11. To Youngsters of Easy Means

To Youngsters of Easy Means

I

WHEN I was a boy the American millionaire and his impulsive prodigality were already good stage-properties; his generosity towards everything he believed in was as great, as easily touched, and often as spectacular as it is now. Nor was he behindhand in patronizing the fine arts, at least for the embellishment of his own surroundings. He built elaborate houses, some of which it is safe to say were in certain respects truly remarkable, and he ornamented them with pictures bought at inflated prices which he paid without wincing—and concerning a good many of these, too, it is becoming to speak with like indefiniteness and reserve. These ventures often, perhaps, reflected the easy indulgence of feminine fancies and foibles, which early became proverbial of him, but in many cases—I believe in most—they came out of the more admirable sentiment that while pretty much anything would do first rate for him, nothing could be too good for the folks; and the thicker the folks chose to lay it on, the grimmer his satisfaction in seeing them do it. This satisfaction was sometimes about all the poor man got; he was often oppressed by his surroundings, and found it hard to expand his simpler tastes to nice: their demands. Mr. Howells sketched his type well in The Rise of Silas Lapham, and in an earlier day Mr. Curtis also sketched it well in The Potiphar Papers.

The primeval millionaire’s interest in the arts, however, reached no further than this. He would do anything in reason or out of reason by way of providing gimcrackery to satisfy the notions of his wife and daughters, but he did not regard art in itself as something incumbent on him to reverence and to promote. L’art pour Part was distinctly out of his line. Perhaps the arts were all very well for women, who were strange creatures anyway, and hardly to be understood. In his practical view of women (he being a Victorian of deepest dye) some were superhuman, others subhuman, but none human. Yet even for women, devotion to the arts could be overdone, and the effect sometimes was to make things uncomfortable. Like Silas Lapham, he remembered his earlier surroundings, the rag carpets that his mother made, the bric-a-brac and chromos, the stout rush-bottomed chairs, and so on, and he thought a little rebelliously of how much easier they all were to get along with. For one thing, then, and perhaps primarily, the promotion of the arts meant pushing all the real comforts of personal environment into yet more hopeless inaccessibility, and he instinctively resented the idea. One can criticise this sentiment in the abstract, probably, but all things considered, it is not easy to disparage those who had it. In them, on the contrary, considering all their circumstances, it seemed pretty sound and natural, and its conservatism savored of a wholesome simplicity. After all, the arts were exotic to America, and these men behaved extremely well towards a rather busy and importunate obtrusion of them upon their intimate life. If unselfishness be the first instinct of a gentleman, probably the unpretentious figures of Mr. Potiphar and Silas Lapham will stand pretty well up in the category with Roland’s and Sir Philip Sidney’s.

Our typical rich man regarded the arts, moreover, as essentially European, and a devotion to them as not only negatively un-American, but as a positive and culpable hankering after the insignia of an alien civilization. This was not the worst; he regarded this civilization as effete, decadent, effeminate. Even this was not the worst. Aside from the nationalist view, artistic pursuits and interests related themselves directly in his mind with a distinct possibility of personal peril and humiliation. Too deep a feeling for the arts might easily open the way for the fetid fascinations of European social life to assert themselves upon his wife and children. His boys might suffer undermining of their sturdy American morale. Most undesirable of all, his girls might find a bond of sentimental communion with some utterly impracticable and objectionable foreign man of title, eager to feather his nest. The Marquis de Vautrien, the Duca del Scioccone, and the Viscount Dedbroke stood continually before his mind’s eye as sinister figures, suave, ingratiating, impecunious, immoral, deceitful, and desperately wicked. When he thought of the arts, he thought of them; and when he thought of them, he ground his teeth, and expressed his emotions of the moment in a flow of spirited profanity.

II

Perhaps it was the Marquis, the Duca, the Viscount, and the deportmental exactions of the new house that carried the rich man of my boyhood a little beyond his predecessors in an impatient wariness of the arts. The prosperous American of earlier days, especially in New England, had a little different attitude towards art, at least when art assailed him in the guise of a domestic issue. Once in a generation or so, one of the God-fearing, whale-catching, rum-distilling, close-fisted Puritan families of the New England coast would produce a black sheep who did not want to go to sea, and cared nothing for rum and whales, but instead had a passion for beauty and harmony. He wanted to paint pictures or sing, learn the violin, study architecture, or write books. It was a fearful blow to the family’s pride. The neighbors, hearing of this appalling calamity, would look at one another with blank faces, and say, “Isn’t it awful?” But the stricken family would swallow the disgrace, and if they found their erring son actually obdurate and beyond entreaty, they would grimly and prayerfully stake him. They would send him to Europe to study, devoutly hoping he might soon get it all out of his system, come home, and go before the mast in the honorable tradition of his ancestors. Thus it happened that in those days America showed some well-developed ability and talent; not much, perhaps, but more than one would expect, I think, considering the circumstances of the country.

But in my childhood, there was nothing like this in the life of the fine old buccaneering type of millionaire who went mostly in his shirt sleeves in the summertime, and worked fourteen hours every day until Satan foreclosed on his flagitious enterprise of cabbaging everything that was not spiked down. He distinctly did not regard subsidizing a promising youth, whether his own or somebody else’s, to learn to paint pictures or play the fiddle, as a good investment. Propose it to him, and before you got the words out of your mouth he would be jumping three feet high. I speak with authority, for I knew several very rich men of this type. My father was a clergyman who had a parish for twelve years in a virgin lumber-country, and his congregation comprised a dozen such, maybe more. I studied their ways with immense amusement and considerable admiration. They were the only very rich men I ever knew, and I rather regret the disappearance of their type. Perhaps our modern man of wealth has as vivid, distinct, and forceful a personality as theirs, but I doubt it. Looking over the contemporary rich man at long range, I question whether Satan would think him much of an acquisition, or be in any particular hurry to gather him in. There was no discount on those earlier brethren, however. They were lurid personages, who could be counted on to make their surroundings extremely lively wherever they found themselves, and each one who dropped off was just so much clear gain to the social life of the lower regions.

So, if it were a question of setting up an art-gallery, endowing a conservatory of music, boosting the theatre or opera, doing a good turn for literature, or staking individual talent on its way to an exiguous self-support, the millionaire of my early days would count himself out with emphasis. But curiously, at this same period a great deal was being done with the arts in an amateur way. In the town that I have been speaking of, for instance, where my father’s parish was, there was a most extraordinary development of amateur music. In particular, I have never since then seen the coincidence of so many really fine male voices in a town of its size, and all with fine amateur cultivation. There were many good woman singers too, and one woman, I remember rather vividly, the wife of a local shoe-dealer, got marvellous and beautiful effects out of whistling. We were a Lake town, sixty miles from a railway, and when an old-fashioned Michigan winter closed down on us, we were completely isolated, and thrown on our own resources for entertainment, for a good long six months. All these people worked hard at music then, individually and in a sort of loosely organized choral society, and they did some excellent things with it.

The country was at this time, moreover, just on the fag-end of the period when young men at large were rather gingerly encouraged to have an “accomplishment,” and well-to-do young women had one or more as matter-of-course. There was a good deal about this that was afflictive, and a later generation recalls it with merited raillery. Mark Twain speaks of the beribboned guitar standing in a corner of the Southern parlor—a guitar capable, he says, of playing the Spanish Fandango by itself, if you gave it a start. As I remember, however, most of the acute distress caused me by the amateur musicians of that day was due to the repertoires. Young ladies who played the piano were likely to spread themselves on a considerable line of “descriptive music,” like “The Battle of Prague,” or to exude sentiment over the ilk of Leybach’s Fifth Nocturne. The vocalist’s range of choice was even more poverty-stricken, being ninety-eight per cent bilge-water English ballads, and the remaining two per cent Scotch and Irish, with an occasional variant of early American, such as “Home, Sweet Home,” and “The Swanee River.” I have heard many glorious voices and many very decent musical instincts wasted evening after evening on things like “In the Gloaming,” “The Blue Alsatian Mountains,” “O Fair Dove, O Fond Dove,” and “Alice, Where Art Thou?”

As much can be said of the common run of china-painting, work in crayon, charcoal, oil and water-color, leather-burning, hammering metals, and so on, that prevailed in that period. I am quite of my younger contemporaries’ mind in deriding the puniness of artistic aspiration represented by all this. I know more about it than they do, indeed, for I have suffered under it, and they have not. Poetry, too—amateur poetry—I have fit, bled, and died over reams of lushy poetry. So I am not dwelling regretfully upon the disappearance of that epoch, nor do I seriously wish it back again. Far from it. I am merely remarking the fact that in a day when it was impossible to get money to promote the practice of the arts in a competent way, and to make sound taste prevail, a great many people were actually practising them as best they could in a misdirected and hamstrung way, and employing sometimes a very fine talent to make bad taste prevail.

III

At the present time, I seem to see an interesting reversal of this state of things. My observations may be superficial and inaccurate, for I have been for years entirely out of any kind of social life in America, and all manner of things that I know nothing about may be going on there. Quite obviously, however, the arts are lavishly patronized—patronized, I mean, in the sense of direct subsidy. Every few days, it seems, one hears of some great gift or endowment to promote them. Sir Thomas Beecham was lately quoted as saying that one American friend of his spent as much money annually to keep up an orchestra in his town as all England put together raised for like purposes. I do not doubt it. When one reads publications devoted to the various arts, as curiosity has led me to do for some time as regularly as I could get my hands on them, one is impressed by the enormous amount of money laid out in these ways.

I should say, too, that there would be relatively little difficulty in finding subsidies to almost any extent for promising individuals, although it is true, I think, that our rich men do not as yet go in as much for this form of patronage, which is the oldest, and still seems to get the best results, as they do for the institutional form. For my part, I wish they would do more with it. I know that if I were a rich man I would do precious little with endowing institutions, and content myself with nosing out individuals of the right sort, and endowing them. But aside from method, in so far as national progress in the arts can be measured by the gross of money given to promote it, America is stepping faster than any country on earth has ever stepped.

At the same time, I notice that relatively much less amateur work is being done in any of the arts except one—literature—than was done under the old regime when I was a boy. The arts have come to be a matter concerning two classes only: a professional class and a non-participating public. Most of the immense amount of writing that is being done has a professional or semi-professional turn, being done in some kind of forlorn hope of some day making money by it. The amateur “accomplishment” in the arts has largely disappeared, except in dancing. Nearly all young Americans dance, and most of them extremely well. The youngster of my day, especially the young woman, had, as a rule, a preposterously imperfect idea of what an accomplishment was, and what it was for; but their successors, instead of retaining and valuing the accomplishment, straightening out its theory and improving its practice, have tended rather, I think, to drop it altogether.

Thus it is that while people today know far more about really good music, good pictures, good sculpture, than the people of my time, and are possibly more interested in them, their knowledge and interest are pretty strictly of a non-participating kind. They themselves do not sing, play, daub or gouge. They patronize staunchly, look and listen attentively, applaud enthusiastically. All credit to them for this. But a non-participating interest can never quite attain to the quality of a participating interest, and is almost always something quite different and much less satisfying. No amount of time spent in sitting on the grand-stand will get one into the innards of a ball game, and give one the gratifying feel of the skill involved in certain plays, like a little practical apprenticeship out on the sand-lots in Mr. Briggs’s “days of real sport.” I played ball for eleven years myself, and speak whereof I know. Similarly, no one gets the instinctive appraisal, the true and exhilarating feel of fine points in tone-production and in breath-control, in line and color, like him who has ever so little, perhaps, but with love and intelligence, done his bit at warbling and smearing. No listener can appreciate the “inside play” in a suite of Bach, like one who had tried to drum it out himself. Therefore it follows, I think, that the general climate of opinion and feeling which prevails in a participating public is higher in quality, and much more conducive to the true and effective promotion of art, than that which prevails in a non-participating public. It stands to reason that the real status of musical art in a community is to be estimated by the number of people who practise it, and not by the box-office returns from concerts and the opera; just as the status of cleanliness is not to be estimated by the amount of plumbing sold, but by the number of people who wash.

