I
Perhaps it has not occurred to many people that the artist in Canada is more difficultly placed than artists have ever been before in any country. My original conception, in planning this book, was that it should deal as much with the handicaps and complications which beset artists in Canada as it does with their achievements. As editor I have attempted to provide contributions that discuss what might be called the soil of our art, as well as others which chronicle its blossoming. And as contributor—in this general introduction—my hope is to sketch a composite picture of the background against which all artists in Canada work, thus unifying the more intensive impressions of special observers in the various fields covered by this volume.
To make clear the claim contained in the first sentence it is necessary that the function of the artist should be stated as simply as possible. (It will be understood that when I speak of the artist, throughout this introduction, I mean to include and typify artists using any conceivable channel of expression; in other words, I am dealing with a certain kind of man and not with certain categories of craftsmen.)
The artist—to put the matter as inelaborately as possible, and, at the same time, to take the highest view—is a person whose experiences crystallize into unified wholes that can be embodied in some medium, as contrasted with persons whose experiences seem fragmentary, unrelated and chaotic.
The artist is not, I believe, distinguished from the layman either in the nature of his experiences or in the quality of his emotional reaction to them. The quantity or character of a man’s experiences apparently have little to do with art, otherwise a man who has actually committed a murder might be expected to write a better tragedy than Macbeth, whose author, we may suppose, was never guilty of taking another’s life. The quality or intensity of a man’s emotional reactions can have little to do with art either, otherwise we might be led to the conclusion that the most hysterical people should make the greatest artists.
No; the faculty that differentiates the artist from the man in the street is what Coventry Patmore, I think, called “unitive apprehension.” It is simply the faculty of seeing things together and related which normal people feel are all “at sixes and sevens.”
When the artist is able thus to unify a certain experience, which is his special faculty, he proceeds to the extrication of it as a whole and the placing of it on paper or canvas or in wood or stone or what not, which is his special function. Faculty and function are not always equal, of course. Some artists are more adept at “unitive apprehension” than they are dexterous in the function of extrication and reproduction. Others possess great fluency in the embodiment of their experiences, but the faculty of relating and concentrating those experiences into wholes that have a new structure and life of their own is perhaps deficient, and hence their experiences do not count for much; they are little removed from the chaotic or sentimental apprehension of the general run of people, no matter how cleverly they manipulate the medium of their art.
Now, the efficacy of art—its power to produce effects—as distinct from the faculties and functions of artists, consists in the concentration of experience into deeper and simpler and more universal unifications, always approaching the total unity of life and conveying intimations of that eternal unity which has probably never been completely revealed to any single individual.
Some writers on Aesthetics prefer to speak of this efficacy of art as an expansion of experience, but whether we proceed outward or inward in our imagery the efficacy of art and the faculty of artists relies on this ability to see unity in multiplicity. It is the root of the “design” sense in the plastic arts and of the “metaphorical” sense in the arts of literature. The true poet does not load his lines with metaphors merely for the sake of ornament, but because he has seen some hitherto hidden relationship between a man and a tree, or between the wind and a wolf. And the true artist does not twist and elongate his figures to look like storm-bent tree-trunks, as Michelangelo did, or make them soar like flames as El Greco did, merely to establish an individual style, but because he has sensed something of the universal rhythms which flow through every manifestation of nature.
And when I say that the artist in Canada is more difficultly placed than usual I mean precisely that it is more difficult for him than for artists elsewhere or in past times to concentrate his experiences into unities and universalities, and extricate them as newly-minted wholes bearing the fresh imprint of his own personality and his own conditions. This difficulty, unfortunately, is by no means a single one. It is rather a very multiple and complicated handicap, so involved, in fact, that few artists in Canada, probably, are aware of the extent of its ramifications.
II
Consider the difficulties of producing a unified art or literature, arising from individual unifications by artists attuned to our soil and conditions, when the background against which our artists must work is split up into the following incongruous and disassociated elements
• a country that is not unified geographically,
• a people that is not unified racially,
• a history that centres about a few picturesque personalities and events, failing to unify for us our past as a people,
• a population too small to provide an adequate audience for artists,
• a general conception of art that lacks any hint of national consciousness, but clings instead to old notions of connoisseurship borrowed from feudal times and countries.
• a disruption of the settling process, which might in time have unified some aspects of Canadian life, by the mechanization of civilisation all over the world.
