Late Mayan and Aztec Art

In Central America the well-ordered, relatively peaceful old Mayan empire passed away by 870. Before that time, the Itzas, a colonizing tribe of Mayans, founded the city of Chichen Itza in Yucatan. Other Mayans colonized Coba and Tulum near the eastern seacoast, perhaps going north toward the valley of Mexico, where they joined the growing Toltec culture which was emerging from the archaic there. Until about 1250, the new Mayans seem to have lived in an unproductive state. At that time there came a revival of culture at Chichen Itza, Mayapan, Uxmal, Labna, and other cities in Yucatan.

The Caracol, a circular astronomical observatory or temple, is one of hundreds of well-planned buildings from this second or late Mayan empire. The ziggurats of that period are much steeper than the early ones. They have high, combed stone cult-houses and suggest skyscraper cities with stepped-back buildings. In every way, the artistic productions of the late Mayans, as well as the Toltecs and the Aztecs who lived in the highlands of Mexico after A.D. 1300, are inferior to the work of the early Mayan empire. This is particularly noticeable in the case of Aztec temple sculpture and late Mayan wall painting. Both the late Mayans and the Aztecs painted codices telling the history of their people after the coming of the Spaniards. These approximate the cartoons of the later American comic strips or, if one believes in the continued influence of our indigenous art, the comic strips can be said to approximate late Mayan and Aztec painting. Central American influences carried by Mayan or Aztec colonists found their way up the Mississippi River valley, appearing in the pyramids of the Mound Builders.

Surveying indigenous American culture, one becomes convinced that Asiatic influences which may have contributed to its rapid flowering at the time of Christ were either so small, or the native American primitivism was so great, that humanistic characteristics soon became lost in a jungle of primitive geometric designs. In the later Mayan, Inca, and Aztec art any foreign influences had practically disappeared, transformed into designs only quasiOriental and distinctively American. An American style of architecture, sculpture, and painting had spread over the two continents when the Europeans arrived. To something like that style the Americans of the 20th century may be gradually changing all the European contributions made during the last 200 years. Our Gothic inheritance, vying with the humanist Classical tradition of simplicity and balance, may find in the quasi-Oriental Indian styles the form most appropriate to the expression of our American culture. If there be any tendency in this direction, it can be discovered in a brief survey of the' fortunes of the European styles on the American continents between 1700 and 1930.

The South American Cultures

While the Mayan culture developed in Central America, other great cultures arose along the seacoast of Peru at Nazca and Trujillo. According to the ancient legends, their development came with the advent of people in ships. Similarly, the Mayan legends concerning Quetzalcoatl tell of his coming in a ship. From the beginning, the early Chimu culture, centered around Trujillo, had an advanced complex social structure, with war chiefs and priests ruling over the lower classes of warriors, artisans, and slaves.

The early Chimu had fine red pottery covered with a white slip decorated in black, red, yellow, and orange figures, showing helmeted warriors, fish, birds, and flowers. Vases in the form of human faces as well modeled as the Copan head have been found in early Chimu levels. Contemporaneous with the Chimu, the early Nazca -- farther south in Peru -- developed polychrome ware suggestive of lacquered inlay, with patterns similar to those on some of the Han-dynasty bronzes.

Following the Chimu and Nazca, other cultures grew up at Tiahuanaco and Chavin. The Tiahuanaco culture or its predecessors perfected architecture and casting in bronze. Like the Mayans, the early Peruvians built great ziggurats, constructing both round and square buildings with corbeled stone domical roofs. They planned their abundantly irrigated cities with much skill. Archaeologists differentiate between Epigonal, Chavin, late Chimu, and Inca cultures, which followed each other with a gradual degeneration of the arts until about 1000 A.D. At that time the Quechuas, a highland tribe under their ruler, the Inca Manco Capac, began to conquer and coordinate all the tribes from Colombia to the Argentine, a process which continued over the next 500 years. Making their capital at Cuzco in Peru, the Incas united their empire with well-constructed roads carried over chasms on suspension bridges. They built many great cities, temples, and fortresses, notably Ollantaytambo, Macchu Picchu, Cuzco, and Sacsahuaman.

