Arts and Letters

Robert Underwood Johnson was perhaps the most enthusiastic among those who first raised and maintained the idea of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. That group, now disappearing (of which the writer is not one), we must believe will always be honorably associated with the creation of this splendid undertaking which has enlisted the interest and service of so many of the best minds of this nation and which will continue to claim the devotion of many others to come.

In this short statement it seems best to mark chiefly his relation to the Academy which he so deeply loved and leave the scrutiny of some phases of his full and rich life-work to others. All who write of him must credit to him the lifelong endeavor to express and enhance beauty and to bring its influence to bear upon the lives of his fellows, an endeavor which has lifted some men to supreme creation and others to unbounded usefulness. His efforts so often directed to cultural matters of intangible value had none the less a true and practical effect as most material grandeur has its origin in the unrealized and unrequited endeavors of the idealist.

While it is true that men, with a boundless impudence and unfathomable vanity, rediscover as their own the simple truths of living, it may be said of Johnson that he came into life fully armed with a Miltonian concept of the truth and wore away barriers by faithfulness to that concept that others storm and lose. There can be no finer thing said of a man when the great bookkeeper has struck his balance than that his life work has brought a light to flood the shadowed byways of living. Hope never left his heart. Steadily, patiently, uncomplainingly he worked and wrote and spoke for those things which to his mind were freighted with import for those about him. Such hope is surely the cloud from which the lightnings of achievement blaze. It is out of the hoping hearts of the world that the healing waters of Horeb softly well.

Johnson paid long and reasoned tribute to the arts and out of that unbroken constancy has risen some added respect, even at a time when respect has grown sick and old and drawn a cloak about her shivering form. So, aside from all his other work as editor, poet, ambassador, we must pay high tribute to his great labors on behalf of the Academy. To him the Academy is indeed greatly in debt.

At a time when we are being told that the arts of the ages are shams it is well to consider that if this be true we who inherit their traditions have a very poor family history. We might just as well say that the average human muscles are failures because of their antiquity and that we must create others at once. Johnson did not believe in all these new voices. He used the old yardstick in judgment, the standard of the endless years, and we may perhaps make as faithful calculations with one measure as with another.

There are those who do not, or say they do not, approve of Academies. The great human movement toward association gives the lie to such beliefs or assertions. Men and women of creative minds do and always will associate for the interplay of the creative spirit; for that sympathy and understanding which can be had only from brothers in the field, and for that recognition which the general public may fail to render. Prophets who speak only from the isolation of deserts are soon surrounded by a curious hierarchy of unrealities—their own privately created academies of the soul. Exclusive academies indeed are these, for what can be more exclusive than that which does not exist! Nor do the great heroes of the word arise as pallid desert flowers. Shakespeare, Goethe, Molière, Cervantes, and Dante worked with men. Isolation spews forth its devotees in a fierce awakened desire for association, for the great deeds of a Mahomet or a Saint Ignatius.

For many there is need of Tradition, of memories, of tribute and reward; of the gathering about an ideal; of the lighting of ever-burning fires; of raising imperishable monuments and tablets to Art, and those who express it. To Johnson this was the predisposition of a lifetime. We recall his work for the Keats and Shelley Memorial, his defense of the Yosemite, and other examples. He was a great amateur of respect, a singer of tributes, an apostle of friendships. And so when the Academy came into being it was largely this man's influence which fanned the first feeble spark, and kept alive a waning interest and which at last brought renewed enthusiasm to bear upon the plan and gained for an institution the dignity of a temple.

To those who find their hearts leaning to the cold-eyed goddess of criticism, the life of Johnson offers many opportunities to indulge the fancies of that highbrowed sister of Hate. He was simple, "impractical," as many who feel that if a thing should be done it can be done, and filled with the endless enthusiasms which small minds condemn—and fear.

It is the fashion these days to credit no man with an unalloyed seeking after truth. So unbelief in goodness or the qualities of the heart and spirit create in many the urge to meet bad opinion half way—to live up to anticipated condemnation. Johnson was not one of these. So as I speak of him I do so with raised voice regardless of those who pick at the threads of a fabric and criticize their hue without comprehension of the beauty of the textile—or its warmth.

Johnson had little of wealth but a wealth of kindness, little power but the power of generosity, and a love for art as he understood art—which is all that any of us have. At a time when some of us feel that much of the fineness of life is being touched by coarseness, when many of the jewels we thought bright seem to lack lustre, he never doubted that allegiance to his ideal was more essential than the analyzing scepticism which picks all ideals to pieces and leaves no spiritual clothing for the coldness of the heart.

In the days when the Academy was a feeble flame in a great darkness he saw it as a blazing light, so that when it came into its own he was not overtaken by surprise or rendered vain by the blinding glare of achievement unforeseen.

The artist truly flies between heaven and earth. Homage rises to him from below—and if he strive to fly too high he may move in the sunlight of derision—a flame to melt his wings away—and give a new name to one more Icarian sea.

Johnson was not one of those who make poetry the Jazz of a pilfered philosophy. His god was sincerity, and sincerity, even half sincerity, casts certain informing high lights. But he was above that falseness which descends to the ringing of little gilded leaden bells for morons.

When we consider the things to which he contributed so earnestly and what they now stand for, we may well be thrilled by the thought that through a long life he did things which bear the stamp of nobility! Let us be thankful for this worker. Men die variously; in a chorus of contempt; in the music of battle, in a vanishing regret. They are buried in their achievement be it good or bad. More than all the others Johnson's spirit lingers in the Academy. Like all of us he will die doubly in the deaths of those who knew him and loved him, and perhaps his name may be for long put aside in a time of fever and semi-insanity—but not be lost, for he gave his life for things which alone will uplift his memory. In a few years all those who knew him will have passed away; there will be no one to say "He bored me with his never-ending enthusiasm for the Academy." But younger men will say "This Academy—how was it brought about? Whose was the devotion which nursed it through long years of discredit?" And then from the dusty pages of old minute books, from files and letters, from memoirs and clippings, from newspapers and magazines there will arise proofs of a devoted life and the name of Robert Underwood Johnson.