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Louder and Faster Pain Joy and the Body Politic in Asian American Taiko Deborah Wong
New York Washington, D.C./Baltimore Bern Frankfurt Berlin Brussels Vienna Oxford
George Van Cleve Speer
Things of the Spirit
ART AND HEALING
IN THE AMERICAN BODY POLITIC, 1929–1941
PETER LANG
New York Washington, D.C./Baltimore Bern
Frankfurt Berlin
Brussels
Vienna
Oxford
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication
Data
Speer, George V.
Things of the spirit: art and healing in the American body politic, 1929–1941 / George Van Cleve Speer. p. cm. — (Literature and the visual arts; v. 17) Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Art and society—United States—History—20th century.
3. Art, American—20th century—Themes, motives. I. Title. N72.S6S666 701’.0309730904—dc23 2012000741
ISBN 978-1-4331-1568-4 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4539-0225-7 (e-book)
ISSN 0888-3890
Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council of Library Resources.
All rights reserved. Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm, xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited.
Printed in Germany
Dedication
This book represents the contributions and unflagging support of many individuals. I am very grateful to Caitlin Lavelle and Sarah Stack at Peter Lang Publishing for their support of this project and for patiently shepherding me through the process of bringing the manuscript to press.
I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to two stalwart friends and mentors, Dr. Eleanor Harvey of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Dr. Angela Miller of Washington University in St. Louis. For technical help, hand–holding and dark humor, I thank my friends Patricia Lynagh (former Research Librarian at SAAM) and Andrew Thomas at the National Gallery of Art.
I would like to recognize Dr. Alexander Nemerov of Yale University, whose work has taught me that art history must be eloquent and imaginative as well as archival.
This project would not have got off the ground without the generous suggestions of Dr. Casey Blake, Columbia University, and Dr. Howard Brick, University of Michigan, both of whom helped to define this book as an exercise in American culture studies.
Early and much–appreciated support for the book came from the Patricia and Phillip Frost Fellowship in American art and visual culture at SAAM. I take this opportunity, as well, to offer profound thanks to my colleagues in the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies at Northern Arizona University for their enthusiasm and encouragement over the last five years. And, I express my deepest gratitude to Dean Michael Vincent and the College of Arts and Letters at NAU for innumerable contributions of institutional support. I hope this book will reflect well upon the university and will redeem the trust of so many who have invested in it.
Acknowledgments
Figure 1 Winslow Homer
Old Mill (The Morning Bell)
Morning Bell
Yale University Art Gallery
Bequest of Stephen Carlton Clark, B.A. 1903
Figure 2 Winslow Homer
The Veteran in a New Field
Bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot (1876–1967), 1967
Figure 3
Thomas Pollock Anshutz, 1851–1912
The Ironworkers’ Noontime, 1880
Oil on canvas, 17 x 23 7/8 in. (43.2 x 60.6cm)
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd., 1979.7.4
Figure 7 Joseph Stella
Voice of the City of New York Interpreted (detail, The Brooklyn Bridge (The Bridge) 1920–22
Oil and tempera on canvas
Purchase 1937 Felix Fuld Bequest Fund
37.288
Figure 10 General Motors–Futurama–Visitors in Moving Chairs Viewing Exhibit
New York World’s Fair 1939–1940 Records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
viii Things of the Spirit
Figure 16 Henry Billings, American, 1901–1987 Men and Machines, 1941
Lithograph
35.9 x 40 cm (14 1/8 x 15 3/4 in.)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Fund in memory of Horatio Greenough Curtis 2002.662
Figure 20 Douglass Crockwell
Paper Workers
1964.1.152
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the U.S. Department of Labor
Figure 28 Charles Sheeler
Steam Turbine 1939 Oil on canvas
Collection of The Butler Institute of American Art Youngstown, Ohio
Figure 29 Charles Sheeler
Suspended Power, 1939 Oil on canvas
Overall: 33 x 26 x 2 in. (83.82 x 66.04 x 5.08 cm)
Framed dimensions: 39 3/8 x 32 1/4 x 2 1/4 in. (100 x 81.915 x 5.7 cm)
Dallas Museum of Art, gift of Edmund J. Kahn
Figure 30 Alexandre Hogue
Erosion No. 2–Mother Earth Laid Bare, 1936 Museum purchase, 1946.4
Chapter One: We Have Good News and Bad News: Fascist Contagion and American Antibodies 19
Chapter Two: Back to the Garden: Regionalism, Manly Men, and the Madonna of the Meadow 69
Chapter Three: Gentle Persuasion: Detroit Industry and the Labor of Art 121
Chapter Four: ‘Good Art is Life–Giving’: Activism, Abstraction, and the Sociality of Art 167
Epilogue 209
Bibliography 215
Index 225
Prologue
Winslow Homer’s The Morning Bell (Figure 1) from 1866 records the dutiful journey of a factory girl from the light and warmth of the out–of–doors to the confinement of a New England mill. This canvas and Homer’s Veteran in a New Field of 1865 (Figure 2) evoke a return to work and to the ordinary after the Civil War. The overt symbolism of the dark, hulking structure echoes in more subtle details: The young woman appears right of center, not fully committed to that half of the painting dominated by the mill; the tilt of her bonnet directs the viewer’s eye up and away from the mill, as if to suggest a reluctance, an inward drawing back from her destination. The roughly constructed boardwalk evokes a gangplank or a seesaw that threatens to spill her into the airless, noisy factory as she reaches the tipping point. At the particular moment Homer has pictured, the girl might decide to turn truant, veering left, down the slatted ramp and into the grass and flowers.
Fig.1 Winslow Homer, Old Mill (The Morning Bell), 1866, o/c
2
Things of the Spirit
But the tipping point is not just hers; this painting reflects a moment when the nation was on the brink of redefining itself as a modern, industrialized state very different from the agrarian, individualistic America of Veteran in a New Field. 1 In the earlier work, Homer positioned the returned soldier at the very center of the image, in the heart of his fields. The strong vertical of the figure, contrasting so sharply with the horizontal planes that predominate, suggests a spiritual uprightness, a return to generational responsibilities of farm and family. The man casts aside his canteen and army–issue jacket and wades into the wheat, swinging the scythe with long, powerful strokes as if determined to put the war and its crushing moral confusion behind him. Effulgent sunlight, shining on the veteran and coaxing the grain out of the earth, infuses the image with clarity of purpose.
The man and woman in these works embody conflicting expectations for America that did not arise, suddenly, after the war, but had
contended with one another from the earliest days of the republic. From the colonial period onward, technology was associated with thrift, hard work, and physical and spiritual health. Through technology, the colonies established their material independence from Britain, while the ability of machines to reduce the burden of labor was seen as a republican virtue of lessening oppression and suffering. American goods did not carry the “contagion” of European luxury, which fed unhealthy appetites that threatened our discipline and sense of duty. Tench Coxe, an important figure in the cotton business as well as an office–holder in Jefferson’s administration, regarded the taste for expensive foreign goods as “a malignant and alarming symptom, threatening convulsions and dissolution to the political body.” Enthusiastic early American industrialists saw technological unemployment (the elimination of as many workers as possible from factory processes) as a means of freeing able–bodied men for work in the fields. In 1830, the Philadelphia publisher Mathew Carey asserted that technological progress in the United States was necessary to the health of the nation, whose physical and spiritual condition would otherwise suffer. In the factory town of Lowell, Massachusetts, women, the elderly, and children—the “lesser” bodies within the body politic—were expected to adopt the qualities of “order, regularity and industry” manifested in the machinery they attended. In turn, the moral and physical health of these citizens, embodied a generation later in Homer’s mill–girl, would help build a nation.
In 1855, Herman Melville’s short story “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” described an hallucinatory visit to a paper mill in the shadow of “Woedolor Mountain.” The narrator, a seed vendor hoping to secure supplies from the mill, discovers “rows of blank–looking girls…all blankly folding blank paper” taken from the “iron animals” whom they serve “mutely and cringingly as the slave serves the Sultan.”2 Melville imagined the paper presses as living beings and, moreover, as rebellious servants, expressing two of the principal anxieties that accompanied our embrace of the “machine in the garden” well into the twentieth century. 3 Veteran in a New Field and The Morning Bell belong to a range of images related to Melville’s, a symbolic territory of the laboring body and the body politic whose futures would be determined by that embrace.
The veteran, the mill–girl and Melville’s seed–man share the loss or inversion of identities and destinies. The veteran was taken from his farm and husbandry and obliged to kill his countrymen; in the next fifteen or twenty years, he will perhaps be displaced again as technology takes farming out of his hands. For as long as she works at the mill, the young girl will not be permitted to marry and create a home as distant generations of women had done. Instead, she will be her own breadwinner, tending to spools and bobbins rather than her own children. Melville’s narrator, who boasted that he would scatter his seed to the frontiers of the virgin wilderness, discovers at Woedolor Mountain that his sexual power has been preempted. Within the paper mill, giant pistons pump great streams of white fluid to the chambers where women press and mold the mass into reams of blank paper. The spectacle un–mans the narrator, who finds himself as pale and faint as the silent girls who fold and carry, fold and carry.
In The Morning Bell, the girl’s face is shadowed by her bonnet in a manner that allows us to think of her as all of the factory girls who found themselves in her predicament. She represents a mode of nineteenth–century American experience, a specific culture and way of life. Homer’s men and women often turn their faces from the viewer, thwarting our desire to know precisely how they feel or how they complete the story; in a similar sense, the Lowell women relieved the monotony of their jobs by cultivating the ability to perform their tasks while indulging in fantasies beyond the surveillance of foremen. Looking at The Morning Bell, we, too, are free to imagine different narratives. Is the apparent narrative the only one, or is it possible that the girl is asleep and dreaming of the routine that awaits her in the morning? Or is she already in the factory at her loom, breathing in rag fibers that will destroy her lungs before she is thirty but, just at this moment, remembering the fine morning she left behind?
Underpaid millworkers quickly grew familiar with the insidious effects of the machine. At Lowell, many rebelled against the system, protesting against the machine–driven “monster” of greed “drawing his fatal folds around us as a nation.” The agitators warned of the emergence of a corrupted race that would one day fill the hospitals “with worn–out operatives and colored slaves.” The women spoke of themselves not as human beings, but as “operatives,” employing the
technical language of the shop; this neutrality disappeared instantly, however, pushed aside by the most damning comparison the women could make, with the slave race of their day. Resisting the colonizing of their bodies and minds by the machine, the factory workers revealed its true extent by presenting themselves as the “Voice of Industry.” 4
Fig.3 Thomas Anshutz, The Ironworkers’ Noontime, 1880, o/c
By 1880, when Thomas Anshutz painted Ironworkers’ Noontime (Figure 3), technology had profoundly complicated the self–awareness of Americans. Ironworkers’ Noontime is encoded with ethnic and class distinctions as well as the tension between a workingman’s autonomy and the demands of modern industry. Like Homer in The Morning Bell, Anshutz makes the human labor that powers the mill visible to us. And, as in the earlier painting, another bell will summon these men to their places on the line.
The theme of the painting and bright sunlight suggest an escape from the oppressive interior of the mill, but everywhere Anshutz signals that the respite is temporary. The varied postures and groupings,
6 Things of the Spirit
the virility and rambunctiousness of the men violate the regularized production process that Anshutz implies through the repetition of smokestacks and windows. At the same time, however, the group of figures describes a triangular footprint whose point rests along the perpendicular right leg of the foremost worker. The men are compositionally contained by the same geometry that governs the truss work inside the mill. Their freedom is incomplete and conditional. Noon is that moment when the sun is directly overhead, the hinge of the daylight hours, which Anshutz has faithfully represented. But noontime is mandated by the factory and is perhaps the only opportunity these men have to be outdoors. They flex, roughhouse, wash the grime from their necks and take in the fresh air, but they are still trapped by the time clock that regulates their days. Cart tracks beneath six of the figures suggest that if they tarry, the ironworkers will be run down by more equipment on the move.
The array of poses dignifies each figure; physical capability radiates from sinewed torsos and three of the men look boldly towards the viewer. A closer look, however, complicates our understanding of the image. All of these men appear to have the light skin of northern Europeans; glimpses of light–brown or red hair suggest that the ironworkers might have come to America in one of the great waves of immigration. Anshutz has depicted a group of men who were twice marginalized, for their suspicious ethnicity and for their caste, as laborers.5
From the perspective of the time, the “otherness” of these men was apparent in the narrative and sealed by their transgressive nudity. In the nineteenth century, as in the twenty–first, foreign workers coming to the United States fueled mistrust among Anglo–Saxon Americans and among those who controlled a vast proportion of the nation’s wealth. Additionally, among the Germans, Irish, Italians and Poles, cultural and nationalist prejudices rooted in centuries of European history translated to the United States. In 1857, John Roebling— an enormously successful German emigre! who would go on to design the Brooklyn Bridge—fired all of the Irishmen laboring on his Cincinnati span for having demanded higher pay. Writing from a city defined by its immigrant citizenry, Roebling wrote to his son, Washington, “the Germans about here are mostly loyal, the Irish alone are
disloyal.” For good measure, the engineer declared that Democrats who claimed to speak for the working class also could not be trusted. With a steely, almost frightening self–discipline and a grasp of modern engineering that was both intuitive and objectively rigorous, Roebling embodied progress. But Roebling’s investment in modernity was as much spiritual as material. Educated by Hegel, he believed that the infrastructure of the western world—its bridges, railroads, ships and communications—was the authentic expression of those who created it and could belong to no other time. His anger at the Irish laborers had as much to do with their failure to recognize the symbolic value of the Cincinnati bridge, its emblematic modernity and promise of communities knitted together. It was not enough that a structure be sound and sturdy, it must serve a common good. Roebling regarded his engineering work as a form of communion, for “Human reason is the work of God and He gave it to us so that we can recognize him.” 6
If the men who controlled the money and politics behind the nation’s great projects regarded themselves as distinct from common laborers, Thomas Anshutz’s viewpoint was similarly distanced from the community pictured in The Ironworkers’ Noontime. On the one hand, Anshutz ennobled the ironworkers, taking the Parthenon pediment, laying it on its face, and populating it with working–class Apollos; but the static quality of his figures and regularity of “type” suggest the painter’s awareness of the limitations in his subjects’ lives. Read from one margin to the other, Ironworkers’ Noontime describes a full turn of the human figure and variations from supine to erect. So far, so good—a subtle and methodical chart of male physicality with an implication of phallic power. But in the “gear and girder” era of the 1880s, “charting” human kinetics quickly led to an understanding of human labor as a mechanical process of consuming and producing energy. 7 Anshutz’s rationalizing gaze transforms the men into what Randall Griffin has described as “cogs of a picturesque and sublime machine.” 8 Anticipating motion studies, efficiency experts, and Henry Ford’s assembly line, the artist sees the future of the class and, to an extent, colludes in its fate.
Thomas Jefferson’s yeoman farmer, whose independence and work ethic would define the republic—and whom Homer honored in
Veteran in a New Field—was not extinct by 1880. Out of a population of fifty million Americans, more than twenty–two million still farmed. Nevertheless, the decade would see the introduction of mechanized binding, horse–drawn combines and gasoline tractors. Agriculture, by 1889, would account for seventy–six percent of America’s exports, a figure that would grow as machinery reduced the man–hours it took to plant, nurture, and harvest. Farming would become industry, subsumed into ideologies of technological progress and new prospects for the nation’s future.
But along with standardization came exaltation of a new kind. Walt Whitman turned from the “blacken’d, mutilated corpses” that populated his memory of the Civil War. He praised, instead, the public works of his age and the men who made them possible, “…thy undaunted armies, Engineering!/ Thy pennants, Labor, loosen’d to the breeze!” 9
“Lo, soul!” Whitman entreated, “seest thou not God’s purpose from the first?/The earth to be spann’ed, connected by net–work,… The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,…You, not for trade or transportation only,/But in God’s name, and for thy sake, O soul.” 10 For Whitman, America must take its place among the righteous nations, redeeming the sins of slavery and fratricide through its beneficent technology. The association of technology and mythic titanism did not begin with Whitman, but the robust poet introduced the passionate language through which subsequent generations celebrated, or trembled before, our great works. In 1870, the English critic Anne Gilchrist wrote that Whitman embodied the promise of America, for “only a young giant of a nation could produce this kind of greatness, so full of the ardour…the joyousness, the audacity of youth.”11 America, Whitman, even progress itself stood incarnate on the nation’s horizons.
At the Philadelphia Exposition marking America’s centennial, the great Corliss Engine (Figure 4) stupefied the fair’s visitors with its scale and rumbling power. The Corliss evoked a new species, brought to life with steam instead of blood in its veins. Author and critic William Dean Howells related in The Atlantic Monthly that “Now and then [the engineer]…clambers up one of the stairways…and touches some irritated spot on the giant’s body with a drop of oil…he is like
some potent enchanter there.”12 Technology was magic, and in the next century, Howells’ idea of the engineer as a wizard or alchemist would become a powerfully persuasive tool among America’s technocratic elite and the industrialists who supported them.
The Brooklyn Bridge—one of the greatest technological achievements of the nineteenth century—opened to the public on May 24, 1883. An engraving (Figure 5) deployed classical and religious allegory to commemorate the event: The dawn of a new day rises over the East River. Goddesses of Manhattan and Brooklyn greet one another like housewives over a fence. The scale of the bridge is heightened by the microscopic landscape of Brooklyn below, while overhead, putti unfurl a banner to celebrate the achievement much as painters of the past had announced the triumph of the Church. For the press and for the project’s supporters, the bridge embodied the “technological sublime” as a new source of transcendence in a
Fig.4 Corliss Engine, engraving, c.1876
Things of the Spirit
“desacralized” world. 13 Images of our modern inventions as both marvelous machines and creatures of a new race resonated in the nearly thirty–year effort to erect the Brooklyn Bridge. The project survived the venality of politics and contracting largely through the determined vision of John Roebling and his son, Washington. From the now iconic gothic towers to the smallest wires and couplings, every detail was imagined, created, and sent out to survive or fail.
Much was accomplished on intuition and faith, as if to prove John Roebling’s belief that mathematics and engineering were modes of spiritual communion. Favorable newspapers urged the public to remain steadfast, particularly when the bridge began to claim victims. The towers rose out of the East River like dripping giants, but not without cost. John Roebling died of tetanus after an accident on the girders; Irishmen like those whom Roebling had dismissed in Cincinnati worked in the caissons, many suffering horribly from “the
Fig.5 “Finis Coronat Opus,” Cover of The Daily Graphic, 1883
bends” as they resurfaced. When Washington Roebling took over as Chief Engineer, he minutely calibrated the amount of time a healthy laborer could work in the pressurized compartments before manifesting the effects of bubbles in their veins. Still, men died or were crippled, their lives crushed under the stride of the towers. 14
Washington Roebling was permanently disabled by episodes of the bends contracted in the caissons. Late in the game, his enemies tried to have him removed as Chief Engineer by citing his infirmities, a slander made credible by the fact that his loyal and competent wife, Emily, was Roebling’s representative on the bridge and in the shops.15
An 1883 cover of Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (Figure 6) seemed to substantiate the accusations. The Chief Engineer sits passively at a
Fig.6 Cover of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, May 26, 1883
12 Things of the Spirit
window in the feminized domestic space of his house in Brooklyn Heights; lace curtains, an upholstered chair, floral wallpaper and a violin subliminally signal the antithesis of the virile effort unfolding at the bridge. The man who had done everything to bring the bridge into being had been overmatched, even emasculated, by his own creation.
But there is another way to perceive Roebling’s circumstances: The Chief Engineer maintained control of the bridge project until the end. The Leslie’s cover took note of the binoculars with which Roebling monitored progress on the span; when a difficulty arose, he would think it through, arrive at a solution, and have instructions messengered to the crews. Roebling’s mind continued to shape the progress of the bridge, which became a material extension of thought. The great spines of the towers and ligatures of cabling were regarded in the press as incarnations of imagination and will, surrogates for the sacrificed bodies of father and son. The Leslie’s image also presaged a particularly compelling aspect of progress that would be trumpeted in the twentieth century: the gift of supernatural powers of sight and hearing through technology. During the Civil War, Northern military forces benefited from advances in binocular design; in the 1870s, leading up to Roebling’s dependence on the device, Italian inventors further refined lenses and resolution. What his body could no longer do, Roebling’s eyes could still achieve, through the prosthetic power of technological “seeing.”
When the towers were complete and cabling began, the giants were dressed like proper Americans in “suspenders” (vertical cables) and “stays” (diagonal or curving cables). Newspapers praised the pristine beauty of the technology and just as eagerly published dark accounts of the casualties. As it came to life, the bridge lashed out at the workmen: cables being strung at enormous tension sometimes failed, slicing through skulls and throwing men hundreds of feet into the East River. The Brooklyn Bridge was dazzling and terrifying in equal measure, and the great structure quickly became a muse and a totem, bearing not just traffic but the visions of America’s artists and writers. Perhaps mindful of the lives it had claimed, Henry James imagined the bridge as the cabled tentacle of a great machine/beast:
One has the sense that the monster grows and grows, flinging abroad its loose limbs even as some unmannered young giant at his ‘larks,’ and that the binding stitches must for ever fly further and faster…becoming thus… some colossal set of clockworks, some steel–souled machine–room of brandished arms and hammering fists and opening and closing jaws.16
The poet Hart Crane grappled with the symbolism of the bridge for the better part of seven years, from 1923 to 1930, even living for a time in Washington Roebling’s Brooklyn Heights house. In the beginning, he saw the structure as proof of the American genius for creating great things. But the bridge overwhelmed Crane until late in the decade, when his writer’s block finally lifted. By then, however, it had come to represent something rather different; the structure was a mystical emblem that offered the poet a means of escaping the ugly pragmatism of American culture. 17 Brooklyn Bridge was “harp and altar” and “the lover’s cry.” 18 The taut, masculine power of the structure—its great towers linked by “arching strands of song” and “orphic strings”—emerged in the ecstatic verse of “Atlantis,” the closing poem of the cycle. Here, Crane begged forgiveness of the young “Deity” for the inadequacy of his verse, which could only evoke the older myths that the bridge had superceded.19
In the language of the period, Hart Crane was an “invert,” a homosexual whose very existence polite society was not likely to acknowledge. Crane was alternately defiant about and shamed by his homosexuality, which he felt marginalized him in New York’s hypocritical literary world. “Let my lusts be my ruin,” he wrote, “since all else is a fake and mockery.”20 Crane had in common with Roebling the experience of being betrayed by his body, if in a very different sense. And yet, like Roebling, he overcame the demands of his physical being (his sexual compulsions and alcoholism) to create an epic work whose inspiration he owed to the determination of an earlier generation.