Through all the South American cultures, as well as those in Central America, the influence of technomorphic designs created first in weaving plays a great part in the architectural decoration. A comparison of a section of decorated wall in an Inca room at La Centinela, part of the wall from the late Mayan temple at Mitla, and a design by a 20th-century architect on the Furniture Exchange in New York City, indicates the appropriateness of this primitive, indigenous design when applied in our own day. It is important to notice that in all the American cultures the high quality and humanistic character of the earlier work gave way, as the cultures aged, to more massive architectural construction and more profuse decoration of a primitive, geometric character.

Refined Space Designing of the Old Mayans

Early Mayan pottery, such as the two bowls from Holmul and Uaxactum, rival for sophistication the tile paintings of the Chinese Han dynasty. The temple of the cross at Palenque and some of the buildings at Piedras Negras have great colored mural carvings in low relief as well composed as the plate from Holmul. The other plate, from Uaxactun, has an abstract quality in its lines like that of Chinese brushwork. The fine balance of its spaces rivals that of the best Greek pottery.

The lintel from Piedras Negras, perhaps the finest mural design of ancient American art, arises from hands as skilled as those that painted the two plates. The sculptor surpasses the painter here in his plausible indication of perspective depth, in the foreshortening of his figures, the naturalness of their poses, and the knowledge of anatomy.

The Copan Head

Rarely did the Mayan sculptors essay figures in the round. The Copan head of the maize goddess, carved in the 6th century, indicates by its sensitive modeling and its fine balance of decorative character and humane picturization, the highest degree of mastery achieved in the sculptor's art. In many respects this head has a Gothic and an archaic Greek quality. Unlike the art of the European sculptors, the indigenous art of America has a detached and impersonal repose comparable to that in most Buddhistic art. Prehistoric American sculpture as a whole lacks the sensual and emotional features that characterize the individualistic European creations. Like the art of the Egyptians, it is essentially religious and architectonic.

Prehistoric Origins of American Design

The first Americans, a few wandering hunters on the paleolithic culture level, probably reached this continent about 7,000 years ago. Archaeologists in general agree that these primitive people either crossed the frozen ice or a land bridge then connecting Alaska with Siberia. During succeeding centuries, other groups followed in canoes traveling along the coast or using the old route. Throughout the North, where a rigorous climate prevented cultural development, the various Asiatic people now known to us as Eskimos and Indians remained on a paleolithic hunting level.

Their Central American relatives gradually developed agriculture during the thousand years before Christ. Baked painted pottery, weaving, and basketry appear at that time, along with those crude clay figurines from which this culture takes the name "archaic." By the first century before Christ, the archaic culture can be found from northwestern Mexico throughout Central America and as far south as Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador. The faces of the figurines indicate that their creators included a diversity of Asiatic and Oceanic ethnical types. Most of them have the slant eyes, round faces, and thin lips of the Mongoloid people. Many either have profiles with retreating brows and chins, like those of the Javanese, or are bearded, like some of the Polynesians and Chinese. Some of the earliest archaic figures are clothed with turbans and skirts; others have hair styles like those shown on early Hindu sculpture. Some wear bird'shead helmets, like the wooden masks of the Alaskan Indians; but few have the elaborate feathered headdress later associated with Mayan and Aztec cultures. The archaic people also worked shell and precious stones for their jewelry. Pottery whorls for spinning, as well as bone and stone implements, abound. Archaic pottery made of coarsely kneaded clay, baked to a reddish brown, repeats most of the shapes found in Chinese neolithic ware. The decoration is in red, white, or black geometric lines.

Until the 1st century B.C., archaic art shows little sign of aesthetic development, remaining upon a level as low as that of the earliest Susian or predynastic Egyptian. There exist no signs from which the complicated hieroglyphic system of the Mayans could have been evolved. Overnight, so it seems, a rich culture appeared in Central America. Almost simultaneously, the Chimu and Nazca cultures arose along the coast of Peru.

