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Your United States: Impressions of a first visit, a non-fiction book by Arnold Bennett |
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Chapter 7. Education And Art |
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_ CHAPTER VII. EDUCATION AND ART I had my first glimpses of education in America from the purser of an illustrious liner, who affirmed the existence of a dog--in fact, his own dog--so highly educated that he habitually followed and understood human conversations, and that in order to keep secrets from the animal it was necessary to spell out the keyword of a sentence instead of pronouncing it. After this I seemed somehow to be prepared for the American infant who, when her parents discomfited her just curiosity by the same mean adult dodge of spelling words, walked angrily out of the room with the protest: "There's too blank much education in this house for me!" Nevertheless, she proudly and bravely set herself to learn to spell; whereupon her parents descended to even worse depths of baseness, and in her presence would actually whisper in each other's ear. She merely inquired, with grimness: "What's the good of being educated, anyway? First you spell words, and when I can spell then you go and whisper!" And received no adequate answer, naturally. This captivating creature, whose society I enjoyed at frequent intervals throughout my stay in America, was a mirror in which I saw the whole American race of children--their independence, their self-confidence, their adorable charm, and their neat sauciness. "What _is_ father?" she asked one day. Now her father happened to be one of the foremost humorists in the United States; she was baldly informed that he was a humorist. "What _is_ a humorist?" she went on, ruthlessly, and learned that a humorist was a person who wrote funny things to make people laugh. "Well," she said, "I don't honestly think he's very funny at home." It was naught to her that humorists are not paid to be funny at home, and that in truth they never under any circumstances are very funny at home. She just hurled her father from his niche--and then went forth and boasted of him as a unique peculiarity in fathers, as an unrivaled ornament of her career on earth; for no other child in the vicinity had a professional humorist for parent. Her gestures and accent typified for me the general attitude of youngest America, in process of education, toward the older generation: an astonishing, amusing, exquisite, incomprehensible mixture of affection, admiration, trust, and rather casual tolerating scorn. The children of most countries display a similar phenomenon, but in America the phenomenon is more acute and disconcerting than elsewhere. One noon, in perfect autumn weather, I was walking down the main road of a residential suburb, and observing the fragile-wheeled station-wagons, and the ice-wagons enormously labeled "DANGER" (perhaps by the gastric experts of the medical faculty), and the Colonial-style dwellings, and the "tinder" boarding-houses, and the towering boot-shine stands, and the roast-chestnut emporia, and the gasometers flanking a noble and beautiful river--I was observing all this when a number of young men and maids came out of a high-school and unconsciously assumed possession of the street. It was a great and impressive sight; it was a delightful sight. They were so sure of themselves, the maids particularly; so interested in themselves, so happy, so eager, so convinced (without any conceit) that their importance transcended all other importances, so gently pitiful toward men and women of forty-five, and so positive that the main function of elders was to pay school-fees, that I was thrilled thereby. Seldom has a human spectacle given me such exciting pleasure as this gave. (And they never suspected it, those preoccupied demigods!) It was the sheer pride of life that I saw passing down the street and across the badly laid tram-lines! I had never seen anything like it. I immediately desired to visit schools. Profoundly ignorant of educational methods, and with a strong distaste for teaching, I yet wanted to know and understand all about education in America in one moment--the education that produced that superb stride and carriage in the street! I failed, of course, in my desire--not from lack of facilities offered, but partly from lack of knowledge to estimate critically what I saw, and from lack of time. My experiences, however, though they left my mind full of enigmas, were wondrous. I asked to inspect one of the best schools in New York. Had I been a dispassionate sociological student, I should probably have asked to inspect one of the worst schools in New York--perhaps one of the gaunt institutions to be found, together with a cinema-palace and a bank, in almost every block on the East Side. But I asked for one of the best, and I was shown the Horace Mann School. * * * * * The Horace Mann School