Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815
Page 71
The new Republic seemed to have no place for idle pleasure. In comedies, the playwrights’ moral messages continually got in the way of humor. If there were to be amusement, it had to be what was commonly called “rational amusement.” The theater, wrote the sometime playwright and feminist Judith Sargent Murray, had to become “chaste and discreetly regulated.” Then “young persons will acquire a refinement of manners; they will learn to think, speak and act with propriety; a thirst for knowledge will be originated; and from attentions, at first, perhaps, constituting only the amusement of the hour, they will gradually proceed to more important inquiries.”55
Even the moral purpose of the arts was not always enough to justify them. Rather than simply describing the arts as benefactions to mankind, Americans felt compelled to measure them by their contributions to the country’s material prosperity, celebrating them, for example, as stimulants to the marble, granite, clay, glass, and cotton industries.56 In Benjamin Latrobe’s oration before the Society of Artists in 1811, which, he said, was “an attempt to remove the prejudices which oppose the establishment of the fine arts among us,” he hesitantly mentioned that, if necessary, “I could call up the spirit of commerce to aid me,” which he then proceeded to do, listing Josiah Wedgwood’s dishes, John Boydell’s prints, and other “demons of cupidity, and of avarice” on behalf of the arts.57
UNDER THESE KINDS of utilitarian pressures the distinction between the fine and useful arts so painstakingly worked out over the previous century was now blurred. Since no one had any doubt of the value of the useful arts in contrast to the fine arts, Joseph Hopkinson went to great lengths to show how helpful the fine arts would be to “the carpenter, the mason, nay, the mechanic of every description.”58 But it was difficult to justify the fine arts to a large public, and American writers and artists like Alexander Wilson, Robert Fulton, and Samuel F. B. Morse eventually found it easy and more profitable to move into the more defensibly useful endeavors involving science and technology.
Young Morse, like other American painters, had been eager to pursue “the intellectual branch of the art,” by which he meant history-painting, and in 1811 he went off to Europe to learn the art. Although his mother tried to set him straight—” you must not expect to paint anything in this country for which you will receive any money to support you, but portraits”—he returned from Europe with the “ambition to be among those who shall revive the splendor of the fifteenth century; to rival the genius of a Raphael, a Michael Angelo, or a Titian.” Above all, he said, he did not want to end up “lowering my noble art to a trade, . . . degrading myself and the soul-enlarging art which I possess to the narrow idea of merely making money.” The temptation was there, but he rejected it. “No, never will I degrade myself by making a trade of a profession. If I cannot live a gentleman, I will starve a gentleman.”59
But no one would give a commission for a history painting, and Morse was eventually reduced to traveling about New England painting heads for fifteen dollars apiece. His idealized picture of the Old House of Representatives, from which he hoped to earn a fortune on tour, was not moralistically theatrical enough for viewers, and the tour was a failure; Congress refused to buy the painting, and it ended up cracked and dusty in a New York warehouse. Ultimately, Morse was able to find monetary reward only by inventing the telegraph and the code to which he gave his name.60
The neoclassical and republican desire to bring the arts to a wider public, to involve the whole citizenry in enlightenment and cultivation, created a popular cultural monster that could not be controlled. Instead of refining the taste of the people, the arts themselves, in their attempts to comprehend the ever enlarging public, became vulgarized. The self-taught artist John Durand may have advertised that his paintings were in accord with the “best taste and judgment in all polite nations in every age.” But he knew that if he were to survive, he would also have to be willing, “either for cash, short credit, or country produce,” to “paint, gild, and varnish wheel carriages; and put coats of arms, or ciphers, upon them, in a neater and more lasting manner than ever was done in this country.”61 No one wanted any sort of painting but portraits or landscapes, and those artists who sought to commemorate great historical events on canvas had to turn their paintings into panoramas, oversized spectacles designed for carnival-like exhibition. John Vanderlyn’s effort to paint classical history, his Marius Musing amid the Ruins of Carthage, went unsold, and with well-to-do spectators, mostly Federalists, not all that eager to view anything French, even his huge panorama of Versailles lost money.62
The maudlin moralizing efforts of Parson Mason Weems to humanize George Washington for ordinary people were a vulgar perversion of the ennobling art of history-writing. Yet his brief popularized life of Washington, which included mythical stories such as young Washington cutting down the cherry tree, influenced American attitudes in ways that John Marshall’s five-volume biography could not.