Despite the remarkable evidence of this unexplained appearance of complex culture forms and design motives so closely paralleling those of contemporaneous Southeastern Asia, most American archaeologists persist, as the ethnologists did for many years before them, in trying to interpret all Indian design in terms of a wholly indigenous development, pointing to the great divergence of styles as against any single Asiatic origin. European ethnologists and archaeologists explain this divergence of types by pointing out that as in historic times there have been several well-known instances of boats and canoes being carried by the Japanese current down the west coast of America, so probably at various times in the last 3,000 years small groups of people from Polynesia, IndoChina, China, Korea, and Mongolia reached the American shores by the water route. These brought a few designed articles, with various techniques like bronze casting, pottery inlaying, and wood carving, as well as their Asiatic customs and gods. The earliest and most obviously Asiatic designs disappeared because carried by people who, like the present-day Indian tribes of the Northwest coast, carved their totem poles, great war canoes, thrones, and chests in wood, which disintegrated in the moist climate of the tropics.

Some European scholars suggest definite cultural influences from China, pointing to the fact that Shih Huang Ti, the Ts'in emperor, who built the Great Wall of China, sent expeditions across the eastern sea for the drug of immortality, which supposedly grew on the legendary three islands of the blest. Between 140 and 85 B.C., the Han emperor Wu Ti also sent out expeditions over the eastern sea. Considering that some of these expeditions might have missed the blessed islands and been caught in the Japanese current, it is conceivable that one or more ships manned by highly intelligent, cultured people could have reached the western shores of Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, and Peru just before the time of Christ.

These men would have understood the art of bronze casting by the lost wax process, the art of building great walled cities, circular and square pagodas, pyramids like those of IndoChina, with sky temples. They would have brought with them a pantheon, including the winged skyserpent, the feline goddess with the serpents, or the Tao Tieh mask and more humane conceptions of the Deity associated with Confucianism and Taoism. They would also have had an elementary system of writing, with signs designed like those on Chou-dynasty bronzes. Most of these things appear in prehistoric American art after the first century.

Important it is to notice that in both the South American and the Central American cultures the quality of the aesthetic production slowly degenerated after the first two or three hundred years of the first millennium. In so elementary a study as ours, there can be no room for more than a glimpse into this fascinating field, the last frontier of archaeological research where the great problems of the origin of the American style are still to be solved.

Archaeologists differ as to the exact time when the Chimu and Nazca cultures appeared in Peru. S. G. Morley and D. Herbert Spinden would date the statuette from Tuxtla, an early Mayan monument, around 100 B.C.; others, like J. Eric Thompson, around 60 A.D. Throughout this chapter the later dates will be used. The first datable city, Uaxactun in Guatemala, was built between A.D. 160 and 320. Shortly after that time, the Mayans had cities at Palenque in Southern Mexico and at Tikal, Copan, Piedras Negras, and Quirigua.

The earliest cities of the old Mayan empire, like Palenque, show that the Mayan architects had an excellent feeling for mass, a genius for designing great complex structures, and a sense for city planning. The buildings of Palenque include ziggurats, pagodalike towers several stories in height, passageways covered with horseshoe vaults similar to those in the Hindu cave temples, and other advanced refinements of the builder's art. The appropriate, skillful design of the architectural sculpture so quickly reached a state of perfection in the earliest stone buildings of the old Mayan cities that one concludes it followed a long practice in wooden sculpture, now lost, or else that seafaring people related to the Polynesians, with skill in wood carving and many advanced motifs, brought new ideas to the receptive archaic culture, along with the advanced hieroglyphic writing which then appears in stone.

In several of the cities, particularly Yaxchilan and Tikal, fragmentary remains of richly carved wooden lintels and doorposts have been found. One from Tikal pictures in complex form the feathered serpent associated with the worship of Quetzalcoatl. It is similar in many points to the Tao-Tieh mask on Chou-dynasty bronzes. All the spaces are completely filled with an intricate interweave of colored areas in absolute balance. Most Mayan sculpture, like this lintel from Tikal, is carved in low relief, so as to harmonize with the surfaces of the rectangular structures. Some of the architects developed a degree of refinement in their design which called for less primitive conceptions than this, as can be seen by studying some of the early pottery and the relief panel from Piedras Negras.