proved to be a palace where a thousand children and their teachers lived with extreme vivacity in an atmosphere of ozone from which all draughts and chilliness had been eliminated. As a malcontent native of the Isle of Chilly Draughts, this attribute of the atmosphere of the Horace Mann School impressed me. Dimensionally I found that the palace had a beginning but no end. I walked through leagues of corridors and peeped into unnumbered class-rooms, in each of which children were apparently fiercely dragging knowledge out of nevertheless highly communicative teachers; and the children got bigger and bigger, and then diminished for a while, and then grew again, and kept on growing, until I at last entered a palatial kitchen where some two dozen angels, robed in white but for the moment uncrowned, were eagerly crowding round a paradisiacal saucepan whose magic contents formed the subject of a lecture by one of them. Now these angels were not cherubs; they were full grown; they never would be any taller than they were; and I asked up to what age angels were kept at school in America. Whereupon I learned that I had insensibly passed from the school proper into a training-school for teachers; but at what point the school proper ended I never did learn. It seems to me that if I had penetrated through seven more doors I should have reached Columbia University itself, without having crossed a definite dividing-line; and, anyhow, the circumstance was symbolic. Reluctantly I left the incredible acres of technical apparatus munificently provided in America for the training of teachers, and, having risen to the roof and seen infants thereon grabbing at instruction in the New York breeze, I came again to the more normal regions of the school. Here, as everywhere else in the United States (save perhaps the cloak-room department of the Metropolitan Opera-House), what chiefly struck me was the brilliant organization of the organism. There was nothing that had not been thought of. A handsomely dressed mother came into the organism and got as far as the antechamber of the principal's room. The organization had foreseen her, had divined that that mother's child was the most important among a thousand children--indeed, the sole child of any real importance--had arranged that her progress should be arrested at just that stage, and had stationed a calm and diplomatic woman to convince her that her child was indeed the main preoccupation of the Horace Mann School. A pretty sight--the interview! It charmed me as the sight of an ingenious engine in motion will charm an engineer. The individual class-rooms, in some of which I lingered at leisure, were tonic, bracing, inspiring, and made me ashamed because I was not young. I saw geography being taught with the aid of a stereoscopic magic-lantern. After a view of the high street of a village in North Russia had been exposed and explained by a pupil, the teacher said: "If anybody has any questions to ask, let him stand up." And the whole class leaped furiously to its feet, blotting out the entire picture with black shadows of craniums and starched pinafores. The whole class might have been famishing. In another room I saw the teaching of English composition. Although when I went to school English composition was never taught, I have gradually acquired a certain interest in the subject, and I feel justified in asserting that the lesson was admirably given. It was, in fact, the best example of actual pedagogy that I met with in the United States. "Now can any one tell me--" began the mistress. A dozen arms of boys and girls shot up with excessive violence, and, having shot up, they wiggled and waggled with ferocious impatience in the air; it was a miracle that they remained attached to their respective trunks; it was assuredly an act of daring on the part of the intrepid mistress to choose between them. "How children have changed since my time!" I said to the principal afterward. "We never used to fling up our hands like that. We just put them up.... But perhaps it's because they're Americans--" "It's probably because of the ventilation," said the principal, calmly corrective. "We never have the windows open winter or summer, but the ventilation is perfect." I perceived that it indeed must be because of the ventilation. More and more startled, as I went along, by the princely lavishness of every arrangement, I ventured to surmise that it must all cost a great deal. "The fees are two hundred and eighty-five dollars in the Upper School." "Yes, I expected they would be high," I said. "Not at all. They are the lowest in New York. Smart private schools will charge five or six hundred dollars a year." Exhausted, humbled, I at last quitted the warmed Horace Mann ozone for the harsh and searching atmosphere of the street. And I gazed up at the pile, and saw all its interiors again in my mind. I had not grasped the half nor the quarter of what had been so willingly and modestly shown to me. I