“America has no tradition. She has no culture-history.”
Therefore, she is damned.
Europe invariably arrives at this self-congratulatory conclusion, usually from the same stock starting-point, the same phrase about tradition and culture. Moreover it usually gets Americans in the eye, for they really haven’t anything more venerable than the White House, or more primitive than Whistler. Which they ought to be thankful for, boldly proclaiming this thankfulness.
Americans in Italy, however, are very humble and deprecating. They know their nakedness, and beg to be forgiven. They prostrate themselves with admiration, they knock their foreheads in front of our elegant fetishes. Poor, void America, crude, barbaric America, the Cinquescents knew her not. How thankful she ought to be! She doesn’t know when she is well off.
Italy consists of just one big arrangement of things to be admired. Every step you take, you get a church or a coliseum between your eyes, and down you have to go, on your knees in admiration. Down go the Americans, till Italy fairly trembles with the shock of their dropping knees.
It is a pity. It is a pity that Americans are always so wonderstruck by our — note the possessive adjective — cultural monuments. Why they are any more mine than yours, I don’t know — except that I have a British passport to validity my existence, and you have an American. However . . .
After all, a heap of stone is only a heap of stone — even if it is Milan Cathedral. And who knows that it isn’t a horrid bristly burden on the face of the earth? So why should the Corriere delta Sera remark with such sniffy amusement: “Of course they were duly impressed, and showed themselves overcome with admiration” — they being the Knights of Columbus, i Cavaliere di Colombo.
The Knights of Columbus were confessedly funny in Milan. But once more, why not? The dear, delicate-nosed, supercilious Anna Comnena found Bohemund and Tancred and Godfrey of Bouillon funny enough, in Constantinople long ago. And well-nurtured Romans never ceased to be amused by the gaping admiration of Goths and Scythians inside some forum or outside some temple, until the hairy barbarians stopped gaping and started to pull the wonder to pieces.
Of course, Goths and Scythians and Tancred and Bohemund had no tradition behind them. Luckily for them, for they would never have got so far with such impedimenta. As a matter of fact, once they had a tradition they were fairly harnessed. And if Rome could only have harnessed them in time, she might have made them pull her ponderous uncouth Empire across a few more centuries. However, men with such good names as Alaric and Attila were not going to open their mouths so easily to take the bit of Roman tradition.
You might as well sneer at a lad for not having a grey beard as jibe at a young people for not having a tradition. A tradition, like a bald head, comes with years, fast enough. And culture, more often than not, is a weary saddle for a jaded race.
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever. Let us live in hopes. But it isn’t the end of all joys. There are as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it: quite as good as that prickly sea-urchin of Milan Cathedral, O Knights of Columbus! As for the sea — la mer, c’est moi. I.a mer, c’est aussi votis, o Chevaliers de Colombe. Which is to say, there are quite as many wonders enfathomed in the human spirit as ever have come out of it: be they Milan Cathedral or the Coliseum or the Bridge of Sighs. And in the strange and undrawn waters of the Knights of Columbus, what wonders of beauty, etc., do not swim un- revealed? A fig for the spiny cathedral of Milan. Whence all this prostration before it?
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever. But there’s more than one old joy. It isn’t the limit. Do you expect me to gasp in front of Ghir- landajo, that life has reached its limit, and there’s no more to be done? You can’t fix a high-water mark to human activity: not till you start to die. Here is Europe swimming in the stagnation of the ebb, and congratulating itself on the long line of Cathedrals, Coliseums, Ghirlandajos which mark the horizon of the old high water: people swarming like the little crabs in the lagoons of Venice, in seas gone dead, and scuttling and gaping and pluming themselves conceitedly on the vision of St. Mark’s and San Giorgio, looming up magic on the sky-and-water line beyond.
Alas for a people when its tradition is established, and its limit of beauty defined. Alas for a race which has an exhibition of modern paintings such as the one in the Gardens at Venice, in this year of grace 1920. What else is left but to look back to Tintoret? Let it look back then.
Let the beauty of Venice be a sort of zenith to us, beyond which there is no seeing. Let Lincoln Cathedral fan her wings in our highest heaven, like an eagle at our pitch of flight. We can do no more. We have reached our limits of beauty. But these are not the limits of all beauty. They are not the limit of all things: only of us.
Therefore St. Mark’s need be no reproach to an American. It isn’t his St. Mark’s. It is ours. And we like crabs ramble in the slack waters and gape at the excess of our own glory. Behold our golden Venice, our Lincoln Cathedral like a dark bird in the sky at twilight. And think of our yesterdays! What would you not give, O America, for our yesterdays? Far more than they are worth, 1 assure you. What would not I give for your tomorrows!
