So, in Austria, I have seen a fallen Christus. It was on the Jaufen, not very far from Meran. I was looking at all the snowpeaks all around, and hurrying downhill, trying to get out of a piercing wind, when I almost ran into a very old Martertafel. The wooden shed was silver-grey with age, and covered on the top with a thicket ot lichen, weird, grey-green, sticking up its tufts. But on the rocks at the foot of the cross was the armless Christ, who had tumbled down and lay on his back in a weird attitude. It was one of the old, peasant Christs, carved out of wood, and having the long, wedge-shaped shins and thin legs that are almost characteristic. Considering the great sturdiness of a mountaineer’s calves, these thin, flat legs are interesting. The arms of the fallen Christ had broken off at the shoulders, and they hung on their nails, as ex voto limbs hang in the shrines. But these arms dangled from their palms, one at each end of the cross, the muscles, carved in wood, looking startling, upside down. And the icy wind blew them backwards and forwards. There, in that bleak place among the stones, they looked horrible. Yet I dared not touch either them or the fallen image. I wish some priest would go along and take the broken thing away.
So many Christs there seem to be: one in rebellion against his cross, to which he was nailed; one bitter with the agony of knowing he must die, his heart-beatings all futile; one who felt sentimental; one who gave in to his misery; one who was a sensationalist; one who dreamed and fretted with thought. Perhaps the peasant carvers of crucifixes are right, and all these were found on the same cross. And perhaps there were others too: one who waited for the end, his soul still with a sense of right and hope; one ashamed to see the crowd make beasts of themselves, ashamed that he should provide for their sport; one who looked at them and thought: “And I am of you. I might be among you, yelling at myself in that way. But I am not, I am here. And so — ”
All those Christs, like a populace, hang in the mountains under their little sheds. And perhaps they are falling, one by one. And I suppose we have carved no Christs, afraid lest they should be too like men, too like ourselves. What we worship must have exotic form.
AMERICA, LISTEN TO YOUR OWN
“America has no tradition. She has no culture-history.”
Therefore, she is damned.
Europe invariably arrives at this self-congratulatory conclusion, usually from the same stock starting-point, the same phrase about tradition and culture. Moreover it usually gets Americans in the eye, for they really haven’t anything more venerable than the White House, or more primitive than Whistler. Which they ought to be thankful for, boldly proclaiming this thankfulness.
Americans in Italy, however, are very humble and deprecating. They know their nakedness, and beg to be forgiven. They prostrate themselves with admiration, they knock their foreheads in front of our elegant fetishes. Poor, void America, crude, barbaric America, the Cinquescents knew her not. How thankful she ought to be! She doesn’t know when she is well off.
Italy consists of just one big arrangement of things to be admired. Every step you take, you get a church or a coliseum between your eyes, and down you have to go, on your knees in admiration. Down go the Americans, till Italy fairly trembles with the shock of their dropping knees.
It is a pity. It is a pity that Americans are always so wonderstruck by our — note the possessive adjective — cultural monuments. Why they are any more mine than yours, I don’t know — except that I have a British passport to validity my existence, and you have an American. However . . .
After all, a heap of stone is only a heap of stone — even if it is Milan Cathedral. And who knows that it isn’t a horrid bristly burden on the face of the earth? So why should the Corriere delta Sera remark with such sniffy amusement: “Of course they were duly impressed, and showed themselves overcome with admiration” — they being the Knights of Columbus, i Cavaliere di Colombo.
The Knights of Columbus were confessedly funny in Milan. But once more, why not? The dear, delicate-nosed, supercilious Anna Comnena found Bohemund and Tancred and Godfrey of Bouillon funny enough, in Constantinople long ago. And well-nurtured Romans never ceased to be amused by the gaping admiration of Goths and Scythians inside some forum or outside some temple, until the hairy barbarians stopped gaping and started to pull the wonder to pieces.
Of course, Goths and Scythians and Tancred and Bohemund had no tradition behind them. Luckily for them, for they would never have got so far with such impedimenta. As a matter of fact, once they had a tradition they were fairly harnessed. And if Rome could only have harnessed them in time, she might have made them pull her ponderous uncouth Empire across a few more centuries. However, men with such good names as Alaric and Attila were not going to open their mouths so easily to take the bit of Roman tradition.
