corbusier, and realize that the common products of mass production need not be nasty just because they were cheap; but might —as in a common glass, a bentwood chair, a smoking pipe—have certain classic qualities of form; so, too, a factory or a grain elevator, an airplane hangar or a steel bridge, might be as fine for their own purposes as a cathedral, a palace, or a stone bridge were for theirs. The error of these artists, an error pushed to its logical end in the polemics of Le Corbusier, did not consist in their thinking that the machine was important; their error lay in thinking that nothing else was important: particularly, in their tendency to despise every wish, every sentiment, every feeling, every purpose, except that which could be reduced to rational thought and mechanical order. The machine, conceived as an organ subordinate to the human personality, is actually an instrument of liberation; but when mechanization takes command of man, diminishing every aspect of personality that does not fit into its

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rigidly defined ends, it leads to a progressive sterilization of the organic and the h u m a n ; and this was in fact one of the most patent tendencies in the arts during the last thirty years. Up to this time, the passionate and personal animus of the artist had served as a counterpoise to mechanization. But after the first World W a r , a one-sided accommodation to the machine became fashionable, first in the mind of the artist, then in every part of society. T h e other name for this process would be: T h e Displacement of Man. H u m a n nature found itself empty-handed and unemployable and impotent; that diminution of the personality gave rise to mischief, and in time the mischief became malicious and even malignant: destructive and suicidal in its final effects. By the end of this period, in advanced esthetic circles, all the great landmarks in art and thought were either defaced or reduced to mere dust and rubble; or at the very least, the shifting winds of doctrine had covered them over so completely with ideological sand that they remained almost invisible to the great mass of educated people. F r o m the eighteenth century onward, indeed, one may say that life had been on the side of revolt in all the arts; and in that posture of affairs, it was easy to assume that the past, the traditional, the established, the historic, was always bad; and the future, the new, the revolutionary was always good. T h i s created a simple, if incredibly naive, canon of judgment, one easy to apply and on the surface infallible: what was new was progressive and what was progressive was good. For those who held this view,

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the two constant aspects of all organic activity, stability and change, continuity and novelty, tradition and innovation, were regarded as hostile and irreconcilable forces. If one accepted change, novelty and innovation, one rejected stability, continuity and tradition; although without stability, change will lack direction and end, without continuity, novelty may be only meaningless caprice, and without tradition, nothing that can properly be called a departure can be achieved. As a result of this convention of "automatic revolt," as one may call it, the human spirit was left without goals and purposes of its own; and the final result was a civilization as badly unbalanced on the side of the new, the mechanical, the anti-human, as the Middle Ages, in their decay, had been unbalanced on the side of the traditional, the obsolete, the effete, the unadventurously sane. Difficult though it is to trace the process I have been attempting to interpret within the limits of a single lecture, I shall only be summing up an opinion on which a solid core of agreement has been reached by thinkers of the most diverse backgrounds, if I say that in our time we realize that the unqualified cult of mechanism leads to nihilism; and that nihilism, even if it were not equipped with the atom bomb and the H-bomb, would be capable of bringing to an end, not merely our civilization, but the human race itself. T h e critical moment when this change took place seems to be gfter the first World W a r ; though as with every social process there were various mutations and forerunners long before anything that could be called a move-

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mcnt had begun. One of the ideological harbingers of this change was the philosopher of history, Oswald Spengler, who in 1918 proclaimed that Western man was entering the winter of his civilization, and that therefore he must abandon lyric poetry for engineering, landscape painting and symphonic music for business and administration, and submit without murmur to the new mechanical barbarism that would govern the world through bloody and brutal dictatorships. That philosophy gave overt expression to defeatist thoughts that had long been in the air; for even before Spengler, Henry Adams had pointed out that the Dynamo had taken the place once occupied by the maternal figure of the Virgin; and he had prophesied that within less than half a century from 1905, morality would become police, law would give way to unqualified force, and bombs of cosmic violence would be invented. In response to the conditions Spengler had called attention to, even if he misinterpreted them, various manifestations of this withdrawal and shrinkage of the human spirit took place in every department of art. The same phenomena became as visible in painting as in architecture. The new attitude was marked by an overstress of technique and an indifference to values, by an intensification of sensation—to the point of exacerbation— and by a ruthless deflation of sentiment; it was marked, above all, by a deliberate suppression of emotion and feeling, or, as in the early novels of Aldous Huxley, by a wry mockery of them. Confronted, for example, with love, the artist behaved like the irreverent little boy who has never

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had such an adult cxpcriencc: he writes a dirty word on the wall and runs away, because the experience is meaningless and valueless, indeed altogether incomprehensible to him. This suppression of the organic, this sterilization of the emotions, this desolate sense of man's emptiness and loneliness in an inhuman world, manifests itself, I say, in almost every department. In architecture it is accompanied by a special effort to give every building, no matter what its purpose, the neutrality, the machine-like quality, the bleak, colorless aspect of a factory building, housing machines whose products are never touched by human hands: the absence of color, texture, visible symbols of any kind, becomes the very test of esthetic sincerity. But what is this other than the change in the style of prose from the immense wealth and individual differences of nineteenth-century prose—from Emerson to Melville, from Carlyle to Arnold, from Newman to Ruskin—to the general acceptance of a neutral, colorless, nonrhythmical journalese, poor in images and lacking in musical quality, as the only possible medium of honest expression: a style that reached its peak, not without triumphs of delicate artifice that partly redeem it, in the flat-footed, dead-pan prose of Ernest Hemingway. Those who conform to this canon have only one purpose, though they may never have formulated it in so many words: they seek to devaluate, to displace, to dehumanize—and so finally annihilate— the human personality. In despair of conquering the machine and humanizing the environment, because this would involve an act of self-regeneration which they are

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incapable of making, or even, it would seem, of conceiving, they turn upon man himself and deface his image. In summing up such a general attitude one naturally tends to use overemphatic blacks and whites, and to miss many important qualifications and gradations; but I think it is at least fairly just, and sufficiently discriminating, to say that the only choice before our civilization was either to accelerate all the mechanical processes that were bringing on catastrophe, or to change the whole purpose and plan of life by which we have lived. On those terms a large part of the art of revolt has not in fact been in favor of revolt or n fundamental change at all; it has rather been an art of conformity and surrender. W h a t seemed a mere revolt against obsolete traditions was, when viewed more deeply, a determined attack upon the organic, the personal, the human aspects of life that can never be obsolete or old-fashioned. If one puts aside all the purely meretricious manifestations of revolt in the arts—what was due to caprice, what was due to fashion, what was due to a mere desire to shock the once shockable middle classes—one will find at the core of the art of the last generation a serious preoccupation with an important thought actually unformulated question: What would the world actually look like, how would man himself behave, if the axioms and premises of seventeenth-century science were wholly and exclusively true? That question will, I think, help us interpret the characteristic works of art produced by many of the creative spirits of the last generation. It accounts for the

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absence of organic images and for the presence of mechanical phenomena or their symbolic equivalent. It accounts for a special respect for the geometrical or the abstract, as if the world were to be conceived, ultimately, solely by means of mathematical equations and formulae. It accounts for the cult of unintelligibility, which as it were parrots the actual unintelligibility of most of the operations, within a laboratory or an automatic machine, to one who tries to understand what is taking place merely by means of the eye; and it accounts for the fact that the human personality, when it appears at all, is reduced either to its animal components, a bundle of reflexes and automatisms, or to an even remoter physical system—to a state in which the personality is the passive servant or victim of forces working outside it, and in which neither freedom nor responsibility, to say nothing of self-transcendence or self-perfection, is possible. As with the physical sciences themselves, from their very origin, this movement carried with it both in painting and in literature a profound animus against the human. The most visible proof of that animus lies in what happened to the human body; for nothing that took place on the battlefield, in the bombed and obliterated city, or in the extermination camp, these last thirty years, was more violent and dreadful than what happened on canvas, in the deliberate deformation, in the procrustean surgery, practiced upon the human body. The artist, mark you, was not recording something he actually saw: the works of art to which I am referring prophetically anticipate the catastrophes of life by a decade or two. In

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the early paintings of Chirico, against an urban landscape in which an ominous order has been purchased by the repression of every sign of life, the human body is represented by a stuffed, faceless d u m m y : the true symbol of a society that has accepted the regimentation of totalitarianism in any form. In the paintings of Picasso, the greatest draughtsman of our time and possibly the greatest artist, every manner of deformation, accentuated by violent contrasts in color, was practiced upon the human image, once conceived as the very temple of divinity. D o not reproach the artist for making so clear the whole tendency of our civilization today; if such art was and is shocking, it is also medicinal, for, taken seriously, it would enable us to understand better the ultimate tendency of our whole civilization, as long as it continues to give power to machines that are almost human and to take away power, initiative, and autonomy, from human beings who thereby almost become machines. In a world denuded of all human values other than the exploitation of power, a world in which mechanisms have replaced organisms, a topsy-turvy world in which the human personality is neither autonomous nor responsible nor creative nor transcendent—in such a world only symbols of disintegration will do justice to the contents of life. So long as the artist chains himself to the premises of seventeenth-century science, he must, to the extent that he is honest with himself and true to his intuitions, reveal the forces of destruction that are at large in the world. But we know now that both the premises and the conclusions of

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seventeenth-century science are man-made; and that the very displacement of man that has taken place in the last three centuries is itself an attempt to achieve order and law in a world whose subjective foundations had, indeed, crumbled, and needed to be rebuilt on deeper foundations. Within science itself, the observer has come back into the picture, and every judgment, however austere, turns out to be a human evaluation, that is, an interpretation based upon symbols and signs, upon values and purposes, which man by his very being and history has brought into a universe that was otherwise without meaning. Once more we understand that it is man's presence, with his high degree of sentience, his great range of feelings, his ample facilities for symbolic interpretation, that makes the difference. The real world, in other words, is the world that art and religion have always known: a world of cosmic perspectives and personal depths, a world of values and purposes, of forms and meanings, created by life for its own furtherance and self-transcendence. On the new premises, we look for patterns and wholes, in both time and space, and are never content with knowledge based upon disconnected parts, observed in discontinuous strips of time; and therefore instead of merely breaking down the complex into the simple, attempting to understand the aggregate by the parts, we see the further necessity of understanding the part by the whole, of judging the process by its consummation, of interpreting the universe itself in terms of its so-far-ultimate visible product: the human personality. On such scientific and philosophical founda-

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tions human life may again flourish, and the processes of integration may control those which otherwise are heading so rapidly toward disintegration—indeed toward an imminent and final catastrophe. T h e situation for us today is quite different from the situation that produced, not merely seventeenth-century science, but the whole series of revolutions, political, industrial, social, esthetic, that followed along in its wake. It is not the dead past that threatens to choke life now, but rather the hyperactive present; our danger springs not from a surfeit of traditional forms, many of which were effete and meaningless, as was true in both the religion and art of the recent centuries; our difficulty rises rather from a plethora of undigested and often indigestible novelty, produced by the revolutionary forces that are at work, without brake or impedance, in our society. T h e danger to the artist today is not that he will worship the past and copy the empty forms handed down from the past; the danger springs rather from an unwillingness to realize how poor and illiterate and misguided a generation is when it makes its own limited experience the sole criterion of the possibilities of life; for the experience of a single lifetime is not sufficient in which to take the dimensions and potentialities of human life as a whole. Man is wiser than men, and without the depths and perspectives of history, the future itself becomes merely a limited extrapolation

of

the

present. T h e danger, finally, is not that man is the victim of hallucinations

and untrammeled

subjectivities

that

make it impossible for him to understand the nature of the

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external world; the danger is rather that his faith in the external and measurable will keep him from understanding values that are inaccessible to science, because they are subjective, private, and non-predictable. W e know at last, with redoubled conviction, something that the mechanical world picture sought to deny: that all that makes man specifically human is the result of his ability to project his own subjectivity, by means of dreams and words, symbols and forms of art and categories of thought, upon the groundwork of "external" nature. If we try to castrate the organs of subjectivity, we reduce man himself to impotence: a creature, not a creator, the sport of random forces in a meaningless world. T h e watchword for the coming era, therefore, is no long revolution but integration. Yet in that process of integration all that was valuable in the revolutionary efforts of the last three centuries will be preserved and safeguarded by being incorporated into the dynamic pattern of the community and the personality, and directed to the renewal of life. This change, in the direction of integration, balance, organic wholeness, personalism, has been working under the surface during the last half century, not least in the sciences themselves; and no generation has been altogether lacking in artists who have rejected the dehumanized ideology of our time and have, either by means of a private philosophy, like William

Butler Yeats, or by

association with a strictly traditional and conventional outlook, like T . S. Eliot, or by deeper metaphysical perceptions and affiliations, like Waldo Frank, sought to do more

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ample justice to human potentialities. Just as the generation of sculptors that so brutally assaulted the body still contained a Barlach and a Maillol, so the generation that responded too exclusively to the cacophonies and exacerbations and degradations of modern life still produced artists as deeply personal, as vigilantly healthy, and as humorously sane as Robert Frost in poetry, and as John Marin in painting. Such artists are both survivals from the past and mutations toward a better future. What seems to be happening among the younger artists today is that the sense of health and wholeness these older men have shown in their work, the respect for the specifically human, for the moral and the purposeful, no longer appears as an aberration but as the common mood of the new generation. They, too, realize that man can no longer be dismembered and live, that he cannot, under penalty of death, renounce his higher nature, reject the concepts of good and bad as meaningless, lose all habits of ethical discrimination and all sense of destination and a mission that transcends his mere biological survival. They realize that the human personality can no longer be looked upon as a mere intruder, an unwelcome visitor, in the natural world; but that, on the contrary, the human personality performs a central role in every operation, replacing automatism with purpose, modifying objectivity with tenderness and sympathy and life-sensitiveness, humanizing power with love. The dismembered man, he who had renounced his higher nature, will become knit together again like the dry bones Ezekiel saw in the Valley of Death. These artists realize

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that the task of the artist is to transpose life, in all its dimensions, into a significant and realizable whole; for in art alone, perhaps, does man fully live out his potentialities, in a medium he has created especially for his proper self-realization. Since each generation, as I have just remarked, has always had artists who sought some sort of private integration, and sturdily resisted external forces of disintegration when they were too great to be controlled, belief in these new tendencies might turn out only a piece of wishful thinking, if one could find evidence of it only in the arts. But the fact is that we are dealing with a much wider process; and evidences of the new philosophy are at hand in every department of life, from childbirth and the nurture of children to medicine and education. Let us take one example close, very close, to home. The generation that was completely under the spell of mechanical principles and scientific depersonalization raised their young under a regime more inflexible, if that were possible, than the most Taylorized factory: a ghostly time-clock presided over every moment of a child's day, punctuating with its inflexible discipline every biological function. Neither tears nor smiles, neither outrage or affection on the part of the infant were supposed to hasten or delay any of these processes; and to make sure of that, the withdrawal of love by the parents, in any visible form, was demanded as a condition of success. By now most of the members of that generation know what the children themselves thought about this philosophy; they have revolted

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against this false science and this dehumanized regimen. Our more enlightened physicians have even discovered that the very processes of nutrition and repair require a loving atmosphere, if the calories and vitamins supplied are to prove effective nourishment. So that it turns out that many traditional methods of child care, even some of the traditional folklore that went with it, instead of being antiquated and useless, are more essential than most of the innovations that a cocky, one-sided behaviorism introduced. This does not mean that we shall throw out the machine and the order it introduced; but it means that we shall put it in its place; that is, under the constant guidance, discipline, and control of man's highest functions, the functions of reason and love. If these changes can happen in the nursery, under pressure of an inner necessity, they can happen in the poet's study, the artist's studio, the playwright's theater, as the artists seek to project f r o m within the forces that may save humanity from its threatening degradations and catastrophes. In mentioning the great artists in every generation who, without ideological support f r o m their contemporaries, nevertheless kept faithful to the claims of life, I purposely omitted perhaps the fullest artist of our time, at least in America—Frank Lloyd Wright. Thirty years ago his work was treated, by a depersonalized generation, as oldfashioned, precisely because of the organic, the personal, the non-mechanical qualities it embodied, though no one in our time has taken fuller advantage of the facilities our technology offers to the creative mind. Today, at over four

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score, Wright is more intensely alive, and in a curious fashion, more up-to-date, that is, more understandable to the young, than Le Corbusier. Thanks in no small measure to Wright's example and influence, the very word "function," in modern architecture, has undergone a change. It now refers not merely to the physical attributes of a building, to the clean handling of structure, to the direct exposition of physical needs—those for light, air, cleanliness—but it also refers to the personal and social dispositions of those who use the building. The truly modern architect realizes that no building can function well if its physical characteristics nullify the purposes of the user or go against the grain of his feelings, no matter how efficient the physical structure may be: feeling, purpose, yes, sentiment—I do not mean archaic make-believe—all have a part to play. As a significant symbol of this transformation one might take Professor Walter Gropius' deliberate reintroduction of the fireplace in the dwelling house, though any heating engineer can calculate the inefficiency of this system and provide a better mechanical substitute. But Gropius, who once worshipped at the shrine of pure mechanism, recognizes now that a feeling for the dark cave and the open fire, goes back to the very dawn of human habitations. Thus fire, that symbol of ancient religious significance, is too deeply a part of man's constitutional makeup to be abandoned for any purely efficient considerations, particularly in a country like the United States, where the campfire has played a part no less than the domestic hearth. Such a feel-

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ing may not be lightly flouted; and in that spirit, tradition and innovation find a meeting ground in an organic form that does justice to both the continuities and the novelties of life itself. The younger architects have not been slow to follow up this lead; though they have not lost respect for order and efficiency, they now find a place for gay sentiments, even for a touch or two of irresponsible caprice, as likewise necessary in anything that can be called a home. There is special encouragement in these examples from architecture, perhaps, because architecture is usually the last art to record the deeper changes that are taking place in society; and the recovery of the organic, the human, the personal, in this realm is sure indication that it is going on in every other field of activity. In no sense do the changes I have been trying to describe lead to a return to the past, considered as a fixed object and the source of unmodified standards. Though the sense of the organic I am describing can rediscover old values in Aristotle's concept of potentiality, it is not neo-Aristotelianism; though we understand more clearly the durable and constant elements in human life, the perpetual presentness of what theology calls the eternal, this is no mere resurrection of Platonism; and by the same token, what is vital in the reaction against the seventeenth-century world picture and the depersonalized world it has finally produced cannot be kept within the archaic confines of neo-Thomism. On the contrary, both in philosophy and in art, the change toward the organic and the personal will bring about a new synthesis, a synthesis no previous age was capable of

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formulating and expressing; for into this synthesis will go the fuller knowledge of the physical world we derive from Einstein, the deeper knowledge of the human psyche we derive from Freud, the greater sense of human mastery that we derive from our over-prolific technology: in other words, the synthesis will transmute and ultimately utilize the very forces that now threaten us. We are moving, to refurbish Henry Adam's generalization, from twentiethcentury multiplicity, with its specialisms, its divisions, its distortions, toward post-twentieth century unity; and in our arts, as they receive these fresh currents of energy and hope, all of man's nature will be fully represented and utilized, not merely his instincts and reflexes and mechanical responses and physical needs, but all that makes him fully and eloquently human: above all, his capacities for understanding, sympathy, and lov^jThe headline that the editors of The Saturday Review have used, "Even Good News is News," might be applied to the human situation generally: Even the Good Life is Life. The human situation is always desperate; and man's life is by nature precarious and mutable, delicately poised in an unstable equilibrium that a little excess of heat or a little shortage of water may completely overthrow. But today, all the normal mischances of living have been multiplied, a millionfold, by the potentialities for destruction, for an unthinking act of collective suicide, which man's very triumphs in science and invention have brought about. In this situation the artist has a special task and duty: the task of reminding men of the depth of their

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humanity and the promise of their creativity. Those who have surrendered to the machine, those who have defrauded themselves of their own human inheritance, those who have revolted against the goods as well as the evils of the past, against the benefits as well as the injustices, cannot perform this mission. But those who dare to be truly human, who dare to love and to create out of the fullness of their being may yet deliver the human race from the cold and calculating insanity that now threatens mankind with perhaps universal extermination. At the beginning of human culture stand the word and the dream, both ultimately expressions of human love; the love of lovers, the love of friends, and the love of parents and children; and in the last days, which may also become the first days, the word and the dream, uttered once more in passionate and devoted love, may yet save us.

Beyond Revolt: The Education of a Poet* Peter Viereck I. HE topic of this lecture series was announced as "Revolt in the Arts." The catch to such a topic is that one man's revolt is another man's conservatism. After a self-consciously "progressive" generation, nothing is more revolutionary—in the sense of smashing the accepted stereotypes—than conservatism: a revolt against revolt. Today this has begun in thought, in politics, and in the arts. The accepted schools and coteries, themselves the Young Upstarts of that earlier "post-war revolt" of the twenties, are shocked by the new anti-avant-garde rebels emerging from World War II. New ideas. New techniques. New mistakes. New aspirations. In the spiral staircase of history, these new values turn out to be a full-circle return to the oldest, most conservative values, which the now respectable and middle-aged rebels of the twenties thought they had buried. This return in* The author has expanded the original manuscript of this lecture in order to include certain essential relevant ideas worked out in his subsequent poetry lecture» on widely differing subjects at other universities and in his Atlantic Monthly articles.

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THE

EDUCATION

OF A

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33

eludes a changc from purely formal and technical interests to the following twofold interest in content: (1) New readers and new writers expect meaning from content; they are concerned with ideas and value-judgments; they expect a certain minimum of clarity and communication; (2) They are alert to the intellectual and moral implications of content. In turn, this renewed interest in clarity and ideas and moral implications, as opposed to technical virtuosity, helps explain the dissatisfaction which greeted Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos and which made that debatable book a turning-point and the end of an epoch. When I say "dissatisfaction," I am not thinking of published magazine controversies. Nor am I thinking of that empire of Philistia which is always with us and which would give the prestige of martyrdom to Pound by attacking him for the wrong reasons or by denying him that freedom of expression to which he is obviously entitled. I am thinking, rather, of young people I know, good students or good writers or good readers, who approach such a work with a completely open mind about the Pound-Eliot schools but who with the best will in the world cannot find it beautiful. They find the Pisan Cantos, and its adulation by the literary status quo, a symbol of everything their hunger for expressive beauty is revolting against. These new readers, writers, and students are revolting against too much revolt; against the irresponsible cult of obfuscating for the sake of obfuscating and of shocking

34

THE ARTS

IN

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merely for the sake of shocking, whether in art, ethics, or politics. Not that any poet can ever hold a brief for the other extreme either. By the other extreme, I mean Sinclair Lewis's George Babbitt whose contagious banality threatened art a generation ago, until the crash of 1929 permanently deflated his smugness. But today's main threat to art no longer comes from him. He merely hated art. Today's new-style Philistine, instead of disparaging art, hugs it to death. This new-style Babbitt has changed his mask; he has gone avant-garde. He tries to talk knowingly about Gertrude Stein and never realizes how old-fashioned such modernity has become. Because he confuses culture with jargon and art with artiness, he considers himself an advanced thinker. He never realizes he is the same old Babbitt, who has merely changed his address to the Left Bank. Just one generation too late, he is "discovering" that seacoast of Bohemia which extends from the Seine to the Hudson at Fourteenth Street. Because it is (to quote a Dumas title) "twenty years later," the real Old Fogey is not the conservative but the dully "daring" bohemian rebel against conservatism. In America's Coolidge era, civilization was stuffy and stodgy; conservatism at its worst. At that time it was healthy and useful—in fact, indispensable—for obscure and surrealist poems and paintings to stir up placid reality with a nightmare art. But today, in the era of terror and total war and atom bombs, the whole world is a nightmarish surrealist painting. In this chaotic age, when there

THE EDUCATION

OF A POET

35

are few artistic or political traditions left to overthrow, culture is less threatened by conservative conventionality than by the rheumatic jitterbugging of our aging

enfants

tcrribles. Today the whole world is terrible. Today, when reality is itself an obscure nightmare-poem of uncontrolled association, then a poetry which is lucid and lofty and calm and ennobling—a clear-water communicative poetry —is more creative and a truer criticism of its age. This midcentury conservative revolt in poetry 1

has

evoked the following comment from the University committee sponsoring this forum: Many poets between the wars and in the early 1 9 4 0 s were disillusioned intellectuals, concerned with technical virtuosity. T h e y emphasized art for art's sake, and their main product was analytical criticism. However, since about 1947 an increasing output of serious work, much of it spearheaded by men who saw service in W o r l d W a r II, indicates some kind of revolt. T h e s e new writers utilize rather than reject what the elder generation learned through technical experiment but with more vigor and more idealism at the core. W h a t have they to say about their own creative life and the state of the arts today? W h a t do they feel they have learned from their elders? W h a t responsibilities has art other than to itself 3 W h a t of the future?

W h a t I have quoted concludes, as you will have noted, with four questions. My talk will be concerned with 1 For a partly analogous problem in fiction, cj. Robert Gorham Davis, "Fiction As Thinking," Epoch magazine (Cornell University, Spring 19-18), pp. 87-96. Mr. Davis advocates a return to using the novel as a responsible vehicle for testing and deepening ideas and values, yet without sacrificing aesthetic standards to any didactic party spirit. His diagnosis is also valid for poetry. In its implications for both poets and novelists, "Fiction As T h i n k i n g " is America's most important literary manifesto since the war.

36

THE ARTS IN

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these four questions. It should be understood that the views advanced tonight are ventured tentatively and gropingly. They are the gropings of an apprentice to poetry who is only beginning to learn and who addresses you about the dilemmas of his craft as a fellow learner rather than in his capacity of "Professor." Since 1913, new aesthetic movements have been outmoding each other so fast that nobody can be sure whether he is radical or reactionary. The rapid turnover makes writers both homesick and self-conscious. Thereby it also increases their historical sense. Each new movement classifies and studies historically all the preceding movements, like an orphan hunting for his origins or like a nouveau riche bolstering himself with portraits of alleged ancestors. Inevitably we find ourselves using words like "classicism," "romanticism," "naturalism," and wondering where exactly we fit in. Never before has the historical sense been keener, and never before has history moved quicker. Some poets tend to pass through a new literary movement with every new book. For example, the ever-fascinating Auden creates a new mode of writing each time his imitators—ever one jump behind—have caught up with his preceding mode.2 Both he and Yeats, among many others, have at different stages evolved styles so different that in any age but ours these styles could only have been movements a full century 2 Outliving fads, schools, and movements, the continuous creative vitality of Auden's genius has become such a matter of course for so many years that the public now takes it for granted instead of being gratefully amazed.

THE EDUCATION

OF A POET

37

apart. In painting, this same rapid evolution has been true of Picasso. This increasing speed, increasing change, our increasing awareness of all past movements: what is this (to cite a metaphor of Mario Praz) but the experience of the drowning man ? In a few seconds, as the fatal waters pour over him, the drowning man—or the drowning civilization— sees all his past racing before his blinded eyes. Each human embryo (to vary the metaphor) recapitulates in a few months the millions of years of animal evolution on this planet. Likewise each nascent modern poet—before being "born" as a poet in his own right— tends to recapitulate the evolving centuries of all our literature. By revolting and by conserving, by romanticizing and by classicizing, by being traditional and being modern, the American poet learns his trade; such progression is his true education. For this reason I could label my topic tonight equally well by three different titles: "Revolt in the Arts," "The New Conservatism in the Arts," or "The Education of a Midcentury American Poet." If as recendy as World War II you had wondered, "What is the dominant revolt in poetry?" the answer would have been: the many-sided movement beginning around 1913 with the Imagist revolt, soon passing under the control of Pound and Eliot, and then overlapping with the New Critics. But in 1950 the answer to the same question would be: today's revolt is the insurrection of younger writers against precisely these schools of Pound, Eliot, and the New

38

THE

ARTS

IN

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Critics. ( N o t that these schools do not differ among themselves also.) T h e very word "school"—the fact that today college students talk less of the N e w Critics than of the "school of New Criticism"—proves that the revolt has already frozen into an established institution, transforming the New Criticism into one more old criticism. The same freezing process has caused some of the most enlightened avant-garde writers of the 1920's to fight a rearguard batde against the midcentury revolt in poetry now sweeping the colleges of the 1950's. T h e current battle of "obscurity" vs. "clarity" tends to divide poets into two extremes equally deadly to poetry. The first extreme, in the name of anti-Philistinism and of a self-styled élite, is for a hermetic crossword-puzzle poetry which, whatever its fascination, would kill poetry by scaring away its audience. The second extreme, in the name of communication, would demagogically popularize poetry, in betrayal of all integrity of standards, until it reaches the wildest, but also lowest, common denominator and is no longer poetry at all but verse. T h e first group would sterilize the muse. The second group would prostitute her. Is there no third possibility for the serious craftsman? Must he appease the "classes" of group one or the "masses" of group two? Must he become either précieux or corny, either Babbitt Junior or Babbitt Senior? The midcentury revolt in American poetry is a resounding answer to these questions. T h e answer is: an act of creative faith in a new and third force, which is already emerging, equally remote

THE EDUCATION

OF A

POET

39

from the muse's mincing sterilizers and chummy prostituters. Toward a third force in poetry: "En ceste joy je vueil vivre et mourir." "Heaven forbid" (one hears variations of this from serious graduate students on every lecture tour) "that the only alternative to an Edgar Guest is an Allen Tate and some kind of Tammany Hall of literary patronage." While sympathizing with this revolt of young poetry-lovers for a third force, yet one must condemn their making a scapegoat of a single critic merely because his style, with its tone of aspiring over-eagerly to authority and pontification, lends itself so readily to parody. In fairness, we must remember that not every man can succeed in being T . S. Eliot. Not every man can imitate, without unconscious self-satire, that nuance of Voice of Authority which pervades Eliot's Sacred Wood but never quite "comes off" in his disciple's Reactionary Essays. This does not justify making the latter a scapegoat for the sterile failure of preciosity in general. At a time when Allen Tate's influence is waning, it is, instead, more chivalrous to recall that he still remains the author of "The Mediterranean," a beautiful poem. As for his political influence on writers, it is largely outside the present purview. Suffice it to distinguish between his reactionary sentimentalizing of anti-social resentments and that true humanistic conservatism which our society needs urgently and which reveres the dignity of men of all races. It is the difference between the conservatism of a tired Petain, mumbling nostalgically of out-

40

THE ARTS IN

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worn regionalisms, and the conservatism of a fighting democratic Churchill. The evolution of Allen Tate, from promising poet to widely-praised successful critic, must be analyzed neither with gasping Little Magazine awe nor with unjust sarcasm, but with sympathetic understanding, as a warningly significant parable for Americans. Tate is an earnest, perceptive craftsman from whom much can be learned and who failed to fulfil his fine early promise because of an unintentional and unconscious sacrifice to the temptation of power ("literary influence" upon strategic coteries). Among artists this is a typically American sacrifice; unconscious because milieu-conditioned; most typical, actually, of the pragmatic, success-minded Yankee North. As an artist he paid the price of sacrificing an attainable, though moderate, creative talent to an unattainable, immoderate pontifical ambition. His reward: a short-run prestige which tempts all American artists, in the agony of their unrespected "alienation," and which they must at all cost resist. Thereby he became for a while the "respected" and "acceptable" symbol and spokesman of all those imitative mediocrities who Alexandrianized Eliot's and Pound's vital original movement, which was then doing much more good than harm. By Alexandrianizing and Babbittizing it, the Tateans turned it not into a "fascist" conspiracy, as the Saturday Review unconvincingly implied, but into a supreme bore. They turned it into a new Academy, today's most harmful block to vital-

THE EDUCATION OF A POET

41

ity and originality. In blasting away this road-block, the third-force midcentury revolt may be rejuvenating poetry as once the Eliot-Pound revolt did in its exciting beginning. Only time will tell, but perhaps the new movement now being born—the midcentury revolt, the third force—is not one more ephemeral fashion but part of a deeper and longer groundswell, comparable in extent to the two earlier groundswells of eighteenth-century neoclassicism and nineteenth-century romanticism. Let us turn for a minute to the visual arts for the analogy best suggesting the present situation. T h e art and architecture of Italy's sixteenth-century, the ebb and flow between discipline and fantasy, was followed by that seventeenth-century synthesis known as the baroque and best defined in the theoretical writings and the actual practice of the great Bernini. 3 His Roman baroque reflected its age—an age as tension-torn as ours— by combining the classic decorum and serene grandeur of the High Renaissance with the movement and the imaginative innovations of the intervening reactions against it. Analogously, the new poetic groundswell might be known 3 For this new view of Bernini's theories, cf. Eleanor Dodge Barton, "The Problem of Bernini's Theories of Art," in the magazine Marsyas, bound volume IV (New York, 1948), pp. 81-112. Miss Barton's brilliant interpretation confirms recent theories by Walter Friedländer and Charles Sterling that (to use her words) "the traditional categories implied in the terminology 'Italian baroque' and 'French classicism' were too restrictive for truth and accuracy." A synthesis between them was possible in Bernini's "humanistic theory of art."

42

THE ARTS IN RENEWAL

in the year 2,000 as "twentieth-century baroque," provided it can worship the sunny clarity of Apollo without losing the fine frenzy of Dionysus. For the purpose of my analogy with baroque, I mean only the disciplined Roman version: the grand underlying sweep of Bernini's Doric colonnade before St. Peter's. (I do not mean the elaborate extravagances and the superficial bravura of the Central European or Spanish American baroque of a century later.) The humanist synthesis which the Rome of Bernini achieved in the visual arts, will perhaps some day be achieved by twentieth-century American humanists in poetry. In several ways New York is the twentieth-century Rome. Another name that can be coined for poetry's modern version of Roman baroque is "Manhattan classicism." ("Manhattan" is meant not literally but as a symbol for urban America; substitute for it Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, as the case may be.) An urban, machine-age classicism must not be afraid to build its small, quiet perfection right inside the largest, noisiest —also most vital—industrial center of the world. This is preferable to fleeing from sooty machine-age realities into an ancient, lifeless Hellas, whose artificial revival leads not to the classicism of Athens but to the dead sterility of the Sahara. Better a quixotic attempt at actually living the spirit of Graeco-Roman classicism inside uncouth New York than safely worshiping its dead letter in a charming old-world museum. Such are the ideas I tried to express

THE

EDUCATION

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43

POET

in one of the poems of Strife Through the MaskThe poem is a garland for the idealized and unattainable brow of any big, imperfect, American metropolis. In the form used, I tried to catch some of the spirit of the old Alcaic and Sapphic metrical schemes: SMALL PERFECT

MANHATTAN

Unable to breathe, I inhaled the classic Aegean. Losing my northern shadow, I sheared the noon O f an almond grove. T h e tears of marble T h a n k e d me for laughter. Shapes! And "Release, release" rustled the quarries; " O n e touch will free the serenity locked in our stones." But archipeligos of olives Distracted me shorewards, W h e r e sails were ripening toward an African sleep. T h i s south wind was no friend of the wind of harps. N o t destiny but destination Incited the grain-ships. "Nevertheless be of cheer," said a jolly skipper; " I sell sick goats that once were deft at flutes. T h e lizard w h o now is proconsul of Carthage W i l l bury you sweetly." T h e n N o to sweet Charon. T h e n h o m e — t h e n not to Sahara, The

elephants'-graveyard

of classics—ascended

the

singing

Green I wove just the size of the brow of Small perfect Manhattan. 4

Quoted with permission from Peter Viereck, "Small Perfect Manhattan,"

Stride p. 34.

Through

the Masl{: New Lyrical

Poems

(New York: Scribner's, 1950),

44

THE ARTS IN RENEWAL II.

The two most original voices in new poetry recently, both deserving far wider appreciation, are Theodore Roethke and Richard Wilbur. Both these extraordinary poets seem to have certain potentials of greatness: Wilbur in his wonderful smoothness, Roethke in his wonderful wildness. Wilbur at only twenty-nine is a mature and flawless modulator of every nuance of rhyme. Roethke lacks the lucidity and communication with which Wilbur proves that extreme clarity can accompany extreme subtlety. In turn, Wilbur, in his paralyzing overrefinement, lacks the simple earthiness and humanness that makes Roethke so inspired and powerful. Wilbur has all the qualities of a true poet except vulgarity. If the qualities of the romantic Roethke and the neoclassic Wilbur could be combined in a single poet, you might some day have an American peer of Baudelaire. Apart, in separate individuals, these qualities illustrate a cultural schizophrenia, to which a new baroque synthesis may bring the completeness Bernini once brought to a similarly divided architecture. Romanticism does only harm in politics. In poetry its emotionalism is a needed ingredient. The struggle between romanticism and rationalist neoclassicism is not always necessary in poetry, as both elements are needed to create beauty. A car needs both brakes and gas; romanticism lacks the former, neoclassicism the latter. The baroque synthesis of the future will combine two kinds of return: ( 1 ) a return to classic clarity and communication and

THE EDUCATION

OF A POET

45

ethical responsibility, which modern poetry has lost; ( 2 ) a return to romantic wildness of music and lyrical passion, which modern poetry has lost likewise. In the poetry of the future, this baroque synthesis may replace the movement now supreme but already on the wane. The movement now supreme is destroying itself by its contempt for communication. Its poets are no longer poetic; its ideal poet is neither the writer for the general reader nor the "poet's poet," but that sterile third category, the critic s poet. The New Critics have produced very subtle and illuminating textual analyses. It is to their everlasting credit that they have cultivated in a select few of readers a superb sensibility for a very select few of poets. They have also done more than their contemporaries to alienate the general public from poetry. This alienated "general public" is not identical with dolts and Philistines. If only it were, how much simpler these problems of non-communication would be! But the problems are only evaded by making such a condescending identification. The Aldous Huxley of Texts and Pretexts is no dolt, no Philistine. Yet in discussing "obscurity in poetry," he observes: A l m o s t all the contents of the " a d v a n c e d " reviews are just " M a r y had a little l a m b " translated into H e b r e w and written in cipher. Re-Englished and decoded, they astonish the reader by their silliness. C a t c h i n g the sense at t w o removes, or ten, he is annoyed to find that it is either nonsense or platitude.

The famous New Critic method of analysis tends to treat a poem by itself, like a self-created autochthonous

46

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object, outside time and space, outside cause and effect. By discarding a poem's irrelevant historical, psychological, and "moralizing" encrustations, the New Critics have splendidly taught us to read the text itself. By also discarding the relevant historical, psychological, and ethical aspects, they are often misreading the text itself. What do they know of poetry who only poetry know ? A reader's response to a poem is a total response, a Gestalt in which aesthetic as well as ethical, psychological, and historical factors are inseparably fused together. It is a self-deception to try to separate them and to discover some alchemistical quintessence of isolated "pure" aesthetics, to be judged only by certified "pure" mandarins of criticism. It may be argued that this inextricability of form and content is undesirable; in any case, it is undeniable, with the Pisan Cantos only one example among many. This inextricability prompted Valery's warning: "To construct a poem that contains only poetry is impossible. If a piece contains only poetry, it is not constructed; it is not a poem." So independent an observer as Harry Levin has summarized some of the pros and cons: Spingarn had called for "the new criticism" in 1910, without receiving very much response. John Crowe Ransom called again in 1941—and this time spirits came from the vasty deep. It is salutary that criticism, which is bound to admit a good deal of extraneous matter, should thus renew itself for each generation by returning to the direct contemplation of the artistic object. T h e danger is that the critic w h o limits his purview too narrowly, is apt to mis-

THE EDUCATION

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OF A POET

interpret the text upon which he dwells. Critics of the new critics, however, have adduced enough specific reminders that interpretation of the present requires acquaintance with the past. . . . Even now the Modern Language Association is beginning to quibble as ponderously over the symbolism of twentieth-century fiction as it used to do over the syntax of Middle English poetry. W e may well be faced, when the situation crystallizes, with a new academicism. T h e issue will then be whether it is more enlightening, less occult than the old. 5

Apropos the alleged Philistinism of seeking more communication and a larger audience for poetry, Professor Henry W . Wells offers the following thought-provoking hopes, perhaps over-optimistic, for vastly broadening and democratizing

the

American

art-community

without

thereby succumbing to the Agitprop atmosphere of the totalitarians: A flourishing culture can be built only upon the active tion of the general

masses

participa-

of the population in creative arts. . . .

N o matter how clearly professionals and men of genius lead us, the public must follow not as sheep, but as active, self-respecting, and self-reliant individuals. A political dictatorship and a passive citizenry are no more loathsome and to be shunned than an esthetic dictatorship and a passive public. If the sin against political democracy is totalitarian

statism, the sin against

the holy spirit

of

democracy is an esthetic absolutism. T h e failure of T . S. Eliot to grasp this simple truth renders him among the least competent persons to write upon culture. T h e error is inherited from the times and from the teaching of the Brahmin, Matthew Arnold, idolator of professionalism. . . . N o one believes that education can make thousands of great dancers, singers, architects. But it can lift 5 Harry Levin, "Preface" to Perspectives (Cambridge, 1950), pp. x-xi.

of Criticism,

ed. by Harry Levin

48

THE ARTS IN RENEWAL

to some fruitful proficiency in the arts by far the larger number of people, even in a philistine society. . . . Men are by nature more the lovers of art than either its haters or mere neutrals. . . . Only an active present can succeed in being conservative, can keep the past alive, and can give confidence for the future. 6 T h e ghosts of the metaphysical poets, especially Donne, are usually invoked as protective deities by English instructors of the schools of Eliot and the N e w Critics. Indeed, the N e w Criticism has been defined with sports terminology as "a triple play in the field of literary influences: . . . Eliot to Donne to Tate." 7 Less epigrammatically but with equal insight, another scholar has commented: Mr. Eliot's apologia for the metaphysical poets performed a valuable service in helping to return to favor a poetry which had suffered long and undeserved neglect. Unfortunately, in so doing he suggested a whole esthetic and theory of literary history, insecurely based and dangerously narrow and intolerant in its implication. And his stimulating but tentative pronouncements harden into dogma as the New Criticism proceeds. . . . They (the New Critics) mistake their own speculations, acute but limited in validity, for truths of universal application. They establish categories, and these categories suddenly become independent, fixed, and permanent. . . . Consequently they are at their worst, in spite of their skill in close reading, when they are dealing with the individual phenomenon of a poem by a poet to whom they are theoretically and temperamentally opposed, and who in addition had the misfortune to be born in the wrong period. 8 • Henry W. Wells, "Reform in English Teaching," in College English (Vol. XI, no. 5, Feb. 1950), pp. 273, 276. T Henry W. Wells, "The Usable Past in Poetry," in American Quarterly (Published at the University of Minnesota, Fall 1949), p. 242. 8 Richard Fogle, The Imagery of Keats and Shelley (Univ. of No. Carolina Press, 1949), pp. 252, 257-58.

THE EDUCATION

OF A POET

49

As Byron said of the Lake Poets, "There is a narrowness in such a notion." Critics, editors, and whole regiments of graduate students are being turned out to perform with marvellous agility (like trained seals limited to one rehearsed act) when it comes to close textual criticism of Donne. But they are helpless about other schools and ages. Hence narrowness of appreciation, and dryness within that narrowness, is what they pass on to their students and disciples in turn. Being helpless to use their beloved technique on other poets than those for whom it works, they either ignore the others or (offense being the best defense) deny the merit of the others. What is needed in a literature so overrefined, and sealed of? so hermetically, is an unrefined snowball through the window to let in the good fresh air. Your present speaker is influenced in part by Eliot, Pound, Ransom, Empson, and Cleanth Brooks. For this he is grateful to them, especially to the beautiful poems of Ransom and Eliot. Perhaps he is more sincerely grateful than are their endless imitators, schools, and cults. T h e latter are like the parasitic aftermath of any successful literary or political revolution: earnest, sterile, pedantic epigenes.

" W o e to you," said Goethe, "if you are a grand-

son!" These epigenes

have turned the anti-Philistinism of

their masters into a new Philistinism just as deadwoodconventional as the nineteenth-century cliches that their masters rightly overthrew. Marx said, "Je Marxiste."

ne suis

pas

Freud dreaded the Freudians. Similarly Eliot

THE ARTS IN

50

RENEWAL

and other idols ought to ask: " W h o will protect me f r o m my proteges?" A n d think only of their heavy, heavy funlessness! By intentionally banning farce and tactless, rollicking rowdyism from respectable poetry, they have unintentionally also banished vitality and vigor. T h i n k ye, because ye are virtuosos, there shall be no more cakes and ale? One is reminded of Roy Campbell's quatrain: Y o u praise the firm restraint w i t h w h i c h they w r i t e — I ' m w i t h y o u there, of course. T h e y use the snaffle a n d the c u r b all r i g h t ; B u t w h e r e ' s the b l o o d y horse?

T h e poetry-murdering vocabulary of this Alexandrian school of Eliotizers and N e w Criticizers is enshrined forever in the "Glossary of the N e w Criticism" by William Elton. Sent forth into the world with a typical blurb of papal benediction f r o m Allen Tate, the "Glossary of the N e w Criticism" appears in three monthly installments in a recently-converted organ of that trend. 9 This is the kind of thing I had specifically in mind when I used the expression "earnest, sterile, pedantic epigenes."

This "Glossary,"

with its painstaking definitions of needlessly pretentious lingo, struck me at first as a diabolically clever parody. Alas, it was meant in dead earnest. T h e fact that enormous explanations, spread over three magazine issues, should be needed merely to define the N e w Critic terminology—this fact alone shows the urgent need for a midcentury counter-revolt in poetry, for it shows fl

Poetry (Chicago, Nov. & Dec. 1948; Jan. 1949).

THE

EDUCATION

OF A

POET

51

how jargonized and alienated our literary language has become. Every poet should read that unbelievably humorless "Glossary" to learn how twenty years of brilliant nonsense have helped frighten the general public away from both poetry and criticism. N o wonder modern poetry seems a snore and an allusion to that audience of intelligent non-experts who are neither poets nor professional critics. It is precisely this lost audience which must be recaptured by the future poets of the baroque synthesis, the Manhattan classicism. If this audience is not recaptured and if poetry is the ever obscurer game of an ever tinier élite, then poetry may come to be as forgotten an art as medieval strawmosaic. Naturally I am distinguishing between "obscurity" (as here defined) and legitimate difficulty. The difference between these two is not nearly so hard to notice in practicc as the obscurantists allege. By "obscurity" I mean an incomprehensibility caused either by willful charlatanism or by incoherent incompetence. Open any of the fashionable arty magazines, and you will find examples of this. In contrast, legitimate difficulty is caused and justified either by profundity or by originality, two qualities sometimes at first mistaken as "obscure" by the envious and the shallow. Legitimate difficulty, as illustrated by the great last poems of Yeats, has the ultimately rewarding difficulty of a deep pearl-laden sea. In obscurity, the opaqueness i? merely the meaningless difficulty of a shallow and muddy puddle. At the beginning, I said that the Pisan Cantos of Ezra

52

THE ARTS IN RENEWAL

Pound best symbolize what midcentury poets are fed up with. Now that the heated charges and countercharges of the Bollingen Prize controversy have subsided, two facts must be coolly pointed out against both sides of the controversy. First fact: it was absurd and unjust to accuse of fascist sympathies the Bollingen judges and the admirers of Pound. Such arguments of guilt-by-association cannot be rejected too strongly. The sympathies of most of Pound's defenders were not with his fascist politics but with the widely held argument (an argument historically and psychologically unsound) that artistic form can be considered apart from its content. Second fact: the Pisan Cantos were far from being a nonpolitical ivory tower of pure aesthetic form, as one would gather from many a review. On the contrary, fascism and anti-semitism compose one of the essential "myths" of these and the earlier Cantos. Both earlier and later Cantos—and no question of insanity arises with the earlier ones10—proclaim that same fascism and racism Pound preached over Mussolini's radio during the war, when Pound tried to incite mutiny in his American soldier audiences. In Partisan Review, May 1949, George Orwell writes of Pound: Some

t i m e a g o I s a w it stated

in an A m e r i c a n

periodical

that

P o u n d only b r o a d c a s t o n t h e R o m e r a d i o w h e n " t h e b a l a n c e o f his mind

was upset."

. . . This

is plain falsehood.

Pound

was

a r d e n t f o l l o w e r o f M u s s o l i n i as f a r b a c k as the 1 9 2 0 s a n d

an

never

1 0 Pound's treason trial was suspended on a ruling of insanity, a ruling challenged as incorrect by the psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham in "The Road to Rapallo," American Journal of Psychotherapy (Oct. 19-19), pp. 585-600.

THE EDUCATION

53

OF A POET

c o n c e a l e d it. H e w a s a c o n t r i b u t o r t o M o s l e y ' s r e v i e w , the Union

Quarterly.

British

. . . His broadcasts were disgusting. I r e m e m b e r

a t least o n e in w h i c h h e a p p r o v e d t h e m a s s a c r e of t h e E a s t p e a n J e w s a n d " w a r n e d " the A m e r i c a n c o m i n g presently. . . . H e may

Euro-

Jews that their turn

be a g o o d w r i t e r ( I

must

was

admit

t h a t I personally h a v e a l w a y s r e g a r d e d h i m as a n e n t i r e l y s p u r i o u s w r i t e r ) , b u t the o p i n i o n s t h a t he has tried to d i s s e m i n a t e by m e a n s o f his w o r k s a r e evil o n e s . . . n

No thought control: there must be no censorship of Pound's right to publish anything whatever, with any opinions whatever. But must he also get an official "Library of Congress" prize for it? Perhaps yes, if it were for his distinguished literary career as a whole. Unfortunately this well-intentioned award by an honorably-motivated committee was in its wording solely for one book: The Cantos.

Poems of aesthetic intention

Pisan

must be judged

aesthetically, regardless of their author's politics.

But

Pound's prize-winning poem was not intended as purely aesthetic. Its message politically was that Mussolini was martyred and World W a r II caused by Jews: "the goyim" (non-Jews) "go to saleable slaughter" for "the

yidd,"

known as "David rex the prime s.o.b." This is politics, not 1 1 For further background, sec essays on Pound, pro and con, in Partisan Review, by Auden, John Berryman, William Barrett, R. G. Davis, Clement Greenberg, Irving Howe, George Orwell, Karl Shapiro, Allen Tate (New York: April, May, June 1949). See R. G. Davis, "Pound: T h e Poem and the Poet" in The New Leader, N. Y., Dec. 1 1, 1950 and " T h e New Criticism and the Democratic Tradition" in The American Scholar, N. Y., winter 1949-50 with spirited rebuttals by Winters, Tate, etc., in subsequent issues. For the ablest, most convincing arguments defending the Bollingen Award and The Pisan Cantos, see the symposium, The Case Against the Saturday Review of Literature, published by Poetry magazine, Chicago, 1949, and Archibald MacLeish, Poetry and Opinion, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1950.

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serious poetry, and hence not exempt from America's ethical, as well as aesthetic, condemnation. Whether from a brilliant, fashionable, coterie-protected poet or from a mere "lowbrow" Gerald L. K. Smith, such influential racist propaganda against the ideals of World War II must be protested by those to whom a simple human compassion for Hitler's millions of tortured victims is the deepest emotional and moral experience of our era. What, indeed, is our urgently necessary zeal against communism but this same heartbreaking distress over inhumanity? To fellow-authors who indiscriminately blacken the motives of all critics of the Pisan Cantos cult, we repeat Cromwell's plea in humility and in sincere good will: "I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken." Is it anti-poetic and Philistine to feel rather violently about the Pisan Cantos and other influential neofascist revivals when one hears of an ex-Nazi official boasting this year in Frankfort that, when Jewish mothers asked him where their missing twoyear-old babies went, he replied: "Up the chimney!" No truly elegant avant-garde critic, reviewing Pound, deigned to mingle his praise with qualms about the immoral political message or the unintelligibility of the nonpolitical parts of the poem. This irresponsible qualmlessness about immorality and about unclarity is the result of two prevalent attitudes, originally liberating but now exerting a despotism of their own. The two attitudes are: first, the triumph of detailed textual criticism for its own sake, scorning the "heresy of paraphrasing" a poem's meaning

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a n d also its ethical content; second, the p u s h i n g of Eliot's plausible statement that m o d e r n poetry must be complex into a literary dictatorship of snobbism, where critics are afraid to object to obscurity lest they be called insensitive middlebrows. T h e midcentury revolt in poetry—the baroque synthesis, the M a n h a t t a n classicism, the third force, call it what you will—rejects these attitudes and seeks to restore content and m e a n i n g to their rightful traditional place. T o add to Archibald MacLeish's splendid poem about poetry: our credo is that a poem must both " m e a n " and "be." Only to "be," leads to hermetic new-critic formalism. Only to "mean," leads to demagogy, the w r o n g kind of popularity, and ultimately to the fatal exploitation of literature by Agitprop, which is not really "democratic," as claimed, but either commercial or totalitarian. All I say in criticism of the school of Eliot, P o u n d , and the N e w Criticism is said on the assumption that its good, at least a m o n g its first generation, has outweighed its h a r m . If anyone doubts that my assumption is correct, let h i m reread the dull and sloppy verse of the Georgians of the early 1900's. Can anyone seriously w a n t a return to that kind of thing? For ridding us of those banalities, we owe gratitude to the subtleties of Pound and Eliot and to the critical rigors of Richards and Ransom. A new movement survives in proportion as it builds on the usable past. T h e n e w poetry of the 1950's will be only one more fashion of a decade if it rejects the positive achievements of Pound, Eliot, E m p s o n , and the N e w

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Critics instead of assimilating them. Just as in politics, extremes of left and right are equally dangerous to liberty, so extreme reactions either way are equally dangerous to poetry. Extreme pendulum-swings involve bigotry, narrow cultism, and personal rivalries. But art thrives in a tolerant atmosphere where different schools learn and plagiarize from each other instead of excluding each other fanatically. Each literary movement has its phobias, usually the overused and hence temporarily outworn favorites of the preceding movement. "Enthusiasm" was the phobia of the eighteenth-century rationalists. Their romantic successors loved "enthusiasm" but instead made a phobia of the "prosaic," by which they meant plodding sobriety. They considered themselves God-intoxicated and natureintoxicated. Perhaps they were merely intoxicated with the concept of being intoxicated. Their poems overused alliteration, rhetoric, and strong musical rhythms, all three devices reaching their peak in Swinburne. In turn, alliteration, rhetoric, and strong musical rhythms are the phobias of the Freud-sobered, big-city-sobered, and sobriety-sobered poets of the self-analytical 1930's. The baroque synthesis of the future will in moderate doses return to these three devices, which are not inherently cheap but were merely crudely handled. In technique, the future will continue the present resurrection of a rigorous conservatism, which the Imagists of 1913 and the free verse of the twenties had pronounced dead and buried. Here again the example of Auden is

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relevant. He began as the incorruptible Robespierre, purging art of every imaginable convention. H e has now happily become his own Thermidor Reaction by turning out the neatest heroic couplets, sestinas, sonnets, and canzones of our day. T h o u g h e.e.cummings (America's purest lyricist) may still sing his defiant Marseillaise and dream of the heady days when Greenwich Village

sans-cidottes were

storming the Bastilles of typography and decapitating all those royal capital letters, yet the Bourbon Restoration has long been a fact. Free verse rests on a psychological fallacy which can be refuted by applying to art-creation the Toynbee formula of challenge and response. Just as liberty is not based on a radical smashing of traffic lights but on law and traditional institutions, so art must be subjected to the challenge of form, the more strict and traditional the better, in order to bring out the response of beauty. Many poets in many ages have begun by experimenting with more easygoing prosodies. Usually they have soon found it more effective to adhere to the admittedly arbitrary laws of conventional rhyme and meter. In the history of English literature these have again and again been discarded as "outworn," but have returned to outwear the discarders. Irregular scansion can be useful onomatopoeia to bring out a jolt in the mood. But as Amy Lowell's revolt illustrated, this is a habitforming drug. Used once too often in poetry, irregularity becomes just another kind of regularity, that of prose. But here too—as in the case of the N e w Critics—we have a revolt that at first did more good than harm. I refer to

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the revolt against poetic disciplines that began with Imagism just before World War I and reached its height in the free verse and so-called proletarian verse of the 1920's and early 1930's; also in Sandburg and Masters. Needed as a gadfly, yet never popularly accepted, it was a revolt which helped scare the general reader away from poetry, for he saw only the gibberish, the exhibitionist stunts, the formlessness. But at its best (as in the honest and strong free verse of Sandburg and the attractive colloquial rhythms of William Carlos Williams), the uprising was less against form than against formalism, and against the romantic clichés and adjectival imprécisions of that time. Except for Einzelgaenger like Hardy, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable were the diction and metrics of the Georgians and Late Victorians. It is regrettable that the rebels too often let their zeal carry them against form itself and into slovenly metrics and originality-via-eccentricity. Yet their real foe was what they would have called "cornyness," had they possessed the resources of our slang. Thereby they unwittingly served a conservative and traditionalist function : sweeping away —by a temporary aesthetic chaos—the misuses of form, they paved the way for our present return to more exacting forms. Note that I said "our return to forms"; I did not say "our return to formalism." The formalism and technical virtuosity of the arts in the thirties and early forties stressed form at the expense of content. The new generation, writing in 1950, was forced—in fact, thrown—by war service

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into a willy-nilly preoccupation with the content of the realities around them. N o w o n d e r that we of this new generation, while conservatively r e t u r n i n g to the traditional forms and metrics, use them not for their o w n sake but as a means to enhance the content, including the intellectual and moral values implied by the content and the lucid communication of these values. T o be sure, art suffers when its ideas and its moral center are dulled into explicit sermonizing or schoolma'amish eighteenth-century didacticism. But in such contemporary poets as Robert Lowell, Roy Fuller, Elizabeth Bishop, the early wartime Shapiro, and the superbly angry Edith Sitwell of the atomic age, the moral fervor is nondidactic and does not conflict with their aesthetic m e r i t ; no, it enhances that merit and inspires its fire. O t h e r especially impressive midcentury examples of h o w ethical indignation can inspire rather than dull aesthetic effect, are f o u n d in Elliott Coleman, Randall Jarrell, K e n n e t h Rexroth, Selden R o d m a n , Delmore Schwartz, and Louis Simpson. It is fitting that the last r e m n a n t s of the free-verse revolt against f o r m s are n o w followed by a conservative revolt, returning to forms without N e w Critic formalism. It is equally fitting that the various revolts, including freeverse and the very different N e w Criticism, have indelibly influenced the new midcentury conservatism by leaving it the heritage of a more precise diction. W i t h o u t the lessons in precision taught by the daring, b l u n d e r i n g experiments of the past, the phrase "young poet" today would still

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mean, as in the 1890's, an endless embarrassment of yearning vagueness, tremulous long-lashed adjectives, and runaway exclamation marks. III. Poetry is returning not only to forms but to one of its oldest subject matters: the mystery of mortality. Yet it is returning with a difference. The reaction against the earlier, too romantic treatment of "nature's mysteries" has purged poetry of an all too finite rhetoric about infinite stars and an all too wooden "impulse from the vernal wood." Instead, there is a fruitfully obsessive search for the path from dinginess and glibness to regeneration. But does not this search at once bring to mind the development of T. S. Eliot ? Is not this the path from his Waste Land to his Ash Wednesday} Here is the real grandeur of this marvellous and narrow poet, whose cultists appreciate all his merits except those he really possesses. Owing to Eliot, a whole body of incantatory poems has grown up about the regeneration theme, treated humanly and not in terms of superman titanism nor of sentimental pantheist rhetoric about living on in Mother Nature. It is here, in his giving new depth and new dignity to the regeneration theme, that Eliot has met a real need which poetry can satisfy in ways different from both science and religion. It is this need for a hard-won profound spirituality which makes the reader eventually turn away unsatisfied from the easy, pseudo-spiritual rhymed editorials of his high school poetry courses, his Longfellow's "Psalm of

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Life" and Kipling's "If," as he discovers the Christian exaltation of Eliot's Roc!{ choruses and the heathen exaltation of Yeats' "Crazy Jane" and "Wild Old Wicked Man." If in the future this return to the anxieties that really matter can be matched with a clarity of communication that present poets lack, then it will be possible to end the schism between poets and readers. To the anxieties that really matter, materialism and the most brilliant sciences can give the reader no answer, while religion's answer strikes many readers as too dogmatic and too futurecentered. Here and now, in this present existence, the reader will again find in the arts, not in the practical world, his exuberant ally against inner and outer mediocrity and mechanization. Poets and readers are both to blame for the present lack of communication between them. Poets have been too precious and private in their symbols. Readers have been willing to reread five times for its clues the cheapest detective novel but have been too lazy to devote sufficient time and brain-power to understanding some poem into which a serious poet, a Yeats or Eliot, condenses a lifetime of thought and passion. Being both to blame, poets and readers of the 1950's must make equal efforts to create a new community of artistic understanding. Only then will the tragedy of a savage atomic age be understood as all spiritual tragedy must be understood : in terms of its beauty and ugliness and in terms of its human ethics and human dignity and indignity, instead of exclusively in either material utilitarian terms or religious supernatural terms.

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When restored communication can convey this classic sense of tragedy, then the reader attains that sweetest and rarest of nuances: he escapes without escapism, he is consoled without being lied to. What if communication is not restored, if our midcentury revolt against revolt fails in its most urgent aim? In that case, there will still be plenty of communication going on, but it will not be by the good writers; it will continue to be left to the bad writers, the demagogues of literature. The default of the good poets in communicating their spiritual values to their readers creates a moral vacuum filled by such tawdry pseudo-spiritual best-sellers as Kahlil Gibran. The success of such books—and of astrology, Rosicrucianism, and the rest—owes its hard-boiled commercial triumph to its noncommercial idealistic opposite: an unsatisfied nonmaterial thirst in the modern reader. For our unread and uncommunicating serious artists, it is a dangersignal that millions are reading such worthless but communicative pseudo-poetry as Gibran's Prophet. Men not only need moral refreshment but will shop around till they get it. If they cannot get it from their legitimate dealer in intellect, the serious artist, then they will get it adulterated in some bootleg half-pint of soul. Either the true Pierian spring, or Southern California. In a recent anthology book, I said (and still believe) that "a difficult simplicity" is the highest art. I said also (and still believe): "Our new credo must be that communication

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is artistic, obscurity inartistic, and a deep simplicity the first virtue." I learnt a lesson f r o m the misunderstanding these two statements evoked, the letters of enthusiastic agreement f r o m precisely the w r o n g sources. A l t h o u g h I qualified "simplicity" both as " d e e p " and "difficult" and gave Yeats as an example, this was misunderstood as if it meant the simplicity of E d g a r Guest or, at best, of Austin Dobson. W h e n I advocate a return to simplicity in poetry, I mean the hardwon simplicity that resolves spiritual tensions and literary complexities; not the easy simplicity that means the absence of tensions and complexities. Difficult simplicity is the tragic affirmation that follows the dark night of the soul, not the crass and jovial affirmation that precedes it. L e t m e give a specific e x a m p l e of what and w h o m I mean. T h e mastery of this difficult simplicity is not found in the N e w Criticism n o r even in Eliot, but in Robert Frost. T h e words " t r a g i c " and "difficult" may surprise some of you in connection with this allegedly jovial and allegedly easy writer. T h i s helps account both for the large n u m b e r of his readers, w h o often like h i m for the w r o n g reasons, and for the indifference of the coteries, w h o resent finding

no double-crostics to solve. Frost's affirmations are

often mistaken as smug, folksy, Rotarian. T h i s fact, plus his reputation for a solid rural conservatism, away

rebel

youth

and

"advanced"

professors.

frightens Unlike

Pound and Eliot, Frost is the only i m p o r t a n t poet w h o has

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never been adequately subjected to the Higher Criticism of the doctores sub tiles. In truth, Frost's cheerfulness and Frost's simplicity are the direct opposite of Mr. Babbitt's or even Mr. Pickwick's. It is a Greek cheerfulness. And the apparent blandness of the Greeks was, as Nietzsche showed in his Birth of Tragedy, the result of their having looked so deeply into life's tragic meaning that they had to protect themselves by cultivating a deliberately superficial jolliness in order to bear the unbearable. Frost's benign calm, the comic mask of a whittling rustic, is designed for gazing—without dizziness—into an abyss of desperation. This is the same eternal abyss that gaped not only for the Hellenes but for such moderns as Pascal, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Kafka. "Pascal," wrote Baudelaire, "had his abyss that followed him." In the case of this great New England tragic poet, the desperation is no less real for being a quiet one, as befits a master of overwhelming understatements. All these qualities are present in Frost's most typical poem "Sand Dunes." Its main metaphor compares the hills of earth to destructive ocean waves. Its first two stanzas evoke the desperation of man's material feebleness, overwhelmed by nature's brutality. But man's spiritual strength remains free for thought, so that the poem ends hopefully. This grim hope—the affirmation I mean by "hard-won simplicity"—is not based on a thick-skinned, whistling optimism but on the painful wisdom of those artists who through the ages have not only stared into the abyss but have outstared it. The poem's effect is achieved without

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esoteric allusions or formal irregularities; note the simple traditional rhyme and meter; note the magic and power of the clear, monosyllabic diction: Sea waves are green and wet, But up from where they die, Rise others vaster yet, And those are brown and dry. They are the sea made land T o come at the fisher town, And bury in solid sand T h e men she could not drown. She may know cove and cape, Rut she does not know mankind If by any change of shape, She hopes to cut off mind. Men left her a ship to sink: They can leave her a hut as well; And be but more free to think For the one more cast off shell.

T o sum up in conclusion: I have tried to show the respective contributions made by such divergent elements as the Imagists, the N e w Critics, Eliot, and Frost to the baroque synthesis—the Manhattan classicism—of tomorrow. I have also tried to show the dangers of some of these, the stifling of poetry that takes place if any school attempts a dictatorship 1 2 and turns out epigenes. Whatever may be 12 Perhaps "dictatorship" sounds like too strong a word; it is not intended to sound so. On the other hand, criticism of the Pisan Cantos and other sacred cows may allegedly be paid for by the Index Prohibitorium, according to the

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the arguments against free individualism in economics, free individualism—uncollectivized, untotalitarian—still remains the most auspicious ism for the world republic of letters. As befits an individualistic democracy, the midcentury poets will learn not by having some new pontificator to replace the old but by freely groping for themselves and, above all, by making mistakes. And when we have made enough mistakes, and when revolt and counterrevolt and the revolt against counterrevolt are all behind us and turn out to be but different mirror-images of the same homesick, urban, twentiethcentury face, then we will learn the honorable humility of these words by the poet William Morris: Men

fight

and lose the battle, and the thing they fought

for

conies about in spite of their defeat; and when it comes, turns out to be not what they m e a n t ; and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.

And when we have not merely recited these words but have lived them, then at last we shall have reached the end of the very first beginning of the education of a poet. analysis in the literary quarterly of the Johns Hopkins University. Its editor, Louis Rubin, Jr., claims in the summer of 1950 issue of Hopkins Review: "Mr. Viereck has been sinning, and greviously, these past twelve months. . . . Though emphatically opposed to Robert Hillyer's dim coterie, he has twice criticized the award of the 1949 Bollingen Prize to Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos, on grounds both of form and content. And now, the crowning insult: he has brought out a second book of poems scarcely a year after publishing Terror and Decorum. Either he must repent, and publicly, or resign himself to a prominent and permanent position in the Index Prohibitorium of the New Criticism."

On Freedom in Music William

Schuman

usic is an art of communication. F o r this reason it

M

is of social importance. T h e degree of this social

importance is in direct proportion to the position music occupies in contemporary life. T h e composer speaks to men in tonal terms which are in their own way unique, just as are the media of the visual arts and literature. In our country today there is musical activity of enormous magnitude. Any evaluation of this activity must consider its complex nature. This means a consideration of music not only as an art, but as a profession and as a business. Furthermore, these aspects are not only highly complicated within themselves, but are constantly merging with each other in a variety of shapes and patterns. In this paper I could not attempt to analyze all the forces that operate in the world of music, even if I were able to do so. I will attempt to cite, mostly from the point of view of the composer, some of the things that appear to me to be important in regard to the creative aspects of music. I hope also to consider, although of necessity less extensively, these aspects as they concern the performer, the educator, and the listener. It is my hope that these observations will be sufficiently clear to provide at least a partial answer to the general question "Is music in the United States f r e e ? " 67

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Perhaps the way to begin this discussion is to say what I do not refer to by the word "free." I do not refer to such things as free counterpoint, or a passage to be played ad libitum, nor, for that matter, do I refer to free concert tickets. Freedom in music stated in its simplest terms would appear to me to be the right of the composer to create without censorship, the right of the artist to choose the music he performs, and the right of the listener to hear the artist of his choice. The essential triumvirate required for musical life consists of the composer, the performer, and the listener. Taking first things first, what is the position of the composer in the United States ? We hear much these days about the problem of listening to contemporary compo'sition. But for the composer the essential problem is no different from what it ever was. It is covering manuscript paper with symbols that will convey his message when translated into sound by performing musicians. In the basic considerations of the development of the craft of musical composition, the first half of the twentieth century has been a rich period. If this is so, the listener has every right to ask what has caused the wide gulf that so often exists between the composer and his audience. Why, the listener asks, is it necessary for the composer to insist on incomprehensible sound combinations when admittedly great music of the past is so easy to comprehend ? It is generally agreed that the emergence of a contemporary tonal language has, as a whole, constituted a musical revolution. Innovations in concepts of form and in

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melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, contrapuntal, and orchestral procedures, have resulted in a language radically different from that of the preceding century, and yet a language that flows naturally from it. This process to me seems to have been a perfectly normal evolutionary one, albeit a swifter and more drastic development than had perhaps taken place in most other similar spans of musical history. Whether this process was revolutionary or evolutionary, it sprang from an awareness on the part of the composer that a point of satiety had been reached. This point of satiety left the composer with the feeling that in order to write music of originality, he was obliged to seek new tonal paths. T h e process of seeking a way of creating fresh sounds is a natural one for a truly creative musician. It may be conscious or subconscious, or both. But whatever the process, the result is innovation in musical speech. T h e innovator in music is no more welcome than he is in any other field of endeavor. If there has been a revolt, then it has been a positive and constructive one—a revolution determined to build without the necessity of killing. T h e artist whose genius has been recognized by the world is not likely to be diminished in public esteem because a colleague of a later generation has created vocabulary extensions which alter the art of music, even if these innovations appear to be the antithesis of the older artist's beliefs. T h e music of Palestrina was not changed by the works of Bach, or Bach's works by the arrival of Beethoven, or Beethoven by Chopin, or Chopin by W a g n e r or Brahms, or

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Wagner and Brahms by Ravel and Stravinsky. But revolt is real and cannot be revoked. The point is that the esthetic values represented by each of the earlier composers can never possibly be viewed in the same light after the advent of each of the later composers. Let me attempt an analogy. Crossing the ocean by steamer is just about the same now as it was twenty years ago, but the fact that one can now cross by airplane completely alters the concept of traveling by ship, even though that in itself remains the same. In music the availability of extended and altered tonal relationships does not mean that the composer is obliged to use all these relationships any more than that one must elect to travel by air. It merely means that evaluation of the product will be influenced by a composer's failure to use existing technical facilities. May I make it absolutely clear that I am not suggesting that the employment of these extended tonal relationships has in itself a qualitative connotation. The extension of these possibilities for tonal expression has absolutely nothing at all to do with the musical merit of a given work. But the fact does remain, although I do not believe that I can prove it, that once new esthetic principles have been accepted into the language of music, it is no longer possible for composers to gain serious recognition if they continue to write as though these did not exist. The precise innovations of the craft of musical composition in the twentieth century are somewhat difficult to describe in a non-technical paper, but I should like, nevertheless, to make the attempt because there is a direct rela-

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tionship between freedom and new music. Composers of originality usually start with many more antagonists than protagonists. T h e antagonists may be sincere men whose judgments are the result of investigation; or they may be those who would deny new music its freedom—its right to be heard. A short description of some of the compositional techniques used in contemporary music should illustrate why the resultant sounds are unfamiliar and why this music has such strong friends and enemies. Many laymen believe that the principal reason why listening to twentieth-century music is often baffling, concerns the preoccupation of the contemporary composer with strange harmonic sounds. Our century is supposed to be a time when a composer not only can, but does, make any kind of sound he wishes. T h e r e is nothing unique in this state of affairs, for composers have always been free to produce any kind of harmony they wished. ( T h e exception to this, of course, would be certain historic and contemporary examples of church or state censorship over actual musical sounds.) It is superficial to view harmony as the sole reason for the problems created by the general musical vocabulary in use today. Harmony is but one element in the composition of music, and while its relation to the whole is basic, it cannot be isolated and considered as a separate phenomenon. T h e function assigned to harmony in contemporary composition is perhaps as much responsible for the novel sounds produced as is the actual construction of any given chord combination. For example, in standard music we are

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accustomed to a harmonic pattern of progression which advances the composition through a series of logically connected tonal centers. In contemporary music it is not at all unusual to use harmony for the sole purpose of producing a definite emotional context in a given portion of a work, through a consistent kind of harmonic sound. In other words, the harmonies produce an effect in musical color and do not in themselves have a function beyond this. Another reason why harmony in today's musical language is fresh in sound, concerns its relation to melody. Ears accustomed to hearing melodies constructed out of the tones of the accompanying harmony would naturally be startled to hear, sounding together, melodies and harmonies consisting, either entirely or in part, of separate tonal entities. Yet in contemporary extensions of the harmonic vocabulary, this kind of procedure is commonplace. Beginning three or four centuries ago, harmonies became more and more complex, but basically remained formulated upon the triadic concept. In other words, chords were constructed out of alternating notes of the scale pattern— 1,3,5,7>9, etc. The harmonic innovations that are now an established part of today's musical language are not so much the results of strange note combinations as of the fact that these notes are often placed in vertical juxtapositions which are no longer based on the concept of the triad. Chords are built in fourths, fifths, seconds, sixths, sevenths, and myriads of other intervallic combinations. In other words, harmony, considered for the moment as isolated vertical sound, presents in today's language an enormously ex-

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tended palette for intervallic relationships, as c o m p a r e d with what we have been accustomed to h e a r i n g in other periods of musical composition. Contemporary music is often found by the l a y m a n to be lacking in melody. But the listener's ability to perceive melody is often confused with the actual existence

of

melody, since m a n y ears are not able to recognize

the

presence of unconventional melodic patterns. It is hardly possible to admire or not to admire a given melody if its very existence is not clear to the listener. O n e reason w h y these melodies are not m o r e readily discernible as such is that more frequently than not asymmetric phrase-lengths or breath-spans are the n o r m , rather than the exception. In conventional melodic writing the ear is able to anticipate phrase-lengths and melodic turns that have been etched deep in the aural consciousness by generations of habit and experience. F u r t h e r m o r e , in this, one is aided by a harm o n i c basis for melody. O f course, in time the listener will be just as adept at hearing contemporary melody. It is already happening and by the time the music of this h a l f of the century has b e c o m e a standard product, the listeners of the future will undoubtedly find themselves s o m e w h a t bewildered by the music that will then be written. F r o m m y own knowledge of contemporary music I have n o hesitancy in saying that to me one of its special glories is its melodic invention. I do not m e a n that every c o n t e m p o r a r y composer has a Schubertian gift for melody, but I do mean that in m u c h of our finest c o n t e m p o r a r y music there is a melodic content of poignant beauty.

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Contemporary melody, as I have said, is rarely cast in conventional phrase-lengths. One of its principal features is that of the very long melody which constantly develops its own momentum out of its own materials. In this it is not unlike Gregorian chant. The sounds of these contemporary melodies are fresh not only because of their unconventionality and because of their relationship to the other elements of the composition, but because the pitch levels themselves are used with great freedom. Each of the twelve tones is considered an independent entity. Furthermore, some music is written in such a way that none of these tones is repeated until all have been sounded. Even in music that does not adhere rigidly to this contemporary formalism there is to be found great freedom in the use of pitch levels, and it is common to find melodies that sound eight or nine or ten pitch levels before repetition. Such compositional procedures extend the melodic vocabulary. If harmony and melody cannot be regarded as separate and unrelated entities, it is not only because they bear a relationship to each other, but because each is intimately associated with rhythm. I will not attempt even briefly to describe rhythm in new music. It is obvious, I believe, to the most casual listener, that the rhythm of contemporary music is infinitely varied and fresh in sound. Related to all of this is the art of orchestration, which too has undergone considerable development. There is a wealth of contemporary music written for almost every kind of performing group, but perhaps it is fair to say that the real love of the contemporary composer and the

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avenue for his greatest achievement is, and has been, the orchestra. I can think of no successful contemporary composer who is not a brilliant orchestrator. T h i s is due at least in part to the astonishing virtuosity of today's performers, although it is true that much of this virtuosity is the result of the demands that composers have constandy made upon instrumentalists to extend their techniques in order to meet the musical demands of

contemporary

thought. T h e peak in the development of the large, rich, and lush orchestral sound, so admired by Hollywood, was reached in the kind of orchestration

associated

with

Richard Strauss. Here the number of instruments required took on swollen proportions and the complexity of orchestral garb could hardly have been anticipated from a perusal of the basic materials, which, when examined in a piano reduction of the score, are often exceedingly threadbare. ( A s an aside, may I add that the composition and its orchestration by any first-line composer is one indivisible whole and cannot, of course, be evaluated separately.) T h e development then of orchestration since Strauss's day has not been concerned with adding still more instruments and creating even richer textures. In fact, one major development has been in exactly the opposite direction: the increased use of smaller instrumental ensembles. While the contemporary composers continue to write for the full orchestra, the instrumental palette itself has been altered partly as a result of fresh ideas in the realm of orchestral sound, and partly out of the necessity of orchestrating for new musical textures which demand different

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treatment. For example, a composer of the classic period wishing to score a chord for the string section of the orchestra, would, for the most part, be dealing with only three or four different tones. In all likelihood he would have assigned the bass of the chord to the 'cellos and contrabasses sounding in octaves, and the other tones to the violins divided into two sections and the violas. O n the other hand, a contemporary composer wishing to score a typical chord from his vocabulary for the string section alone might well discover that he is dealing with five, six, seven, or twelve tones. Obviously, then, the contemporary composer is obliged to split his string section into many more divisions. It is not at all infrequent, therefore, to have the basses, the 'cellos, the violas, and each section of violins divided into two, and, on many occasions, even more, parts. The string section then, instead of being restricted to five parts, is often divided into ten or more parts. This is a very simple illustration of how the materials themselves create new orchestral sounds. Another example of how the materials of contemporary composition suggests new scoring devices would be the composer's frequent practice of writing in more than one key at a time. It is quite possible that a composer wishing to maintain the quality of each of two separate chordal forms would probably score each of these entities with characteristic orchestral colors in different choirs in order to preserve and emphasize their separateness. On the other hand, he might purposely fuse these chords by combining

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colors f r o m different sections of the orchestra in order to unify the h a r m o n i c impression. C o n t e m p o r a r y music very often abounds in contrapuntal w r i t i n g : that is to say, music in which t w o or m o r e separate but c o m p l e m e n t a r y melodies are heard

simultaneously.

W h i l e this contrapuntal music may be related to a harm o n i c f r a m e w o r k , there are many occasions in w h i c h , as in certain examples of medieval music, the melodies exist independent of a h a r m o n i c background discernible as such. W h e n a composer chooses to write music of this description, his orchestra does not have the vertical tonal resonance which a h a r m o n i c background w o u l d supply. In short, orchestration in our time makes use of all the resources that have c o m e down through its interesting historical development and, in addition, has added highly imaginative innovations which have resulted f r o m contemporary procedures in musical composition. T u r n i n g f r o m these considerations of the composer and his craft to that of the composer and his e c o n o m i c existence, we see at once that an inter-relationship exists. F o r the e c o n o m i c position of the composer is intimately related to the kind of music he writes and the kind of audience that listens to it. T h e very basic problem of what kind of audience listens to his music will be considered at a later point. F o r the m o m e n t , let us e x a m i n e the position of the composer in his everyday life. I m i g h t begin by saying that the only A m e r i c a n composers of serious music I k n o w w h o live entirely by their pens are bachelors.

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from royalties and performance fees for his music. T h e potentialities for income from performance fees can best be indicated by the fact that the rental of the orchestral score and parts for the performance of a new major work by a major orchestra commands a fee of perhaps one hundred to two hundred dollars. In considering this fee it should be realized that the composer probably spent six months or a year, and sometimes more, in creating it, and that the cost of copying the music to the composer or his publisher would be in the neighborhood of one thousand dollars. F r o m this it can be seen that the copyist often earns more from a symphonic work than its creator. If a composer is much performed during a season his income from the performances might support him for a month or two. In addition to this source of income, there is the return on the sale of the music when it is published. It is easy to see that there are not many people in the United States who are interested in buying, or equipped to read, an orchestral score. Hence it is obvious that any advanced musical composition must by its very nature enjoy a very limited sale. T h e works of the serious composer that sell in quantity are usually those special compositions which he has designed for use in the schools. Here the market is extensive, but even so, a choral piece that enjoys the very large sale of say twenty thousand copies a year will not yield a staggering amount in royalties. If it sells for twenty cents, a fair average price for a short choral work, it would yield its composer two cents a copy, provided he did not have

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to share with the writer of the text. T w o cents times twenty thousand equals four hundred dollars. And this sale of twenty thousand, it should be pointed out, is most unusual. Prolific composers can develop catalogs of music that enjoy modest but steady sales. Such publications, when they are most commercial, include short teaching pieces for piano; and when they are least commercial, string quartets. Even though an active composer, by the time he is in his middle years, can have accumulated a published repertory of orchestral scores, band pieces, choral pieces, chamber music works, and compositions for various individual instruments, the annual return from this published catalogue is invariably modest. There is usually a greater return from one or two short pieces suitable for school use than from the composer's more ambitious output. A number of composers now enjoy some modest income from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. T h e Society a few years ago began to collect performance fees for the use of concert music, in addition to its extensive licensing of radio broadcasts. This development is still in its earliest stages, but it does result in modest payments of royalties for some composers of art music. Another source of income is the practice recently adopted by certain publishing houses of offering their most successful composers an annual retainer, either as a bonus or as an advance against royalties. In summary, taking into account all forms of income derived directly from royalties and performance fees, we find that even our top-flight composers rarely earn more

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than the schoolteacher, and usually not as much. The situation then for our successful composers is that they cannot hope for more than the most modest financial reward. If they wish to approach the living standard of a moderately successful business executive, they must supplement their incomes (even the bachelors) by engaging in commercial music work such as writing for the movies, or by lecturing, editing, and teaching. It should also be borne in mind that these remarks apply only to a handful of the most successful composers of serious music. For the others, direct income from composition probably amounts to less than 10 per cent of their annual income, however modest the latter may be. It is easy but extremely superficial to conclude from all this that the lot of the composer in America is not a happy one. As in any other endeavor, it is happy for those who succeed, but in general I am not at all sure that the situation today is not as advantageous as it has ever been. It is true that private patronage is practically a thing of the past. But with the many fellowships available to gifted youngsters, enabling them to have economic assistance which frees time for concentration on composition, and with the increased opportunities that exist in the field of publishing, the society that exists for the collection of performance fees, the hope of increased recordings of contemporary music, and the many school and college posts that are open to composers, I wonder whether the picture is not reasonably hopeful. T h e composer who subjects himself to a restrictive

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formula in order to produce music of immediate marketability, exposes himself to a self-imposed censorship—the only censorship of music in the United States today. However, this is a question of artistic integrity. It seems to me that an integral part of true artistic endowment is the fierce determination to write according to one's own standards. These standards cannot be altered in order to satisfy some extra-musical consideration. T h e composer cannot change his direction in order to meet the demands of others; on the contrary he often succeeds in bringing others around to his way. If he cannot do so, he will go his own way nevertheless, even if it means financial sacrifice. Every composer I know is as delighted as any other citizen when he is able to increase his earnings, but I have yet to see the composer who abandoned the writing of string quartets, which are notoriously uncommercial, for the writing of more commercial pieces, when what he really wanted to do was to compose string quartets. Nor have I ever heard a composer use the plea of economic necessity to account for the kind of composition he was creating. This does not mean that the serious composer is above writing music on occasion, the primary intention of which is to make money. H e will be frank to tell you that he is doing such work and if he is really good, the chances are that he will bring to any job a degree of genuine creativity which will remove it from the ordinary. In fact, what often happens is that while his creativity is removing it from the ordinary, it is also removing it from the commercial. Composers in America usually earn the largest portion

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of their income from activities only indirectly connected with composition itself. This may be an unsatisfactory state of affairs, but it has the advantage of permitting each composer to be, so to speak, his own patron. In an economic sense, then, the United States is no Utopia for the composer, but while the going is tough, it is possible for him to earn a reasonable livelihood if he is willing to supplement his composing with other work. The opportunities for performances of new orchestral music have recendy both increased and decreased. In the orchestra field there are really three categories. In the first are the major orchestras which exist in our larger cities and have seasons of twenty weeks or more, and whose members are full-time professional musicians. In the second category I would include the orchestras of the smaller cities and communities wherein some of the members are professionals who work at other jobs during the day and rehearse and perform during the evening. And in the third category are the school and amateur orchestras. In the instance of the major orchestras there has been a trend of late toward more conservatism and greater subservience to box office appeal. This concern for the box office is born of the very real necessity of budget balancing. It has become increasingly difficult for our orchestras to raise funds to meet their annual deficits. N o major orchestra functions without a deficit, and in an age during which contributors of large sums are becoming increasingly scarce, the situation both in terms of art and business leaves much to be desired. T h e art is naturally seriously affected

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when it is said that the performance of new music is damaging to the box office receipts. This is a specious argument, since no one has been able to show any discernible difference in the relative economic positions of those major orchestras that perform a great deal of new music and those that perform less. T h e crux of the situation lies in the conviction of the music director. If box office influences are not to dictate artistic policies there must be present an orchestral conductor of strong convictions supported by an informed board of directors. Any enlightened conductor realizes that it is his obligation to serve the music of his own day. H e knows that an art, like a living organism, will atrophy if it is not consistently nourished. H e knows, too, that the way to nourish music is to encourage its creation. Yet, as things now stand, even the most ardent champion of new music among the conductors can perform only a small percentage of contemporary works on his programs. If our theatre observed similar proportions we would have theatrical seasons in which the customary present ratio of revivals and standard works to new plays would be reversed. From my own point of view I regret the lack of opportunity of seeing the great classics of drama more frequently. T h e theatre has gone much too far in the opposite direction and strangely enough it has done this, at least in part, for box office reasons. It is curious that economic factors seem to operate in inverse proportion for the theatre and for music. An ideal solution, it would seem to me, would lie some-

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where between—balanced programs of new and fresh material, and standard works. The manager who urges his conductor to perform new music is a rare soul, if indeed he exists at all. His worries are fiscal in nature and one cannot justly criticize him for being preoccupied with these worries. The point is that he should not be in a position to deal with economic problems by means of pressures that affect the choice of works to be performed, and therefore the fate of contemporary music for the duration of his tenure. The real fault in this situation does not lie with the manager only; it is the lack of imagination of the usual board of directors of our symphonic organizations. To this generalization, as to others, there are undoubtedly exceptions, but I have yet to hear of the board of directors of any major symphonic organization choosing the side of the angels and taking a positive stand toward enlightened repertory. A great symphonic organization is a great social body, and the music it performs in a given city over a period of years constitutes in large measure the musical thought to which its citizens have access during their lifetimes. To anyone traveling around the country it is apparent that symphonic audiences reflect in their essential tastes the kind of musical fare which they have been privileged to enjoy. In short, a great musical organization must stand for something in the world of intellectual endeavor, just as any educational institution worthy of the name does. To develop and maintain the free inquiring mind is no less desirable for the orchestra than it is for the university.

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Bold and imaginative policies characterize at least one of the smaller orchestras, namely the Louisville Orchestra. T h e orchestra is limited to fifty musicians and does not attempt to compete in performance or repertory with the mightier orchestras of the nation. Its personnel is composed of professional musicians who work at other jobs during the day since the short musical season cannot possibly supply a sufficient annual wage. T w o years ago it began commissioning composers to write special works for first performance in Louisville and, in many instances, inviting the composer himself to conduct the performance. T h e idea was to do this rather than to spend huge sums on the importing of big-name soloists. T h e result has been most gratifying, not only in the nationwide notice taken of this interesting development, but, of all places, at the box office. While this is going on in Louisville, not many miles away another orchestra in a similar economic position is performing no contemporary music this season. Between these extremes we find that an increasing number of the smaller orchestras are discovering that it is possible to include contemporary music on their programs with encouraging results. T h e attitudes of the conductors of these orchestras range from true artistic conviction and sense of responsibility down to a complete lack of these qualities, and of course the repertory reveals this. If our boards of directors consisted of men and women who were aware of their responsibilities in establishing the artistic and intellectual principles of their organizations, there would exist criteria for the encouragement of con-

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ductors that would include the vitally important item of repertory. T h e position of conductors who choose works on a broad base in keeping with their sense of obligation to music of the present as well as the past would be greatly strengthened by a positive stand in support of this from their directors. There is no immediate solution in sight for this problem as long as the members of the boards of directors of our orchestras continue to function with little or no awareness of the nature of their responsibilities. The reason orchestra performances are of such importance to the composer is that they are virtually the only medium, aside from the theatre, through which a composer can become an established figure in career terms. In musical terms it is obviously the only way in which he can hear the music he has written for orchestra, and only by hearing music he has written for orchestra is he likely to advance in his technique of orchestral writing. T h e opportunities for a world première of a new orchestral work are excellent. Almost every top-flight conductor (there arc exceptions) is delighted to have the world première of a new work. There is always an excitement about a première. If the work proves to be one of merit, it is to the glory of the conductor who introduced it. If the work meets with an uncertain or hostile reception, at least the conductor showed his willingness to give it a hearing. First performances really present little problem. It is hard to imagine any American work today that possessed a modicum of individual profile remaining unperformed for very long. I say this knowing full well that many col-

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leagues with works on the shelf would cheerfully have my head for the statement. T h e real problem lies not in première performances, but in repeated performances after the première has taken place; and herein lies one of the true evils—there is no other word for it—of the distorted values that prevail in symphonic circles. It is difficult to understand why works that are well received by the public, the press, and musicians in general, are not given repeated performances. Any composer can understand that a work that proves to be highly problematical or that meets with an uncertain response need not necessarily be made the subject of a celebrated cause, but it is difficult to understand why works that are well received are not taken up with greater enthusiasm and frequency. The important factor for the contemporary composer is that his music be given the opportunity of repeated hearings if his initial success warrants this repetition. There is no other way for a new work to become part of the regular repertory. On the positive side of the ledger, contemporary music is both more frequently and better performed than it was fifteen years ago, and the situation then was much better than it was fifteen years before that. This fact is due to the increased number of contemporary compositions which can find favor, these compositions comprising some works by foreign composers and the small beginnings of an American symphonic repertory. It is perhaps not too much to say that the emergence of the contemporary school of serious American composers is one of the most important

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musical facts of our century. Aside from its importance as a matter of national pride, it is important because a new and vital music has sprung from a goegraphical area that previously had been comparatively barren in this

field.

Those of us who have faith in this American school of composition find a tonal language that is original and forceful and that is on a technical plane comparable to that of the best contemporary music being written anywhere. Incidentally, the increasing performance in Europe of serious contemporary American music has created some awareness in the European mind that there is more to music in America than "Beat Me Daddy Eight to the Bar." Recently, a world-famous soloist introduced a piano sonata by an American composer. 1 T h e combination of first-rate performance and first-rate music would by itself be enough to have made the event noteworthy. But the fact that an artist enjoying world-wide acclaim should have taken up a major work by an American composer made the event even more noteworthy. There are only a few internationally-known performers who champion contemporary music. Unfortunately, most of the great soloists are content to perform the works that are sure-fire at the box office. This attitude is the more regrettable because artists of unquestioned standing are in a key position to champion new music. T h e fact that aside from a few exceptions they tend to ignore it shows an appalling egocentricity and a complete lack of any sense of musical and 1 Samuel Barber's Piano Sonata was performed for the first time by Vladimir Horowitz, on December 9, 1949, in Havana, Cuba.

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social responsibility. This provincialism is unwittingly emulated by most of the other solo performers. After all, their main ambition is to become great stars, and what is more natural as an avenue of approach than to imitate the successful ones? Contrasted with this is the helpful presence of a small but increasing number of performers who realize that the presentation of unhackneyed programs must be based on musical values and not on mere personal vanity. Perhaps in the future there will be more great solo performers, the strength of whose artistic and intellectual fiber begins to equal that of their

fingers.

A m o n g chamber music groups are several that devote a major portion of their energies to contemporary music, but there are some that virtually ignore it. O n the whole, the situation in this area is fairly satisfactory. T h e growth in popularity of chamber music in the United States today is one of the most healthful signs in the development of our musical culture. It means that more and more people are finding pleasure in playing and performing music that does not rely on any superfluities of expressive device, but that comes to grips in a very basic sense with the highest reaches of musical thought. One major result of this growth is the advent of the resident string quartet, now to be found in a number of educational institutions. In the field of music education there is an increased use of contemporary materials, but the choice of this material is determined not so much by the technical abilities of young performers as by the musical equipment and imagination of the teacher. For this reason the gamut is an

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enormous one. The rank and file music teacher may be quick to perceive the importance of having performances of new compositions, but the choice of this material naturally remains geared to his own equipment. Great strides have taken place in school music in the United States, and although the quantitative activity is staggering, the field, from a qualitative view, is uneven. However, the situation must be viewed in the light of its development, and the progress during recent years has been, without question, astonishing. More and more opportunities will arise for the contemporary composers who are willing to write without condescension, but with an eye to the intellectual, emotional, and technical limitations of young performers. Where the colleges and conservatories of music are concerned one finds that some are engaged in humdrum routine instruction, while others are centers for the most vital and forward-looking kind of musical education. In increasing measure the enlightened centers supply opportunities for composers. Some educational institutions give frequent performances of contemporary works for chorus, band, and orchestra, and it is not at all unusual these days for them to introduce a new opera. The last area of performance open to the contemporary composer is the theatre, in which term I include opera, ballet, and modern dance, movies, radio, and television. Radio has given the serious contemporary composer very little opportunity for creative work designed directly for it. While there have been occasional works, including operas, written especially for broadcast purposes, radio, for the

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most part, has been helpful only to those composers who have had positions writing incidental music for various programs, and this work has been definitely limited to the commercial variety. The contribution that radio has made to contemporary music has been in broadcasting new works; and despite the quantitative limitations, the importance of these broadcasts cannot be overestimated. It is true that a few radio officials resist the broadcasting of contemporary works and do everything in their power to have these broadcasts curtailed, even if it means awkward program changes. Fortunately, men with this anti-art attitude have not always prevailed. Television is, of course, still in such a crystal-set stage that it is difficult to envision what it holds in store for music in general, let alone contemporary music. T h e opportunities for the effective employment of fine music through the medium of television are obvious. There should be, during the second half of this century, major achievements in the composition and performance of opera. There is every appearance of new and vital activity on the part of composers in the field of opera. Not only do our professional opera companies give evidence of increased interest in new works, but there are more and more opera workshops in colleges and conservatories that are equipped to give contemporary opera interesting and adequate performances. One of the most difficult tasks the composer faces here is in finding gifted librettists. This paucity of librettists is undoubtedly directly related to the need of the contemporary theatre for playrights. And

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speaking of the theatre, it can be said that it has in general supplied very little opportunity for composers except in the composition of incidental music. It may well be, however, that the theatre is undergoing a change, and that works of greater musical subtlety may begin to find favor. The area of ballet and modern dance I have left to the last because it has perhaps supplied the most abundant opportunities. T h e list of contemporary composers who have written, and written successfully, for ballet and modern dance, is a long and distinguished one. T h e modern dance groups have relied almost completely on contemporary composers for their scores, and the ballet companies have, with few exceptions, been most interested in new music for their choreographers. If every other performing group were as keenly conscious of the value and excitement of contemporary musical thought, composers would be in a much more fortunate position. T h e considerations enumerated have been set forth from a composer's point of view. In discussing these problems it was of course impossible not to mention performers, but this discussion considered performers only in relation to their activities in presenting new music. Although it is my intention to concentrate our analysis on the problems of the composer, to give a reasonable summary even of this specific aspect of music it is necessary at least to indicate and suggest some of the other pertinent musical and career questions. What does it mean to be a performer in the United States? What are the opportunities for education and career? A discussion of the career aspect of the per-

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former's art would of necessity lead us into a detailed analysis of the organization of concert management. Music management in America is in itself so broad a subject that any serious treatment would require an extended sociological as well as musical study. I will consider briefly some of the aspects of concert management, with special emphasis on the influence of management on program selection. T o begin at the beginning, I am ready to confess as the head of a music school that every child is a musical genius. W h a t happens to all these potential artists I do not know except that everyone has elaborate excuses for failure to make the concert stage. Some of these excuses have their origins in situations of valid musical and human concern. Let us consider for a moment the young performer of proved gifts who is ready for advanced study. If he does not have the funds for instruction there are at least three major conservatories of music that have liberal scholarship funds available, and there are many fine private teachers who stand ready to help talented youngsters. T h e r e is still to my knowledge no formalized public support for private instruction in music, although I am well aware that many schools offer group work in music, and that some also have arrangements for private instruction given at low cost. I rather suspect that most young artists of outstanding merit eventually find their way to the best conservatories. Much of the later career problem begins in the professional school through the attitude engendered in the embryo artist. W i t h few exceptions, instruction of the po-

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tential virtuoso performer remains geared to an unrealistic view of "Carnegie Hall or nothing." This attitude is unfortunate not only in a career sense, but also in a musical sense. Giving the young artist the idea of a concert career is in itself no crime. But it is a crime to limit an education to this possibility when it is obvious that in terms of percentage the market can absorb only a limited number, while the broad world of music has opportunities for the employment of many, if their education is so planned that they are able to function in the areas where the needs exist. If a group of twenty-five splendid young violinists graduate in a given year from one conservatory, it is obvious that they are not all going to be successful as solo performers. In terms of training, many of these young people are capable of playing the most difficult solo works, but are relatively incapable of sitting down and reading at sight the violin part of a symphonic score, or a manuscript placed before them in a radio studio or orchestra pit. In such cases their training has been most unrealistic because if they are to make their living in music, they will either end up playing in orchestras or studios, or in teaching; or not in music, and very bitter. It is right for them to be trained for the highest goals of virtuosity in terms of technical finesse. It is wrong when this training leaves them with the idea that the only way to serve music is to become a star in the star system. But the evil that still persists among many of our finest teachers is not limited to this career aspect. It also includes an exaggerated sense of

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the interpreter's importance, which is in turn reflected by the manner in which the music is performed. A sound education helps the performer understand that the only way a rendition of a composition can be evaluated is in terms of the performer's understanding of the language of that composition. In other words, it is not possible to evaluate a performance in the abstract by marveling at the manual dexterity of the performer, his rapid passage work, remarkable breath control, or any other isolated technical feature. These techniques are only valid in terms of the musical demands the composition makes upon them. It is therefore essential that every performing musician be given a thorough grounding in the literature and materials of the art of musical composition. W h i l e this in itself sounds like a truism, nevertheless the fact remains that little instruction is offered today that gives the performer a realistic notion of the basic nature and dynamic qualities of these materials. Furthermore, instruction in the language of music itself has for the most part lagged far behind contemporary thought. One of the hopeful signs in music education today is the dissatisfaction of some musician-teachers with this kind of instruction and the development of more realistic curricula. Whatever lacks may exist in the branch of musical instruction to which I have just referred, there is certainly no lack in the virtuosity of the American-performing musician. T o my mind no other place in the world has performance standards comparable to those we take for

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granted in the United States. This is, of course, not limited to the field of serious music. The pyrotechnics of our jazz players sometimes reach a point where one can hardly believe one's ears. What opportunities exist for the young performer who is armed with a brilliant technique and who has ambitions for the concert stage or opera? As in the instance of the young composer, the young performing artist will find opportunities for competing in a number of different contests and, if successful, will be assured of either a debut recital or an appearance with a major orchestra. The winners of these contests are often enabled to appear before the public and be reviewed by the press. From such appearances careers can be successfully launched, although the statistics tell us they rarely are. Without an attempt, as I have said, at any detailed analysis of concert management, one or two points should be made. Big management, it seems, can always use a few young artists. The artist has become a purely commercial property and is handled as such. The youngster just beginning his concert career is very happy to be booked as part of a tie-in sale to a small community which must take him and four or five others like him, in order to get the great one. After the young artist has been exploited in this manner for several years and feels he is ready to move up a notch toward stardom, he is often faced with a stone wall and finds that he really cannot advance. The star system hates a new face. A small number of great concert stars reap lavish financial rewards. For the artist in the lower echelons the going is not easy. By the time travel expenses and

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management commissions and promotion expenses have been paid, there is precious little left. One of the real abuses in the organization of management is the profligate manner in which young artists are used for a few years and then discarded. T h e influence exerted by large management corporations on the musical tastes of the public is incredible. Although they constantly maintain that they do not influence program selection, many artists under their management will confirm what every musician knows, namely, that they not only exercise pressure on program content, but often actually dictate which piece may or may not be performed. Leaving aside the few concert managers who arc interested in music as well as profits, we find that there is a total disregard of anything except box office success. In other words, while these managers are interested in supplying the most successful artists to the public, they are not the least bit concerned with the quality of music that the performers offer as long as it is music of immediate appeal. In this area of musical activity there is a most flagrant abuse of musical freedom. A pointed illustration of this abuse concerns a distinguished singer who was to give a program in a city in Texas. W h e n he arrived he was met at the station by the local concert committee, and was informed of their pleasure at hearing him sing again. However they expressed disappointment at the program he felt obliged to give them since they found so little of it of interest. W h e n he asked what would interest them, he was given an outline

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for a program that consisted of some of the finest examples of the standard song literature. H e had previously been informed by his management that the program originally scheduled was in response to a specific request of the local concert committee. T h i s artist was delighted to rearrange his program and have the opportunity to perform the requested works. It should be pointed out, however, that very few artists can act so independently without running the risk of serious damage to their earning capacities. As long as so large a portion of our concert activity is in the hands of managers who interfere in musical matters, a great area of our music will not function in a truly free manner. T h i s entire situation, despite its serious defects, has led to two important developments. T h e first of these is the constantly increasing number of communities that are brought live concerts through the enterprising field work of managerial representatives. W h i l e these concerts may be on a lower artistic plane and while performers may be obliged to cater to the managers' tastes, the fact does remain that live music is being performed in centers where such events were previously unknown. This activity always has in it the promise of future improvement. T h e second result, which is indirect and appears at first to be negative, is actually a hopeful sign. Out of all of this supercommercialized concert activity has come for many of today's young artists a realization that they must be equipped for a broader career, if they are not to be sold short on the musical slave market. T h i s means that more and more of

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our brilliant youngsters are realizing that an opportunity can exist to live a full and happy life in music, with ample opportunities for performance, by becoming established in one of the smaller cities, through the community or educational centers, as teacher and performer. By this I do not mean to imply that the eye of the average young virtuoso is still not on the career in capital letters, but I do mean to say that the more intelligent of these youngsters realize that because of the peculiar economic and social climate of concert life in the United States, concert careers may be barred to them for extramusical reasons over which they have little or no control. Out of their abortive experience, a constructive force may be developing. T h e audience is of course the final arbiter in the kind of music it wishes to encourage. T h e quality of the listening public forms an integral part of national musical life. Every nuance of our musical culture is reflected in the vast and growing audience for music in the United States. Beginning with symphony audiences, may I say that the atmosphere many of them create is just about as lively as that of an unfrequented museum. Like all generalizations, this one is obviously unfair to the exceptions and for this reason it is necessary to point out that even the most desultory of our symphonic audiences invariably include some keen and interested listeners. However, this small group is hardly enough to overcome the funereal pall created by the majority. Contrasted with this norm are certain symphonic audiences of astonishing alertness. T h e quality of a listener is obviously the result of many

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factors. These factors not only include specific experience in music, but encompass as well educational, social, and certainly economic levels. Generally speaking, most orchestras give each program at least twice, and one of these is often a weekday matinee. There is a great similarity among these matinee symphonic audiences in the large cities of this country. Such audiences rarely include a significant number of serious listeners. The symphony matinee is the thing to do, and its social prestige is unquestioned. These audiences (always bearing in mind the limitations of generalities) supply about the worst possible climate imaginable for acceptance, let alone encouragement, of forward-looking music-making policies. The evening audiences are invariably more genuinely interested in the music itself although they, too, are predominantly conservative. It is interesting to observe the different receptions given to a single piece performed before successive audiences during the same week in a given city. I have seen compositions received with comparative indifference by a matinee audience, excite an evening audience to a considerable degree of enthusiasm. This picture is admittedly a gloomy one, but there are signs of change. In San Francisco, for example, one of the evening concerts is given for an audience composed mainly of college students, as a result of a special promotional campaign. If this audience is typical of the rising generation of listeners to symphonic music, we have reason to be optimistic, for it is alive, intelligent, and, most of all, interested. It is not afraid of novelty and does not, as

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a rule, judge a piece before listening to it. In describing this I do not mean to imply that intellectual and artistic curiosity has anything whatever to do with age—anyone who has taught knows that there are many old men and women of eighteen. W h e n an unfamiliar work is presented to the usual symphonic audience the composer's dilemma is something like this: If the work sounds familiar and is readily understood, an experienced audience is quick to cite its derivations and to dismiss it as unoriginal. If, on the other hand, the work shows originality and happens to be cast in a tonal language not readily assimilable, the work may be denounced as chaotic, dissonant, lacking in melody and devoid of charm. These audiences by and large are not ready for the kind of creative listening which is only possible with deep concentration. T h e y tend to view music as mere diversion. It has been argued that there is nothing wrong in this attitude, that it is up to the composer and the performer to be so arresting that the attention of the listener is won, and that it is not up to the listener to make any special effort. It seems to me that this view is born of ennui and ignorance, and indicates a total lack of any sense of responsibility to the furtherance of creative activity. In the final analysis, the quality of the listener has a definite bearing on the basic quality of the musical culture of his time. Audiences for opera and chamber music seem to m e on the whole much more a genuine part of the proceedings than do symphonic audiences, even though they arc perhaps at opposite poles. T o be sure, the social factor of opera

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far outshines that of the symphony, yet opera audiences seem always to contain a high percentage of violently enthusiastic listeners, who seem really to care. Chamber music audiences, though small, are generally very intense, as is required by the highly concentrated music they are listening to. It is, however, a great mistake to think of listeners entirely in terms of attendance at musical events. The appreciation of basic values on the part of audiences, and the recognition of musical superfluities, is directly related to the quality and quantity of amateur music-making in the nation. If the final result of television, phonograph, and radio is to take away from the layman his natural desire for self-expression through making music, the quality of the listening public will deteriorate. If, on the other hand, the desire of the individual for expression through music proves stronger than these distracting media, the quality of our listening audience can improve. It is not inconceivable that the day will come in America when audiences for music will parallel in informed enthusiasm audiences for sporting events. If one doubts the parallel between intelligent audience response and audience knowledge concerning the event taking place, one has only to look to sports. The reason the spectators at a baseball game are so intensely preoccupied with the event itself is that they are aware, through their own experience, of the rules of the game, the performance that is taking place in terms of those rules, and the subtlety of performance that makes a great game. A n audience for music with comparable

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understanding would also demand critics who are the equals of the sports writers. Attacks are frequendy made on musical criticism as such when what is being attacked is the men who write it. N o artist should object to criticism that is on a level of seriousness comparable to the seriousness with which the artist has approached his work. But what everyone has not only a right to object to, but should protest against, is the kind of ignorant bombast with which most critics fill their columns. In the United States today, writing music criticism for our daily newspapers, there are a handful of men equipped for the task and a few others who might get by. Unlike their colleagues who write for the sports pages, most music critics have not played the game, do not know its rules, and have little to go on except their journalistic ability which, unfortunately, is often brilliant. T h e role of the critic seems to me less important for composers than for performers. Obviously, the success of a composer can only be accelerated or retarded by critical evaluation. If the music is valid it will somehow rise to the surface, given sufficient time. The performer is in no such fortunate position because, when time marches on for him, so do his best performing years. Some will argue that a brilliant performer will rise above unjustified criticism and make a career despite this. Undoubtedly this has been true in some instances, but essentially there is a direct relation between critical acclaim for an artist and his income. That this fact is indisputable is indicated by the investments made by artists for performances in certain

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halls for the prime purpose of corralling favorable notices which can be quoted in future advertisements. T h e effect of criticism on the audience is related of course to the intelligence of the individual reader, and while this effect can be serious for those who have heard the concert, it is even more so for those who will or will not go because of the review. In the case of a critic of sound musical training, catholicity of taste, strong convictions, and a lack of capriciousness, the over-all result of his activity can definitely be constructive. We have such examples today. It is unreasonable to expect every judgment of even such a critic to be correct, but if he has the qualities just enumerated he becomes more than a reporter. He is a teacher and a leader of thought. This critic is also in a key position to support the program-making and performances of forward-looking musicians, and by so doing, to discourage the others. In short, a fine critic means that the public has an opportunity of reading the considered judgments of a professionally qualified musician who is also endowed with a literary gift. Returning now to our question—Is music in the United States free ?—I would say that it is free to the same extent that America is free. While this freedom is defined officially in the Declaration of Independence, and the principles of freedom are the law of the land, there are those who are either disinterested or opposed, and those who strive vigorously to implement these values in everyday life. Music reveals this diversity in the fact that its freedomloving elements have every opportunity for expression and

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expansion even though they are hampered and blocked at every turn of the way by the apathetic, or by those who refuse to understand that basically music is neither a profession nor a trade, but an art. In considering the larger question of this series of lectures, specifically in the field of music, I would say that any revolt that has taken place must be considered both in terms of the craft of musical composition and the general context of music in society. There have been comparatively quiescent periods in the history of music, but since it is a vital art there have always been, and will continue to be, violent battles about esthetic principles. Perhaps in music revolt is a usual state of affairs that seems more extreme today because in a short period of time the language of music has undergone drastic extensions. In historic perspective I do not believe that these extensions will seem quite so extreme. T h e distinctions we like to make today will not appear very real tomorrow. T h e arguments about the relative merits of romanticism and neo-romanticism, classicism and neo-classicism, to say nothing of neoclassic romanticism and neo-romantic classicism, will be afforded their just placc as part of the twentieth-century musical gibberish. T h e qualities that make for fine musical composition today are the same as they have always been— something to say combined with the technical equipment to say it with expressive clarity. T h e art of music is understood by the public predominantly in terms of speech as divorced from content, or performance from composition. W e will truly have had

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a revolt in music when interest in the art centers in what is said as well as in the way it is said. When that Utopia comes about there will be as much concern with the composition being performed as there is with the tonsils of the tenor performing it. W e can all agree that whatever the myriad problems which the art of music faces today, it functions on a broad democratic base drastically different from that of the days when it was available to a privileged few. It has a part in our national consciousness that augurs well for its future. It may not always have the degree of economic security we would wish for its practitioners, but it does have an enormous vitality and range. It is fast becoming a famous and enviable American product. Finally, music as a social force communicates the deepest aspirations of man in ways that defy verbalization or pictorialization. The nature of its future is, of course, inexorably a part of the future of civilization itself. Concerning this larger issue, there is no such thing as an expert opinion, and one must go on faith. It is my own deep conviction that we will develop sufficient wisdom to preserve our way of life and that through this process we will grow in maturity. With this growth in maturity there will inevitably follow greater opportunities for artistic expression. As a potent force in our existence the influence of music in human terms should not be underestimated. It is important to preserve and extend freedom in an art which is the profession of thousands, the avocation of millions, and the joy and inspiration of a nation.

The Conscience of the Contemporary Novel James A.

Michener I

recently returned from England said, "I was terribly ill at ease in London. You know what I mean. An American, presuming to stand there amid the cultural and moral glory of England! I felt as out of place as the Roman barbarians must have felt standing amid the glories of conquered Athens." During the war a French officer was showing a group of his American allies the dusty remnants of Carthage, and he said, "You understand that the desolation of Carthage is unique. The Carthaginians disappeared without leaving a trace. No books, no poetry, no art, no glorious architecture. They were merely traders. The Americans of their day." Within the month I have myself returned from an extensive trip to another part of the world. Wherever I went I met the universal assumption that America was a rich and powerful nation, true, but one totally devoid of any art more serious than Grade "C" movies and the comic strip. Finally, on a superb hillside on Guadalcanal, once one of the most backward islands on earth, the handsomely cultivated wife of a local official studied the AmeriGENTLEMAN

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can anthology I earned and said, "It's big, like everything your country produces, but it's also probably most uninspired." Then she smiled disarmingly and added, "You know what I mean." Unfortunately, I do not know what such critics mean. I once lived in London, and I did not feel like a barbarian lately arrived from the North. I attended several European universities and found my American training to have been somewhat more thorough than that of the young men with whom I had to compete. At Carthage, where I tramped as a youngster out of college, I felt no blood relationship with those ancient and powerful traders, although I did feel a shiver course down my spine when I pondered how easy it is for any nation to disappear if it consistently makes the wrong choice. And in the South Pacific, as I looked homeward, I saw no moral and cultural wasteland. I saw instead a nation which had, admittedly, produced a million chromed toilets—and also Sinclair Lewis, who had won a Nobel Prize for lampooning men who thought that the creation of chromed toilets was an end of civilization. I saw a land which could build a million motor cars— but which also had time to produce Pearl Buck, who won her Nobel Prize for describing the spiritual stirrings among Chinese peasants. I saw a democracy which had the capacity to arm the free world, plus the courage to destroy the European and Asiatic tyrants—and then also had the energy to provide

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the men who have so far best described that accomplishment: Norman Mailer, Irwin Shaw, John Hersey, and T o m Heggen. In short, I saw a magnificently vital nation, peopled with men and women artistically awake, producing more than their share of the best writing being done in the world today. It is stupid arrogance to describe the America I know as a land of the stainless steel barbarism. Consider only the accomplishments in

fiction.

In Ernest Hemingway we have the strongest writer now practicing the craft. H e is also one of the best storytellers. In William Faulkner we have a superb prober into the dark areas of the mind, a masterful evoker of mood and meaning. In Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers we have provided the inheritors of Katherine Mansfield's skill with the butterfly net wherein vagrant emotions are caught during the indolent heat of a midsummer's day. In Marquand we have a brilliant, if repetitious, satirist, and in Kenneth Roberts we surely have the peer of Sir Walter Scott in what might be termed the eye, ear, nose, and throat department of fiction. More important, we have at least twoscore brilliant beginners who are producing as fine writing as any being turned out anywhere in the world. W e may be headed for the wasteland, but we are not yet engulfed by those arid plains. In fact, we constitute one of the world's artistic oases. Yet I must not be a chauvinist. W e have not produced a novelist with the social vision of Jean Paul Sartre or the social dedication of Jules Romains. W e have not yet pro-

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vidcd a sovereign synthesist like Thomas Mann, or a chronicler of labor like Ignazio Silone. We do not even show the putrescent brilliance of an Evelyn Waugh. One could continue for a long page outlining our deficiencies— no humorist like Joyce Cary, no polished commentator like Andre Gide—but to do so would be fruitless, for any sensible critic knows that American fiction is only just beginning. Our novels, if compared only with what is being done in Europe today, are commendable; but if weighed against the masterpieces of a previous generation, they seem immature and trivial. Actually there have been no great American novels. Our two leading contenders, Moby Dic\ and Huckleberry Finn, represent a limited glory, and the limitations are defined when one recalls that neither novel contains a major woman character. They are works of a primitive and self-conscious civilization where men were afraid equally of art and women. They might properly be classified in the Beowulf stage of literary development: the strong and wonderful relics of a nation just emerging. But in these two novels we have made a good beginning, and there is much cause for hope, especially when one remembers that for the past three decades a yeasty revolt has been in progress. Let us go back to 1913. In that year Walter Hines Page was the high panjandrum of American literary taste. Each season he published a collection of drivel that was unmatched. The plots of novels were hackneyed. The characters were sentimental. And the words in which the books were written composed a sticky, gushy vocabulary that had

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somehow become labeled "literary." There was as little realism as there was talent, and compared with contemporary novels from Europe, ours were so miserably stunted as to warrant no serious attention. But in the next decade a group of young writers appeared whose work destroyed the silly bonds by which our literary life had been tied into tight and meaningless parcels. Recall the explosive effect of the following artists upon the American mind of the nineteen-twenties! Ernest Hemingway killed the old literary vocabulary. He gave new currency to an entire portion of the English language. Like an able cauterist, he burned away much of the florid excess in which idea and emotion had been wrapped. Equally important was his cleaning up of the sentence so that it no longer had to be a tortuous melange of dependent clauses hanging upon some pretty thought long since forgot. Finally, he showed how character could be portrayed in spare strokes. His effect was monumental. John Dos Passos built new structural forms for the novel. H e set free our conceptions of time sequence, of place immobility, and of relationships between characters.

He

stressed the overriding importance of hanging a novel not upon old pegs of time and place but upon the new hooks of meaning and relationship. Ernest Poole demonstrated that any subject matter is worthy of attention. F . Scott Fitzgerald proved that the lyric quality of words and of human life could be combined to create patterns of immense implication. Willa Cather showed us in beautiful rhythms that the simplest

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theme could, if the writer's art were sufficient, be spun into majestic tapestries. On the other hand, Theodore Dreiser proved that a novelist need have little command of artistic processes if only he has the monolithic understanding of life as it is lived on various levels of society. And finally, Sinclair Lewis showed us that even the most sacred cows of American culture were vulnerable if one had but a witty pen and enough anger. These years of American fiction might be termed the Saturday-morning or house-cleaning period, during which these essential elements of fiction were scraped clean: words, sentences, character development, subject matter, setting, plot, the inherent poetry of life, the appreciation of simplicity, the acknowledgment of primitive forces that exist wherever there are human beings. Unfortunately this was also a period of intense dissatisfaction with America. Our novelists, excepting Willa Cather, seemed to hate their own land. Many of them, finding no sanctuary here, fled to a more hospitable Europe. Glenway Westcott, Louis Bromfield, and Hemingway found spiritual homes abroad, and it is noteworthy that Hemingway has not even yet written an important novel about America. Furthermore, many of our writers had been additionally alienated by their experiences in World War I, which they knew to be a betrayal, poorly managed, inhumanly fought, and inconclusively ended. Their castigation of this folly was unremitting. For these reasons our most gifted writers of the nineteen-

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twenties were in revolt against most of what they saw. Is that true of our writers today ? Some time ago I was privileged to review the unpublished findings of a group of America's leading critics as they discussed the novels of World W a r II. T h e critics were pretty harsh. They accused the novelists of lacking moral courage because they did not stand up and denounce the animal barbarism of war and of being deficient in artistic courage because they had devised no startling new narrative tricks. " T h e y are," said one distinguished critic, "afraid to revolt." H e went on to add, quite rightly, " A n d we know that few great books are written unless the author is in revolt." But these critics were older men remembering their reactions to World W a r I. They were waiting hungrily for some new Dos Passos to serve up the old hash over again, perhaps with a new poached egg on top. W h a t they had not discovered was that the younger novelists of today are in revolt. T h e y are rebelling against the intellectual and moral poverty of the nineteen-twenties. T h e y are deeply engaged in the problems of content and meaning. T h a t they are not content to devise striking new techniques and forms is to their credit, for they seek a greater prize. T h e y are fighting for the conscience of the world. T h e older critics seem to have forgotten the nature of revolt. A revolution is always two-faced. Janus-like, it looks backward to the hateful symbols that must be destroyed. T h e initial destructive rage of the French Revolution, the

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determined gallantry of our men of 1776, and the excesses of the October Revolution in Russia were all directed against outworn social forms. This first face of the revolutionary Janus is violent because the symbols of oppression exist right at hand, targets begging to be destroyed. The chains that have bound can be felt and the muscles grow strong to burst them. The literary revolt of which we have been speaking repeated the pattern of all revolutions. The primary concern was the smashing of old symbols. The enemy was the debauched taste of the American reader. The enemy was the calloused, materialistic nation that America threatened to become. In the case of word-artists like Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, the enemy was also the sloppy, sentimental, and vague vocabulary enshrined as literary. In the early days of this revolt the pitchfork wielders were engulfed by outworn symbols, and as in the early days of most revolutions, the preliminary smashing of idols was exciting business for those involved. It was also exhilarating for the onlooker. I shall never forget the tremendous effect of Elmer Gantry. I had begun to suspect that such men might exist. Equally powerful was a first reading of A Lost Lady, for with it came my first awareness of the fact that sometimes in art the gentle, slowlymounting pressure of a whisper is ultimately to become more triumphant than a hurricane. In fact, there are probably few readers whose growing up was not in some way affected by the writers we have been discussing. But there is another face to revolution. It looks to the

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future, past the smoke of smashed symbols, and invariably it is concerned with what must be done to preserve and augment the ideas that started the revolt. This is the constructive phase. After the nihilism of Robespierre comes the codification of Napoleon. After the night-riding exuberance of Sam Adams comes the painful building of John Adams. In more terrible pattern, after the violence of Trotsky comes the calculating consolidation of Stalin. Each revolt reaches the point where it can no longer merely destroy. It has got to prove what it stands for. This construction of lasting new ideals to replace the old must not be demanded of those who flourish in the first stages of revolt. It is enough that they destroy the old symbols. Therefore we must not be dismayed at the poverty of constructive ideas in the fiction of the 1920's. Hemingway, Dreiser, Lewis, and even Willa Cather exist on a shockingly small fund of thought; and if you seek constructive thought these writers provide almost none. You could tabulate all of Sinclair Lewis' constructive ideas on a filing card. Dreiser was not much better. It is difficult to ascertain what F. Scott Fitzgerald was driving at, and not until For Whom the Bell Tolls does Hemingway produce a single constructive thesis. Of course, there is much great writing that is philosophically barren. Jane Austen, Balzac, and Arnold Bennett were content merely to describe symptoms without writing prescriptions. Much of Willa Cather's reputation derived from the fact that she discarded a sententious moralism and was content merely to tell a story. I suspect

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that many writers are happiest when they are trying simply to achieve an artistic purpose—and let didacticism remain the concern of teachers. But I must not delude myself into believing that any great national literature has ever been sustained by imagination alone. That is not enough. There has got to be a central core of thought, hard and fearless, and this thought must be applied to the problems of current society. Tolstoi, Dostoievski, and Turgenev illustrate my thesis. So do John Galsworthy, Charles Dickens, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. And Victor Hugo, £mile Zola, and Jules Romains. These writers, along with hundreds of others, have represented the conscience of the world. Many forces of society combine to make up this world conscience. The four that seem outstanding are these: religion, education, the best elements of a free press, and books by aroused writers. Within this goodly fellowship the writer of fiction has a unique freedom, since he is neither embroiled in the inhibitions and forms of an established religion nor involved in his own special advertising interests, like even the best newspapers. Nor is he required by society to be prudishly sentimental, like the teacher. No, the novelist stands apart. He exists in greater freedom than any other arm of the world's conscience save only the poet. And he has used this freedom with courage. After John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath America could still kick around the dispossessed. But we could not do so with impunity, for Steinbeck had taught even the most calloused conscience the moral outlines of this problem. If you want

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to, you can go on lynching Negroes, but your guilt has been nominated once and forever by William Faulkner and Lillian Smith. You can drop as many atom bombs as you like, but John Hersey has specifically told you what you are doing. But a great novel must contain much more than merely a forceful social message. T h e r e is a rule of thumb among novelists, and a fine rule it is, too, that any novel about an abstract idea will surely be a bad novel, for fine novels are invariably about people who chance to represent the working out of abstract ideas. Yet I must again insist that a stupendous portion of the humane and liberal ideas which circulate to keep the conscience of the world clean are customarily circulated by novels. This does not mean that the novelist is a social philosopher. Only rarely does the novelist discover the clarifying truths. T h a t is the job of the religious leaders or the scholar. It is the novelist's peculiar aptitude that he can transmit the discoveries with fire and force. Any young man who reads Dickens, Thackeray, Tolstoi, Mark Twain, Hardy, and T h o m a s Mann, to name a random few, enters a certain climate of humanitarianism whose aura shall never leave him so long as he has memory. I don't claim that these men "stood f o r " any political theory or body of social doctrine. T h e y stood for the continuing hopefulness of the human race. They had the courage to be optimistic about the final outcome, yet they were not ostriches, oblivious to the ever-present evil about t h e m ; at times they were almost scavengers working in the evil itself until they found cause for a reasonable

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hope concerning human life on this earth. Like the most perceptive religious leaders, like dedicated teachers, or the exemplary press, they were willing to commit themselves to the defense of humanity. The great writer is almost invariably describing, explaining, and justifying those cumulus "clouds of glory" which even in these so-called dark days trail behind us as they did in Wordsworth's. The novelist shares his huge responsibility with the poet and the dramatist, but he is luckier than they because mass distribution permits his work to reach a wider audience. The novelist is really the poor man's poet, riding a plodding Percheron instead of a soaring Pegasus. He is likewise the poor man's dramatist, since his work will penetrate even the backwashes, whereas the poet and the dramatist are reserved for the metropolitan elite. The novelist requires less intellectual and artistic equipment than either the poet or the dramatist, for this point must never be forgotten: the novelist is essentially a popular artist, and as such his responsibility is very great. II How can the American novelist, if he accepts the responsibility thus defined, best discharge his obligations? How can he make fruitful the constructive phase of the literary revolt? Obviously, he will try to write the great novels so long overdue. In making the attempt he will consider four possible areas of new or continued experimentation: (1) What new narrative devices are needed? (2) What new style of writing? (3) Is new content re-

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quired? (4) Can the philosophical meaning of fiction be increased ? Let us consider these possibilities in order. Must we evolve new narrative devices ? Were the critics right when they assailed our war novelists for a lack of inventiveness in style and form ? In other words, are our unborn masterpieces dependent upon the midwifery of artistic tricks and gimmicks ? Rubbish! We need new devices about as much as we need a literary dictator to tell us where and when to use the devices. Simply because Hemingway and Dos Passos won their freedom through the manufacture of new tricks it is not required that the next generation do the same. If we review certain recent attempts to devise new literary gimmicks we shall see how barren such procedures can be. Two of the finest war novels turned up, oddly enough, with the same tricky device. In The Gallery John Home Burns links his delicate and lovely novelettes together with what he calls "promenades," whereby the narrator reviews certain areas of experience, leading to the fictional account that is to follow. The Gallery was a most successful book, and one might be tempted to conclude that much of its merit derived from this narrative device, but actually it was the beauty of writing in the main passages, the poignant humanism of the stories themselves, plus the deft elucidation of mood and character, that made the book so memorable. In fact, if the obscuring superstructure of supercilious form had been knocked down so as to reveal

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more cleanly the inherent form, The Gallery would have been even finer. Similarly, Alfred Hayes in All Thy Conquests clutters up his perceptive novel with a structural form that infuriates. By jumping back and forth unnecessarily, Hayes retards rather than speeds the reader, and the retardation is not for the legitimate purpose of telling the reader more while holding him back, but for the illegitimate purpose of adding a kind of literary flourish to the story. Again, the thing that makes All Thy Conquests a fine novel is the power of the author's emotion. The tricky format in which it is presented actually prevents the full effect of that emotion from reaching the reader. Other young novelists are experimenting with new forms, and in almost every case the experiment is unnecessary, proving forcefully that our principal need these days is not for radical new forms into which stale ideas can be poured but for radically more powerful thought, expressed in the simplest practical terms. A second group of novelists is experimenting with words, the most successful innovator being Carson McCullers, whose odd juxtaposition of small-town vernacular and traditional simplicity yields one of the most delightful vocabularies in use today. Reading The Member of the Wedding is an exhilarating adventure in the joy of words. But this alone is not enough. Unless Miss McCullers can apply that beguiling vocabulary to substantial themes she seems destined to that minor niche enjoyed by those who escaped both mediocrity and greatness.

