There's a lot of it from those classicists, Winslow Homer, Eakins, Sargent. There's a lot of it from the popular illustrators and from the cartoon artists such as John Held Jr. The cartoon-comics form a separate field, though, a branch that is larger than the main river of visual art.
The Country-and-Western influence has been even stronger in painting than in music. Those Western, Cowboy-and-Indian painters, Jacob Miller, Bodmer, Bingham, Thomas Moran, Bierstadt, Kurtz, and Catlin and Remington and Russell, they were all fine romantic-realists and they left a heroic deposit of quality pulp. Their paintings were high colored and clear, and direct and expressive and apparent, though Remington did scribble in bronze and introduce notes of abstraction in his sculpture.
The painters of a little later period added quantities of experimentation and abstraction, and it mixed well with the native pulp. There are many good ones of widely different sorts, Hans Hofmann, de Kooning, Norman Rockwell, Wyeth, Klenholz, Pollock, Max Weber. Not a real giant among them, no; nor a real midget either.
But there are many thousands of people doing painting and drawing and sculpture. There are many millions liking it and understanding it, and that is what the whole golden business is about. Contemporary art is aided by contemporary nostalgia: this is the seeing of things as better than they are; and, by creative participation, the causing of them to be better than they are.
What about music? It's very noisy in here. I can't hear you. Will you write it down? Oh. What about music, huh? Well, it lags, it lags.
It has the Country-and-Western element growing out of the old ballad music. And it has the contemporary nostalgia working mightily for it. It has creative participation to a degree not enjoyed by any of the other arts. It has the pulpish backgrounds of all the mountain musics and plain songs, of river-boat music and hoe-down, of a wide variety of jazzes and rags, of barber-shop quartet music and of Gay Nineties music, the products of the popular composers from the Great Victor Hubert to Berlin and Gershwin and Cole Porter. But it lags badly.
I have suggested that all rock would be better if played only one-tenth as loud. “No, that wouldn't work at all,” a lady rockist said. “It has to be played too loud for you to listen to it. It won't stand listening to.” Yes, that's true.
“Music is the brandy of the damned.” In this case yes. Still, there is a little bit of good Bluegrass music appearing, and all sorts of novelty stuff. That music lags is not to say that it is out of it. It may explode in the second half of this long century of the golden age. Perhaps it is now creating an absolutely thunderous trash and pulp to complete the deposit that may be cashed in coming decades. (Remember that Wagner himself was pulp intended to be ground up for future use; the other giants of the European golden age of music weren't, but Wagner was). Care is required here in the comments: there are people who will kill you if you say that rock isn't the greatest.
How goes it with writing? The printed underlay that is now being transmuted is very thick and of many tribes. Besides that of still earlier times and further places, there are the seven hundred years of vernacular literature of the Western burgeoning. Much of that has already been transformed into set and mounted and museum gold, and that part will not come to popular handling.
But much of it, and the most excellent part of it, is a flowing slag of trash that is intoxicating in its profusion and availability. Most of the direct transmogrified trash-underlay of the present American-as-world-nucleus golden age, however, is American with a touch of limey-English in the Toff-and-Terror, and Mystery, and Salt-Water Adventure areas.
There was, to be sure, a practice golden age of literature in America in the 1920's, and the best pieces of this become valuable components now. But most of the raw material, the pulp material literally, was not accounted golden in its times. Yet Gold Rush Tales are important in it, those and Blood-and-Thunder and Buffalo-Hunter and Indian-War, Mountain-Men and Trappers Tales, Cattle-Men and Wagon-Men Tales, Horatio-at-the-Transition Novels, Detective Stories and Mystery Stories, Aviation Stories, Tom Swiftian Stories, Pirate Stories and Road-Agent Stories, Nat Buntline Stories, Tarzan Stories, First Science Fiction Stories, Horror Stories and Weird Tales, Sea Stories, Klondike Stories, Golden Age Science Fiction Stories, Sports Stories, Confession Stories and True Stories. There were more than a hundred years of pulp novels and pulp magazines in a wide spectrum. Who remembers St. Nicholas Magazine? Who remembers Black Mask Magazine? Who remembers Oliver Optic? Or Oliver Onions? The transmuting nostalgia remembers them.
