This may seem a bit odd, but, by now, regular readers should be used to my discoveries of Confucian sensibilities in all sorts of places…

     The other night I was reading some shorter pieces in the April 16th edition of The New Yorker and came upon a review, by Claudia Roth Pierpont, of a book: The Worlds of Linclon Kirstein by Martin Duberman.  Kirstein was an impresario who, among other things, was a driving force behind the creation and institutionalization of the New York City Ballet.  He was instrumental in bringing George Balanchine to the US, with all of the cultural implications that followed from that. 

     The review was great, conjuring up a sense of the artistic dynamism of New York in the post-war era.  Kirstein, it seems, was a driven and complex man: frustrated, to some degree, at his lack of personal artistic accomplishment, yet celebrated for his support and facilitation of the extraordinary artistic achievements of others.  He was gay but, in certain ways, culturally conservative, interested in fostering a new American dance expression from the foundations of the great Russian ballet tradition.  And then I came upon this passage:

“It is not enough to be able to see, to have personal vision, an
original eye, and the ambition to be an artist,” Kirstein wrote in
1948, not about himself—although it might have been—but about the
general state of modern art. The all-important missing element was
technique: “digital mastery,” as he later put it, for which ability he
championed a range of contemporary artists from Pavel Tchelitchev to
Paul Cadmus. But for all the awe this anxious and awkward man expressed
before any sort of technical virtuosity, he did not regard technique as
an end in itself. It was, rather, the necessary start of an internal
chain reaction: technical precision implied a respect for tradition,
which in turn presumed a reverence for the masters who had come before,
which defeated the common tendency toward romantic narcissism (the ruin
of so much modern art and dance) and opened one’s eyes to the world and
to the God-given nature of genius—which, in culmination, made the truly
great artist a truly moral human being.

    That "chain reaction" – moving from technique (dare we say Ritual), to respect for the past as a counter to "romantic narcissism," to a sense of moral righteousness – is stunningly Confucian.  It is precisely what the Venerable Sage has in mind when he urges us toward education as a means to moral improvement: we must master the tasks of our daily life (and this has a certain ritual technique, or technical ritual, about it), venerate great individuals from the past in order to purge ourselves of narrow selfishness and cultivate a deeper Humanity.  I imagine Kirstein would embrace certain passages from the Analects:

The Master said: "Devote yourself to the Way, depend on Integrity, rely on Humanity, and wander in the arts." (7.6)

     The quote above links aesthetic pursuits to morality, which is what Kirstein was ultimately about (though he might have taken some exception to the word "wander," which might not capture the seriousness of the artistic enterprise).

     And this passage might summarize the optimism of moral eduction through art:

The Master said: "The noble-minded encourage what is beautiful in people and discourage what is ugly in them.  Little  people do just the opposite. (12.16)

      My sense of Kirstein is that he was reaching for this sort of noble-mindedness, though his questionable treatment of his wife, Fidelma, undercut his moral force:

…Duberman credits Fidelma with an “aristocratic obliviousness toward
mainstream standards of behavior”—true enough; she lived with a kind of
serene affection within her brother’s and her husband’s gay circles—but
he also notes that “now and then the problem of ‘the boys’ would prove
difficult” for her. Unfortunately, “now and then” seems to have
included every occasion that forced her to confront her husband’s
sexual and emotional infidelities, occasions that Kirstein amply
provided—whether out of resentment, carelessness, or cruelty—for many
years.

      Perhaps we can pity the man who could not, given the tenor of his times, be fully honest and out with his gayness.  But that does not excuse deployment of "resentment, carelessness, or cruelty."  Commitments to those closet to us, even the wife of a gay man in the fifties and sixties, matter to Confucians.

      Kirstein, then, was a Confucian-manque (aren’t we all?).  Performing a commendable moral duty in public, but failing in his private obligations to his wife.