WE WERE talking with an American who had just come back after living several years in Europe. He expressed with some dismay his resensitized impression of the furious ugliness and clamour of American life; the ghastly wastes of rubbish and kindling-wood suburbs fringing our cities; and suggested that the trouble is that we have little or no instinctive sense of beauty.
To which we replied that perhaps the truth of it is that the American temperament is more likely to see opportunities for beauty in large things than in small. But we were both talking bosh. Only an extraordinarily keen and trained philosophic perception—e. g., a Santayana—can discuss such matters without gibbering. A recent book on young American intellectualism recurs to us as an example of the futility of undigested prattle about æsthetics. Even the word æsthetics itself has come to have a windy savour by reason of much sophomore talk.
But, though we have laid by our own copy of that particular book as a permanent curio in the realm of well-meant gravity, its author was obeying a sound and praisable instinct in trying to think about these things—beauty, imagination, the mind’s freedom to create, the meaning of our civilization. We are all compelled to such an attempt: shallow, unversed, clumsily intuitive, we grope into them because we are sincerely hungry to understand. The same wise, brave, gracious spirit that moved Mr. Montague to write his exquisite book Disenchantment is tremulously and tentatively alert in thousands of less competent minds. And we, for our own part, grow just a little impatient with those who are quick to damn this wildly energetic and thronging civilization because it shows a poverty of settled, tranquil loveliness. We look out of our window into this morning where Mrs. Meynell’s “wind of clear weather” tosses the Post Office flags and the rooftop plumes of steam; we see the Woolworth pinnacle hanging over our head—and ask, is it possible that this great spectacle breathes from her towers only the last enchantments of a muddled age?
Aristotle remarked that “the flute is not an instrument which has a good moral effect; it is too exciting.” And very likely New York civilization falls under the same reproach. But even if it is all madness, what a gallant raving! You cannot see the beauty in anything until you love it for its own sake. Take the sightseeing boat round Manhattan if you want to get a mental synthesis of this strangest of islands. From a point in the East River off Coenties Slip you will see those cubed terraces of building rising up and upward, shelves and ledges of rectangular perspective like the heaven of a modernist painter. Nor do we deny the madness and horror. Farther up the river you will see the ragged edges of the city, scows loading their tons of jetsam and street scourings, wizened piers, grassless parks, all the pitiful makeshift aquatics of the Harlem region. And yet, all along that gruesome foreshore, boys—and girls, too—bathing gayly in the scum-water, flying ragged kites from pier-bollards, merry and naked on slides of rock or piles of barrels. Only on the three grim islands of Blackwell, Ward, and Randall will you see any touch of beauty. There, grass and trees and beds of canna and salvia (the two great institutional flowers) to soothe the criminal and the mad. When your mind or your morals or your muscles give way, the city will allow you a pleasant haven of greenery and air. It is odd to see the broad grounds of the Children’s Hospital—on Randalls Island, is it?—with no child in sight; but across the river the vile and scabby shore is thick with them. And the bases of the Harlem swing-bridges, never trod by any one, are carefully grassed and flowered.
So the history of every modern city consists of a painful, slow retracing of its errors, an attempt to undo painfully and at vast expense the slattern stupidities it has allowed to accumulate. But to see only these paradoxes and uglinesses is to see less than the whole. He cannot have lived very long or thoughtfully with humanity for neighbour who does not ruefully accept greeds and blindnesses as part of its ineradicable habit. It takes a strong stretch of the imagination to grasp this island entire; to see, even in its very squalors and heedlessnesses, an integral portion of its brave teeming life. You must love it for what it is before you have a right to love it for what it may be. We have never been able to think this thing out, but there seems to us to be some vital essence, some miraculous tremor of human energy and folly in the whole scene that condones and justifies the ugliness. It is queer, but the hideous back-lots of the city do not trouble us so greatly: we have a feeling that they are on their way towards being something else. We do not praise them, but we feel in an obscure way they are part of the picture. Zealous passion and movement always present, to the eye of dispassion, aspects either grotesque or terrible, according to that eye’s focus. In this ugly hurly-burly we feel daily (though we cannot define it) that there is a beauty so overriding that it does not depend on beautiful particulars. And, to feel that beauty fully, one must discard all hankerings to improve humanity, or to preach to it, or even understand it—simply (as Uncle Remus said) “make a great ’miration”—accept it as it thrillingly is, and admire.