Jacob Abbott and his Little Rollo Stories, Father Finn and his Tom Playfair Stories, Burt Standish and his Frank Merriwell Stories, Edward L. Wheeler and his Deadwood Dick and Calamity Jane Stories, Harold Bell Wright and his Shepherd-Of-The-Hills Stories, Zane Gray and the Rimrock, Emerson Hough and his Covered Wagon, Owen Wister and his Virginian, Dashiell Hammett and his Maltese Falcon, A.B. Guthrie and his Big Sky, S.S. Van Dine and his Philo Vance Detective Novels.
Yes, there's a working synthesis of it all going on, a yeasting from the bottom up. This is the Group Unconscious of American Literature and it has become a very active form. And the stuff that comes up from that unconscious these last several years is ragged and unrefined gold.
(You call this a golden age? You know how really dumb some of the stuff is that the smart boys are putting out? Yeah, I know.)
Contemporary architecture? It was never as bad as it has been false-mouthed. And the mélange of the buildings of several recent times emerges now and presents itself in freshening fashion. It grows new gracefully.
Anthropology and para-anthropology? The Law of Intellectual Constancy had just recently become true. Its verification (becoming true) is the biggest thing that has happened in anthropology. It was not true fifty years ago when Havelock Ellis and others were pushing it. It has just become true in the last half-decade, since the beginning of the golden age. And it says that every human has just about the same amount of potential. Each may carry it in buckets of a different shape, but each has about the same amount of it.
Drama? Theatre? Show-Stuff? Oh, they're looking for some sort of stage now to present the new plays on. Whatever will be the descendant of the old stage? TV isn't quite the right stage, nor are conventional films. And all the theatres are either too large or too small. There's a lot of good drama ready to show; and some of it is showing already, even before a proper consensus stage has been selected or developed. It will be good when it happens. Maybe it is already happening and is already good.
Lean and spare, often archaic, measured, easy-going and even lazy, rough in detail but shaped and proportioned in large, insightly and intuitive and astonishing, archetypal, funful as firecrackers, at the same time reminiscent and original — Those are qualities of it? Yes, those are qualities of it.
Well, what of the steep things, the ultimates of good and evil, the final accounting things, the eschatological or end-of-the-world things? They go on the same during a golden age and they keep the same accounts, but all these things are brought into a sharper and brighter focus when looked at through the golden glass. And the golden age itself has a touch of the eschatological and the eternal. It has an aspect that philosophers have always ascribed to eternity: it doesn't have duration; it has instead that vaster thing, moment.
All well then, who are the thousand or so giants in the hundred or so fields that make up a golden age? No; should we list the thousand, there would be someone who would disagree with two or three of them, and then there would be controversy. But there are very many of these gold-dusted larger persons, and many more being born into the condition every day from previous estates.
“Unmisered gold in open booths for all.” Now we're talking real Golden Gobbler Turkey!
April 15, 1974
Prologue of the Persons
ROME, the city that was the world and the Empire, is the main person of the story: How she came to her end, and how the world ended at the same time.
GOTHIA, the ambulant kingdom of the Wes
t Goths who, under her esoteric nobility, returned to the attack across many centuries and thousands of miles.
ALARIC, the Boy Giant, the King of the West Goths, who brought the world to an end in his moment of weakness.
STAIRNON, the first and most magnificent of the Valkyries, the wife of Alaric. And her three brothers:
SINGERICH, the Goth who became a Greek,
SARUS, the Goth who became a Roman,
ATHAULF, who is Cain, the Goth who remained a Goth.
Then:
STILICHO, the great Master General of Rome, a Pannonian German Vandal convert from paganism who was more Roman than the Romans and more Catholic than the Pope.
THEODOSIUS THE EMPEROR, the last who can be called ‘Great’ without laughing. And his three offspring:
ARCADIUS, the Emperor of the East, who was born an old man. HONORIUS, the Emperor of the West, with the mind of an eleven-year-old boy.
GALLA PLACIDIA, the goblin child and sister of the two young emperors who, at age seventeen and when all the rest of them were cowed, seized control of the Roman Senate and the City and represented the defiance in the last one hundred days of the world.
