Horace Greeley on literature as a vocation

Horace Greeley, founder of the New York Tribune (est. 1841), was well known for his vehement opinions on everything from slavery and women's rights to unions, nativism and education. Here are his thoughts on books:

"It is a very common but a very mischievous notion, that the writing of a book is creditable per se. On the contrary, I hold it discreditable, and only to be justified by proof of lofty qualities and generous aims embodied therein. To write a book when you have nothing new to communicate, - nothing to say that has not been better said already, - that is to inflict a real injury on mankind. A new book is only to be justified by a new truth. If Jonas Potts, however illiterate and commonplace, has been shipwrecked on Hudson’s Bay, and has traveled thence overland to Detroit or Montreal by a route previously unknown, then he may give us a book – if he will attempt no more than to tell us as clearly as possible what he experienced and saw by the way, - which will have a genuine value, and which the world may well thank him for; and so of a man who, having manufactured charcoal all his days, should favor us with a treatise on burning charcoal, showing what was the relative value for that use of the various woods; how long they should be on the fire respectively; how much wood should be burned in one pit, and how the burning should be managed. Every contribution, however rude & humble, to our knowledge of nature, and of the means by which her products may most advantageously be made subservient to our needs, is beneficent, and worthy of our regard. But the fabrication of new poems, or novels, or essays, or histories, which really add nothing to our stock of facts, to our fund of ideas, but, so far as they have any significance, merely resay what has been more forcibly, intelligibly, happily, said already, - this is a work which does less than no good, - which ought to be decried and put down, under the general police duty of abating nuisances. I would have every writer of a book cited before a competent tribunal and made to answer the questions: “Sir, what proposition is this book intended to set forth & commend? What fact does it reveal? What is its drift, its purport?” If it embodies a new truth, or even a new suggestion, though it seem a very mistaken and absurd one, make way for it! and let it fight its own battle; but if it has really no other aim than to be readable, therefore salable, and thus to win gold for its author and his accomplices, the printer and the publisher, then let a bonfire be made of its manuscript sheets, so that the world may speedily obtain from it all the light it is capable of imparting."

I emphatically disagree with Greeley that all published books ought to be didactic: see the essays in Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan on Hale and Bryant, and more definitively, Ayn Rand's Romantic Manifesto. Of course millions of books have been and will be published that offer neither practical advice nor inspiration, but better to let the workings of the capitalist system punish those who perpetrate such works than have authors face censorship.

The bibliography and out-takes for Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan Essay 7 offer several other substantial quotations from Greeley's Recollections of a Busy Life (1868), plus an anecdote by Mark Twain and a pithy comment by William Cullen Bryant (OMOM Essay 22).

The image at the beginning of this post is by Thomas Nast, famed 19th-c. caricaturist; see the end of the Greeley bibliography for details.

Horace Greeley on literature as a vocation

Horace Greeley, founder of the New York Tribune (est. 1841), was well known for his vehement opinions on everything from slavery and women's rights to unions, nativism and education. Here are his thoughts on books:

