Nationalism in Art

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NATIONALISM in art is most often the new minting of foreign gold. The lending and borrowing of ideas is an incessant shuttle, for ideas travel without passport and blithely leap customs barriers. One look over the frontier is even more potent, since observation begets imitation, and the power of imitation is the beginning of civilization. Animals do not really possess it (in spite of legend), and for lack of it peoples like the American Indians have come near to perishing. Indeed, as we learn that the Europe of our ancestors, until recently the proving ground of countless migrations, is the most hybridized area on earth, we are forced to realize how imitative, how conglomerate must be our thought, our tradition, and our behavior. When we realize further that by 3000 B.C. there was an established artistic intercourse between the Far East and the Mediterranean, and that by A.D. 200 Christianity probably had reached China, we are tempted to wonder how there are such concepts at all as those embodied in the words “national characteristics” or “nationalism.”

Yet, when it comes to judging the expressions of those characteristics, particularly in works of art, the striking validity of nationalism cannot be denied. There is no confusing a Tanagra with a Chinese statuette of the same period, or an Etruscan burial urn with one from Thebes; no mistaking a Persian rug for a Navaho blanket, or a Spanish barqueño for a Danish painted cupboard. Though it was not always so, there are today easily recognized characteristics of so-called Spanish music, as there are definite local idioms native to the music of Bali. The examples are infinite. And the imprimatur of a country is an obvious and sound thing. But, to be healthy, it must come from the ground up — not by superimposition, but from the very soil.

The true wellsprings which have prompted people to make and to be certain things in certain ways are mainly found in the local natural resources. In Shiraz the quality of the water was propitious for washing the wool of the Persian lamb; it gave the wool just the right texture and brilliance; it suited the dyes which were used. And from these natural sources, of field, pasture, water — climate and topography — came the stuff of the finest carpets known. Such a humble raw material as sand, when of peculiarly fine substance and color, has dictated the fortunes of a locality and the subsequent tour of the antiquary. The lagoons of Venetia were rich in a sand which, melted and molded, made the first wealth of Venice as the dunes of Cape Cod made the wealth of Sandwich. Many of the lovely peculiarities of French architecture are due to the soft white limestone which cuts like butter and then hardens in the air. The French built differently from those whose hillsides hid marble or travertine, or who, for lack of stone, made brick. In North America, where the forests had to be cut down to make way for fields, the houses and fences were of wood.

Wherever a certain plant is found or an animal, mollusk, or mineral, people acquire a trade concerned with it, a special knowledge, an aptitude in handling it. And that properly sets them a little apart from their neighbors. That begets a legitimate nationalism. There are seafaring people and non-seafaring people. But one is not thereby more virtuous than the other.

Many other less tangible qualities and causes of divergence exist, some of which are rooted in local phenomena such as climate or diet. Language is one of them. The terse clarity of Greek not only induced the brilliance of Greek poetry but also conditioned the pattern of Hellenic thought; just as the slower magnificence of Latin lent itself to heavy monuments and the codification of laws. Both languages may have lent themselves equally well to driving a bargain or conquering the world, but in matters of art and intellect there is no denying the essential difference. Laws, frontiers, the proportions of racial mixture, the accessibility to outside knowledge (was the country on a trade route or off the beaten track?), the pull of the mother country or the push of the colony — all these, and many more, are in the compound which we call national characteristics.

To separate a personal expression — something as proper as the nose on one’s face—from the political monster known as Nationalism, let us take four great works, generally regarded as masterpieces, renowned, you might say, for their nationalism. They are historic works, yet charged with meaning for us today. They have been recognized, from the day of their completion, as fulfilling magnificently the design and purpose for which each was made. No one, I think, will quarrel with me if I call them pinnacles of art and exemplars of what a nation, through groups or through one artist, can accomplish. No one will deny that Notre Dame, Toledo by El Greco, Die Meistersinger, and the University of Virginia are master works, inescapably French, Spanish, German, and North American.

And the argument would follow : Are these works stronger by reason of their marked nationality than similar works not so marked, and were their authors moved by an ardent nationalism in order to accomplish them?