Richard Harding Davis, Jack London, O. Henry

By the end of the 19th century there rose in American life a consciousness of having come of age. Richard Harding Davis, Jack London, and O. Henry wrote completely without the "Brahmin's" interest in European culture. Encouraged by the example of the greatest American literary figure, Mark Twain, these local colorists and a host of writers without self-consciousness then created the most significant novels of the American scene. Most of these, nevertheless, still retain their Puritan inheritance -- a sense of social significance. In their methods they fluctuate between realism and naturalism, most being influenced by the prevailing methods in literary style of the American press. In 1915, Theodore Dreiser wrote The Genius, analyzing the egotistic selfishness of the romantic creative individualist. His An American Tragedy ( 1925) tells with the minutest detail of the way in which a crime may overtake almost anyone in modern society who is without a sense of direction. Sherwood Anderson in Dark Laughter shows the American businessman, who, like Thoreau, desires to escape social obligations.

Sinclair Lewis, like Dreiser essentially a news reporter, in Main Street and Babbitt shows the frustration caused in the human soul by provincialism, the demands of the race for material success, and inability of the American middle class to achieve spiritual freedom. Carol Kennicott in Main Street and George F. Babbitt in Babbitt were to see their isolationist world blasted by the World War, to witness their children in the jazz age from 1920 to 1930 find ing an illusion of freedom in the "speak-easy." Lewis, like most naturalists, gains an effect almost of caricature by carefully reporting many details. In Arrowsmith he portrays a young idealistic physician thwarted by commercialism, or industrialism, in his task of helping mankind. In the name character of Elmer Gantry, Lewis concentrates all the habits and attitudes of revivalist preachers. In It Can't Happen Here, he pictures the struggle of a patriotic newspaper editor against the American equivalent of a Fascist dictator.

Edith Wharton's Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country characterizes the ambitious young American woman without moral guidance; and in Ethan Frome Mrs. Wharton tells of New England's frustrated souls. In contrast, Willa Cather, living among the Norwegian pioneers of the Middle West, affirms in O Pioneers, The Song of the Lark, and My Antonia the ability of the American woman's creative spirit to overcome the greatest handicaps. O. F. Rolvaag , in his Giants in the Earth and Peder Victorious, likewise tells of hardy Scandinavians pioneering in a new world.

In a vein akin to the spirit of these novelists is the poetic Spoon River Anthology of Edgar Lee Masters, with its somewhat pessimistic revelation of unheroic American lives. Carl Sandburg deals boldly and gladly with American industry in Chicago, Corn Huskers, and Smoke and Steel. Vachel Lindsay, catching the rhythms of Negro life, of frontier camp meetings, and the industrial machine, creates an expressionist poetry in "GeneralWilliam Booth Enters into Heaven." "The Congo," and "The Kallyope Yell." For years Lindsay, like some inspired bard of the Middle Ages, wandered from town to town preaching a gospel of beauty and regeneration through art. Sandburg, too, with his guitar inspired those who heard him. Like Lindsay, Robert Frost describes farm life, but his scene is New England rather than the Middle West.

The period shortly before and immediately after the World War brought to the "Brahmins" an interest in Symbolism, expressionism, and introspective analysis which had earlier found its verse forms in the works of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Edna St. Vincent Millay, Amy Lowell, T. S. Eliot, and Edward Arlington Robinson carry introspective analysis further and approach the techniques of such stream-of-consciousness writers as E. E. Cummings and Gertrude Stein. All of these, like late English Romantics, the French Symbolists, and Edgar Allan Poe, have an interest in the effectiveness of words or rhythmical patterns for their own sake or as an aid to self-revelation. Most of them, cut off from the American Utopian vision or disillusioned by the apparent triumph of materialism during the war years, can be considered as thwarted individuals seeking an escape through their art.

After the war of 1917-1918, many Americans retreated into mysticism or nature worship. It is perhaps significant that a poem like Joyce Kilmer 's Trees became the favorite of Rotary and other social service clubs where American businessmen strove to recapture some vision of Utopia. The paradox of the American as revealed by his literary portrait is that he wants freedom from domination, wants escape from his loneliness, yet fears to take his place as a citizen of the world. Today he is being forced to see that he cannot escape wholly either the culture or the consequences of his background.