"It is a very common but a very mischievous notion, that the writing of a book is creditable per se. On the contrary, I hold it discreditable, and only to be justified by proof of lofty qualities and generous aims embodied therein. To write a book when you have nothing new to communicate, - nothing to say that has not been better said already, - that is to inflict a real injury on mankind. A new book is only to be justified by a new truth. If Jonas Potts, however illiterate and commonplace, has been shipwrecked on Hudson’s Bay, and has traveled thence overland to Detroit or Montreal by a route previously unknown, then he may give us a book – if he will attempt no more than to tell us as clearly as possible what he experienced and saw by the way, - which will have a genuine value, and which the world may well thank him for; and so of a man who, having manufactured charcoal all his days, should favor us with a treatise on burning charcoal, showing what was the relative value for that use of the various woods; how long they should be on the fire respectively; how much wood should be burned in one pit, and how the burning should be managed. Every contribution, however rude & humble, to our knowledge of nature, and of the means by which her products may most advantageously be made subservient to our needs, is beneficent, and worthy of our regard. But the fabrication of new poems, or novels, or essays, or histories, which really add nothing to our stock of facts, to our fund of ideas, but, so far as they have any significance, merely resay what has been more forcibly, intelligibly, happily, said already, - this is a work which does less than no good, - which ought to be decried and put down, under the general police duty of abating nuisances. I would have every writer of a book cited before a competent tribunal and made to answer the questions: “Sir, what proposition is this book intended to set forth & commend? What fact does it reveal? What is its drift, its purport?” If it embodies a new truth, or even a new suggestion, though it seem a very mistaken and absurd one, make way for it! and let it fight its own battle; but if it has really no other aim than to be readable, therefore salable, and thus to win gold for its author and his accomplices, the printer and the publisher, then let a bonfire be made of its manuscript sheets, so that the world may speedily obtain from it all the light it is capable of imparting."

I emphatically disagree with Greeley that all published books ought to be didactic: see the essays in Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan on Hale and Bryant, and more definitively, Ayn Rand's Romantic Manifesto. Of course millions of books have been and will be published that offer neither practical advice nor inspiration, but better to let the workings of the capitalist system punish those who perpetrate such works than have authors face censorship.

The bibliography and out-takes for Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan Essay 7 offer several other substantial quotations from Greeley's Recollections of a Busy Life (1868), plus an anecdote by Mark Twain and a pithy comment by William Cullen Bryant (OMOM Essay 22).

The image at the beginning of this post is by Thomas Nast, famed 19th-c. caricaturist; see the end of the Greeley bibliography for details.

The Progress of Modern Art & Modern Theory

In "19th-Century French Painting and Philosophy" (The Objective Standard, Fall 2006), I argued that the ideas that made works by Matisse and Picasso acceptable by the early 20th c. had been gaining adherents throughout the 19th century, because traditional artists did not have a sound theoretical basis on which to argue against the subjects and styles of the avant-garde. This confusion and defeat came to mind when I began to compile the bibliography and out-takes for Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan Essay 6, on John Quincy Adams Ward's Washington at Wall St. The Armory Show of 1913, with works by Picasso, Duchamp, and Kandinsky, is generally cited as the introduction of Modernist European art to the United States. (See Theodore Roosevelt's disparaging but accurate comments.) Even before the Armory Show, however, some American sculptors were anxious about current trends in sculpture. In a memorial address for Ward (d. 1910), Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., (1868-1953), art critic and long-time professor at Princeton, commented:

Both men [Ward and Winslow Homer] cultivated the robust and masculine order of design, both quietly ignored the current shibboleth that a work of art must be precious in every detail; both, I take it, would have scorned the cosmetic theory that surface has a value irrespective of the thing expressed. [Probably a crack at Rodin.] … Such an art presupposes discipline, clearness of aim, self-knowledge on the part of its creator. It is not my purpose to appraise Ward's singularly even and meritorious production. It seems to me to have a high and especial value in view of prevailing notions that hysteria and the artistic temperament are convertible terms. Ward's life and purposeful well-balanced work are an effective protest against the fallacy that the life artistic ranges between overt melodrama and inward tragedy. (John Quincy Adams Ward, Memorial Addresses Delivered Before the Century Association, Nov. 5, 1910 [New York: for the Century Association, 1911], pp. 2, 5-6)

Although representational art continued to sell to conservative collectors, by 1925, F.W. Ruckstull, whose allegorical figure of Phoenicia stands third from the right on the cornice of the Customs House at Bowling Green (Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan Essay 4), and whose Wisdom and Force flank the entrance to the Appellate Court at Madison and 25th St., felt impelled to commence his 500-page Great Works of Art with the statement:

Anarchy reigns in the world of art today. The cause is: 'Modernism.' … Let the Reader carefully examine, and reflect over, some works of art illustrated in Figures 1 to 8 [by Brancusi, Picasso, Matisse and others], the result of the inflicting upon the world of one foolish fad after another. He will observe a gradual drifting away from the normal to the abnormal. And, strange to say, every inventor of one of the weird fads which these things represent, has been backed up, as Tolstoy said, by some casuistic 'new theory' of art, of some pretentious critic, to justify its production and its infliction on the public, to the bewilderment and weakening of the present and succeeding generations. (p. v).

