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Title: The roving critic
Author: Carl Van Doren
Release date: March 4, 2025 [eBook #75524]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923
Credits: Bob Taylor, Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ROVING CRITIC ***
Transcriber’s Note
Italic text displayed as: _italic_
THE ROVING
CRITIC
_SOME BORZOI BOOKS_
FINDERS _by John V. A. Weaver_
POEMS _by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt_
INTO THE DARK _by Barbra Ring_
GOLDEN BIRD _by James Oppenheim_
LITERARY LIGHTS _by Gene Markey_
YOUR HIDDEN POWERS _by James Oppenheim_
FOX FOOTPRINTS _by Elizabeth J. Coatsworth_
THE STORY OF THE MIKADO _by W. S. Gilbert_
A LINE O’ GOWF OR TWO _by Bert Leston Taylor_
THE WORLD IN FALSEFACE _by George Jean Nathan_
THE ROVING
CRITIC
CARL VAN DOREN
[Illustration: Decoration]
NEW YORK
ALFRED · A · KNOPF
1923
COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
_Published, March, 1923_
_Set up and printed by the Vail-Ballou Co., Binghamton, N. Y.
Paper furnished by W. F. Etherington & Co., New York.
Bound by H. Wolff Estate, New York._
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO
GUY, FRANK, MARK, PAUL
_These essays, sketches, and reviews are reprinted, with the courteous
permission of the various publishers, from_ The Atlantic Monthly, The
Literary Review, The Nation, _and_ The Texas Review.
CONTENTS
I. TOWARD A CREED
A FOURTH DIMENSION IN CRITICISM 15
THE REVENGE OF THE BARDS 21
CREATIVE READING 27
II. THREE OF OUR CONQUERORS
THE POETICAL CULT OF LINCOLN 35
WHITMAN IN HIS CRISES 40
THE LION AND THE UNIFORM 45
III. TWO NOTES ON YOUTH
THE RELEASE OF YOUTH 59
YOUTH IS ALWAYS RIGHT 63
IV. HOWELLS: MAY 1920
EULOGIUM 69
V. NOOKS AND FRINGES
ON HATING THE PROVINCES 83
WHAT THE FATHERS READ 87
THE KIND MOTHER OF US ALL 92
MOCHA DICK 97
FOLK-LORE IN KENTUCKY 100
PAUL BUNYAN GOES WEST 105
THE WORST AMERICAN BOOK 108
AT THE SATURDAY CLUB 114
THE SILVER AGE OF OUR LITERATURE 121
JOHN BURROUGHS 125
BROAD HOUSE AND NARROW HOUSE 128
GOOD NAMES 133
PICTURES OF THE PAST 142
THE GREAT LABORATORY 146
VI. LONG ROADS
THE COSMIC IRONIES 153
JUSTICE OR MELODRAMA 158
THE CORRUPTION OF COMFORT 162
“GOD IS NOT DEAD OF OLD AGE” 167
VII. SHORT CUTS
PETIT UP TO THIRTY 175
IN LIEU OF THE LAUREATE 180
“MURDERING BEAUTY” 183
CHAIRS 186
INISHMORE, INISHMAAN, INISHEER 189
SWEETNESS OR LIGHT 192
CROWNING THE BISHOP 195
VIII. A CASUAL SHELF
HONESTY IS A GIFT 199
GOLDEN LYRICS 202
THE CHRISTIAN DIPLOMAT 205
LAWYER AND ELEGIST 207
WOMEN IN LOVE 209
MOSES IN MASSACHUSETTS 212
BROWN GIRLS 215
INVENTION AND VERACITY 217
A HERO WITH HIS POSSE 219
MARIA AND BATOUALA 221
STUPID SCANDAL 224
THE MUSE OF KNICKERBOCKER 228
IX. POETS’ CORNER
GREEK DIGNITY AND YANKEE EASE 231
THROUGH ELLIS ISLAND 238
TAP-ROOT OR MELTING-POT 244
X. IN THE OPEN
AUGUST NIGHTS AND AUGUST DAYS 251
LAKE AND BIRD 256
FIREFLIES IN CORNWALL 258
GARDENS 260
THE ROVING
CRITIC
I. TOWARD A CREED
A FOURTH DIMENSION IN CRITICISM
Criticism ordinarily asks about literature one of three questions: “Is
it good?” “Is it true?” “Is it beautiful?” Each of these questions, of
course, permits the widest range in the critic. He may be so simple
as to think a given work is not good when it fails to emphasize some
truism or when it violates the sort of poetic justice which children in
the nursery are mistaught to expect; he may be so complex as to demand
from literature the subtlest casuistries concerning moral problems;
he may be so perverse as to wince at the first symptom of any plain
contrast between good and evil. If it be the true which exercises him,
he may sink so low as to be worried over this or that surface error in
his author—such as an anachronism or a blunder in botany or mechanics;
he may rise so high as to discuss on an equal plane with a great
authority the difficult questions what the nature of truth may be or
whether there is after all any such thing as truth. Or, holding beauty
uppermost in his mind, he may at the one extreme peck at a masterpiece
because it departs from some traditional form or at the other extreme
may view it under the light of an eternity of beauty and feel satisfied
if he can perceive and identify the masterpiece’s peculiar reflection.
Yet wide as these ranges are, they can all be reduced to the three
questions and they mark what may be called the three dimensions of
criticism.
There is, however, a fourth dimension—to continue the analogy—which
comes into the account when a critic asks about literature: “Is it
alive?” In a sense this query includes all the others and in a sense
it transcends them. Odysseus is not good: he is adulterous and crafty;
Faust is not good: he sells his soul for the sake of forbidden power;
Gargantua is not good: he buffets and tumbles the decencies in all
directions; Henry V is not good: he wastes his youth and wages unjust
war; Huckleberry Finn is not good: he is a thief and a liar. The
heroes, the demigods, the gods themselves occasionally step aside from
the paths into which men counsel one another; there are at least as
many great stories about gorgeous courtesans as about faithful wives.
It is not the “goodness” of all such literature but the vividness that
gives it its perennial impact. Better a lively rogue than a deadly
saint.
To a different extent the same thing appears when truthfulness is
concerned. There is a vitality which lies back both of naturalism and
of romance and which communicates itself through books as dissimilar,
say, as _Madame Bovary_ and _The Faerie Queene_—one of them the most
fastidious document and one of them the most spacious dream. The gods
of Homer are not real; the history of Virgil will not bear scrutiny;
Dante wanders in a maze of superstitions; Shakespeare lets his plots
take him almost where they like; the machinery of a folk-tale is good
enough for Goethe, as it was for the author of the Book of Job. How
many cosmogonies, Bernard Shaw points out, have gone to the dust heap
in spite of an accuracy superior to that which keeps Genesis alive
through cynical centuries! The looser Molière is in the long run no
less convincing than the tighter Ibsen. Swift and Voltaire and Lucian,
twitting their worlds for their follies, dare every extravagance of
invention without serious penalty. Ariosto with his whimsical paladins
and Scott with his stately aristocrats and Dickens with his hearty
democratic caricatures and Dostoevsky with his tortured souls—to find
a common denominator of truth among them is so hard that the critics
who attempt it are likely to end in partisanship for this or that one
and to assign the others to a station outside the approved class. Yet
an author may be killed a dozen times with the charge of untruthfulness
and still live.
And concerning beauty the disagreement of the doctors is unending
and unendable. Whitman is now called beautiful and now called ugly;
so are Browning, and Hugo, and Tolstoi, and Nietzsche, and Lope de
Vega, and Leopardi, and Catullus, and Aristophanes. Moreover, by any
aesthetic standard which the judgment can arrive at, any one of these
authors is sometimes beautiful and sometimes not. Nor does it finally
matter, as it did not finally matter that Socrates had a thick body
and a pug-face. The case of Socrates illustrates the whole argument.
Was he good? There was so great a difference on this point among
the critics of his time that the majority of them, translating their
conclusion into action, put him to death as dangerous to the state. Was
what he taught the truth? It is of course not easy to disentangle the
actual Socrates from the more or less polemic versions of him which
Xenophon and Plato furnish, but it seems clear that he had his share of
unscientific notions and individual prejudices and mistaken doctrines.
Was he beautiful? He confused Greek orthodoxy by being so uncomely and
yet so great. But whatever his shortcomings in these regards, no one
ever doubted that he was alive—alive in body and mind and character,
alive in war and peace and friendship and controversy, alive in bed or
at table. Life was concentrated in him; life spoke out of him.
So with literature, which collects, transmutes, and utters life. It
may represent the good, may speak the truth, may use the modes of
beauty—any one or all of these things. Call the good the bow which
lends the power; call the truth the string which fixes the direction;
call the beautiful the arrow which wings and stings. But there is still
the arm in which the true life of the process lies. Or, to change the
figure, one of those gods who in the mythologies model men out of
clay may have good clay and a true purpose and may shape his figure
beautifully; but there is still the indispensable task of breathing the
breath of life into it before it will wake and go its own course and
continue its breed to other generations. Life is obviously what makes
the difference between human sculpture and divine creation; it is the
same element which makes the difference between good literature and
dead literature.
The critic who is aware of this fourth dimension of the art he
studies saves himself the effort which critics less aware contrive to
squander in trying to explain their art in terms merely of the three
dimensions. He knows that life began before there were such things
as good and evil; that it surges through both of them; that it will
probably outlast any particular conception of either one or the other:
he knows that it is not the moral of so naïve a tale as _Uncle Tom’s
Cabin_ which makes it moving but the life which was breathed into it
by fiery passion. He knows that the amount of truth in poetry need not
always be great and often indeed is much exaggerated; that a ruthless
hand can find heaps of theological slag in Milton and corners full of
metaphysical cobwebs in Plato and glittering excrescences of platitude
in Shakespeare: he knows that these poets now live most in those parts
of their work in the creating of which they were most alive. He knows
that a powerful imagination may beget life even upon ugliness: he knows
it because he has felt the vibrations of reality in Browning’s cranky
grotesques and in Whitman’s long-drawn categories and in Rabelais’s
great dung-cart piled high with every variety of insolence and wisdom.
Not goodness alone nor truth alone nor beauty alone nor all of them in
one of their rare fusions can be said to make great literature, though
these are the tools of that hard trade. Great literature may be known
by the sign that it communicates the sense of the vividness of life.
And it communicates it because its creators were alive with it at the
moment of creation.
There are many kinds of literature because there are many kinds of
life. Pope felt one kind and Wordsworth another and Poe another—and
so on and on. There are no universal poets, not even Homer and
Shakespeare. Nor, of course, are there any universal critics, not even
Lessing and Sainte-Beuve. Neither creator nor critic can make himself
universal by barely taking thought about it; he _is_ what he _lives_.
The measure of the creator is the amount of life he puts into his work.
The measure of the critic is the amount of life he finds there.
THE REVENGE OF THE BARDS
“The natural desire of every man,” says Peacock in _The Four Ages of
Poetry_, “to engross to himself as much power and property as he can
acquire by any of the means which might makes right, is accompanied
by the no less natural desire of making known to as many people as
possible the extent to which he has been a winner in this universal
game. The successful warrior becomes a chief; the successful chief
becomes a king; his next want is an organ to disseminate the fame of
his achievements and the extent of his possessions; and this organ he
finds in a bard, who is always ready to celebrate the strength of his
arm, being duly inspired by that of his liquor. This is the origin of
poetry.... The first rude songs of all nations ... tell us how many
battles such an one has fought, how many helmets he has cleft, how many
breastplates he has pierced, how many widows he has made, how much
land he has appropriated, how many houses he has demolished for other
people, what a large one he has built for himself, how much gold he has
stowed away in it, and how liberally and plentifully he pays, feeds,
and intoxicates the divine and immortal bards, the sons of Jupiter,
but for whose everlasting songs the names of heroes would perish.”
The bards meanwhile, according to Peacock, do not neglect their own
status. “They are observing and thinking, while others are robbing and
fighting: and though their object be nothing more than to secure a
share of the spoil, yet they accomplish this end by intellectual, not
by physical, power: their success excites emulation to the attainment
of intellectual eminence: thus they sharpen their own wits and awaken
those of others.... Their familiarity with the secret history of gods
and genii obtains for them, without much difficulty, the reputation of
inspiration ... being indeed often themselves (as Orpheus and Amphion)
regarded as portions and emanations of divinity: building cities with a
song, and leading brutes with a symphony; which are only metaphors for
the faculty of leading multitudes by the nose.”
This is the revenge of the bards: from singing of godlike men they come
to feel themselves godlike; and in time they persuade a respectable
portion of the community to take them at their own value. Now it is
their turn to share—almost to usurp—the glory of the kings and warriors
their former patrons. Homer takes as high a rank as Agamemnon and
Achilles and Ulysses, who are remembered because Homer admitted them
to his narrative. The bard establishes the canon of the memorable. May
there not have been other men as wise as Moses or as patient as Job
or as strong as Samson? There may have been, but as they lacked bards
they dropped out of the race for perennial honor. That race, at least,
is not for the swift alone. Socrates had a better bard than Pericles;
he had Plato. Caesar had a better bard than Pompey: he had himself.
If there were more Caesars, history might be different; certainly
historiography would be. As it is, accident and art play an enormous
part in fixing human fame.
The process continues to the present day, for the biographer who has
succeeded to the bard has the bard’s habits in no very different
degree. But he is no longer quite so dependent as his ancestor, no
longer quite so official. Like will to like in biography as elsewhere.
So long as the craft of making reputations is left to the guild of
letters, so long will the guild impress it with its special prejudices.
It will choose to write about those great men whose careers best
conform to some classic type or fit some dramatic mode or flatter some
literary sentiment. A great man who has been a conspicuous patron of
the arts has ten times the chances at posterity that a mere man of
power or money has; but so has a great man who has been eloquent or who
has borne himself like Cato or who has had a fate in some way or other
resembling Napoleon’s.
Not only does the literary guild choose men of action on literary
grounds to write about: it chooses disproportionately to write about
its members. There are as many lives of thinkers and artists as of
generals and monarchs. Philostratus wrote about the sophists and
Eunapius and Diogenes Laertius about the philosophers and Suetonius
about the grammarians; in the Middle Ages monks wrote particularly
about monks who succeeded in their business and turned saints; Vasari
in the Renaissance said less about even the princes who encouraged
painters than about the painters themselves; Boswell chose not Burke
nor Chatham but Johnson to stand as the centre of his society; Goethe’s
Duke survives primarily in the various lives of Goethe; how many
passionate, beautiful books there are about Poe and Keats and Byron and
Heine and Hugo and Pushkin and Leopardi!
The situation has consequences. Though the king who can command a poet
or the politician who can catch a biographer will always have one,
few other persons outside the poet’s or the biographer’s own caste
boast any such intercessors with the future. The most mighty man of
business perishes from the public memory almost as speedily as the most
petty trader. The artisan who has invented no matter how comfortable
devices and the athlete who has been no matter how much on the tongues
of men leave but short wakes of fame behind them. Now this may hint
that those who do not survive actually merit oblivion, but it does
not prove it. Rather, it proves that peoples have the best memories
with regard to those men and women about whom there are voices to go
on speaking. In any given generation rumour widens out in various
ways: its heroes are pugilists and saints and misers and entertainers
and generals and statesmen and orators and preachers and lovers and
murderers and philanthropists and scholars and poets and humorists
and musicians and detectives—all mingled in one vast confusion. But
with posterity selection intervenes. A hundred fames grow dim because
no one has a special reason for perpetuating them; word of mouth in
general is not enough. Even particular professions in time forget those
who once practised them eminently. Only of the men of letters—bards
and biographers—is it the trade as well as the delight to keep old
reputations burning. And it is only certain things that they remember:
blood and glory and learning. Paul Revere gave a lifetime to a noble
craft and a few hours all told to a midnight ride which any man might
have made who was able to sit a horse and follow a dark road. Who now
hears of Revere’s craft? He is merely a demigod and Longfellow is his
prophet; the two of them symbolize the past, as most men see it, and
the way of the bards with the past.
For it is clear, upon reflection, that just as the current world comes
to the perceptions of mankind through the interpretations of artists
or demagogues or prophets, so the past comes to them through the
interpretations of its chroniclers. There lies the past, enormous and
unformed; here are the men of pen and book who make the lenses through
which it is perceived, who fix the frame of the picture, who choose
what shall be looked at and what not. They are artists and the past is
their material. Let a given chronicler be as honest as he can or will
be; he is still a member of a limited class of men and he is interested
in a limited range of life. Let all the chroniclers be honest, and they
are still chroniclers: they will set down what interests their caste.
They will shape their material in epic or dramatic form; they will find
arguments for their favourite convictions; they will cherish or neglect
in accordance with their dispositions. Sophisticate and complicate the
matter as they will, they tend in all ages and the latest age to do
what they did at first. They see the rulers of men sitting on their
proper thrones and they sing in verse or say in prose how those rulers
came there; they remember themselves and they pay natural honour to
their fellows of the guild. In a sense, the plain man cannot feel that
he has a past. He looks into histories and sees very little of the
world he knows. That older world is much too full of kings and bards
for him to feel at home.
CREATIVE READING
As surely as there is such a thing as creative writing there is such
a thing as creative reading. That it is not very common appears from
the universal demand for fiction, in which the creative process has
already been applied to the material in hand, so that the reader is
called upon to contribute very little himself. Indeed, if the writer
of fiction is strong enough he can carry his more compliant readers to
almost any distance from the world of their experience and can persuade
them to accept as its equal or as its superior some merely invented
region. To go so far with a romancer is not, as is often thought, a
necessary sign that the reader is imaginative: he may be only limp or
uncritical, unable to hold his own in the presence of a more powerful
fancy. Children are regularly beguiled in this fashion, as are the
credulous of all ages by travellers and politicians and priests who
have a romantic turn of mind. The creative reader, however, begins to
build the minute he begins to read. In varying degrees, of course, he
leans upon his writer, but he takes profit from his book in proportion
to the amount of creative energy he puts into it. Perhaps the simplest
illustration of this is to be noted in the fact that one reads a book
with different results at different times. A reader, for instance,
who has never been in love cannot find in a play or poem, a novel or
biography portraying the effects of love, more than a fraction of what
he would find there if he had genuinely known the passion. Another who
has thought the history of some foreign country dull may discover that
it is fascinating after he has visited that country. And still another
may suddenly perceive a large pertinence in ideas or speculations which
heretofore have left him cold: he has in his own person caught up with
them, and now greets them heartily for the first time though they have
been there in the book all the time.
The notion that unhappy men and women employ reading as an anodyne is
not quite accurate. With them reading furnishes more than a substitute
for thought; it furnishes them the occasion to set going in their minds
a dance of images, a sequence of ideas, a march of memories which run
parallel to the matter of the book, and to which the book, indeed, may
be but the exciting cause. Neither is it quite accurate to say that
inveterate readers, happy or unhappy, lead their lives within the pages
of this volume or that for want of the more robust outlet which action
affords those who do not care to read, or at least to read so much.
Rather, such readers may be full of creative impulses which they prefer
to exercise in a purer and more plastic universe than they have found
elsewhere. There happens to be no standard by which to measure the
relative value of the forces which are released by action and of those
which are released by contemplation. If the man of action is associated
in his career with other active persons, why may not the man of
contemplation be equally associated in his with others whose society he
enjoys through the medium of printed words? As there are men of action
who drive blindly forward, without thought, to some goal which they
hardly see though their instincts urge them in that general direction,
so there are men of contemplation who drift with the tide of some—or
any—poet or historian or philosopher without critical resistance;
but the creative reader challenges, disputes, denies, fights his
way through his book, and he emerges to some extent always another
person. He has been a creator while he seemed to be merely passive and
recipient.
To take another easy illustration, a scholar engaged in actual research
may wade through rivers and climb mountains of books while in the
pursuit of proofs for his thesis, and may yet at every step be full of
creative fire, throwing aside what he does not need and choosing what
he does as emphatically as if he were a soldier on the most difficult
campaign. The researcher is but a common type of creative reader, his
process and his aim being more readily comprehensible than those of the
other types but not essentially unlike them. All creative readers have
at any given moment some conscious or unconscious thesis which they are
seeking to prove, some conscious or unconscious picture they desire to
complete, some conscious or unconscious point they mean to reach if
they can. By it they are sustained through what would be unendurable
labour to another, or even to them at an earlier or a later day. It
gives them resoluteness, it gives them form. More potent than has been
ordinarily recognized, it belongs with that faculty whereby the mind
arranges its impressions in some sort of order and comes to some kind
of conclusion without always consulting the will or even inviting the
consciousness to be aware of what is going on.
The token by which the creative reader can best be known is his lack
of the pedantic expectation with which many readers of considerable
taste begin to read. For instance, there was that professorial critic,
for whom no pillory can be too high or naked or windy, who declared
he could not approve of _The Playboy of the Western World_ because it
was neither tragedy nor comedy nor tragi-comedy. He did not create
as he read; he could not even follow a free representation of human
life; he was tied brain and mood to a prejudice which shut him in from
any liberation by novel wit or beauty. Like many better men, he was a
victim of an obsession for the classics into which creative readers
never allow themselves to fall. They may have formed their literary
principles upon the strictest canon and they may be richly responsive
to the great traditions of style and structure; but they have not been
made timid by their training and they know that the heartiest reader,
like the heartiest spectator of human affairs, must occasionally have
his fling outside narrow circles or must begin to stifle. It is as
snobbish to feel at home only among the “best” books as to feel at home
only among the “best” people. After all, the best books have been made
up out of diverse elements, transmuted by some creative spirit from
the raw materials which lay around. The reader who in some degree can
share that spirit’s vision can share also its delight in the same sort
of original stuff. Imagine, for example, the state of mind of a person
who can argue that it is a weakness, if not a literary impropriety, to
prefer Goethe’s conversations with Eckermann at times to _Faust_.
There are very proper moods which the noblest work of art cannot
satisfy as well as some casual memoir, some quaint history or book of
travel, some halting speculation, some mere array of facts. Who has
not preferred the nasturtiums or turnips of his own garden to more
sumptuous flowers or vegetables from the open market? The pleasant
odours of many mornings and the colour of many fine sunsets cling
about the blossoms which he has tended; the plain roots from his soil
have in them the savour of honest sweat and the contour of agreeable
hopes. So the creative reader likes frequently to shape his own designs
and make his own conclusions out of raw materials which no other
hand—however better he may know it is—has worked with. In fact, it is
now and then hard for a reader in the full strength of some creative
impulse to keep himself as aware of the positive aesthetic merit of
what he is reading as perhaps he should. If the matter of life is there
in large abundance he may overlook the lack of form and proportion
and interpretation because he is himself able to supply them. It is
for this reason that generous spirits like Sir Walter Scott, and even
more rigid critics, seem often to have gone too far in their praise
of this or that book which has not survived or pleased as much as
they expected; they were misled by finding in the book an element
of creation which they had contributed but which colder readers do
not find there. If criticism, professional or amateur, were an exact
science, practised in a vacuum, the creative reader by his vagaries
might deserve the accusation of being a sort of astrologer among the
scientists; but it is not, and so his more creative vagaries must be
classed less with the winds of bad doctrine than with the breath of
life.
II. THREE OF OUR CONQUERORS
THE POETICAL CULT OF LINCOLN
When Secretary Stanton at the bedside of Lincoln declared that the dead
man now belonged to the ages, he had a vision which was probably not
without melodrama, not without the large pomp and plumage which went in
the sixties with the expectation of renown. He must have seen rows of
ample bronze statues in innumerable parks, where togaed or equestrian
Lincolns would look blandly down, mindful of the dignity of history,
upon a reverent people hushed in part by the very weight of the metal
which commemorated the great man. It is after all too much to have
hoped from Stanton that he could foresee how familiar fame would be
with Lincoln, how colloquially it would treat him on the one hand, and
on the other how quickly it would make him out not an iron demigod, or
a wooden hero, but a friendly saint, an immanent presence, a continual
comforter. Richard Henry Stoddard, in his _Horation Ode_ written almost
at the first news, was not even sure that Lincoln was great: he saw in
him a curious epitome of the people, a genius who had risen from them
yet safely stood above their variable antipathies and affections. A
consciousness of class sounds also in Lowell’s more impassioned lines,
though the _Commemoration Ode_ perceives the nation not as divided
within itself into grades and ranks but as united upon a common ground
of simple humanity against the ingenuities and insubstantialities of
feudal caste. It remained for Whitman to disregard all thought of
Lincoln’s modest origins and to utter, without argument or doctrine,
the intimate grief of the great American poet of the age for the great
American leader, the cautious-handed, gentle, plain, just, resolute,
the sweetest, wisest soul, the natural captain who had brought in the
victor ship from her fearful voyage.
No such memorable utterance rendered at the moment, or has rendered
since, proper tribute to the aspects of Lincoln which on the whole
have most touched the daily memories of his fellow-countrymen: his
habit of humour and his habit of pardons. Everywhere in the North,
but particularly on his own frontier, he was, even in 1865, reputed
for his mirth—for his illuminating repartee and his swift, homely,
pertinent apologues. Lincoln stories multiplied, many of them gathered
year by year in tolerant volumes which paid no attention to any canon;
and still others, often too indelicate for type, clustered about his
name through their casual ascription to him by narrators who wanted
the effect of his authority. Our folk-lore is permeated with anecdotes
of this description. And side by side with them go other tales of
a sentimental sort, tales of wives who went begging to him for the
lives of their husbands under military sentence, and of plain, dull,
sad old mothers who pled—never in vain by the popular records—for
sons who had slept on sentry post almost in the face of the enemy. Of
all folk-heroes Lincoln most strikingly unites a reputation for wit
with a reputation for mercy. The American folk has done nothing more
imaginative, and nothing more revealing, than to build up this tender,
merry myth.
In the hands of our newest poets, however, the myth is changing both
outlines and dimensions. Lincoln’s laughter has lost something of its
rusticity since we have ceased to live so close to frontier conditions.
To Edwin Arlington Robinson, who has cut as in steel his conception of
Lincoln the smiling god, the laconic Olympian, that laughter was only
a cryptic mirth with which a sage met the rancour of blind gentlemen,
sullen children who had to be taught what they could not understand
until it should be too late to acknowledge that their master had after
all been right and they pitifully wrong. The homespun mantle which
Lincoln originally wore in the myth has entirely fallen away, as Mr.
Robinson perceives him; and with it have gone both the buffoonery of so
much of the popular tradition and the sentimental humanitarianism. What
survives is the elemental, ancient matter of heroic genius and wisdom.
By this sense of the cosmic elements which shaped his hero Mr. Robinson
stands in the centre of the latest Lincoln cult, a cult which has the
distinction of bringing the most revolutionary and most reactionary
poets together to pay equal honours to the sole American whom they all
agree to honour.
Lowell struck this note tentatively when he spoke of the sweet clay
from the West out of which nature had chosen to fashion the new hero
who should be less a lonely mountain-peak than a broad, genial,
friendly prairie. Edwin Markham more fully analyzed him: the tried
clay of the common road, warmed by the earth, and dashed through
with prophecy and laughter; the colour and tang and odour of primal
substances, with a dozen virtues caught from external nature. This
rhetoric John Gould Fletcher translates into a subtler language in
his massive image of Lincoln as a gaunt, scraggly pine which has its
roots so deep down in the very foundations of human life, in the old
unshakable wisdom and knowledge and goodness and happiness, that wind
and weather cannot hurt it and that a nation of men may safely rest in
its shade.