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More spectacular is the vocabulary of Nelson Algren in The Man With the Golden Arm. Grubbing among the human wreckage of Division Street in Chicago, Algren comes up with a fascinating argot. He reproduces an incredible syntax and even dares to revive the malapropism with hilarious effect, as when Frankie shouts for "artificial inspiration," or when Sparrow calls his stolen cocker spaniel a "cocky Spaniard." Yet to contend that Algren is a major literary figure merely because he has mimicked the sounds of live people is like praising Beethoven because in his Sixth Symphony he used a tin flute to mimic the sound of birds. If that was all he had been able to do, he would not now be remembered as Beethoven; and if Algren can do no more than merely report deliciously garbled syntax he will become merely the esthete's Milt Gross. Still other young novelists have experimented with style. Calder Willingham's spare dialogue is copied from the masters of the nineteen-twenties, and when it is good it is the best dialogue now being written; but generally it obtrudes. It is not germane to the novels he is trying to write, and in its worst redundancy seems only a pathetic parody announcing the bankruptcy of yet another device. Frederick Buechner, in A Long Day's Dying, presents a truly remarkable style, derived from Henry James but successful in its own right. Buechner takes a simple sentence and embroiders it so delicately with commas that soon the reader is enmeshed in a superb brocade that holds prisoner his senses. Of all recent experiments in style his

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is surely the most satisfying—and therefore the most easy to parody—and yet if he depends on it alone he will produce little but a series of winsome volumes, each charming in its own right but all of them together adding up to little. Fortunately, Buechner is too fine an artist merely to weave strands of lace, but when he does write the masterful novel of which he seems capable, it will depend not upon flourishes and curlicues but upon his gift of insight into situation and character. One might conclude from the above remarks that I am a very peasant type of critic, sitting at the table, hammering my fork and shouting for meat and potatoes while delicate chefs bring me rare pastries done up in lacy frills. I plead guilty. At a time when my country has become the leader of the world, I am banging on the table for substantial steak and potatoes because in this period of great hunger it is not enough for our artists to drag out pastries. W e need, and we have a right to expect, substantial intellectual and moral food. T h i s can be provided only by a conscious movement toward a more significant content plus a more vital presentation of meaning. Let us consider content first. W h a t should be the subject matter of a great novel? It is impossible to say. Remember that America's two finest novels dealt with the most improbable content: a white whale snarling in seas far removed from America, and a juvenile delinquent drifting down the Mississippi on a raft! N o one can predict what ill-assorted subject matter will inspire genius, but one can survey modern America

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to discover that many of the most important aspects of modern life have been ignored by the novelists. W e present the anomaly of a nation assuming world leadership before it even knows itself. This nation needs to be analyzed, reported upon, inspired, and directed. If all the novelists we have spent all the time they have on such a job, it would still be incompletely done. For example, five unprobed areas come to mind, each worthy of a master novel: First, as our world responsibilities expand, what is the effect upon the mind of an average American with average fears, hopes, preconceptions, and prejudices? Second, now tfiat labor has assumed a full partnership in national life, where is the great novel depicting the rise of this new force? Third, what ought to be the relationship between the sexes? This is perhaps the most vital area to be explored, for if we sponsor a world civilization as badly confused on this critical problem as America now is, we shall simply be extending folly. Fourth, how can we absorb an increasing number of aged people into our economic and social life ? Fifth—and I mention a completely trivial subject, in comparison with the others, merely to show how much of American life is yet untouched by fine novels—in World W a r II American women went to war seriously for the first time. It seems to me there must have been an immense drama in this, say in the life of a W a c attached to General Eisenhower's staff during the bombing of Britain and the invasion of Germany. Certain critics think that we shall have discharged our responsibility when we have compiled a healthy collection

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of regional novels. I cannot think so. Probably the most overrated aspect of our current literary scene is the socalled Southern Renaissance. It is true that most of our best writers happen to be Southerners, but the morbid and inverted little books they produce simply do not add up to a national literature. They do comprise a fascinating and embellished belles-lettres. One is reminded of the early days at Guadalcanal when our Navy had no battleships, so that a great fuss was made over the litde P-T boats. It was fine to have those gallant craft holding the line, but one must never mistake a P-T boat for a batdeship. Fortunately, there have been two superb American novels written in recent years, and they show what can be accomplished. Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men and James Gould Cozzens' The fust and the Unjust are works of large stature, the latter being particularly mature and magnanimous. It is a study of justice in a small town where five perplexing cases arise to test the wisdom of a community. Three brutal gangsters murder a dope peddler. A crackpot justice of the peace stifles testimony to prevent a beaten-up woman from pressing charges against her husband. The playboy son of a National Committeeman of the Republican Party is involved in a serious traffic accident. A wet-lipped young teacher prevails upon some giggling high school girls to pose in the nude. An old swine of a man dies and pillories his family upon an unjust will. Slowly justice digests these varied cases and we find American society itself on trial. That it comes off reasonably well is unimportant. That the nature of justice

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—and recall how many in the world live without it—is explained is the important thing. When the defeated young assistant district attorney is about to renounce the law because of the stupidity of juries, his father reminds him: T h e jury protects the Court. It's a question how long any system of courts could last in a free country if judges found the verdicts. It doesn't matter how wise and experienced the judges may be. Resentment would build up every time the

findings

didn't

go with current notions or prejudices. Pretty soon half the community would want to lynch the judge. There's no focal point with a jury; the jury is the public itself. That's why a jury can say when a judge couldn't, "I don't care what the law is, that isn't right and I won't do it. . . ." [ F r e e men] have a way of saying that and making it stand. They may be wrong, they may refuse to do the things they ought to do; but freedom merely to be wise and good isn't any freedom.

Yet fine as All the King's Men and The Just and the Unjust are, neither is entirely satisfying, for like Moby Dic\ and Huckleberry Finn, neither contains important or believable women. Even our finest novels thus continue the literary heritage that began with those sickly shadows parading as women in the pages of James Fenimore Cooper. This fact alone proves the contention that it is about time for the American novel to grow up. But it may be that there is no time left in which the novel about America can mature. It is quite possible that our writers will leap boldly into the field of the world novel, for in the last few years it is the entire world that has become our battleground of ideas. For example, John Hersey, one of

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the young men on whom we can most safely rely for future fine writing, has placed his three best works in Adano, Hiroshima, and Warsaw, and in so doing has posed the most terrifying modern dilemma, one that each living writer must face: Are we citizens of one nation only or are we citizens of the world? I suspect that nine out of ten creative artists in America are ready to support a world government. When an officer of the State Department sneeringly asks, "But would Americans be ready to sacrifice a portion of their sovereignty in order to obtain a stable world government?" the average novelist, deeply concerned over problems of life and death, will surely reply, "Why not?" Furthermore, the wise novelist knows that you do not create a national literature from exclusively national themes. He remembers that in the Elizabethan Age, a period of bursting frontiers like our own, the English mind was quickened by four masterpieces: Hamlet, a study of Denmark; Macbeth, an account of Scodand; Othello, a tragedy of Venice; and Lear, a mythical fantasy of prehistoric Britain. And yet, the pathway to a responsible world government, in which America would of necessity be a keystone, seems to me to be the narrow road of explaining and defending and reassuring and urging our people here in America. We must not proudly try to save the world and meanly lose our own heritage. A really fine novel about life in a Vermont village would do more to keep hope

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alive than would a ranting novel on world responsibilities. It is the wonderful habit of the fine novel that it enmeshes the mind in memories of what goodness and decency have accomplished. As to content, therefore, the novelist has an infinity of choice, from the Vermont village to the outermost reaches of the universe. His only responsibility is that he tackle themes of magnitude. But even more needed than ample content is powerful meaning. Here the American novelist has been noticeably deficient, and as a result readers turn for intellectual enlightenment to European novelists like Sartre, Camus, Waugh, and George Orwell. Because our own fiction is well-nigh bankrupt of meaning one sometimes has the feeling that the surges of modern thought seem to be passing us by. There is, however, one area of thought in which our younger writers have done some rather thorough work, and since this area is perhaps the most important in the world today, we can take hope. Almost without exception our best young writers have courageously affirmed the positive values of humanism. Their novels are memorable defenses of men against the machines of military life, tyranny, and despair. Some recent novels have even dared to present old-fashioned heroes! In his deeply-studied chronicle of Raintree County (marred, be it noted, by unnecessary experiments in form) Ross Lockridge detailed the love of land and compassion for human beings that have characterized the best in

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American life. His most successful passages are those which remind us of our national heritage of lusty humor and decency. Thomas Heggen's Mister Roberts does the same. In boisterous scenes it affirms the triumph of average men over tyrants. Heggen keeps his characters pretty close to the animal, where many of us choose to reside, but he infuses them with a courage which is purely cerebral. The captain goes down not because he is a vile, cowardly bully but because a bunch of average men won't tolerate such behavior, even when Navy Regulations say they may be shot for protesting. In his sensitive study of the Catholic padre and the Protestant chaplain, John Home Burns has written exquisitely of the hope that good men may one day get together on varied problems, even if they do so only at the moment of death. The established critics were thinking of Burns' book when they charged that the novelists of this war were a pretty soft-spined bunch because they didn't write brutal attacks on their elders. Why, I ask you, should our generation be expected to be so stupid about warfare as the generation of Dos Passos and Hemingway ? As I understand it, the previous gang went off to war with banners flying, convinced they were on a holy crusade. Their disillusion was epic, and their cries of rage produced much fine writing. But in the last war I never met a man who considered the affair a crusade, even though General Eisenhower tried to sell that bill of goods. It was a rotten, messy busi-

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ness and no one I knew thought of it as anything else. On the other hand, after Dachau and Bataan men were fools if they could not comprehend the necessity of calling a halt to such barbarism. Therefore, with the exception of Norman Mailer's handsome and immature The Na\ed and the Dead, the war novels have not been agonized protests. The old patterns were not repeated. Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions is a case in point. Shaw is concerned with the delineation and preservation of liberal values. Like other novelists of his generation, he is willing to announce his belief in the fundamental rights of the individual. In fact, Shaw might be taken as representative of our war novelists, for he is willing to risk the charge of sentimentality in order to restate certain truths which the writers of a preceding generation avoided with a certain shame. I find Shaw's attention to human values restated even in an apparently defeatist book like Algren's The Man With the Golden Arm. Here is a novel that a decade ago would have been steeped in filth and hopeless misery. It's the story of a gambler addicted to drugs, surrounded by one of the choicest collections of mugs and punks and worn-out women yet depicted in fiction. But an amazing sympathy is developed for the gambler and his friends. Like heroes in Greek tragedy they are remorselessly trapped in their follies and in the morass of the society in which they live, and the reader becomes personally concerned over what is going to happen to this apparently worthless rubble. Never once does Algren let you forget

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that these people are important to themselves. Even when Violet and Sparrow cuckold the stupid immigrant, they can still worry about what the old fellow will do in jail without his upper teeth. As Shaw represents the war novelist, so Algren represents the post-war writer. He is hard-boiled, tough-minded, well-informed. But he is not trapped into a mechanistic novel. He knows that today more than ever the individuality of any given human being is of immense importance. In this brief comment on meaning, five specific novels have been mentioned: Raintree County, Mister Roberts, The Gallery, The Young Lions, and The Man With the Golden Arm. None of these is a great novel. But the men who wrote them had touches of greatness about them. They were honest in their appraisal of life. They were not afraid to hope. In time of darkness they often turned up with a rousing belly laugh; and when the world seemed to be restricting its emotions, drawing in its love, they expanded theirs. Perhaps none of these men—two have already died in the moment of shattering success—will ever write a truly great novel, but I am completely convinced that there are at least twoscore other young men and women who are competent to try. The tragedy is that now, when the liberal tradition should be supporting these aspirants, it is everywhere in cowardly retreat. Ill Here is the core of the revolt we have been talking about. Here is the nub of what I wish to say. W e are

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demanding that our artists forge ahead to new visions while we ourselves scuttle back into an old darkness. It is both astonishing and perplexing to live in an age when the liberal tradition of Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson is being denied, or even expelled from certain universities. It is incredible that a nation grown strong on a doctrine of humanism should desert that doctrine when the going gets a little rough. We are witnessing a concerted attempt to drive America from the open highway of liberalism and into a retreat toward the caves of an all-powerful reaction. We are asked to abandon the honest Cartesian speculation that led to the Constitution of the United States and are encouraged to commit our intellectual life to some neo-medieval authoritarianism. It has even been suggested that democracy itself, built upon liberalism and speculation, must be surrendered to some ambitious Fuehrer or group of scientific superman. How terrible to witness such cowardice! Because an atomic bomb has been fashioned we must stop all experiment. Because it is admittedly difficult to control the use of atomic weapons, we must terminate the democratic system that seems best able to accomplish such control. And because free investigation leads to consequences we must therefore end free inquiry. It seems to me almost immoral for a civilization to prosper on a given set of assumptions and then to abandon them when the consequences of those assumptions be-

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come a little startling. Morality, it seems to me, consists of being prepared for those consequences and of having the energy to meet them when they fall due, capitalizing upon those that are helpful, confining those that are not. No one should expect the consequences of a liberal civilization to be uniformly pleasant. Men are not uniformly pleasant, and to misquote Hamlet, "no, nor women neither." It is folly therefore to suppose that their actions will be entirely pleasing, but surely one of the duties of the liberal state is to weed out destructive growth and kill it. We have in our liberal society both the foundations of courage to permit us to go ahead and the strength of will to eradicate evil where we meet it. Instead of denying liberal principles, we should be ready to affirm them. Now more than ever we must announce our loyalty to those religious, political, and humanitarian principles which seem best calculated to see a man or a nation through a a period of darkness. T o throw away the lantern at the brink of the abyss is such folly that I have no word to describe it. What is the job of the novelist at such a moment in history ? His job is to remind all men of those well-springs of humanism that have nourished our society in the past. T o accomplish this the writer must be very specific as to just what he does believe, and although I am in no way competent to speak for my generation, I am willing to offer certain of my own conclusions, confident that many

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writers today are even more loyal to these principles than I. ( 1 ) 1 believe that men reared in an atmosphere of freedom should continue to investigate all aspects of life. I imagine that we are only at the threshold of human knowledge, only at the beginning of human wisdom, and since I instinctively hate journeys that take one to the edge of the village where a postern gate slams in the face as the adventure is about to begin, I cannot ask scientists or religious leaders or novelists to stop right at the breathless moment of discovery. I know that certain safeguards, perhaps many, need to be established to prevent the kind of medical investigation that took place at Buchenwald, but I do think that the principles which can be used to check excess are clearly defined in the liberal doctrine I have been defending. ( 2 ) I believe in the supremacy of human beings over the power of the state or any other social agency that would dictate a way of life or command a return to darkness. ( 3 ) Having been reared on the great documents of humanism: the visions of Marcus Aurelius, the Declaration of Independence, the epics of Milton, the poetry of Virgil, the novels of Tolstoi, the deductions of John Locke and the conclusions of Immanuel Kant, I cannot at the first sign of trouble turn my back upon such preceptors and fly into the arms of any autocracy. ( 4 ) I believe that the atom bomb is much the same as

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streptomycin, another inevitable step in the human mind's analysis of the corporeal world. If the bomb is dangerous, control it. Human beings, with human capacities, can do so. (5) I am increasingly eager to go to religious philosophers for guidance. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, and George Fox can help unravel many current perplexities; but I am totally unwilling to hand the government of my country or my world over to any church, for churches have been notoriously inadequate administrators of temporal destinies, which was probably why Christ admonished them to leave such affairs to Caesar. The monasticism of T. S. Eliot and Thomas Merton frightens me. I doubt that the world will be saved only by those who withdraw from it; I suspect we must depend equally upon those who enter with full body into the market place, the scientific laboratory, and the political forum. It is the minds of such men that must be revitalized, and art is the perfect instrument for such revitalization. (6) I find myself more deeply committed than ever to the capacities for good in the average human being. I am totally convinced that the moral world of Shakespeare, Tolstoi, Thomas Mann, and Nathaniel Hawthorne will continue to triumph. (Remember that it triumphed spectacularly in 1945 after being nearly exhausted in 1941.) And I believe that men trained in liberal thought will continue to be the instruments of triumph. (7) I am completely aware that the kind of world I bespeak may have to be fought for. This does not alarm

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mc. Before my nation was safely established three wars needed to be fought. Why should we expect a world to be won more easily than a small portion of it ? The prospect simply does not alarm me. What have my preceptors— St. Augustine, Thomas Hobbes, Abraham Lincoln—been doing for the past centuries but fighting for a world ? Why should I expect to be exempted from similar service ? (8) Finally, I cannot possibly believe that the human mind has reached its breaking point. For example, I don't believe that democracy is doomed simply because the American voter in 1948 refused to do what newspapers, radios, opinion polls, and all right-thinking people assured him had already been done. Nor do I find evidence that the world has reached the end of its tether. I should think the available data point to quite the contrary conclusion: that the world is about to enter an era of accomplishment and happiness as yet uncharted because we have been afraid to do the charting. Now suppose that a novelist were actually to accept the preceding propositions. What kind of novel would he write ? Before he could answer this question he would have to clarify one point. Does a belief in the old roots of liberal tradition commit a writer to what is popularly called "the return to tradition" ? The fact that great ideals of humanism are ancient might seduce the novelist into believing that he must therefore write novels on ancient patterns. To do so would be a grave mistake. The return to tradition must not become a retreat to traditionalism. For ex-

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ample, a retreat to the tradition of Irving Babbitt and William Dean Howells simply isn't good enough for our times. I am not even sure that a retreat to the tradition of Van Wyck Brooks, as reported by his friend Oliver Allston, is substantial enough for modern needs. It is difficult to detect how the tradition of Brooks can provide a place for writers like Nelson Algren, Norman Mailer, or Ernest Hemingway, and unfortunately for tradition it is usually such writers who produce the best novels. Nor, on the other hand, is it safe to retreat to the traditions of the nineteen-twenties. Superb in their day, those traditions are poor patterns now. Most current novels in the Dos Passos or Hemingway style are arid reading. And as for a retreat to the sterile beauties of Henry James, that would be truly deplorable. But there is a return to tradition which any young artist can profitably follow. It is the restudy of the roots of greatness in the best of the world's literature. I applaud such a return. Let us discover what it was that made the Russians of the last century the supreme novelists they were. What enabled Dickens and Thackeray to pour their incredible vitality into involved and sometimes creaking plots? How did Stendhal acquire his mastery of subtle evocation? Nexo his immense compassion? Jane Austen her sweet simplicity ? Let us go back to school to all the great storytellers; then, forgetting patterns, let us see how we can infuse the native material of our civilization with the same kind of fire. I am for such a return to tradition,

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for I believe that only by such study can we set ourselves the goals c o m m e n s u r a t e with the demands facing us. And

because

a

certain

modern,

flippant

school

of

t h o u g h t derides the study of historical masterpieces as s o m e h o w beneath the dignity of an artist, let m e smash that idiotic phobia right now. In the last hundred years there has probably been no artist in any m e d i u m whose violent break with tradition has been so spectacular as V i n c e n t V a n G o g h ' s . H i s stars swirling with golden his tortured cypress trees, his

flaming

fields

fire,

of yellow

shocked the world that saw t h e m . His effect on the lay m i n d has been m o n u m e n t a l . A n d yet if we study this a m a z i n g D u t c h m a n we find that he laid the groundwork for his impassioned flight into n e w worlds by the painst a k i n g copywork that is n o w so m u c h berated. N o t only that, but he copied one of the most unlikely masters you could n a m e : colorless, sentimental, pedantic Jean François Millet. A n d then one day he copied Delacroix of the fiery palette. N o w the figures twisted themselves into the patterns that were to m a k e V a n G o g h immortal. T h e moral is that he copied to find himself. H e improved inevitably upon each thing he studied, and that should be the goal of everyone who studies D i c k e n s and T u r g e n e v : study so as to write better novels than either D i c k e n s or T u r g e n e v . W e l l , our dedicated novelist is n o w ready to go to w o r k . W h a t will be his attitude toward experiments in f o r m ? H e will r e m e m b e r h o w Ross L o c k r i d g e , J o h n

Home

Burns, and Alfred Hayes almost ruined their fine novels

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with theatrical superstructures of unnecessary form. He will recall that American poetry practically destroyed itself when it made form paramount. Yet at the same time he will remember that two recent American novelists have created works of great beauty by finding precisely the form required by their subject matter: Joseph Pennell in The History of Rome Hartas and John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath. Nine young novelists out of ten ruin their works with esoteric forms, and the tenth creates a new beauty. Like pepper, form should be experimented with only if the touch is quite precise. What will be the novelist's attitude toward style and words ? Surely he will be fascinated by the glowing patina of Thornton Wilder or the artistic success of Buechner's A Long Day's Dying, but careful study will show him that most works of this kind achieve a modest success that need be taken no more seriously than the inevitable torture scene that adds a comparable fillip to the historical novel. What is wanted is that perfect blending of vocabulary and story as, for example, in A. B. Guthrie's The Big Sl(y, for then words echo the sounds of life. If I am pessimistic about over-experimentation in form and style it is because I have seen how dusty and barren such preoccupation made our poetry. Furthermore, I do not think that the average novelist can hope to compete, in form and style, with the best of our mass-produced magazines like Life, Time, and The Reader's Digest. The best writing in America, if you are interested only in writing, is being done in these magazines and in the advertís-

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ing offices of New York. This staff-produced, impersonalized writing is alluring, forceful, and scintillating. Consider this random passage snipped from a recent issue of Time, and note the forceful use of words, the suspense, and the excellent metaphors: Just before Labor Day, a fat but unhappy farmer was admitted to Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. He had a deep-seated infection caused by a common microbe, Aerobacter acrogenes, which is usually a pushover for penicillin or streptomycin. But the farmer's germs were a special strain. They had licked their weight in penicillin, and come back to knock out streptomycin, chloramphenicol, and aureomycin. Unchecked, they were a sure bet to kill the farmer. Dr. Garfield G. Duncan pitted the tough germs in a test tube against neomycin. The drug murdered them. Then Dr. Duncan tried Waksman's supposedly dangerous drug on the patient. Within a few hours the infection was licked, and a few days later the fat farmer walked out, pain-free for the first cime in years.

