Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (97 page)

As long as artists were told that their primary task was to spread a knowledge of art throughout the society—in the words of William Tudor writing in Boston’s
North American Review
, to “feel something of a
missionary
spirit” in improving “the taste of the publick”—they could scarcely develop much sense of artistic autonomy. Indeed, as historian Neil Harris points out, “the intellectual and moral autonomy of American artists did not disappear under civic attack; it never existed.”
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These educational efforts to raise the people’s artistic taste often became so frantic that they created their own distortions. Precisely because Susannah Rowson’s racy story of seduction,
Charlotte Temple
(1794), went through forty-two editions in two dozen years, guardians of taste felt pressed to exaggerate the likes of British novelist Maria Edgeworth, whose heavily didactic novels ranked her, or so the
North American Review
claimed, among “the greatest reformers who have given a new direction to the faculties and opinions of mankind.” Andrews Norton, an important Boston Federalist intellectual and later professor of sacred literature at Harvard, even thought that Edgeworth’s works, all of which were intended to inculcate morality, integrity, and good sense, even at the expense of plot and character development, “entitle her to a reputation as enviable, perhaps, as that of any writer in English literature.”
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By the early nineteenth century these developments were reshaping American culture. In the pre-democratic world of the eighteenth century cultivation or learning was considered to be unitary and homogeneous, involving all aspects of the arts and sciences, and regarded primarily as a personal qualification for participation in polite society. Indeed, to be learned was the equivalent of being a gentleman. Cultivated persons had
no doubt of the existence of vulgar bucolic habits like bear-baiting or eating with one’s hands, but they scarcely had seen these crude plebeian customs as some sort of popular culture set in competitive opposition to the enlightened republic of letters.

The Revolution and the relating of art to the public were not supposed to destroy the cultivated elite and threaten its standards but only broaden its sources of recruitment and elevate the taste of society as a whole. Yet the explosive expansion of literate middling sorts was having the opposite effect. The republic of letters was rapidly degenerating, “sliding,” as Federalist Theodore Dehon complained in 1807, “inadvertently into a democracy.”
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Many of the novels of the period were designed for untutored readers. They were small and easily carried and could be held in one hand. Their plots were straightforward, their vocabulary undemanding, and their syntax unsophisticated. Since they were often designed to instruct while they amused, they became an important means by which many marginally educated persons acquired an acquaintance with the larger world. The novels offered their readers who lacked a classical education Greek and Latin quotations conveniently translated. They also provided readers with devices—by contextually defining unusual words, for example—by which they could enlarge their vocabulary or improve their writing skills. Epistolary novels supplied models for readers to write their own letters. For women especially, novel-reading was a way of acquiring an education otherwise denied to them. In fact, all of these early American novels, observes their modern historian, “played a vital role in the early education of readers previously largely excluded from the elite literature and culture.”
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The playwright and critic William Dunlap had been convinced that the theater was the most powerful engine for promoting morality in the society. But by the early nineteenth century he had come to realize that a significant distinction had arisen between “the wise and good,” who learned “lessons [of] patriotism, virtue, morality, religion” from attending plays, and “the uneducated, the idle, and profligate,” whose tastes were so bad as to lead “mercenary managers” to put on “such ribaldry or folly, or worse, as is attractive to such patrons, and productive of profit to themselves.” Dunlap was torn between his desire to save the unenlightened and boorish populace from their degeneracy and his fear that they were corrupting the theater and turning it into “a breeding ground for ignorance
and depravity.” He had tried to bring enlightenment to the populace, but people wanted only to be entertained. To keep his theater going he hired jugglers and acrobatic performers, including a man who whirled around on his head, with firecrackers attached to his heels. Even melodramas did not satisfy his audiences, and his theater went bankrupt in 1805. Dunlap had learned his lesson: he recalled that he was “one who had on trial found circumstances too strong for his desires of reform, and who, after a struggle of years (with ruined health and fortunes) gave up the contest without giving up the wish or the hope.” If the legitimate drama were to continue in middle-class America, it had to meet popular taste and share the stage with bizarre novelty acts.
⁷⁵

Painting was likewise popularized. Many of the trained artists who emigrated from England, such as George Beck, William Winstanley, and William Groombridge, some of whom had seceded from Peale’s Columbianum, were unable to make a living painting in America. Beck and Groombridge had to turn to schoolteaching, while Winstanley ended up copying Gilbert Stuart’s portraits of Washington before returning to England. But Francis Guy, another expatriate from England, prospered brilliantly where others had failed. Guy was trained as a tailor and dyer in England and in the 1790s fled to America to escape his debts. Unable to make it as a dyer, he, in the words of Rembrandt Peale, “boldly undertook to be an artist, although he did not know how to draw.” Nevertheless, without repudiating his occupational title as a dyer, he learned how to reproduce landscapes in a new and strange manner—by stretching over the window of a tent some thin black gauze upon which he traced an actual scene before transferring it to canvas. According to Peale, who concluded that Guy’s “rough transcripts from Nature . . . were really good,” this amateur artist “
manufactured
” these topographical pictures by the dozens and sold them for twenty-five dollars apiece.

That this self-taught artist was succeeding in Baltimore, while trained artists failed, enraged a female editor, Eliza Anderson, daughter of a distinguished Irish physician and fiancée of the French architect Maximilian Godefroy, who was exiled to the United States by Napoleon in 1805. Anderson could not get over the American tendency to believe that mere artisans—tailors and carpenters—could pretend to a taste in painting. Americans, she wrote in the Baltimore
Federal Gazette
in 1807, seemed unable to distinguish between the useful arts of artisans and the fine arts
of real artists. “Apollo is somewhat aristocratic,” she claimed, “and does not permit of perfect equality in his court. . . . The Muses are rather saucy, and do not admit of
workmen
to their levees.” She advised Guy to return to his “soul-inspiring avocation of making pantaloons.” As for Baltimore, Anderson concluded, it was “the Siberia of the arts.”

Guy went on to become, along with the German immigrant John Lewis Krimmel, the English immigrant William Russell Birch, and the visiting Russian diplomat Pavel Svinin, one of the first genre painters in American history. These painters depicted people, buildings, and landscapes topographically, more or less as they were, not as the artistic conventions of the day dictated. Sophisticated critics like Eliza Anderson may not have liked their work, but many Americans did.
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Serious artists thought that genre scenes were too mean and lowly for their talent, and painters such as John Vanderlyn and Samuel Morse scorned the depicting of ordinary folk—except, said Vanderlyn, Italian peasants. With their lack of “fashion and frivolity,” Italian peasants, Vanderlyn declared, were close enough to nature to possess a neoclassical universality that was worth depicting. But most major artists would have nothing to do with such common and humble subjects. William Dunlap mocked the former sign painter Jeremiah Paul for his crude efforts at genre painting. Paul, he said, was “one of those unfortunate individuals who, showing what is called genius in early life, by scratching the lame figures of all God’s creatures, or every thing that will receive chalk or ink, are induced to devote themselves to the fine arts, without the means of improvement or the education necessary, to fit them for a liberal profession. . . . He was a man of vulgar appearances and awkward manners.”
⁷⁷