The image is finely illustrative of a common attitude taken toward
Lincoln during the late war, when men constantly turned to him, more
by far than most people realized, for words which would quiet their
bitter fears and doubts, and for instructions how to act in a time so
nearly parallel to his. He was the symbol and seal of American unity;
he was the American proof that greatness may emerge from the people;
he was the American evidence that supreme nobility may come very close
to normal love and comprehension. Vachel Lindsay, in Lincoln’s own
Springfield, gave true voice to this feeling in the poem which speaks
of Lincoln as so stirred even in death by the horrors which alarmed
the universe that he could not sleep but walked up and down through the
midnight streets, mourning and brooding over the violent dangers as in
the days when he himself bore the burden of a similar, however smaller,
strife. It is precisely thus, in less critical ages, that saints are
said to appear at difficult moments, to quiet the waves or turn the
arrow aside. These more vulgar manifestations Mr. Lindsay naturally did
not use. Lincoln as he walks at midnight is only the desire of living
hearts realized, the apparition for a moment in its bodily vesture of
a spirit too precious ever to have become merely a memory. He lives
as the father of every cult lives, in the echoes of his voice on many
tongues and the vibrations of his presence in many hearts. For poetry
such a cult offers an enormous future as yet only just suspected. Our
poets have a folk-hero who to the common folk-virtues of shrewdness
and kindness adds essential wit and eloquence and loftiness of soul.
Perhaps the disposition just now to purge him of all rankness and to
make him out a saint and mystic may not last for ever, but obviously
it is a step in his poetical history analogous to those steps which
ennobled Charlemagne and Arthur and canonized Joan of Arc.
WHITMAN IN HIS CRISES
Documents increase around the great and mysterious figure of Whitman,
but they add little to his greatness and take away little from his
mystery. The two volumes called _The Gathering of the Forces_ contain
after all only ephemeral material which Whitman wrote for the Brooklyn
_Daily Eagle_ during his editorship in 1846-47 and which, though
important because by him, would be less important if it were by any
one else. And it might have been by almost any one else. Generally
sensible, occasionally rather noble, now and then eloquent, often
symptomatic of the prophet who was to come, these editorials and essays
and book reviews are most of the time perfunctory and commonplace. Here
Whitman loses himself in trivial political rows, echoes conventional
opinions, scrambles up to a few peaks of originality with obvious
effort. The demands of his occupation perhaps account for this; and yet
at that very period he was beginning to undergo the spiritual upheaval
which seems to have taken place in him during 1847-48 and out of which
he emerged with his loins girded for the mighty race. Something of the
nature of that upheaval appears in the manuscript notebooks lately
published for the first time in _The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of
Walt Whitman_. What Whitman wrote for the _Daily Eagle_ came, one may
say, from the top of his head; in his notebooks he set down the record
of dim perturbations which were then going on in his very spirit, his
very tissue.
The moment when Whitman found his wings and dared them is the most
interesting moment in his entire career. There the mystery of the poet
centres. He who had once screamed with the spread-eagle now proposed
to “sky-lark with God.” His excursion to New Orleans and back in
1848 does not sufficiently explain his awakening, much as it stirred
him to wonder at the body of his land; neither does the troubled
love which may then have entered his life and have shaken him out of
his established routines. Some change was taking place in him, some
annunciation, which roused the man into the seer. What are the actual
causes and processes of that change no one yet knows how to explain.
It may be God, it may be glands; it is the deep, unseen behaviour of
genius.
I am habitually at a loss to know why so few critics of Whitman have
paid due attention to what he himself reveals in his poems concerning
the crucial moments in his growth. Is it because he dramatizes those
moments with such fierce intensity that the biography in them is
neglected? He is unmistakably explicit in his account of the experience
reported in the fifth section of the _Song of Myself_, of his
experience with what he called his Soul:
“I mind how once we lay, such a transparent summer morning,
How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d over
upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to
my bare-stript heart,
And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held
my feet.
Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass
all the argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women
my sisters and lovers.”
Yet this mystical experience, which has been often noted, is in no
respect more illuminating than the poetical experience of which Whitman
tells quite as explicitly in _Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking_. In
that supreme song of separation he not only gives voice to bereavement
in the guise of a bird’s wailing for its lost mate by the seashore:
he also records the sudden genesis of his consciousness that he was a
poet, “the outsetting bard of love.”
“Demon or bird! (said the boy’s soul,)
Is it indeed toward your mate you sing? or is it really to me?
For I, that was a child, my tongue’s use sleeping, now I have
heard you,
Now in a moment I know what I am for, I awake,
And already a thousand singers, a thousand songs, clearer, louder,
and more sorrowful than yours,
A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me, never
to die.”
Awakened to his function, however, and vowed to be the singer of
death, Whitman had yet to find a mode of utterance. He would not find
it among traditional modes because he was wedded to the conception of
a new democratic aesthetic; he could not respond to current rhythms
because he was too stoutly original. What happened he makes clear
enough in _Proud Music of the Storm_. The poet lies in his “lonesome
slumber-chamber” haunted by the rhythms of life:
“Blast that careers so free, whistling across the prairies,
Strong hum of forest tree-tops—wind of the mountains,
Personified dim shapes—you hidden orchestras,
You serenades of phantoms with instruments alert,
Blending with Nature’s rhythmus, all the tongues of nations.”
Thither come to him the strophes of love, of martial enterprises, of
folk-dances, of the hymns of religions, till he is so shaken that
“Give me to hold all sounds, (I madly struggling cry,)
Fill me with all the voices of the universe,
Endow me with their throbbings, Nature’s also,
The tempests, waters, winds, operas and chants, marches and dances,
Utter, pour in, for I would take them all.
Then I woke softly,
And pausing, questioning awhile the music of my dream,
And questioning all those reminiscences, the tempest in its fury,
And all the songs of sopranos and tenors,
And those rapt oriental dances of religious fervour,
And the sweet varied instruments, and the diapason of organs,
And all the artless plaints of love and grief and death,
I said to my silent curious soul, out of the bed of the
slumber-chamber,
Come, for I have found the clue I sought so long,
Let us go forth refresh’d amid the day,
Cheerfully tallying life, walking the world, the real,
Nourish’d henceforth by our celestial dream.
And I said, moreover,
Haply, what thou hast heard O soul was not the sound of winds,
Nor dream of raging storm, nor sea-hawk’s flapping wings, nor harsh
screams,
Nor vocalism of sun-bright Italy,
Nor German organ majestic, nor vast concourse of voices, nor layers
of harmonies,
Nor strophes of husbands and wives, nor sound of marching soldiers,
Nor flutes, nor harps, nor the bugle-call of camps,
But, to a new rhythmus fitted for thee,
Poems bridging the way from Life to Death, vaguely wafted in the
night air, uncaught, unwritten,
Which let us go forth in the bold day and write.”
There was never a bolder conclusion to a poem in the world.
THE LION AND THE UNIFORM
In _The Ordeal of Mark Twain_ Van Wyck Brooks studies the tragedy which
he sees in the career of a genius who was born with the nature of a
great artist but born into an environment so uncongenial to art that
he had to struggle against it all his life, and vainly, except for a
few radiant occasions when he escaped it rather by accident than by any
natural sense of his best direction or any wisdom which he had been
able to acquire. In “that dry, old, barren, horizonless Middle-West
of ours,” according to Mr. Brooks, where in Mark Twain’s boyhood and
youth the frontier had not yet lightened the hand of death which it
always laid upon every uncomplacent urge toward art or creativeness
or even distinction, Mark Twain had a smaller opportunity for free
growth than he would have had on “the fertile human soil of any spot in
Europe.” Moreover, not only his general environment but the individual
who touched him most intimately contrived, however unwittingly, to
clip and bind his instinctive wings. His mother, keen, spry, witty,
energetic, but hungry for the love she had missed in her marriage and
therefore insatiate in her maternal passions, checked all the impulses
in her sensitive son which looked to her like eccentricities and
tenderly hammered him into the only mould tolerated in Missouri—the
mould of respectability and amiability. That he did not quite stay
hammered is testimony to the strength of his desire, but it was never
to become fully conscious. So, though his episode on the river as pilot
partly liberated him, for there he had a craft and an authority which
he never had anywhere else in his life, he was capable of relapsing
again into the temper and texture of the herd when he drifted to the
still wilder frontier of the Rockies and the Pacific Coast. There,
where any affection for privacy seemed a contempt for society and
any differentiation from the crowd seemed almost an insult to it,
Mark Twain had no choice, if he was to express himself and still be
respectable and amiable, but to express himself in the permitted idiom
of the humourist. “Plainly, pioneer life had a sort of chemical effect
on the creative mind, instantly giving it a humorous cast. Plainly,
also, the humourist was a type that pioneer society required in order
to maintain its psychical equilibrium.” Laughter was the only ultimate
weapon in the desperate battle with the wilderness. “Women laughed,” as
Albert Bigelow Paine phrases it, “that they might not weep; men when
they could no longer swear.”
That such laughter was heroic, Mr. Brooks, a humane critic, would
admit, but he is too ardently, too fiercely, a partisan of the divine
right of the creative impulse to feel that Mark Twain’s submission to
such laughter was less than deeply tragic. And when the first harvests
of fame released this Pacific humourist from his humorous prison, what
had he to turn to? Nothing, Mr. Brooks answers, but the Gilded Age of
our Reconstruction madness, when the entire nation, with a fearful
homogeneity, was out money-hunting as it had never been before; when
natural resources hitherto unsuspected were being tapped, and such
sparse resources of the soul as had existed here and there under the
régime of our ancient culture were being deserted, almost as obviously
as were those stony farms which the most alive natives of New England
were leaving to the shiftless men and hesitant, half-alive virgins who
had to carry on the stock and the traditions.
Into this desiccating atmosphere Mark Twain came just when its best
spiritual oxygen had all been pumped out. Too insecure in his own
standards not to defer to those of the established East, he took the
standards of the first persons under whose influence he fell. There
was his wife, who had been brought up in Elmira, in “up-state” New
York, where a “stagnant, fresh water aristocracy, one and seven-eighths
or two and a quarter generations deep, densely provincial, resting
on a basis of angular sectarianism, eviscerated politics, and raw
money, ruled the roost, imposing upon all the rest of society its
own type, forcing all to submit to it or to imitate it.” Mark Twain
submitted and imitated, with the result that he, who had in himself
the makings of a _sans-culotte_, became in most outward ways a pillar
of society, and he who was built to be a Rabelais of loud, large,
exuberant satire, became instead a writer quite safe (with a few
furtively obscene exceptions, such as “1601”) for the domestic fireside
and the evening lamp. And not only his wife was to blame. There was
William Dean Howells, whom Boston, lacking any such energetic blood
of its own in those decaying days, had had to import from Ohio, but
who without serious struggle accepted the spinsterly principles of
Boston, decided that “the more smiling aspects of life are the more
American,” and, as regards Mark Twain, tamed him with the doctrines
of a timid gentility and a surface realism. Once handcuffed between
these two good and gentle captors, Mark Twain was lost. Instead of
satirizing the United States as he was born to do, he satirized
medieval France and England and generally the great, deep past of
Europe, thereby actually multiplying the self-congratulations of which
his countrymen had already too much the habit. Instead of telling the
truth about contemporary life, which he had the eyes to see, he kept
a thousand silences on matters about which he could not say what he
saw and thought without hurting the feelings of his friends—that is,
the privileged class. Instead of building some precious edifice of
beauty that might dare the sun and shake the very spheres, as great
beauty does, he was content to laugh at beauty or at least at those
exceptional creatures who follow it into paths that to duller men seem
vague or ridiculous. Poor Mark Twain, Mr. Brooks in effect concludes,
he was born to be a master and creator, but he died having never
been anything but the victim of his epoch—the “saddest, most ironical
figure,” the playboy of the Western World.
No briefer summary could do justice to a book in many respects so novel
as this and no bare outline of Mr. Brooks’s argument could afford to be
less uncompromising, for he himself is uncompromising in his general
arraignment of the industrial civilization and the uncompleted culture
which could hold Mark Twain down and of the qualities in his character
which allowed him to be held. That it is an arraignment, however, and
exhibits instances of special pleading and a definite animus must be
admitted even by those who, like myself, agree that the picture here
drawn of our greatest humourist is substantially accurate as well
as brilliant. Let me cite some examples. Mark Twain once proposed a
conundrum, “Why am I like the Pacific Ocean?” and himself answered it:
“I don’t know. I was just asking for information.” “If he had not had
a certain sense of colossal force,” comments Mr. Brooks, “it would
never have occurred to him, however humorously, to compare ... his
magnitude with that of the Pacific Ocean.” It will not do to take the
commentator here as seriously as he takes Mark Twain. Again, speaking
of the instinct for protective coloration which led Mark Twain, with
the other humorists, to adopt a pen-name, Mr. Brooks finds it an
“interesting coincidence that ‘Mark Twain,’ in the pilot’s vocabulary,
implied ‘safe water.’” Interesting indeed, but totally insignificant,
though Mr. Brooks by mentioning it makes it look like a tiny aspersion
on Mark Twain’s courage. And once more, this passage with regard to
_Huckleberry Finn_, in which for once its author seems to Mr. Brooks
to have slipped out of the silken net of which Mrs. Clemens held the
drawstrings and the golden cage to which Mr. Howells held the key,
and floated freely and gloriously down the Mississippi on a raft,
essentially disguised as the joyful, illiterate, vagabond Huck. “That
Mark Twain was almost if not quite conscious of his opportunity we can
see from his introductory note to the book: ‘Persons attempting to find
a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to
find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot
in it will be shot.’ He feels so secure of himself that he can actually
challenge the censor to accuse him of having a motive!” With the aid
of psychoanalysis one can find motives for any burst of mirth, but
this explanation singularly recalls O. Henry’s remark about a certain
husband whose wife was trying to provoke him to beat her so they could
have the fun and luxury of making up: “Many ideas were far from his
mind, but the farthest was the idea of beating his wife.”
One thing that makes me suspect at times the general drift of
Mr. Brooks’s argument is that a good many of the details of his
psychoanalyzing look suspicious. Read in cold blood the account of
the effect upon Mark Twain’s subsequent life of his promises to his
mother on the occasion of his father’s death: “Already,” we are
told, “he was ‘broken down’ by his father’s death: remorse had ‘laid
a heavy hand on him.’ But what was this remorse; what had he done for
grief or shame? ‘A hundred things in themselves trifling,’ which had
offended in reality not his father’s heart, but his father’s will,
as a conventional citizen with a natural desire to raise up a family
in his own likeness. Feeble, frantic, furtive little feelings—out of
this moody child, the first wavering steps of the soul; that is what
they have really been, these peccadilloes, the dawn of the artist. And
the formidable promptings of love tell him that they are sin! He is
broken down indeed: all those crystalline fragments of individuality,
still so tiny and so fragile, are suddenly shattered; his nature,
wrought upon by the tense heat of that hour, has become again like soft
wax. And his mother stamps there, with awful ceremony, the composite
image of her own meagre traditions. He is to go forth the Good Boy by
_force majeure_, he is to become such a man as his father would have
approved of, he is to retrieve his father’s failure, to recover the
lost gentility of his family that had once been proud, to realize that
‘mirage of wealth’ that had ever hung before his father’s eyes. And
to do so he is not to quarrel heedlessly with his bread and butter,
he is to keep strictly within the code, to remember the maxims of
Ben Franklin, to respect all the prejudices and all the conventions;
above all, he is not to be drawn aside into any fanciful orbit of his
own!... Hide your faces, Huck and Tom! Put away childish things, Sam
Clemens; go forth into the world, but remain always a child, your
mother’s child!” Are eleven-year-old boys, even boys of genius, really
ever made over so sharply as this? Mr. Brooks says “we feel with
irresistible certitude that Mark Twain’s fate was once for all decided
there.” I wonder if this is not the “irresistible certitude” of those
romancers and evangelists who believe in instantaneous and irrevocable
conversions. Barbarous and dangerous a thing as it is for parents to
exact promises from their children under the pressure of bitter events,
still it is rarely as bad as all that.
The point is strained again when Mr. Brooks digs around the roots
of Mark Twain’s “obsession of animosity against the novels of Jane
Austen” and traces it to an “indirect venting of his hatred of the
primness and priggishness of his own _entourage_.” More specifically,
in his submerged self he hated his wife and Howells. “When Mark Twain
utters such characteristic aphorisms as ‘Heaven for climate, hell for
society,’ we see the repressed artist in him striking out at Mrs.
Clemens and the Rev. Joseph Twitchell, whose companionship the dominant
Mark Twain called, and with reason, for he seems to have been the most
lovable of men, ‘a companionship which to me stands first after Livy’s
[his wife’s].’ Similarly, when he roars and rages against the novels
of Jane Austen we can see that buried self taking vengeance upon Mr.
Howells, with whom Jane Austen was a prime passion, who had even taken
Jane Austen as a model.” Now, of course, when the psychoanalytic
hunt is on it seems unsubtle and unsympathetic to object, with common
sense, that our antipathies are often accidental and that often enough
we whimsically specialize in this or that antipathy, seeing how many
angles we can hate it from, in how many slashing phrases we can utter
a distaste which has grown into a habit that is positively a delight.
But even if we do not lean too heavily on common sense and are merely
rival psychoanalysts we must still admit that in Freud’s house are many
mansions and that every genius analyzed has so many roots each of them
may look like the tap-root, though only one can actually be.
Without for a moment denying Mr. Brooks the credit of being the first
critic to dig importantly about the roots of an American man of
genius, and indeed of making clear much that was not clear before,
I still think he has reduced Mark Twain too neatly to the dualistic
formula. For all this critic’s learning and research and penetration,
he does not quite give the effect of having been and seen entirely
around the subject of his study. Just in proportion as Mark Twain was
stupendously casual, as wasteful as nature in his processes, not always
purposive at all but a rioter in whims and unprophesiable explosions,
an amateur of the drifting life, Mr. Brooks appears to have missed
him, because he misses there what he conceives to be “the mind of the
mature artist, which is all of a single flood, all poise, all natural
control.” As in his earlier study of John Addington Symonds, Mr.
Brooks is rigorously monistic—almost monotheistic—in his conception
of the creative life, so rigorously that he has come to see any sort
of dualism in an artist’s nature as not only the chief of tragedies
but indeed as the chief of sins against his function and destiny.
Ibsen felt that way about it and so did Milton on somewhat different
grounds, but Molière and Shakespeare, if they had thought much about
the matter, would pretty certainly have laid the emphasis much nearer
the tragedy than the sin. And even whatever tragic aspect there might
be would be somewhat relieved for them, I suspect, as _King Lear_ by
its poetry, by such an abundance of life as Mark Twain had and tasted.
Is it merely being deceived by quantity to feel that Mr. Brooks, so
avidly exigent as regards quality, limits too narrowly his judgments
as regards the creative process and its achievements, and by despising
quantity overlooks some quality too? At least I am persuaded that Mr.
Brooks has taken the vast figure of Mark Twain, both fact and myth, and
has recreated it too near his own image, making the Mark Twain of his
re-creation suffer more both in his submerged and his dominant selves
than the originally created Mark Twain did by reason of the turbulent
confusion of his career. Mr. Brooks, sparer, more clear-cut, more
conscious, would thus have suffered if _he_ had walked such a fraying
path.
If I take too many exceptions to this account of the, “ordeal” of
Mark Twain it is because I believe it to be a book worthy the most
scrupulous consideration. Side by side with the vulgar myth of Mark
Twain I foresee that this interpretation of him will take its place
for a long time to come, correcting the other, pleasing the judicious
by its general truthfulness and its felicitous language, even invading
the textbooks and becoming classic. I think it should do these things,
but I hope it will also be perceived to be, something after the manner
of, say, Voltaire’s _Lettres Anglaises_, a clever tract, another
resounding shot in the warfare which Mr. Brooks is waging on behalf of
the leadership of letters. Herein he has set forth the career of a man
of letters who should have been leader and was not, with implications
on every vivid page as to why and how others may take warnings from
his failure. “Has the American writer of today the same excuse for
missing his vocation?” Mr. Brooks concludes. “‘He must be very dogmatic
or unimaginative,’ says John Eglinton, with a prophetic note that has
ceased to be prophetic, ‘who would affirm that man will never weary
of the whole system of things which reigns at present.... We never
know how near we are to the end of any phase of our experience, and
often, when its seeming stability begins to pall upon us, it is a sign
that things are about to take a new turn.’ Read, writers of America,
the driven, disenchanted, anxious faces of your sensitive countrymen;
remember the splendid parts your confrères have played in the human
drama of other times and other peoples, and ask yourself whether the
hour has not come to put away childish things and walk the stage as
poets do.”
III. TWO NOTES ON YOUTH
THE RELEASE OF YOUTH
John Fiske perceived that human history has been greatly affected
by the fact that man has a longer infancy than the other animals. A
creature which grows to its full stature and faculties in a few hours
or weeks or months or even years has not the same opportunity to travel
far in knowledge or to build its intelligence upon observations and
conclusions as has the creature which normally matures through at least
a score of years. There still remains to be studied the effect upon
mankind of the deliberate prolongation of infancy which, particularly
in Europe and America, has been going on for something over a century.
Perhaps it should be called less a prolongation of infancy than a
discovery that infancy actually lasts longer than had been realized.
The social effect is much the same. In the eighteenth century the
unproductive and acquisitive period of infancy for boys rarely lasted
beyond twenty years, even for those who were trained at the colleges
and universities. For the same class in the twentieth century—a class
now proportionately larger than then—a period of twenty-five years is
nearer the average. The shift is even more marked as regards girls, who
a hundred years ago were likely to be married at seventeen or eighteen
but who now are quite likely to remain unmarried till twenty-five,
and very many, of course, till later. What has become of those years
of human life thus lost to adult society, or at least diverted to new
purposes?
It will not do to answer that such years of youth have been offset
by the years added at the end of life through the advance of hygiene
and medicine. Even if the total number were the same—and there are no
figures to prove or to disprove it—there would still be an incalculable
difference in quality. Consider the matter in a simple biological
aspect. The postponement of marriage has reduced the number of children
born, and has therefore released for other functions a vast amount
of human energy once devoted by very young women to gestation and
lactation. Anyone who has had occasion to observe a group of girls in
the schools and colleges of this generation knows how tremendous is the
store of surplus energy for which there is no biological outlet and
which too often fails to be sublimated as it might well be into other
forms of service. The quantity of such energy which the war showed
to be in reserve should not have been a surprise to the teachers or
observers of youth. No more should it have been a surprise that those
who were thought of as mere boys should have suddenly and successfully
taken up heavier labours and larger responsibilities than they had
known before. The energy had been all the time in existence, though
it had been spent on study or sports or dissipation. Thousands and
thousands of years had instructed the race to give about so many years
and about so much energy to youth, and the arbitrary customs of a
century could not accomplish anything but the most superficial changes.
The war, which wasted and worse than wasted human riches, almost
certainly threw away a larger treasury of youth than any previous
generation could have done, for the reason that there was more youth to
throw away.
Surely the splendour of modern life, its variety and glitter and
colour and movement, capable even of blinding men now and then to the
drabness of its machine-processes, must have been due in part to the
prolongation of infancy. There have been longer hours for play and
more ways of playing: new games, new dances, new contests of speed and
strength and dexterity, and in America especially an increasing return
to the mimic wild life of the summer camp. What, among other things,
peace must be made to give back is that abundance of youth. We need
no increase of the birth-rate to absorb the energy of the girls; we
need no new wars to waste the energy of the boys. We need instead to
recognize this precious asset and to employ it. The first step should
be to distribute the fulness of life among more boys and girls than had
it before the war, when it belonged to a too narrow privileged class.
The next should be to civilize it, not by cramping and restraining
its activities but by associating them with thought and passion and
beauty. In how many quarters of the world have athletics, the natural
expression of the release of youth, been viewed as sheer rowdyism or
at best as squandered power! But, viewed more largely, athletics must
appear the physical symbol of the energy which the race has latterly
been hoarding. Not athletics merely but the thing thereby symbolized
must be drawn into the general current of existence. It means the
enlargement of youth’s pleasure, the evocation of its deeper thought
and passion, the development of its capacities. And of course whatever
enriches youth in time enriches all society.
YOUTH IS ALWAYS RIGHT
The keenest intelligence in the British Isles has recently uttered
what is perhaps its keenest observation. The intelligence is, of
course, Bernard Shaw’s. The observation is that if a great teacher
of his age has done all he ought to do he must expect, and he should
desire, to come in time to seem outmoded, superfluous, even something
of a nuisance. Thinking, Mr. Shaw perceives, is in this respect like
walking: once the habit has been acquired the learner has to practise
it alone. As he cannot be precisely the same person his teacher was,
he must go by different paths to different goals. Indeed, the measure
of the valuable teacher of thinking is his power to show his pupils
how they may reach conclusions he himself never could reach. After
Socrates, Plato; after Plato, Aristotle. It calls, indeed, for an
almost inhuman degree of magnanimity to rejoice when we see ourselves
distanced by those whom we first set upon their feet; Mr. Shaw’s
attitude of willingness, even of eagerness, is a sign of that capacity
for elevated vision which has lent wings to his words and barbs to his
truth. But his prompt admission of a thing which his mind lets him see
is only what he has taught his followers, and his age, to expect of
him. No matter if it does not flatter his pride. He does not have the
kind of pride by the exercise of which a man would rather be president
than be right. He knows that the life of thought depends not upon the
fidelity with which it continues in one direction but upon the vitality
with which it stirs successive generations.
For thinking is part of the human process no less than play or work or
love or aspiration. Its roots are in the protoplasm and its nourishment
comes from living growth. To look back over the long and jagged history
of opinion is to discover that opinions rise and fall but that only the
making and testing of opinion go on for ever; and it is to discover
that opinion has always prospered most when it was most nearly allied
with the creative forces of youth. Perhaps one should hardly call it
opinion at all when those who cherish it are following it in full
pursuit. Perhaps then it is instinct and little more. But the instincts
of youth are precious as nothing else is precious. Youth, viewed
broadly, is always right.
Viewed thus broadly, conservatism is the element of death and
radicalism is the element of life. The human tribe, straggling through
the wilderness of the world, perpetuates itself by begetting and
bearing its young, who, at first protected by bosom and counsel,
eventually detach themselves and move toward the front while their
parents gradually slip toward the rear and are left behind. The process
is cruel but it is real; and it is irresistible. What other course,
after all, is there to take? Who knows where we come from or where
we are going to? If youth has now and then plunged blindly along
blind roads, so has age wrought incalculable evil by inquisitions and
oppressions aimed to check the march of mankind in its natural advance.
Experience grows cynical and lags heavily back, scorning the impulse
to create. Youth staggers under the burden of freeing itself, as if it
were not enough to perform the hard tasks and fight the bitter battles
which the old men of the tribe “wish” upon it. No wonder high hearts
falter under their fate when they do not rebel; no wonder they grow old
so soon and take up the immemorial complaint; no wonder the youth of
any particular generation always does so little. It is right but it is
in the minority.
Fortunately years alone are not the final evidence of youth or age.
Always there are wise men who, like Socrates or Goethe in their days,
or like Bernard Shaw or Anatole France in ours, refuse to grow old
as the seasons increase upon them. They put forth new leaves, they
unfold new blossoms, with a continuous rejuvenescence. They are the
links between young and old. Through their intercession youth grows
conscious of the meaning of its urges, as it is already conscious of
its essential rightness. Through their interpretation age is reminded
of what, left alone, it would always forget: the generous intentions
and the authentic power of youth. They are the true spiritual parents
of the race. Yet what they do is no more than what all parents do who
are not jealous of their children. They watch them at their wild games
with joy that they are so strong. They offer advice which, they hope,
may save them the experience of unnecessary pain and may help them to
realize their potentialities, but they do not feel too much chagrin
when the advice is slighted, knowing that wisdom is incommunicable and
must be learned over again in person by each new apprentice to life.
Alas that there are so few good or wise parents! It is the fault of the
bad and the unwise if they find youth wilful, heedless, insolent. They
have fixed their eyes upon individuals who go astray and not upon the
larger drift in which life is perpetually renewed. Is life itself good
or bad? There are, it is true, divergent answers to the question, but
few are better than that of E. W. Howe, who says: “We have it, and must
make the best of it. And as long as we do not blow our brains out, we
have decided life is worth living.” At least life is best where it is
most vivid—in the heart and ways of youth.