had formed no theory as to the value of some of the best juvenile education in the Eastern States. But I had learned one thing. I knew the secret of the fine, proud bearing of young America. A child is not a fool; a child is almost always uncannily shrewd. And when it sees a splendid palace provided for it, when it sees money being showered upon hygienic devices for its comfort, even upon trifles for its distraction, when it sees brains all bent on discovering the best, nicest ways of dealing with its instincts, when it sees itself the center of a magnificent pageant, ritual, devotion, almost worship, it naturally lifts its chin, puts its shoulders back, steps out with a spring, and glances down confidently upon the whole world. Who wouldn't? * * * * * It was an exciting day for me when I paid a call next door to Horace Mann and visited Columbia University. For this was my first visit of inspection to any university of any kind, either in the New World or in the Old. As for an English university education, destiny had deprived me of its advantages and of its perils. I could not haughtily compare Columbia with Oxford or Cambridge, because I had never set foot even in their towns. I had no standards whatever of comparison. I arose and went out to lunch on that morning, and left the lunch before anybody else and rushed in an automobile to Columbia; but football had already begun for the day in the campus costing two million dollars, and classes were over. I saw five or more universities while I was in America, but I was not clever enough to catch one of them in the act of instruction. What I did see was the formidable and magnificent machine, the apparatus of learning, supine in repose. And if the spectacle was no more than a promise, it was a very dazzling promise. No European with any imagination could regard Columbia as other than a miracle. Nearly the whole of the gigantic affair appeared to have been brought into being, physically, in less than twenty years. Building after building, device after device, was dated subsequent to 1893. And to my mind that was just the point of the gigantic affair. Universities in Europe are so old. And there are universities in America which are venerable. A graduate of the most venerable of them told me that Columbia was not "really" a university. Well, it did seem unreal, though not in his sense; it seemed magic. The graduate in question told me that a university could not be created by a stroke of the wand. And yet there staring me in the face was the evidence that a university not merely could be created by a stroke of the wand, but had been. (I am aware of Columbia's theoretic age and of her insistence on it.) The wand is a modern invention; to deny its effective creative faculty is absurd. Of course I know what the graduate meant. I myself, though I had not seen Oxford nor Cambridge, was in truth comparing Columbia with my dream of Oxford and Cambridge, to her disadvantage. I was capable of saying to myself: "All this is terribly new. All this lacks tradition." Criticism fatuous and mischievous, if human! It would be as sapient to imprison the entire youth of a country until it had ceased to commit the offense of being young. Tradition was assuredly not apparent in the atmosphere of Columbia. Moreover, some of her architecture was ugly. On the other hand, some of it was beautiful to the point of nobility. The library, for instance: a building in which no university and no age could feel anything but pride. And far more important than stone or marble was the passionate affection for Columbia which I observed in certain of her sons who had nevertheless known other universities. A passionate affection also perhaps brought into being since 1893, but not to be surpassed in honest fervency and loyalty by influences more venerable! Columbia was full of piquancies for me. It delighted me that the Dean of Science was also consulting engineer to the university. That was characteristic and fine. And how splendidly unlike Oxford! I liked the complete life-sized railroad locomotive in the engineering-shops, and the Greek custom in the baths; and the students' notion of coziness in the private dens full of shelves, photographs, and disguised beds; and the visibility of the president; and his pronounced views as to the respective merits of New York newspapers; and the eagerness of a young professor of literature in the Faculty Club to defend against my attacks English Professor A.C. Bradley. I do believe that I even liked the singular sight of a Chinaman tabulating from the world's press, in the modern-history laboratory, a history of the world day by day. I can hardly conceive a wilder, more fearfully difficult way of trying to acquire the historical sense than this voyaging through hot, fresh newspapers, nor one more probably destined to failure (I should have liked to see some of the two-monthly resumes which students in this course are obliged to write); but I liked the