It was the same echo that had sounded in Robert Underwood Johnson’s ear since his days at Earlham College, a small Quaker institution in Indiana that emphasized Latin and “the human element of Virgil, Horace, Tacitus, Cicero.” Even the college-boy jokes were in Latin: a classroom was dubbed Nugipolyloquidium, “a place of talkers of nonsense.” Out of all this came the lingering faith that the classical is the eternal, and that the past, because it Ls the past, holds a sacred and permanent power—a view that differs from the historical sense, with its awareness (in contradistinction to Truth and Beauty) of evolution, displacement, violence and oppression, migration of populations, competing intellectual movements, the decline and fall of even contemporary societies and cultures. The achievement of such a serene outlook will depend on one’s distance from strikes, riots, destitution, foreign eruptions, the effects of prejudice, immigrants pressing in at Ellis Island, and all the rest.
Inland Earlham in 1867, when Johnson was a freshman there, is deservedly called “tranquil”—“Tranquil Days at Earlham” is a chapter in Johnson’s autobiographical Remembered Yesterdays, self-published in 1923 (just when Marshal Foch was pocketing the silver trowel); and tranquility was the goal and soul of Johnson’s artistic understanding. “We were charmed by the mountain scenery of the Gulf of Corinth, every peak and vale of which is haunted by mythological associations,” he writes in a chapter entitled “Delight and Humor of Foreign Travel.” “The Bay of Salamis gave us a thrill and at Eleusis we seemed to come in close touch with classic days, for here was the scene of the still unexplained Eleusinian mysteries.” Living Greeks—at their rustic best, since “the urban Greek is undersized and unimpressive”—are admired solely as an ornamental allusion: “Some of them resembled fine Italian types, one or two reminding me of the elder Salvini,” an Italian tragedian. More gratifying than these Greeks in the flesh are the crucial landmarks: “I stayed up until one o’clock at night to catch sight of the beacon on the ‘Leucadian steep’ which marks the spot from which Sappho is reputed to have thrown herself.” “One may well imagine that three fourths of the time we spent in Athens was passed on the Acropolis.”
This was the sensibility that dreamed and labored over and built the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Johnson came to this task—this passion—after forty years at The Century, the magazine that succeeded Scribner’s Monthly. Its editor-in-chief was Richard Watson Gilder, a poet hugely overpraised by his contemporaries (“An echo of Dantean mysticism … He wanders in the highest realms of spiritual poetry”) and wholly dismissed by their descendants. As editor-cum-poet, he was uniquely qualified to be mentor and model for Johnson, whom Gilder appointed associate editor in 1881. Gilder’s own mentor and model was Edmund Clarence Stedman, himself a mediocre poet of the idealist school; both Stedman and Gilder were Academy members. Although Alfred Kazin (a present-day Academician) describes Gilder as “a very amiable man whom some malicious fortune set up as a perfect symbol of all that the new writers [of the Twenties] were to detest,” he was, for Johnson and his generation, the perfect symbol of all that belles-lettres and an elevated civilization required.
Nor were Johnson and his generation misled. The Century was the most powerful literary periodical of its time, a genuine influence in the formation of American letters. In 1885, for example, the February issue alone carried—remarkably—excerpts from Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham, and James’s The Bostonians. Gilder was a believer in purity of theme, which drew him away from certain subjects; Johnson was Gilder’s even more cautious copy. In 1904, when, despite the editorial risk, Gilder wanted to publish Edith Wharton—he was shrewd enough to see that she was “on the eve of a great popular success”—Johnson demurred: Wharton had written stories about divorce. At Gilder’s death in 1909 Johnson took over as editor-in-chief. The decline of The Century is usually attributed, at least in part, to his inability to respond to changing public taste and expectation. The trustees, at any rate, found him inflexible; he resigned in 1913.