You might as well sneer at a lad for not having a grey beard as jibe at a young people for not having a tradition. A tradition, like a bald head, comes with years, fast enough. And culture, more often than not, is a weary saddle for a jaded race.
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever. Let us live in hopes. But it isn’t the end of all joys. There are as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it: quite as good as that prickly sea-urchin of Milan Cathedral, O Knights of Columbus! As for the sea — la mer, c’est moi. I.a mer, c’est aussi votis, o Chevaliers de Colombe. Which is to say, there are quite as many wonders enfathomed in the human spirit as ever have come out of it: be they Milan Cathedral or the Coliseum or the Bridge of Sighs. And in the strange and undrawn waters of the Knights of Columbus, what wonders of beauty, etc., do not swim un- revealed? A fig for the spiny cathedral of Milan. Whence all this prostration before it?
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever. But there’s more than one old joy. It isn’t the limit. Do you expect me to gasp in front of Ghir- landajo, that life has reached its limit, and there’s no more to be done? You can’t fix a high-water mark to human activity: not till you start to die. Here is Europe swimming in the stagnation of the ebb, and congratulating itself on the long line of Cathedrals, Coliseums, Ghirlandajos which mark the horizon of the old high water: people swarming like the little crabs in the lagoons of Venice, in seas gone dead, and scuttling and gaping and pluming themselves conceitedly on the vision of St. Mark’s and San Giorgio, looming up magic on the sky-and-water line beyond.
Alas for a people when its tradition is established, and its limit of beauty defined. Alas for a race which has an exhibition of modern paintings such as the one in the Gardens at Venice, in this year of grace 1920. What else is left but to look back to Tintoret? Let it look back then.
Let the beauty of Venice be a sort of zenith to us, beyond which there is no seeing. Let Lincoln Cathedral fan her wings in our highest heaven, like an eagle at our pitch of flight. We can do no more. We have reached our limits of beauty. But these are not the limits of all beauty. They are not the limit of all things: only of us.
Therefore St. Mark’s need be no reproach to an American. It isn’t his St. Mark’s. It is ours. And we like crabs ramble in the slack waters and gape at the excess of our own glory. Behold our golden Venice, our Lincoln Cathedral like a dark bird in the sky at twilight. And think of our yesterdays! What would you not give, O America, for our yesterdays? Far more than they are worth, 1 assure you. What would not I give for your tomorrows!
One begins to understand the barbarian rage against the great monuments of civilization. “Go beyond that, if you can.” We say to the Americans, pointing to Venice among the waters. And the American humbly admits that it can’t be done. Rome said the same thing to Attila, years gone by. “Get beyond Aquileia, get beyond Padua, you barbarian!” Attila promptly kicked Aquileia and Padua to smithereens, and walked past. Hence Venice. If Attila or some other barbaric villain hadn’t squashed the cities of the Adriatic head, we should have had no Venice. Shall be bewail Aquileia or praise our Venice? Is Attila a reprehensible savage, or a creator in wrath?
Of course, it is simple for America. Venice isn’t really in her way, as Aquileia was in the way of Attila,
or Rome in the way of the Goths. Attila and the Goths had to do some kicking. The Americans can merely leave us to our monuments.
There are limits. But there are no limits to the human race. The human race has no limits. The Milanese fished that prickly sea-bear of a cathedral out of the deeps of their own soul, and have never been able to get awav from it. But the Knights of Columbus depart by the next train.
Happy is the nation which hasn’t got a tradition and which lacks cultural monuments. How gay Greece must have been, while Egypt was sneering at her for an uneducated young nobody, and what a good time Rome was having, whilst Hellas was looking down a cultured and supercilious nose at her. There’s as fine fish in the sea as ever came out of it.