In one of my favorite books on 20th-c. art, The Painted Word, Tom Wolfe describes with characteristic exuberance how the relationship between theory and the visual arts had progressed by the late 20th c.:

All these years I, like so many others, had stood in front of a thousand, two thousand, God-knows-how-many thousand Pollocks, de Koonings, Newmans, Nolands, Rothkos, Rauschenbergs, Judds, Johnses, Olitskis, Louises, Stills, Franz Klines Frankenthalers, Kellys, and Frank Stellas, now squinting, now popping the eye sockets open, now drawing back, now moving closer - waiting, waiting, forever waiting for … it … for it to come into focus, namely, the visual reward (for so much effort) which must be there, which everyone (tout le monde) knew to be there. […] All those years, in short, I had assumed that in art, if nowhere else, seeing is believing. Well - how very shortsighted! Now, at last, on April 28, 1974, I could see. I had gotten it backward all along. Not 'seeing is believing,' you ninny, but 'believing is seeing,' for Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text. (p. 6)

If a painting or sculpture requires that one know a theory in order to understand it, it does not function as visual art. Few of those who stop to admire Ward's Washington have any idea when it was made or what philosophical and esthetic principles were espoused by Ward. There is no need for such knowledge: Washington bears its own message, visually rather than verbally. The bibliography and out-takes for Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan Essay 6 appear on the Forgotten Delights website.

William Shakespeare: OMOM Essay 37

"About the Sculpture" for this essay was challenging because I aimed to explain Ayn Rand's term "metaphysical value-judgments." By this point in Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan I had discussed so many ideas that were implied by sculptures (rather than explicitly illustrated) that I thought readers would have the necessary foundation for a discussion of MVJs. The essay's hook is the description of a laser technology that creates the equivalent of a 3-D photograph, which introduces the issue of why a mechanical reproduction isn't art, which leads to selectivity, and thence to why an artist would select a certain subject or detail over others.

"About the Subject" reviews New Yorkers' attitudes toward Shakespeare through the 19th century. Did you know that in 1849 twenty-two people were killed at Astor Place in riots over a certain actor's portrayal of Macbeth?

The Forgotten Delights calendar has a close-up of Shakespeare's head and torso along with Polonius's advice from Hamlet.

William Earl Dodge: OMOM Essay 24

In "About the Sculpture" I consider what details make this figure of a businessman so different from those of Rea and Vanderbilt (Essays 20 and 25). I also note that all the portrait sculptures erected in the 19th c. were meant to remind viewers of people worthy of emulation. More on this under Duffy (Essay 27).

My favorite story about Dodge (d. 1883), which I didn't manage to fit into either Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan or Forgotten Delights: The Producers, is his dialogue with President-Elect Lincoln in February 1861. As Burrows and Wallace describe it in Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (p. 867):

William E. Dodge, industrialist and financier, explained that New Yorkers were nervous about the position he would take toward the South in his forthcoming inaugural and wanted to know "whether the grass shall grow in the streets of our commercial cities." Lincoln responded pleasantly that "if it depends upon me, the grass will not grow anywhere except in the fields and meadows." But when Dodge pressed him, asking if this meant he would yield to the just demands of the South, Lincoln replied grimly that the Constitution must be "respected, obeyed, enforced, and defended, let the grass grow where it may."