He was then sixty years old, in full and effective vigor, with a strong activist bent and an affinity for citizenly service. He was an advocate, a man of causes. At The Century he had promoted the conservation of forests and was instrumental in getting Congressional sanction for the creation of Yosemite National Park. It was he who persuaded a coolly reticent General Ulysses S. Grant to set down an emotional memoir of the battle of Shiloh. As secretary of a committee of authors and publishers, Johnson lobbied for international copyright and fought against the pirating of foreign books. His ardor spilled over into nine volumes of verse, all self-published, on subjects both sublime and civic, often interwoven: “The Vision of Gettysburg,” “The Price of Honor: The Colombian Indemnity,” “The New Slavery (On the Expatriation by Germany of Civil Populations of Belgium),” “Armenia,” “Henrik Ibsen, The Tribute of an Idealist,” “To the Spirit of Luther: On Learning of the Reported Appeal of Germany to Matrons and Maidens to Give Themselves ‘Officially’ to the Propagation of the Race, Under Immunity from the Law.” There are poems on the Dreyfus Affair: “The Keeper of the Sword (Apropos of the Dreyfus Trial at Rennes)” and “To Dreyfus Vindicated.” The talent may have been middling, but the good will, and the prophetic vigilance, were mammoth.
If, as Emerson insists, the shipbuilder is the ship, then Robert Underwood Johnson was, long before its founding, the American Academy of Arts and Letters. There can be no useful history of the Academy that fails to contemplate Johnson’s mind. Whatever ignited his enthusiasm, whatever struck him as repugnant—these formed the mind of the Academy. It was not that Johnson was dictatorial—on the contrary, he was elaborately courtly, and punctilious as to protocol. (As Permanent Secretary, he sent himself a deferential letter announcing his election to the Academy, and, with equal deference, wrote back to accept the honor.) He did no violence to the opinion of others; rather, his opinion was generally the opinion of the membership, and vice versa. It may have been the Muses themselves who nurtured such unanimity; or else it was the similarity of background of these cultivated gentlemen, similarly educated, similarly situated in society, each with his triplet of rhythmically interchangeable names, all of them patriots, yet all looking toward an older Europe for continuity of purpose—with one urgent European exception.
The exception was Germany in the Great War. The Academy, most notably in the person of Robert Underwood Johnson, threw itself indefatigably into the war effort against Germany, contributing $100,000 to Italy and over one hundred ambulances presented in the name of the poets of America. Though the hostilities had come to an end with the November armistice of 1918, the Academy’s hostility remained white-hot into the following year, with the publication of its World War Utterances. Here patriotism overreached itself into unrestrained fury. In an essay called “The Incredible Cruelty of the Teutons,” William Dean Howells—the most benignly moderate of novelists—asked: “Can anyone say what the worst wickedness of the Germans has been? If you choose one there are always other crimes which contest your choice. We used at first to fix the guilt of them upon the Kaiser, but event by event we have come to realize that no man or order of men can pervert a whole people without their complicity.”
Luminary after luminary joined the cry, under titles such as “Can Peace Make Us Forget? A Plea for the Ostracism of All Things German”; “The Shipwreck of Kultur”; “The Crime of the Lusitania”; “Germany’s Shame.” “The nation which had invited our admiration for its Gemütlichkeit instantly aroused our abhorrence for its Schrecklichkeit,” wrote Brander Matthews. And Nicholas Murray Butler, condemning Germany’s “principle of world domination,” compared German conquest and subjection of peoples to Alexander the Great, the legions of Rome, Charlemagne, Bonaparte, and, finally, “the Hebrews of old.” (As the author of Columbia University’s notorious and long-lasting Jewish quota, Butler—quite apart from his Academy activities, where such views were never expressed—apparently also feared conquest by later Heb
rews.) Woodrow Wilson, who had campaigned for the Presidency with the slogan “He kept us out of war”—to the disgust of his more belligerent colleagues at the Academy—now spoke of Germany as “throwing to the winds all scruples of humanity” while engaged in “a warfare against mankind.” In his “Note on German Music and German Ideas,” Horatio Parker, one of the period’s nearly forgotten composers, could not resist making a plea for German music, especially Bach, Richard Strauss, and Mendelssohn (“It is as useless to deny the beauty and greatness of classical masterpieces by Germans as it is to deny the same qualities in their mountains”); nevertheless he concluded that “prejudice of the public and of officials in this country against modern German music is perhaps justifiable.”
In these exhortations to hatred and ostracism, the Academy’s impulse was no different from the anti-German clamor that was everywhere in the American street. From our distance, the bitter words may seem overreactive and hyperchauvinist. Still, reading these papers now three-quarters of a century old, one feels a curious displacement of rage—a vertiginous sense of the premature, as of an hourglass set mistakenly on its head. The sinking of the Lusitania, merciless act of war though it was, was not yet Auschwitz. If Howells, say, had written as he did, not in 1918 but in 1945, after the exposure of the crematoria, how would we judge his judgment? It is sometimes an oddity of history that the right thing is said at the wrong time.