In his attempt to mature quickly after the World War, the American turned to many popular semiliterary accounts of scientific accomplishment, first pausing, with Gamaliel Bradford, to debunk his heroes, in thoughtful American Portraits. Edward Bok, Michael Pupin, and Mary Antin wrote autobiographies that told what the latest immigrants hoped to achieve in America. In Jane Addams's Twenty Years at Hull House are skillfully portrayed the problems of Americanization.

Always eager students, the average Americans turn to the idealistic Englishman H. G. Wells for a popular historical outline. Edwin E. Slosson 's Creative Chemistry, Paul deKruif's Microbe Hunters, Will Durant's Story of Philosophy, Harry Overstreet's About Ourselves, Lewis Mum ford 's Technics and Civilization, and the pseudoanthropological writings of Freud, Adler, and Jung take the place of Benjamin Franklin's humanist and Biblical backgrounds. For his economic and political theory the American depends too greatly upon the daily press and the radio. The actual drama of modern life has become so thrilling that the arts pale by comparison. In 1939 a radio drama telling of the invasion of this world by people from Mars appeared to be so real that many could not distinguish it from actual reports of armies in Europe about to destroy civilization.

Mark Twain ( Samuel L. Clemens) the most significant writer

Mark Twain ( Samuel L. Clemens), a Missourian, the most significant writer in the latter half of the 19th century, began his adventurous life as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi. Here he absorbed the legendry of the early Midwestern frontier. After a few months spent as a soldier of the Confederacy, he became a Union sympathizer and spent his next years in the gold camps of the West. The rest of his life, when he was not lecturing, was spent in traveling and writing in bed. Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and Life on the Mississippi hold much of the romance of the old South. Roughing It tells of the pioneer West. The Jumping Frog story is a classic of American humor. Innocents Abroad, The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg, and Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court display the writer's satire at its best.

Other writers who caught the spirit of the West were Bret Harte and Edward Eggleston. The latter told, in The Circuit Rider and The Hoosier Schoolmaster, of the early settlements in Indiana. Hamlin Garland, following this tradition, later wrote A Son of the Middle Border. Shortly after the Civil War, these writers and others awakened a strong interest in local color. In Deephaven, Sarah Orne Jewett characterized the little New England seaport town; in his Old Creole Days, George W. Cable told of New Orleans; and in his book, In Old Virginia, Thomas Nelson Page characterized the South. The New England businessman furnished the subject of William Dean Howells's The Rise of Silas Lapham.

Henry James, a "Brahmin," saw this same American businessman rather satirically in The American. In his Daisy Miller he described the unconventional young American girl. Fleeing the aesthetic crudities of American life, Henry James, after living in Europe for years, wrote several novels in almost perfect form. Best known among them are The Ambassadors and The Wings of the Dove. In all his works the American is seen as an individual who, discontented with his own lack of spirituality, seeks for a more complete development through a greater knowledge of European culture. While Henry James strove for an understanding of the soul of the New England "Brahmin" type through literary expression, his brother William characterized it through his studies in psychology and philosophy. He founded the philosophical school known as "American pragmatism," which maintains that ideals should be checked with social experience and are most valuable when socially effective.

Another New England scholar whose historical writings and literary self-analysis have the greatest value for the understanding of American character is Henry Adams. His description of the medieval point of view in MontSaint-Michel and Chartres has had great influence in stimulating interest in the field of medieval studies. With his History of the United States during the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison and America, Adams represents the last of a line of literary historians which began with William H. Prescott , author of The Conquest of Peru and other works, and John Lothrop Motley, who wrote The Rise of the Dutch Republic. Edward Bellamy, a leader of the Populist movement, in Looking Backward and Equality strove to chart the future, prophesying the phonograph and the radio.