enterprise and the originality and the daring of the idea; I liked its disdain of tradition. And, after all, is it weirder than the common traditional method? [Illustration: UNIVERSITY BUILDINGS--UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA] To the casual visitor, such as myself, unused either to universities or to the vastness of the American scale, Columbia could be little save an enormous and overwhelming incoherence. It so chiefly remains in my mind. But the ingenious humanity running through the whole conception of it was touching and memorable. And although I came away from my visit still perfectly innocent of any broad theory as to ultimate educational values in America, I came away also with a deeper and more reassuring conviction that America was intensely interested in education, and that all that America had to do in order to arrive at real national, racial results was to keep on being intensely interested. When America shall have so far outclassed Europe as to be able to abolish, in university examinations, what New York picturesquely calls "the gumshoe squad" (of course now much more brilliantly organized in America than in Europe), then we shall begin to think that, under the stroke of the wand, at least one real national, racial result has been attained! * * * * * When I set eyes on the sixty buildings which constitute the visible part of Harvard University, I perceived that, just as Kensington had without knowing it been imitating certain streets of Boston, so certain lost little old English towns that even American tourists have not yet reached had without knowing it been imitating the courts and chimneys and windows and doorways and luscious brickwork of Harvard. Harvard had a very mellow look indeed. No trace of the wand! The European in search of tradition would find it here in bulk. I should doubt whether at Harvard modern history is studied through the daily paper--unless perchance it be in Harvard's own daily paper. The considerableness of Harvard was attested for me by the multiplicity of its press organs. I dare say that Harvard is the only university in the world the offices of whose comic paper are housed in a separate and important building. If there had been a special press-building for Harvard's press, I should have been startled. But when I beheld the mere comic organ in a spacious and costly detached home that some London dailies would envy, I was struck dumb. That sole fact indicated the scale of magnificence at Harvard, and proved that the phenomenon of gold-depreciation has proceeded further at Harvard than at any other public institution in the world. The etiquette of Harvard is nicely calculated to heighten the material splendor of the place. Thus it is etiquette for the president, during his term of office, to make a present of a building or so to the university. Now buildings at Harvard have adopted the excellent habit of never costing less than about half a million dollars. It is also etiquette that the gifts to the university from old students shall touch a certain annual sum; they touch it. Withal, there is no architectural ostentation at Harvard. All the buildings are artistically modest; many are beautiful; scarcely one that clashes with the sober and subtle attractiveness of the whole aggregation. Nowhere is the eye offended. One looks upon the crimson facades with the same lenient love as marks one's attitude toward those quaint and lovely English houses (so familiar to American visitors to our isle) that are all picturesqueness and no bath-room. That is the external effect. Assuredly entering some of those storied doorways, one would anticipate inconveniences and what is called "Old World charm" within. But within one discovers simply naught but the very latest, the very dearest, the very best of everything that is luxurious. I was ushered into a most princely apartment, grandiose in dimensions, superbly furnished and decorated, lighted with rich discretion, heated to a turn. Portraits by John Sargent hung on the vast walls, and a score of other manifestations of art rivaled these in the attention of the stranger. No club in London could match this chamber. It was, I believe, a sort of lounge for the students. Anyhow, a few students were lounging in it; only a few--there was no rush for the privilege. And the few loungers were really lounging, in the wonderful sinuous postures of youth. They might have been lounging in a railway station or a barn instead of amid portraits by John Sargent. The squash-racket court was an example of another kind of luxury, very different from the cunning combinations of pictured walls, books, carved wood, and deep-piled carpets, but not less authentic. The dining-hall seating a thousand simultaneously was another. Here I witnessed the laying of dinner-tables by negroes. I noted that the sudden sight of me instantly convinced one negro, engaged in the manipulation of pats of butter, that a fork would be more in keeping