And it may be that, in the third decade of its life, many right things were spoken at the Academy at the wrong time. When the war was over, Johnson turned his energies once again to the celebration of a type of high culture. And again there looked to be a displacement of timing. In 1919, race riots broke out in Chicago and a dock workers’ strike hit New York; the eight-hour workday was instituted nationally; President Woodrow Wilson won the Nobel Peace Prize and presided over the first meeting of the League of Nations in Paris; the Red Army took Omsk, Kharkov, and the Crimea; Mussolini founded the Italian fascist movement; Paderewski became Premier of Poland. Henri Bergson, Karl Barth, Ernst Cassirer, Havelock Ellis, Karl Jaspers, John Maynard Keynes, Rudolf Steiner—indelible figures—were all active in their various spheres. Short-wave radio made its earliest appearance, there was progress in sound for movies, and Einstein’s theory of relativity was borne out by astrophysical experiments. Walter Gropius developed the Bauhaus in Germany and revolutionized painting, architecture, sculpture, and the industrial arts. Kandinsky, Klee, and Modigliani were at work, and Picasso designed the set of Diaghilev’s The Three Cornered Hat. Jazz headed for Europe; the Los Angeles Symphony gave its initial concert; the Juilliard School of Music opened in New York, and the New Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Edgard Varèse, inaugurated a hearing for modern music. A nonstop flight across the Atlantic was finally accomplished. Babe Ruth hit a 587-foot home run. The Nobel Prize for Literature went to Knut Hamsun.
In short, 1919 was the beginning of a deluge of new forms, new sounds, new ventures, new arrangements in the world. And in such an hour the Academy undertook to mark the centennial of James Russell Lowell, who had died twenty-eight years before. In itself, the choice was pleasant and not inappropriate. A leading American eminence of the nineteenth century, a man of affairs as well as a man of letters, a steady opponent of slavery, Lowell was poet, critic, literary historian. He was vigorous in promoting the study of modern languages, which he taught at Harvard. He was, besides, The Atlantic Monthly’s first editor and (with Charles Eliot Norton) a founder of The North American Review. He served as American ambassador to the Court of Spain, and afterward as emissary to Britain. His complete works—both verse and prose—occupy ten volumes. According to Lowell’s biographer, Horace E. Scudder—member of the Institute and author of a laudatory Encyclopaedia Britannica article on Lowell that is virtually contemporaneous with the Academy’s celebratory event—Lowell “impressed himself deeply on his generation in America, especially upon the thoughtful and scholarly class who looked upon him as their representative.” Johnson unquestionably looked on Lowell as his representative; Lowell’s career—poet, editor, ambassador—was an ideal template for Johnson’s own.
The centennial program, subtitled “In Celebration of the Unity and Power of the Literature of the English-speaking People,” was intended to emphasize the ongoing link with the Mother Country. To further this connection, invitations went out to, among others, Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, Robert Bridges (the Poet Laureate), Rudyard Kipling, James Barrie, Conan Doyle, Gilbert Chesterton, Gilbert Murray, Arthur Quiller-Couch, Edmund Gosse, Alfred Noyes, and John Galsworthy. Ambitious though this roster was (it ran after nearly every living luminary of that scepter’d isle), only the last two accepted and actually arrived—Galsworthy with the proviso that he would attend the gala luncheon “so long as this does not entail a speech.” Stephen Leacock came with a troop of notables from Canada, and Australia was represented by one lone guest.
Still, a demonstration of the unity and power of literary Anglo-Saxonism was not, as it turned out, the whole purpose of the centennial. Nor was it precisely as an act of historic commemoration that Johnson sought to honor Lowell. On February 13, 1919, a New York newspaper, The Evening Post, explained: “James Russell Lowell, who was born a hundred years ago next week … would not have liked vers libre or modern verse in general, says Robert Underwood Johnson.… Mr. Johnson knew Lowell personally.” The Post went on to quote the Permanent Secretary’s reminiscences—“I remember hearing Lowell once say, when asked if he had read the latest novel, ‘No, I have not yet finished Shakespeare’ ”—and followed with a considerable excerpt from the rest of Johnson’s remarks:
Mr. Lowell represented in himself, as it is sometimes necessary to remind the current generation, the highest plane of learning, scholarship, and literary art, the principle of which he expounded in season and out of season in his critical writings.… His critical works furnish a body of doctrine in literary matters which is certainly preeminent in American criticism at least. In these days, when the lawlessness of the literary Bolsheviki has invaded every form of composition, it is of tonic advantage to review Lowell’s exposition of the principles of art underlying poetry and criticism.… No man studied to better purpose the range of expression afforded by the English classics or would have been more outraged by the random and fantastic productions which are classified with the poetry of the present time under the name of vers libre. While no doubt he recognized the force of Whitman, he refused to recognize him as a poet, and once retorted, when it was suggested that much of Whitman’s poetry was between prose and poetry, that there was nothing between prose and poetry.