Joel Chandler Harris, a Southerner, recorded the poetry and songs of the Negroes in Uncle Remus, His Songs and Sayings. The introduction to this book includes a significant study of those primitive rhythms which later greatly influenced American poetry and music. Sidney Lanier, particularly interested in music, regarded all his verse as having a melodic background. He contributed to American aesthetic theory in The Science of English Verse. James Whitcomb Riley, the Hoosier poet, like Whittier before him, was interested in home life. Lyric poets such as Joaquin Miller, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman, although creating in the nineteenth century, had their greatest influence just before the World War. In all their works lives a strong suggestion of the great expanse of the American soul, its incompleteness, its exuberance, and at times its sadness.

A Literary Portrait of America Colonial Times

Colonial literature in the 17th and 18th centuries retained much of its Elizabethan flavor, which still persists among writers from the mountains and prairies. Half of the matter in this vigorous style had to do with religious subjects; the rest, with history. During this period the witchcraft trials and the struggles against persecution by Roger Williams and the Quakers had built up a considerable background of dramatic historical material.

In the period between 1700 and 1776, despite the unfortunate attitude of the Puritanical priestcraft in New England, and the determination on the part of such provincial leaders as Governor Berkeley of Virginia to keep the people ignorant by forbidding free schools and printing, there had grown up a strong spirit of liberal idealism, which can be detected in the writings of Jonathan Edwards. Edwards's Essay on Beauty presents a definition which displays both the strength and the weakness of the Puritan's position -- that beauty is similarity, regularity, or mutual accord, that is, conformity.

Benjamin Franklin, the most typical 18th-century literary figure, educated himself with Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, the writings of Daniel Defoe, The Spectator Papers, Plutarch's Lives, and the powerful sermons of Cotton Mather. From this balanced humanistic-medieval background arose a liberal, witty personality with a pragmatic philosophy. Franklin's Autobiography presents the first authentic American self-portrait.

The spirit of the Revolution, clearly presaged in the writings of Paine, Jefferson, and other patriots, is closely related to the deism and the social pamphlets of Rousseau and Voltaire. Clarity and fineness of expression in American statecraft is a tradition which found its epitome in the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the Constitution, as well as in the state papers of Abraham Lincoln.

The Early Republic. The early years of the 19th century saw the beginnings of westward expansion, accompanied by the growth of the merchant marine, steamboat travel on the inland rivers, and the building of canals and railways. New England and New York at that time were the acknowledged centers of cultural activity. Washington Irving's Tales of a Traveller, Sketch Book, and Knickerbocker's History of New York carry forward the tradition of Elizabethan style untempered by sober puritanism. Irving also wrote the Conquest of Granada and The Alhambra. The energy of the American spirit, with its love of adventure and the sea, is nowhere better expressed than in Herman Melville's great novel, Moby Dick, the story of the revengeful Captain Ahab and the whale Moby Dick, or in Two Years before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana.
In a more romantic vein, James Fenimore Cooper 's Leatherstocking Tales told the story of frontier heroes and Indians. George Catlin wrote and illustrated careful scientific monographs on the Indians, while Henry Rowe Schoolcraft collected their legends directly from the tribal storytellers. With a romantic's love of nature, and with Rousseau's determination to live free from the bonds of civilization, Henry David Thoreau built his cabin by Walden Pond and wrote his essays to prove that simple living under the beneficent influence of nature nourishes the soul of man more than can material success. In New England an intellectual attitude grew up which was characterized by Oliver Wendell Holmes as "Brahminism."

The Brahmins were those literary artists who acknowledged inherited backgrounds of European culture. Most of them had university training and some had traveled abroad. The philosopher Emerson, author of the poem Brahma, led the group, which included Longfellow, Lowell, and Holmes himself. Contrasting with the Brahmins, Holmes found less cultured, virile men whose provinciality led them to ignore Continental backgrounds. Although he wrote only in jest, Dr. Holmes characterized two definite tendencies in American artistic thought. The "Brahmins" for all their inheritance, never reached the primitive virility and revolutionary fervor of their contemporaries -- Thoreau, Whittier, Edgar Allan Poe, and later, Walt Whitman and Mark Twain. Two women -- Louisa May Alcott and Harriet Beecher Stowe -- reached wide audiences, respectively, with Little Women and Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Nathaniel Hawthorne is remembered for his short stories, and his well-constructed novels, The Scarlet Letter, The Marble Faun, and The House of the Seven Gables. These are distinguished by writing of great suggestive power and welldrawn characters, presented together with a fine psychological analysis of the inner motives of their actions. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who translated both the Niebelungen Lied and Dante's Inferno, is best remembered for his romantic minor epics Hiawatha and Evangeline, his Tales of a Wayside Inn, and The Courtship of Miles Standish. Ralph Waldo Emerson, a philosopher in the deist tradition of Pope, although he was the leader of the "Brahmins," believed that American literature should be based directly upon American life. The exuberance of the unformed American spirit lives in all Emerson's essays. Particularly in his attempted definitions of beauty one finds that he includes all nature and suggests universal associational patterns.