These are the high persons of the history, and should be noted. Then these others, from the strangeness of their ancient names and in the interest of clarity, are given for easy reference:
FRITIGERN, the Gothic leader who defeated and slew the Emperor Valens during the boyhood of Alaric.
ATHANARIC, the Gothic leader who threw away the victory.
EUTROPIUS, the Imperial eunuch who may have been two different men.
ARBOGAST, Count of the Franks, who had the world in his hands, and dropped it.
EUGENIUS, the pretender Emperor, the last of the last of the pagans.
SIRICIUS, the Pope who did nothing.
INNOCENT, the Pope who did next to nothing.
SAUL, who led the switch to the Christian side at Frigidus and so saved the day.
ULDIN, a King of the Huns, who devoted his life to the support of the Roman Empire after the Romans had ceased to care.
ST. AMBROSE in Milan, who believed that the world was to endure.
ST. AUGUSTINE in Hippo Regius who understood why the world must end, and when.
GODIGISEL, the King of the Vandals, who was overmatched by the imperial Vandal Stilicho.
RADAGAIS, the Ogre, the complete barbarian, who convinced the Roman world that it had falsely applied the name to others.
OLYMPIUS, the Defamer, who out-Heroded Herod.
SOLINAS, the Infiltrator.
HERACLIAN, Count of Africa, who, from another viewpoint and in the light of different sympathies, might be considered as great a man as Stilicho whom he killed.
These and many other great men and ladies mingle in the high history of the days just before the world ended.
Prologue of the Picture
Near the end of the fourth century, the Mosaic-of-the-Great-Picture came into its own. Its centers were Constantinople and Ravenna. Like Creation itself, it was built around one grand trick.
The great mosaics were made up of thousands of small cubes or tesserae imbedded in a matrix of plaster or cement or clay. The colored cubes formed intricate pictures, one picture merging into another: these smaller pictures, when seen from a distance and in the right aspect, would form one great picture. Most persons could see it clearly: some could not see it at all.
The small glass cubes were clear or naturally colored. The clear cubes were wrapped in gold or silver leaf or colored fabric; over this another thin layer of glass was fused. The cubes were set into the matrix with an unevenness that was an art, so that the light off them shattered and gave a sheen and sparkle to the whole arrangement.
The smaller pictures were of people, animals, actions, furniture and handicrafts, towns, fields, banquets, worships, labors and pleasures, buildings, ships, plows, soldiers, children, courtesans, sheep, and asses. They combined in the great picture (which not everyone could see), the face of Christ.
Among the colored cubes pressed into the matrix to form the mosaic of the end of the fourth century were these: the cities Rome, Constantinople, Ravenna, Brundisium, Syracuse, Zancle which is Messina, Oea which is Tripoli, Massilia, Alexandria, Artaxata, Caesarea, Camulodunum which is Colchester, Carthage and Cyrene, Corinth and Athens, Damascus and Jerusalem.
There are six hundred mountain peaks that must be pressed in here, and two hundred main rivers. There are fifty million slaves who form a part of the picture. The Adriatic Sea is a person in the complex, and the Euxine.
There are the nations of the Empire whose names read like a litany: Cappadocia and Cappadocia Pontica; Cilicia and Pisidia and Pamphylia; Galatia, Lycia, Bithynia; Arabia Petrae and Arabia Felix; Syria and Coele Syria and Palestine and Armenia; Greece and Thrace and Macedonia; Dalmatia and Dardania and Moesia; the settled nation of the Pannonian Vandals, and the wandering nation of the further Vandals; Raetia and Vindelicia and Decumates; the three nations of Gaul, Aquitania and Lugdunensis and Belgica; Britain and Narbonnensis; Tarraconensis and Cisalpine Gaul; Baetica, Lusitania, Gallaecia, Asturia; Mauretania and Numidia; the Province of Africa which had been Carthage; Libya and Egypt; and the wandering nations of the West Goths (them especially), the Burgundians and Lombards and Alemans and Huns. And many more, for there were two hundred nations involved in the Empire.