• a destruction of ethical-philosophic-religious stability by the encroaching scepticism of a science-ridden age.
Even geographically we are not unified. Conditions at our seacoasts vary greatly from conditions surrounding the great inland lakes. Life on the prairies and in the Rockies has little in common. In the north we border the Arctic and a scattered, illiterate population of Esquimaux. In the south we lay alongside a populous, wealthy, sophisticated republic. Variations of temperature produce marked differences in the flora and fauna of various portions of the country, and produce varying habits of occupation, recreation and even of clothing, among the human inhabitants. In short, an art or a literature that could be called indigenous to one portion of the Dominion would inevitably contain elements as alien to other portions as the art and literature of foreign countries.
Racially we are split “forty ways,” to use a native colloquialism. Old European antagonisms still seethe in the blood of Canadian sons and daughters of Frenchmen, Englishmen, Scotsmen and Irishmen. To these have been added the confusing strains of middle-European blood and thought. Back of all this is the Indian, supplying occasional motifs for our art and subtly tincturing the national admixture in ways that we mostly ignore. And in front of us is the certainty of continuous and steadily increasing influences of all kinds—by actual contacts, intermarriage and uninterrupted communication—bearing on us from our neighbours in the United States.
Historically we have no past as a people. There is a history of costumed dare-devils who found perilous ways across the continent. There is a chronicle of what the French and English did to the Indians and to each other. These—the French, the English and the Indians—from to-day’s standpoint, were all foreigners. The settlers from Scotland and England and France, they were all foreigners, too, until the second or third generation. Until a year or two ago we were all foreigners to each other in a land that we mutually called “ours.” And even yet, particularly between the French-speaking and the English-speaking sections, this attitude still persists. We are not yet a people!
And in common with the politicians who think there are not enough of us yet to make a nation, the artists feel that there are not enough of us to make an audience. It is not merely that an artist must live and can live in New York or London, where markets exist for his work. An artist does not live by bread alone; he lives by understanding and sympathy and encouragement, even though he starves or clerks in a store for a material living. Those who can understand and encourage artists are few enough in any population—even among a hundred millions—but in nine millions they are very few indeed, and in Canada widely scattered. The artist, seeking the living sustenance of togetherness with an audience, loses heart here, lacks incentive and impetus, and either hurries to Europe or the States, or turns sour and cynical in the shop or the counting-house where he is forced to work.
And if the audience in Canada is quantitatively negligible it is even less stimulating to the artist from the qualitative standpoint, unless he still happens to be a “foreigner” in spirit, a purveyor of old-country wares which appeal to his fellow-foreigners, not yet awake to the fact that this country which we all call ours is ours, and not a colony, a temporary settlement, a place to make fortunes with which to scurry back to “the dear homeland.” This is our homeland, and some of us can see it so with our eyes and not with the eyes we brought across the Atlantic, still hazy with Scottish mists and rose-tinted by English blossoms.
How shall the artist fare when the audience sees its country and its country’s art through an old glamour—the product of centuries of blood, and flags, and creeping ivy, and the bells of churches in the fields—a glamour which is not here! Our own glamour is what the artist here is trying to show us, but at present we cannot see it.
When we can forget the old countries—when we really awake and see this country as ours instead of merely calling it ours—when we no longer regard ourselves as exiles and everybody else as foreigners—then, perhaps, we shall be able to “sing the Lord’s song in a strange land,” because it will be no longer strange.
III
That rapprochement between audience, critic and artist which is necessary to the establishment of an art, native or otherwise, has thus been very difficult, if not impossible, in Canada, up to the present time. The critic plays a more important part in such a consummation than many people realize. A single historic instance is perhaps sufficient to make this clear. Consider, for example, how long England would have delayed recognition of both Ibsen and Wagner had it not been for the pugnacious pen of Bernard Shaw.
Our critics, on the whole, have been as blind as the audience and many of the artists in Canada to the fact that we are situated in a country very different from any countries across the Atlantic—different not merely in physical conformation, rhythm, atmosphere, and so on, which are looked upon as subject-considerations that interest only the painters (although actually they have intangible influences on our whole national mood), but different also in the most practical aspects, in the way in which we make a living here, re-create ourselves, govern each other, provide for our unfortunates; to say nothing of language, manners, diet and the daily programme of our meals. Let us also say little of any possible differences in mental and emotional characteristics, bred of our sojourn here, which perhaps lead to ethical, philosophic and religious idiosyncrasies; for these are more intangible and would require too elaborate analysis for the present purpose.
