Books: Early Stages

THE ROOTS OF AMERICAN CULTURE—Constance Rourke—Harcourt, Brace ($3).

In her first six books,* the late Constance Rourke revealed something of the abundance and variety of American folk culture. She labored to bridge the cleavage between the fine arts and the popular and practical arts of common life. When she died, last year, she was a little like a pioneer whose imitators, lacking her simple, sincere feeling for the authentic, deep-buried roots of U.S. life, were busily taming her savage sector into a profitable, suburban truck garden.

The Roots of American Culture, edited after her death by Critic Van Wyck Brooks, includes eight essays. One examines the esthetic opinions of Founding Fathers Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, John Adams, and the culture of their time. One is an almost book-length study of the early American theater. One is a shorter companion piece on music. One is about the Shakers, who became “a folk” in one generation, then all but died out, due to their insistence on celibacy, in another. There are minor pieces on Negro tradition, folklore, the early U.S. genre painter Voltaire Combe, and the possible future of American art. These essays, if Miss Rourke had lived, would have been part of a culminating work which she had planned in three volumes. As last words, they lack unity, but they have charm, sense, vision.

American Culture, from the first, was profoundly social and practical. The Founding Fathers agreed to a man that the arts must be closely relevant to daily living if they were to exist at all. Hence the fine arts would probably have to wait a while.

The young nation agreed with them. Its art was best and most beautiful in all that was most immediately useful to a rural civilization. The work of men’s hands became “a common language of hand and eye,” with marked divergences of idiom—the New Englander’s “downright pleasure in stripped forms and beautifully finished plain surfaces,” the more complex art of figurehead carving, the decorative designs of the Pennsylvania Germans which (derived from the manuscript paintings of medieval monasteries) gave expression to “all the great ceremonial relationships.”

This folk culture was rich in music; most of it was “applied [religious and political] music.” It was rich in verse; most of it was “practical letters,” along with the lively related arts of “oratory, pulpit eloquence and pamphleteering.” It was rich in symbolism, which “tends to dominate folk expression.” It was rich also in a sense of evil. The Salem witch burnings were “cumulative folk-obsessions.” Jonathan Edwards “induced tortuous introspections.” Charles Wesley and the “dark fire” of his fellow Methodist, George Whitefield, kept the nation incandescent with revivalism for a generation. Calvinism, a scientific bent and poverty, gave early U.S. art a flair for abstraction.

The American Theater. As literature, the stage plays “may be regarded with pious horror.” But they may also be regarded as folk expressions. While there was little interest in individuals as such, the interest in types was strong: The Yankee, The Backwoodsman, The Negro, The Comic Irishman were immensely popular.

Tragedy, love, passion, characterization, sentimentality, were taboo; “scale and violence” were all that most of the native plays had, and about all that were left of foreign plays, once they were adapted. “Hamlet was played for the murder, the ghost, the burial; Macbeth for the witches, the sleepwalking scene, the knocking at the gate.” Some plays “were hardly plays at all but omnibus inclusions of the latest news, the latest partisan arguments.” The drama was half operatic, exceedingly oratorical, and stagy oratory was perhaps the greatest and most popular of the arts.

Pageants were enormously popular. In Philadelphia Charles Willson Peale whipped up a magnificent triumphal Peace Arch in 1783, groaning with symbols. It was to be illuminated by skyrockets and 1,000 candles, but it caught fire. Undaunted, Peale invented “an ingenious mechanism” for dropping a laurel wreath on the brow of George Washington, who had to put up with that sort of thing wherever he went. The launching of the Constitution was staged “with marine background scenery bordering on the marvelous, with a final climactic picture of Niagara Falls.” In Americana and Elutheria Benjamin Franklin stepped out of lightning-forked clouds with nis newly invented rod and handed it to France, who electrocuted Tyranny and Pride with it and revived prostrate Liberty “by the application of Science.” Finale: eight nymphs lay down on the Alleghenies.

Early American Music was a scream from the same eagle. Opera was popular in every major city. In Philadelphia Andrew Adgate projected, in 1786, a great choral concert, with singers from every section of Philadelphia society. His grandiose plan, which fizzled, was to anneal all social disparities through the use of “solfa,” the powerful archaic open scale which artisans and farmers still knew from the Middle Ages, but which the musically literate upper classes had begun to scorn. In Boston the one-eyed crippled tanner, William Billings, was even bolder. He got the cello into church, and the much more needed pitch pipe. Against the ancient unison of the psalms he offered “fuges.” For greater dissonance he recommended the braying of an ass, the filing of a saw, the squealing of a hog “who is extremely weak,” the “cracking” of a crow, the howling of a dog, the squalling of a cat, “and what would grace the concert yet more, would be the rubbing of a wet finger upon the window glass. . . .”

Billings’ songs took religious music back to “its prime source, the dance.” His own prime source was balladry. He further disturbed a time when “the close spiritual identities that had produced the concentrations of unison were going or had gone.” Miss Rourke calls him as great a democratic force as Shays’s Rebellion.

The Shakers were less an eccentricity than an American quintessence. “The impulse toward communal organization formed a conspicuous strain through something like 100 years of our history.” The Shakers were among the first religious collectivists. They were “expressive, not only through their beliefs but in their crafts, their music, their dancing, their rituals and their writing.” Their hymns—some devotees knew as many as a thousand—had charm and simplicity. The Shakers were in a sense part of a whole American attitude (“if something worked, hold on to it; if not, discard it”). But their concern was “not whether something worked as an immediacy but whether it produced significant change.”

Shaker songs were combined with shaking, dancing and symbolic motions of the hands into a powerful collective euphony; and “these unities were heightened in effect by unities in dress.” Shakers were continually under attack by the world; and now & again their teachings split up families.

Shaker shaking sometimes threw Shakers into doubt, but they kept on shaking. To Josiah Talcott “an evil buffeting spirit” once whispered: “You wear out a great deal of shoe leather dancing and it does no good.” Josiah had a comeback for his invisible tormentor: “What’s that to you? I tan my own leather.”

*Trumpets of Jubilee (1927), Troupers of the Gold Coast (1928), AmericanHumor (1931), Davy Crockett (1934), Audubon (1936), Charles Sheeler (1938).