Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (93 page)

Being members of this trans-Atlantic intellectual fraternity enabled some Americans like the artist Robert Fulton and the poet Joel Barlow to spend most of their mature lives abroad without any sense of expatriation. And it allowed many Americans, much to the surprise of later generations, to embrace the cultural fellowship of the painters John Singleton Copley and Benjamin West and the scientist Count Rumford despite their loyalty to Great Britain.
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The American Revolutionaries intended, however, to be more than participants in this “republic of letters”; they aimed to be its leaders. Many of them came to believe that the torch of civilization was being passed across the Atlantic to the New World where it was destined to burn even more brightly. And why not? America had everything going for it, declared Joel Barlow in 1787; “the enterprising genius of the people promises a most rapid improvement in all the arts that embellish human nature.”
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In light of their former colonial status and their earlier widespread expressions of cultural inferiority, their presumption of becoming the cultural leaders of the Western world is jarring, to say the least. Yet the evidence is overwhelming that the Revolutionary leaders and artists saw America eventually becoming the place where the best of all the arts and sciences would flourish.

Newspapers, sermons, orations, even private correspondence were filled with excited visions of future American accomplishments in all areas of learning. When the Revolutionaries talked of “treading upon the Republican ground of Greece and Rome” they meant not only that they would erect republican governments but also that they would in time have their own Homers and Virgils, in the words of historian David Ramsay, their own “poets, orators, criticks, and historians, equal to the most celebrated of the ancient commonwealths of Greece and Italy.”
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Such dreams, bombastic as they seem in retrospect, were grounded in the best scientific thought of the day. This grounding undercut the
Buffon-bred view that the New World was an undesirable human habitat and helped to give Americans the confidence to undertake their revolution. They knew, as philosopher David Hume had pointed out, that free states encouraged learning among the populace, and a learned populace was the best source of genius and artistic talent. But more important in convincing Americans that they might become the future artistic leaders of the world was the idea of the
translatio studii
, the ancient notion that the arts and science were inevitably moving westward.

From the beginning of the eighteenth century some Americans had dreamed that the arts were on their way to their wilderness. Even the founding of Yale College early in the century proved to Jeremiah Dummer that “religion & polite learning have bin traveling westward ever since their first appearance in the World.” He hoped that the arts “won’t rest ‘till they have fixt their chief Residence in our part of the World.”
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With the publication in 1752 of Bishop Berkeley’s “Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America” (originally written in 1726), more and more Americans began to believe that the future belonged to them. Everyone knew that civilization and the arts had moved steadily westward—from the Middle East to Greece, from Greece to Rome, from Rome to Western Europe, and now, wrote Berkeley,

Westward the course of Empire takes its way,

The first four acts already past,

A fifth shall close the drama with the day;

Time’s noblest offspring is the last.
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With Berkeley’s poem reprinted in virtually every American newspaper and many magazines over the succeeding decades, more and more Americans became convinced that the arts were about to move from Western Europe to America, there to thrive as never before.
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As early as 1759 the unsympathetic British traveler Andrew Burnaby noted that the colonists were “looking forward with eager and impatient expectation to that destined moment when America is to give the law to the rest of the world.”
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So common became this theme of the
translatio studii
to eighteenth-century Americans that it led to the emergence of a new literary genre, the Rising Glory of America poem, which, it seems, every gentleman with literary aspirations tried his hand at. The most famous work with that title, “The Rising Glory of America,” was Philip Freneau’s and Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s 1771 Princeton commencement poem. In it they predicted that Americans would in time have not only their own states, “not less in fame than Greece and Rome of old,” but their own Homers and Miltons too. The poet John Trumbull echoed the same theme in predicting that painters, architects, musicians, and writers must inevitably find their place in this free and uncorrupted country:

This Land her Steele and Addison shall view,
The former glories equal’d by the new;
Some future Shakespeare charm’d the rising age,
And hold in magic chains the listening stage.
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Of course, not every American intellectual was sure of the New World’s ability as yet to receive the inherited torch of Western culture, and some doubted whether America’s primitive tastes could ever sustain the fine arts. Yet nearly all who became committed to the Revolution found themselves embracing a vision of America’s becoming not only a libertarian refuge from the world’s tyranny but also a worthy place where, in the words of Ezra Stiles, the enlightened president of Yale, “all the arts may be transported from Europe and Asia and flourish with . . . an augmented lustre.”
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T
HE
R
EVOLUTIONARIES, OF COURSE
, never saw these dreams realized. Indeed, the gap between what they hoped for and what actually happened in the arts was so great that many historians have never been able to take their dreams seriously. Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss their hopes of America’s becoming the eventual repository of Western learning as empty bluster. Not only did the Americans mean what they said, but their earnest attempts to implement that meaning had profound effects on American culture. By conceiving themselves as receiving and fulfilling the westward movement of the arts, the Revolutionaries inevitably became involved in powerful currents of cultural change sweeping through Europe in the eighteenth century.