America, therefore, should leave off being quite so prostrate with admiration. Beauty is beauty, and must have its wistful time- hallowed dues. But the human soul is father and mother of all man- created beauty. An old race, like an old parent, sits watching the golden past. But the golden glories of the old are only fallen leaves about the feet of the young. It is an insult to life itself to be too abject, too prostrate before Milan Cathedral or a Ghirlandajo. What is Milan Cathedral but a prickly, empty burr dropped off the tree of life! The nut was eaten even in Sforza days.
What a young race wants is not a tradition nor a bunch of culture monuments. It wants an inspiration. And you can’t acquire an inspiration as you can a culture or a tradition, by going to school and by growing old.
You must first have faith. Not rowdy and tub-thumping, but steady and deathless, faith in your own unrevealed, unknown destiny. The future is not a finished product, like the past. The future is a strange, urgent, poignant responsibility, something which urges inside a young race like sap, or like pregnancy, urging towards fulfilment. This urge you must never betray and never deny. It is more than all tradition, more than all law, more than all standards or monuments. Let the old world and the old way have been what they may, this is something other. Abide by that which is coming, not by that which has come.
And turn for the support and the confirmation not to the perfected past, that which is set in perfection as monuments of human passage. But turn to the unresolved, the rejected.
Let Americans turn to America, and to that very America which has been rejected and almost annihilated. Do they want to draw sustenance for the future? They will never draw it from the lovely monuments of our European past. These have an almost fatal narcotic, dream-luxurious effect upon the soul. America must turn again to catch the spirit of her own dark, aboriginal continent.
That which was abhorrent to the Pilgrim Fathers and to the Spaniards, that which was called the Devil, the black Demon of savage America, this great aboriginal spirit the Americans must recognize again, recognize and embrace. The devil and anathema of our forefathers hides the Godhead which we seek.
Americans must take up life where the Red Indian, the Aztec, the Maya, the Incas left it off. They must pick up the life-thread where the mysterious Red race let it fall. They must catch the pulse of the life which Cortes and Columbus murdered. There lies the real continuity: not between Europe and the new States, but between the murdered Red America and the seething White America. The President should not look back towards Gladstone or Cromwell or Hilde- brand, but towards Montezuma. A great and lovely life-form, unper- fected, fell with Montezuma. The responsibility for the producing and the perfecting of this life-form devolves upon the new American. It is time he accepted the full responsibility. It means a surpassing of the old European life-form. It means a departure from the old European morality, ethic. It means even a departure from the old range of emotions and sensibilities. The old emotions are crystallized for ever among the European monuments of beauty. There we can leave them, along with the old creeds and the old ethical laws outside of life. Montezuma had other emotions, such as we have not known or admitted. We must start from Montezuma, not from St. Francis or St. Bernard.
As Venice wedded the Adriatic, let America embrace the great dusky continent of the Red Man. It is a mysterious, delicate process, no theme for tub-thumping and shouts of Expositions. And yet it is a theme upon which American writers have touched and touched again, uncannily, unconsciously, blindfold as it were. Whitman was almost conscious; only the political democracy issue confused him. Now is the day when Americans must become fully self-reliantly conscious of their own inner responsibility. They must be ready for a new act, a new extension of life. They must pass the bounds.
To your tents, O America. Listen to your own, don’t listen to Europe.
INDIANS AND AN ENGLISHMAN
Supposing one fell onto the moon, and found them talking English, it would be something the same as falling out of the open world plump down here in the middle of America. “Here” means New Mexico, the Southwest, wild and woolly and artistic and sage-brush desert.
It is all rather like comic opera played with solemn intensity. All the wildness and woolliness and westernity and motor-cars and art and sage and savage are so mixed up, so incongruous, that it is a farce, and everybody knows it. But they refuse to play it as farce. The wild and woolly section insists on being heavily dramatic, bold and bad on purpose; the art insists on being real American and artistic; motor-cars insist on being thrilled, moved to the marrow; highbrows insist on being ecstatic; Mexicans insist on being Mexicans, squeezing the last black drop of macabre joy out of life; and Indians wind themselves in white cotton sheets like Hamlet’s father’s ghost, with a lurking smile.
And here am I, a lone lorn Englishman, tumbled out of the known world of the British Empire onto this stage: for it persists in seeming like a stage to me, and not like the proper world.