The natural depth of American character, already demonstrated in the early years of the 19th century by such poems as Bryant's A Forest Hymn, The Prairies, and Thanatopsis, emerged again in Whittier's Snowbound, in the vast reaches of Whitman's descriptive verse and the Marshes of Glynn and other poems by Sidney Lanier. A vein of utopianism runs through the writings of all these men, as it had in those of Emerson's friend, Thoreau. Those were the days of many experiments in communal living. Hawthorne, for a time, lived at Brook Farm, a Utopian community, but found that intellectual life could not easily be combined with the hard manual labor of the pioneer. Americans must experiment with ways for improving man's lot or else they belie the premises of their Declaration of Independence. Underlying the writings of most philosophic American literary men is that belief expressed in Lowell's essay On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners, "There never was a colony save this that went forth not to seek gold but God."

Edgar Allan Poe, the most brilliant writer of prose fiction during the first half of the century, alone among the early Americans discovered the romantic formula that the primary purpose of art is pure sense impression. Lacking stability of character and great social integrity, Poe had to believe that the primary purpose of art is amusement. His Symbolist verse and his exciting, macabre short stories made him a Continental literary figure long before his compatriots were so accepted. Walt Whitman, another pioneer in the field of expressionism, wove Emerson's philosophy into a mighty, expansive, rhythmical verse of epic grandeur.

The White Folk Legends

The northern groups brought in, besides the Elizabethan folk legends, much material from the medieval morality plays found in the stories of Pilgrim's Progress or the poetry of Milton. With the development of an aristocracy in New Orleans, New York, and Virginia, there came during the last years of the 18th century the classical legends of Greece and Rome. These were taught as part of the body of humanist culture in the newly founded colleges. During the 19th century, many of these legends, with the fairy tales of the Dutch, Germans, and Scandinavians, furnished much of the grade-textbook material.

The Germanic legends have come mostly through the folk stories of the brothers Grimm and of Hans Christian Andersen, introduced during the 19th century. Among them, a famous plot much used in American dramatic literature is the story of Hans the Swineherd, who grew up to marry the king's daughter. This, the first success story, was popularized in the tales of Horatio Alger, considered indispensable reading by the developing youth in the last half of the 19th century and the early 20th. Another legend, which runs through most of the American idealistic philosophy, includes the thought that inventive ability used for the good of society eventually brings recognition and riches. Riches, in turn, bring leisure time which can be spent in healthy sport and aesthetic pursuits. Throughout all American legendry runs a large strain of Utopianism. The Americans unconsciously believe in an aesthetically planned society where all the component parts move with the minimum amount of friction and where the maximum of lasting enjoyment can be got with a minimum of labor. This legendary plot material from which all American art forms arise is usually portrayed with humor. The American tragic sense appears when the individual feels thwarted in his attempts to achieve this expanding life or when, having achieved it too late, he has forgotten how to use it.

Indigenous Origins of American Literature

The earliest Indian legends bear close resemblance to those of China and East India. In Central America, the figure of the savior-god Quetzalcoatl corresponds to the Great Man Panku of the Chinese or the Purusa of the Hindus. The American savior-god, like the sun-god Mithras of the Persians, battles an evil spirit or magician. Like the Greek Orpheus, Quetzalcoatl has the power to charm all nature of which he is a part. His song begins with a remarkable invocation to nature's beauty, differing in this from the European epics. The god sings
As I wander through the forest

There I hear the rocks replyingTo the sweetly-singing flowers;

And the gleaming, chatting waterMakes its answer to the fountain,

To the ever-shining fountain,Sweetly singing, forward springing,

Ever lilting its new song.