IV. HOWELLS: MAY 1920
EULOGIUM
Mark Twain and Henry James could have agreed on few subjects, but
William Dean Howells was one of them. To such antipodean geniuses he
stood as equally great writer and great friend. “For forty years,”
said Mark Twain in a familiar passage, “his English has been to me a
continual delight and astonishment. In the sustained exhibition of
certain great qualities—clearness, compression, verbal exactness, and
unforced and seemingly unconscious felicity of phrasing—he is, in my
belief, without his peer in the English-writing world, _Sustained._
I entrench myself behind that protecting word. There are others who
exhibit those great qualities as greatly as he does, but only by
intervaled distributions of rich moonlight, with stretches of veiled
and dimmer landscape between; whereas Howells’s moon sails cloudless
skies all night and all the nights.” Henry James never ceased to
exclaim at the abundance no less than the discipline of Howells’s
“great garden, ... the tract of virgin soil that, beginning as a
cluster of bright, fresh, sunny and savoury patches, close about the
house, as it were, was to become that vast goodly pleasaunce of art and
observation, of appreciation and creation, in which you have laboured,
without a break or a lapse, to this day.... They make a great array, a
literature in themselves, your studies of American life, so acute, so
direct, so disinterested, so preoccupied but with the fine truth of the
case.... The _real_ affair of the American case and character, as it
met your view and brushed your sensibility, that was what inspired and
attached you, and, heedless of foolish flurries from other quarters, of
all wild or weak slashings of the air and wavings in the void, you gave
yourself to it with an incorruptible faith. You saw your field with a
rare lucidity; you saw all it had to give in the way of the romance of
the real and the interest and the charm of the common, as one may put
it; the character and the comedy, the point, the pathos, the tragedy,
the particular home-grown humanity under your eyes and your hand and
with which all the life about you was closely interknitted. Your
hand reached out to these things with a fondness that was in itself
a literary gift, and played with them as the artist only and always
can play: freely, quaintly, incalculably, with all the assurance of
his fancy and his irony, and yet with that fine taste for the truth
and the pity and the meaning of the matter which keeps the temper of
observation both sharp and sweet.... Stroke by stroke and book by book
your work was to become, for this exquisite notation of our whole
democratic light and shade and give and take, in the highest degree
_documentary_; so that none other, through all your fine long season,
could approach it in value and amplitude. None, let me say, too, was
to approach it in essential distinction; for you had grown master, by
insidious practices best known to yourself, of a method so easy and so
natural, so marked with the personal element of your humour and the
play, not less personal, of your sympathy, that the critic kept coming
on its secret connection with the grace of letters much as Fenimore
Cooper’s Leather-Stocking—so knowing to be able to do it!—comes, in the
forest, on the subtle tracks of Indian braves.”
How great a friend Howells was to Mark Twain and Henry James—the three
of them so much the most important American men of letters in their
generation—comes vividly to light in the brilliant correspondence
already made public by Albert Bigelow Paine and Percy Lubbock. James
admits with a tender eagerness that the editorial hand which Howells
held out to him from the _Atlantic_ in the summer of 1868 “was really
the making of me, the making of the confidence that required help
and sympathy and that I should otherwise, I think, have strayed and
stumbled about a long time without acquiring.” Mark Twain owed Howells
a larger, more intimate debt than mere encouragement at the outset:
nothing did more to civilize the magnificent barbarian who wrote
_The Innocents Abroad_ to a point at which he was capable of writing
_Huckleberry Finn_ than the friendly counsel and judicious approbation
of Howells, who drew him by the “insidious practices” of a perpetually
good example from journalism to literature. He who with one hand
was encouraging the sensitive young dilettante, with the other was
restraining the tumultuous humourist—and at the same time managing
with so great devotion and dexterity his own richly unfolding career.
Neither Mark Twain nor Henry James could have done it for the other
two; the surest and strongest of the three was not either of those who
have most usually been called the geniuses but that one who for his
quietness has been so much too much unheard.
The quietness with which Howells lived, though as an author he was
so busy, has kept not only the general public but the more or less
literary public from realizing the part he played in the literary life
of his time. His relations to Henry James and Mark Twain but epitomize
his relations to many others of fainter reputation. In Hamlin Garland’s
_Son of the Middle Border_ there is a significant chapter which tells
how a passionate young pilgrim from a prairie farm approached the “most
vital literary man in all America at this time”—the middle eighties,
when “reading Boston was divided into two parts—those who liked Howells
and those who fought him.” And in Brand Whitlock’s _Forty Years of
It_—among the most moving of American books—appear constant references,
in the midst of a world of warfare for justice and decency, to another
young writer’s charmed intervals of passion for a master, particularly
an account of certain “long summer afternoons in company with William
Dean Howells, whom, indeed, in my vast admiration, and I might say, my
reverence, for him, I had gone there [to New England from Ohio] to see.
He had introduced me to Mark Twain, and I had come away with feelings
that were no less in intensity, I am sure, than those with which Moses
came down out of Mount Horeb.” In a dozen memoirs, if one wanted to
quote them all, there are already such testimonies; and more dozens
will be written wherein testimony will be borne to the effect that
Howells more completely than almost any other American led and fought
for and exemplified and accomplished a notable literary movement. The
very extent to which he succeeded in his persuasive battles for realism
in fiction has somewhat obscured his deeds. No one now goes—or needs
to go—over the arguments for simple truthfulness which Howells had to
make in the eighties. Even his classical little treatise “Criticism and
Fiction”—let alone the body of book reviews and slighter essays of his
minor skirmishes—seems doctrine too unquestioned to call for argument.
Of course, its vitality has gone out of it only in the sense that the
vitality has gone out of any seed from which a plant has grown up. The
energy has passed into the flower and the fruit. Just how large was
this expended energy it is still too soon to estimate; but any serious
study in the intellectual and spiritual history of America discovers
more and more lines converging to the controversies of the decade from
1880 to 1890 when Howells’s was the most eloquent voice. Even the
theatre—that native home of the tinsel which Howells hated—had for a
time its James A. Herne trying “to write plays which should be as true
in their local colour as Howells’s stories.”
To speak of the battle for realism in fiction as a cause won can mean,
of course, nothing more than that the cause as Howells led it was
won for the moment. Against his sort of civilized and decent reality
the tide is always rising. In the nineties there were reactions on
two sides from the more or less official realism of Howells and his
immediate followers: one the flamboyant and rococo historical romance
of the school which first begot “best sellers,” and the other the
sterner, angrier naturalism of younger men who were no longer suited by
the gentleness with which Howells exposed the truth. It was no secret
from his friends that in his later days he felt lonely and outlived.
Everywhere criticism applauded him, but his books were less frequently
bought and read than they had been. Into the causes of that decline
it would need a volume to go deeply: the whole movement of the world
is involved, the movement away from an urbane liberalism with its
balance and calm and delicate irony to a more insistent clash between
extremes of temper which war on one another with an animus surpassed
only by that with which they hew down the peace-makers of the middle
ground. For twenty years Howells has been under judgment from such
partisans, and it is no wonder that the hand of time has been hurried
in the task of discriminating between those achievements of his which
shall survive and those others which are to enter into their mortality.
Naturally, his uncollected trifles will go first, though that universe
must be rich which can afford to throw away his various occasional
comments on books and men, especially those essays from the Editor’s
Study and the Editor’s Easy Chair in which he more than any one else
made Americans familiar with the great Latin realists and the greater
realists of Russia. Next, without much question, it will be his farces
which find their proper niche in oblivion, though here, too, the
sacrifice of spirit and mirth is greater than any but a few cheerful
antiquarians will ever know. His more formal criticism will go then,
having done its work and taken its honest wages. Nor have his many
books of travel a good chance long to outlast his criticism, fresh and
sunny as some thousands of their pages are, unless perhaps his early
Italian volumes have the luck of James Howell’s letters, to be kept
alive by the pungency in their observations and the poetry in their
wit. A few of Howells’s verses may very well find enduring corners in
the anthologies—a form of immortality not really to be sniffed at.
There remain two departments of his work which in the light of such a
scrutiny draw very close together: his memoirs and his novels. Perhaps
the travel books ought to be mentioned here again. Indeed, Howells
himself many years ago explained that in his first novel, _Their
Wedding Journey_, he started out “to mingle fiction and travel—fiction
got the best of it.” On the whole, however, his travels suffer from
comparison with his memoirs and novels by reason of the very quality
which makes most novels inferior to his—inferior in the actual amount
of human life present. Howells would have been one of the first to
argue that a traveller sees too many formal displays to see much
reality; sees too many types to see many men and women; sees too many
facts to see much truth. Life, he steadily maintained, can never
be judged nor can it be veraciously represented by its picturesque
aspects. On this point Howells deserves to be called perhaps the most
truly democratic of all novelists. Fenimore Cooper and Hawthorne in
their day, and Henry James in his, could never leave off complaining
that a democracy lacks the elements of saliency and colour upon which
the novelist must base his prosperity. No, said Howells to all such
complaints. Whatever in life tends to raise individuals arbitrarily
above the average in wealth or station tends to make them formal and
typical, and so no longer truly individual—and so no longer true. What
essentially characterizes and distinguishes men from one another and
so varies the pattern of life and fiction is the minutiae of daily
differences—and they are the true concern of the novelist. No wonder
then that Howells’s memoirs are so close to his novels in tone and
substance. It was with the same method that he set forth the people
whom he had known in the flesh and those he had known only in the
larger world of his imagination. His pen moved quite naturally from
Lowell to Silas Lapham, and it would be difficult to say which is
richer in verisimilitude, _The Rise of Silas Lapham_ or _Literary
Friends and Acquaintance_. The first is more intimate, because, as the
characters were all Howells’s own, he could do with their secrets as
he liked; the second is more spacious, because it deals with a group of
men who led lives of spacious learning and reflection; but the truth is
in both of them. Memoirs and novels must consequently be taken together
to make up that documentary revelation which Henry James admired.
Where else, indeed, may be found another representation of American
life during half a century as extended and accurate as that in
Howells’s total work? Geographically, indeed, he was limited, in
the main, to Ohio, New England, and New York, and to those parts of
Europe in which Ohioans, New Englanders, and New Yorkers spend their
vacations. He belonged, too, to the older America, the America in which
the country still could lie down with the towns and the villages could
lead them; the thunder and smoke of the larger industrial America
appear in his later work and are reported with exquisite sympathy, but
they appear less as realities in themselves than as problems pressing
into the lives of the older order of citizens. Howells shut his eyes—at
least in his fiction—somewhat singularly also to the brutal, sordid,
illicit aspects of his country, not intending to deny them, as Puritans
or pedants do, but preferring to move discreetly among them, choosing
his subjects “as a sage chooses his conversation, decently.” All these
are limitations, but they accuse Howells of nothing worse than too much
gentleness. They ask him to stand a little further off from Ibsen and a
little nearer Irving; nearer Thackeray than Carlyle; nearer Flaubert
than Balzac. And yet by his wealth of observation he belongs with the
most luxuriant geniuses, with Scott and Dickens and George Sand. Nor
does it contradict the claim that he was so luxuriant to say that
doubtless a few of his novels will easily survive the rest—_A Modern
Instance_, _The Rise of Silas Lapham_, _Indian Summer_, _A Hazard of
New Fortunes_, _The Kentons_, and that exquisite triumph of art and
temper, _A Chance Acquaintance_. (Of this last Howells himself said
that it made him more friends than any of the others; he thought _A
Modern Instance_ the strongest, and he liked _Indian Summer_ best.)
Outside of this charmed, preferred circle there are dozens of other
novels which exhibit dozens and hundreds of corners of the American
world with sharp eyes and sunny wisdom and golden humour and delicate
art.
That art could make men as different as Mark Twain and Henry
James—again—unenviously despair. “I should think,” the first of them
wrote Howells, on reading _A Foregone Conclusion_, “that this must be
the daintiest, truest, most admirable workmanship that was ever put
on a story. The creatures of God do not act out their natures more
unerringly than yours do.” And nearly thirty years later Henry James
wrote concerning _The Kentons_: “Delightful, in one’s golden afternoon,
and after many days and many parturitions, to put forth thus a young,
strong, living flower. You have done nothing more true and complete,
more thoroughly homogeneous and hanging together, without the faintest
ghost of a false note or a weak touch.” To all appearances the art of
Howells was one of the easiest for the artist with which a story-teller
was ever endowed. Never any signs of awkwardness, or of straining with
his material, or of plotting against his action how he shall make it
come out at some better point than it seems to wish! From the very
first Howells can have had little to learn. He said that the master
of his first manner was Turgenev, whose look of artlessness seemed
to Howells the perfection of technique; but that after he became
acquainted with Tolstoi he could no longer feel satisfied with any
sacrifice, however subtle, and so transferred his allegiance to the
manner of Tolstoi, which not only seemed but actually was without
art. This confession cannot be taken too seriously. When the change
came Howells had already written _A Modern Instance_ and _The Rise
of Silas Lapham_; and the narratives that follow show no increase in
ease and naturalness. Nor, of course, did Howells speak literally
in his claim that Tolstoi exhibits no art. All that the episode can
mean—and Howells’s account of it—is that he had the native knack of
story-telling, and that once started his narratives flowed from him
with an orderliness and lucidity and progress toward a destination
which thoroughly matched his prose.
Now this order and clarity were Howells himself, and with the friendly
charm of his personality they make beautiful the little body of
memoirs for which he is unsurpassed in the literature of his country.
American boyhood has nowhere been more goldenly recalled than in _A
Boy’s Town_. Nowhere may there be encountered more lovely records of
a dreaming and yet ambitious adolescence than in _Years of My Youth_.
_My Literary Passions_ contrives to make the mere account of Howells’s
reading seem more exciting than the adventures of most men and more
beguiling than many intrigues considerably less innocent. _My Mark
Twain_ is the most exquisite tribute yet paid by one American man of
letters to another. And _Literary Friends and Acquaintance_, best of
all pictures of the classic days of Cambridge and Boston when Howells
was editor of the _Atlantic_, is no less classical than the original
productions which the period put forth. But superlatives, though true,
are terribly unavailing. And how do justice to the subtlety of his
senses, the tenderness of his affections, the range and hospitality
of his sympathies, the strength yet generosity of his ambition, the
firmness of his will, the temperateness of his behaviour, his resolute
fair-mindedness, his unprejudiced reverences, his undivagating
shrewdness, and his great treasures of good humour? Occasionally there
do occur men who disarm all censure—at least for a time—and in the
midst of a censorious world it is pleasant now and then to let down the
visor and throw by the spear and shield. Such a man Raphael was; and in
a different way and world such a man Howells has been.
V. NOOKS AND FRINGES
ON HATING THE PROVINCES
Emerson lived in Concord and took villages for granted, as natural
microcosms in any one of which a sage might study the world. Whitman
lived in Manhattan and sent his imagination on strong flights over the
entire body of his land, and to the remotest regions, neither denying
nor rejecting whatever signs of life he saw. Lincoln in Springfield,
whitherto by no means all the philosophies had come and little enough
of culture in any composition, mastered not only an incomparable wisdom
but an incomparable style. To no one of these men could it have been
quite understandable that a second or third generation after them
would begin to display among certain of its intellectual leaders that
restless and intense hatred of the provinces which marks, for example,
the critics of Paris and the professors of Berlin. Yet something of
precisely this sort has come to pass. Voice after voice is added to the
regiments of criticism being raised against suburban Philistia and the
villatic bourgeoisie.
That is to say, a reaction is commencing against the frontier which
has had so large a hand in making us. It is no longer a natural device
to put critical sagacity in the mouth of a rural sage. When Lowell
created Hosea Biglow he did so with the brash originality of a young
man who was taking venturesome shots at his age; no young American of
Lowell’s scholarship would think a second time of such a device today.
Josh Billings and Artemus Ward to all but a few have come to seem
“old stuff.” Even Mr. Dooley is not a crossroads loafer but a native
son of the city streets. In return for a long course of ridicule from
rustic philosophers a new order of _philosophes_ is striking back. We
need not wonder, perhaps, that the riposte is often acrimonious; the
weight of all this village ridicule has often been heavy. We need not
feel too much distressed at the look of snobbishness which some of the
critics of our frontier somewhat too continually wear; nothing ought to
be so easy to forgive as a zeal for enlightenment. It is important to
remember, however, that there is a point of vantage a little above this
particular critical melee from which the battle appears less crucial
than it doubtless appears to those who wage it.
That point of vantage is the artist’s, at least so far as the artist is
concerned with the reproduction of life without the Puritan’s anxiety
to make it—or to make it out—the kind of life he thinks it ought to
be. The moralist condemns the “bad” people and the wit condemns the
dull; but these are phases of argument. With argument the dramatist
or novelist is much less concerned. His task is first of all a
representation of what he finds, and his obligation ends—though he may
decide to do more—when he has represented it. At his lowest level
he yields himself wholly to the manners of his society and sets them
forth with implied approbation, as if they were the laws of God. At a
higher level, he turns violently against its prejudices and assails
them as if they were the sins of Satan. But there is a level higher
still, from which, as he looks upon his community, he sees it as men
and women involved in the exercises of life, and he makes his record of
them without either uncritical admiration or vexed recrimination. Those
novelists and dramatists who now hate our provinces most are nearly
all dissatisfied men lately escaped from stodginess and devoted to
getting their revenges. In this fashion the heretic, while his wounds
smart, lashes back at the doctrines which oppressed him. But the truly
emancipated spirit no longer has time for recrimination or revenge. He
goes, as artist, about his proper business, accepting stupidity as his
material as well as intelligence, vice as well as virtue, gentleness
as well as cruelty. In every community, he knows, all the types and
tendencies of humanity may be found, and it does not occur to him to
be partisan of one neighbourhood—town or country—against another. He
knows, too, that familiarity with mankind comes partly from affection
for it, and that the truth is therefore not unrelated to affection.
How then shall he tell the truth about the provinces so long as he
feels nothing but animosity for them? It was not in this temper that
Fielding drew Squire Western, or Scott his Caleb Balderstone, or Balzac
poor stupid Père Goriot. After long years in which this temper has
sweetened and softened American fiction too much, we do indeed need
more iron in it. But likewise it is well to remember that hatred rarely
speaks the last word.
WHAT THE FATHERS READ
The later Elizabethans and the Jacobeans thought of the realm of
Britain as comprising England, Scotland, Ireland, and Virginia—the
fourth of these provinces being a more or less natural outlet for
the energy of men who, cramped at home, had to seek gold or glory or
adventure in wider regions. As the century advanced there grew up
in the parent islands a party who felt no less cramped by theology
than by geography, and they turned their imaginations to New England,
where, it seemed, the faith might grow in the way they wanted. Certain
of the proletarian members of this group went to Plymouth and a more
prosperous body shortly afterwards to Boston, but neither they nor
the sympathizers left behind understood that the saints had been
really sundered by the emigration. Not for a century and more did the
inhabitants of Boston and thereabouts, in Massachusetts, cease to
look towards London as their cultural capital much as they had looked
towards it while they lived in and near Boston in Lincolnshire; they
were further removed, and that was all. The tongue that Shakespeare
spoke, the faith and morals Milton held....
The Puritans in New England, indeed, knew or cared little enough about
Shakespeare. The late Thomas Goddard Wright’s scrupulous researches
have unearthed no signs that Shakespeare’s works reached the Puritan
colonies before 1722, when the reprobated James Franklin announced that
he had them at the office of the _New England Courant_ for any writer
who might want to use them; or before 1723, when Harvard, also under
fire for its lack of orthodoxy, listed them in its library catalogue.
Nor was even Milton greatly valued for his poetry, though four copies
of _Paradise Lost_ are known to have been shipped to Boston in 1683;
though Cotton Mather clearly knew the epic; though Yale received a
gift, among other books, of all Milton’s poetical works in 1714; and
though Harvard in 1721-22 acquired “a new & fair Edicon” in two volumes
(probably Tonson’s noble quartos of 1720). Mather once or twice quotes
Chaucer, whose writings were in both the Yale and Harvard libraries by
1723; Anne Bradstreet makes a solitary—and conventional—reference to
“Spencer’s poetry”; her father, Gov. Thomas Dudley, curiously enough,
possessed the “Vision of Piers Plowman.” But on the whole there was
scanty demand in New England for imaginative literature of any kind.
It is the contention of Mr. Wright, persuasively sustained, that while
New England was no great country for poets it was a good country for
scholars, and that it does not suffer by comparison with provincial
Britain as regards its literary culture. The press at Cambridge was
set up before the first one at Glasgow, or Rochester, or Exeter,
or Manchester, or Liverpool. The ministers and magistrates of the
colonies brought books with them, and regularly received more.
Theologians and theological treatises flowed back and forth across the
Atlantic in a consistent stream. “_Old_ England,” says the _Magnalia_
with pride, in 1702, after the founding of Harvard “had more ministers
from _New_, than our New England had since _then_ from Old.” The
younger John Winthrop was one of the early fellows of the Royal
Society, and but for the Restoration might possibly have drawn Robert
Boyle and others like him to Connecticut to establish there a “Society
for Promoting Natural Knowledge”; Jonathan Brewster of that colony was
by 1656 already a practising alchemist who felt sure he could perfect
his elixir in five years. Even scholarship, however, tended to fall
into a lower status as the first generation passed; in 1700 Harvard
had certainly a smaller prestige abroad than it had had in 1650. The
distance from London and the English universities was beginning to have
its effect, precisely as would have happened had any of the English
counties suddenly been cut off from them by a thousand leagues of
dangerous ocean. Irrepressible scholars like Cotton Mather kept up the
European tradition, but learning can hardly have been so generally
diffused as it was during the first half century.
The creative instincts underwent a similar decline. John Cotton and his
contemporaries were as eminent in theology as the Puritan ministers in
England, and the funeral elegies which were their sole contributions
to belles-lettres can stand unashamed side by side with similar English
performances. But as the Restoration succeeded the Commonwealth, and
in turn was succeeded by “Anna’s reign,” New England neither evolved
a literary class to follow, at a distance, the modes of the capital
nor produced, as the English provinces were doing, an occasional wit
who could leave home and make his literary fortunes in London. For
that there was needed a stronger secular taste than New England had.
Literature settled down to sermons. Instead of Marlowe’s tragedy,
people read the prose _History of the damnable Life and deserved Death
of Dr. John Faustus_; the earliest play printed in New England seems to
have been Lillo’s edifying _George Barnwell_, issued by James Franklin
in the _Weekly Journal_ in 1732. And yet the importers’ lists which
Mr. Wright has unearthed make it clear that for a long time such plays
and romances as Sidney’s _Arcadia_, Head’s _English Rogue_, _Pilgrim’s
Progress_, _Guy of Warwick_, and _Reynard the Fox_ had been coming
over in considerable numbers. John Dunton—an unreliable fellow, it is
true—tells that during his stay in Boston in 1686 he had a customer
who bought such books, “which to set off the better, she wou’d ask for
Books of _Gallantry_.” In 1713 Cotton Mather was so much annoyed by
the “foolish Songs and Ballads, which the Hawkers and Pedlars carry
into all parts of the Countrey,” that he wanted, “by way of Antidote,”
to issue “poetical Composures full of Piety”—including some of the
“excellent _Watts’s_ Hymns.” And shortly thereafter the influence of
the English wits had become so strong that Benjamin Franklin is seen to
begin his literary career with imitations of the _Spectator_ and that
Mather Byles,
Harvard’s honor, and New England’s hope,
Bids fair to rise and sing and rival Pope,
as a poetical friend neatly put it at the time.
THE KIND MOTHER OF US ALL
I imagine that those of our ancestors who first struggled up from the
aboriginal slime used to sit occasionally in moody caucuses and talk
of the good old days and perhaps envy the slower creatures which still
drew their breath—such as that breath was—in the simple freedom of
the mud. I know that at this very moment there are excursion steamers
plying, as a certain wit says, from the foot of Main Street to the
Blessed Islands of the Pacific, where the air never dreams of biting,
where love lies for ever in the green shade, and where the noble
savage runs wild and beautiful and good—but not too good—on the lovely
land or gives himself ecstatically to the tumbling surf. And I have
just been reading of a time in the eighteenth century—most amusing of
centuries—when curiosity and sentiment and a kind of cosmic libido
among Englishmen focussed themselves upon the State of Nature and found
what they were looking for, first abroad in many quarters of the earth
and then at home, where proper English explorations end.
Little Britain, as Chauncey B. Tinker shows in a solid and jolly
monograph called “Nature’s Simple Plan,” was waking up. During the
sixties of the century Commodore Byron had come back with yarns about
the giant Patagonians; Wallis had seen Tahiti and named it after the
idyllic George III; Cartwright, having lived for years in Labrador, had
brought live Eskimos to London; Bruce had studied deepest Abyssinia,
and Captain Cook had begun to plough the most distant seas with many a
home-keeping eye upon him. Not only did the poets hymn the delights of
new paradises, but the more or less sober men of science took up the
ardent chorus. Lord Monboddo claimed that the Golden Age still lingered
in the South Seas and tickled all the wags with his talk about men with
tails and about the cousinship of men and monkeys. Luxury was under
fire: Dr. Johnson defended it, but Goldsmith wept to see it devastating
villages and consequently to
see the rural virtues leave the land.
Rousseau, orator and laureate of the primitive, called the attention of
mankind to Corsica, where liberty still survived and where it might be
possible for some wise man to teach the people how to preserve it. He
himself began a constitution for the island, though he never finished
it. Half Europe looked on encouragingly—but idly—while Pasquale Paoli
led his Corsican revolt against Genoa. Boswell, visiting Rousseau
while the philosopher was about his constitutional task, formed such
a passion for the hardy island that he ventured into it, talked with
Paoli, carried back to England a Corsican costume, and now and then
conspicuously wore it while he tried to arouse the interest of
Englishmen at large in the heroic little revolution. When Genoa gave
Corsica to France and England let France keep it the lovers of liberty
had a dreadful shock.
They need not have been quite so shocked if they had viewed the matter
more in its political and less in its literary aspect. But most of
the partisans of Corsica were men, or amateurs, of letters, and they
believed its defeat meant the loss to the world of that outburst of
song which they had made up their minds they would hear as soon as
Corsica should be free. Without liberty, they thought, there would be
no lyres. At the very moment when countless peasants of England, unable
or unwilling to endure the hard conditions of life in that tight realm,
were taking themselves off in droves to the colonies, the poets of the
country, partly stifled by a smug atmosphere and a tame tradition,
sent their imaginations voyaging into lands and ages more hospitable
to their profession. In _The Progress of Poetry_ Gray talked about the
behaviour of the Muse in Lapland and Chile; in _The Bard_ he set forth
the figure of an ancient minstrel whose rage lifts him to the point
of prophecy. And whereas Gray had created a primitive singer, James
Macpherson created a primitive song and filled the world with the wails
of Ossian. The dream of a State of Nature had borne at least that much
fruit.
But there was more to come. Romance had sown its seeds broadcast and
the mood of the race kept on writhing in parturition. Gray had brooded
over the mute Miltons of Stoke Poges churchyard; the generation which
saw his poem did what it could to see that no such persons should be
mute. With the somewhat famous Stephen Duck the Poetical Thresher
must stand, Professor Tinker points out, Mary Collier the Poetical
Washerwoman and Henry Jones the Poetical Bricklayer and James Woodhouse
the Poetical Shoemaker and Ann Yearsley the Poetical Milkwoman—all
of them being wonders whom the fashionable exploited to this or that
extent. Poetically, it happened, they were unanimously fizzles; and
yet they paved a kind of way for a later peasant who was a genius. The
discoverers of Robert Burns the Poetical Ploughman must at first have
thought that here was merely another Duck. When they had caught him,
indeed, they did not know what to do with him, and it is a question
whether they helped or hurt him. He did not come, somehow, in the garb
and gesture they had expected. Where were the high strains of the
primitive bard? Where were the abstract declamations about liberty?
Where the novel “numbers” in which he might be expected to dress his
“natural” thought? Where the noble suavity? Where, I am afraid they
asked in some chagrin, was the meek gratitude that even an inspired
peasant should feel towards those who had unearthed him? So far as they
could see, this was a man very much like other men.
Well, give them credit for what they did, whatever it was. They had
been hunting for a simple, holy plan of nature, and they had looked
for it in the wrong places. They had looked into dim pasts and
into distant islands about which they knew too little to be able to
distinguish between nature and art. In their ignorance they had taken
to pleasant guesses, to pretty sentiments, to poetical inventions.