IV

But whether so or not, there can be no doubt that participation is more fun, and this is the only point that I mean to dwell on. I have no thought of making a plea for the future of the arts in America. What really started me out on these reflections was the news lately conveyed to me in a private letter, that in one of our Western cities several business men, well along in years and of large wealth, have secretly, clandestinely, surreptitiously, and insidiously banded themselves together to study drawing and painting in a practical way, by doggedly plugging away with brush and pencil, under a teacher. Here, I thought at once, is the real thing! Here is America in earnest! It is commendable to have learned how to give money prodigally for the support of the arts, but the genuine fun begins when the same people who give the money make up their minds to jump in themselves, tackle the actual practice of some art, and make what they can of it in a strictly amateur way, and “on the side.”

Incidentally, it is good for art; it is the one thing needful, really, because, as I said, it helps most to engender a congenial atmosphere, and it also puts into effect the best insurance against waste of money. This handful of Western business men are really in the best way to protect their investments. When some one tells them cock-and-bull stories about the colossal innovations of Schmierpinsel in Vienna, and the revolutionary ideas of Barbenfeu in Paris, and how these have completely effaced all traditions, and sent Rembrandt and Frans Hals back to the woodpile, they will be in a position to look the matter over intelligently for themselves—an advantage which some of our contemporary private collectors appear to have missed most lamentably. But apart from this, they are laying up a resource of incalculable delight for themselves, and that is the great thing.

In the new social order, the leisured class—those, that is, who can command leisure if they wish it—stand towards art in somewhat the relation of the old aristocracy; and in Europe one sees the extraordinary leavening power of the talents which were cultivated by such of the aristocracy as had them. As talents, they may have been unpretentious, rather pleasant than robust, but they tended powerfully towards the diffusion of an agreeable and amiable life; and because they did this, one cannot help thinking that they made life amiable primarily for those who exercised them. The poetry of the Grand Duke Constantine connotes a more agreeable life than that which (without pretending to know) one instinctively associates with the thought of the late Judge Gary, for example. Seeing in Brussels the beautiful paintings and sculpture done by the Count de Lalaing—not great, I think, but very lovely—one thinks of him as a happy man, and one would like to have known him. Noblesse oblige—men like these seem really to have made something of their position and opportunities all around, and there is no happiness to match what one gets out of doing that.

There is much room in America for the exercise of a merely pleasant talent, if it be exercised in true taste and for no motive but the love of it, for money and leisure are so abundant—one has to be in Europe to realize how relatively abundant they are, and to understand how much happiness a little intelligent self-direction could produce from them. I know a solicitor in London, as pure a type as the one that Gilbert and Sullivan put on the stage in “Patience,” who plays Bach for an hour every evening when he comes home from his office. In talking about Flemish folk-ways lately with a Belgian engineer, a man busy with his profession from dawn to dark, mention was made of a couple of interesting old Flemish songs. He sat down at the piano, rattled off a rather intricate accompaniment, and sang them for me most agreeably, and with the unmistakable taste of the cultivated amateur. The Royal Opera would never put him on for his singing, or the Conservatory for his playing, and he would not have the least wish to go on for either. He simply had the view of the arts, so general in Europe, so uncommon in America, as something for anyone to take a hand in, naturally and easily, because one loves them, because they are familiar and domestic assets for making life agreeable and amiable for oneself—with no thought of using them on the chance of money or fame, or for anyone’s pleasure but one’s own, and least of all with any repulsive delirium of vanity about “self-expression.”

v

Americans are inclined to be a little impatient of a critic who does not offer what they call “practical proposals”; one, that is, who does not pretend to do all their thinking for them, furnish all their initiative, and diagram all their actions, thus imposing on them no harder task than the rather mechanical one of putting one foot before the other. For certain reasons hardly worth recounting here, I have always been a little diffident about making practical proposals. Still, if it helps to show that one is in earnest, one might perhaps venture a little way with them. To the men who now give money so liberally to promote the arts, the men who might be thought, perhaps, to be looking at the arts a little wistfully—men like the late Mr. Munsey, for example—I would say, If you wish really to promote the arts, keep on with the money, but also sell one of your motorcars, buy a second-hand piano or some paint or crayons or modelling-clay, and get somebody to show you what to do with it. You will have a great deal of fun, more fun than ever you had in your life, and you may incidentally turn up some aptitude inside yourself that you never suspected of lurking there.