Whatever makes a proper world, I don’t know. But surely two elements are necessary: a common purpose and a common sympathy. I can’t see any common purpose. The Indians and Mexicans don’t even seem very keen on dollars. That full moon of a silver dollar doesn’t strike me as overwhelmingly hypnotic out here. As for a common sympathy or understanding, that’s beyond imagining. West is wild and woolly and bad-on-purpose; commerce is a little self- conscious about its own pioneering importance — Pioneers! O Pioneers! — highbrow is bent on getting to the bottom of everything and saving the lost soul down there in the depths; Mexican is bent on being Mexican and not gringo; and the Indian is all the things that all the others aren’t. And so everybody smirks at everybody else, and says tacitly: “Go on; you do your little stunt, and I’ll do mine,” and they’re like the various troupes in a circus, all performing at once, with nobody for Master of Ceremonies.
It seems to me, in this country, everything is taken so damn seriously that nothing remains serious. Nothing is so farcical as insistent drama. Everybody is lurkingly conscious of this. Each section or troupe is quite willing to admit that all the other sections are buffoon stunts. But it itself is the real thing, solemnly bad in its badness, good in its goodness, wild in its wildness, woolly in its woolli- ness, arty in its artiness, deep in its depths — in a word, earnest.
In such a masquerade of earnestness, a bewildered straggler out of the far-flung British Empire, myself! Don’t let me for a moment pretend to know anything. I know less than nothing. I simply gasp like a bumpkin in a circus ring, with the horse-lady leaping over my head, the Apache war-whooping in my ear, the Mexican staggering under crosses and bumping me as he goes by, the artist whirling colours across my dazzled vision, the highbrows solemnly declaiming at me from all the cross-roads. If, dear reader, you, being the audience who has paid to come in, feel that you must take up an attitude to me, let it be one of amused pity.
One has to take sides. First, one must be either pro-Mexican or pro-Indian; then, either art or intellect; then, Republican or Democrat; and so on. But as for me, poor lamb, if I bleat at all in the circus ring, it will be my own shorn lonely bleat of a lamb who’s lost his mother.
The first Indians I really saw were the Apaches in the Apache Reservation of this state. We drove in a motor-car, across desert and
mesa, down canons and up divides and along arroyos and so forth, two days, till at afternoon our two Indian men ran the car aside from the trail and sat under the pine tree to comb their long black hair and roll it into the two roll-plaits that hang in front of their shoulders, and put on all their silver-and-turquoise jewellery and their best blankets: because we were nearly there. On the trail were horsemen passing, and wagons with Ute Indians and Navajos.
“De donde viene Usted?” . . .
We came at dusk from the high shallows and saw on a low crest the points of fndian tents, the tepees, and smoke, and silhouettes of tethered horses and blanketed figures moving. In the shadow a rider was following a flock of white goats that flowed like water. The car ran to the top of the crest, and there was a hollow basin with a lake in the distance, pale in the dying light. And this shallow upland basin, dotted with Indian tents, and the fires flickering in front, and crouching blanketed figures, and horsemen crossing the dusk from tent to tent, horsemen in big steeple hats sitting glued on their ponies, and bells tinkling, and dogs yapping, and tilted wagons trailing in on the trail below, and a smell of wood-smoke and of cooking, and wagons coming in from far off, and tents prick - ing on the ridge of the round vallum, and horsemen dipping down and emerging again, and more red sparks of fires glittering, and crouching bundles of women’s figures squatting at a fire before a little tent made of boughs, and little girls in full petticoats hovering, and wild barefoot boys throwing bones at thin-tailed dogs, and tents away in the distance, in the growing dark, on the slopes, and the trail crossing the floor of the hollows in the low dusk.
There you had it all, as in the hollow of your hand. And to my heart, born in England and kindled with Fenimore Cooper, it wasn’t the wild and woolly West, it was the nomad nations gathering still in the continent of hemlock trees and prairies. The Apaches came and talked to us, in their steeple black hats and plaits wrapped with beaver fur, and their silver and beads and turquoise. Some talked strong American, and some talked only Spanish. And they had strange lines in their faces.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 1003