The daily business of New York, its striving and hustle, oppressed the poet to the extent that the Brooklyn Bridge became his immense, robotic lover. The towers, the arc of the bridge floor and the soaring cables symbolized freedom from the expectations of ordinary people. Crane, who would kill himself in 1932 by jumping from a ship, hinted at his growing despair in the epic poem: A fragmentary image in the earliest verses describes the “bedlamite” (in one of his self–loathing
moments Crane might have written “sodomite”) who escapes the claustrophobic city and climbs a bridge tower, his “shrill shirt ballooning” over the onlookers below watching to see if he will jump. 21
Other, less tortured modernists embraced the span as an incarnation of unfettered American optimism. John Marin depicted the bridge as a dancing partner for Manhattan’s Woolworth Building, shimmying and swaying with the libidinal energy that Whitman and Crane ascribed to the metropolis. The Woolworth Building rose out of a thicket of etched marks, vibrating like an eager phallus while the bridge tower evoked a bowlegged sailor, newly arrived at the Port of New York and dancing a celebratory jig, his upper body out of the frame. In both prints, Marin’s modernist dissolution of forms into a field of swiftly moving marks reflected the artistic freedom engendered in the vibrant urban culture of New York in the American Century.
The Italian emigre! Joseph Stella exulted in American technology and particularly in the romance of Roebling’s bridge. The structure was physical proof of the genius of Whitman, whom he called the “modern Prometheus unbound.” Stella’s paintings and passionate writings added another historical layer to the language of giantism descended from Whitman. He described a nighttime visit in the spectral darkness on the bridge, where, frightened and exhilarated by the vibration of the trains “like the blood in the arteries,” Stella found himself “on the threshold of a new religion or in the presence of a new DIVINITY.”
Stella’s five–paneled work, The Voice of the City of New York Interpreted: The Bridge from 1920–22 (Figure 7: shown, the rightmost panel) served as an altarpiece for that religion, a simulacrum of the bridge itself, which was a “shrine” and an “apotheosis” of American power. For Stella as for Crane, the dark hours brought out the sublimity of the structure. The towers were never more fearsome than during the night, while the cabling seemed, paradoxically, to convey “divine messages from above…cutting and dividing into innumerable musical spaces the nude immensity of the sky.” 22
Written in a language liberated by Whitman, Stella’s words recall the mystical communion that John Roebling found in his engineering calculations, as well as the dedicatory message for the transatlantic
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Title: Knights and their days
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WIT AND WISDOM OF THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH: BEING
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The chief writings of the Rev. S S are included in the original English editions in eight octavo volumes. These are his “Two Volumes of Sermons,” 1809; the Collection of his “Works,” (embracing articles from the Edinburgh Review, the Plymley Letters, and other Papers) 4 vols., 1839-40; a posthumous volume, “Sermons preached at St. Paul’s,” &c., 1846; “Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy, delivered at the Royal Institution,” published in 1850. To these are to be added, “Letters on American Debts,” 1843; “A Fragment on the Irish Roman Catholic Church,” 1845; Letters on Railway Management and other topics to the Morning Chronicle; Articles in the Edinburgh Review not collected in his “Works”; numerous Sketches and Essays printed in the “Memoirs,” by his daughter, Lady Holland; and the extensive series of “Letters,” edited by Mrs Austin These have mainly furnished the material of the present volume In the preparation of the Table Talk, Memoir, and Notes, many collateral sources have been drawn upon.
The most important of Sydney Smith’s Writings will here be found given entire; while the selection generally presents the most
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The Parasite.