At least, however, they had longed for something simpler than the
muddled universe they lived in; and at last they must some of them have
understood that there is no State of Nature and there never has been
and there never will be. Among the turbulence of things the mind, each
mind, must discover and conquer its own simple plan.
Professor Tinker’s book, besides being a pungent footnote to human
history, is allegory. Its hero, which was a generation, set out to find
simplicity. It travelled into very far countries and was disappointed,
but in the end it turned back and learned that simplicity begins at
home.
MOCHA DICK
Moby Dick, the hugest character in American fiction, had his original
in a whale which Melville’s biographer does not even mention but
which must have been known to Moby Dick’s. The name of the creature,
according to the principal authority, was Mocha Dick, and he was first
seen and attacked near the island of Mocha about 1810. For years he
resisted capture. “Numerous boats are known to have been shattered by
his immense flukes,” wrote J. N. Reynolds a dozen years before _Moby
Dick_ was published, “or ground to pieces in the crash of his powerful
jaws; and on one occasion it is said that he came off victorious from
a conflict with the crews of three English whalers, striking fiercely
at the last of the retreating boats at the moment it was rising from
the water in its hoist up to the ship’s davits.... From the period of
Dick’s first appearance his celebrity continued to increase, until his
name seemed naturally to mingle with the salutations which whalemen
were in the habit of exchanging in their encounters upon the broad
Pacific, the customary interrogatories almost always closing with ‘Any
news from Mocha Dick?’”
No wonder that “nearly every whaling captain who rounded Cape Horn, if
he possessed any professional ambition, or valued himself on his skill
in subduing the monarch of the seas, would lay his vessel along the
coast, in the hope of having an opportunity to try the muscle of this
doughty champion, who was never known to shun opponents.” No wonder,
either, that his fame went so far. “From the effect of age, or more
probably from a freak of nature, ... he was white as wool. Instead
of projecting his spout obliquely forward, and puffing with a short,
convulsive effort, as usual with his species, he flung the water from
his nose in a lofty, perpendicular, expanded volume, at regular and
somewhat distant intervals; its expulsion producing a continuous roar,
like that of vapour struggling from the safety-valve of a powerful
steam engine. Viewed from a distance, the practised eye of the sailor
only could decide that the moving mass which constituted this enormous
animal was not a white cloud sailing along the horizon.”
In time Mocha Dick’s back came to be serried with irons which had
pierced his mighty hide and his wake was tangled with yards of line
which he had broken in his rush or which had been cut off by desperate
whalers to keep their boats from being dragged under water. Caution,
too, entered that head with the barnacles clustered hard and tight upon
it; he learned to present his back to the harpooner and to guard his
“small” and the softer area under his fins. But with so many allies
against him he finally met his fate. Attacked in his last battle, off
the coast of Chile, he charged the boat at the first encounter and
frightened the harpooner into missing him and then, on being accused
of fear, of plunging into the water to drown himself for chagrin. Later
Mocha Dick, who had been keeping out of sight though suspected to be
still near the ship, was angered at the attack which the whalers made
upon a calf and its mother and again charged them. This time the first
mate made a surer stroke and, after a furious struggle, got his victim.
“Mocha Dick was the longest whale I ever looked upon. He measured
more than seventy feet from his noodle to the tips of his flukes; and
yielded one hundred barrels of clear oil, with a proportionate quantity
of ‘head-matter.’”
This material underwent a great alchemy in Melville’s imagination.
He would not let his Moby Dick be mortal, but carried him unscathed
through his adventures and at the end sent him off, victorious,
shouldering the troubled waves with his ancient head. Nor would
Melville allow the war against Moby Dick to be the plain war of the
hunter and the hunted, but gave his hunter the excuse to chase the
whale that the whale had chased him and had bitten off his leg. Nor
would Melville allow the story to be conducted on the simple plane
of mere adventure, but lifted it up into the regions of allegory and
symbolism, added the fury of hot passions, drenched it with poetry and
dark mystery, lighted it with irony and satire and comic vividness and
vast laughter. It was his genius which made the story of Moby Dick
important. Because it is important, the neglected story of Mocha Dick
deserves at least its little moment.
FOLK-LORE IN KENTUCKY
The first and second members of the firm of Mencken, Nathan, and God
must have shouted for joy when they first opened—as doubtless they have
opened—the compilation lately made of nearly four thousand “Kentucky
Superstitions,” in the volume of that name. _The American Credo_ had
only about an eighth as many vulgar errors, for all its satiric malice.
And satiric malice can find nothing in the national mind more primitive
than some of the beliefs here set forth. For instance: “To cure a child
of thrush, let a stallion snort into the child’s face”; “Gunpowder is
given to women to facilitate childbirth”; “Catch a toad, put it under
a rock, and let it starve to death. After it has dried thoroughly,
beat it into a powder, and sprinkle this powder on the person whom you
wish to fall in love with you.” Doctrines like these recall medieval
medicine, aboriginal witchcraft, the jungle, and the cave. And yet side
by side with them are recent absurdities as new as the news: “Billikins
bring good luck”; “It is well for an aviator to wear a lady’s stocking
around his neck”; “It brings bad luck for the last of three people to
use a lighted match in smoking.” The idol has become a Billikin, and
the knight wearing his lady’s favour has taken to the air, but these
are superficial accidents. Otherwise it looks as if the folk changes
not much more rapidly than mountains grow.
The compilers of _Kentucky Superstitions_ have in a fashion perfectly
impartial printed all they have found (with some expurgations) without
distinction of age or novelty, universality or locality. “The good
die young,” according to one of the citations; and “No news is a sign
of good news.” Such notions belong to folk-lore everywhere. Others
among these Kentucky superstitions are more specific: “If once you
get your feet wet in the Cumberland River, you will always return
to the Kentucky Mountains”; “It is firmly believed by the people of
Leslie County, a mountain county, that President McKinley’s name was
written by spiders in their webs as a prophecy of his death.” There are
ceremonies for May Day that point to the rites of Flora: “To become
beautiful, wash your face in dew before sunrise on May Day”; there are
quaint fancies about Christmas old-style, such as that “At midnight of
Old Christmas the elders bloom”; there are sortileges and incantations,
divinations and auguries, weather wisdom, dream-lore, signs of the moon
and of the zodiac, witchcraft and hoodoos. The most numerous of all are
concerned with animals, birds, insects, and reptiles; then follow cures
and preventives, divinations concerning love (most of them practised by
girls), weather, household and domestic life, the human body, in the
order named.
The total result is an amazing palimpsest, as if each new generation
had written its lore upon an original manuscript, partly erasing the
old symbols and partly employing them to make new symbols; altering the
old text or adapting it; adding new illustrations or comments; bringing
in fresh material that flatly contradicts the old. One superstition
says that “If you take the next to the last biscuit on the plate, you
will never marry”; but another, that in such an event “you will have a
handsome husband.” A merely mnemonic change may alter the whole point
of a saying: “A whistling woman or a crowing hen never comes to a very
good end”; but “A woman that whistles, or a hen that crows, has her
way wherever she goes.” Most of these superstitions are, of course,
held by few people, and many by no one very seriously. The more highly
educated sections of the state, while represented by a large number of
superstitions, report rather trivial ones, for the reason that they
are of little importance in the life of these sections. The mountain
whites and the Negroes cherish a larger number of superstitions, which
are more barbarous but obviously more authentic than those of the
lowland whites. “If you drink water out of a stranger’s shoe,” they
say in the mountains, “your sore throat will be cured.” This is not so
casual an invention as the notion that “It brings bad luck to see an
empty street-car.” “If you curse God and shoot at the sun, you will be
able to see the wind,” according to mountain doctrine: according to the
Louisville Negroes, “If you cut your eyelashes, you will be able to see
the wind.”
Such a compilation is genuinely valuable to the anthropologist, the
folk-lorist, the historian, the teacher, but to none of them more
so than to the student of imaginative literature or, indeed, to the
creative writer. Every folk-superstition alluded to in _Tom Sawyer_
and _Huckleberry Finn_ is here recorded. Other superstitions in this
collection it is easy to remember from various novels and tales of
Kentucky life. And yet to read the book with such matters in mind is
to realize how little the riches of our folk-lore have been utilized.
Consider Thomas Hardy, working away like a profound mole among the
buried lores and memories of Wessex, and then consider the so much
more trivial, the sentimental use that literary Kentuckians have made
of their materials. The ordinary attitude of American men of letters
is that inasmuch as we have a briefer history on this continent than
Europeans have on theirs, there is hardly an excuse for investigating
our own folk-lore and employing it. But, of course, the folk here is
as old as the folk there, in any but a political or geographical, and
therefore superficial, sense. It has, too, customs and superstitions
developed on the native soil. Here is an extraordinarily important
field for the imaginative writer to plough. We write of our smart sets,
tinkling and cosmopolitan; we write of our Indians and Negroes, looking
for essentially native material there; but between these extremes,
except in the highly circumscribed “local colour” stories, we have done
little to sound the life and opinions of our folk as regards anything
deeper than their outward manners. In _Kentucky Superstitions_ we
have a document to help us in going deeper. There is the germ of such
another story as Hardy’s _The Withered Arm_ in the Kentucky belief that
“You may remove birth-marks by rubbing them with the hand of a corpse.”
There are poetry and drama both in one superstition from the mountains:
“A maid says: ‘If I’m not going to marry anybody, knock, Death, knock!’
If she hears nothing, she says: ‘If I’m going to marry a young man,
whistle, bird whistle!’ If her appeal remains unanswered, she says: ‘If
I’m going to marry an old man, hoot, owl, hoot!’”
PAUL BUNYAN GOES WEST
It was idle, of course, to expect that Paul Bunyan would continue to be
satisfied with the home in the neighbourhood of the Great Lakes where
that mighty man seems to have reached his majority. Call it invented,
if you will; true it is that the epic Paul sprang from the imaginations
of many lumbermen competing at evening fires for the honour of having
told the biggest whopper about the career of Paul the logger’s darling.
But a ghost of such heroic vigour is not lightly raised; Paul’s fame
has widened out, by word of mouth alone till very lately, to a thousand
camps in many forests; in that sense he has gone himself, for the man
lives, like your true epic hero or your politician, by the breath of
reputation. Now, as the first chapbook about Paul records for us, he
has moved west and done magnificent new deeds under the sunset. The
chapbook is called _Paul Bunyan Comes West_ and it should make all
lovers of Americana and all collectors of chapbooks snatch for it. What
are copies of the first _Faustbuch_ fetching now?
I admit that Paul Bunyan still lacks his Marlowe and his Goethe, but I
contend that he is a fellow at least as well worth keeping an eye on as
Bevis of Southampton or Guy of Warwick or any of the Seven Sleepers
of Ephesus or the Seven Champions of Christendom, to say nothing of
Jack the Beanstalk-climber or Jack the Giant-killer. In this first book
about him Paul Bunyan has fallen into the hands of a certain Yank,
still living somewhere in the valley of the Willamette and devoting the
hours he can spare from the neglect of his professional duties as camp
cook to the elaboration of tales about Paul. Art thus makes an advance
upon nature; in real life the mighty Bunyan grows almost by repartee,
as when one logger tells one tall tale about his hero and another tries
to go him rather better and some third attempts to outdo both; but the
epic has its rights. Robin Hood moved from separate ballads to a ballad
sequence, and the wily Ulysses from epic lays to the grand march of
Homer himself. So Paul Bunyan starts up.
It will be a shame if, like George Peele and some others, he ends in
a jestbook and never flies further. Exaggeration such as that in some
of the stories presses upon genius. His pick drags behind him on his
way West and the first thing he knows he has cut out the Colorado
Canyon; he blows the new dinner horn and down fall three square miles
of timber; with his Blue Ox to help him he brings an Alaskan glacier
down to the States and digs out Puget Sound for the Government; he
raises corn in Kansas enormous enough to suck the Mississippi dry and
interfere with navigation; he builds a hotel so high that he has “the
last seven stories put on hinges so’s they could be swung back for
to let the moon go by”; his ax “had a wove grass handle and Paul he
jist swung it round in a circle an’ cut all the trees within reach to
wunst.” He has a daughter Teenie of the same heroic breed, an adequate
dog named Elmer, and the Blue Ox, Babe, “a ’normous critter—forty
ax-handles an’ a plug o’ Star terbacker between the eyes.”
The question what the American imagination will make of Paul Bunyan is
a curious one. Will it make him another Hercules or another Munchausen?
Or will it extravagantly think itself rich enough to afford to neglect
him?
THE WORST AMERICAN BOOK
Now and then an honest superlative is both a luxury and a necessity,
and I take real pleasure in declaring my confident belief that the
worst book in American literature is one which was written by Milo
Erwin of Williamson County, Illinois, and published at Marion, the
county seat, in 1876 under the title _The Bloody Vendetta_. Though
intended to be an authoritative county history, it concerns itself
chiefly with a feud which had lately flourished in the neighbourhood
between the Bulliner and Henderson clans, with their allies. Only
ruthless quotation can do the work justice.
“On the morning of December 12, 1873, George Bulliner started to
Carbondale, on horseback. The sun was standing against the murkey haze
of the east, red and sullen, like a great drop of blood. The pearly,
vapour-like sails dotted the sky, and covered the more delicately
sculptured clouds with their alabaster sides. The great oak trees
lifted their parapets to the morning sky, and spangled the earth with
shadows. The voiceless winds swept the earth with sublime resignation
lawless through the leafless woods, and a melancholy breeze stirred the
dead ferns and droping rushes. A cold-scented sleuth-hound had followed
the tracks of Bulliner remorselessly. This morning two of them, with
stealthy movement, took their position near the Jackson county line in
an old tree top, on the ground. There, planted on the spot, their ears
drank in every sound that broke the air, mouth half open, ears, eyes,
soul, all directed up the road to catch, if possible, each passing
object.... Bulliner came riding along and one of the assassins fired
on him; only two or three of the balls took effect in his hip and leg;
but his horse wheeled and threw his back to the assassins, who fired
on him again, and forty-four buck-shot took effect in his back, and he
fell to the earth. The assassins then escaped. Bulliner was soon found
and carried to the nearest house, and his sons notified, but after
desperate riding John reached the place only in time to hear his father
say, ‘Turn me over and let me die.’ He did so, and George Bulliner
escaped from the cruelties of earth to the charities of Heaven.”
A few months later David Bulliner, another son, was shot, also from
ambush. "David was carried home by a host of friends, who had gathered
at the gate. At the gate he asked ‘Is it a dream? is it a dream?’ and
each broken word gurgled up out of the red fountain of his life. His
brothers were standing around, their faces sealed with the death seal
of inexpressible suffering, and their hearts hushed in the pulsation
of woes. His mother lay trembling against the casement, her heart
throbbing with its burden of sorrow, while the issues of life or death
were being waged in the soul of her son. His sisters were standing
in the vortex of misery, praying for the dreadful slaughter to be
stopped, and suing for happiness with the sunny side of life in view....
“This was the worst murder of them all. No other equals it in
heinousness. You may combine corruption, debauchery and all the forms
of degredation known to inventive genius of man, and cord them together
with strings drawn from maiden’s hearts, and paint the scene in human
blood bespangled with broken vows and seared consciences, and still it
will redden Heaven with revengeful blush and leave you blacken hell to
make it equal.”
Thomas Russell, an ally of the Hendersons, was brought to trial for
the murder. Here are sketches of certain persons present at the trial:
“One of The People’s witnesses was Miss Amanda Bulliner ... about
sixteen years old. She took the stand with a helpless and confiding
look, her voice was a little softened by emotion, her rose-left lips
curled delicately, but soon her clear, translucent eye lit up with a
brilliant lustre. The shadows of misery seemed to depart. Her soft,
round cheek dimpled and dimpled again, like the play [of?] waters in
the sun, in the lovely and touch [touching?] assembly of charms. Her
features were of classic regularity. Her presence seemed to shadow
the place. So pure, so truthful, so charming her actions, that all
pronounced her a most gentle, and most noble creature. Though never
a jewelled wreath may span the curls of her beautiful brow, yet,
happiness may as well erect its shrine around her, for Nature can no
further gifts bestow.... One of the witnesses was the famous Sarah
Stocks [John Bulliner and Russell had both courted her], who swore to
threats. Her contour is not as faultless as a Greek goddess, but her
form and features had caught some new grace from the times. Her eye was
as clear and cold as a stalactite of Capri. She wore a sigh, and there
is something in a sigh for everybody. But I will throw no shadow over
her, for life in her is as mysterious as in the rich belle; and when
the golden chariot of destiny rolls through the skies, she may take her
seat among the great.”
Yet all these charms arrayed against Russell could not convict him. He
was acquitted, and, though pursued by the Bulliners, got away. Fate,
however, tangled him in the snare of Milo Erwin’s prophecy. “If Thomas
Russell is guilty, it may be that the almighty sovereignty, love, was
too strong for him, and envy seized him, and John and not Davis [David]
was the one he wanted to kill. If he could have wrung this lady from
John Bulliner, and unstained her life, I doubt not if the shadow of
his own would not have again darkened it; and inasmuch as he did not,
it may be that the arrowy words wrung by the hand of passion from each
of them were destined to hang quivering in memory’s core till they
festered and bled, making an irremedial wound, shaped in the red-hot
forge of jealousy, and cured only by the exultant feelings of gratified
revenge. These little bubbles of joy that jet up from the tumultuous
waters of passion, soon evaporate, and leave but mingled dross and
shame to fester and canker the mind of its possessor, who ever after
leads a life of infamy and its accompanying wretchedness. Whoever
committed the murders is the guiltiest of them all. It was he who with
death first knocked at our portals, and with buck and ball opened the
flood gates of misery, and let murder rush with living tide upon our
people. And today his life is ruined, his hopes blasted, and sooner or
later he will come to sorrow, shame and beggary, and have the scorpion
thongs of conscience lashing his guilty bosom as he promenades the
sidewalks of destiny.”
Consider the plight of the Bulliner boys, thus denied justice by the
law. “Must they be driven to the bushes by this hard bargain, or be
placed for a lifetime at the mercy of assassins, with their hearts
enclosed in palisades of sorrow? They saw their father and brother shot
down by vandal hands, and their own lives threatened by fiends stalking
in midnight darkness.... What could they do but pick up the gauntlet
hurled into their faces, and give vent to anger long pent up?...
Embassadors were at an end. Words of menace and expostulation were
exchanged for the thunders of the shot gun.... The god of the bushes
had been invoked.”
This is enough to justify my claim for Milo Erwin’s book, but I must
cite one anti-climax from the sequel touching Marshall Crain, who
joined the vendetta and was later hanged for murder. “Soon after,
Marsh’s wife entered his cell, and he took her on his knees and
embraced her.... Her eyes glittered with a metallic gleam, and the soft
curl of her lips was lost in a quiver of despair. Her’s was a deadly
pallor. It was the incandescence, and not the flame of passion, that
was burning in her inmost being. She would burst out into shrieks of
great anguish, and then subside into sobs. She dreaded the heaving of
her own bosom—dreaded the future and the world. If she could have died
she would have been happy and holy in the hope of mercy. To be torn
from a love made holier by past sorrows, was an insult to the attribute
of Heaven. Marsh was in his sock feet, with a pair of jeans pants on,
and a ragged jeans coat. He looked care-worn, and shed a few tears.”
AT THE SATURDAY CLUB
Few clubs have had a more distinguished membership than the Saturday
Club of Boston, not even Dr. Johnson’s, to which the Saturday often
compared itself in its golden days. It had Boston’s best learning,
best poetry, best wit, best philanthropy, best statesmanship, and only
lacked Boston’s best fashion because it had no great fondness for the
Cotton Whigs of Beacon Street. Its origins were predominantly literary.
As early as 1836 there had been a sort of informal organization which
held a “Symposium” now and then, and which Emerson enjoyed for all
that it was very clerical and that he said its seal might well be “two
porcupines meeting with all their spines erect.” This organization
languished, however, and Emerson—who here appears as very hungry
for companions—and his friend Samuel Gray Ward planned in 1849 a
Town-and-Country Club. This also languished under that name; but in
the fifties two clubs grew up, existing side by side and more or
less interlocking. The Magazine or Atlantic Club, purely literary,
gradually faded, or rather gave way to the _Atlantic_ dinners; the
Saturday Club, for which Ward had suggested a less didactic membership
and monthly dinners, was kept alive, clearly in no small part by
Horatio Woodman’s special talent as high steward of the feasts, held
on the last Saturday of each month except July, August, and September.
Some such civilizing influence must have been needed in a group among
whom Woodman’s introduction of mushrooms as a food seemed a startling
novelty. According to Emerson’s journal Dwight was chosen to experiment
first with the unfamiliar delicacy, and he amiably reported: “It tastes
like a roof of a house.”
Something more than the fact that the publishers have made Edward
Waldo Emerson’s _The Early Years of the Saturday Club_ somewhat in
the likeness of _The Education of Henry Adams_ keeps reminding one of
that other book, though Adams, nipping critic of orthodox Boston, is
nowhere mentioned. The horribly dreary Boston world of Adams’s second
chapter assuredly did not exist for the Saturday men, a body so festive
that when Agassiz returned from Brazil in the summer of 1866, Lowell,
Holmes, Fields, and the rest “joined hands, made a ring, and danced
around him like a lot of boys, while Mr. Emerson stood apart, his face
radiant.” In fact, no more genial chronicle of New England in negligee
has been written. The Pundits were a long way from the Frog Pond
when the Adirondack Club, most of its members then or later members
of the Saturday Club as well, went to its first camp in 1858. Holmes
would not leave the daily felicities of the Hub, and Longfellow, also
no frontiersman, gave as excuse for staying at home the report that
Emerson was taking a gun, though in fact Emerson never touched man or
beast with a bullet. But Emerson was enchanted with the transcendental
paradise which he found in the wilderness; and Lowell, younger and
robuster, climbed a pine tree over fourteen feet in girth and sixty
feet to the lowest branch.
Still, the Club dined more than it picnicked. While it unfortunately
had no systematic Boswell, not a few of its good sayings are brought
together in the record, particularly as taken down by Emerson in his
omnivorous journal. There is Tom Appleton’s praise of horse-chestnuts:
“I have carried this one in my pocket these ten years, and in all
that time have had no touch of rheumatism. Indeed, its action is
retrospective, for I never had rheumatism before.” And the same wit
commented as follows upon a sad defect in the economy of nature:
“Canvasback ducks eat the wild celery; and the common black duck, if
it ate the wild celery, is just as good, only, damn ’em, they won’t
eat it.” Once William Morris Hunt was asked if he would like to see
a Japanese vase or cup which Norton had just received. “Like to see
it?” Hunt exclaimed. “By God, it’s one of those damned ultimate
things.” Felton, kept from a meeting by illness, “horizontally but ever
cordially” wrote that he was “living on a pleasant variety of porridge
and paregoric.” Holmes, referring to the immense vitality of Agassiz,
said: “I cannot help thinking what a feast the cannibals would have
if they boiled him.” Judge Hoar declared he valued the Book of Common
Prayer for its special recognition of his native town: “O God who art
the Author of good and the lover of Concord.” Holmes, no beauty,
declared: “I have always considered my face a convenience rather than
an ornament.” Longfellow, vexed at seeing plover on the table in
May, 1858, “proclaimed aloud my disgust at seeing the game laws thus
violated. If anybody wants to break a law, let him break the Fugitive
Slave Law.” Whittier complained to Lowell over some delay in connection
with a poem sent to the _Atlantic_: “Let me hear from thee some way.
If thee fail to do this, I shall turn thee out of thy professor’s
chair, by virtue of my new office of overseer.” To commentators who
tamper with Shakespeare’s text, Lowell felt “inclined to apply the
quadrisyllablic name of the brother of Agis, King of Sparta”; Felton
identified the brother of Agis as Eudamidas.
A characteristic conversation between Holmes and Hawthorne goes thus:
“Holmes said quickly ‘I wish you would come to the Club oftener.’ ‘I
should like to,’ said Hawthorne, ‘but I can’t drink.’ ‘Neither can
I.’ ‘Well, but I can’t eat.’ ‘Nevertheless, we should like to see
you.’ ‘But I can’t talk, either.’” Actually, Hawthorne hardly ever
spoke at the Club, preferring to sit next to Emerson or Longfellow
and to let the other speak for him. Once, however, he spoke to
amusing effect. Anthony Trollope, a guest, had roared out that only
England produced good peaches or grapes. Lowell reports: “I appealed
to Hawthorne, who sat opposite. His face mantled and trembled for a
moment with some droll fancy, as one sees bubbles rise and send off
rings in still water when a turtle stirs at the bottom, and then he
said: ‘I asked an Englishman once who was praising their peaches to
describe to me what he meant by a peach, and he described something
very like a cucumber.’” A brilliant letter from the elder Henry James
still further visualizes Hawthorne at the Club: “He has the look all
the time, to one who doesn’t know him, of a rogue who suddenly finds
himself in a company of detectives. But in spite of his rusticity, I
felt a sympathy for him amounting to anguish.... It was so pathetic
to see him, contented, sprawling Concord owl that he was and always
has been, brought blindfold into the brilliant daylight, and expected
to wink and be lively like any little dapper Tommy Titmouse or Jenny
Wren. How he buried his eyes in his plate, and ate with a voracity that
no person should dare to ask him a question ... eating his dinner and
doing absolutely nothing but that, and then going home to his Concord
den to fall on his knees and ask his Heavenly Father why it was that an
owl couldn’t remain an owl, and not be forced into the diversions of a
canary.”
Some of these things were not actually uttered at the Club, but they
pretty accurately represented its conversation. An abridgment would
have to be almost as long as the book to do full justice to its wealth
of material; it would have to repeat countless literary incidents: such
as the fact that Lowell for a long time tried to find out something
of Forceythe Willson, only to discover him living in Cambridge within
two hundred yards of Elmwood; that E. J. Reed, the Chief Constructor of
the British Navy, thought Longfellow had written “the finest poem on
shipbuilding that ever was or probably ever will be written”; and that
one of the members said Emerson’s “good word about a man’s character is
like being knighted on the field of battle.” No one, indeed, emerges
from the history in such noble proportions or in such an agreeable
light as Emerson. Nor is this due to any partiality of his son. The
truth plainly appears that even in the company of Agassiz and Hoar
and Holmes and James and Lowell and Norton, Emerson was the spiritual
master of the Club. Sumner, on the other hand, though heartily
praised in a good many pages, simply refuses to seem attractive. He
had the vices of manner for which Boston is too famous—its egotism,
its insolence, its complacency. The early history of the Saturday
Club goes far toward proving that fame unjust. Its members at least
can be called inhuman only in the sense that they were honourable,
conscientious, busy, temperate, and kind much beyond the common run
of men conspicuously talented. And they lacked neither mirth nor
fellowship. Why are their books on the whole not as good as themselves?
Did the thinness of the product of most of them come from Puritan
inhibitions? The history of the Saturday Club unconsciously emphasizes
a discrepancy, for the men who wrote the gentle, pure, noble, but not
too rich or varied classics of New England were themselves men of
pretty full blood and high hearts.
THE SILVER AGE OF OUR LITERATURE
To what is due the fact, which can hardly be denied, that the great
older magazines no longer dominate the fields of journalism and
literature in the United States as they once did? Many answers may be
given, and all have been given by observers of varying predilections:
that the tide of proletarian vulgarity has risen; that the levels of
art have fallen; that public taste demands more violent stimulants;
that the non-English elements of our national composition are asserting
themselves as never before; that a sharper critical temper has invaded
the atmosphere; that the Bolsheviki are among us, red and raging;
that our democracy has just begun to live. Each of these is but
explanation from one angle. Speaking as historian, I see in that shift
of leadership the end of an epoch, the period from about 1870 to 1910
which may be called the Silver Age of our literature.