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GOTHIC art and what we now call European music are the only great art-forms native to continental Europe (unless one adds French cooking— in which case the credit for two of the three must go to France). Notre Dame is the flower of this Gothic art. It was built at a period when Catholicism was at its height, when the Nestorian Christians flourished in the Orient, when a man could safely travel without visas from the Aventine in Rome to Kells in Ireland, an international citizen of the Faith, and when Petrarch spoke Provencal by preference and St. Francis was christened after his father’s favorite country. No passport was needed for voyaging on earth, and only one for Heaven.

Notre Dame, like Chartres or any of the other great cathedrals, was essentially communistic, in an entirely un-Marxian sense but in the spirit of purest Christianity. The churches were built by the people and for the people, almost in opposition to the Duke’s private chapel and moated castle or the Prior’s fat abbey. The cathedrals were the contemporary Rotary Clubs, lodges, workmen’s centers, WPA centers, and Teatro del Pueblo, as well as being religious edifices. We know the names of many of the architects and engineers and of some special donors; but by and large the work was anonymous. It was the effort of whole townships and communes, everybody contributing something in love and labor. And the results took on the characteristics of the hands that made them.

Everything that was elegant, fanciful, aspiring, or logical in the French spirit soared into the skies toward Heaven in these spires. Some of the tricks of the trade were borrowed. The flying buttress came from Persia, in the memory of some early Crusader. The stained glass, like the illuminated manuscripts or the enamels of Limoges, owed much to Byzantium. But the imprint of France, of the French people, was on every stone, from foundation to last pinnacle. And perhaps, when the crowds turned out to view their own work, as the church was completed and blessed, we have there the only great popular surge of artistic emotion since the Greeks attended a tragedy by Euripides.

In one sense nothing could be more national; in another, nothing more international. Certainly the builders did not think of their work in terms of nationalism. In the doctrine itself there was complete internationalism. St. Fiacre, from whom the Paris cab got its name, was an Irishman, and the Abbot of Mona was likely to be a Swiss. The architects and master builders, like the sculptors, belonged to Christendom, and went where service required.

Though France was the first nation in Europe to achieve nationality and would seem still to be the “nationalist” nation par excellence, it was the French language which superseded Latin as a universal tongue, and it was in France— under Philip the Fair, as later under Louis XI and then Henri IV that the plans for a Federation of Europe were drawn. It was in France that the people raised the great community centers, open to ail the world, these cathedrals which were acceptable to God as to the Pope because they were the very chalice of no-nationalism. The dreams of Comte or Renan or Hugo for a united Europe were hut re-evocations of a past endeavor, the endeavor to recognize the individual, par inter pares, as a prelude to the brotherhood of nations, of families, of man. Long before, the hands of laborers in the Île de France had raised an edifice at whose portal all souls became equal.

The concept of universality in the highest realms, and the power of adoption in lesser ways, are two of the keys to El Greco. One of the most striking pictures in the Metropolitan Museum in New York is his painting of Toledo. The towers and roofs thrust severely against a stormy sky. There is a wildness in the air, as though the ghost of Torquemada were on the wind. As in The Windmill by Rembrandt, there is a whole world within a small canvas; only, El Greco’s world is not serene, like the Dutchman’s, but tortured and dramatic and tragic. Nothing could be more Spanish, though the hand that painted came from Greece by way of Venice,

To my mind, Velasquez is the least Spanish of the great painters, whereas Goya — in so far as the eye and the subject are concerned — is the most Spanish.

But because El Greco was a “convert” and not a native, and because his acute spirituality fulfilled itself completely through the Church as he found it in Spain—and at a time when the counterreforming church was Spain — he, more than any other, is to me the great Hispanic artist. The very elongation of his figures seems to express that almost lunatic striving for something beyond reality which lay also behind the mind that conceived the Escorial. Beside a great tenderness, there is a fierce and ruthless dogmatism. The meticulous and horrible sores and mutilations which adorn so many of the early Spanish paintings and particularly sculptures (cruelties which rarely found their way into French or Italian art, except for an occasional St. Sebastian) represented a tendency of the spirit to which El Greco responded.

