America Becomes "Past" Conscious

Some Reflections Growing Out of Our Increasing Interest and Pride in Our Past

JOHN PEALE BISHOP

AMERICA seems suddenly to .have become conscious—proud—of its past. Everywhere there are signs that we are delving into our early history: focussing our attention things we feel to be really indigenous.

This is made evident by the extraordinary success of recent movies, novels, plays, poems, paintings, prints and furnishings which are distinctly American (most of them early American) in theme and treatment.

This consciousness of our past has perhaps found its finest expression in the gift of the new American wing to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Contrary to the belief of the directors of the museum, who expected nothing more than to interest the few who were already interested, the new wing has almost doubled the daily attendance at the museum and made it a crowded and extremely popular institution. In the thousands who visit it daily, eloquent testimony is borne to our new feeling for sources-, to the sentiment "that blood is thicker than water", to that special wisdom which might be called being "native wise".

THE rooms in this great wing which were brought from old Connecticut farmhouses, from the early and more pretentious taverns and country mansions of the South, from the old dwellings of the well-to-do gentry of the middle colonies, and set up complete with their ceilings of pargetry and crude plastering, their side panels and walls of painted paper, with all their old furniture, portraits, coverings, and even cutlery and glassware, are something more than a curious and beautiful collection. They are an exhibition not simply of old rooms and of old furniture but the entire pageant of the American past.

The rooms from Haverhill, Philadelphia, and Oriole in Maryland, are clearly products of the eighteenth century. They have the formal grace, the purity of line, the discreet elegance which we require of that period.

This was to have been expected, though it may come as a surprise to some of the more furious collectors of early American pine, who seem to suspect the authenticity of every piece that does not have a starved and country look, to know that these colonists of a formal age demanded, in a new country, such dignity in their surroundings. What was not to be expected was that these colonial rooms should have so definitely an American quality. That quality I shall not attempt to define; we have only very recently learned that it exists; we shall have to become still more familiar with our past before it can be given an accurate definition.

Of course it must be admitted there have been stray collectors of American antiques for the last hundred years or more, just as there have been collectors of Napoleonic relics since the interval of the Hundred Days. The donors of the wing, for instance, must have been rummaging in old farmhouses and attending auctions for years. But it is only quite recently that interest in early American furniture, in Americana of all kinds has become so very general. The wing has attracted such crowds to the Metropolitan as have not been seen there in twenty years. And you have only to go to the museum yourself to surmise that the ballroom from Alexandria could not have felt the pressure of more feet, when, in. the remote past, it was a dancing floor.

WHAT has caused this lack of curiosity on the part of Americans as to their past —this pride, almost, in lack of tradition —until ignorance of our own history has become itself a sort of national tradition? Perhaps it is because, not sure of our existence as a separate race—in the sense that the French are a race— we have been afraid to consider too closely the time when we were not even a nation. We have preferred not to open our archives, for fear that, like Mother Hubbard's cupboard, they might prove bare, or else that we should find, on the dusty shelves, only Englishmen's bones. As a consequence, we have tended to assume that our national life begins on that raw March day when Andrew Jackson rode up to the White House on a bony white charger and hitched it with his own hands to the gatepost. As for the refinements of our civilization, we have taken it for granted that they date only from the installation of our first hot and cold water pipes, from the introduction into America of the enamel bathtub—whenever that was.

The American wing offers a proof, if indeed a proof is any longer needed, that there were two centuries of civilization in America before Andrew Jackson rode into the city of Washington with that backwoods rabble at his horse's heels, that horde of pioneers and politicians that mi£ht well have carried their axes in their hands, so bent were they on destroying everything fine that had preceded them.

The rooms that are shown at the Metropolitan from the seventeenth century, to be sure, have something of the rudeness which one would expect of a dwelling built on the edge of a savage wilderness; the more ornamental pieces of the period arc still largely importations. But, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, something very fine begins to emerge, which is not less native for being fine. The skill of the American craftsman increases, until at the very end of the line, working well into the nineteenth century, we have Duncan Phyfc, who, if he was Jess than Sheraton, was much more than an imitator of Sheraton.

THE finer examples of American colonial furniture are now, all over America, almost beyond price. As a consequence the more modest collectors, who are of course in the majority, have turned their acquisitive attention to early American furniture of the cottage type. Native pieces of pine, if they can be proved to be authentic, are worth more than the most laborious English mahogany. At the upper end of the collecting scale, the portraits of Copley, West and Gilbert Stuart are being valued above the paintings of their Georgian masters. A little more, and the works of the talentless Rembrandt Peale will be fetching higher prices than those of Rembrandt himself.

In another field, the books and pamphlets of the eminent early New England divines, Cotton Mather, Norton, Brainerd, Eliot, Amos Adams, Hooker, Davenport and others, as well as the works of the early voyagers who at any time touched on the American continent or the offlying islands; have steadily increased in value. Daniel Denton's A Brief Description of New York, London 1670, the first account of New York printed in English, brings considerably more a copy than the first edition of Milton's Paradise Lost. A Brief Relation of the Discovery and Plantation of New England, a pamphlet printed in England in 1622, is worth only a little less; while even in the second edition of 1685, John Eliot's Indian Bible is worth nearly twice as much—at least to collectors.

This desire to collect objects of a certain period in Ameria does not, of course, necessarily imply any serious interest in the period as a whole. The craze for Americana might be only a collector's vagary, like any other. But there are other evidences of a new interest in the American past which cannot possibly be attributed to a jackdaw sense of acquisitiveness. There is, for instance, the surprising popularity of novels which attempt to "fix" a certain period of American life, of which the best and most popular have been Mrs. Wharton's Age of Innocence and Old New York. The list might be made a long one; it is perhaps enough to mention Bali sand, The Fabulous Forties, Brownstone Front, The Dark Cloud and Sandoval. There was, to be a sure, a period of popularity for the historical novel during the late 1900s; but, to take a typical work of that period, there was no more seriousness in the attitude of the author of Alice of Old Vincennes toward the past than there would be in that of a man dressing for a costume party toward his periwig and red-heeled slippers. Whereas in Sandoval, the most romantic of the later novels, there is a conscious effort to render the manners of the seventies, to so manipulate the intrigue as to make it appear typical of the decade. Mr. Hergesheimer is as conscientious about his surface as a Chinese expert in lacquer;, and if ever one of his characters should come alive, he would find himself surrounded by all the appropriate accessories.

FORGOTTEN AMERICAN BOOKS

AND in hand with this, has gone a revival of interest in neglected American writers: Crane, Bierce, Hermann Melville. There have been a number of republications of forgotten American books, like the Memoirs of the Notorious Stefhen Burroughs, new editions of historical documents, like the Journal of Christopher Columbus, the Journal of Nicholas Cresswell, and reprints of the impressions of early visitors, English and French. There have been numerous attempts to approach the legendary figures of the past and to consider them not as myths but as men. Mr. Werner's biography of Barnum is an excellent example: it aims not merely to present a charlatan of heroic proportions but to pass a critical judgment on an age in which such a humbug could be not only possible but prodigiously successful; General Tom Thumb is made a General Grant in miniature, and the exhibitor of fabricated mermaids more representative than Lincoln. Even such a book as Dr. Pearson's Studies in Murder becomes a series of studies in the American scene; at least three of his five murders seem to be due rather to bad manners than to bad morals.

Something of the same sort has recently been reflected in the extraordinary popularity of such films as The Covered Wagon, Mr. Griffith's America, and the apparently unending list of imitations of one or the other: The Iron Horse, North of 36, Janice Meredith, Lincoln, and so on. Naturally the movies are not yet up to complete accuracy, and disclaim any satiric intent. But the success of The Covered Wagon was deserved—not by reason of its silly and banal love-story, but because it did recapture, whenever it was true to its medium, that is to say, whenever it confined itself, as the cinema should, to multitudinous moving images, something of the epic grandeur of that movement across a continent. It had moments when it was pure cinema; and at those moments it came very close to achieving the qualities of an American myth.

Whether we are yet far enough from the nineteenth century to form any just estimate of its virtues is a question, but we have certainly recovered from our first fine rage against its vices. The eminent figures of the mid-century have almost attained again their former height —through comic exaggeration. As for the plush, the haircloth sofas, the atrocious whatnotry of the eighteen-fifties, they have lost some of their ugliness and become quaint, or, to use the modern word, "amusing".