All these the critic is as much inclined to ignore as the public. He defends his blindness by the assertion that the standards whereby art must be judged are universal. (I have myself taken this position and consequently know how common it is and how easy it is to adopt it.) The position would be an excellent one if anyone would really stick to it, but what actually happens is that these so-called “universal” standards we talk about nearly always turn out to be the art-shibboleths of two or three centuries of European culture. In many cases this narrow range of standards is even more curtailed, comprising only standards, and very low ones at that, which were prevalent in northern European countries during the nineteenth century alone. To readers of Spengler, Croce, Faure—if of no earlier writers on aesthetics—the gulfs fixed between postrenaissance art in northern Europe (“Faustian” art) and the art of Greece, and between the arts of Greece and China, for example, are fairly obvious, even when little understood.
The Canadian critic, as a rule, is not only unfamiliar with the art of Greece and China (the little he knows about an art as recent and accessible as that of Russia is usually only sufficient to make him detest it), he seems to be also unfamiliar with the broad historical fact that the aims of artists in certain countries and in certain ages have differed very greatly and that to judge the art of one by the standards of another is to ignore those “universal” standards he often postulates but rarely knows how to apply.
Perhaps the most comprehensive criterion of what constitutes art in any country or time is that it should crystallize into harmonious and unified wholes the experiences of people living at a certain time and in certain conditions. When it does this it inevitably feels Chinese, or Egyptian, or early Italian. But if the critics in a given country—in Canada, for example—possess only fragmentary, unrelated and chaotic impressions of their own country and their own time (and naturally so, lacking artists to unify these impressions for them), it stands to reason that what little art we possess that does tend to unify and portray a typically Canadian kind of thing—a thing found only in Canada—will be unrecognizable to them. It will have something of a new kind of unity which is totally unfamiliar to them.
That this lack of rapprochement between artists and critics occurs quite often, and particularly in new countries, is borne out by the fact that both Whitman and Edgar Allen Poe had to be recognized in Europe before the critics of the United States could accept them. The critics of another country can often sense the native unification in a foreign work of art more keenly than in their own, because, being unfamiliar with all the smaller complications which the local critic is aware of, they find in the simplified whole presented by the artist a coherent experience unlike that portrayed by artists among other peoples or in other times. This has in fact occurred in respect to what little art we have so far produced in Canada. In England, France and the United States the work of a few of our painters and writers (Morley Callaghan is the most recent example) is much more generally recognized than is the case here—recognized, that is to say, as embodying something peculiar to this country.
I have permitted myself this parenthetical discussion on the state of our criticism because it is really one of the major handicaps under which our artists labour. I would have given it a special place in the list of complexities that perplex the artist in Canada if it were not so inextricably bound up with the lacks and deficiencies that are symptomatic of the Canadian audience as a whole. Special stress is here laid upon it because I believe with St. John Ervine that “it is the business of critics not only to judge the work of an author, but to create an audience for him; and we enable authors to live and to grow by making more and more people capable of appreciating him. The better we are, the better the authors will be.”
Expand this to include workers in all the arts and it becomes obvious that critics have a great creative duty to perform, besides the pettier business of pulling things to pieces. To criticize Morley Callaghan for writing about people that one would not think of asking to dinner, or Lawren Harris because his pictures are not likely to be conducive to immigration, is to mistake the highest function of criticism, which is to clarify for the public the artist’s aims and show to what extent he has succeeded in realizing them.
In the face of those critics who prate so much of universal standards I assert with all the force of my convictions that the aim of artists in Canada to-day should not be the same as those of artists in England in the nineteenth century or in China a few thousand years before Christ. Their aims being different, their art should be different also.
IV
Brought back, then, to the aims, the tasks, and the difficulties of artists in Canada, there remains to be considered a fresh set of handicaps. So far we have been discussing our background here more or less historically. The lacks and complications we have discussed were perhaps more prominent and operative twenty years ago than they are to-day. And they are, besides, peculiar to this Dominion. I must now speak of disruptions which further hinder possible unifications by Canadian artists, but which are recent and world-wide in scope, affecting this country in common with many others. I refer to the mechanization of civilisation and the almost superstitious acceptance of scientific formulae as constituting a true account of the universe in which we live.