Table Traits of Utopia and the Golden Age.
Table Traits of England in the Early Times.
Table Traits of the Last Century.
Wine and Water
The Birth of the Vine, and what has come of it
The Making and Marring of Wine
Imperial Drinkers, and Incidents in Germany An Incident of Travel
A few odd Glasses of Wine [Egyptian]
The Tables of the Ancient and Modern
The Diet of the Saints of Old.
The Bridal and Banquet of Ferques.
The Support of Modern Saints.
The Cæsars at Table.
Their Majesties at Meat.
English Kings at their Tables.
Strange Banquets The Castellan Von Coucy.
Authors and their Dietetics.
The Liquor-loving Laureates.
Supper
Nearly every page contains something amusing, and you may shut the book in the middle, and open it again after a twelvemonth’s interval, without at all compromising its power of affording enjoyment. The London Times.
Habits and Men, with Remnants of Record touching the Makers of both. By D . D , author of “Table Traits,” &c., &c. 12mo., cloth, $1 Half calf, or mor extra, $2 00 CONTENTS.
Between You and Me
Man Manners, and a Story with a Moral to it
Adonis at Home and Abroad Pt I Pt II
Remnants of Stage Dresses
Three Acts and an Epilogue
The Tiring-Bowers of Queens “La Mode in her Birth-place ”
Hats, Wigs and their Wearers. Beards and their Bearers. Swords.
Gloves, B s, and Buttons. Stockings. “Masks and Faces.”
Puppets for Grown Gentlemen. Touching Tailors.
The Tailors Measured by the Poets.
Sir John Hawkwood, the Heroic Tailor. Why did the Tailors choose St. William for their Patron?
George Dörfling, the Martial Tailor
Admiral Hobson, the Naval Tailor
John Stow, the Antiquarian Tailor
John Speed, the Antiquarian Tailor
Samuel Pepys, the Official Tailor
Richard Ryan, the Theatrical Tailor
Paul Whitehead, the Poet Tailor.
Mems. of “Merchant Tailors.”
Chapters on Beaux.
The Beaux of the Olden Time. Beau Fielding Beau Nash.
The Prince de Ligne Beau Brummel. Doctors Ready Dressed Odd Fashions.
This is one of the most amusing and erudite books of the day, abounding in anecdote and queer stories of the dress of different ages, of kings and queens, poets, statesmen, tailors, &c The sketches of the “tiring-bowers” of queens, of Paul Whitehead, the poet tailor; of Beau Nash, and Beau Fielding, are rich in lore, and are produced in sparkling style. Boston Courier.
The Lives of the Queens of England of the House of Hanover. By D . D . 2 vols., 12mo., cloth, $2. Half calf, or mor. extra, $4
00
CONTENTS.
Sophia Dorothea, Wife of George I
Caroline Wilhelmina Dorothea, Wife of George II
Charlotte, Wife of George III
Caroline of Brunswick, Wife of George IV
Dr. Doran has availed himself of the ample material scattered through personal memoirs, pamphlets, periodicals, and other fugitive literature of the time, with the thoroughness, quick eye for humor, and appreciation of the picturesque, which characterize his other amusing works.
KNIGHTS AND THEIR DAYS.
K N I G H T S
B Y D R . D O R A N
AUTHOR OF “LIVES OF THE QUEENS OF ENGLAND OF THE HOUSE OF HANOVER,” “TABLE TRAITS,” “HABITS AND MEN,” ETC.
“Oh, ’tis a brave profession, and rewards All loss we meet, with double weight of glory.” S (The Gentleman of Venice.)
TO PHILIPPE WATIER, ESQ.
IN MEMORY OF MERRY NIGHTS AND DAYS NEAR METZ AND THE MOSELLE, THIS LITTLE VOLUME
Is inscribed BY HIS VERY SINCERE FRIEND, THE AUTHOR.
THE
KNIGHTS
AND THEIR DAYS.
A FRAGMENTARY PROLOGUE.
“La bravoure est une qualité innée, on ne se la donne pas.” N I.
D . L , when adverting to the sons of Henry II., and their knightly practices, remarks that although chivalry was considered the school of honor and probity, there was not overmuch of those or of any other virtues to be found among the members of the chivalrous orders. He names the vices that were more common, as he thinks, and probably with some justice. Hallam, on the other hand, looks on the institution of chivalry as the best school of moral discipline in the Middle Ages: and as the great and influential source of human improvement. “It preserved,” he says, “an exquisite sense of honor, which in its results worked as great effects as either of the powerful spirits of liberty and religion, which have given a predominant impulse to the moral sentiments and energies of mankind.”