In all this, El Greco was intensely Spanish. Yet it would be a bold critic who would claim that by that fact alone he rose superior to Velasquez, any one of whose Venuses might have been painted in Italy. And no one, I think, would claim that the great Greek painter was consciously Spanish. He strove mightily, as did Fra Angelico, or Piero della Francesca at Borgo San Sepolcro, to fix for the eyes of humanity, in visible and uplifting splendor, the ecstasies and wonders of the True Faith. And he undoubtedly found the rugged landscape, the austere features, and the somber people of Spain more inspiring than the worldly magnificence of Venice. But he would have been as surprised, had anyone charged him with being a consciously national painter, as Fra Angelico would have been had he similarly been called Italian. The good brother would have said he was first a Christian and second a Florentine.

The perfect example of nationalism in art is Wagner’s great comedy on the medieval guilds of Nuremberg, largely because he wrote it quite consciously as a private national anthem. To be sure, he wrote it also to answer the friends of Brahms who felt that Wagner could not write counterpoint and the enemies in Paris who felt he could not write at all. It was, in fact, designed for nationalism, a celebration of the oldest German musical traditions, free-flowing and springlike as those songs of the wandering scholars that delighted Eleanor of Aquitaine.

I myself feel he wrote it also somewhat in expiation of sin: the chief sin being that of having woven a third of a legend from Burgundy, a third from Iceland, and parts from the Garonne and the Rhine into the fabrication of a hybrid and synthetic hero named Siegfried. This hero could not overcome flames except with supernatural aid, nor conquer women except under false pretenses. He was almost as great a liar as the god Wotan who produced him, and very nearly as ersatz. Here was no Galahad or Roland or San Martín. Nothing pure in heart, altruistic, or truly valiant. And Wagner, for all that he was the most intriguing of men, must have known it. At least once in his life, between the borrowed Druid gods and the Celtic princesses and Rienzi, he wanted to present a decent and charming German hero. He dug into the past some four hundred years and emerged with Hans Sachs, Walter, and a masterpiece.

In this opera, as in Boris Godunow, we have a definitely affirmative answer to the first part of our original proposition. It is undoubtedly a work much of whose strength lies in its national flavor. But, taking Wagner’s music as a whole, should we be justified in saying that he was moved by an ardent nationalism in order to accomplish it?

Certainly his other great opera, Tristan und Isolde, is the reverse of nationalistic. It is as Celtic, in its way, as Pelléas et Mélisande. The overstatement in the one is Germanic, the understatement in the other is French; but in both these chefs-dœuvre the composers caught and consciously interpreted a spirit quite alien to the Nordic: the wandering Celtic Alma which has left its imprint on Russian soil, as well as on Iberia and the coasts of Ireland, Wales, and Brittany. And if we consider Wagner’s notorious wooing of Paris and his contempt for Prussia, which he voiced as vigorously as Goethe or Heine; if we consider the socialistic and antiimperialistic philosophy which Bernard Shaw discovered in the Ring; or Wagner’s final and Parsifallic message, which would have shocked Bach or Kant as much as it revolted Nietzsche, we cannot for a moment consider him an artist who worked through nationalism to achieve his splendors. The Reformation Symphony of Mendelssohn breathes a much purer nationalism than any work of Wagner’s except only Die Meistersinger.

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JEFFERSON was his own greatest work of art; he wrote frequently of the “art of living,” and he summed up in his personality all the qualities and conditions we have just had under examination. In him, as in any fine opus, the great disciplines were interdependent. Rarely has there been a more intense and conscious American, and never a more eclectic one.

As a practicing artist and architect, he also was consumed by a cause: the dignifying of the new, little American nation. The passwords to his enthusiasm were not those of El Greco, but legality, freedom, sovereignly. His heroes were not, like Hans Sachs, dug out of a distant past; we had no past. They were awaited in some brilliant future. Like the cathedral builders — though Jefferson turned aside from Gothic as unsuitable to our needs, as he turned from the courtly, unchaste Rococo — he planned, in almost every case, some public building, a house for the community, some place where the souls of men could expand. Even his own Monticello was designed to receive those countless guests who ultimately ate him out of house and home.