The first is the more easily disposed of. Everybody, by this time, is at least chaotically aware of what mechanization is doing for us and doing to us, but there are few, probably, who relate all these things and become conscious of them—not as a broadcasting aeroplane here, a globe-circling zeppelin there, a talking movie elsewhere, and television in the immediate distance—but as a unified and definitely new kind of civilisation, all of a piece, that our children are growing up into, half oblivious of its wonder.
Are there many who realize, for example (especially the enthusiasts for universal standards), that books like those of Henry James, George Meredith and Joseph Conrad simply cannot be written by a man who has just breakfasted with an electric toaster at his elbow and whose morning meditation in the garden has been disturbed by ukulele-music trickling out of the sky? Those of us who are forty or more have passed out of an old civilisation into a new one in half a lifetime—and that has never happened before! Every day, with the tremendously widened and intensified means of communication—by newspapers, movies, radio, etc.—new ideas are given so much publicity that we become accustomed to them and accept in a twelvemonth what in mediaeval times would have taken at least a century to become absorbed.
Moreover, the new civilisation into which we have stepped so hurriedly differs in a greater degree from the former one than has ever been the case before. The people who went to see Shakespeare’s comedies differed very little from the people who went to see Aristophanes’ comedies, either in their way of thinking or in their mode of living. The spread between the matter and manner of plays presented in ancient Greece and Elizabethan England is slight compared with the difference between what we saw when we used to go to Drury Lane to see Henry Irving and what we see now at a movie.
Yet, though we realize this, there persists a curious reservation in a great many minds. So long as these very rapid changes depend on a mechanical invention or improvement of some kind we are likely to accept them with only a slight degree of disturbance and irritation. We took to the new dramatic form of the movie like ducks to water. We have welcomed new architectural forms like the grain elevator and the skyscraper. But in the arts where form is divorced from mechanics—notably in literature and painting—we permit ourselves to be greatly disturbed by ingenuity, originality, and the invention of new contrivances, new moods, new modes. We can tolerate a machine being new, up-to-date, and ingenious; but the same qualities in a human being are intolerable. So long as imagination and inventiveness confine themselves to mechanical, scientific and commercial channels we approve and applaud; but let the same forces loose in the theatre, the novel, and in the art gallery, and we boo and hiss and write indignant letters to the newspapers. The artist is the last person on earth who is granted the right to originality.
The artist, unfortunately, is among the first to be affected by such changes as have taken place in the past few years. He is at once more sensitive to a pressure that makes life faster and noisier, and, on the other hand, his faculty of unification enables him to grasp more quickly than the lay mind the potentialities and possible culminations of a trend which is not yet recognized by many as a broad stream, gathering terrific impetus, and carrying us far from what we have always been pleased to call “human” moorings.
Mechanization, and the widespread obsession with it, in recent years, has affected art in at least two different ways. By compressing and speeding up our lives we are made less responsive to natural phenomena which bear the secrets of ultimate unity in their forms, rhythms and relationships. We are made more responsive to the forms, rhythms and relationships of artificial and mechanical reproductions of natural phenomena and so-called “improvements” on natural living conditions. This, in turn, produces a concern with, and an admiration for, the exactness and efficiency of machines, leading to more mathematical considerations in art and more geometrical forms. It is more than a coincidence that the modern revival of an overwhelming interest in “form” in painting (and a type of form based on cones, cylinders and circles), coupled with the stenographic accuracy sought by modern fiction writers, occurs at a time when the exact relationships of such forms and their accurate timing in all kinds of mechanism has become the most common concern of the age.
The artist in Canada, as elsewhere, is a sensitive receiving-station on which these concerns with mechanization impinge. His scene and his neighbours—the subjects of his art—are affected by them. They must be assimilated into the unifications of experience which he attempts.
Thus, before his country and his people could get themselves shaken down into some sort of homogeneous whole, the artist in Canada is confronted with these new disruptions which still further complicate his task.
Added to his local situation are the disturbing and influencing experiments conducted by fellow-artists in Europe who, having a homogeneous scene to deal with in their older-established countries, were quicker to react to mechanistic influences and motifs as constituting material or suggesting methods from which new art-forms might arise. These experiments have been variously labelled “modern” and “primitive.” It seems to give the critics of the movement considerable cause for merriment in that such a supposed confusion should exist. Actually, however, it is most natural that a genuine “modern” to-day should react “primitively” to his surroundings. In the first place, it is a sign, in any age, of a freshness and honesty of outlook, uninfluenced by the technical traditions of his forerunners. And, in the second place, a certain kind of “primitiveness” is the most appropriate possible reaction to our particular time, for we are, in the strictest sense primitives, the first men of a new civilisation whose implications are incalculable.