Marshall, who published his life and times of Washington between 1804 and 1807, was interested only in the public life of the great man, and in his first volume not even that: it covered the entire colonial period and scarcely mentioned the subject of the biography. Unlike Weems’s biography, which concentrated on Washington’s boyhood and early manhood, Marshall’s second volume dismissed Washington’s youth in a single page.
Although John Adams assured Marshall in 1806 that his biography of Washington would create “a more glorious and durable Memorial of your Hero, than a Mausoleum would have been, of dimensions Superiour to the proudest pyramid of Egypt,” seven years later Adams told Jefferson that Marshall’s work had indeed become “a Mausolaeum,” resembling a pyramid that was “100 feet square at the base and 200 feet high,” and all part of what he called “the impious Idolatry to Washington.” Although Bushrod Washington, Marshall’s collaborator, blamed the poor subscription sales of Marshall’s Life of George Washington on the use of postal agents, who, he said, were mostly “democrats” who did not “feel a disposition to advance the work,” the volumes were in fact too long, too formal, and too slowly published to attract many buyers.63
By contrast, Weems’s fast-paced and fanciful biography sold thousands of copies and went through twenty-nine editions in two decades and a half following its publication in 1800. The public wanted Weems’s human interest stories, even if they were fabricated. Weems’s new sort of popular biography naturally disgusted some traditional reviewers, who said that the author “often transports us from a strain of religious moralizing . . . to the low cant and balderdash of the ranks and drinking table.” But it awed others, who feared that this outrageous peddler-preacher and his popular biographies were endowed with “the power of doing considerable good, and considerable mischief, among the lower orders of readers in this country.”64
Literature was supposed to be morally instructive, and most of the American novels published in the early Republic were intended to control sexual license and teach self-discipline, especially among young women. In fact, many of the novels, such as William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy (1789) and Hannah Foster’s The Coquette (1797), were designed to replace the advice manuals, which were increasingly regarded, as one writer said, as “too generally tedious, and often uninteresting in the lively idea of youth.” Better to insinuate morality “through the medium of history or even of fiction,” which could “answer the same end, in a manner unquestionably more agreeable.”65
Since these seduction novels were supposed to be true, their descriptions of the illicit love affairs became more and more obtrusively exciting and the overlaid moral lessons more and more transparent and gratuitous. Although themes of seduction tended to dominate the stories published in the periodicals of the period, most people ended up reading these sensual tales not to be reformed but to be titillated. Many of the seduction novels seemed to make the socially unacceptable but passionate suitor more attractive than the male character that society and the young woman’s parents regarded as the appropriate m
ate. The writers railed against seduction, but at the same time they aroused sexual desire with erotically charged descriptions of the seductions. In Foster’s The Coquette, for example, the libertine male character spends the night in the room of heroine Eliza Wharton and is seen sneaking away in the early morning hours by one of Eliza’s female friends, who no doubt voiced the feelings of many readers in remarking: “My blood thrilled with horror at this sacrifice of virtue.”66
INSTITUTIONS THAT WERE PRIMARILY DESIGNED to benefit artists had a hard time getting established. Artists in America initially tried to organize, as artists in England did, in order to create a school of the fine arts that would, as an advertisement promised, “supersede the necessity and save the expense of a foreign education.” In 1794 Charles Willson Peale brought together thirty artists to form a society in emulation of the Royal Academy or the Society of Artists in England, to which he had belonged when he was in London. Peale’s academy was designed for art instruction and exhibitions of the artists’ works. The members of the society, which grew to over sixty in several weeks, called their organization “the Columbianum, or American Academy of the Fine Arts,” a takeoff of “Athenaeum,” which Americans in other cities were calling their institutions of cultural promotion. At the outset many of the members were foreign immigrants, especially English immigrants of middle age and often mediocre talent, including John James Barralet, Robert Field, and George Isham Parkyns, seeking to advance their careers in this new land of opportunity. These English immigrants, as Field told a colleague back home, saw a chance of “making a figure in an Academy of Arts and Sciences now establishing here, the plans of which is the most enlarged, liberal and grand of any in the world.” To top it off, he said, President George Washington would become its honorary patron just as King George III was the patron of the Royal Academy.