It is no essential contradiction of that title that during the era
there throve such glorious barbarians as Whitman and Mark Twain; they
came from a class and a region which flowered later than the Shantung
of the nation, the New England of the image-breaking Emerson, the
philosophical hired man Thoreau, the transcendental critic and artist
Hawthorne, the fighting Quaker Whittier, the many-tongued translator
Longfellow, the jolly Cantabrigian Lowell, the festive Bostonian
Holmes. Nor is it a contradiction that at the end of the century came
such a rollicking philosopher as William James or such a silken ironist
as George Santayana, or such naturalistic young men as Stephen Crane
and Frank Norris and Jack London, or such a multitudinous cynic and
sentimentalist as O. Henry; or even that during the era lived those
three terrible infants of the Adams family, Charles Francis 2d, Henry,
and Brooks, to flay the era and all its inherited conceptions. The
background and the prevailing colour of the age were still silver. It
was then that reminiscence began to enrich the texture of our literary
past. Most of the epigones—Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Frank B.
Sanborn, for instance—devoted a good part of their lives to writing
about the lives of the protagonists. Holmes, of the greater line,
wrote memoirs of Emerson and Motley; Howells, later but greater too,
gave us dozens of precious memorial essays. Our classics settled into
comfortable positions to wait till some revolution should spill them
out. Washington as chief national hero gave way to Lincoln, whom the
Silver Age softened and sweetened until his angularities hardly showed.
The old flaming ardours about manifest destiny considerably cooled,
not so much because the national humility was stronger but because
there was a stronger sense of decorum current. Poetry was dainty and
smooth and rounded as never before in this country. The short story
after many experiments straitened itself to a few prevailing types of
a distinctly native form and substance. The novel, with Howells as
choragus, even subdued Mark Twain from the extravagance of his earlier
burlesques to the suaver annals of Huckleberry Finn and Joan of Arc;
and it taught the drama that reality had a place on the stage as well
as in books. Our essayists grew lighter and gayer, not without a
good deal of orthodoxy and a gusto which somehow seemed to have been
trained upon sweet cider, but still mellow and kindly and urbane.
After the faun Thoreau, the sage John Burroughs! Scholarship grew to
Alexandrian proportions; dissertations showed their heads. At the best,
these silver qualities all tended towards art; at the worst they bred
dilettantism and languor.
Now such unaccustomed qualities as dilettantism and languor in the
midst of a nation which had plunged into furious industrial competition
and was beginning to cherish imperialistic schemes without quite
realizing what it was about, hardly belonged to the setting. In the
Silver Age this discrepancy had seemed not to matter very greatly, for
the reason that the opinion of the day held that after all a fairly
decisive cleavage exists between art and affairs. The trouble began
when a more strenuous generation arose and demanded that literature
perform a larger, or at any rate a different, share in the national
work. It is a hot and impatient generation, not tolerant of its elders.
It damns the gentle tradition by calling it genteel. It suspects it
of lukewarmness, accuses it of prudery, and believes it to have been
verbose and trivial. The older magazines were essentially the children
of that Silver Age which is now under indictment. The question seems to
be whether they can renounce their old virtues, now become sins, and
acquire the new virtues, which certainly would have been sins in their
proper day.
JOHN BURROUGHS
John Burroughs long seemed old to many of his readers, but measured
by anything but mere linear years he was older than he seemed to most
of them. Measured, for instance, by reference to the fame of Whitman,
Burroughs went back to the days when he was a clerk in the Treasury,
and Whitman, then likewise a Government clerk, was dismissed from his
post by a Secretary of the Interior who now survives in the memory
of his nation chiefly by reason of this episode. Burroughs wrote the
earliest book ever written about his greatest friend, and for more
than half a century he neither forgot nor long neglected to praise
Whitman’s large sanity and seerlike wisdom. Measured by the reputation
of Thoreau, of whom it was easy for the most casual to perceive that
Burroughs was in some fashion a disciple, he went back so far that he
had been seventeen when _Walden_ came into the world, and he began
himself to write about birds and green fields before Thoreau died.
And measured by a line even longer than the fame of either Whitman
or Thoreau, Burroughs went back so nearly to the origins of American
literature that he saw the Catskills, of which he was to remain the
particular singer and annalist, within three or four years after
Irving, heretofore acquainted with them only from the deck of a Hudson
River boat, had first visited the neighbourhood already sacred to the
quite mythical but also immortal spook of Rip Van Winkle.
To mention Irving is to suggest a comparison actually more fruitful
than that which some thousands of pens have recently made between
Burroughs and Thoreau. The bland old man whose beard was latterly as
well known in these States as that of Bryant in its day, had hardly
anything in common, except an affectionate concern for external
nature, with the dry, hard, vivid Yankee who acted out his anarchistic
principles on the shores of Walden Pond and fiercely proclaimed
the duty of civil disobedience to all men who might find the world
travelling along false paths. Burroughs had in him too much of the milk
of American kindness to thrive in a comparison with an authentic genius
like Thoreau, who might not be half the naturalist that Burroughs
was but was twice the poet and a dozen times the pungent critic of
human life. Nor, in another direction, does Burroughs appear to much
advantage by comparison with Whitman, who had a cosmic reach and a
prophetic lift and thrust that never visited Slabsides. Rather, for
all Burroughs employed a modern idiom and took to the country instead
of staying snugly in town, he points back to the earlier tradition
of smoothness and urbane kindness and level optimism which Irving
practised. Did Burroughs not but a few weeks before his death take
a mild exception to the “naked realism” of Howells? In that phrase
a very old school speaks. Perhaps we shall in the long run remember
best that Burroughs annually made one of an odd triumvirate of campers
which included besides him Thomas A. Edison and Henry Ford. Let us,
for the sake of seeing the group in its true perspective, call Mr.
Ford the village blacksmith who happens to have the fortunate touch
of Midas; let us call Mr. Edison the village inventor who happens
to have the touch of a mechanical Merlin; let us call Burroughs the
village naturalist who to his native instincts adds the winning gift of
language and makes himself heard, as his friends do by their machines,
outside the village.
BROAD HOUSE AND NARROW HOUSE
There is a broad house of life and there is a narrow house of life.
What marks the broad house is not so much the breadth of the walls
within which its people live nor the height of the deeds they do or of
the passions they experience; rather it is the insulation—as it may
be called—which protects their nerves against the agony of too rough
contact. Custom is the larger part of this insulation. In the broad
house men and women grow unconcerned about irritating things with which
they are familiar. The minor imbecilities of their relatives and their
companions do not pain them greatly. They do not tug at leashes or
kick against pricks or cry over spilt milk or strain at gnats. They
can live in the presence of their own thoughts without discomfort. And
when custom is not enough to keep the insulation stout, change of scene
or mood or occupation mends it. In the broad house memory is not very
long. When the occupants begin to feel stifled they stir about and soon
forget. When they begin to brood they expose themselves to laughter
or excitement and pull themselves together. When they have been bored
beyond a certain point they turn to a new job and get lost in it. From
too much thinking they take refuge in sleep or liquor.
In the narrow house things are different. Custom does less there, being
an insulation which does not fit the sorer nerves. Instead, it rasps
them. They wince and keep on wincing more and more at the burden and
the pressure of mere existence. Lying so near the surface they suffer
from the proximity of other nerves in other people and nearly as much
from the proximity of other people without nerves. Men and women who
are so tender first feel irritation at minor imbecilities, then pain,
then anger, and may go on to madness. The contempt which familiarity
breeds is in them an active passion—not, as in the broad house, a
comfortable ease or even entertainment. Their memories are too long
and too alive for that. Each scratch leaves a scar and the scar smarts
for ever. Imagination sets in with the neurotic when he feels stifled
or begins to brood or grows bored or finds himself deep in thought.
It carries him, as the imagination can, beyond the actual occasion,
calling up future or conjectural irritations or injuries and bringing
them to wound the nerves, which are already twitching. Retreating from
the unendurable frontiers of his experience he lives tautly at the
centre, his scrutiny fixed inward. He may hate what he sees there or he
may love it.
Narcissus, the youth who loved himself until he died of his passion
and was transformed by the gods into a flower, is in some respects the
very symbol of the neurotic, whose fate it is to resemble a flower
in fragility if not always in beauty or in fragrance. With a happy
accuracy Evelyn Scott, who called her first novel _The Narrow House_,
calls her second one _Narcissus_. Her creative faculty has allowed
itself to seem submerged by the troubled flood of life which it chooses
to represent. It does not laugh, it is rarely ironical or pitiful, it
suggests no methods of escape. For the time being it is preoccupied
with the inhabitants of the narrow house and with their careers. It
accepts their own sense that the doors are locked and the windows
tight and that there is nothing to do but to run round and round in
the sticky atmosphere. By thus accepting her neurotics Mrs. Scott
intensifies her art: she brings her characters upon a cramped stage
under a glaring light; she crowds them into a cage which they think a
trap and there inspects their struggles. With the fewest reticences
she sets them forth, making stroke after stroke of the subtlest
penetration, shearing away disguises and subterfuges till she reaches
the red quick. What she finds in all of them is essentially narcism.
What further intensifies this biting art is that, narrowed to the
narrow house and concentrated upon self-love, it anatomizes and
subdivides self-love with minute analysis. The plight of practically
all the characters in _Narcissus_ has the complication that they are
in love and are therefore habitually on edge as they might not be in
calmer circumstances. But love does not liberate them. Julia turns from
her dullish husband first to one lover and then to another without any
genuine escape from the inversion of her desire. Her husband cannot
take her as seriously as she demands; he too is bound up in his own
hard self. Her first lover, Allen, has no passion more expansive than
a sort of sadistic cruelty; her second, Hurst, none more generous than
a sort of masochistic modesty. Paul, the adolescent tortured by the
longing to realize himself, flinches at the knowledge of his awkward
movements towards freedom. Each of them, looking for love as Narcissus
did in his pool, sees in lover or beloved something not entirely
expected: sees, that is, another face and not a mere reflection of
the looker’s. Here lies the particular ground of their irritations.
Whereas the lovers of the broad house reach eagerly out for qualities
unlike their own, the Narcissuses of the narrow house cannot endure
unlikeness. And as there are no absolute likenesses in nature, they
must be disappointed and must agonize.
One of the commonest devices in fiction is to show a narrow house with
its inhabitants invaded and purged by a large breath from the broad
house. Mrs. Scott denies herself this compromise. Her method, no less
than her reading of life, compels her. She marshals her characters in
a fugue of pain and exasperation. They have no career, in her novel,
besides that of their passions; they do not appear at work or at play
or in relaxed moments. When they try to speak lightly they speak
stiffly. She never forgets the tense business in hand. That business,
obviously, is not to make a general transcript of human existence, but
to fit certain materials into a certain pattern in order to make a
work of art. The pattern in this case does not equal the materials.
Though the novel has form and proportion, its whole is partly hidden
by the brilliance of its parts, which glitter with fiendish thrusts of
observation delivered in a style of cruel curtness and vividness. The
paths of the characters through the action seem tangled in a multitude
of sensations. It is the tone which gives unity: the tone of passionate
frustration sustained by art till the familiar sanities fade out of
sight and the narrow house has shut out the sun, the wind, the soil,
and the healing hands of time. Narcissus, heedless of the broad house,
strikes through the skin to the nerves; it finds fierce atavisms,
stubborn wilfulnesses, inexplicable perversities, rages, attacks,
retreats in the forest, in the morass, in the jungle of the mind.
GOOD NAMES
There are good names and good names. Seedsmen use them to catch young
gardeners; lovers woo with them; maps, full of them, become a sweet
adventure to the eye; men and women who always wear them please the
moralists. And since they play their part in life, they have a part in
novels. Consider the course of English fiction, from Defoe to Thomas
Hardy, with its many names and fashions of names.
Defoe, who lacked few other realistic arts, seldom named a character.
In his anonymous underworld brisk Moll Flanders knows even her husbands
better by their callings than by their names. Colonel Jacque speaks of
only his fourth wife as if she had been christened. Roxana’s Europe has
hardly more souls with names than Crusoe’s island. Some of the titles
seem to come from the stage, such as Count Cog, “an eminent gamester,”
Alderman Stiffrump, and Christallina the virgin; but Defoe was,
perhaps, too much a democrat to care much for names for their own sake.
So, it seems, was Richardson, though not in the same way; he named his
people, but nearly all in plain and simple terms, as became a blunt
tradesman: Andrews, Jones, Williams, Adams, Jenkins, Tomlinson. Pamela,
indeed, can tell her children the fates of Coquetilla, Prudiana,
Profusiana, Prudentia, yet the lady herself becomes Mrs. B—— without
a backward sigh. At times, however, Richardson grew less neutral and
wrote character neatly into proper nouns. Mrs. Jewkes could be only a
wicked conspirator, Polly Barlow a faithful maid, Dorcas Wykes full of
guile and arts, Sally Godfrey a woman of spirit. Could the Harlowes be
people of no breeding, or Miss Harriet Byron? And there are syllables
that breathe gentility: Lovelace, Grandison, Sir Rowland Meredith, Sir
Harry Beauchamp, Sir Hargrove Pollexfen, Bart.
Fielding, turned novelist, remembered the old comedies of his nonage
and christened half his younger children with a pun in his cheek.
This is not true of the most important persons, as a rule. Tom Jones,
Amelia Booth, Sophia Western, Joseph Andrews, Parson Adams are nearly
all as straight from life as Jonathan Wild himself, though Adams and
Andrews do come through Richardson. In the second rank fall Mr. Booby,
the importunate Slipslop, Heartfree and Allworthy, pictures of virtue,
Partridge, whose name has both a poaching and pastoral air, Blifil,
Thwackum, Square, and the unrelenting Mrs. Honour. And still further
from the centre of his stories belong those men and women whom Fielding
has too little time to portray at length but whom he dockets with names
very appropriate to them. One thinks of Peter Pounce, usurer-general,
the incompatible Tow-wouses, pig-keeping Trulliber, Tom Suckbribe
the venal tipstaff, Mrs. Grave-airs the curious prude, Varnish and
Scratch, painters, Arsenic and Dosewell, physicians, Fireblood,
Blueskin, Strongbow, rogues all, Betty Pippin and Tom Freckle, rustics
body and soul; and then one remembers that such names are less frequent
in _Tom Jones_ and _Amelia_, by Mr. Justice Fielding, than in _Joseph
Andrews_ and _Jonathan Wild_, written while the old Harry Fielding was
not so far away.
For Smollett, alliteration was almost a necessity when it came to
heroes: Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Ferdinand Fathom. In this
and other artifices he outdid his age in general, for he had high
spirits and he did not fret over little realisms. His sailors, Tom
Bowling, Oakum, Jack Rattlin, Tommy Clewline, Lieutenant Hatchway,
Pipes, and Commodore Hawser Trunnion, are sailors, that and nothing
more. Roger Potion is a druggist, Comfit Colocynth a doctor, Obadiah
Goosecap a Quaker, Captain Weazel a coward, Sir Giles Squirrel and Sir
Timothy Thicket country gentlemen, Timothy Crabshaw, Dolly Cowslip, and
Hodge Dolt, children of the greenest fields. Unsuccessful playwright
that he was, Smollett could call an actor Mr. Bellower and a manager
Mr. Vandal with a clear conscience and doubtless with some delight. He
named a gentleman commoner of Christ Church Mr. George Prankley and he
put the smack of Cambria in Cadwallader Crabtree, deaf and caustic.
After Smollett, whom Sterne called Smelfungus, there were many to
practise the punning trick, which lasted, even after Jane Austen,
whose names are nature itself, into Scott, who is a world of many
natures. History kept him close to fact with a large part of his
characters, but he could invent names, when he liked, as rich and
varied as his plots. He was most fantastic, perhaps, with his
clergymen: witness John Halftext the curate, canny Peter Poundtext,
and the Episcopalian Mr. Cuffcushion; witness the two Presbyterian
Nehemiahs, surnamed Solsgrace and Holdenough; witness martyred Richard
Rumbleberry, covenanting Gabriel Kettledrummle, and the most violent
Habakkuk Mucklewrath. Pedants, too, are broadly named in Scott, even
to the extent of Jonathan Oldbuck, Jedidiah Cleishbotham, Cuthbert
Clutterbuck, Chrystal Croftangry, and Dryasdust, who has fathered a
tribe. With some others, besides parsons, the calling gives the titles,
as in Tom Alibi the lawyer, Raredrench the druggist, Saddletree, who
sells harness, and Timothy Thimblewaite, tailor. Such names are for
the sake of comedy, and comedy, with Scott, generally plays with
humble life. But he had names for the virtuous poor as well: Caleb
Balderstone, David Deans, Dandy Dinmont, and on through the alphabet.
Where Scott was best, however, seems to have been at naming those
gentlemen and ladies who bring chivalry to his books. What certain
signs of birth in the bare surnames Waverley, Redgauntlet, Glendenning,
Mannering, Osbaldistone! Could Diana Vernon have changed names with
Alice Lambskin, or Lucy Ashton with Meg Dods, or Rose Bradwardine with
devoted Phoebe Mayflower even? Cosmo Conyne Bradwardine has not the
same savour as Saunders Broadfoot; Quentin Durward is not of a rank
with Giles Gosling. Scott could and did devise fit syllables for every
order and station of life.
Dickens had no such pretty courtliness, but spoke brusquely of Lady
Coldveal and Lady Jemima Bilberry and Lady Scadgers, Lord Snigsworth,
Sir Mulberry Hawk, Sir Morbury Dedlock, Lord Decimus Tite Barnacle. But
so he spoke of all the world, making names for every creature like a
new comic Adam in a new topsy-turvy paradise. All the power of Smollett
passed into him to be enlarged to quite new proportions. Smollett
could call a bumpkin Hodge Dolt, but only Dickens could invent the
gigantic titles of Nicodemus Boffin, Luke Honeythunder the unlaughing
philanthropist, the Pardiggles, rapaciously benevolent, or Chevy Slyme.
Smollett, indeed, might have called an undertaker Mould, as Dickens
did, a visiting nobleman Count Smorltork, a schoolmaster Bradley
Headstone, a canting preacher Melchisedech Howler; might even have
named Nicholas Nickleby, Betsy Prig, Sally Brass, Miss Mowcher, Mr.
Pugstyles, or Zephaniah Scadder; but Smollett could never have attained
to Gradgrind, the Cheerybles, Mrs. Kidgerbury the oldest charwoman in
Kentish town, Uriah Heep, Septimus Crisparkle, Daniel Quilp, Pecksniff,
Podsnap, or the firm of Chicksey, Veneering, and Stobbles. It is a
quality and glory of Dickens that he could caricature words as he did
people. Micawber and Skimpole and Pickwick are caricatures no more
than the syllables which name them. Humorous hybrids of language, they
sometimes seem to suggest parent words, as if Scrooge were the child
of _screw_ and _gouge_, and Wardle of _warden_ and _waddle_, but they
commonly elude analysis and seem new words for new persons.
Thackeray took certain advantages, not only in the linguistic
gargoyles of his burlesques but in the wild words he coined from
Germany and Ireland. In English, however, he was rather nearer nature
and directories. He has his Lord Bishop of Bullocksmithy and the
Archbishop of Mealypotatoes, indeed, as well as their humbler brethren
of the black cloth, Charles Honeyman the unctuous, Silas Hornblower,
missionary, Thomas Tufton Hunt, tufthunter, Felix Rabbits the curate
with fourteen daughters, dull Thomas Tusher, and Lemuel Whey, “full of
the milk and water of human kindness.” The Earl of Bagwig can, without
leaving the Thackerayan world, consort with the Earl of Bareacres, Lord
Trampleton, who walks on his dancing partners, Lord Tapeworm, Lord
Brandyball, Lord Castlemouldy, Lord Deuceace, or with Sir Huddlestone
Fuddlestone and Sir Giles Beanfield. Jack Snaffle keeps a livery
stable, the Hawbucks are parvenus, George Marrowfat, snob, eats peas
with his knife, Poseidon Hicks is a drysalter with a turn for classical
poetry, Tom Eaves gossips, Clarence Bulbul has travelled in the Orient,
Squire Ballance holds the scales of justice. But these are fun and
ornament. Foreigners aside, Thackeray chose to be more real than
Dickens, in this matter, though not commonplace. He leaned a little
towards distinction and genteel dignity in his families: the Gaunts,
Warringtons, Sedleys, Newcomes, Osbornes, Kews, Amorys, Claverings,
Crawleys, Esmonds. The Kickleburys, after all, are snobs, and the
Hoggartys are Irish.
Meredith the iridescent does not flaunt such colour in his names
as one might expect. He has his puns, or nearly: persuasive Lady
Blandish, Farmer Broadmead, Squire Uploft of Fallowfield, Mr. Parsley
the curate, Isabella Current, prim and kindly and not young virgin,
Mabel Sweetwinter, too fair to be always a shepherdess, Sir Willoughby
Patterne the world’s model, the swooping Lord Mountfalcon, the blazing
Countess of Cressett, Gower Woodseer the poet studied from R. L. S.
Meredith has his plain souls: Tobias Winch, of course a green grocer,
the immemorial Mrs. Berry, Farmer Blaize, Jonathan Eccles, and Anthony
Hackbut. He has his fantastics: Sir Meeson Corby, Lord Pitscrew, Lord
Lockrace, Lady Denewdney. But for the most part it is not comedy which
names Meredith’s characters, but gentility. Lucy Desborough, Dahlia
Fleming, Letitia Dale, Clara Middleton, are dewy and fragrant, as are
Carinthia Jane Kirby, Clara Forey, Janet Ilchester, Rose Jocelyn, Diana
Antonia Merion. And the gentlemen mount from Evan Harrington, son of
a tailor, and Blackburn Tuckham, through Nevil Beauchamp, Normanton
Hipperdon, naturally a tory, and the Hon. Everard Romfrey to those
superb fathers Sir Austin Absworthy Bearne Feverel, Bart., and Mr.
Augustus Fitz-George Frederick William Richmond Guelph Roy, who made
princes laugh.
Gentlemen and ladies are not the special care of Thomas Hardy, and
yet he has done well by them: witness Elfride Swancourt, passionate,
thwarted Eustacia Vye, the Earl of Uplandtowers, Barbara Grebe, who
married him, Swithin St. Cleeve, merely a curate’s son, and Lady
Viviette Constantine, who loved him. One of Hardy’s tricks is to
match with stout Saxon words others that come from Greece or Rome or
Judea, as Cytherea Aldclyffe, Damon Wildeve, Aeneas Manston, Bathsheba
Everdene. The effect is like that of the ruins of Roman Britain which
always stand behind the scene to lend it depth and tragic atmosphere.
And the Saxon words have hints in them. Caroline Aspent is a trembling,
uncertain creature, like Thomas Leaf; Donald Farfrae is a wanderer from
his own heath; Gabriel Oak will not bend; Sue Bridehead carries into
middle age the shock and fear of the bride. Philology, ready servant of
art, makes the difference between Smollett’s stolid rustics and such
as Anne Garland, Fancy Day, Tabitha Lark, Phyllis Grove, Diggory Venn,
Giles Winterbourne, and Thomasin Yeobright. Philology, too, makes the
comedy more subtle in comic names which Shakespeare could not better:
Laban Tall, Joseph Poorgrass, Cain Ball, whose mother had misheard the
scripture, Anthony Cripplestraw, the distressed lovers Suke Damson
and Tim Tangs, Tony Kytes, who wooed too many, and Unity Sallet, who
declined him. Not even to speak of his dialect and place names, which
are unspeakably rich, Thomas Hardy’s well-christened children are
enough to show that his knowledge goes to the roots of the language.
Of all these, smaller novelists being left out for brevity, which have
been conscious of the full savour and perfume of their syllables?
What traits come out in the choice? What had the age of each of them
to do with it? Who saw the sober hues in Defoe and Richardson, the
candid puns of Fielding and Smollett, the large fecundity of Scott,
the hugeness and exuberance of Dickens, the polyglot mockeries of
Thackeray, the flash and fragrance of Meredith, the deep, native colour
of Thomas Hardy? Words, words, words!
PICTURES OF THE PAST
When we read or think about the past, what images actually form in
our minds? Take the average American, for instance. He probably has
two sets of such images and no more. One is of bunchy persons in
preposterous garments—something between a toga and a burnoose—moving
over the garish landscape of a Sunday-school card. The other is of
heroic gentlemen in the blue-and-buff of the American Revolution, with
powdered wigs and elaborate manners, either engaging in battle or else
dancing minuets with the furbelowed dames who, like their gallants,
abound in the illustrations of the old-fashioned history books. As the
blue-and-buff habiliments represent actually a very brief period of
history, and those of the Sunday-school pictures none at all, this is
but a scanty wardrobe for the imagination. And in matters not quite
so sartorial, things are little better. There are probably only a few
persons alive anywhere who can sit down and assemble anything like an
accurate mental picture of a street in Athens or Rome or Florence or
Paris or London or Weimar or Philadelphia, even in the days which mean
most and are consequently most studied in the history of those cities.
We have generally but the vaguest notions of the physiognomy of the
ancients, or even of the remoter moderns. We cannot actually visualize
them at their meals, at their work, at their relaxations.
If this is the case now, when we possess libraries of archaeology to
draw upon if we care to, what was the case before illustrated books had
become common? To judge by the paintings of the Middle Ages, the past
then was visualized as merely like the present in its outward details.
On the Elizabethan stage the Greeks and Romans were set forth pretty
much after the fashions contemporary with the audiences. And even far
down through the eighteenth century this custom prevailed. Garrick
acted Lear in breeches and wig and nobody minded. It is certain that,
while many in his audience would have known better if they had been
questioned, they did not experience the shock that we should feel.
Lear belonged to an age about which the eighteenth century readers
knew little. They were, however, hardly more exact in their images of
the Greek and Roman past. Examine, for instance, the illustrations of
Pope’s Homer, completed a little over two hundred years ago. It was
issued in a magnificent folio with elaborate plates. The frontispiece
to the second volume, “Troja cum Locis pertingentibus,” aims to
exhibit the plains of Troy, with the sea in the foreground and at the
back the city itself. It is true that the ships have slightly Grecian
prows, and the warriors on the plains fight with bows and spears and
shields and chariots. But the citadel towers above the surrounding
houses suspiciously as does St. Paul’s above the City of London. The
landscape rolls across the page with the soft curves of England. Here
and there are English hedgerows, and the brooks and mountains, so far
as they have any vraisemblance at all, are of English make. Quaint and
incredible! But what chance, after all, had the illustrator for knowing
better? Not for a generation did the excavations begin at Herculaneum
and Pompeii or Winckelmann begin the great career which taught the
world to think of the ancients very much in their true proportions,
though not in their true colours or movements. The fact of the matter
is that the Renaissance and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
spiritual great-grandchildren of Greece and Rome and worshippers of
their ancestors, did not really know what their ancestors looked like.
Yet in those ages a great and truthful art grew out of that worship.
The moral seems to be that we lean very little upon definite images
in our imagination of the past. The vaguest images will do for most
people. Even when we deal with more recent periods and have striking
illustrations to help us out, such as Hogarth’s for his age, or those
of Phiz for Dickens and Ainsworth, or those of the too-much-neglected
F. O. C. Darley for the old American frontier, we probably depend less
upon them than we think. We create our favoured personages from history
or fiction in our own image. Let any reader of an historical novel,
even of so incomparably vivid a series of pictures as _Salammbô_,
examine himself as he reads, and the chances are he will find that,
having seized upon a few mental or moral traits of the characters,
he follows them by this scent and hardly notices their outward
appearances again, any more than he carefully visualizes the landscape,
much pleasure as he may take from its presence in the action. Such
an examination is likely to show, on simple psychological grounds,
that Lessing has not been wholly superseded in his doctrine of the
true provinces of poetry and art. It is likely also to make us ask
whether the Imagists, exquisite lyrics and vivid episodes as they have
produced, can ever by images alone build up any great or sustained
illusion of events really transacted in something like a real world.