One begins to understand the barbarian rage against the great monuments of civilization. “Go beyond that, if you can.” We say to the Americans, pointing to Venice among the waters. And the American humbly admits that it can’t be done. Rome said the same thing to Attila, years gone by. “Get beyond Aquileia, get beyond Padua, you barbarian!” Attila promptly kicked Aquileia and Padua to smithereens, and walked past. Hence Venice. If Attila or some other barbaric villain hadn’t squashed the cities of the Adriatic head, we should have had no Venice. Shall be bewail Aquileia or praise our Venice? Is Attila a reprehensible savage, or a creator in wrath?
Of course, it is simple for America. Venice isn’t really in her way, as Aquileia was in the way of Attila, or Rome in the way of the Goths. Attila and the Goths had to do some kicking. The Americans can merely leave us to our monuments.
There are limits. But there are no limits to the human race. The human race has no limits. The Milanese fished that prickly sea-bear of a cathedral out of the deeps of their own soul, and have never been able to get awav from it. But the Knights of Columbus depart by the next train.
Happy is the nation which hasn’t got a tradition and which lacks cultural monuments. How gay Greece must have been, while Egypt was sneering at her for an uneducated young nobody, and what a good time Rome was having, whilst Hellas was looking down a cultured and supercilious nose at her. There’s as fine fish in the sea as ever came out of it.
America, therefore, should leave off being quite so prostrate with admiration. Beauty is beauty, and must have its wistful time- hallowed dues. But the human soul is father and mother of all man- created beauty. An old race, like an old parent, sits watching the golden past. But the golden glories of the old are only fallen leaves about the feet of the young. It is an insult to life itself to be too abject, too prostrate before Milan Cathedral or a Ghirlandajo. What is Milan Cathedral but a prickly, empty burr dropped off the tree of life! The nut was eaten even in Sforza days.
What a young race wants is not a tradition nor a bunch of culture monuments. It wants an inspiration. And you can’t acquire an inspiration as you can a culture or a tradition, by going to school and by growing old.
You must first have faith. Not rowdy and tub-thumping, but steady and deathless, faith in your own unrevealed, unknown destiny. The future is not a finished product, like the past. The future is a strange, urgent, poignant responsibility, something which urges inside a young race like sap, or like pregnancy, urging towards fulfilment. This urge you must never betray and never deny. It is more than all tradition, more than all law, more than all standards or monuments. Let the old world and the old way have been what they may, this is something other. Abide by that which is coming, not by that which has come.
And turn for the support and the confirmation not to the perfected past, that which is set in perfection as monuments of human passage. But turn to the unresolved, the rejected.
Let Americans turn to America, and to that very America which has been rejected and almost annihilated. Do they want to draw sustenance for the future? They will never draw it from the lovely monuments of our European past. These have an almost fatal narcotic, dream-luxurious effect upon the soul. America must turn again to catch the spirit of her own dark, aboriginal continent.
That which was abhorrent to the Pilgrim Fathers and to the Spaniards, that which was called the Devil, the black Demon of savage America, this great aboriginal spirit the Americans must recognize again, recognize and embrace. The devil and anathema of our forefathers hides the Godhead which we seek.
Americans must take up life where the Red Indian, the Aztec, the Maya, the Incas left it off. They must pick up the life-thread where the mysterious Red race let it fall. They must catch the pulse of the life which Cortes and Columbus murdered. There lies the real continuity: not between Europe and the new States, but between the murdered Red America and the seething White America. The President should not look back towards Gladstone or Cromwell or Hilde- brand, but towards Montezuma. A great and lovely life-form, unper- fected, fell with Montezuma. The responsibility for the producing and the perfecting of this life-form devolves upon the new American. It is time he accepted the full responsibility. It means a surpassing of the old European life-form. It means a departure from the old European morality, ethic. It means even a departure from the old range of emotions and sensibilities. The old emotions are crystallized for ever among the European monuments of beauty. There we can leave them, along with the old creeds and the old ethical laws outside of life. Montezuma had other emotions, such as we have not known or admitted. We must start from Montezuma, not from St. Francis or St. Bernard.
As Venice wedded the Adriatic, let America embrace the great dusky continent of the Red Man. It is a mysterious, delicate process, no theme for tub-thumping and shouts of Expositions. And yet it is a theme upon which American writers have touched and touched again, uncannily, unconsciously, blindfold as it were. Whitman was almost conscious; only the political democracy issue confused him. Now is the day when Americans must become fully self-reliantly conscious of their own inner responsibility. They must be ready for a new act, a new extension of life. They must pass the bounds.
To your tents, O America. Listen to your own, don’t listen to Europe.