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2.

The primitives can be left out of this. They are safe as they are an intuitive crystalisation of what one wants to prove about self-conscious art. Primitive art is immediately national & it can no more be considered with self-conscious art than the apt observation of a child can be pitched against adult reasoning although the final essence may be the same. I say this truism to show I am not slighting the primitives, nor do I want to hint that they are the only pure american painting. 

Nationalism will always get a rise just as we always stand for the anthem & as with the anthem, not very many know the words. Even in the colonial days when there was comparatively little mind for art & it was almost compulsory for an artist to study abroad there were ardent advocates for american expression. The newspapers & townsmen declared a lively interest if someone turned out a vigorous, albeit clumsy, work that has a homely character, but there was little done then except the fashionable portraits & the fashionable always demand something more worldy than local. There is scout reason why they should not & in the work that was done for them we have the to content ourselves, for american spirit, in a certain vigor, a frequent rigidity & a lack of imagination, imagination having been waylaid by a charming earnestness. This is particularly true of Samuel F.B. Morse who reached a zenith of doggedness & in him er have one of the clearest statements of the intrinsic american. 

Morse went Benjamin West but he came back bitterly disappointed with the realisation ground into him that allegory & classicism did not fit his country in spite of the education & cultural leanings that way. At least they did not fit done on a large scale by one whose every instinct denied his ambition. And Morse turned, naturally though financial necessity, to portraits where he brought the frankly searching quality, the conspicuous attempt to delve the subject, that is a hallmark of americanism. This self-conscious honesty which seldom allows grace in its ardor is certainly one of the truest american characteristics. Honest grace, if you believe there is such, had a hard fight & never fared better than captive.