THE GREAT LABORATORY
Modern poets can never praise Greek poetry too much; modern
philosophers, Greek philosophy; modern orators, Greek oratory. But
the shift away from ancient studies as the basis of all education has
tended to leave such employments in the hands of the conservative, or
at least of those whose imaginations live largely on the past, and
has thus contributed to the notion that practical affairs—economy
and polity—are not properly to be studied in Greek literature. To
the extent that knowledge has been multiplied since Aristotle’s
day, this is, of course, true. We cannot look to the Greeks for
information which they did not have, and it would be most un-Greek to
neglect superior sources of knowledge merely on the ground that other
sources were better established in an old tradition. Undoubtedly this
alienation of men of affairs from ancient studies has been due less
to the deficiencies of the Greeks than to the deficiencies of the
teachers of Greek, who, so long holding a vested interest in education
everywhere, permitted themselves, like other vested interests, to fall
into sluggish routine and tyranny, a pitiless round of grammar without
sense and of words without life. The reaction against their monopoly
has been, like most reactions so forced, excessive. In our discovery
that we had overvalued the scanty amount of grammar and prosody
which unwilling students actually carried away from their compulsory
struggles with Greek, with the mere letter of its language without any
deeper spirit or meaning, many have come to undervalue the Greek world
as a laboratory in which, better than anywhere else in history, we may
study human beings vividly and rationally engaged in the conduct of
human life.
No other laboratory can ever compare with this in importance for us.
Racial or national jealousies do not enter into our calculations
here. We have no more right as Americans or Britons or Frenchmen or
Germans to be jealous of the primacy of Greece in such matters than
to be jealous of the multiplication tables because they happen to
enjoy a certain strategic position with regard to other facts. It
is true that we are no longer allowed the luxury of believing, with
the eighteenth century, for instance, that in looking back to Greece
we are looking at the very fathers of the race, who “discovered not
devised” the rules of nature, which until then there had been no men
to find out. All the more, however, are the Greeks instructive to us
when we realize that they, too, had to free themselves from immensely
ancient bonds of tradition and superstition. What clear reason did
for them, ceaselessly revolving and inquiring, it has at least a
chance to do for us, if we want it to. Study the Greeks and you are
likely to stop hugging prejudices, or taking pride in them. Study the
Greeks, and a hundred petty reverences fall away in a light as lucid
as the Athenian atmosphere. Our own day’s work concerns us every day,
as it did the Greeks, but, as a good maxim says, the man who knows
only his business does not know his business. Why will some one not
speak out and say what events have lately shown—that a knowledge of
history and literature is indispensable in affairs, and that only
those men, barring a genius or two, have shown any conspicuous talent
for leadership in our terrible decade who have known something about
history and literature? It is true. If we were beasts, we should not
especially need history; we should have instinct. But having, as men,
exchanged instinct for reason, we need as much of the past as we can
get—remembering that every man is free, thanks to the multiplication of
records, to choose his own past; that is, to choose that part of human
history between him and Adam which to him is worth most. The Middle
Ages are good to illustrate devotion; the Renaissance, passionate
individualism; the rise of the Americas, civilized men pitted against
virgin nature. But Greece surpasses them all not only in reasonableness
but also in completeness and sharpness of outline. She is the best
microcosm, with the scale best adjusted to our vision. She is the best
crystal, most purely revealing the vast matters therein pictured; she
is the best laboratory, and under the simplest and loveliest conditions
exhibits the processes of life which ordinarily appear confused and
vexed.
The claim frequently made, that we cannot find in Greek experience
enough that is analogous with our problems, because Greece had
so simple and circumscribed an existence and lived in a world so
little complicated by machinery, means no more than to say that in
a laboratory generations of guinea-pigs succeed one another with a
lower mortality than in Guinean jungles, or that diamonds may be made
out of their raw materials without the geological convulsions of
which in nature they are admirable but accidental byproducts. That
is what laboratories are for, to exhibit simply the behaviour of
complex things. And the parallel between laboratories for matter and
laboratories for mind has more than a fanciful value. Life in Greece
was reduced to the simple facts of the human intelligence, leaning
less than anywhere else upon mere tradition, upon mere materials, upon
mere superfluities. Much as we have grown in range of knowledge by our
study of the physical universe, and little as we can afford to reject
any wisdom founded upon it, we need often to remember that in practice
the centre of our universe is still the mind of man, that for the most
part we have to conduct our affairs as if really the Ptolemaic system
were good astronomy, as it is very fair politics and morals. The study
of the material universe and all sorts of highly specialized studies
tend to draw us away from these central facts, as pedants and casuists
are continually being drawn away from fundamental principles. The
principles, however, are still fundamental.
VI. LONG ROADS
THE COSMIC IRONIES
The Cosmic Ironies sat on a bright island in the midst of the Galaxy,
holding a caucus over the universe’s affairs. Boötes flamed, Orion
glowed, Scorpio glittered, Ursa Major sulked, Eridanus sprawled and
yawned, Canis Major and Canis Minor eyed each other distrustfully,
Centaurus and Pegasus huddled close and whispered at intervals.
Boötes, it appeared, had just been speaking, and there were still
reverberations of his great voice in the ether, while the glare of
difference or assent with which he had been greeted by his fellows
played upon him from every quarter and illuminated the enormous scene,
now red with fire, now blue with space, now opaline with shifting moods
of the Ironies.
Into this circle, before one of those present had had time to break the
meditative silence, came a brisk invader in burning yellow who walked
round the seated group and was obviously chagrined to find that no
place had been kept for him.
“I say, brothers of the universe,” he began, “it seems to me this
committee has been closed long enough. It needs new blood. One of you
move over and let me in.”
If any heard him, at least there was no sign. The reverberations of
Boötes’s words travelled farther away and the light from his listeners
gradually ceased playing upon him; but the charmed occasion was not
apparently disturbed.
“Well, it doesn’t seem very hospitable. I sent word I was coming, and
look how you receive me. And, as they say on the Earth, I think it
isn’t representative. The Solar System has a right to be here and a
right to be heard. Perhaps we are a little younger than some of you,
but that excuse won’t hold for ever. Youth, as they say on Jupiter, is
no crime.”
Somewhere a star exploded and threw a momentary brilliance over the
caucus, so that the gems on the brows of the Ironies sparkled as if
they were actually Betelgeux and Aldebaran and Spica and Arcturus and
Capella and Sirius and Altair. None of the brooding figures started at
the explosion, however, much less at the accusations of the Solar Irony.
“Have I got to repeat all I told you before about the ironic work I
and my helpers have done in the Solar System? I must say I am tired
of telling it. You ought not to close your minds the way you do to new
inventions and discoveries. The first thing you know you’ll all be so
out of date that this radical doctrine about the moral government of
the world will spread and ruin all your schemes. If you don’t wake up
pretty soon it won’t matter whether you ever wake.”
From one of the Ironies a red glow and from another a blue flame and
from yet another a white radiance swept around the circle as if looking
to see who would speak next, but, settling upon no one, they mingled
in the centre and there rested quietly, splashing the pavement with
gorgeous colours.
“Take what’s going on in Mars today if you want to test my right
to sit in this conclave. I have bilked the Martians into thinking
that their everlasting messages to Earth are understood. So those
philanthropists have wasted a mountain of treasure making instruments
to carry their pompous flashes, and they babble wisdom into the void—as
if their wisdom actually mattered or as if Earth would or could pay any
attention to it if it ever reached there! You strike me as glum enough,
but if you could only see the prophets and poets crowding around that
transmitter and pouring all they have and are into it, and then going
back to their business with the thick smirk of a duty performed—if you
could see that you would laugh a month. That’s what I’ve done in the
Solar System: I’ve trained the higher beings to prattle wisdom till
they are hoarse and then not to practise it any more than if they were
deaf and had never heard of it.”
It may have been some vibration of sympathy which ran through the
Ironies or it may have been merely deeper thoughts stirring them to
resume the huge discourse.
“For that matter, take Earth alone as evidence of what I can do when I
try. The scrawny race of bipeds who think they manage Earth have come
up from the slime by the exercise of their wits, trampling the slower
races under their heels for thousands of years to make a bare living,
and yet, now they have explored all the paths of Earth and dug up its
riches and learned to cultivate its fruits, they are acting as if they
couldn’t imagine any better future than to take the path back again
into the slime. But do they listen to even the petty wisdom a few of
them have got at? No, they strut about as they always have, blown up
with pride that they are human and not like the other beasts which they
have driven into the wilds or else made into slaves. Man, proud man!
You should see him. And I have taught him both to be all this and to
admire himself. Now why can’t I come into the caucus?”
Surely something was stirring in the moods of the Ironies. Ursa Major,
who had been almost grey in his sullenness, darted awakened glances
around the circle, coruscating, it seemed, with thought. Orion sent out
an iridescent gleam, fanned by quicker and quicker breath. The whole
place grew so bright that each ironic countenance shone in comparison
with the waves of the Galaxy which beat upon the island.
“But I have done more than all that to win my seat. Those same bipeds,
who have been clever enough to map and weigh the stars, have made
them gods in their own scrawny image and have laid out heavens on the
plan of their desires. And I have taught them to lay the blame of
their follies on their gods and to call the consequences their just
punishment; I have taught them, moreover, to endure whatever comes,
no matter how much the fault of men, in the confidence that they will
shortly die and be born again into a world which will make good their
wrongs and agonies; I have, in fact, persuaded that tiny race, on its
mortal star, that it is the heart and heir and purpose and crown of the
universe.”
Now for the first time the great silence was broken by bursts of
laughter which shook the zenith and perturbed the Galaxy. From each
of the giant faces leaped rays of fearful brilliance, revolving like
wheels, interlacing in an ineffable net of light. The Cosmic Ironies
rocked in their seats with mirth, smote one another on knee and
shoulder, tossed their giant arms in paroxysms of delight, and shouted
genial invitations to the candidate.
The Solar Irony stepped forward and sat down between Canis Major and
Canis Minor, who unhesitantly made room for him.
JUSTICE OR MELODRAMA?
Notions about justice, in the heads of dull or selfish or angry men,
have done so much harm that I sometimes despairingly inquire whether
it would not be better if the very principle itself had never been
discovered. Dull men follow paths which they have been told are just
until they ruin them with ruts. Selfish men are just only to themselves
with a complacency denied to those who have no doctrine to sustain
them. Angry men vindicate their rages and unreason by pointing to the
primitive sense—father of revenge and vendetta—from which we with
so much difficulty free ourselves in the long progress toward civil
conditions. If justice, according to an enthusiastic hyperbole of
Emerson’s, is the rhyme of things, then the vulgar conceptions of it
are no more than tinkling couplets. A blow struck must rhyme instanter
with a blow received; an eye rhymes with an eye, a tooth with a
tooth, burning with burning, and strife with strife. Or, to allude to
another mode of literature, justice in its primitive aspects is merely
melodrama, wherein virtue is always rewarded with prosperity and evil
is always fatally punished.
The mood which followed the war was the mood of melodrama, on a larger
scale, perhaps, than ever before in human history. Germany, seen
solely as a bully and a brute, had been beaten at her own foul game;
therefore let her be joyously annihilated, while the gallery gods who
filled the theatre of the world almost from top to bottom hooted and
gloried at the justice weighed out to her. What made it harder to
contend against the uproar was that the uproar at first thought seemed
justifiable. Nemesis never looks like so righteous a doctor as when he
feeds a poisoner his own poison. But I always suspect first thoughts.
For civilization, after all, is but the substitution for first thoughts
of second or third or hundredth thoughts, reason supplanting passion,
and polity guiding anarchic instinct. Melodrama is what commonly
occurs to us first, in the form of those too neat or too hasty moral
conclusions to which we are all more or less prone to jump when we
allow ourselves to indulge too amply the sense of primitive justice
which we share with all the savages of our ancestry.
Men do not, of course, jump too hastily to conclusions merely by reason
of their ruder sense of justice. There is involved also a certain
obscure instinct toward art, toward rounding out and completing and
closing a chapter. Paradox cheerfully says, not forgetting Oscar Wilde,
that affairs in 1918-1920 were trying to conform to dramaturgy, that
the war was trying to shape itself a good fifth act. But paradox is not
needed, for few things are clearer than that centuries of literature
were then indeed influencing the world’s attitude toward the peace and
the treaty. Obscurely, again let it be emphasized, men had felt that
they were witnessing, or acting, the vastest of dramas. The curtain,
for them, rose sharply with the Austrian ultimatum and the invasion of
Belgium. The sinking of the _Lusitania_, say, was the villain’s fatal
blunder, which brought against him a fresh, powerful enemy. The odds
then deserting him, he hazarded all on a single blow, lost, and came
down in a fearful wreck with the spent world falling about him. Was
it not due and natural that there should descend another curtain to
hide the bloody stage, and that the lights should flash sharply on,
and that the spectators should turn away, contented though somewhat
subdued, to eat, drink, and make love, possibly commenting upon the
actors and their art? Of course the peace on which the curtain fell had
to be dramatically satisfying, the villain dead or prostrate and the
hero in the ascendant. The sense of form must be served, the taste for
melodramatic finality gratified. If the piece ended happily for the
victors, justice had been done.
Justice or melodrama? It is only in art, and that not always the
truest, that things come out so right. History has no beginning, no
middle, no end, but moves everlastingly in some dim direction of which
mankind at least does not know the secret. Poets and dramatists may
honourably pilfer from history such materials as they require, and may
of course work them into forms more compact or conclusive than life
itself. But history cannot be handled so masterfully, for one can
never be sure at what point in it one is standing. When the _Lusitania_
went down, no one knew whether her loss opened the first act or the
last. When America entered the war no one could be sure whether the
fourth act of five or of fifty acts had ended. And no one could say
that the peace absolutely concluded the drama. The business of the
treaty was not to close the war but to open the peace, not to avenge
those who died but to preserve those who still lived, not to crown
events past with poetic justice, which belongs to the technique of
melodrama, but to prepare for events to come by trusting to the higher
and humaner justice which is less concerned with righting old wrongs
than with trying to foresee and prevent new wrongs—the justice, let me
call it, of plain prose.
THE CORRUPTION OF COMFORT
Someone lately asked me by what image I would represent the age that
began with the use of steam and ended with the World War. I was not
sure that any age had actually ended then, but an image did occur to
me. It came from the story of the fisherman in the _Thousand Nights and
a Night_ who let the Jinni out of the jar and then found him fierce and
uncontrollable. But upon second thought I saw that the image was not
accurate: the fisherman by using his wits did persuade the spirit back
into his copper prison and made a bargain with him which saved the man
from death. Then another image occurred to me. It was that of a crew
of pirates who chanced upon an unexpected island and there found such
incalculable treasure that they went mad with their good fortune, raged
up and down the island, extended their fury to a whole archipelago, and
at last wound up in a debauch of robbery and slaughter. But neither did
this image satisfy me: the people of the last age were not criminals to
start with; they were as virtuous as those of any other age on—or not
on—record. A better image would be that of some tribe of anthropoids
who, after long subsisting on a more or less difficult plane of life,
suddenly got hold of a hundred tricks and secrets which gave them
power over earth, air, fire, and water, endowing them with human riches
without human discipline.
And yet it is less than fair to make this distinction between men
and their lagging cousins of the tree-tops. Not monkeys too abruptly
promoted to be men but men come too abruptly into wealth—that is the
analogy. Thinking in terms of the long history of the race, look what
happened. Never before, to put it broadly, had men been warm enough
except in those regions of the earth where the sun warmed them; now
they dug up mountains of coal and drew off rivers of oil and fashioned
whole atmospheres of gas for fuel; and with these, besides warming
themselves, they made such tools and weapons as had not even been
dreamed of. Never before, still to put it broadly, had men had food
enough; now they discovered how to coax unprecedented crops out of the
soil and how to breed new armies of beasts to be devoured and how to
catch what the depths of forests and oceans had hitherto denied them
and how to create all sorts of novel foods by manufacture. Never before
had men, except in dangerous, communal migrations, moved much from
their native places; now they made vehicles and ships to go like the
wind and in time took to the wind itself for their trafficking until
restless tides of human life flowed here and there over the surface
of the earth as if men and nations had no such things as homes. Long
naked, they covered themselves with preposterous garments and strutted
up and down; long hungry, they stuffed their bellies till they were
sick with surfeit; long home-bound, they ran wild till they were lost.
Meanwhile their minds could not keep pace with this enormous increase
of their goods. Their ancestors, it may be guessed, had taken centuries
to accustom themselves to the use of fire and of the successive
machines they had invented; they had taken centuries to find out those
parts of the earth they knew. In the last age such processes were
accelerated to a dash and a scramble. Things poured in upon minds and
overwhelmed them. The century in retrospect has a bewildered look,
like a baby at a circus: some art which it could hardly comprehend had
brought a universe into a tumbling, twisting focus and the century’s
head ached with the effort to find a meaning in it. To vertigo
succeeded what was probably an actual madness of the race—but a madness
with the least possible method. Everywhere a wild activity occupied
the faculties of those who followed affairs; and—though the finest
intelligences dissented—among the sophists who encouraged such activity
was an even greater frenzy of bewilderment.
Call what happened the corruption of comfort. Men had so long been cold
and starved and isolated that they clutched at the chance to wrest
every advantage from stubborn nature, and they clutched it faster than
they could put it to sound uses. Discomfort was one of the penalties
of their madness. Nerves in the loud din of the new age learned new
agonies. Confusions grew and desperations thrived till the whole earth
was on a tension out of which anything might develop. What did develop
was the war which wrapped the world in horror. To ascribe it to this
or that particular cause or guilt is to see it in terms too small. The
race of man was gorged and could not digest its meal; it was drunk and
could not control its motions; it was mad and could not understand its
course. In the long run the observer of mankind must look back upon the
last age as one of the several moments in the history of the race when
it has blundered into mania and cruelly hurt itself before it could
find its head again.
The race is very old and it doubtless has many aeons still to live
before the cooling of the planet sends it back to its aboriginal state.
Nor is there use or sense in imagining that the race might return to
the simpler conditions that existed before the era of superfluous
things. Things are. Hope must be seen to lie in the direction of their
assimilation by the human mind. Here and there different prophets
insist that the mind is on the verge of some discovery as large as
Columbus’s which will establish a truer balance between it and the
matter which now outweighs it. But why put trust in miracles? The
madness of the age is more likely to subside gradually, under quiet
counsels, as the debauch wears out its influence. Slowly the mind must
lift its faith in itself up above its temporary obsession with mere
things. It must learn to hold and master all of them which are capable
of being held and mastered. It must become accustomed to live among
the rest of them as a mountaineer becomes accustomed to live in the
city streets after the panic which overcomes him when first he enters
them from the high silences and pure outlooks of his native hills.
“GOD IS NOT DEAD OF OLD AGE”
It is a pleasant literary speculation, and not without its moral
bearings, to inquire whether the disorder and discontent and chaos
now ominous among men may not arise from the fact that the world has
grown too large for us to manage—like a lion cub which can no longer
be played with or like another mechanical monster which indeed we
have created but which refuses to do our bidding any longer. A man of
affairs, a financier certainly not acclimated to philosophic despair
and certainly accustomed to govern wherever his hand turns, lately
ventured such an explanation. It may be, he said, that there is no
solution which our reason can arrive at. We look about us for authentic
leaders and see none; we pass in review hundreds of counsels but
find none that seem in all ways to suit—unless we are doctrinaires;
assuredly of all the schemes we have tried no one has been successful.
By what right do we assume that some such device for salvation exists?
Plagues have come before for which there was no cure. Our crisis may
be one of them. It may be that the day of solutions is over. H. G.
Wells would have us search history to find our future there—or at
least some track pointing to a future we can reasonably confide in.
But perhaps he was just as near the truth in his younger scientific
days when he gave us vivid pictures of men who travelled beyond the
known areas of our kind, no longer the engineers of their own destiny
but drifting about at the convenience of fate. We think of Anatole
France, voluptuously contemplating the age when our earth shall have
grown too cold for human habitation and men have gradually died away
among the ice hummocks of a universal frozen sea. Or, bitterest of
all, we remember Thomas Hardy’s fancy of the delegate sent up to God
to ask about the direful state of the planet, only to learn that God
had utterly forgotten us and but dimly recollects that He had made
us so long ago and had meant to destroy His experiment when He saw
how contemptible it was. Beyond Hardy on that path of reflection lies
merely such madness as drove Swift to his Yahoos and Houyhnhnms.
And if we dare the path the only escapes from madness are some
Asiatic discipline of the will to the peace of acquiescence or some
sleek optimism shutting its eyes to all the evidences of horror and
chattering and eating and wooing merrily among them.
Along that path lies madness—but we need not take that path. Nor is
it a trivial optimism alone that can hold us back. Without doubt too
many men and women in the world are too optimistic. After the excessive
and artificial strain imposed upon them by the war their spirits have
relapsed, their consciences have grown dull, and they have sat down
for a vacation among the ruins. This is one of the innumerable prices
which mankind pays for the mad luxury of war. But it is still too early
to conclude that civilization is a wreck. Civilization is very old,
and every new exploration among its ancient monuments makes clear that
it is older than we thought before. The Mousterian, the Aurignacian,
the Solutrian, the Magdalenian, the Azilian, the Neolithic ages must
each have seen in its particular downfall the end of mankind; and yet
thousands of years were still to elapse before there followed what we
have till recently called the dawn of civilization. The destruction of
the great Minoan city of Cnossus, Havelock Ellis maintains, may have
been a more memorable event in the history of human affairs than the
catastrophe from which we are trying to recover. To certain types of
mind a view of history so extensive as this is like a first realization
of the vastness of the physical universe. If time is so long and space
so wide we are but momentary and infinitesimal insects whom it is
scarcely worth any one’s efforts, even our own, to preserve. Yet the
advances of civilization have been largely effected through just this
enlarging vision of our natures and our cosmic residence. After the
first despair, not unlike that of a child strayed from the nursery into
a crowd, comes a sense of greater dignity at being part of a structure
so vast, a new hopefulness that what has endured from everlasting will
still endure. The Spanish peasants have a proverb with which they
console themselves when there seems no other consolation: “God is not
dead of old age.” In such a saying Sancho Panza touches Aristotle.
Aristotle could think of a universe without beginning or end, moving
indeed toward no definite point but moving always through successions
of being. Less metaphysical, the peasant knows as truly that rain
follows sunshine and harvest the time for planting, and that in each
new season the old labours come back to be done again.
In the midst of our worst distresses we have need of some such cooling
wisdom. It is, of course, the faith of men who have not hoped for too
specific a mortal or immortal career. We do not hasten to console the
lover who has lost his mistress by telling him that for ages there
will still be love and mistresses. We do not hasten to assure the man
who has just failed of a fortune that though he is poor the sum of the
world’s wealth is still the same. And yet both these things are true.
The truth to be remembered is that in the very world where thrive
the ardours of the lover and the seeker of his individual fortune,
and where tragedy goes with defeat, there exist also such perennial
processes as the patience of the grass and the slow healing of time.
There is a spacious rule of life which has rarely been formulated but
which is probably held by most enlightened men and which better than
any other combines ardour with ripeness of reflection—a rule which in
effect says that though we should work at our appointed tasks as if
everything hung upon success we should afterwards regard each success
or failure as something which really does not matter. Thus only can
we advance with our fullest power; thus only can we free ourselves
from the past when we are done with it, not moaning too loudly over
defeat or being too vainly elated by some little victory. To extremists
such an attitude will seem a frivolous compromise. It is the solemn
hallucination of the hopeful that by ardour and by ardour alone can
the world be saved, and that each defeat of each plan he follows will
mean disaster. It is the cheerful prejudice of the desperate that in
spite of temporary oscillations here and there nothing is really to be
gained by ardours, for when they have cooled the world will continue
its decreed procession down a road paved with ardours flattened under
its solid tread. But between them is that temperate zone where men are
continually warmed by the fires that keep mankind alive and yet draw
from the long records of civilization the wisdom that shows them how to
keep the fire within its bounds, that it may do its work without waste
and destruction.
VII. SHORT CUTS
PETIT UP TO THIRTY
From the inquisitive elder Disraeli, Petit the Poet learned that Lope
de Vega was a poet from his cradle, and he learned it bitterly, for he
was sixteen, and his poetic April lingered. There was great solace in
Keats, who had begun to be a poet at an age which gave Petit still two
years to falter in. But what of these cradle rhymes of the Spaniard?
What of the numerous lispings of Pope to nurse and bottle? What of the
spines of satire Bryant put out at three-and-ten, or the _Blossomes_
Cowley bore midway his second decade? And Chatterton!
Never mind Pascal and his conic sections, precocious Pliny, or the
well-stuffed Hermogenes—monsters, not poets! But to see the years slip
by while his own virtues lay still under a cloud of youth was a trial
which set Petit brooding full of anger, over the hours he had wasted
in play before he had grown conscious of an imperative function. No
honourable poet could weigh pleasure against the duty to be great. For
all her tricky record, Fortune had never behaved so ill, Petit felt, as
when she cheated him of his destiny by fifteen years’ stark ignorance
of it. There was some comfort in the excuse which he made to himself,
that these more forward poets had beaten him in the race toward the
Muses merely because they had had an earlier summons. But this comfort
faded when he wondered whether they had not beaten him because their
summons had been more genuine than his. Nor could he be much heartened
by the spectacle of those who had come later into self-knowledge.
Wandering in the wilderness palled no less because of the tribes who
shared it with him. The dying, Petit felt, might lie down comforted
that patriarchs, kings, even the wise and good, were bedfellows; but
the hot thrust of those who looked toward birth wanted none of the
cool medicine which encourages death. Those who had to be about Father
Apollo’s business had little time for beds.
And yet, strenuous as he was for the bright reward, he gave hours to
becoming a specialist in the youth of poets. Like a man sick with some
lingering disease, he ransacked annals for cases like his own, mad
after a sign which would point to an end of his sullen malady of prose.
He could tell you at a question when his poets had assumed the _toga
poetica_, from Tennyson, covering his slate with blank verse at six
or seven, up through Goldsmith, who scarcely touched pen to verse on
the poetical side of thirty, to Cowper, who at fifty, a few cheerful
bagatelles aside, had only just begun to be a poet. From this learning
of his, more truly a scholar than he knew, Petit took examples,
despair, and vindications. When he thought of poets he thought of
a thin line marching fierily down through all the ages, endless,
quenchless, and himself waiting unsuspected in a prairie village
for the tongue of flame which should mark him of their company. When
he thought how much he lacked their art and scope, Petit despaired;
but whenever despair had a little numbed, he vindicated himself by
instancing those who had slept late in the shell.
Thus, year by year, he pushed back the age at which he must come into
his powers and fame. By the precedent of Bryant, Petit should have
written some new _Thanatopsis_ at seventeen, but he got only heartache
from that precedent. With what a thrill, then, he learned that Bryant
had made the poem over in riper years. Eighteen was harder for Petit
to endure. _Poems by Two Brothers_, Poe’s _Tamerlane_, _The Blessed
Damozel_ (unanswerable challenge), drove him ashamed and passionate to
his rhyming. But once again he found out a defence. If Pope’s _Ode on
Solitude_, written at twelve for lasting honour, was a prank of genius,
why not _The Blessed Damozel_? And who would contend with ghosts?
Yet he could not remember this assurance when, that year, he found
Chatterton’s bitter, proud will, and thought of the career which had
led so straight toward it.
Some years were kinder, or at least Petit’s ignorance saved him, for
at nineteen and twenty he kept his courage well enough. But twenty-one
threatened him to the very teeth. Drake’s _Culprit Fay_ mocked him;
Holmes’s _Old Ironsides_ roared at him; Campbell’s _Pleasures of Hope_
enticed him; Milton’s _Nativity_ ode submerged and cowed him. “No, no,”
Petit cried, as he read again these resonant strophes, “I will be a
minor poet and never strive with Milton.”
Later, by an odd reversal, Petit consoled himself with proofs that the
great poet must come slowly to his heights, and he lived for cheerful
months on the surpassing badness of Shelley’s work before _Alastor_,
fruit of twenty-three.
But the years would not cease, nor would they bring Petit’s summons.
