Fame & Folly (43 page)

The public meeting honoring Molière—or his latterday representatives—was held at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on April 25, 1922. A day earlier the visitors had been taken uptown to see the site of the new Temple, and then were conducted back to the temporary Academy building at 15 West Eighty-first Street for tea and a speech by Butler: “I well recall that in his subtle and quite unrivaled study of French traits, our associate, Mr. Brownell, pointed out that while among the French the love of knowledge is not more insatiable than with us, it is infinitely more judicious.… precision, definiteness, proportion, are certain marks of what is truly French.” “The aim of the American Academy,” he continued, “must for long years to come be to rescue a people’s art and a people’s letters from what is vulgar, from what is provincial, from what is pretense, and to raise a standard to which the lovers of the beauty of loveliness and the lovers of the beauty of dignity may, with confidence and satisfaction, repair.”

Precision, definiteness, proportion were truly French; vulgarity, provinciality, pretense were truly American. The literary foreigners may have been flattered by what seemed to be homage born of New World insecurity, but since Butler’s list of American flaws covered not only homegrown philistinism but also international modernism (“pretense”), the French were surely implicated in the latter. It was France, after all, that had produced Matisse and Milhaud and Jules Laforgue (who had influenced Eliot)—not to mention the French infatuation with jazz, and Paris’s harboring of suspect American types like Gertrude Stein. And if the laughing ghost of Molière had come to the feast, would it have chosen to side with the deadly predictable purveyors of “the beauty of loveliness” or with the syncopated ironists of modernism?

In 1925 Robert Underwood Johnson was still incorrigibly at war with the new poets. The recoil from modernism he enshrined as a cause; and what was Johnson’s cause was bound to become the Academy’s cause, very nearly its
raison d’être
. (The first cracks in anti-modernism would not occur until late in the decade, and then—torrentially—in the 1930’s and 1940’s.) On November 23, 1925, in a letter to
Who’s Who in America
, presenting himself as an incarnation of the Temple’s eternality, Johnson requested that he be identified as “an antagonist of free verse and author of a criticism of it in an address before the Academy entitled ‘The Glory of Words.’ ” “The modernists,” he complained in that talk, “wish to exalt into poetic association words that heretofore have not been considered poetic.… Naturally such an attempt is conspicuously deficient in the glory of words.” The “metrical product of the revolutionists,” he went on, was “unimaginative,” “monotonously conventional,” and “objectionably sophisticated—individualism run to seed.” And: “They are determined to make silk purses out of sows’ ears.” “Because the Muses no longer rule there must be no allusion to Parnassus; the Muses are not ‘factual’ and must go by the board.” “The chief promise of poetry is to express the pervasive and permanent spiritual forces of all time.”

Although Johnson’s zeal on behalf of Miss Thomas had failed to win her an Academy honor, his fight against Robert Frost did not abate. To Booth Tarkington he wrote:

To our ears these are largely unrecognizable minor deities. Johnson’s own Parnassus has not gathered them to its bosom. And if Polyhymnia, having anointed (sparingly) Edward MacDowell and Victor Herbert, remains cool to Frederick Shepherd Converse
and George Whitefield Chadwick, while smiling palely on Horatio Parker chiefly for his connection with Charles Ives, what of the painters’ Muse? Edith Thomas as poet and John Powell as composer may be confined to the category of antiquarian curios, but (for instance) Joseph Pennell and Childe Hassam are not. (Anyone examining the superbly evocative Pennell drawings that accompany Henry James’s
Collected Travel Writings
, reissued in 1993 by the Library of America, will be stirred by what we call permanence in art: that which cannot date.)

Repeatedly infuriated by the encroachments of new modes of literary expression and helpless before its tide—Robinson and Frost were both admitted to the Academy, in 1927 and 1930 respectively—Johnson was determined that the Temple should make an indelible statement at least in the graphic arts. One effort toward that end, the attempt to put a museum in every state, fizzled. A second idea both survived and prospered: this was to establish a collection by Academicians and other American painters. Johnson worked closely with the earliest Committee on Art, then known as the Committee on Art Censorship—a name that may suggest the prescriptive tastes of its three members: the painter and critic Kenyon Cox, the sculptor Herbert Adams, and the architect Cass Gilbert. Paintings were solicited from private collectors and through bequests. Since one of Johnson’s motives was to promote and augment the influence of the Academy, it is no wonder that portraits dominated, or that the collection was based, by and large, on the products of its own members. Johnson was relentless in going after contributions, especially from the freshly widowed wives of deceased Academicians. The collection expanded to cover etchings, lithographs, engravings, small sculptures, photographs, memorabilia, and manuscripts.

To display the Academy’s riches, the year 1927 saw four public events: separate exhibits honoring Academicians Childe Hassam, Timothy Cole, and Joseph Pennell, and an “Exhibition of Manuscripts Representing the First Century of American Independence”—which included the notebooks of John Burroughs and letters by Academy members Henry Adams, Charles Francis Adams, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Julia Ward Howe, William Dean
Howells, Thomas Wentworth Higginson (the very Higginson who had chided Emily Dickinson for “spasmodic” and “uncontrolled” verse), Henry James, Henry Charles Lea, Edmund Clarence Stedman, and Richard Henry Stoddard. Manuscripts by Emerson, Hawthorne, and Whitman were also on exhibit. As a mendicant on behalf of the Academy, Johnson was astoundingly tireless, and his solicitations ended only with his death in 1937. With Johnson gone, the Academy’s policy for both artists and writers (and for musicians and composers as well) moved from mainly self-reflecting acquisition to outward-looking prodigality: awards to the young at the start of their careers.