A century later these European currents would be labeled neoclassicism and disparaged as cold, formal, and sterile.
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Yet to those who participated in this eighteenth-century artistic transformation, including Americans, neoclassicism represented not just another stylistic phase in the development of Western art but the ultimate realization of artistic truth, a promise of a new kind of enlightened art for an enlightened world. From the early eighteenth century, in France and England especially, amateur theorists had worked to distinguish several of the arts—usually painting, architecture, music, and poetry—from other arts and crafts and had designated them as possessing special capacities for civilizing humans. Numerous treatises systematically combined these “fine arts” together because of the presumed similarity of effect they had on audiences, spectators, and readers. Out of such efforts not only was the modern conception of aesthetics created, but the idea of measuring and judging nations and peoples by their artistic tastes and contributions was also born. These eighteenth-century developments radically transformed the aesthetic and social meaning of art. Paintings and literature were being taken out of the hands of the aristocratic courts and narrow elites and were being made into public commodities distributed to all literate members of the society eager to acquire reputations for polish and refinement.
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There were two interrelated aspects of this neoclassical transformation of the arts. One involved the purposes of art; the other involved a broadening of its public. For too long too many of the arts, such as the rococo paintings of François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard, seemed to have been the exclusive preserve of courtiers and a leisured aristocracy. Devotees of the rococo style, it was thought, looked upon the arts as a means of private pleasure, amusement, and display, as diversions from ennui or instruments of court intrigue. Such frivolous arts could scarcely be paid any special public veneration; indeed, with the courtly emphasis on amorous dalliance, lasciviousness, and luxury the arts could only be
considered sources of personal corruption, effeminacy, and decadence, and hence dangerous to the social order.

Americans knew only too well that the fine arts, like painting or sculpture, in Benjamin Rush’s words, “flourish chiefly in wealthy and luxurious countries” and therefore were symptoms of social decadence. Throughout his life, John Adams always had an extraordinarily sensuous attraction to beauty and the world of art. When he joined the Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1774, he entered his first Roman Catholic church and, accustomed as he was to the stark simplicity of the Puritan churches of Massachusetts, was overwhelmed by the pomp of the service and the richness of the ornamentation. “Here is every Thing,” he told his wife Abigail, “which can lay hold of the Eye, Ear, and Imagination.” When he went to France in 1778 he was even more enchanted and overwhelmed by the beauty of Paris and Versailles, where “the Richness, the Magnificence, and Splendor is beyond all Description.” Yet he knew that such art and beauty were the products of a hierarchical church and an authoritarian monarchy. As a good republican he knew “that the more elegance, the less virtue, in all times and countries.” Buildings, paintings, sculpture, music, gardens, and furniture—however rich, magnificent, and splendid—were simply “bagatelles introduced by time and luxury in change for the great qualities and hardy, manly virtues of the human heart.” The arts, he said, could “inform the Understanding, or refine the Taste,” yet at the same time they could also “seduce, betray, deceive, deprave, corrupt, and debauch.”
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Since the arts were associated with the politeness and gentility that many eighteenth-century people, including many Americans, were eager to acquire, they became a serious problem for enlightened reformers. How could the arts be promoted without promoting their evil consequences?

The solution was to change the character and purpose of art. Since those who feared being corrupted assumed that the arts, particularly the visual arts, had powerful effects on their beholder, it took only a slight shift of emphasis to transform art from a corrupting instrument of pleasure
into a beneficial instrument of instruction. By the middle of the eighteenth-century European and English philosophers were already redirecting the content and form of art away from frivolous and voluptuous private pleasure toward moral education and civic ennoblement. Infused with dignity and morality and made subservient to some ideological force outside themselves, the arts could become something more than charming ornaments of an idle aristocracy; they could become public agents of reformation and refinement for the whole society.

At the same time as the social purpose of art was transformed, the patronage of art expanded from the court and a few great noblemen to embrace the entire educated public. Indeed, the two developments reinforced one another. Cultivation in the arts became a central means by which eighteenth-century gentlemen sought to distinguish themselves. Wealth and blood were no longer sufficient; taste and an awareness of the arts were now necessary. Indeed, the English philosopher Lord Shaftesbury declared that morality and good taste were allied: “the science of virtuosi and that of virtue itself become, in a manner, one and the same.”
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Politeness and refinement were connected with public morality and social order. The spread of good taste throughout the society would make for a better and more benevolent nation.

Through the multiplication of newspapers, magazines, circulating libraries, and book clubs, through the public exhibitions of paintings and the engraving and distribution of prints, and through the formation of salons, subscription assemblies, and concert halls—through all these means Englishmen and other Europeans sought to exploit the arts in order to reform their societies. In the process they turned the arts into culture, into commodities, and created a central characteristic of modern life. The polite essays of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, the novels of Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, the satiric prints of William Hogarth, the history paintings of Benjamin West, even the vases of Josiah Wedgwood, all in their different ways expressed this new moral and social conception of culture. All were efforts to meet the new desire of a public eager to learn how to behave, what to value, and why to be refined. To possess this culture—to have correct taste and an amateur knowledge of the arts and sciences—was to be a truly enlightened gentleman.

The effects of these developments on the arts and society were enormous. The arts became objects of special knowledge and examination, to
be placed in museums and studied in academies. Enlightened writers and painters sought to embody new ethical qualities in their work—truth, purity, nobility, honesty—to counteract the licentiousness and frivolity of their predecessors. The artist was no longer a craftsman catering to a few aristocratic patrons; he was to become a public philosopher academically educated and speaking to the society-at-large. Just as enlightened scientists and statesmen were seeking to discover the universal verities that underlay the workings of the universe and political states, so too were artists urged to return to long-accepted standards of excellence and virtue for the sake of the moral improvement of humanity.