Too many men, middling men, men of vulgar appearances and awkward manners, it seemed, were participating in all the arts, and serious artists and many of the elite despaired over what they saw as the increasing vulgarization of taste. As the social distinction between gentlemen and ordinary people blurred, cultivation itself seemed to have descended, as Dunlap grumbled, to “a certain point of mediocrity.” The arts had become popularized, creating, complained disgruntled Federalists, a new kind of commodity culture, “widely and thinly spread,” whose contributors
had become cultural “methodists,” “feebly grasping at everything . . . flying from novelty to novelty and regaling upon the flowering of literature.”
⁷⁸
Members of the literati who clung to traditional humanist standards of the republic of letters found themselves beset by an avaricious popular culture they could scarcely control, yet to which they bore a peculiar republican responsibility. “We know, that in this land, where the spirit of democracy is everywhere,” wrote young biblical scholar Andrews Norton in 1807, “we are exposed, as it were, to a poisonous atmosphere, which blasts every thing beautiful in nature and corrodes every thing elegant in art.” Nevertheless, these learned gentry like Norton believed that they had a special civic obligation to purify this poisonous atmosphere, “to correct blunders, to check the contagion of false taste, to rescue the publick from the impositions of dullness, and to assert the majesty of learning and of truth.”
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In the minds of many, the future of the new Republic had come to rest on the cultivation of its public. Because the cultural atmosphere was drenched with civic and moral concerns, artists and critics alike found it impossible to justify any sort of independent and imaginative existence in defiance of the public. Two nude paintings—
Danae
by the Danish immigrant Adolph Wertmüller and
Jupiter and Io
(renamed
Dream of Love
) by Rembrandt Peale—were exhibited in Philadelphia in 1814 to multitudes of paying viewers, but also to some intense criticism. Americans were naturally suspicious of the fine arts, wrote one critic in the
Port Folio
, but they have tolerated the arts “by representing them as able auxiliaries in the cause of patriotism and morals.” But the exhibition of the two nude paintings did nothing for patriotism or morality. Instead, their exhibition offered, daily, scenes of “seducing voluptuousness to the young and thoughtless part of the city” of Philadelphia, which was such “a quiet, decent, moral city.” True, admitted the critic, artists must be allowed “great latitude” for their imagination, and the critic “should be among the last to abridge the limits of their fancy.” But these two nudes went too far; they violated “every consideration of morals and decorum, and even ordinary decency.” He knew of “no apology for such licentiousness.”
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This sort of moralistic criticism led to the immediate withdrawal of the paintings and to a contrite public apology from the Society of Artists, which condemned the exhibition as “indecorous and altogether inconsistent with the purity of republican morals.” The dociety, which represented dozens of various Philadelphia artists, went on to express its “deep regret” over the way these exhibitions were “evidently tending not only to corrupt public morals, but also to bring into disrepute those exhibitions which experience has proved to be important in cultivating a chaste taste for the fine arts in our country.”
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Even the first copyright law in the country, adopted by Connecticut following the Revolution, put the needs of the society over the artist’s right to earn what the market would bear. An artist’s originality and individual inspiration could not count against such civic demands. When Wordsworth was criticized for writing too solitary and too unsocial a kind of poetry, what freedom from social obligations could an American poet expect?
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Wordsworth’s
Lyrical Ballads
was published only once in America before 1824. By contrast, Robert Bloomfield’s
Farmer Boy
and its cult of sympathy had five American editions between 1801 and 1814. Indeed, all the great English Romantic poets—Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Shelley—were condemned or ignored in early nineteenth-century America, and Pope remained the most popular English poet until at least the 1820s.

The experience of painter Washington Allston reveals the tragedy of a romantic sensibility in a didactic neoclassical world. Born in 1779 in South Carolina, Allston was educated at Harvard where he became determined “to be the first painter, at least, from America.” In 1801 he sold his inherited Carolina property and took off for England, where he befriended Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He returned to America in 1808 in order to fulfill his destiny but ended up painting portraits, which were all that Americans seemed to want. Frustrated, he returned once more to England in 1811, where his romantic artistic impulses found some success. Three years after the death of his wife in 1815, he returned once more to America. He brought with him
Belshazzar’s Feast
, an unfinished canvas, which was supposed to become his masterpiece, but which over the next twenty-five years he never completed. When he declared in his
Lectures on Art
, published after his death, that “all effort at originality must end either in the quaint or the monstrous,” he may have been reflecting on his own inability to express himself fully in a society that did not value originality.
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