These modern importations from Europe sometimes assist an artist here by suggesting a method of unifying mechanical with natural phenomena which, due to other preoccupations, he might arrive at very late. On the other hand, they often exert a bad influence, by suggesting merely technical innovations very easily imitated. No one can quarrel with an artist for learning from others how to see and seize upon reality, provided his unification of that reality and his interpretation of the experience he gets from it is expressed in his own terms.
The extent to which an artist in Canada should allow modern mechanization to disturb his as yet undigested knowledge of the natural phenomena of his country is a question that will be examined in a moment.
V
Before returning for a final estimate of the Canadian artist’s difficulties and prerogatives there remains to be considered another world-wide movement which affects artists everywhere. I have referred to it as “the encroaching scepticism of a science-ridden age.”
We have been accustomed to thinking that the terms scientist and agnostic are practically synonymous, but actually the scientist has been more superstitious than most of us. He has believed in a kind of reality that could be measured, bottled up, labelled and explained away, whereas most of us have known all along that the only reality is inside of us, and that to think of splitting it up is as futile as Shylock’s notion of taking a pound of Antonio’s flesh.
The scientist has now come round to our opinion. The whole structure of scientific thought has been destroyed by what is called the Fitzgerald “contraction”—which means simply that no measurements that man can devise can be relied on to measure anything with perfect accuracy. The deviation from perfect accuracy is so small that for ordinary terrestrial measurements the difference is negligible; yet this infinitesimal inequality has wrecked the former structure of science. On it has been built the whole new theory of relativity, the gist of which, from the layman’s viewpoint, is that no absolute picture or knowledge of the universe can ever be attained by man. Such a picture will always be warped out of shape by the instruments that measure it. And man is one of the instruments! In short, the complete picture of the universe will always be different and unequal for every human being!
We face a universe whose inequalities can never be completely harmonized (scientifically) for and by any one individual. The dream of science, that it might some day reduce all phenomena and all laws to a simple and understandable manifestation of one original first cause, is shattered. Inequality, and its corollary, the unpredictability of events, are seen to be the essential pattern of the world as viewed through the eyes of man.
The conception of a universe continuously imperfect to human eyes, and full of inequalities, has not been accepted either suddenly or generally. It is a matter of slow growth and mysterious contagion. It is more like a mood that spreads—as through an audience—by veiled hints and cryptic allusions that affect the emotions deeply just because they are not clear to the intellect.
In this mood we are all now swimming. We may be able to “look through” the imperfections and inequalities of existence, and thus, for ourselves, are not disturbed by this newest destruction of idealism; but we cannot insulate ourselves against the electric current of a huge world-mood which rattles everything we touch.
The impossibility of harmonizing life’s inequalities appears like a warrant authorizing eccentricity. Art therefore becomes aristocratic, in the sense that the artist no longer cares about the audience. He is concerned chiefly to pursue his own particular eccentricities and to ring the changes on the particular aspects of inequality to which his nature especially responds. Art consequently becomes devoid of “associational” values, lacks human interest, and, in the final extreme, communicates nothing except to the few who happen to be “conditioned” by the same kind of inequalities as the artist himself.
Artists of this type abound in Europe, but only a few names are familiar to us here—Mondrian, Kandinsky, Man Ray, Epstein, Joyce, Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, and a few others. The pages of Transition, published in Paris in English, continually introduce new recruits, including many Americans, who are joining this group of what might be called “unintelligibles.”
Lower in the scale, from the European standpoint—for the extreme of unintelligibility seems now to be the highest criterion of present-day art over there—is another group whose activities can only be described as “clinical.” Their obsession with the diseased and the abnormal extends to people in the last stages of some malignant illness. The characters in their books are people who ought to be under observation in psychiatric institutions or receiving proper care in hospitals. And modern architects, instead of designing houses, are producing buildings that look like small hospitals to put all these sick people in.
To dismiss this trend in a paragraph, when it really requires a volume to itself, is not fair to the practitioners of this kind of art, many of whom are thoroughly sincere and hardly less ecstatically devoted to their notions of art than the “unintelligibles.” But already this survey is becoming formidably long.
