January 2011

Every so often the world of American folk art museums and collectors discovers a new star to add to its firmament—a primitive painter, a rustic sculptor. This happened in 1967 when a Manhattan gallery held an exhibition of thirty-seven astonishing wood carvings by a carpenter named John Scholl. Born in W’fcrttemberg in 1827, Scholl emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1853 and lived there until his death in 1916. But despite his unquestioned talent as a folk artist, his work was known only locally until his recent discovery.

One of the vainest of modern beliefs may be the assumption that it is civilization that makes life complicated. We like to dream that primitive man found existence very simple. He was at the mercy neither of his possessions, which were few, nor of his political and economic arrangements, which were extremely sketchy; all he had to do, apparently, was to solve the basic problems of survival—find shelter and food and some sort of security for life and limb—and he was home free. Life may have been hard, but it needed only to be lived, and while he was living it, primitive man did not need to think about it much.

As any ethnologist could testify, that is not quite the way it was. The simple savage did not have our worries, but he had plenty of his own, and a major concern of his life was the attempt to adjust himself to a universe that seemed just as complicated to him as ours does to us. For an illustration, read Two Leggings: The Making of a Crow Warrior , by Peter Nabokov.

A mysterious phenomenon, to which professional critics are usually oblivious, reoccurs often in the literary history of the United States. A man or a woman with no special talent for poetry will put together some apparently run-of-the-mill stanzas and manage to get them printed in a newspaper or magazine. The poem is read and talked about. It is reprinted here and there. People cut it out to carry in a billfold, or pin on a bulletin board, or put under the glass top of a desk, or frame and hang on a wall. Thousands memorize it. Eventually it becomes so well known—inexplicably, and often to the author’s own amazement—that it is hard to find a literate person who has not read it. “Casey at the Bat” is such a poem, and its author, Ernest Lawrence Thayer, is a prize specimen of the one-poem poet. He wrote nothing else of merit. No one imagines that “Casey” is great in the sense that the poetry of Shakespeare or Dante is great; a comic ballad obviously must be judged by different standards. One doesn’t criticize a slice of superb apple pie because it fails to taste like crepes suzette.

“Oh! how I love a people who don’t live for the love of money,” George Catlin once exclaimed. The artist never ceased to marvel at the guileless, trusting simplicity and unselfish generosity of his Indian hosts, who welcomed him without reservation into their homes, entertained him as best they could, and who, he explained, “are honest without laws, who have no jails and no poor-house.”

This was hardly a popular point of view in the expansionist days of Catlin’s America, and he was often accused, not without some validity, of romanticizing the Indian, both in his paintings and in his lucid writings. But at least part of Catlin’s nostalgia sprang from his prophetic knowledge that the American Indian as he knew him could not survive in the white man’s culture. Catlin wrote in 1835: