VIITHE CULT OF THE BEST
A valuable inventory of our American ideals of taste and culture should result from the request of the American Federation of Arts that the Carnegie Foundation undertake an investigation of the teaching of art in this country. We have devoted much attention to importing æsthetic values and works of art from Europe, and to providing museums, libraries and art courses for the public. But we have scarcely asked ourselves what is to come of it all. A survey of what is being done “in the schools and colleges and universities as well as in the professional art schools of the country to promote the knowledge, appreciation and production of art in America” will be of little value, however, if it is to concern itself merely with discovering how many art schools and how many students there are; how many courses on art are given in the colleges, and the credits which each course counts towards the degree.What we need to know is the direction of the studies. We must not feel relieved in spirit if we find there is “enough,” and correspondingly depressed if we find there is “not enough” being done for art in America. We must clear up our ideas as to what a genuine art education would be for the layman, and then ask whether the present emphases are the ones to produce it.
Artistic appreciation in this country has been understood chiefly as the acquiring of a familiarity with “good works of art,” and with the historical fields of the different arts, rather than as the cultivating of spontaneous taste. The millionaire with his magnificent collections has only been doing objectively what the anxious college student is doing who takes courses in the history and appreciation of art, music or literature, or the women’s clubs that follow standard manuals of criticism and patronize bureaus of university travel. Everywhere the emphasis is on acquisition. A great machinery for the extension of culture has grown up around us in the last generation, devoted to the collection, objectively or imaginatively, of masterpieces. The zealous friends of art in and out of the schools have been engaged in bringing before an ever-widening public a roster of the“best.” Art education has been almost entirely a learning about what is “good.” “Culture” has come to mean the jacking-up of one’s appreciations a notch at a time until they have reached a certain standard level. To be cultured has meant to like masterpieces.
Art education has, in other words, become almost a branch of moral education. We are scarcely out of that period when it was a moral obligation upon every child to learn to play the piano. There is still a thoughtful striving after righteousness in our attendance at the opera. And this moral obligation is supported by quasi-ecclesiastical sanctions. Each art, as taught in our schools and colleges, has its truly formidable canon of the “best,” and its insistent discrimination between the sanctified and the apocryphal scriptures. The teaching of English literature in the colleges is a pure example of this orthodoxy. Criticism and expression are neglected in favor of absorption and reverence of the classics. The student enters college on a ritual of examination in them. He remains only through his susceptibility to their influence. Examine what passes for cultural education in other fields, and you will find that it is historical, lexicographical, encyclopædic,and neither utilitarian nor æsthetic. It is prompted by the scholarly ideal rather than by an ideal of taste. The prize goes to those who can acquire the most of these goods. No one is challenged to spontaneous taste any more than the monk is asked to create his own dogmas.
To me this conception of culture is unpleasantly undemocratic. I am not denying the superlative beauty of what has come to be officially labeled “the best that has been thought and done in the world.” But I do object to its being made the universal norm. For if you educate people in this way, you only really educate those whose tastes run to the classics. You leave the rest of the world floundering in a fog of cant, largely unconscious perhaps, trying sincerely to squeeze their appreciations through the needle’s eye. You get as a result hypocrites or “lowbrows,” with culture reserved only for a few. All the rest of us are left without guides, without encouragement, and tainted with original sin.
An education in art appreciation will be valueless if it does not devote itself to clarifying and integrating natural taste. The emphasis must be always on what you do like, not on what you ought to like. We have never had areal test of whether bad taste is positive or merely a lack of consciousness. We have never tried to discover strong spontaneous lines of diversified taste. To the tyranny of the “best” which Arnold’s persuasive power imposed upon this most inquisitive, eager and rich American generation, can be laid, I think, our failure to develop the distinctive styles and indigenous art spirit which the soil should have brought forth abundantly. For as long as you humbly follow the best, you have no eyes for the vital. If you are using your energy to cajole your appreciations, you have none left for unforced æsthetic emotion. If your training has been to learn and appreciate the best that has been thought and done in the world, it has not been to discriminate between the significant and the irrelevant that the experience of every day is flinging up in your face. Civilized life is really one æsthetic challenge after another, and no training in appreciation of art is worth anything unless one has become able to react to forms and settings. The mere callousness with which we confront our ragbag city streets is evidence enough of the futility of the Arnold ideal. To have learned to appreciate a Mantegna and a Japanese print, and Dante and Debussy, andnot to have learned nausea at Main street, means an art education which is not merely worthless but destructive.
I know that such complaints are met by the plea that the fight has been so hard in this country to get any art education at all that it is idle to talk of cultivating public taste until this battle is won.Mr.Edward Dickinson still pleads in a recent book the cause of music to the stony educationists of the land. Let us get a foothold in the colleges with our music courses, these defenders seem to say, and your taste will evolve from them. But the way to reach a goal is not to start off in the opposite direction, and my thesis is that education in the appreciation of art has been moving exactly in this wrong direction. Widespread artistic taste would have had a better chance to develop in this country if we had not been so much concerned with knowing what we ought to know and liking what we ought to like. The movement has caught those whose taste happened to coincide with the canons. It has perverted a much larger host who have tried to pretend that their taste coincided. And it has left untouched the joyous masses who might easily, as in othercountries, have evolved a folk-culture if they had not been outlawed by this ideal.
The ideal still dominates, although it becomes every day more evident that its effect has been disastrous. A younger generation of architects has filled our cities with sepulchral neo-classicism and imitative débris of all the ages. We get its apotheosis in the fantasy of Washington, where French chateaux snuggle up close to colonial mansions, and the great lines of the city are slashed by cheap and tawdry blocks. All this has been done with the best will in the world, by men curious and skilful, well instructed in the “best” of all time. It has been a conscientious following of an ideal of beauty. We are just beginning to discover uneasily how false that ideal is. Art to most of us has come to mean painting instead of the decoration and design and social setting that would make significant our objective life. Our moral sense has made us mad for artistic “rightness.” What we have got out of it is something much worse than imitation. It is worship.
This effort to follow the best, which even our revolutionists engage in, has the effect of either closing the appreciation to new styles or leavingit open to passing winds of fashion. That we are fashion-ridden is the direct result of an education which has made acquisition and not discrimination the motive. The cult of the best is harmless only if it has been superimposed on the broadest basis of personal discrimination, begun in earliest years. Let us admit that the appreciations of the Brahmins marvelously coincide with what Matthew Arnold has stamped as right. But perhaps for most of us there has not been the environment to produce that happy coincidence. Our education has forced us all to be self-made men in artistic appreciation. Our tastes suffer from hiatuses and crotchinesses and color-blindnesses because no effort has been made to integrate our sincere likes and dislikes and focus and sharpen our reactions. Until the present ideal is overthrown, we have no chance of getting a sincere and general public taste. We can have only the mechanics of art education. I do not mean that America has been unique in this. We have only been a little worse than other countries because we have been more conscientious.