There he envisions a land.

Land where there is no affliction;

Land where no one serves a master,

If on earth we ever reach it'

Twill be only through submission

To the Author of Our Being.

Quetzalcoatl, we are told, taught his people all the arts and crafts. Together they built wondrous houses adorned with coral and seashells, emeralds, gold, and silver. They had chocolate plantations and untold wealth. They lacked nothing in their households, and hunger never dwelt among them. The small ears of corn they never had to grind, but used them for heating their baths. Many are the songs which Quetzalcoatl left to his people. Almost all the North American Indian tribes had stories which can be connected with him.

Chief among the stories of the Iroquoian nations was that of Hiawatha, who united them in a confederacy under a rule of law. The Great Spirit or the Indian's Manitou still persists in many forms as an underlying concept of the Deity for most people of Indian background. Several totemistic legends concerning the animals related to the various tribes have come down in the "Brer Rabbit Tales" of Uncle Remus. Many American fraternal organizations (for which the Europeans have no counterparts) include various lodges called the Eagles, Elks, Owls, and Redmen, which have adopted Indian ceremonial rites.

Stories of giants characterize the mythology of all primitive peoples who are forced to wrestle with a powerful natural environment for their existence. The Cherokee Indian has the tale of Tsul Kalu, a slant-eyed giant whose many marvelous exploits are almost completely duplicated by the frontiersman Davy Crockett, the lumberjack Paul Bunyan with his Swedish foreman Ole Olsen, and the Mississippi Negro stevedore, John Henry. American humor, relying for much of its expansive effect upon the narration of highly improbable or "tall" stories, incomprehensible to most Europeans, bears direct relationship to the primitive vigor of the pioneers. This accounts in part for the "resiliency" mentioned by Paul Claudel.

Americans of both continents tend to glorify their heroic democratic leaders -- Washington, Jefferson, Bolivar, San Martin, Juarez, and Lincoln -- conceiving of them not in any sense as deities, but as men of gigantic stature and superhuman achievements. Personification of the various American ideals can be found in the tall figure of Uncle Sam, suggestive of Yankee ingenuity, and in the Goddess of Liberty. The Mexicans have recently pictured Quetzalcoatl, and the Peruvians have their Inca general, Ollantay.

The Art of the Americans

The taproots of American productions in both continents go deep into the Indian culture. In South America and in North America south of the Rio Grande, the native Indian population is ethnically the largest group. Into this great underlying stratum of indigenous American culture flowed first, in Central and South America, a Spanish strain. Before 1800, to the more sparsely populated North America came French, English, Dutch, and German groups. These were followed by German revolutionaries, the Irish, the Italians, and from 1910 on, by great Slavic migrations, bringing their colorful folk arts from the Balkans and Western Asia. All through these years the Africans brought into our literature and music their rich underlying rhythms and soft harmonious speech.

Although the majority population in the United States is of Celto-Germanic origin, it has assimilated elements from Indian, African, and Mediterranean cultures, so that the fundamentally Gothic art which it would naturally have created has been transformed into a new form, more nearly universal in style and international in its message. This poetic ideology, expressed in the four quotations heading this chapter, has not yet found its expression in a satisfactory graphic and plastic form necessary for complete definition of the American idea of beauty. One cannot fully visualize the American art of the future until he has examined the folk legends and mythology of the various groups represented. Considering these legends and the primitive rhythms of the dances accompanying them, one gains a new conception of the meaning of American art. It is broader than that presented by Paul Claudel, who derived all from the dynamo.

The inventive American, although capable of creating the dynamo, enjoys a feeling of power transcending the monotony of the assembly line. His construction of the machine, undertaken partly for the joy of creating new sources of power, also predestines him for the creation of a spatial art, energetic as the early Celto-Germanic interweave. Throughout American mythology one also finds a Promethean spirit, at times rough and humorous, at times melancholy and musical, which seeks expression in the temporal arts.