WHOEVER undertakes to
discuss art influence brings up sooner or later at the Greeks. I prefer to
begin there, and to begin with that one of its sources which is not peculiarly
Greek, but eternal: I mean with Greece. Whatever a people may make will
resemble the thing that people look on most; so that the first guess as to what
is likely to come out of any quarter is a knowledge of the land itself, its
keen peaks, round-breasted hills, and bloomy valleys. Greek polity had never so
much to do with the surpassingness of Hellenic art as the one thing the
Hellenes had nothing whatever to do with--the extraordinary beauty of the land
in which they lived.
However much it is
possible to derive the varied and intimate art of Italy from Greek influence,
it is impossible to ignore the variations that mark just the differences
between the topographies--mass, contour and color--of the two peninsulas. In
attempting to forecast the probable shapes of art in any quarter of America, it
becomes of prime importance to know whether the contours of that region are
austere, dramatic, or slow and gracious, and, above all, whether it is
colorful. Given to all quarters an equal chance at man, the richest in color
will bring the quickest reactions. And of all America the most strikingly
colored is the strip lying along the south Pacific coast "nearest to the
terrestrial paradise," as the old Spanish romance puts it, "called
Californias."
In the early days, when
all the West was full of a belt-loosening, breath-easing sound as men
accommodated themselves to its largeness, the color of California was a thing
to make one gasp. It affronted the puritan temperament with its too abundant
charm; gold it was, and blue and amber, over miles and miles of up-flung
foot-hill slopes and indolent mesa. Beyond that it melted, between green and
blueness, to peaks of opalescent white. It was a country of which one of the
wittiest of its writers said, "You couldn’t tell the truth about it
without lying," and got into the blood of the Iowans and New-Englanders
within a generation. It charged not only their hopes, but their speech; made it
rich in figures, full of warmth and amplitude. It had even more obvious and
commercial results.
On one of those
frequent cross-continent trips growing out of an inability to reconcile a
desire to enjoy the charm of the West with the necessity of doing business in
New York, I met a buyer of women’s garments for a large Los Angeles house. In
the course of the acquaintance she explained why it was that my clothes, which
seemed quite all right on South Occidental Boulevard, had the effect on Fifth
Avenue of being noisily out of place. They were perfectly good clothes and
appropriately expensive, they bunched up in the right places or displayed a
modish slimness; but they put me decidedly out of the picture. The distinction
was too subtle for me to grasp, but knowing nice distinctions of that kind was
the buyer’s business. She said it was a question of color; not so much of
intensity, but of expert arrangements by which the dress of the Westerner is
made to reflect the total effect of bright sun, rich-toned landscapes, and a
life spent largely in the open air. The buyer expressed it more crudely than
that, but she knew to a dollar in buying for Los Angeles how far she could
carry the instinctive feeling of human kind for harmony with its environment.
It comes out; this
lurking preference of the land for color, in that latest toy of the West, a
world exposition. Whether or not they succeed in making it a bigger or a better
or more interesting exposition, in one thing the West has satisfied the secret
desire of its heart: it has made this exposition the richest dyed, the
patterned splendor of all their acres of poppies, of lupines, of amber wheat,
of rosy orchard, and of jade-tinted lakes. Beside a sea which runs from lion
color to chrysoprase and sapphire blueness, they have laid down a building
scheme which is as bright as an Indian blanket. This is the first communal
expression of the kind on a scale large enough to take account of. Probably one
would have to hark back to the days of Pompeii and the Greco-Roman splendor to
find its like, and be safe in prophesying from it a more vivid burst of
decorative art. That is to say, if there is anything in comparative influences,
for the color of California is to the color of Italy as a rose is to its
pressed remembrance in a book.
Taking that good look
at the West which is the first requisite to knowing what is to come from it,
one is struck at once with the extraordinary definition of form in the
landscape. The high mountain-edges deserve their specific name,
Sierras--toothed, cutting edges. The foothills, even under thick chaparral,
never lose their bold outlines; the pines upon the farthest ridges preserve
their perfect spires; and the low, round-headed oaks, both the roble and the
encina, have all been put into the landscape with the same brush. Farther south
and east the buttes, squared to the sky-line, repeat the flat note of the mesas
with insistence. One has, however, to turn square about, face to the Old World
for a moment, to understand just what this may mean in the final product of the
West. One must recall that the glory of Gothic architecture comes of its being
a sublimated memory of a forest, its clustered trunks, its crossing boughs,
leaf-stained light and rare chiaroscuro, and that the Egyptian expressed the
massiveness of natural stony outcrops and the relief of shadowy caves from the
glare of the sun. Lands which have strongly accented features from the hands of
the World Builder are those which produce the lasting types of architecture,
not only by the superior degree to which they stamp themselves upon the memory,
but in the demands which they make for special ways of being lived in. Here in
the West the suggestion made by the soil and the wild growth has already been
accepted by the aboriginal. The castellated mesas have produced the flat-roofed
pueblo types of dwelling, which, mixed with the elements happily introduced by
the Spanish missionaries, has become one of our most characteristic styles of
domestic architecture. But the peculiar gift of the Southwest to a genuine
American form is the one which takes its name from the Indian bungalow on which
it is remotely based. In fact, it is very little like anything in India, and has
much more kinship with the American Indian wickiup both in its form and its
adaptation to the exigencies of living. In other words, it is derived from the
forms of life native to the land. Go up beyond Pasadena some day when the
chaparral is in full leaf, and you will discover that the preferred type of
dwelling repeats the characteristics of the encinal, with low, slightly pitched
roofs and pillared entrances. You dive into one out of the heat and glare of
the day as the rabbit into its tunnel. Southern California runs to encinal and
bungalows as naturally as the North runs to sharp, sloping roofs and pointed
firs. It is written in the Baedekers that the form of Milan’s marble miracle
was suggested by the springing stalks of marsh grasses; but it is not said
anywhere often enough that if a man with the soul of an architect were brought
up in the California Tulares, amid all those miles and miles of thin, graceful
reeds, breaking at the top into arching, airy inflorescence, he might easily
touch the inspirational sources of Milan. It is all a question of looking four
hundred years forward or four hundred years back.