This proposal of the president as patron was too much for Peale and the Jefferson Republicans, who saw themselves as simply a group of workmen coming together for mutual advantage; and they attacked the Englishmen as men “who fancy themselves a better order of beings,” and “who started up from the hot-beds of monarchy, and think themselves lords of the human kind.” Giuseppe Ceracchi, the hot-tempered Italian neoclassical sculptor who had come to America in the 1790s with the aim of erecting a hundred-foot marble memorial to American liberty and its heroes, was especially incensed by the monarchical suggestion of the Englishmen, and a spirited debate in the press followed.
This debate and the expression of support for radical republicanism angered many of the English immigrants and other conservative members, and early in 1795 eight of them withdrew to form another organization. The two organizations fought for weeks in the press over their names, until, first, the English separatist organization collapsed, and then several months later Peale’s academy finally died as well.67
By the early nineteenth century supporters of the arts had come to realize that the English model of a learned academy of artists did not fit American conditions. If artistic institutions were to exist in America, they would have to be formed by prominent and well-to-do laymen and benefit not the struggling artists but a society very much in need of sophistication. The Society of Fine Arts in New York, formed in 1802 and later called the American Academy of the Fine Arts, set the pattern. Although its lay subscribers, such as Robert R. Livingston and the wealthy merchant John R. Murray, realized that such an academy might eventually help to “bring the Genius of this Country to perfection,” they knew that there was a far more pressing need for the society to improve the artistic taste of the public, including not just middling artisans but even their fellow wealthy merchants, lawyers, and landowners. Since “the great Mass of our Gentry . . . want a little of the Leaven of Taste,” lamented Murray, raising the gentry’s taste had to be the first priority. Livingston and the other laymen wanted to display pieces sent from Europe, copies of the paintings of old masters and casts, as Livingston put it, of “the most admired works of the ancient Greek and Roman sculptors.” Unfortunately, the American artists, who naturally wanted to display their own works, did not agree, and the academy divided and stagnated.68
A similar disparity of interests plagued the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, formed in 1805. The first exhibition, held in 1807, once again organized by Peale, was dominated by casts of European sculptures and several paintings by contemporary English artists and some old masters, which, since they came without labels, gave Peale a great deal of difficulty. He could not decide, for example, whether a picture entitled Cain and Abel was painted by Titian or Poussin.69
Having the wealthy lay patrons of the city encourage a love of art among the general public by these sorts of exhibitions was not what American artists wanted. They continued to desire an institution that would help them improve their craft and earn them some money. In 1810 a large group of Pennsylvania painters, architects, sculptors, and engravers—numbering a hundred within six months—tried once again to organize as the Society of Artists of the United States. At first the society tried to merge with the academy, but the different aims and interests were too great, and the effort failed. An attempt in 1809 to establish an academy of art in Boston came to nothing, largely because Gilbert Stuart, the great portrait painter and Boston’s leading artist in residence, objected on the grounds that “too often the founders of such institutions were endowed with more wealth than knowledge of art.”70
As long as artists were told that their primary task was to spread a knowledge of art throughout the society—in the words of William Tudor writing in Boston’s North American Review, to “feel something of a missionary spirit” in improving “the taste of the publick”—they could scarcely develop much sense of artistic autonomy. Indeed, as historian Neil Harris points out, “the intellectual and moral autonomy of American artists did not disappear under civic attack; it never existed.”71