For models, he turned to the accomplishments in architecture and literature of that other republic, the Roman Republic, before Augustus destroyed it. Here he found the cube and the sphere, the observance of geometric laws, the “noble and true proportions” worthy of our new country, the bold chastity which would reprove the colonial untidiness that all travelers found and deplored. In fact, the disciplines were so interdependent in him that we may observe his purpose, which we know, of fortifying the Constitution with lawfulness, reasonableness, and with checks and balances, running parallel with his purpose of housing the government under the same terms. Check and balance, strut and thrust — in all things he sought basic form.

He borrowed profusely, but he transformed the ancient shapes to suit new media: new materials, new purposes, new sites. For the library at the University of Virginia he studied the Pantheon down to the last measurements and then began what might have been a small-scale copy. But his natural inventiveness and his eclecticism led him out of imitation into creation, into the amazing extension of the entablature of the porch around the whole body of the rotunda in one fresh and happy movement. Fine as the Pantheon is, it looks the tomb it is, it reverberates with the heavy tread of legions. Under the touch of real genius, in red brick and white trim, the library soars lightly, not ponderous but elegant, reverberating to the young voices of those who would read old books but lead new lives. Somehow the University stands apart, immediate, quite unlike anything in France, England, or the Vicenza of Palladio. It is as American as the lovely Circus in Bath, which the Germans nearly destroyed, was unmistakably English, or the Place Stanislas in Nancy unmistakably French. It has this affinity, too, with Bath and Nancy, that it was conceived by one mind and carried out at one time.

The Classic revival in architecture, the revival of the republican ardors which had made Rome great, the passion for legality, these were not slavish copyings of old glories but the desire to carry on where the ancient republics had left off — the desire to skip the feudal and the monarchial, in building as in government. The new buildings like the new government did not have their counterparts on earth; yet the motive of their designing was not to make something new just to be new. Rather, something that would fit a new scale and a new spirit. The hills and trees and contours of Virginia are not those of Kent or Angoulême or Latium, Jefferson wrote his friend Lee (May 8, 1825) that his aim had not been originality of principle or sentiment, but that he had intended to express the American mind. In doing that, he touched the whole world.

It is curious that of these examples of “nationalism” in art, all but one are also examples of agglomeration: the purpose or performance implies a group. It may seem farfetched to say that each example also lies within the canons of sound biology. Yet those canons, in sum, are but the search for the maximum welfare of humanity, achieved by the expanding cultivation of the individual. Certainly this has been the avowed care of that Church for which El Greco labored. Equally certainly it was the intent of those medieval guilds into one of which Walter, the maverick, was admitted by a “shifting of specialization.” It was as difficult to join a union then as now (and in those early days the Church excommunicated those who broke the union rules), but Hans Sachs would have the bars lowered or the sights raised: let the knight and the laborer both be poets, let the people sing, said Sachs. And there is no doubt that an ideal of group welfare and of the preciousness of each individual soul animated Jefferson, the builder of universities, and those who built cathedrals.

In the greatest works of art, in those I have mentioned as in the Pole-vaulter of Cnossus or the Taj Mahal or King Lear, the impress of the nationality of the hand and brain that created them is strongly marked. The local idiom is there of necessity, conditioned by the local material, the inherited and basic shapes, the reflections of the familiar type. And there is inherent also the heightening of effect, common to all art, which intensities the qualities by concentration and idealization. Die Meistersinger is far more German than the intellectually polyglot Wagner himself: it is the spirit of Germany at its best — and perhaps nations, like individuals, have a right to be judged by their highest aspirations.

Yet, under this varied cast of nationalism, in all these examples, we can find little that was conscious. No line was drawn on paper, no note of music written, no couplet rhymed just to be different or just to impose a separation. The borrowings were done to the end of a humble usefulness, for there is no arrogance in great art, nor feeling of exclusion. Indeed, the artist approaches his work with the old grace in his heart: “Bless, O Lord, this food to our use and us to thy service.”