These two, then, must
be thought of as affecting the final form of Western art--color and high
simplicity of form combined with great intricacy of detail.
It is inevitable that
the first response of a people to the shaping hand of beauty would be expressed
in that which meets the eye, but there is another factor in life in California
likely to have a profound effect on the kinds and qualities of its art product,
one which brings us a little nearer to the influence of ancient Greece and
Italy: I mean the element of pageantry in life as it is lived there.
Variations in the
artistic product of any nation can be scaled very nicely to the degree to which
the people live with their land rather than off it. There is much in the
difference between Greek and Italian art which can be directly traced to such
obvious circumstance as that the Greeks, when they were not conquering, talked
philosophy, and the Romans returned to their farms to raise turnips. It is only
critics of art, and not artists, who maintain that art and turnips have nothing
to do with each other. For the Romans did not only plant turnips and harvest
them; they understood that there is a god of turnips, an essential essence of
plowed fields and dung-heaps and steaming oxen, which must all be brought into
harmony by prayer and sacrifice before turnips could come forth properly to
feed and comfort the nations.
Just how it works is
not easy to say,--it is in part perhaps a matter of feeding,--but the great
art-producing peoples have also been great agriculturists, much given to the
joyous expression of their relation to the land they live in by green-corn
dances, cherry-blossom fêtes, and processions to Pomona. Any one familiar with
the West must see in the tendency toward rose tournaments, apple fairs, and
festivals of Raisina Regina, a return to this instinctive method of dramatizing
the working partnership between man and the forces of nature.
No doubt it is in part
the effect of topography. Everything, even the daily alternation of night and
morning, tends to appear more dramatic in a mountain country; mile-long shadows
move as dials across the valleys, cloud masses do not sail an open sky, but
wheel and enfilade between the ranges; storms are not obscured in a flat
horizon, but are seen to gather and break, and suns come out as in an
amphitheater. When I first knew that country which is watered by the Merced,
Tuolumne, Kings, and Kern rivers, a country now producing food enough to
support a small kingdom of Europe, it was overrun by little, long-armed Basque
and French herders and their wandering flocks. It embraces in Hetch-Hetchy,
Yosemite, and Kings River Cañon the most stupendous scenic panorama of America,
but the herders read it as a dog reads the face of its master. I remember how
in May and June they would go peering along the edge of the down-pouring rivers
for the floating yellow scum, pollen drift from the forests hundreds of miles
away on the uplifted flanks of the Sierras. By the date of the first appearance
of the floating pollen, and the quantity, they judged whether the summer feed
would be full or scanty, and on indications as slight as these they bargained
with the dealers who came out from San Francisco for their spring lambs.
Intimacies such as these between the land and the people breed poets faster,
and much better ones, than do universities.
Undoubtedly, the
development of the creative spirit in the West is affected by the sense of
sustained vitality in nature. A blossoming almond-orchard is not only a
beautiful thing; it is also an inescapable thing: it scents the air for almost
as many miles as its delicate, roseate cloud takes the eye along the foot-hill
slopes. Swarms of fallen petals drift in the roadways like snow. And the long
rows of the low-trimmed muscats, reaching out from vine to vine with advancing
summer as though to take hands against the weight of the harvest--how they
assault us with the visible process of earth and sun and air made into wine and
food for man! At every turn the consciousness of something doing, something
vitally connected with the large process of nature and our own means of
subsistence, raises the plane of expectation. There is something doing every
minute in a country of such varied topography, as the procession of harvest
follows the season. Orange-picking begins in December and overlaps the pruning
of the deciduous orchards. The smoke of the last burning has scarcely passed
from the shorn trees of the highest, most northerly valleys when the flowering
of almonds and apricots opens the honey harvest. The berry-pickers move in
solid phalanxes from the cherry lands of Napa and Santa Clara to the river
bottoms, and from that on to the August hop-picking and the raisin-drying; all
labor is in flux. It passes up and down the great Twin Valleys in "free
companies," working, eating, and as often as not sleeping in the open.
