Beauty for Ashes

by FRANCIS HENRY TAYLOR

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THERE is a moving chapter (lxi) in the prophecy of Isaiah which gives courage to those of us who contemplate the holocaust of Europe and which fixes us with a new pattern of responsibility : —

The Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound;. . .

To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness;. . .

And they shall build the old wastes, they shall raise up the former desolations, and they shall repair the waste cities, the desolations of many generations. . . .

For as the earth bringeth forth her bud, and as the garden causeth the things that are sown in it to spring forth; so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring forth before all the nations.

They are hopeful words, these words of Isaiah, but not easy ones to swallow with complacency when each day we hear that some new European monument which we have loved has been bombed out of existence. It is impossible to estimate how much of European culture has perished in this war. What Hitler has not already destroyed in England, France, in Italy and Greece, he has threatened to wipe out in the hour of his defeat. Libraries, churches, and galleries of art have been destroyed and looted, and with them have gone the creative labor and imagination of countless generations. With every lamp that has been broken and melted down into the slag of barbarism, there has been extinguished some small tongue of the eternal flame which has ever warmed humanity and lighted the pathway of ignorance.

The thoroughness with which the Nazis have perfected the technique of ruin may be cited by the single example of the great library of the University of Naples, where kerosene was poured upon the bookshelves and each alcove in turn lighted by exploding hand grenades. In every land that has felt the searing imprint of the Prussian boot the story is the same. During a single night of the fire in London, eleven million volumes — more than the total contents of the Library of Congress — were burned. The Board of Economic Warfare has put the looting of works of art in occupied countries (not including monuments destroyed by military action) at over a billion and a half dollars — more than the total value of works of art in the United States.

The raids upon the military targets of the Reich by the British and American air forces, despite the most elaborate efforts to spare cultural centers, have inevitably drawn in their wake of ruin a certain portion of that patrimony of the world which the Nazis so despise and obviously never have deserved.

To be sure, the institutions of Europe, viewing the progress of catastrophe after 1934, undertook certain necessary preparations. The Munich incident provided a dress rehearsal for the evacuation of the Louvre. The most careful and competent plans were made, and in September, 1939, hundreds of thousands of works of art were moved to the south of France, where later they came under the control and possession of the lieutenants of Ribbentrop. In England, the National Gallery and the British Museum sent their finest things to the country. Only the masterpieces were thus favored, for the great bulk of systematic collections were too vast and clumsy to be transported to safety. The mass of scientific and reference literature was left to the mercy of the blitz.

In the United States, along the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards, similar preparations were made for the safety of public collections. The Metropolitan Museum, upon the advice of military authorities, put away some fifteen thousand works of art. This operation, which occupied the greater part of the time of the entire staff from Pearl Harbor until the following May, was carried on under ideal conditions of labor, packing, and trucking. Yet in the aggregate less than one per cent of the collections was removed from the Museum. Surely in Europe, in the midst of battle, no greater percentage of the collections of museums and libraries was taken away. We are faced, therefore, with the grim realization that while the greatest masterpieces of Europe have probably been preserved, even though many of them have been stolen by the enemy, the comprehensive study collections have for the most part been necessarily abandoned to uncertainty.

Now, contrary to popular belief, the history of culture is not written about the isolated masterpiece, but is drawn from the study collections. Beautiful and important as it is, the masterpiece cannot stand alone. It is a prima donna which must have a supporting cast and chorus to speak authoritatively for the time and place of its creation. Cast and chorus are the vast chronological sweeps and type series from which the masterpiece springs and demonstrates by comparison its unique and superior qualities. A great work of art is essentially the extension of the artist’s personality — a communication of his vision to the beholder. There is a parallel in literature, where the poet is not judged by an individual utterance. His impact upon his generation, and ultimately upon posterity, is not confined to one of his works alone. Shakespeare, for example, would probably have been considered great if no more than a single play or sonnet had come down to us. But it is through the great body of his full creative production that he has exercised his enormous influence.

So it is with the artist. The page of drawings from Michelangelo’s notebook in the Metropolitan Museum, the only work by his hand in America, is in itself an object of inestimable beauty, but its value to the Museum and its public is in its relation to his other known works and to the various aspects of Renaissance civilization which are reflected in the tapestries, paintings, and furniture of the Museum’s galleries. The collections of prints, of ornament, all of the type series of decorative arts, help us to understand the real meaning and significance of the painting and the statue. Knowledge is an accumulation of facts and opinions which sharpen the visual perceptions.

What is true of the study collections of museums is even more true of libraries. The loss in London of the files of newspapers of the last two centuries would be, from this point of view, a far greater catastrophe than the destruction of the Codex Sinaiticus.

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THE peculiar nature of museums and public libraries, which jointly bear the burden of man’s collective memory, is, as Frederick Keppel once observed, that of an iceberg — they are at all times seveneighths submerged. Their importance and value lie not alone in what the public sees, but in what the student knows he can find in them if he looks for it. Their chief purpose, then, is to show the visitor the best, in order to whet his curiosity to consult the stacks. That is the problem of the institution abroad as it is in this country. And in so far as this is true, every object in a museum storeroom takes on an added luster.

