ONE WAY TO MAKE THINGS BETTERTHE FUNCTION OF HIGH STANDARDS IN LITERATURE AND THE ARTS
THE FUNCTION OF HIGH STANDARDS IN LITERATURE AND THE ARTS
AT first thought, it seems like mockery to recommend to a world of social unrest and of shifting ideals, a world that for the most part is struggling for three meals a day, the efficacy of music, letters, and art to ameliorate its condition. “Emerson in words of one syllable for infant minds” will not reach below a certain intellectual stratum. Beethoven for the people seems a contradiction of terms. There are times when, despite the crowds at the museums, Michelangelo and the Greek marbles seem to have as little influence upon the stream of humanity as rocks upon the current of a river that flows past them. The cry for the elevation of the race, which is the dominant note—the Vox Humana—of our time, the hope that we mayall move up together, is a logical development of the Christian idea and the most creditable aspect of the new century. The whole world is reaching for sun and air. The ambition of the wage-earner is a counterpart of nature, as Lowell reads it into his “June”:
“Every clod feels a stir of might,An instinct within it that reaches and towers,And, groping blindly above it for light,Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers.”
“Every clod feels a stir of might,An instinct within it that reaches and towers,And, groping blindly above it for light,Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers.”
“Every clod feels a stir of might,An instinct within it that reaches and towers,And, groping blindly above it for light,Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers.”
“Every clod feels a stir of might,
An instinct within it that reaches and towers,
And, groping blindly above it for light,
Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers.”
With the impetuosity and the lack of discipline of our day, this aspiration often overreaches itself. The highly stimulated desire for advancement is thwarted by unwillingness to take the plodding and the stony road. The treasures of the humble are forgotten. The quick fire burns up the substance and leaves but ashes. Meanwhile, it is something if, with Landor, we have
“warmed both hands against the fire of life.”
“warmed both hands against the fire of life.”
“warmed both hands against the fire of life.”
“warmed both hands against the fire of life.”
But, with all this impatience to “get culture,” and this rush to take beauty and intellectual resources to those who have them not, as food to the famine-stricken, we are in danger of forgetting the chief value of the best in literature and the arts: thatit awakens the imagination and gives poise to life. Now, imagination and poise are two traits that differentiate man from the brute, and the superior man from the inferior. The best thinking is done by men of imagination; the best action is accomplished by men of poise; for, by poise is meant the faculty of holding one’s course courageously to the compass among contrary winds and waves. The value of high literary, artistic, and musical standards is not that they make poise and imagination universal, but that they affect the world secondarily, through the leaders in whom these qualities are developed. Who shall compute the worth to humanity of one great thinker, one great novelist, one great poet, one great painter, one great sculptor, one great composer? In debating societies, great material advances through invention and discovery are weighed in the balance with great achievements in arts and letters; but account is seldom taken of the intellectual forces that created the inventors and the discoverers.
It is because America is in need of great men that she stands most in need of these forces. The twentieth century appears to be a century of challenge to all the centuries that have gone before, with the accelerated momentum of them all. Now, more than ever, must we have men of imagination and men of poise, and every agency that gives promise of developing these traits deserves encouragement and support. The uplifting of the people to a high average of happiness is thus closely though indirectly related to the advance of literature and the arts.