A few days after the Timothy Cole event, Huntington presented the Academy with a gift of $100,000 as an endowment for future exhibits. The permanent collection, and the new plan for ongoing showings by painters, were designed to set a standard for American cultural aspiration. So were the concerts and recitals sponsored by the Academy during the decade of the Twenties: what was to be emphasized, George Whitefield Chadwick urged, was “the development of
American Music
(not by foreign musicians, no matter how accomplished),” But the pressure for indigenous American achievement—a sign of the early Academy’s sense of its own inferiority before the age and weight of Europe’s cultural cargo—was nowhere more pronounced than in the preoccupation with American speech. President Sloane warned of “a stream of linguistic tendency, prone to dangerous flood and devastating inundation,” alluding no doubt to the postwar immigration. Yet native-born journalists were almost as perilous a threat as foreigners spilling into the country: “How are we to justify the diction of the press,” William Roscoe Thayer inquired, “through which pours an incessant stream of slang, vulgarism, grammatical blunders, and rhetorical crudity?” Responding, the press—in the shape of the Boston
Herald
of December 15, 1926—pretended to take up the case of an instance of ambiguity in the use of “is” and “are,” which was being placed before the Temple for adjudication: “After having brought half the dilettantes and intellectuals of the nation in futile disagreement, one of the worst sentences ever
written will soon arrive at the Academy of Arts and Letters in search of further trouble.”

Further trouble? Such playfulness—or mockery—could hardly sit well with the Permanent Secretary. The function of the Academy, Johnson grandly noted, was to reject “invasions from the ribbon counter” and to “stand against the slovenly, and for the dignified and effective use of words.” This meant also the
sound
of words. In a radio talk invoking the Academy’s various causes, Mrs. Vanamee testified to the excitements of clear enunciation:

Mrs. Vanamee was plainly not in line for a medal honoring Style.

T
HE RIBBON COUNTER
, along with the Academy’s defunct ribbon badge, has vanished; it is a different Academy today. For one thing, though born of the Institute, the Academy has swallowed up its progenitor. What was once two bodies, joined like Siamese twins in any case, is now a single organization—diverse, welcoming, lavishly encouraging to beginners in the arts. Yet what Hamlin Garland remarked on long ago remains: a quantity of seasoned gray heads—few of whom, however, are polemically inclined to retrogressive views. Crusty elitism is out. The presence of women goes unquestioned. Ethnic parochialism is condemned. No one regards experiment as a revolutionary danger. And by now modernism, which seventy years ago seemed so disruptive to the history-minded, is itself an entrenched tradition with a lengthening history of its own—even fading off into the kind of old-fashionedness that derives from repetitiveness, imitation, overfamiliarity. Modernism has grown as tranquil as Robert Underwood
Johnson’s Parnassus; and what postmodernism is, or will become, we hardly know.

Do these white-bearded, high-collared gentlemen of the old Academy—who live out the nineteenth century’s aesthetic and intellectual passions right up to the lip of the Great Depression—strike us as “quaint”? Condescending and unholy word! Unholy, because it forgets that death and distance beckon us, too: our turn lies just ahead. Possibly we are already quaintly clothed, as unaware that we are retrograde as Kenyon Cox and Royal Cortissoz before Matisse, or Robert Underwood Johnson in the face of T. S. Eliot and Marianne Moore. Despite our ingrained modernist heritage, we may, after all, discover ourselves to be more closely linked to the print-loyal denizens of the Twenties Temple than we are to the cybernetic future. If a brittle and browning 1924 Mencken clipping testifies to the cultural irrelevance of the official humanists of two generations ago, the loss of a fixed and bound text, if it occurs—bringing a similar disorientation to fixed expectations—may be as cataclysmic for us as Cubism was to the votaries of Beaux Arts.

And if time has reduced Robert Underwood Johnson and his solemnly spiritualized colleagues to toys for our irony, what does that signify? Probably that (given our modernist habits) we value irony more than dignity, and what does
that
signify? The “mystic nobles,” as Mencken called them, of the Academy’s third decade lacked irony; but they also lacked cynicism. When they sermonized on “nobility of character,” they believed in its likelihood, and even in its actual presence. When Johnson honored “Beauty changeless and divine,” he took it for granted that the continuity of a civilization is a sacred covenant. A review of
American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century
, a pair of Library of America volumes published in 1993 and edited by John Hollander, a contemporary Academician, adds this perspective: “Just as the spare acerbity of early modernism must have looked bracingly astringent to writers and readers grown weary of nineteenth-century rotundities, so today … these relics of another age are deeply refreshing.”

We who are postmodern inheritors of the violent whole of the twentieth century no longer dare to parade—even if we privately
hold them—convictions of virtue, harmony, nobility, wisdom, beauty; or of their sources. But (setting aside irony, satire, condescension, and the always arrogant power of the present to diminish the past), the ideals of the Temple, exactly as Johnson conceived them,
are
refreshing to an era tormented by unimaginable atrocity and justifiable cynicism. Nor are those ideals precisely “relics.” Suppose Johnson had chosen Frank Lloyd Wright as architect for the new building; what might the Academy have looked like then? If it is good to have the Guggenheim Museum’s inventiveness, it is also good to have the Academy’s Venetian palace, just as Stanford White and Charles McKim dreamed it.

Or what if the Academy’s art committee had allied itself with, say, Alfred Stieglitz’s “291” gallery, the heart and muscle of the modernist cause? What if Robert Frost and Charles Ives had been admitted to membership in 1918? Or H. L. Mencken?

Such speculations instantly annihilate the history of the Temple’s credo between the Great War and the Great Depression. Worse, they wipe out the name and (noble) character of the redoubtable Robert Underwood Johnson, and who would want that?