There are the translucent tesserae of the saints and martyrs like chips of lapis lazuli; and of the Blessed Virgin who did not die, who is the only yet-living citizen of the Empire. There are the popes of the turning of the century, Damascus, Siricius, Anastasius, Innocent: the Emperors Valentinian and Valens, Gratian and the Second Valentinian, Theodosius the Great, Magnus Maximus the Usurper, Eugenius, Arcadius and Honorius and the Second Theodosius.
There are Goths by the dozens. (We will come to them. The Gothic people were very strong in the mosaic.)
The great Master Generals of the era: Promotus, Nevigastes, Gennerid, Sebastian, Trajan, Frigerid (many of these were Gothic men), Victor, Maximus, Nanienus and Mellobaudes, Hellebicus and Caesarius, Saturninus, Lupicinus, Julius, Heraclian, Bacurius, Stilicho, Arbogast.
There are the Kings: Godigisel and Respendial and Uldin the Hun. The ministers, the heresiarchs, the great ladies were all parts of the big picture. Sometimes the picture of the passion and death of the Empire will be the face of the crucified Christ: but often there will emerge the most fulfilled, the most shatteringly profound image ever, the laughing Christ of Creophylus.
And now we will attend to the business at hand and disclaim all further looseness of thought and word. We will studiously add the colored bits to the matrix of blue clay, and we will be guilty of no more such outbursts. Dimitte nobis rhapsodia nostra—forgive us our rhapsodies.
To a great extent, the matrix was Roman, and in that fullness of time, the tesserae were very often Gothic. We consider that perfervid Gothic element now.
1. All About Goths
Tacitus, four lifetimes before, had referred to the Goths as a red-haired nation, but most now called them blond. Their coloration may have changed in their wanderings or with the mixing of blood: or the application of the words may have changed, as Latin Americans today call a blond a rubia, a red one.
The Goths were a tall people, that much is agreed upon. They were giants to the Romans, as the Celts and the Scythians and Persians and African Negroes were not. In early illustrations they were a type of German that has changed little in nearly two thousand years: deep-eyed, what can only be described as dished-faced, long of moustache and beard and hair, very tall and straggly, often gaunt, tremendous of hands and feet. The same type appears later, again in popular illustrations, as the Vikings. They are subject to caricature, and their appearance on early murals almost had to be caricatures. Real people could hardly look like that, but we must assume that the caricatures are valid ones. The Goths were of an exaggerated size; and to the Romans they were funny looking.
Strabo, the ancient geogr
apher, writes of two rivers lying near to each other: the Sybaris that makes the horses that drink from it timid; and the Crathis that makes the hair of persons who bathe in it to be yellow. He sets these two rivers in ancient Italy, but the geographer was weak on geography. One of those rivers surely was in deep Gothia: that which turns the hair of the people yellow. And in Gothia also there must have been a river of opposite effect to the Sybaris: one that turned the horses into savage giants.
The elephants that Hannibal had brought over the Alps did not startle the Romans so much as did the giant horses of the Goths. The elephants were completely strange, and evoked mere wonder. The giant horses resembled, to a degree, the Roman horses, though Pliny believed them of separate species and unable to breed with each other on account of the great divergence of size. These giant horses were, to the Romans, a familiar thing gone wrong, an animal friend cast in a gigantic and frightening aspect—a terror.
The Gothic word for horse, maran, cognate to the English mare though with change of sex, has become an element in the word for a terror, a nightmare, in several of the Low-Latin languages, cauchemar, quauquemaire, and has kept its same sense for sixteen hundred years.
The Roman word for horse, equus, was to die out, and caballus, a slang word given by the Romans to the four-footed giants, became the generic word for horse. The new giant men and the new giant horses came together of necessity. A Roman horse would have carried with difficulty a heavily armed Gothic knight, and would not have given sufficient bottom for the using of the heavy lance. The big northern horse was a draft animal in its development, whereas the Romans used ponies for riding and oxen for draft. The northern horses were kin to the giant modern draft horses used into the twentieth century. They were larger than the Percherons or Clydesdales, as heavy as the Shires and Belgians, and probably taller than these animals.
Summa Risus: Collected Non-Fiction Page 16