The custom of receiving arms at the age of manhood is supposed, by the same author, to have been established among the nations that overthrew the Roman Empire; and he cites the familiar passage from Tacitus, descriptive of this custom among the Germans. At first, little but bodily strength seems to have been required on the part of the candidate. The qualifications and the forms of investiture changed or improved with the times.
In a general sense, chivalry, according to Hallam, may be referred to the age of Charlemagne, when the Caballarii, or horsemen, became the distinctive appellation of those feudal tenants and allodial proprietors who were bound to serve on horseback. When these were equipped and formally appointed to their martial duties, they were, in point of fact, knights, with so far more incentives to distinction than modern soldiers, that each man depended on himself, and not on the general body. Except in certain cases, the individual has now but few chances of distinction; and knighthood, in
its solitary aspect, may be said to have been blown up by gunpowder.
As examples of the true knightly spirit in ancient times, Mr Hallam cites Achilles, who had a supreme indifference for the question of what side he fought upon, had a strong affection for a friend, and looked at death calmly. I think Mr. Hallam over-rates the bully Greek considerably. His instance of the Cid Ruy Diaz, as a perfect specimen of what the modern knight ought to have been, is less to be gainsaid.
In old times, as in later days, there were knights who acquired the appellation by favor rather than service; or by a compelled rather than a voluntary service. The old landholders, the Caballarii, or Milites, as they came to be called, were landholders who followed their lord to the field, by feudal obligation: paying their rent, or part of it, by such service. The voluntary knights were those “younger brothers,” perhaps, who sought to amend their indifferent fortunes by joining the banner of some lord. These were not legally knights, but they might win the honor by their prowess; and thus in arms, dress, and title, the younger brother became the equal of the wealthy landholders. He became even their superior, in one sense, for as Mr. Hallam adds:—“The territorial knights became by degrees ashamed of assuming a title which the others had won by merit, till they themselves could challenge it by real desert.”
The connection of knighthood with feudal tenure was much loosened, if it did not altogether disappear, by the Crusades. There the knights were chiefly volunteers who served for pay: all feudal service there was out of the question. Its connection with religion was, on the other hand, much increased, particularly among the Norman knights who had not hitherto, like the Anglo-Saxons, looked upon chivalric investiture as necessarily a religious ceremony The crusaders made religious professors, at least, of all knights, and never was one of these present at the reading of the gospel, without holding the point of his sword toward the book, in testimony of his desire to uphold what it taught by force of arms. From this time the passage into knighthood was a solemn ceremony; the candidate was belted, white-robed, and absolved after due confession, when his
sword was blessed, and Heaven was supposed to be its director With the love of God was combined love for the ladies. What was implied was that the knight should display courtesy, gallantry, and readiness to defend, wherever those services were required by defenceless women. Where such was bounden duty—but many knights did not so understand it—there was an increase of refinement in society; and probably there is nothing overcharged in the old ballad which tells us of a feast at Perceforest, where eight hundred knights sat at a feast, each of them with a lady at his side, eating off the same plate; the then fashionable sign of a refined friendship, mingled with a spirit of gallantry. That the husbands occasionally looked with uneasiness upon this arrangement, is illustrated in the unreasonably jealous husband in the romance of “Lancelot du Lac;” but, as the lady tells him, he had little right to cavil at all, for it was an age since any knight had eaten with her off the same plate.
Among the Romans the word virtue implied both virtue and valor—as if bravery in a man were the same thing as virtue in a woman. It certainly did not signify among Roman knights that a brave man was necessarily virtuous. In more recent times the word gallantry has been made also to take a double meaning, implying not only courage in man, but his courtesy toward woman. Both in ancient and modern times, however, the words, or their meanings, have been much abused. At a more recent period, perhaps, gallantry was never better illustrated than when in an encounter by hostile squadrons near Cherbourg, the adverse factions stood still, on a knight, wearing the colors of his mistress, advancing from the ranks of one party, and challenging to single combat the cavalier in the opposite ranks who was the most deeply in love with his mistress. There was no lack of adversaries, and the amorous knights fell on one another with a fury little akin to love.
A knight thus slain for his love was duly honored by his lady and contemporaries. Thus we read in the history of Gyron le Courtois, that the chivalric king so named, with his royal cousin Melyadus, a knight, by way of equerry, and a maiden, went together in search of the body of a chevalier who had fallen pour les beaux yeux of that