It proved surprisingly difficult to gather biographical information about Dodge. Although he co-founded Phelps Dodge, today one of the world’s leading mining companies, Dodge isn't in the American National Biography or the Encyclopedia of New York City. I ended up scrounging for information in 19th-c. biographical dictionaries at the New-York Historical Society. More details on my research for Dodge are included in Forgotten Delights: The Producers. (This is the sixth of ten sculptures covered in both OMOM and FDP.)

Roscoe Conkling: OMOM Essay 18

As opposed to Booth (Essay 17), my problem with prominent New York politician Conkling wasn't lack of reaction but indecision. A contemporary said, "He stood for independence, for courage, and above all for absolute integrity." A later biographer denounced him as "one of the harshest, strictest, most narrow-minded of all political bosses. Possibly like Pooh Bah he was born sneering." Eventually I made "About the Sculpture" a discussion of how one's knowledge affects one's interpretation of and reaction to art. Thus it's a sequel and elaboration of the discussion of emotional reactions to sculpture that began in Essay 17 of Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan.

I spent considerable time searching for an objective evaluation of Conkling, but with a deadline impending, finally focused "About the Subject" on the primary sources one would have to research in order pass judgment on Conkling's character and career.

Alexander Lyman Holley: OMOM Essay 11

In the "About the Sculpture" section of this essay in Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan I return to the related issues of selectivity and the purpose of art.

"About the Subject" focuses on how Holley almost single-handedly introduced Bessemer steel to the United States, and then kept those who operated the steel plants up to date on the latest improvements in the process. Before I researched Holley, I had not considered that neither the skyscrapers of Manhattan nor the expansion of the railroads across the U.S. would have been possible without mass-produced steel. Forgotten Delights: The Producers includes details on the labor- and time-intensive steel-making process before Holley's time.

The Forgotten Delights calendar has a profile photo of Holley next to Longfellow’s “Success” - another poem about triumph after long effort that is an inspiration as we begin the New Year. (See also "Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth" in my 12/31/06 post.)

Horace Greeley: OMOM Essay 7

Why does Greeley look so disheveled? In "About the Sculpture," I compare Ward's Greeley at City Hall to Doyle's Greeley at Herald Square, and argue that the rumpled look makes the Ward sculpture a better likeness of Greeley. (Objective esthetic evaluation is a topic that's covered in more detail in Essay 16 of Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan, on Lincoln.)

"About the Subject" includes an paragraph by Greeley (1811-1872) explaining his novel concept for what is covered in his New York Tribune. While Greeley had flaws, quirks, and self-contradictions, I have to admire him for the quote in the Sidebar, in which (at age 31) he asserts his right to disagree with an older and more experienced business partner: "I have given you and I have been ever ready to give you any service in my power, but my understanding, my judgment, my consciousness of conviction, of duty and public good - them I can surrender to no man. You wrong yourself in asking." (That's about a quarter of the Sidebar.)
On the Forgotten Delights site you can read Greeley's description of New York ca. 1831, and a list of some of the political causes he promoted and condemned.

Below: detail of the Doyle's Greeley

George Washington: OMOM Essay 6

Several sculptures in Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan have elements that recall Ancient Greece and Rome. In the Washington at Nassau and Wall Streets it's the fasces, that bundle of rods behind Washington. (And yes, I think the choice not to include the traditional axe for cutting off malefactors' heads was the right one.) "About the Sculpture" discusses the effect of such elements and the popularity of the Neoclassical style in the late 18th and 19th centuries.

Historians such as Joseph Ellis and David McCullough don't just tell what happened - they involve their readers by showing the options available in a given period and why people chose one over the other. In "About the Subject" I try to use that approach to present Washington's 1789 inauguration as his contemporaries might have perceived it. The Sidebar is W. Irving's vivid description of the difficulties facing Washington as he took office for the first time.

For a photo of the whole sculpture from the front, see the essay on Washington on the Forgotten Delights site, which also includes substantial excerpts from Washington Irving's biography of George Washington.