Certain tendencies in Canadian literature, painting, sculpture and architecture, however, are not easily understood without a side-glance at these European manifestations of the world-mood of the moment. Our artists cannot, even if they would, remain entirely unaffected by the clinical, scientific, aristocratic and “unintelligible” tendencies so rife abroad.
And this brings us to our final consideration of the extent to which an artist in Canada—or anywhere else, for that matter—should keep the pores of his temperament open to the heat and cold of waxing and waning moods throughout the world.
VI
In that remarkable passage which I have placed at the beginning of this book, Whitman says that the artist (he uses the word “poet” in much the same sense that I use the word artist), must “flood himself with the immediate age as with vast oceanic tides”. In another place he clarifies and extends the meaning of this passage by saying that the poet (the artist) “places himself where the future becomes present.”
This supplies the answer to the question asked above. It suggests that the artist should be aware of present tendencies, but not immersed in them to the extent of destroying his backward and forward perspective. Art and literature on the grand scale is never narrowly contemporary. It gathers its energies from the heroic exemplars of a past time and leaps forward at such a pace and with such herculean stride that it over-shoots the present, and to succeeding futures ever seems to recede, inevitably ahead of oncoming generations. Its essential grandeur is in this tremendous arch from past to future which swings high over the dwarfed concerns of the “present” of each generation that catches up to it.
Here we see another type of unification that has to do with time, and it is this particular unification which is most endangered by present tendencies. Artists almost everywhere have cut off the past, impatient with its superstitions, its dogmas, its antiquarianism. And having no faith, no ideals, no hopes, or even wishes (all these are sentimental), they cut off the future also. Like sick people in hospital, doomed to die, they deliberately prevent themselves from thinking of the great sunlit spaces outside and the expanding futures of individuals luckier than themselves.
Concerned only with the immediate sicknesses and eccentricities of the age they live in, they cannot see the colossal proportions of the race and its life, like a giant tree going down into the deep past and branching up into future infinity. They jump feverishly from leaf to leaf of one tiny branch of the towering tree, solicitous about a tiny touch of blight or the infinitesimal ravages of some short-lived insect. Devastation on this microscopic scale is sufficient to unnerve them, driving them to satire or cynicism, all forgetful of the great surrounding downshine of the sun and the upward-aspiring sap within. What they see of life is fragmentary, chaotic, unrelated, and if we apply to them our general test of the artist’s faculty, we find that such unifications as they are able to make are only fragments, little bits of life which they break off or isolate in order to study them, as in a clinic, as in a vacuum, as specimens, rather than as manifestations of a great unified realm of being whose every part depends upon or gives birth to every other part, in an endless and subtly interrelated “becomingness”.
To recognize this unity of being is obviously akin to the experiences which in the past have always been called religious. And perhaps the simplest way of describing the highest faculty of the artist is to say that it is essentially a religious sense—a sense of the mystery of the whole of life. And whether he manufactures a god who sits outside of this whole and guides it—either jealously as in the old testament interpretation, or lovingly as in the new testament interpretation—or whether he feels a sufficient godliness in the virility and variety and majesty of the whole to want no other god but this immense, pulsating being itself—or whatever other doctrinal view he takes, so long as he apprehends and is exalted by the wholeness and the oneness of life, he possesses the first qualification of a great artist.
“The altitude of literature and poetry,” said Whitman, “has always been religion—and always will be … the religious tone, the consciousness of mystery, the recognition of the future, of the unknown, of Deity over and under all, and of the divine purpose, are never absent, but indirectly give tone to all.”
Is there, in Canada, any of this consciousness of unity to counteract the distracting influences from without and the many divisions within? Perhaps there is a little. But we are not really awake. We are not sensible of national unity and we are not sensible of universal unity. Yet there are signs that both may perhaps soon blossom into being. These signs, so far, are deducible only from the occasional work of isolated individuals. But the opportunities to build an art here and an audience that may be stirred by it are as great as have ever existed in any nation, if not greater.
There is a spirit here, a response to the new, the natural, the open, the massive—as contrasted with the old, artificial, enclosed littlenesses of Europe—that should eventually, when we rely on it less timidly, become actively creative. And this creativeness, recognized as our own, and proceeding from the awakened consciousness of a new people with a new future, will itself become a quickening power, jogging laggards out of their dose in the bosom of dying orthodoxies, or counteracting the narcotic effects of scepticism, so that religion—and hence art— becomes vital and fresh; an hourly response to life’s exultations!