These educational efforts to raise the people’s artistic taste often became so frantic that they created their own distortions. Precisely because Susannah Rowson’s racy story of seduction, Charlotte Temple (1794), went through forty-two editions in two dozen years, guardians of taste felt pressed to exaggerate the likes of British novelist Maria Edgeworth, whose heavily didactic novels ranked her, or so the North American Review claimed, among “the greatest reformers who have given a new direction to the faculties and opinions of mankind.” Andrews Norton, an important Boston Federalist intellectual and later professor of sacred literature at Harvard, even thought that Edgeworth’s works, all of which were intended to inculcate morality, integrity, and good sense, even at the expense of plot and character development, “entitle her to a reputation as enviable, perhaps, as that of any writer in English literature.”72
By the early nineteenth century these developments were reshaping American culture. In the pre-democratic world of the eighteenth century cultivation or learning was considered to be unitary and homogeneous, involving all aspects of the arts and sciences, and regarded primarily as a personal qualification for participation in polite society. Indeed, to be learned was the equivalent of being a gentleman. Cultivated persons had no doubt of the existence of vulgar bucolic habits like bear-baiting or eating with one’s hands, but they scarcely had seen these crude plebeian customs as some sort of popular culture set in competitive opposition to the enlightened republic of letters.
The Revolution and the relating of art to the public were not supposed to destroy the cultivated elite and threaten its standards but only broaden its sources of recruitment and elevate the taste of society as a whole. Yet the explosive expansion of literate middling sorts was having the opposite effect. The republic of letters was rapidly degenerating, “sliding,” as Federalist Theodore Dehon complained in 1807, “inadvertently into a democracy.”73
Many of the novels of the period were designed for untutored readers. They were small and easily carried and could be held in one hand. Their plots were straightforward, their vocabulary undemanding, and their syntax unsop
histicated. Since they were often designed to instruct while they amused, they became an important means by which many marginally educated persons acquired an acquaintance with the larger world. The novels offered their readers who lacked a classical education Greek and Latin quotations conveniently translated. They also provided readers with devices—by contextually defining unusual words, for example—by which they could enlarge their vocabulary or improve their writing skills. Epistolary novels supplied models for readers to write their own letters. For women especially, novel-reading was a way of acquiring an education otherwise denied to them. In fact, all of these early American novels, observes their modern historian, “played a vital role in the early education of readers previously largely excluded from the elite literature and culture.”74
The playwright and critic William Dunlap had been convinced that the theater was the most powerful engine for promoting morality in the society. But by the early nineteenth century he had come to realize that a significant distinction had arisen between “the wise and good,” who learned “lessons [of] patriotism, virtue, morality, religion” from attending plays, and “the uneducated, the idle, and profligate,” whose tastes were so bad as to lead “mercenary managers” to put on “such ribaldry or folly, or worse, as is attractive to such patrons, and productive of profit to themselves.” Dunlap was torn between his desire to save the unenlightened and boorish populace from their degeneracy and his fear that they were corrupting the theater and turning it into “a breeding ground for ignorance and depravity.” He had tried to bring enlightenment to the populace, but people wanted only to be entertained. To keep his theater going he hired jugglers and acrobatic performers, including a man who whirled around on his head, with firecrackers attached to his heels. Even melodramas did not satisfy his audiences, and his theater went bankrupt in 1805. Dunlap had learned his lesson: he recalled that he was “one who had on trial found circumstances too strong for his desires of reform, and who, after a struggle of years (with ruined health and fortunes) gave up the contest without giving up the wish or the hope.” If the legitimate drama were to continue in middle-class America, it had to meet popular taste and share the stage with bizarre novelty acts.75