But there is another class of candidates for my magisterial attentions, and with them I shall be even more specific. These are the young men and women who are not doing much at the moment but amuse themselves, who feel some faint stirrings of a desire to do something a little more important, who think they may possibly have some small ability in some department of art, and who also have enough money—or may have it for the asking—to see them through pretty much anything that they wish to attempt. America is full of just such youngsters. Their surroundings are rather against their doing more with themselves than they are doing, yet a good many of them are vaguely dissatisfied and would like a job, if they could find one that they felt really counted. Naturally, they do not want something that keeps them merely marking time, or that will show no particular achievement when it is done, but they are ready to look disinterestedly at something that is an actual challenge, and if they liked it, they would be willing to put their backs into tackling it.

Well, the fields of art are full of jobs—great jobs—that ought to be done, that would bring endless satisfaction to those who did them, but that can never be done except by people who can afford to do them, because there is no money in them and never will be. Here, it has always seemed to me, is the leisured young American’s chance, and I cannot understand how he has managed to miss it for so long. In the sciences, I notice, he has long ago caught on in precisely the same adventurous way he might catch on in the arts. He is in the laboratories, he is on all sorts of scientific expeditions, toiling away at his own expense in enterprises that 246 he knows will never bring him the worth of a copper cent in anything but the exhilarating sense of a great job greatly done. Exactly the same chance is waiting for him in the arts.

Take it in the one department of art with which I am, perhaps, a little acquainted. There is not a publisher in America worth his salt who does not know of at least a dozen great and distinguished pieces of literary work waiting to be done, which can never be done until some one comes along who can afford to do them. I could myself name offhand a dozen such. In my casual talks with publishers about various pieces of work that needed doing, the first question has always been, Who can do it? and the next one was, How will he keep himself going meanwhile? My conviction is that the only procedure that will get this kind of work satisfactorily produced is the one that produced the great Flemish pictures, or the one that now gets analogous results in science—i.e., training people to produce it; and because there is no money in such work when it is produced, the only people eligible to be trained are the ones I am addressing.

The procedure is as follows—and here I hope I shall be specific enough to meet fully the American yearning for practical proposals. Suppose these paragraphs that I am writing fall into the hands of a young man or woman, such as I have described, who takes stock of himself and decides he wishes to try his edge on a real job in literature. Let him go to some publisher with this book in his hand, and say, “You see what this writer says. Well, now, my general training is so-and-so; my leanings, as far as I can make them out, are so-and-so; and I have so-many dollars a year to live on while I am on one of these jobs that this essay says are going begging. What about it?”

Then the publisher, if, as I say, he be worth his salt, as none too many of them are—tell it not in Gath!—will bring forth a line of subjects that will make the young person’s mouth water. They will agree on one, and the publisher will say, “Now, the thing to do is for you to go to So-and-so, just as Rubens went in his youth to van Noort and van Veen. He is quite a fellow in that line, so go to him and stand him up on the carpet, get him to talk it over with you, put an eye on your work once in a while, stiffen up your backbone, and in a general way hold the bull-whip over you until you get your gait.”

The other arts hold as many and as great possibilities which remain to be developed by the same line of procedure. I myself happen to know of one most spicy adventure in the line of the graphic arts, which calls for just the resourcefulness and quickness of mind that Americans are supposed to have. It might turn out to be a dud, but how many exploratory and experimental scientific undertakings turn out that way! Any really competent expert in that line knows of others; any really competent musician knows of a dozen lying here and there in the theory, history, or practice of music; and so on. The thing is to get these experts to stand and deliver, as they will do if they are put under reasonable conviction of the young person’s seriousness of purpose, and to convince them of this is a good preliminary test of the enthusiasm and pertinacity of American youth.

THEEND

ON DOING THE RIGHT THING

and Other Essays by

Albert Jay Nock

Set in linotype Caslon Old Face drawn from the original designs by William Caslon as preserved in the punches that are possessed by the present successors to his original foundry. Type design by A. W. Rushmore. Linoleum block cover and end leaves by Prentiss Taylor.