But the circumstances of the war have abruptly interrupted the life of Europe’s libraries and museums where they have not yet been destroyed. It will take years for her institutions to return to any normal program. The destruction of personnel has been as dreadful as the loss of property. New generations of scholars must be trained, if for no other purpose than to classify and sort out the chaos of collections which have changed hands in the war. The physical and financial burdens alone will force galleries to remain closed for many years. Works of art long neglected in improper storage will require endless attention by competent technicians. One shudders to think of the works of art that may perish by default. Where, one asks, can the necessary training in scholarship and technique be acquired?

The answer, of course, is that we in America have a new responsibility towards our European colleagues. Having been for so long on the receiving end, we find it hard to realize that this is our big moment to repay our debts. But we can repay them only if our own standards of scholarship and integrity can measure up to those which in the past we borrowed overseas. Those standards imply a complete and ready understanding of what we have. The larger museums of the United States already have the most extraordinary riches in practically every field. The more we know them, the better we can interpret and classify them. It is our duty so to perfect our own institutions as centers not merely of popular recreation, but of scientific study and research, that they may form the cornerstone for the re-establishment of those abroad.

Already the body of competent professionals in the United States is very large. The universities and colleges, the museums and library systems, have developed in recent years an expert personnel who, while they may lack in some instances the charm and polish of the generation which trained so many of us abroad, are today far better equipped to carry on the intellectual tradition than those collaborators who are left behind in the institutions of Hitler’s “Fortress Europe.” For one of the additional tragedies of the war is that many of the finest minds have been forced into exile and their places filled with successors whom we should consider secondrate. Under the leadership of these exiles and those scholars who have survived the Nazi terror we must prepare professors, librarians, archivists, curators, and architects who can devote the next ten or twenty years to reconstruction. They may be nationals of foreign countries whom we can bring to our institutions for graduate study.

American generosity knows no bounds; yet it is often as ill-considered as it is spontaneous. The very inconsistencies in our approach to problems which for centuries have tormented the older nations immediately make our gestures suspect. The Congress is providing astronomical sums for the feeding, clothing, and physical rehabilitation of Europe. Even in this field of the arts a commission for the salvage and protection of the artistic and historic monuments of Europe has been appointed to function with similar commissions of the United Nations, In the January Atlantic the Editor reported a movement launched by the American Library Association for the collecting of books, both scientific and in the humanities, for replenishing the parched or destroyed libraries of Europe. This work, towards which the Rockefeller Foundation has granted $200,000 for the purchase of scientific periodicals, has won the enthusiastic response of our entire academic community.

The Department of State has established a committee of distinguished educators to advise it in the selection of personnel for the reopening of Continental schools and universities after the cessation of hostilities. The ambitious program of the Greek War Relief Committee for the reconstruction of entire cities is a further evidence of our desire to help those who have suffered more than we have. It has even been suggested that archaeological excavation, financed by American institutions, be conducted to provide work for villages in Mediterranean countries whose ordinary means of employment have been wiped out by the war.

Worthy as these suggestions may be, we must not let ourselves be misled into the belief that the rehabilitation of European culture can be accomplished by lend-lease alone. Charity begins at home. It is not enough for us to send abroad books and vitamins, teachers and laboratory equipment. For if we limit ourselves to those objectives, the ready willingness of the European mind to reject our interest as economic and intellectual imperialism will be more than justified. We must face the fact that, though we have not suffered from the war in the same way or to the same degree as the inhabitants of continental Europe, our stockpile is rapidly diminishing. We no longer have the resources and reserves that we had in 1939.

The “speeded-up” program of the colleges, with its complete abandonment of humanistic study, has left tears and gaps in the fabric of our intellectual life which sadly need repir. Our institutions have become, by force of war, shabby not only in their physical and outward appearances but likewise in their points of view. Because of critical shortages of trained personnel, emphasis has been placed on the virtue of the applied and social sciences to the exclusion of the proper long-range furnishing of the mind, and we are seriously in danger of losing our souls in our frantic efforts to save our skins.

If circumstances have thrust upon us the economic and political responsibilities of world leadership, we must accept the intellectual responsibilities as well. An English friend remarked to me, “You Americans, like the English in the eighteenth century who undertook to see the world and shoulder the white man’s burden, have entered upon the era of the younger son.” By this he meant that we must, be willing to make the sacrifices of maintaining the burden and obligation of hereditary civilization. We shall see our sons and grandsons settle in distant lands, in Asia and the South Pacific, in Africa and Europe and in our own Western Hemisphere, contributing to the reconstruction of a world which is forever expanding, yet at the same time shrinking through ease of communication and air transport These colonists of the future must be strong in the belief of the land which gave them birth. To give them this strength and the necessary background and perspective for their task, we must perfect the cultivation of our own gardens. Our own institutions must flourish in the practice of a wisdom restricted to no time or place or people. Europe then may be convinced that, in the good fortune of our sanctuary, American scholarship has been able to hold in trust for her, and intact, the civilization which withered in her hands. When she is ready to rebuild once more the citadel of the mind, may she find something besides material wealth in the New World. We must be prepared to give her, besides our food, our old clothes, and our dollars, “ beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning.”