Few novelists can write as well as that, but what the novelist can do is to create real characters facing up to real problems with honesty and truth. That field has not, and I think never will be, pre-empted by the magazines, or the movies, or the advertising magicians, for that is the job of the single mind working alone with its conscience. You cannot command a team of men to create Death Comes for the Archbishop. That has got to be done in the secrecy of one mind's impeccable judgment. There is the problem and there, I think, the answer. Amid all the confusion that Sartre has spilled, he has said

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one brilliantly dear thing. He says we must have writers who have committed themselves. To what ? Not to exercises in form and style. Not to historical pageants. Not to shockers or sociological tracts. But to the exalted themes and great meanings of modern life. In that way the American novelist, leaving behind his joyous adolescence and the line smashing of symbols, can grow into the mature responsibilities that now await him.

The Old Theatre and the New Challenge Marc

Connelly

HAT I have to say this evening is offered with apologies and qualifications. I must confess that the pressure on me during the few days in which I might have had an opportunity to respond worthily to such a flattering invitation as to come here, tonight, I found so crowded with trifling demands that I have not been able to prepare an organized address relevant completely to the theme of the Franklin Lectures of this year. However, if you can bear with me as I improvise and wander through some hen-scratched notes on these pages that I have jotted down in the last few days, perhaps I can achieve a communication of an opinion of one aspect of our current theatre, and relate it to the general concept of revolt in the arts. Before we begin looking for evidence of revolt in contemporary drama it might be helpful to examine the structure of the institution within which a revolt would arise. I think an unprejudiced inspection would show us that the theatre is a complex entirety, of which dramatic literature is part of the whole. This fact seems to have eluded the understanding of many of the theatre's more intellectual. Unless this complex structure is seen with reasonable 141

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clarity, and certain aspects of its nature understood, it will continue to be a baffling medium to the critically minded, concerned exclusively with literary merits, and hence drawing fractional conclusions. To bring the same consideration to the judgment of the play written for the theatre that one would bring to the novel or a poem would be like employing only one's knowledge of painting in an estimate of Debussy's "Le Mer." Literary standards, of course, require the establishment of total values, but by a fuller awareness of the theatre's structure and nature perhaps we can recognize changes in its relationship to the moral and cultural conditions of society. If the theatre existed solely as a temple to Shakespeare the Poet, the insistence on judging it by literary standards might be justified; but Shakespeare the Poet, consciously regardful of the institutional requirements of the theatre, collaborated with Shakespeare the Dramatist, who at his best continues to collaborate with actors and minor technicians, and with the completing factor in the realization of the theatre, the artist. A play script in its functional sense is really a "schema"; by it its interpreters erect an edifice in which the audience can find an emotional and spiritual dwelling-place. The poet-playwright must know his own dual functions, in that scheme of the drama. A poem as a poem, and a play, may have the common purpose of enriching man's spirit with. inquiry and statement, but the poem has achieved its ultimate expression when it leaves its com-

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poser's hand. We must remember that the play script, while communicating implicit melody to sensitive ears, is relatively and substantially only an orchestral score, written in a kind of musical shorthand, and requiring instrumentation, if its music is to be generally heard. The relationship of play, actor, and audience requires a consideration of the audience as something more than a sounding board for the activities of the stage. Now, let us examine this "party of the third part." The common definition of an audience is that of a group of spectators and, of course, hearers, but in the chemistry of the drama the audience is a thing capitalized; spiritually, it is a thing created. And let us glance at the genetics of the audience. A playgoer—you and I or anyone else with a hunger and feeling of need for the theatre—may go to other forms of popular entertainment for diversion, but consciously or unconsciously the drama lover comes to the experience of an ennobling play as an active thing. A play is part of man's spiritual heliotropism. He seeks in the drama a reward more valuable than mere amusement. He gropes for that God-personality which the Dionysian mind found in the ancients. He hungers for Aristotle's catharsis of compassion. Now, according to the degree with which the faith of the assembled theatre-goers is confirmed by the performance of the play, there is either reborn in an audience an organic responsibility to the rest of the organism of the stage, or they remain isolated from the community—only

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a group of spectators in the theatre's auditorium, sitting more or less objectively as you are at the moment, listening to an individual pursuing a line of thought. An audience must be born. Now, just how is that audience born ? You and I and everyone else who wants what the theatre can give are, let us say, not seeking a fire escape from life. We are not looking for a headache cure or an appeasement of grief in the theatre. W e are not looking for an anodyne; we are looking for a dividend for our investment of time and attention. We arrive in the theatre, each with his individual relationships to society. Now, whether we know it or not, we have also come to work. W e have come to work and receive that reward unique in human experience. Now that we are in the theatre we turn over our tickets and someone directs us to an aisle; we find ourselves seats or are shown our seats. Programs are put into our hands; we sit down— in the case of a New York theatre, in a receptacle something like a straitjacket and a book press. W e are physically aware of discomfort, usually. W e find a friend to whom we wave. We open the program and run through the various directives to interest printed there. We see our favorite actor, and if we are familiar with and concerned with such details we may look up the name of the individual who directs the play, or who furnished the costumes, or designed the scenery. Perhaps we just sit there and wonder whether we dropped a glove, or whether the elbow in the side or the hat in front is going to become an increasing burden. In other words, we are you and I at the theatre.

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Well, the lights in the auditorium go down, and after a mystic pause—mystic according to our individual reactions to the theatre—the curtain rises, and detachedly we try to dodge the elbow or get to a clearer view past the hat, to look at the representations, in case we are encountering a photographic stage production—a representation of a library or a bedroom or a laboratory—whatever it might be. We look at it quite objectively and remark its fidelity, the fidelity of the mechanical rabbit—and we look at the actor, and if we are concerned with such things we may say he looks a little older than when we saw him last; or, if it is a woman, we may be concerned with such a thing as the source of the gown. In other words, we are concerned with what we are seeing, and only with what we are seeing. In a moment a voice will most likely be heard from the stage, and, according to whatever is communicated by the voice we are going to abandon our more detached observations and be concerned with what is being said. And then, if the play has been effectively brought to us, a rather wonderful thing is to happen. W e are going to encounter that moment in the play for which the Greeks had the word "prothesis"—the beginning. The Greeks didn't use that word merely to indicate a structural point in the play. They meant it to indicate that moment at which the burden on the audience occurred; that moment when the elbow and the hat and the concern for the gown or the appreciation of time and the actor's face have all disappeared and we find ourselves with a common interest in what is happening here on the stage. It is truly an enchant-

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ing moment, and it is the moment that we have anxiously been waiting for ever since we started for that uncomfortable seat. We are beginning to be part of the theatre. From the play—as nourishment is furnished the embryo in the womb—an emotional bloodstream is being fed to our cumulative sense of reality, and in a miraculously short time we are born into a condition that stirs us—stirs atavistic pressures that very few of us ever consciously consider. We are approaching the God-state. We are approaching a curious kind of omniscience. We suddenly have a sharpness of perception; as an audience our perception contains much more than the sum of the perceptions of all the individuals who were such a brief time ago corporate organisms. Now we are an organ related to an organism. Now how can we justify such a statement ? Well, suppose that on the way to the theatre, you, Miss Smith, and I, Mr. Jones, approaching from east and west encounter two people quarreling—a man and a woman are having a good old noisy argument, so self-centered in their common dislike that they are unaware of any other being alive. And they are so noisy and so obstreperous that we are forced to stop at least a moment or two to observe them. Well, you, Miss Smith, may see in your hasty observation of the woman's action a curious similarity to the conduct of someone you know in perhaps a less vigorous quarrel. I may see in the activity of the man or, perhaps, watching the woman, I may see a resemblance to some personal characteristic that prompts a memory, and as the time is get-

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ting late, and the quarrel subsides, perhaps both of us move on to the theatre according to our temperament and our general morale—amused, exhilarated, gay, disturbed, or affected sadly—over that experience. We walk into the theatre. Now, a half hour later, on the stage a quarrel arises between a man and a woman, the occasion of which, the detail of which, are nowhere as specific perhaps as the details of the quarrel we watched on the street, and yet you and I and all the other integrated elements in that organ, the audience, have an utterly identical reaction. W e know the woman's validities or lack of them; we know the man's validities or lack of them—and we seem to have an encyclopedic knowledge of that quarrel that neither of the participants have. We "know" it. And we also have another curious advantage over the poor individuals who came to the theatre with such restricted knowledge of what they encountered. We watch that quarrel and, if we are truly being moved by drama and not by cheap claptrap—and I qualify the word "claptrap" with the word "cheap" advisedly, for the reason that claptrap is not an entirely ignoble implement in the theatre, in spite of (if I can continue parenthetically) that airy snobbery with which the pun is regarded as the lowest form of speech by thoughtless people who have forgotten, or perhaps have never seen, the pun used with dignity and with grandeur in communicating imagery. Unless, then, it is cheap claptrap, we sit there and share the ultimate benefit that an audience can have—that benefit which, when we later properly resume our roles as members of

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society, will produce a constructive value in the social pattern. We sit there, objectively, oddly enough, paradoxically enough, objectively concerned with virtue and truth itself, in our subjective roles—as a group machine, as a group organ. We are interested in truth, and we are not punitive —we are a very good type of "God-at-work." We are not a Jove—a Jove so inadequate that he must throw thunderbolts. W e aré at that moment when the power of the theatre has permeated us, has enriched us, has equipped us with better, with healthier, approaches to the life of the individual again. W e are like Thornton Wilder's actress in The Bridge of San Luis Rey—you may recall the scene in her dressing room where she is quarreling with her manager, the renegade monk, concerning the achievement, or lack of it, in the performance we have just quitted. Mr. Wilder stops his consideration of the quarrel to say that she and the monk are aware of incredible standards of excellence, that they are reaching eagerly, as we are, for those dimly remembered beauties that might be seized again. At that moment the triangular structure of the theatre is clear to the senses and the emotions, and the intellect is coming to the support of the emotion in a hypnotic state— but we are somehow or other possessed of the sense, if not the articulation, that the play or the drama, to have any validity is as Dunsany described it, like a dewdrop—a very small thing in the scheme and range of nature, but reflecting the whole sky. Now what has happened to the theatre recently that

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warrants an examination or stretching of its scenes or a tilting of its balance ? What has occurred in the theatre ? T o find movements in the theatre that have any import, we must be very careful to discount the effect of the "fashionable." Most of us who live in large cities are conditioned partly; our diet is largely that of the commercial theatre, and, in the commercial theatre very frequently we encounter great beauty. We encounter very, very, very rich rewards. On the other hand, we need not be cynics to recognize that expediency and the "main chance" play very important parts in the operation and institutionalism of that theatre. I invite you to think of the theatre as a thing of wider inclusions than the commercial Broadway theatre. If you will think of the theatre as a way of life, as part of man's greatest accomplishment, as probably the most effective cultural agency he has ever contrived, you are going to think of the theatre as something apart from the consideration it is given by the exclusively literary mind. The poet is the person who, in my not too carefully studied survey of the scene, seems to be the most potential and influential protestant against any barnacle-gathering influences that may be hurting the theatre right now. If the theatre is standing still, this is not due to the public, who certainly is knocking at its door and is ready to push it down unless he is allowed to come in. N o w the poet's relation to the theatre is a thing we should look at, I think, and see his juxtaposition against the theatre today. T h e poet as a poet has not been a very

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happy man in the theatre. Let us just glance at his activity —and perhaps I should not so isolate the poet. Goodness knows, the novelist as a novelist has been frequently as handicapped as the poet in finding himself at home in the theatre. We have the picture of Mr. Dickens—and Victor Hugo, for that matter, who, although he had momentary acclaim, left nothing of enduring value to the theatre, unless in an historical sense. The poet has a long list of unhappiness. The poet, first of all, seemingly, by his genes, maintains an alien relationship to the theatre. We have as fine an ear as Swinburne's, completely tone-deaf in the theatre. Swinburne said he didn't know where to look except in Aeschylus, Dante, and Shakespeare for the sheer force, the tragic and noble horror, that he found in the subtlest, deepest, and sublimest passages of John Webster. He was referring to The Duchess of Malfi. If you have ever seen it you will recall that, as victim after victim falls on the stage, someone else has to be removed. It is probably one of the biggest butcher bills in history. Now Mr. Swinburne was fooled. In the nineteenth century we find Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Scott, Browning, Tennyson, Mr. Swinburne himself, Robert Bridges—all writing plays without the slightest vitality—most of them Elizabethan in form. Tennyson's Queen Mary does have signs of life, but hardly justifying the theatre's nursing. And we find as perceptive, delicately adjusted, and critical intelligences as Charles Lamb being baffled by the content of the play. He too was one of the admirers of The Duchess.

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And you will find a great many men in history, when poetry was having a vigorous rebirth—you will find those men concerned and influenced in a kind of sand-blindedness by the acting, not by the play, not by the dramatic content of the play, not by the abiding relationship of the play—the interpreting and the audience. Never do we seem to find among those men the perspective of observation which is essential to any drama. Yet the poet, who by perspective has often added to the theatre's treasures, added most measurably to it. W e find the revolt of the Irish, or rather the creation of the Irish theatre, as against a vacuum. W e find Yeats and Lady Gregory, sitting down one night with two or three others, saying in one of the blandest statements ever made, followed by one of the most incredible results, "Let's found a National Theatre"—and by George, they did. Overnight we had theatres created; and the enthusiasm, and the fully equipped writing talents of some of the finest playwrights of modern times prepared a path for the greatest of all their talents. It really happened, and it was the poets who did that! In America in the nineties we had evidences, vestigial, fleeting, of the demand of the theatre for the poet. But he has had a class-removal from the theatre. Something has usually got between him and the theatre, and today we find, as a generality, the poet-mind working in prose very frequently; but nevertheless it is poetic in its dramatic concepts and in its form of presentation. W e find the poet

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working progressively through many of Mr. Anderson's more important works. The poet is there. If the poet really collaborates with the dramatist, the theatre is his home. The most auspicious arrival of the poet in the theatre is that of Mr. Eliot, and because of Mr. Eliot's power and influence in the cultural stream, I want to talk a bit about him, because whether he has elected the position or not, he is unquestionably the champion of new moral considerations, new spiritual sieges, against man's fortress or ignorant traditions. He has tried to blaze trails and has done wonders. There is no denying Mr. Eliot's impact on our cultural life, but Mr. Eliot is at the moment, I think, continuing the tradition of ineptitude of the poet in the theatre. Now Mr. Eliot wrote two plays that are quite widely known, Family Reunion and Murder in the Cathedral. Murder in the Cathedral is an achievement—it is a memorable effort on the part of the poet to use the medium of the theatre, and he used it very honorably, I think, manifesting the moral concern of the craftsman for his obligations and commitments. The play is written in verse, as you know, in many experimental forms. Oh, the amount of effort lost in rhymes! Even today we have a Clemence Dane writing ambitiously and imaginatively and with a nice concept, for the larger part, of the dramatic obligations. You remember also the beautiful play by Judith Anderson which perished almost immediately here and in other places because she insisted on an arbitrary rhyme-scheme all

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through the play. One sat never in the state of an audience; one was never a participant; one was always the spectator. One always watched; one never shared, for the reason that like the poor man under the Chinese water torture, drop by drop came those rhymes with metronomic exactness, and it became at last an agonizing experience. Now Mr. Eliot, you know, in Family Reunion employed the measured prose line rather than arbitrary poetic meter. He gave us a sharp, clean, clear, microscopic organization on the stage. We were able to appreciate the substance which he gave to it, and we were able to catch the glow and to share the richness which he contained in the substance. Mr. Eliot has not done that in The Cocktail Party. The Cocktail Party, according to John Mason Brown, demonstrates that somehow or other the theatre is eluding Mr. Eliot. Mr. E. Martin Brown staged the play originally for the Edinboro Festival, and later for the New York performance. In the introduction to the play, Mr. Eliot thanks Mr. Brown, who is a close friend, for advice in vocabulary, idiom, and machinery, I think, which were supplied by either or both of these gentlemen in the various versions of The Cocktail Party. Well, the unhappy report that must be made is that Mr. Eliot seemingly is so concerned with his function as a poet that he has forgotten the institution and the structure called the theatre. It is as if we come to see a play by Mr. Eliot with a certain humble hope that we are going to be given a restatement of values that make life worth living. We look to Mr. Eliot for ennobling com-

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munications, and as we sit in that state of audience acceptance it is as if a prankish boy put a banana peel in our path so that as we move closer to the core of the play, to the meaning, we slip and possibly fall over the brink of despair. That is not a poet's duty, that is not a poet following his duty; that is not a poet-dramatist showing a concern and a responsibility in the theatre. The bill of particulars could be drawn up quite long, on all the defects Mr. Eliot has permitted in The Cocktail Party. To choose at random, there is Julia, who at the beginning of the play is presented to us as a tired butterfly on its last flight, rather stupidly concerned about the identity of a mysterious guest at the party. The device of laughter is provided by the actress playing the part. Incidentally, it is one of the most mesmeric casts you have ever seen, and three-quarters of the clamor the play has received was due entirely to the hypnotic contributions of these great interpretive artists. Julia has a private joke with us, a joke offered by Mr. Eliot, that has no relevance to the play, at least none that my eyes have been able to distinguish. She doesn't know who this man is. Now we are invited to be concerned in the momentum of the play with that emotional stimulus. We are invited to consider, in perhaps metaphysical fashion, that Julia does not know this man; we are offered it as consideration for anything we care to give to increase our enjoyment of its presence; yet, as the play advances to the office of the psychiatrist, with the shock of irrelevance, but nothing else

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—ccrtainly not a dramatic shock—in walks Julia, casually presenting to us, as an intimate friend, this man who, Mr. Eliot had spent so much time demonstrating, was a stranger to her. Well, as I say, that is one of many irrelevancies. Now Mr. Eliot is too important to be doing shabby work like that. An examination of the lines of the play may bring you a measure of exaltation and enjoyment but, I promise you, all it has done has been to frighten those of us who look to Mr. Eliot the poet, as we properly should, to come and help the theatre. But if Eliot's influence on the young poets is going to engender further disregard for the structure of the theatre, what shall we have in a poetic theatre except the collapsc of a building and the burying of perhaps inspiring sculpture in the pile of rubble P Now that is an annoying and a depressing aspect of the theatre. I hope it is merely that of Mr. Eliot's nodding, and that he will be wide awake when he brings his next offer. There are other poetic influences in the theatre which are as heartening as the evidence of The CockjaU Party is depressing. I am thinking of that happy, sunny, dramatic personality—Christopher Fry. If you love the theatre, do you rush out and get a copy of The Lady's Not for Burning? Here is a young poetic story—some have found in his work the promise of a Marlowe, at least the Faustus Marlowe. Certainly the "mighty line" is present. There constantly buds and bursts with frightening brilliance some lovely passage. Take one small blossom. If you don't

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know the play, it deals with a young woman who, in a fourteenth-century English town, is trying to escape the witch-hunters, and realizes that she actually is a strange creature. She is obsessed and possessed by facts, and facts are not a common currency in that world. The daughter of an alchemist who himself died while trying to encounter some truths, she is describing, in the following glowing speech, the behavior ascribed to her by the superstitious people of the street: I wave a sprig of thyme and T i m e returns a little the worse for burial—reenacting the palatial past. F o r instance Helen comes, brushing the maggots from her eyes and clearing her throat from several thousand years. She says, " I loved, but cannot any longer remember n a m e s " ; or Alexander, wearing his imperial cobwebs and breast-plate of shining worms, awakens and looks for the glasses to find the E m p i r e which he knows he put beside his bed.

That is not one of the emotional passages of the play; it is one of the flowers to be found on the roadside of that landscape painted by Mr. Fry. He is going to be important for the reason that he approaches the theatre with an awareness of his functions as a dramatist as well as a poet. And so we must look, I think, to the poets to save the theatre. T h e theatre will not perish; the theatre is too grand in all of us. For three thousand years it has survived literary flood and famine. It goes along, reserving always a part in the public's dreams, hopes, consciousness, and soul. It will continue to serve us. If the Revolution comes, it will be one that I think we can welcome.