At twenty-two he thought of _Götz von Berlichingen_ and thrust
his boundary back. Twenty-three taunted him with _Paracelsus_ and
_Endymion_ and Milton’s wistful _On his Being Arrived to the Age of
Twenty-three_. Petit passed twenty-four sickly conscious of _The
Defence of Guenevere_ and _Tamburlaine_ and those cantos of _Childe
Harold_ which, already two years out of the pen, made Byron splendid in
a night. Keats, by having died glorious at twenty-five, made Petit’s
year desolate. To be twenty-six was to remember _The Ancient Mariner_,
Collins’s pure _Odes_, and the fair, the fragrant, the unforgettable
_Arcadia_. Nor was twenty-seven better: what could Petit’s numbness say
to _The Strayed Reveller_, _The Shepheardes’ Calender_, and _Poems,
Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect_? With twenty-eight, _The Lyrical
Ballads_ and _Atalanta in Calydon_ saw his hopes begin a slow decline,
which dropped off, the next year, amid contracting ardour, past
Johnson’s _London_, Crabbe’s _Village_, Clough’s hospitable _Bothie_,
into thirty’s hopeless wilderness. After thirty poets are not made. And
Petit was thirty.
Tall Alp after tall Alp behind him, Petit saw before him only a world
of foothills. Yet his journey had been passionate. Now the work he had
done was dead leaves, his energy all burned grass, his aspirations
dust. And dry and bitter in his mouth was the reflection that the
summons might have missed his ear while he had watched his fellows. Had
zeal overreached him, some hidden jealousy undone him? What grief and
rebellion to know himself cause, agent, and penalty of his own ruin! O
black decades to come!
Still, Scott found himself at thirty-four.
IN LIEU OF THE LAUREATE
I am so distressed to see that the Poet Laureate has failed to produce
an official ode for the British royal wedding that I hardly know
whether to rummage through the archives of the Hanoverians for a
substitute manufactured for some earlier occasion or to manufacture
a new article myself. I think I shall let learning and poetry both
serve me with the help of E. K. Broadus’s agreeable new study of “The
Laureateship.”
Here, for instance, is a part of what the elegant Henry James Pye,
George III’s laureate, wrote when the Princess Charlotta Matilda of
England married Prince Frederick William of Stuttgart:
Awhile the frowning Lord of arms
Shall yield to gentler Pow’rs the plain;
Lo! Britain greets the milder charms
Of Cytherea’s reign.
Mute is the trumpet’s brazen throat,
And the sweet flute’s melodious note
Floats on the soft ambrosial gale;
The sportive Loves and Graces round,
Beating with jocund step the ground,
Th’ auspicious nuptials hail!
The Muses cease to weave the wreath of war,
But hang their roseate flow’rs on Hymen’s golden car!
Or if this seems a shade heroic and a little old-fashioned, here are
certain lines of Tennyson on the marriage of Princess Beatrice to
Prince Henry of Battenberg:
The Mother weeps
At that white funeral of the single life,
Her maiden daughter’s marriage; and her tears
Are half of pleasure, half of pain—the child
Is happy—even in leaving _her_!
And yet that seems to me to have a touch of insinuation about the fun
of getting away from the royal mother which I should be the last to
intend—though Tennyson cannot have meant it. Let me turn instead to
Thomas Warton and his admirable compliments to a king with the same
name as that of the present husband of England’s queen:
Lo! the fam’d isle, which hails thy chosen sway,
What fertile fields her temperate suns display!
Where Property secures the conscious swain,
And guards, while Plenty gives, the golden grain....
These are Britannia’s praises. Feign to trace
With rapt reflections Freedom’s favourite race!
But though the generous isle, in arts and arms
Thus stands supreme, in Nature’s choicest charms;
Though George and Conquest guard her sea-girt throne
One happier blessing still she calls her own—
and that happier blessing was of course the bride.
I find myself coming back to the bride, as one does when mortals are
married. Here suddenly the homely muse of one of our republican poets
overtakes me:
This George and Mary Windsor must have lots of sense as well as dust,
to let their only daughter marry a man who is quite ordinary—a man at
least who never had as good a start in life as dad, but is a boy of
their own town, grew up there and there settles down. Well, that is
how it ought to be, and if he sticks to business he will thrive and
prosper till he may stand before kings and queens some day. And what
if the new couple have to work and plan and scrimp and save a few
years till they make their pile and can put on a better style? If they
attempt it nothing loth it will be better for them both. Then hail
the bridegroom and the bride! Let the nuptial knot be tied! Whatever
others may prefer, her for him and him for her!
“MURDERING BEAUTY”
At the Butirki prison in Moscow, say certain Frenchmen who were
formerly there as involuntary guests of the Bolsheviki, there was a
beautiful Lettish girl, at about the remorseless age of fifteen, who
acted as official executioner, shooting her victims expertly in the
back when they had been chosen by lot and led before her. The brawny
Jack Ketch of the old tradition had yielded to a mere flapper, “with
unerring aim and a lust for blood.”
The French will be French! My mind goes back to some thousands of
fine poems and of gallant speeches which have been made by this fine
and gallant race upon the theme of “murdering beauty.” What after
all is so deadly as a lovely eye? It stabs deep with a glint, slays
with a glance, and utterly consumes with a level gaze. There is no
armour proof against it. Whenever beauty walks abroad it leaves its
path strewn with the wrecks of foolish men who have encountered it.
It rises in the morning, like the sun for glory, and kills off a few
swains who are outside its casement when first it looks out at the new
day. It lisps its dutiful orisons, tastes matutinal nectar, and comes
forth to begin its proper business. Walking beside some clear brook
it topples one venturer after another into the sympathetic flood.
On the smooth enamelled green, where daisies pie the meadow, beauty
does its fatal work no less ruthlessly than in secluded arbours or
umbrageous grottoes. Then mounted on its favourite courser it takes
to the hunt, leaving to others the lighter task of bringing down the
boar or catching up with the fox, but itself more deadly among the
human quarry who, though hunters, are at last the hunted. Finally
twilight, the end of the day, candles, spinet, the dulcimer and the
soft recorders, witching sounds and more bewitching silences; but still
beauty goes on its conquering course. Not even midnight dims it. When
beauty has retired from mortal sight, the lover who had not the luck to
come within its range and so be slaughtered, lies disconsolate upon his
couch waiting for another day and another chance to dare the killing
eyes of beauty.
The French will be French! Even in the dungeon, say the old gallants,
they longed for the most murderous gleam of beauty. Better that
and annihilation than the long night of safety. Leaning out of his
desperate window this or that prisoner, if he beheld some lady walking
in the courtyard, would fix his admiration upon her and bend every
effort to draw in his direction that killing look. Is there not a
story by Kenneth Graham about a headswoman in some courteous region
who became so popular that the whole world masculine swarmed to her
begging to be slain as a tender personal favour? And did they not swarm
so numerously that it embarrassed the land and almost stripped it of
its finest heroes because they chose death by the delicate headswoman
rather than life at any less exquisite hands whatever?
I do not know whether it was in this fashion that the prisoners of the
Bolsheviki behaved, but I suspect that something of the sort might
have happened, so true to form does their ancient gallantry seem to
have run. It might have happened; it must have happened. For this is
not, after all, history we are talking about. It is romance, romance
joyfully conscripted in the war against the enemies of the old order
and naturally using the old, old tricks.
CHAIRS
Here and there in the rural districts people still talk about
professors as holding chairs in this or that subject at some college
or university. When they do this they make me remember that the chair
was once cousin to the throne. It was an affair of some state. Our
remotest ancestors did not sit on chairs; they sat on branches when
they had time to sit at all. Our mediate ancestors, having come down
to earth, sat on it, or on the floors of the houses they built, or on
any odd piece of furniture that came handy. Chairs marked the great
who used them, such as kings and senators and bishops. Only our most
immediate ancestors, in the last few centuries, ever thought of having
enough chairs to go round. Within the memory of plenty of living men
quite respectable households, even in the United States, have required
children to stand at meals, partly because there were more children
than chairs and partly because it did not seem worth while to get more
chairs for the relatively unimportant members of the household. Now
everybody has chairs—even infants and dolls and dogs and cats; even
prisoners in jails; even professors, in fact as well as name. The race
has grown sedentary.
What, the moralist inquires, is to be the effect of all this sitting?
Not being very moralistic, I answer calmly that the chief effect is
to make people fatter than they used to be. The vital and sanitary
statistics that are always appearing about the increase of the average
age and height of mankind never have a word to say about the increase
of average weight. But it is clear that the race is heavier and that
chairs have helped to raise the ponderous average. When the race sat on
branches the fat men broke the branches, fell, and broke their necks.
When the race sat on the floor the fat women grew lean by getting up
and down so often. Nor after chairs came in did fatness evolve at once.
To have to move one of those primitive settles a few times a day was
enough to keep weight down; to sit on their oaken planes and angles
was never comfortable enough to make the laziest do it long. Did the
Puritan Fathers and Mothers fatten sitting in the straight-backed
chairs and pews of their age? No, it remained for the padded and
upholstered chair to do the work, for the rocker and the morris chair,
for the sprawling chair of the hotel lobby and the trustees’ room.
Consider what happens. The most strenuous man of business, when he
sinks into a chair in the hotel thinks dimly—if he is literate enough
for that—about “taking mine ease in mine inn” and fattens almost under
the very eye. Yet even this is nothing to the process in the trustee’s
chair. Something drowsy hangs over it; something soft slumbers in it
and infects the sitter. The moment the trustee sits down he feels
his spine agreeably melting; he slips deeper in his seat and listens
to the committee reports as from a muted distance; he has a sense of
power which he realizes it is manners to exercise quietly; he looks
with sleepy disapproval upon plans to raise salaries or cut dividends
or reinvest funds or elect new trustees; he softens till he is scarcely
vertebrate; his bones matter less and less; in time he does not know
which is chair and which is he. The fatness of the chair has struck
upward to his head. As a certain poet of the primitive has it:
Men in chairs
Put on airs.
INISHMORE, INISHMAAN, INISHEER
If, as it was reported dimly, the war in Ireland reached the Aran
Islands, then there is no spot left untouched in that ancient kingdom
and new free state. The story says the forces of the English Crown
heard those windy western islets harboured men on the run, and went
after them, patrolling the sea with boats and raiding the land. Two
civilians are said to have been killed in the mimic battle, three
wounded trying to escape, and seven arrested. But only the barest
details ever got back to Dublin.
Like enough there were men on the run here and there among the island
cottages. There have always been. Didn’t John Synge when he was on
the islands hear of a Connaught man who killed his father with a blow
of his spade because he was in a passion, and who fled to Inishmaan,
where the natives kept him safe from the police for weeks till they
could ship him off to America? The impulse to protect the criminal is
universal in the Irish west. Chiefly this is because the people, “who
are never criminals yet always capable of crime,” feel that a man would
not do a wrong unless he were under the influence of an irresponsible
passion. But partly, too, it is because “justice” is associated with
the English. How much more than in Synge’s day was that the case in
the day of this episode when “justice” was trying to level Ireland
under its iron feet, and many a fine young man must have had to run
to Inishmore or Inishmaan or Inisheer! Even in Synge’s day the most
intelligent man on Inishmaan declared that the police had brought crime
to Aran. The Congested Districts Board has done something to modernize
Killeany, but elsewhere the island population changes very slowly.
A quaint story has come to light about the islands. They were being
used, it says, by the Irish Republic as a place of internment for its
prisoners, though there is, of course, no jail there. And it seems
that when the forces of the Crown crossed Galway Bay from the mainland
and offered these prisoners their freedom they rejected it completely,
desiring rather to stay where they were than to go free to any other
part of the British Isles whatever. I see the seed of legends in
this story. Pat Dirane, the old story-teller who made Synge’s day
delightful, is dead now; and Michael (really Martin McDonagh) has
married and come to America. There will be others, however, to carry
on the tradition among a people who still pass from island to island
in rude curaghs of a model which has served primitive races since men
first went to sea; who still tread the sands and invade the surfs of
their islands in pampooties of raw cowskin which are never dry and
which are placed in water at night to keep them soft for the next
day; who make all the soil they have out of scanty treasures of clay
spread out on stones and mixed with sand and seaweed. Old Mourteen
on Inishmore told Synge about Diarmid, the strongest man on the earth
since Samson, and believed in him. Pat Dirane told tales that were the
island versions of _Cymbeline_ and _The Merchant of Venice_, tales
known elsewhere in the words of Boccaccio and of the _Gesta Romanorum_.
Michael’s friend sang “rude and beautiful poetry ... filled with the
oldest passions of the world.” How then shall the story die of how men
who were put away on Inisheer or Inishmaan or Inishmore found that
prison sweeter than freedom and would not go back when the chance was
offered them?
SWEETNESS OR LIGHT
Jonathan Swift who invented the phrase “sweetness and light” and
Matthew Arnold who made it what it has become are not themselves
precisely a congruous pair; but then, neither are the qualities they
bracketed. Or at least they occur together in the minds and tempers
of none but the utterly elect. Most persons who have either of them
have never more than one or at best have only one at a time. Consider,
for instance, your perfect optimist: he is a mine, a quarry, a very
bee-tree of sweetness, a honey-dripping fellow, a foaming pail of the
milk of human kindness. But when now and then the light falls on him
from some alien source he shrivels or scurries to a shady nook where
the illumination is not so deadly. Or consider your perfect pessimist:
he is a vial of light imprisoned, a storage battery charged with the
sun, and unless the properest precautions are taken he explodes when
sweetness touches him.
But then, however, consider those eclectic citizens who go in for both
at once. They usually undertake to be sweet in a light way or to be
light in a sweet way. When they are lightly sweet they flit through
the sunshine with the prettiest iridescence, stopping at all the
prosperous flowers but stopping no longer than a moment and never
really exhausting the deepest stores of sugar at the heart of the
blossom. When they are sweetly light they sport admirably in the sun
in the morning hours while its beams are still young and generous and
again toward the evening after mellowness has set in; but they do not
often care to venture into the noon at its full splendours. Sweetness,
it appears to most of them, is a question of the coat rather than of
the constitution; light, it appears to most of them, comes from the
air itself rather than from the fire which uses the air merely as
its medium. If they had studied the history of sweetness they would
realize that it is the fruit of powerful processes working with matter
not altogether sweet itself and arriving at the final essence only
with patience and strife and victory. If they had observed the methods
and effects of light they would understand that though it can heal it
can also kill and that though it may throw a radiance around plain
things it can quite as truly strip off glamour and halo and luxurious
subterfuge.
It is a lamentable arithmetic which has led millions to put sweetness
and light together and to make out of the combination something less
than either might be by itself. Each has been played off against the
other as an excuse. If you follow light too far, says sweetness, you
will grow fierce and lose me. If you follow sweetness too far, says
light, you will grow soft and forget what I have taught you. Here is
the danger. Left to themselves, sweetness and light quarrel a hundred
times for once they kiss. Even Socrates and Shakespeare must have had
many hours when the war was hot within them. Was Swift, for all his
light, ever really sweet? Was Arnold, for all his sweetness, not now
and then negligent of the light while he mooned it with his Senancours
and Amiels and missed the point of the diamond which Heine actually was?
For my part, while urging no one to refrain from being a Socrates or a
Shakespeare if he can, I hint that light was first in the universe and
that sweetness, invented since, is its creation. If I cannot have them
both I choose light.
CROWNING THE BISHOP
Apse, altar, architrave,
Chasuble, rochet, pyx, chimere,
Clerestory, nave,
Throne, mitre, incense, sheer
Surplices like snow,
Choir boys carolling like throstles:
_It was not so
With Jesus and the lean Apostles_.
VIII. A CASUAL SHELF
HONESTY IS A GIFT
A good many people think that honesty is a trait which a man chooses
out of the various traits offered him by life. Perhaps it is nearer
the truth to think that honesty is a gift, and innate, like a man’s
complexion or the shape of his skull. It can be hurt by abuse or
encouraged by proper treatment, but its roots are deeper than
experience. Clarence Day must have been born honest and he has, so far
as I can see, never done anything to waste his birthright. The eyes
with which he looks at things are as level as E. W. Howe’s, but his
language is lighter and his fancy nimbler. In _This Simian World_ it
was his fancy which perhaps did most to get him a hearing. In _The
Crow’s Nest_, without giving up his fancy, he ranges over more varied
fields than in his first book and seems even wiser. He has a perfect
temper. He has known pain but it has not soured him—or at least his
book. He has known passion but it has left no visible ruts or hummocks
in his mind. He has done all that a human being can do with his reason
but he feels no resentment that reason at its best can do so little.
Having a perfect temper he sits at ease in his crow’s nest and surveys
the deck, the sailors, rival ships, the waves, the horizon, and the
sky, without heat, of course, but also without pride in his position or
in his self-control. Having a perfect temper he is not harried into any
violence of style by his instinct to express himself. As shrewd as a
proverb, he never plays with epigrams. As much of a poet as he needs to
be, he yet seems to have no need for eloquence. Such lucidity as his is
both prudent and elevated.
He is primarily an anthropologist, as he showed in _This Simian
World_. The race of man is for him “a fragile yet aspiring species on
a stormy old star.” It has lived a long while and has gone a long way
from its original slime, but plenty of the old stains still colour
its nature. Its impulses are tangled with the impulses of the ape and
with the inhibitions of the amoeba. “The test of a civilized person
is first self-awareness, and then depth after depth of sincerity in
self-confrontation.” By this test Mr. Day is thoroughly civilized. Nor
does he merely search in his own mind and admit what he finds there. He
observes others with the same awareness and the same sincerity. Hardy,
he sees, takes his pleasure in portraying gloom. “That’s fair,” says
Mr. Day. Shaw has had a vision of the rational life that men might lead
and can never stop insisting that they lead it: a master of comedy when
he paints the contrast and rather tiresome when he insists too much.
Maeterlinck is king in the realms of romance he has created, like any
other child; he is also a child when it comes to judging the “real”
world. We know what Fabre thinks of wasps, but we wish we knew what
the wasps think of Fabre. Mr. Day’s ideas are never gummed together
with their hereditary associations. He talks always as if he had just
come into this universe and were reporting it for other persons as
intelligent as he. What a compliment to mankind! And what a compliment
to mankind, too, that he should find it quite unnecessary to lecture
it! A whimsical fable, a transparent allegory, a scrap of biography, a
few verses, a humorous picture—these are his only devices.
GOLDEN LYRICS
Snuffy, prosy men always keep pawing over the poets. It is bad enough
when they are only literary critics, but when they are theologians
there is no length to which they will not go. Think what has happened
to that radiant anthology which the late Morris Jastrow translated and
edited as his final work, _The Song of Songs_. Originally, it seems
clear, a collection of popular lyrics which the Hebrew folk prized
so highly as to insist on giving them a place in the sacred canon,
these poems have been argued and allegorized to what would have been
the death of anything less indestructible. While the Stoics were
“explaining” Homer, partly Hellenized Jews began to interpret the
_Song of Songs_ as an expression of Yahweh’s love for Israel and then
Christians as an expression of Christ’s love for his Church. Learned
scholiasts wallowed in commentary, declaring, for instance, that the
phrase “eyes like doves” referred to the wise men of the Sanhedrin or
to the thoughts of God directed toward Jerusalem. Augustine saw in
“where thou reclinest at noon” a hint that the true Church lay under
the meridian—that is, in Augustine’s Africa! Bernard of Burgundy
composed eighty-six homilies on the first two chapters. The Jewish
Saadia, writing in the tenth century, detected in the _Song of
Songs_ a complete history of the Jews from the Exodus to the coming
of a twelfth-century Messiah; and Thomas Brightman in 1600 drew the
prophecy down to Luther and Melancthon. Not until the Enlightenment,
in the hands of Lowth and Herder, did criticism become more direct
and reasonable. Even after that the passion for finding some kind of
unity in the book led even such scholars as Ewald, Delitzsch, Renan
to explain it as a rudimentary drama, with Solomon as one of the
characters. There were, of course, always heretics, like Thomas Hardy’s
Respectable Burgher, who slyly rejoiced to learn
“That Solomon sang the fleshly Fair
And gave the Church no thought whate’er,”
but they were generally outside the beaten track of doctrine.
Mr. Jastrow brought to his labours on the _Song of Songs_ at once the
erudition and common sense with which he had already edited _Job_
and _Ecclesiastes_ and in addition a feeling for youth and love and
poetry which his latest theme particularly required. In a masterly
introduction, utilizing all that is known about the book and reducing
it to convenient form for a wide audience, he cuts away the accretions
of centuries while tracing the fortunes of this golden treasury with
its cloud of commentators. Then he offers a new translation divided
into twenty-three separate lyrics, each of which he equips with
adequate yet simple notes, purging the text of intrusive variants and
glosses, explaining the allusions, sympathetically pointing out the
grace and spontaneity of the poems. In his treatment the _Song of
Songs_ is restored to an ancient status which gives it a fresh, modern
meaning. Once more the Palestinian villagers have come together at a
wedding; once more they sing exquisite songs about the joys of love
which no thought of theology invades. Lover and beloved praise one
another’s charms in glowing imagery. Alone, each longs for the other;
united, they rush to ecstatic, unabashed consummation of their desire.
This is love at its rosy dawn, tremulous, candid, exultant. This is
what Wilfrid Scawen Blunt had in mind when he declared in his diary
that he would rather have written the _Song of Songs_ than all the rest
of literature.
THE CHRISTIAN DIPLOMAT
Regarding Europe as an intricate republic with all its interests
close-knit and its equilibrium exquisitely sensitive, François de
Callières in 1716 published at Paris a vade-mecum for diplomats which
has been translated and issued in a handsome edition by A. F. Whyte as
_On the Manner of Negotiating with Princes_. “Secrecy,” says Callières,
“is the very soul of diplomacy”; and his manner of expounding the
manners of negotiation might almost be that of some accomplished
mole long employed by his monarch in listening for ground-tremors in
all parts of the garden, learning where traps were set and ploughs
expected and where the roots grew sweetest and lushest, and finding
out the shortest way to them and back in safety. Discretion, however,
not deceit is the method Callières urges. The ideal diplomatist must
be “a man of probity and one who loves truth.” “It is true that this
probity is not often found joined to that capacity for taking wide
views which is so necessary to a diplomatist.” He should have learning,
experience, penetration, eloquence, as well as the most equable temper,
the most easy gallantry, the quickest repartee, the most tireless
patience; he must be courageous without being rash, dignified without
being mysterious, wealthy without being too proud of his purse,
well-bred without being haughty. He must dispense gifts generously,
though he should rarely take them, and he should do his bribing like a
gentleman, in the due fashion of the court to which he is accredited.
In a democratic state he should flatter the Diet—and feed it, for
good cheer is an admirable road to influence. He should have a flair
for nosing out secrets as well as a genius for hiding them; his use
of spies is the test, almost the measure, of his excellence. “The
wise and enlightened negotiator must of course be a good Christian.”
Machiavelli explained princely policy and Chesterfield worldly polish
no more lucidly than Callières, who was private secretary to the Most
Christian King Louis XIV and ambassador and plenipotentiary entrusted
with the Treaty of Ryswick, explained the devices and virtues of his
craft. He had high standards for diplomatists; he wanted them to be
better-trained, better valued, and better rewarded than they were.
He thought they should be men of letters and men of peace. He would
not have held himself to blame for assuming that the relation between
even friendly princes was that of ceaseless rivalry and that the first
interest of each was to take something from the others. Those were the
assumptions of the age. Callières was merely pointing out, with tact
and charm, how the members of the diplomatic corps might best observe
all the punctilios that go with honour among the most precious thieves.
LAWYER AND ELEGIST
Every one knows Clarence Darrow as a fighting labour lawyer, a
double-handed berserker of the bar. Only his friends know that at heart
he is an elegiac poet. Yet any one who wishes may find this out by
reading his exquisite half-novel, half-autobiography, _Farmington_. It
has unstinting veracity; it has mellow moods and ivory texture. The
book rises naturally from the spirit, dear to the American tradition,
of tender affection for some native village. Thousands of men daily
dream thus of childhood, but the pictures which come before them are
dimmed by short memory or distorted by sentimentalism or falsified
by some subsequent prejudice. Mr. Darrow’s _Farmington_, it is true,
lies continually in a golden haze, melts and flows, increases and then
diminishes like a living legend. The colours, however, have grown truer
not fainter, and the forms of his remembered existence more substantial
if less sharp-edged. Richly and warmly as he visualizes that perished
universe, he has not brought in illusions to multiply his pleasure
in it. What gave him pain as a boy he remembers as pain and will not
make out to have been a joke. What gave him delight he remembers as
delight, not as an offence to be expiated by an older conscience. Such
dreams do not lie. They are the foundations on which truth mounts above
facts. To _Farmington_ they impart a firmness which enables an honest
reader to move confidently among its lovely pictures without the sense
that a breath may shatter them. The ringing laughter of Mark Twain’s
_Hannibal_ never sounds through Mr. Darrow’s softer pages: herein lies
a limitation of _Farmington_, its lack of a large masculine vitality.
But that, of course, is just the quality which we have no right to ask
for in an exquisite elegiac poem.
WOMEN IN LOVE
The hunger of sex is amazingly set forth by D. H. Lawrence, whose novel
_The Rainbow_ was suppressed in England and who has now brought out his
_Women in Love_ in the United States in a sumptuous volume delightful
to eye and hand. Mr. Lawrence admits no difference between Aphrodite
Urania, and Aphrodite Pandemos; love, in his understanding of it,
links soul and body with the same bonds at the same moments. And in
this latest book of his not only is there but one Aphrodite; there is
but one ruling divinity, and she holds her subjects throughout a long
narrative to the adventure and business and madness and warfare of
love. Apparently resident in the English Midlands, Gudrum and Ursula
Brangwen and their lovers Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich actually
inhabit some dark wood sacred to Dionysiac rites. If they have an
economic existence, it is of the most unimportant kind; at any moment
they can come and go about the world as their desires drive them.
If they have any social existence, it is tenuous, or at best hardly
thicker than a tissue of irritations. War and politics and art and
religion for the time being are as if they had never been. Each pair
recalls those sundered lovers of whom Aristophanes told the guests at
Plato’s Symposium—lovers who, in reality but halves of a primordial
whole, whirl through space and time in a frantic search each for its
opposite, mad with delay, and meeting at last with a frantic rush which
takes no account of anything but the ecstasy of reunion.
If references to Greek Cults come naturally to mind in connection with
_Women in Love_, these lovers none the less have the modern experience
of frantic reaction from their moments of meeting. They experience
more than classical satiety. Mad with love in one hour, in the next
day they are no less mad with hate. They are souls born flayed, who
cling together striving to become one flesh and yet causing each
other exquisite torture. Their nerves are all exposed. The intangible
filaments and repulsions which play between ordinary lovers are by
Mr. Lawrence in this book magnified to dimensions half heroic and
half mad. He has stripped off the daily coverings, the elaborated
inhibitions, the established reticences of our civil existence, and
displays his women as swept and torn by desires as old as the race and
older, white-hot longings, dark confusions of body and spirit. Gudrum
and Ursula are women not to be matched elsewhere in English fiction
for richness and candour of desire. They are valkyries imperfectly
domesticated, or, in Mr. Lawrence’s different figure, daughters of men
troubling the sons of God, and themselves troubled. No wonder then
that the language which tells their story is a feverish language; that
the narrative moves with a feverish march; that the final effect is
to leave the witness of their fate dazed with the blazing mist which
overhangs the record. Most erotic novels belong to the department of
comedy; _Women in Love_ belongs to the metaphysics and the mystical
theology of love.
MOSES IN MASSACHUSETTS
More than thirty years after Brooks Adams first flayed his ancestors
in _The Emancipation of Massachusetts_ a new edition of the book has
appeared with the original text and a novel preface. What Mr. Adams
has added, besides an expression of regret for his earlier acrimony
of speech, is an account of the philosophy to which he has arrived
after three meditative decades. Although he belongs to the ineffably
disillusioned generation which bred also Charles Francis 2d and Henry
Adams, Mr. Brooks Adams is still an Adams: he thinks with the hard
lucidity and writes with the cold downrightness of his tribe. The
central point of his doctrine is touched upon almost in passing: “And
so it has always been,” he says, “with each new movement which has been
stimulated by an idealism inspired by a belief that the spirit was
capable of generating an impulse which would overcome the flesh and
which would cause men to move toward perfection along any other path
than the least resistant. And this because man is an automaton, and can
move no otherwise.” The emancipation of Massachusetts, Mr. Adams has
presumably come to believe, was merely an irresistible movement of the
commonwealth away from the idealistic impossibilities to which it was
originally pledged and to which the conservatives vainly tried to hold
it. Once they seemed villains; now they seem fools and dupes.