During the brief season of the rains it is housed in packing-sheds and preserve
factories, but for the greater part of the year the human laborer is as much a
part of the great outdoor pageant as the woodpecker or the ant.
All this makes for a
kind of understanding of nature that is as different from the afternoon-walk
kind of nature-loving as marrying a woman and having children by her is
different from writing a sonnet to one’s mistress’s eyebrow. The mastery of
rivers and snows and granite mountains and their conversion into crops and
light and mechanical power raises the average plane of human activity all
through.
It should mean that in
California we shall have not necessarily poems written to a redwood and
pictures of snow-capped ranges, but that whatever is written or painted should
evince breadth and power. The final achievement of the people among whom this
takes place ought to be a newer and more consoling expression of man’s relation
to the invisible, to the trend and purpose of things. In other words, one would
expect the art of the West to be strongly religious in its implications.
Already one sees indications of this tendency in that most native of
institutions, the outdoor theater. There are enough of these delightful places
of entertainment in California to be able to speak of their development as a
feature of Western community life, and their evidence as to the trend of
community thought is singular and convincing.
One instance of the
earliest and most notable of these, the theater of the Bohemian Grove, serves
our purpose better for being the best known and most unconscious. The grove, a
stately recess in the redwood forest north of the bay, is the summer playground
of a group of San Franciscans who are supposed to have distinguished themselves
either in the creative arts or in the more personal art of living. Outside of
this summer precinct they are preëminently of that stripe for whom the whole of
American literature is supposed to be keyed down to the compass of a grown-up
nursery-tale, the t.b.m.’s who hang around the neck of American drama like the
traditional millstone to prevent its soaring to its possible and predestined
heights. And every summer these tired business men, on an occasion denominated
"High Jinks," produce a play which by popular deduction ought to be
the concentrated extract of all the Broadway atrocities ever perpetrated in the
name of entertainment. Only it isn’t. It is usually poetic in form,--excellent
poetry, too on more than one occasion,--it is symbolic in character, and
distinctly religious in tone. That is to say that it tends to choose for its
theme some aspect of man’s relation to the invisible, inescapable forces of
life. A year ago it was the conquest of fear in that dark region of the heart
of man which once found its expression in the gargoyles of our most Christian
cathedrals, the spawn of cowardice and imagination. And if the conquest of fear
isn’t an effort in the direction of true religion, what is it? As nearly as can
be made out by report, for no woman can know any thing of them except by
report, the Bohemian performances approach more nearly the Eleusinian mysteries
than any modern occasion. All without conscious imitation and by the simple
process of giving the Bohemians exactly what they want. It is true, however,
that there are many things one can not even want in the presence of trees that
might remember the drouth in the time of King Ahab, when the ravens fed Elijah.
It is not so easy to
discern this native tendency behind so stupendously mechanical a thing as a
world exposition. You have to see it not as the final expression, but as a
pageant of things, the procession around the Sabine farm in honor of the god of
the turnips which Lucullus ate; the joyous recognition that there is a god of
seed-time and harvest, of bridges and rivers and dams, and that we are on very
good terms with him.
Another determining
force in shaping the art of a country, which it is impossible to overlook, is
the prepossession which its citizens bring to it. The Argonauts of forty-nine
brought the spirit of romance, and left us with that joyous disregard of
artistry which is the best ground for a new art to spring from. The Franciscan
fathers contributed one of our two predominating types of architecture and a
style of furniture which gains favor steadily. The Conquistadores bequeathed a
little of the romantic manner and a poetizing tendency in names of places. The
Japanese and Chinese have done much in their wares to satisfy and foster the
Western love of color in decoration, but the artistic consciousness of the
Oriental is worn too smooth by centuries to make a dent in the robustious West.
They have glanced off at contact, to fall outside the area of immediate
production. It has remained for the rejected and downtrodden aboriginal to
leave a determining mark. In color, in decoration, and in design the Indian
note has struck upward like the thorn through the foot which treads the
thorn-bush. It is very noticeable in the Exposition of San Diego; it is shaping
by slower and less sensible degrees the forms of verse and drama, it sounds not
as an alien strain through the music of the West, but as the plaintive,
intimate note of the land itself, the earth cry below the song of the harvest.
What one observes at present is a resemblance growing out of something like the
aboriginal surrender to the environment rather than any deliberate
appropriation of aboriginal motives. Not until this vanishing race attains the
full dignity of extinction will its musical themes and decorative units pass
into the artistic currency of the West.
But when you reflect
that the Greeks began with just these things, great natural beauty, an
adventuring, colonizing people such as settled the Sacramento and the San
Joaquin, and with a legendary and dramatic representation of man’s relation to
vast invisible forces, it is possible to believe that people beginning there
and on a scale so much more magnificent will be justified in any expectation.
Any one going west to look for it must find the index of what the art of the
West is to be not in the art palace, but in life as it is lived there, in the
mastery of modes of living in which the West suggests its as yet unutterable
things.