Johnson concluded with a pledge that the Academy would take on the “agreeable duty to endeavor to accentuate the treasures of American literature which have fallen into neglect,” and hoped that the occasion would “incite our college faculties and their students to a study of the heritage which we have in the beautiful poetry and the acute and high-minded criticism of James Russell Lowell.”
To suppose that the times were ripe for a return to the prosody of Lowell was a little like a call to reinstate Ptolemy in the age of Einstein. The Lowell centennial was not so much a memorial retrospective—i.e., an unimpeachable review of a significant literary history—as it was that other thing: an instance of antiquarianism. Or—to do justice to Johnson’s credo—it was a battle-cry against the onrushing alien modernist hordes, the literary Bolsheviki.
The difficulty was that the Bolsheviki were rampant in all the arts. Young American composers—Virgil Thomson, Marc Blitzstein, Elliott Carter, Marion Bauer, Roger Sessions, Herbert Elwell, Aaron Copland, George Gershwin—were streaming toward Nadia Boulanger’s studio outside Paris for instruction in harmony (much as young American writers were streaming toward Gertrude Stein’s Paris sitting room for lessons in logic), and coming back home with extraordinary new sounds. Boulanger introduced Copland to the conductor Walter Damrosch (later President of the Academy at a time when its laces were far less strait), who joked ab
out Copland’s Symphony for Organ and Orchestra: “If a gifted young man can write a symphony like that at twenty-three, within five years he will be ready to commit murder.” What Copland called the “jazz spirit,” with its irregular rhythms and sometimes exotic instruments, was received by the more conventional critics as a kind of symphonic deicide—the old gods of rational cadence struck down by xylophones, tam-tams, Chinese woodblocks. Copland was charged with releasing a “modernist fury” of “barnyard and stable noises.” “New York withholds its admiration,” Virgil Thomson wrote of the critical atmosphere, “till assured that you are modeling yourself on central Europe.”
But experiment was unstoppable: George Gershwin was blending concert music and jazz in works commissioned by Damrosch, and Serge Koussevitsky, conducting the Boston Symphony, was presiding over Copland’s barnyard noises. Edgard Varèse, who came to the United States from Paris in 1915, reversing the flow, declared his belief in “organized sound,” or “sound-masses,” and employed cymbals, bells, chimes, castanets, slapsticks, rattles, chains, anvils, and almost every other possible percussion device, “with their contribution,” as he put it, “of a blossoming of unsuspected timbres.” His scores were often marked with “hurlant,” indicating howling, roaring, wild and strident clamor: any sound, all sounds, were music.
In the prosperity and optimism of the Twenties, proponents of the “new” music were turning their backs (and not without contempt) on traditionalists like Frederick Shepherd Converse, Edward Burlingame Hill, George Whitefield Chadwick, Reginald De Koven, Arthur Foote, Victor Herbert, and John Powell, all members of the Academy, and all continuing to compose in nineteenth-century styles. The maverick among them was John Alden Carpenter, nearly the only Academician to venture into blues, ragtime, and jazz. But in the world beyond the Academy, the matchless Louis Armstrong and other eminent black musicians were revolutionizing the American—and European—ear, and by 1927 Duke Ellington’s band in Harlem’s Cotton Club was devising original voices for trumpet and trombone. The Twenties saw an interpenetration of foreign originality as well: Sergei Rachmaninoff arrived after the Russian Revolution, and in the winter of 1925 Igor Stravinsky appeared with both the New York Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony. Three years earlier, Darius Milhaud was lecturing at Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia. Ernest Bloch, noted for chamber music and an enchantment with Hebrew melodies, became an American citizen in 1924. Arnold Schoenberg, inventor of twelve-tone technique and a refugee from Nazi Germany, emigrated to the United States in 1933, but his influence had long preceded him.
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