with the Harvard tradition than his fingers, and I was humanly glad thus to learn that the secret reality of table-laying is the same in two continents. I saw not the dining of the thousand. In fact, I doubt whether in all I saw one hundred of the six thousand students. They had mysteriously vanished from all the resorts of perfect luxury provided for them. Possibly they were withdrawn into the privacies of the thousands of suites--each containing bedroom, sitting-room, bath-room, and telephone--which I understood are allotted to them for lairs. I left Harvard with a very clear impression of its frank welcoming hospitality and of its extraordinary luxury. And as I came out of the final portal I happened to meet a student actually carrying his own portmanteau--and rather tugging at it. I regretted this chance. The spectacle clashed, and ought to have been contrary to etiquette. That student should in propriety have been followed by a Nigerian, Liberian, or Senegambian, carrying his portmanteau. My visits to other universities were about as brief, stirring, suggestive, and incomplete as those to Columbia and Harvard. I repeat that I never actually saw the educational machine in motion. What it seemed to me that I saw in each case was a tremendous mechanical apparatus at rest, a rich, empty frame, an organism waiting for the word that would break its trance. The fault was, of course, wholly mine. I find upon reflection that the universities which I recall with the most sympathy are those in which I had the largest opportunity of listening to the informal talk of the faculty and its wife. I heard some mighty talking upon occasion--and in particular I sat willing at the feet of a president who could mingle limericks and other drollery, the humanities, science, modern linguistics, and economics in a manner which must surely make him historic. * * * * * Education, like most things except high-class cookery, must be judged by ultimate results; and though it may not be possible to pass any verdict on current educational methods (especially when you do not happen to have even seen them in action), one can to a certain extent assess the values of past education by reference to the demeanor of adults who have been through it. One of the chief aims of education should be to stimulate the great virtue of curiosity. The worst detractors of the American race--and there are some severe ones in New York, London, and Paris!--will not be able to deny that an unusually active curiosity is a marked characteristic of the race. Only they twist that very characteristic into an excuse for still further detraction. They will, for example, point to the "hordes" (a word which they regard as indispensable in this connection) of American tourists who insist on seeing everything of historic or artistic interest that is visible in Europe. The plausible argument is that the mass of such tourists are inferior in intellect and taste to the general level of Europeans who display curiosity about history or art. Which is probably true. But it ought to be remembered by us Europeans (and in sackcloth!) that the mass of us with money to spend on pleasure are utterly indifferent to history and art. The European dilettante goes to the Uffizi and sees a shopkeeper from Milwaukee gazing ignorantly at a masterpiece, and says: "How inferior this shopkeeper from Milwaukee is to me! The American is an inartistic race!" But what about the shopkeeper from Huddersfield or Amiens? The shopkeeper from Huddersfield or Amiens will be flirting about on some entirely banal beach--Scarborough or Trouville--and for all he knows or cares Leonardo da Vinci might have been a cabman; and yet the loveliest things in the world are, relatively speaking, at his door! When the European shopkeeper gets as far as Lucerne in August, he thinks that a journey of twenty-four hours entitles him to rank a little lower than Columbus. It was an enormous feat for him to reach Lucerne, and he must have credit for it, though his interest in art is in no wise thereby demonstrated. One has to admit that he now goes to Lucerne in hordes. Praise be to him! But I imagine that the American horde "hustling for culture" in no matter what historic center will compare pretty favorably with the European horde in such spots as Lucerne. All general curiosity is, to my mind, righteousness, and I so count it to the American. Not that I think that American curiosity is always the highest form of curiosity, or that it is not limited. With its apparent omnivorousness it is often superficial and too easily satisfied--particularly by mere words. Very seldom is it profound. It is apt to browse agreeably on externals. The American, like Anglo-Saxons generally, rarely shows a passionate and yet honest curiosity about himself or his country, which is curiosity at its finest. He will divide things into pleasant and unpleasant, and his curiosity is trained to stop at the frontier of the latter--an