Fashion, the first American comedy, has been successfully revived in New York, as well as Uncle TomJs Cabin. The lithographic prints of Currier and Ives, which were in every American home between 1830 and 1870, are once more being eagerly sought after—and acquired at fantastic prices. Ten years ago several of them were conspicuously placed in an exhibition of bad taste.

The difficulty in the way of proper appreciation of the eighteenth century has been of quite another kind. It is not that the period is too remote, or that the break with it has been so complete; rather, I should say, the trouble has been that we were afraid that our claims to a colonial ancestry were not legitimate. There is something suspiciously British about the products of the thirteen original colonies. Even George Washington, as he becomes more alive to us all, after having had for years the marble features of an antique republican, tends to redden with the flush of a beef-eating, foxhunting English squire. And in our present mood we want nothing that is not peculiarly our own. And those who are most concerned with maintaining the American tradition seem to think that we had best leave the colonial period and the decades that immediately followed the Revolution entirely out of consideration.

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY WITH A DIFFERENCE

HIS point of view is understandable, but it restson a misapprehension. In theeighteenth century standards of taste were everywhere pretty much the same in all civilized countries. Virginia gentlemen conformed, as far as it was convenient, to the fashion of London; and London was closer than it has ever been since to Paris—or Versailles. Washington, ordering a new coach from England, gives as his personal preference that it should be green with gold trimmings, byt adds that if this will make him appear out-of-date, a more fashionable colour is to be used. The satin on the walls of the room from Petersburg, Virginia (dated 1810) now in the Metropolitan, is of the same vivid yellow that is still to be found in the music room at Malmaison. In fact, the American wing provides ample proof that America had rather completely assimilated the eighteenth century in Europe. The local touch is there, but it is subdued—which is exactly what one would have expected of a period in which even English noblemen lost some of their pride in provincialism and aspired to be citizens of the world. It would be foolish not to make use of anything that our genteel ancestors have left us on the ground that, since they were so civilized in their taste, they could not possibly be authentic Americans. As a matter of fact, they were. Washington is not a replica of Fielding's Squire Weston, in buff and blue.

The differences between our American rooms of the eighteenth century—as we see them at the Metropolitan—and rooms of the same period in England and France—or Prussia and Austria, for that matter, were slight; but as William James once said of the equally slight differences between one person and another, they are extremely important. When importation and adoption have been fully allowed for, there remains, in our eighteenth century colonial products, a distinctly American quality.

Our most distinguished architects have recognized this. For many years now, they have been modelling their houses on the village builders of New England, the carpenters, masons and joiners of the middle colonies. Abandoning the French, the British and the Italian, they have been looking to early Massachusetts, early Pennsylvania, early Virginia for their models. Mr. Guy Lowell's Piping Rock Country Club, on Long Island, is a case in point; and would be difficult to imagine anything finer or more appropriate of its kind.

What are the final implications of this new attitude toward our past? They are various of course; but none of them are very important if they are merely expressions of a sudden taste for native antiques and early New England curiosities.

But are they? Aren't all these minor expeditions into the American past related to that more general exploration of America which during the last decade has covered the continent, in search, not this time for cities of gold or fountains of youth, but for traces of an indigenous civilization?

A NEW SENSE OF IDENTITY

IT may be that we have not yet acquired complete self-consciousness as a nation. But we have certainly in the last ten years become more alive to our own qualities and more anxious for their accurate definition—a state of mind which does not in the least preclude a certain pride in whatever stands the test of being indubitably our own, whether the raciness of American speech; its steel and concrete skyscrapers; its jazz music and mechanical noise; its revues glorifying the androgynous American girl; or its myths of the early pioneers.

We are like a youth who on coming of age, is suddenly aware of *his own identity, and hence curious of everything which serves to set him apart from his fellows. It is in order to establish our character more clearly in our minds that we have begun to look into our past. The consciousness of a race, like that of an individual, is composed of memory and desire; we cannot, if we are to know ourselves, ignore either our childhood or our ancestry. And both belong to the past.

The effect of this awakening to the significance—for us—of our past can only be conjectured, but it seems fair to believe that there will be at least some important effects on American art arising out of this quickened sense of our own essential quality, this fresh attempt to know ourselves; for, what and how a people conceive of themselves must profoundly influence their art.