Anglo-Saxon device for being comfortable in your mind! He likes to know what others think of him and his country, but he is not very keen on knowing what he really thinks on these subjects himself. The highest form of curiosity is apt to be painful sometimes. (And yet who that has practised it would give it up?) It also demands intellectual honesty--a quality which has been denied by Heaven to all Anglo-Saxon races, but which nevertheless a proper education ought in the end to achieve. Were I asked whether I saw in America any improvement upon Britain in the supreme matter of intellectual honesty, I should reply, No. I seemed to see in America precisely the same tendency as in Britain to pretend, for the sake of instant comfort, that things are not what they are, the same timid but determined dislike of the whole truth, the same capacity to be shocked by notorious and universal phenomena, the same delusion that a refusal to look at these phenomena is equivalent to the destruction of these phenomena, the same flaccid sentimentality which vitiates practically all Anglo-Saxon art. And I have stood in the streets of New York, as I have stood in the streets of London, and longed with an intense nostalgia for one hour of Paris, where, amid a deplorable decadence, intellectual honesty is widely discoverable, and where absolutely straight thinking and talking is not mistaken for cynicism. * * * * * Another test of education is the feeling for art, and the creation of an environment which encourages the increase of artistic talent. (And be it noted in passing that the intellectually honest races, the Latin, have been the most artistic, for the mere reason that intellectual dishonesty is just sentimentality, and sentimentality is the destroying poison of art.) Now the most exacerbating experience that fell to me in America--and it fell more than once--was to hear in discreetly lighted and luxurious drawing-rooms, amid various mural proofs of trained taste, and usually from the lips of an elegantly Europeanized American woman with a sad, agreeable smile: "There is no art in the United States.... I feel like an exile." A number of these exiles, each believing himself or herself to be a solitary lamp in the awful darkness, are dotted up and down the great cities, and it is a curious fact that they bitterly despise one another. In so doing they are not very wrong. For, in the first place, these people, like nearly all dilettanti of art, are extremely unreliable judges of racial characteristics. Their mentality is allied to that of the praisers of time past, who, having read _Tom Jones_ and _Clarissa_, are incapable of comprehending that the immense majority of novels produced in the eighteenth century were nevertheless terrible rubbish. They go to a foreign land, deliberately confine their attention to the artistic manifestations of that country, and then exclaim in ecstasy: "What an artistic country this is! How different from my own!" To the same class belong certain artistic visitors to the United States who, having in their own country deliberately cut themselves off from intercourse with ordinary inartistic persons, visit America, and, meeting there the average man and woman in bulk, frown superiorly and exclaim: "This Philistine race thinks of nothing but dollars!" They cannot see the yet quite evident truth that the rank and file of every land is about equally inartistic. Modern Italy may in the mass be more lyrical than America, but in either architecture or painting Italy is simply not to be named with America. [Illustration: MITCHELL TOWER AND HUTCHINSON COMMONS--UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO] Further, and in the second place, these people never did and never will look in the right quarters for vital art. A really original artist struggling under their very noses has small chance of being recognized by them, the reason being that they are imitative, with no real opinion of their own. They associate art with Florentine frames, matinee hats, distant museums, and clever talk full of allusions to the dead. It would not occur to them to search for American art in the architecture of railway stations and the draftsmanship and sketch-writing of newspapers and magazines, because they have not the wit to learn that genuine art flourishes best in the atmosphere of genuine popular demand. Even so, with all their blindness, it is unnatural that they should not see and take pride in the spectacular historical facts which prove their country to be less negligible in art than they would assert. I do not mean the existence in America of huge and glorious collections of European masters. I have visited some of these collections, and have taken keen pleasure therein. But I perceive in them no national significance--no more national significance than I perceive in the endowment of splendid orchestras to play foreign music under foreign conductors, or in the fashionable crowding of classical concerts. Indeed, it was a somewhat melancholy experience to spend hours in a private palace crammed with artistic loveliness that was apparently beloved and understood, and to hear not one single word disclosing the slightest interest in modern American art. No, as a working artist myself, I was more impressed and reassured by such a sight as the Innes room at the colossal Art Institute of Chicago than by all the collections of old masters in America, though I do not regard Innes as a very distinguished artist. The aforesaid dilettanti would naturally condescend to the Innes room at Chicago's institute, as to the long-sustained, difficult effort which is being made by a school of Chicago sculptors for the monumental ornamentation of Chicago. But the dilettanti have accomplished a wonderful feat of unnaturalness in forgetting that their poor, inartistic Philistine country did provide, _inter alia_, the great writer who has influenced French imaginative writers more deeply than any other foreign writer since Byron--Edgar Allan Poe; did produce one of the world's supreme poets--Whitman; did produce the greatest pure humorist of modern times; did produce the miraculous Henry James; did produce Stanford White and the incomparable McKim; and did produce the only two Anglo-Saxon personalities who in graphic art have been able to impose themselves on modern Europe--Whistler and John Sargent. * * * * * In the matter of graphic art, I have known so many American painters in Paris that I was particularly anxious to see what American painting was like at home. My first adventures were not satisfactory. I trudged through enormous exhibitions, and they filled me with just the same feeling of desolation and misery that I experienced at the Royal Academy, London, or the Societe des Artistes Francais, Paris. In miles of slippery exercise I saw almost nothing that could interest an intelligent amateur who had passed a notable portion of his life in studios. The first modern American painting that arrested me was one by Grover, of Chicago. I remember it with gratitude. Often, especially in New York, I was called upon by stay-at-home dilettanti to admire the work of some shy favorite, and with the best will in the world I could not, on account of his too obvious sentimentality. In Boston I was authoritatively informed that the finest painting in the whole world was at that moment being done by a group of Boston artists in Boston. But as I had no opportunity to see their work, I cannot offer an opinion on the proud claim. My gloom was becoming permanent, when one wet day I invaded, not easily, the Macdowell Club, and, while listening to a chorus rehearsal of Liszt's "St. Elizabeth" made the acquaintance of really interesting pictures by artists such as Irving R. Wiles, Jonas Lie, Henri, Mrs. Johansen, and Brimley, of whom previously I had known nothing. From that moment I progressed. I met the work of James Preston, and of other men who can truly paint. All these, however, with all their piquant merits, were Parisianized. They could have put up a good show in Paris and emerged from French criticism with dignity. Whereas there is one American painter who has achieved a reputation on the tongues of men in Europe without (it is said) having been influenced by Europe, or even having exhibited there. I mean Winslow Homer. I had often heard of Winslow Homer from connoisseurs who had earned my respect, and assuredly one of my reasons for coming to America was to see Winslow Homer's pictures. My first introduction to his oil-paintings was a shock. I did not like them, and I kept on not liking them. I found them theatrical and violent in conception, rather conventional in design, and repellent in color. I thought the painter's attitude toward sea and rock and sky decidedly sentimental beneath its wilful harshness. And I should have left America with broken hopes of Winslow Homer if an enthusiast for State-patronized art had not insisted on taking me to the State Museum at Indianapolis. In this agreeable and interesting museum there happened to be a temporary loan exhibit of water-colors by Winslow Homer. Which water-colors were clearly the productions of a master. They forced me to reconsider my views of Homer's work in general. They were beautiful; they thrilled; they were genuine American; there is nothing else like them. I shall never forget the pleasure I felt in unexpectedly encountering these summary and highly distinguished sketches in the quietude of Indianapolis. I would have liked to collect a trainful of New York, Chicago, and Boston dilettanti, and lead them by the ears to the unpretentious museum at Indianapolis, and force them to regard fixedly these striking creations. Not that I should expect appreciation from them! (Indianapolis, I discovered, was able to keep perfectly calm in front of the Winslow Homer water-colors.) But their observations would have been diverting. _ |
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