But Massachusetts is the least of the concerns of this preface, one
half of which is devoted to the deeds and character of Moses, an
optimist who thought he had found some supernatural power and could
control it, tried leadership, discovered that he must after all depend
on his own wits, sought vainly to “gratify at once his lust for power
and his instinct to live an honest man,” and, after bilking the
Israelites in the little matters of the Brazen Serpent and the Tables
of the Law, went up into Mount Nebo and committed suicide. (Tom Paine
would have liked to write this account of Moses.) The Mosaic idealism
having failed, there followed the Roman confidence in physical force,
which the Romans erected into a sort of vested interest, in turn also
overthrown by the Christian confidence in divine aid secured through
prayer—“a school of optimism the most overwhelming and the most
brilliant which the world has ever known and which evolved an age whose
end we still await.” Thus optimisms rise and fall, but the life of
mankind rolls forward without observable acceleration or retardation,
only now and then heated here or there to an explosion by some sort of
conflict between powerful interests, generally economic. The past shows
no variation from this procedure; the future holds forth no hope except
in a change to some form of non-competitive civilization which Mr.
Adams does not venture to propound. Depressing enough in details, the
preface as a whole is one of the most provocative arguments in American
literature. Some day the allied and associated pessimism of Brooks
Adams and his two brothers will seem hardly a slighter contribution
to America than the diplomacy of their father or the statesmanship of
their grandfather and great-grandfather.
BROWN GIRLS
The ardours celebrated in _Coloured Stars: Versions of Fifty Asiatic
Love Poems_, by Edward Powys Mathers, have not been uttered in original
English poetry since the days when the young Marlowe and the young
Shakespeare lavished the wealth of Elizabethan eulogium upon the
gorgeous bodily beauties of Hero and Venus—and even those ladies,
all red and white, seem a little cool and proud compared with the
browner girls who kindle such infinite desires in Asian lovers. The
poets whom Mr. Mathers has here rendered with delicate skill represent
almost every corner of the continent, yet the most frequent note in
the collection is the flaming praise of radiant mistresses, pictured
not so much in the lover’s hours of longing as in the hot moments of
the fruition of his desire. For sheer intensity it would be hard to
equal the two Afghan poems, _Black Hair_ and _Lover’s Jealousy_, or
the Kurdistan _Vai! Tchod-jouklareum_—full of raptures as barbarously
naked as the girls they praise. Out of the same fury comes the Altai
_War Song_, which sets forth the most tempting charms of love, only
to vow that still better are the arrows and sabres and black horses
of battle. The Burmese _My Desire_, only a little less passionate,
is more philosophical. What most differentiates this anthology from
any similar one that could be made from European literature is the
comparative absence from it of the deep humility of the lover before
the person or the thought of his beloved. These lovers are nearly all
superbly confident. More civil moods, however, appear in the Hindustani
pieces, which are not without a note of fear and distrust of women as
chilly jilts. True to our preconceptions, the Japanese poems are the
daintiest, all but one in the accustomed five-line stanza, and each one
an exquisite picture associated with tender longings; and the Chinese
poems seem most familiar, most universal, in feelings and ideas.
Without the abandon of the poems from western Asia, and with less than
the hard, bright compactness of the Japanese, they are exquisitely
truthful and humane. It is notable that only the eastern Asiatics are
here represented as giving expression to the woman’s emotions, as if in
the west, women, at the worst the victims of desire, were at best only
an ear to hear of it, never a voice to speak it out.
INVENTION AND VERACITY
There may be a line which separates fiction from biography but it
is a metaphysical affair about which no one need worry much. On one
side, let us say, is invention and on the other is veracity; every
biographer, however, has now and then to invent, and veracity is often
indispensable to the novelist. It is strange that the two forms have so
rarely been compounded: that, for instance, so few authors have written
biographies of imaginary persons. The mixture is particularly tempting.
It makes possible at once the freedom of the novel and the sober
structure of the biography; it has the richness, though perhaps also a
little of the perverseness, of certain hybrid types. In _Peter Whiffle_
Carl Van Vechten has crossed the two literary forms fascinatingly. His
hero has a _fin de siècle_ look about him, as if he were, perhaps, a
version of Stephen Crane or of one of his contemporaries. When Peter
first dawns upon his biographer he has in mind to beat such decorative
geniuses as Edgar Saltus at the art of producing fine effects by the
sheer enumeration of lovely or definite things: he will make his
masterpiece the catalogue of catalogues. Later, he has shifted to the
mode of Theodore Dreiser, having been converted by _Sister Carrie_,
and is a revolutionist wedded to the slums. Eventually he turns to the
occult and the diabolical and ends in about that spiritual longitude
and latitude. Does Peter suggest some of Max Beerbohm’s men too
much? The question will be asked. At least it is certain that he is
piquant, arresting, brightly mad. Whether in Paris or in New York he
glitters in his setting. And that setting is even more of a triumph
than the character of Peter. Mr. Van Vechten, however he made up his
protagonist, has taken his setting from life: actual persons appear in
it, actual places. He deals with it now racily, now poetically. He is
full of allusions, of pungencies, of learning in his times. He knows
how to laugh, he scorns solemnity, he has filled his book with wit and
erudition. He is a civilized writer.
A HERO WITH HIS POSSE
If literature is not cosmopolitan when a Japanese-German publishes in
the United States in English a book dealing with the life of the great
Jew whose deeds and doctrines, recounted in the Greek of the Gospels,
serve as the basis of the Christian religion, when is it? Sadakichi
Hartmann’s _The Last Thirty Days of Christ_ will sound to the orthodox
a good deal like George Moore for irreverence and a little like Anatole
France for slyness. Ostensibly the diary of the disciple Lebbeus, also
called Thaddeus, it explains the miracles as so many quite rational
affairs and ends with Jesus dying like a mortal man in a garden at
Emmaus; in the most realistic language it shows Lebbeus asking Jesus
if he is to “swipe” the ass on which the Master entered Jerusalem,
describing the shapely legs of the Samaritan woman, and recounting
with vigour and gusto the pranks of the dusty, naked apostles in the
Jordan. Bull-necked Peter, “fierce, stubborn, easily roused, but
devoted to the Master like no other”; “flamboyant Judas Iscariot, a
strangely magnetic personality”; “sturdy, straightforward James and sad
and headachy-looking John”—John being the Boswell of the expedition;
doubting Thomas, “a lean elderly crab-apple sort of a man”; “old
‘muffled-up’ Bartholomew, of whose face at no time one could see more
than a snivelling nose”; Matthew, “practical, shrewd, determined that
something great must be the outcome of all this personal discomfort and
marching about”—these and the others are keenly drawn to what may have
been life—of course no one knows. The apostles talk metaphysics behind
the Master’s back and undertake plans for “something great.” Indeed,
the betrayal appears as merely Judas’s scheme for bringing matters to
a head and forcing Jesus to call on the “legion of angels” which he
had said he could command. Alas, the apostles could not comprehend
their Teacher, his humour, his paradoxes, his hyperboles, his strength
in tenderness, his nature so rich and full that he could be ascetic
without drying up. He stands in this book, wherein the arguments of
Renan are made flesh, as a companionable saint—not a god at all—who is
still marked off from the intensely human group about him by a mystery
and a glory which are Sadakichi Hartmann’s tribute to his power and
which in Christian art have been symbolized by the bright aureole
around his head.
MARIA AND BATOUALA
The face of _Batouala_ is the face of Esau but the voice is the voice
of Jacob. Paris speaks through René Maran, as it spoke recently through
Louis Hemon and his _Maria Chapdelaine_: the Paris which is subtle yet
bored with subtlety and cruel yet bored with cruelty and eager for art
yet bored with art. Such complex towns are hungry for idyll and for
epic, the more so if, sitting at the centre of an empire, they can
look out toward dim provinces and see idyll and epic transacting on
their own soil. Paris, looking into French Canada, is thrilled along
unfamiliar nerves at the sight of the girl of Peribonka who, having
lost her dearest lover, chooses rather to stay in that hard native
wilderness than to take what comfort may be found in softer regions: it
is as if some Arcadian maiden had preferred Arcadia to Athens or some
Shropshire lass had preferred Shropshire to London. So Paris, looking
into French Africa, exults over the deeds of the black chief Batouala,
who loves and fights and loses and dies, like a bison or an eagle,
without a thought deeper than sensation and without a future longer
than quick oblivion. _Batouala_ is no primitive piece of art: no naïve
ballad of the people; no saga, remembering the harsh conflicts of
actual men; no epic even, calling up the large days of Agamemnons and
Aeneases and Rolands and Siegfrieds and Beowulfs for the edification
of smaller days. It is a document of civilization, of civilization
turning, with a touch of nerves, from the contemplation of itself to
a vicarious indulgence in the morals and manners of the jungle which,
whether they exist in Africa or not, exist somewhere beneath the
surface of every civilized person.
To say this is to say that René Maran, though himself of Batouala’s
race, has learned in Paris to make Parisians understand him and that
the fame of his book depends upon his skilful use of a sophisticated
idiom. But there is more to be said than that. _Batouala_ is a document
as well upon the process by which an inarticulate section of mankind is
beginning to be articulate. Out of the heart of a dark continent comes
a tongue which uses neither the rant of the imperialist nor the brag of
the trader nor the snuffle of the missionary. That tongue is hot with
hatred for what Europe has done to Africa through the exercise of a
greed which is the more malevolent because it is incompetent. The world
of Batouala is a world spoiled by alien hands and laid waste as fever
and tribal wars never laid it waste. Back of the quiet accents which M.
Maran uses is the impact of a whole race’s wrongs and resentments. And
yet those accents are quiet, for the book, though not primitive art, is
art of a high order. It is, says M. Maran in his preface, “altogether
objective. It makes no attempt to explain: it states.” Being a genuine
work of the imagination, _Batouala_, of course, is less impersonal than
its author believes it to be; its material is shaped at every point by
a hand which, beating with the pulse of Africa, loves these contours
and expresses its passion through them. Its passion, however, has been
so guided by principle that it is emphasized by reticence much as that
reticence is warmed by passion. In the circumstances, a plain story is
enough, given, too, merely as a series of etchings from the career of
Batouala, and only partly concerned with his relations to the whites.
Candid pictures (considerably softened in this translation) of his
daily life and final tragedy pass vividly by: all the customs and rites
and sounds and stenches of his village, the throbbing of drums, the
ferment of sexuality, the conflict of races, the pressure of nature
upon man, the irony of primitive plans, the pity of primitive defeat.
A great novel? Not quite, because it is febrile and fragmentary. But
it has some of the marks of greatness upon it: energy, intensity,
vitality.
STUPID SCANDAL
The story that Abraham Lincoln was an illegitimate son became a matter
of gossip about the time of his first nomination for the presidency
and was given a wide if stealthy circulation by the malice of the
disaffected. He himself always spoke with reticence of his ancestry,
for the reasons that he believed his mother to have been born out
of wedlock and that, supposing his parents to have been married in
Hardin County, Kentucky, he had looked in vain for the record of their
marriage which was all the time lying in the court house of Washington
County, where Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks had been married 22
September, 1806. Lamon’s biography in 1872 first put the scandal into
print, though in veiled language. Since then it has been repeated in
varying forms, for the most part obscurely and always uncritically.
While there has never been any good excuse for crediting it, there
has come to be a better and better excuse for undertaking to refute
it. That has now been done by William E. Barton in _The Paternity of
Abraham Lincoln_, a convincing study which leaves not a square inch of
ground for the scandal to stand on. Mr. Barton’s researches have been
exhaustive and—barring a few minor slips—accurate; he follows the
rules of evidence in a way to put to shame those many lawyers who on
such trivial testimony have believed the story; at the risk of making
his book too bulky he has included practically all the documents in the
case; he writes everywhere with good temper, although he might well
have been forgiven for being vexed at the inanity or insolence of most
of those who have argued that Lincoln was the son of this or that Tom,
Dick, or Harry.
Mr. Barton’s arguments remove most of the charges into the territory of
the ridiculous. Abraham Enlow of Hardin County, Kentucky, for instance,
turns out to have been no more than fifteen—perhaps fourteen—years
old when Abraham Lincoln was conceived. As to Abraham Enlow of
Elizabethtown, Kentucky, there was no such man. George Brownfield,
of what is now La Rue County, was real, and may have known Lincoln’s
father and mother as early as eight or nine months before the child was
born, but no scandal ever touched Brownfield’s name in this connection
for fifty years after 1809, and then the yarn was apparently invented
because the story of Abraham Enlow of Hardin County to the older
citizens in the locality seemed untenable. The “Abraham” Lincoln of
Ohio who was formerly identified with the President, and about whose
birth there was a scandal, turns out to have been named John. Abraham
Inlow of Bourbon County is said to have paid Thomas Lincoln five
hundred dollars to marry Nancy Hanks, who already had a child named
Abraham; as a matter of fact, the pair had been married nearly three
years when their son was born, and there is nothing in the Abraham
Inlow story that even hints at an adulterous connection. If such an
affair ever took place it concerned a certain Nancy Hornback. The
rumour that Martin D. Hardin was the father of Lincoln died of its own
impossibility with the discovery that Lincoln was neither born nor
conceived in Washington County, where Hardin lived. Patrick Henry,
occasionally asserted to have been Lincoln’s father, died ten years
before Lincoln was born. The foolish affidavits which attempt to credit
the paternity to Abraham Enloe of North Carolina are too ignorant and
contradictory to be noticed. That a foster son of John Marshall was
Lincoln’s father seems unlikely in view of the fact that Marshall never
had a foster son; this report is about of a piece with another which
says that one of Marshall’s own sons was the father of Nancy Hanks,
when as a matter of fact she was a year older than the eldest of them
and might have been the mother of the youngest. John C. Calhoun may
possibly have indulged in a flirtation with a young woman at a tavern
at Craytonville, North Carolina, in 1808-9, and she may just possibly
have been a Nancy Hanks, but she cannot have been Nancy Hanks Lincoln,
who had already been married for two years and had been living in
Kentucky, it seems on good evidence, since early childhood.
All this is sheer gossip, motivated partly by an ugly desire to hurt
Lincoln’s fame and partly by a vulgar attempt to account for his
genius by giving him a father more promising than Thomas Lincoln. At
the worst it is disgusting; at the best it is stupidly unimaginative,
for the Hardin, Henry, Marshall, Calhoun stories are singularly frail,
and the Enlows and Inlows and Enloes of the legend were certainly
no more likely to beget a genius than the actual father. Even the
Baconians have chosen a great man to explain Shakespeare with. The only
use of the whole matter is to throw some light upon the way in which
in unenlightened ages, when there was no Mr. Barton to investigate the
facts and lay the ghosts, various nations of mankind have sought to
explain their heroes and leaders of humble birth by finding for them,
among gods or demigods, fathers more suitable than the plain men who,
such is the mystery of genius, are all that need be taken into account.
THE MUSE OF KNICKERBOCKER
We guiterman a volume when,
Though but one pen can rightly do it,
We view it reasonably, then
With ripe and rippling rhymes review it.
(How delicate should be the eye,
How deft and definite the hand
Of the audacious poet by
Whom Guiterman is guitermanned!)
This Arthur with the nib of gold,
The quaintest of the critic carpers
Who sang New York, has sung the Old
Manhattan now in ballads (Harpers).
The color of his music moves
From Dobson’s to our Yankee Doodle’s;
Assay his mixture, and it proves,
However, Guiterman in oodles.
He sings the founders: “Kips, Van Dorns,
Van Dams, Van Wycks, Van Dycks, Van Pelts,
Van Tienhovens, Schermerhorns,
And Onderdoncks and Roosevelts.”
Of Tappan Zee, of Nepperhan,
Of Hellegatt, of Spuyten Duyvil,
Of’t Maagde Paetje, Guiterman
Here rhymes in rings around each rival.
Adieu vers libre, adieu the news,
Adieu the horrid shilling-shocker;
We hail the marriage of the Muse
To Mynheer Diedrich Knickerbocker.
IX. POETS’ CORNER
GREEK DIGNITY AND YANKEE EASE
The single solid volume of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s _Collected Poems_
holds without crowding all but a few lines of the verse into which
one of the acutest of Americans has distilled his observations and
judgments during thirty studious, pondering, devoted, elevated years.
Never once does Mr. Robinson show any signs of having withdrawn his
attention from the life passing immediately under his eyes; but he has
no more frittered away his powers in a trivial contemporaneousness than
he has buried them under a recluse abstention from actualities: he has,
rather, with his gaze always upon the facts before him, habitually seen
through and behind them to the truths which give them significance
and coherence. That he from the first chose deliberately to follow an
individual—however solitary—path appears from a very early sonnet,
_Dear Friends_:
The shame I win for singing is all mine,
The gold I miss for dreaming is all yours;
that he from the first deliberately chose the path of stubborn thought
rather than of genial emotion appears from his unforgettable _George
Crabbe_:
Whether or not we read him, we can feel
From time to time the vigour of his name
Against us like a finger for the shame
And emptiness of what our souls reveal
In books that are as altars where we kneel
To consecrate the flicker, not the flame.
In the nineties, when England was yellow with its Oscar Wildes and
Aubrey Beardsleys and America was pink-and-white with its Henry van
Dykes and Hamilton Wright Mabies, Mr. Robinson was finding himself in
the novels of Thomas Hardy—the sonnet on whom has been omitted from
this collection—and fortifying himself in the study of Crabbe’s “hard,
human pulse.” His absolute loyalty to the ideals of art and wisdom thus
achieved is a thrilling thing.
The long delay of the fame to which he had every right may possibly be
held in part to account for his countless variations upon the theme
of vanity—even of futility, of which he is the laureate unsurpassed.
Leaving to blither poets the pleasure of singing the achievements of
the successful at the top of the wave, Mr. Robinson took for himself
the task of studying the unarrived or the _passé_ or the merely
mediocre. Consider Bewick Finzer,
Familiar as an old mistake,
And futile as regret;
consider Miniver Cheevy, who wept that he was ever born because he
could not stand the present and longed for the colours of romance—
Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
And kept on drinking;
consider the Poor Relation, who has perforce outstayed her welcome and
on whom
The small intolerable drums
Of Time are like slow drops descending;
consider the women-maddened John Everldown, and Richard Cory committing
suicide in the midst of what the world had thought triumphant
prosperity, and Amaryllis shrunk and dead, and Aaron Stark so hard that
pity makes him snicker, and Isaac and Archibald each telling their
little friend that the other has grown senile, and the graceless,
ancient vagabond Captain Craig discoursing gracefully from his
death-bed like some trivial Socrates, and Leffingwell and Lingard and
Clavering—
Who died because he couldn’t laugh—
and Calverly and that incomparably futile Tasker Norcross whose
tethered range
Was only a small desert,
and yet who knew that there was a whole world of beauty and meaning
somewhere if he could only reach it—all these are the brothers and the
victims of futility. Even when Mr. Robinson ascends to examine the
successful he bears with him the sense of the vanity of human life. The
peak of his poetry is that speech in which Shakespeare, in _Ben Jonson
Entertains a Man from Stratford_, likens men to flies for brevity and
unimportance:
Your fly will serve as well as anybody,
And what’s his hour? He flies, and flies, and flies,
And in his fly’s mind has a brave appearance;
And then your spider gets him in her net,
And eats him out and hangs him up to dry.
That’s Nature, the kind mother of us all.
And then your slattern housemaid swings her broom,
And where’s your spider? And that’s Nature, also.
It’s Nature, and it’s Nothing. It’s all Nothing.
It’s all a world where bugs and emperors
Go singularly back to the same dust,
Each in his time; and the old, ordered stars
That sang together, Ben, will sing the same
Old stave tomorrow.
And in his great flight into legend, in _Merlin_ and _Lancelot_, Mr.
Robinson elected to view a crumbling order from angles which seem
opposite enough but which both exhibit Camelot as a city broken by
frailties which on other occasions might be heroic virtues: Merlin
follows love to Vivien’s garden at Broceliande and the kingdom of
Arthur falls to ruin because it has no strong, wise man to uphold it;
Lancelot leaves love behind him to follow the Light, like a strong,
wise man, but the Light dupes him as much as love has duped Merlin, and
ruin overtakes Camelot none the less. This is Mr. Robinson’s reading
of existence: We are all doomed men and we hasten to our ends according
to some whimsy which establishes our hours soon or late, leaving us,
however, the consolation of being perhaps able to perceive our doom and
perhaps even to understand it.
What is it that holds Mr. Robinson, with his profound grasp of the
tragic, from the representation of those popular, magnificent hours of
tragedy when—as a more pictorial critic might say—the volcano bursts
from its hidden bed and the thunder reverberates along the mountains?
Well, Mr. Robinson is a Yankee, free of thought but economical of
speech; he is another Hawthorne, disciplined by a larger learning, a
more rigorous intellect, and a stricter medium. The light of irony
plays too insistently over all he writes to allow him to indulge in any
Elizabethan splendours. His characters cannot rave. They, too, in a
sort, are Yankees poet-lifted, and they must be at their most eloquent
in their silences. Consequently the fates which this poet brings upon
his quiet stage must all be understood and not merely felt. He gives
the least possible help; he pitilessly demands that his dramatic
episodes be listened to with something like the tenseness with which
the protagonists undergo them and without alleviating commentary or
beguiling chorus; he never ceases to cerebrate or allows his readers
to. Such methods imply selected readers. They imply, too, on the poet’s
part, that he pores too intently over the white core of life to look
long or often at the more gorgeous surfaces. If Mr. Robinson has any
strong passion for the outward pageantry of life—such as men like
Scott or Dickens have—he does not communicate it. His rhythms throb
with heightened thought not with quickened pulses, or only with pulses
quickened by thought. No line or stanza escapes his steady, conscious,
intelligent hands and runs off singing. Endowed at the outset with a
subtle mind and a temperament of great integrity, he has kept both
uncorrupted and unweakened and has hammered his lovely images always
out of the purest metal and in the chastest designs.
To lay too much stress upon the tragic and the fateful in his work is
to do it, however, less than justice. It contains hundreds of lines of
the shrewdest wordly wisdom, of the most delicate insight into human
character in its untortured modes, of rare beauty tangled in melodious
language. He has employed the sonnet as a vehicle for dramatic
portraiture until he has almost created a new type; he has evolved an
octosyllabic eight-line stanza which is unmistakably, inalienably,
inimitably his; he has achieved a blank verse which flawlessly fits his
peculiar combination of Greek dignity and Yankee ease; he has, for all
his taste for the severer measures, taught his verses, when he wanted,
to lilt in a fashion that has put despair in many a lighter head. Nor
must it be overlooked that Mr. Robinson has written some of the gayest
verses of his generation, as witness these from the ever-memorable
_Uncle Ananias_:
His words were magic and his heart was true,
And everywhere he wandered he was blessed.
Out of all ancient men my childhood knew
I choose him and I mark him for the best.
Of all authoritative liars, too,
I crown him loveliest.
How fondly I remember the delight
That always glorified him in the spring;
The joyous courage and the benedight
Profusion of his faith in everything!
He was a good old man, and it was right
That he should have his fling....
All summer long we loved him for the same
Perennial inspiration of his lies;
And when the russet wealth of autumn came,
There flew but fairer visions to our eyes—
Multiple, tropical, winged with a feathery flame,
Like birds of paradise....
THROUGH ELLIS ISLAND
Pascal D’Angelo was born, he says in an autobiographical sketch which
he has let me see, “near the old walled city of Sulmona, Italy. It is
a small town in the beautiful valley that was once the stronghold of
the Samnites, walled in by the great blue barrens of Monte Majella. Few
roads run to this quiet land and ancient traditions have never entirely
died out there. Below the town is the garden of Ovid with its wild
roses and cool springs, and above is an ancient castle that in summer
is fantastically crowned with the mingling flight of pigeons which take
care of their young on its towered heights. In the valley below are
finely cultivated fields dotted with the ruins of Italica, the capital
of fierce Samnium.” There Pascal D’Angelo went to school a very little
during his childhood, handicapped by the fact that his parents at home
could neither read nor write and that, because of their poverty, he was
frequently obliged to stay at home to herd the family’s six or seven
sheep and four goats. At sixteen he came with his father and a number
of fellow-villagers to the United States.
“In this country immigrants from the same town stick together like
a swarm of bees from the same hive and work where the foreman, or
‘boss,’ finds a job for the gang. At first I was water-boy and then
shortly after I took my place beside my father. I always was, and am, a
pick-and-shovel man.” Pascal D’Angelo worked here and there at similar
rough labour, in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts,
Vermont, West Virginia, Maryland—at first unable to read newspapers
printed in English and unaware that there were any printed in Italian.
But gradually he learned to read, and always he was a poet. “When night
comes and we all quit work the thud of the pick and the jingling of the
shovel are not heard any more. All my day’s labours are gone, for ever.
But if I write a line of poetry my work is not lost, my line is still
there—it can be read by you today and can be read by another tomorrow.
But my pick-and-shovel works can be read neither by you today nor by
another tomorrow.... So I yearn for an opportunity to see what I can
accomplish ... before suffering, cold, wet, and rheumatism begin to
harm me in the not distant future.”
One of the finest lyrics of his which I have seen thus gives a picture
of the world in which he then moved:
In the dark verdure of summer
The railroad tracks are like the chords of a lyre gleaming across
the dreamy valley,
And the road crosses them like a flash of lightning.
But the souls of many who speed like music on the melodious
heart-strings of the valley
Are dim with storms.
And the soul of a farm lad who plods, whistling, on the
lightning road
Is a bright blue sky.
As a result of being taken by a bar-tender to an Italian vaudeville
show on the Bowery, the boy began to write—a farce, jokes, anecdotes
“of the type for my class of people.” Then he bought a small Webster’s
dictionary for a quarter and set out to master it. His companions
laughed at him, but he persisted tirelessly. “I made them understand by
spelling each word or writing it on a railroad tie or a piece of wood
anywhere, just to express myself.” As his ardour and his reputation
grew some young brakemen undertook to discipline him. “What they did
was to bring new words every morning. They used to come half an hour
before working time and ask me the meaning of the new words. If I could
answer the first word all was well and good; then they were quiet all
day. If not, when noon came all the office people, both men and women,
crowded the place where everybody was present and tried to show me up.
But their trials and efforts were all useless, as useless as I could
make them. But one day they brought me before all the crowd, just to
have me ridiculed perhaps, because they all were high-school lads. So
they brought five words of which I knew only three. Then they began
to proclaim themselves victorious. But I gave them two words they did
not understand. Then I bet them I could give them ten words, and two
more for good measure, that they could not understand. And I began:
‘troglodyte, sebaceous, wen, passerine, indeciduity, murine, bantling,
ubiquity, clithrophobia, nadir’; and instead of two I added seven
more to make their debacle more horrible. So I again wrote seven more
words with the chalk which they provided me, writing them against
the office façade where every one could see their eternal defeat:
‘anorexia, caballine, phlebotomy, coeval, arable, octoroon, risible.’
Then to complete I added ‘asininity’ and explained its meaning to them
immediately.... After that triumph they named me ‘Solution’ and all
became friends.”
Later he went to Sheepshead Bay to hear “Aïda” in the open air.
“Suddenly when I heard the music I began to feel myself driven toward
a goal—a goal that became more and more distinct each day. There were
parts of such eloquent beauty in that opera that they tore my soul.
At times, afterwards, even on the job amid the confusion of running
engines, cars, screams, thuds, I felt the supreme charms of the
melodies around me.” But he could not compose music, for he did not
know one note from another—“as I still don’t know.... Music is not
like the English language, that I began to write without a teacher....
In poetry I fared better. In the library I wandered upon Shelley and
was again thrilled to the heart. Shelley I could proceed to emulate
almost immediately.... It was a hard job to put my words in order. The
stuff I used to write at first was unthinkable trash. But I was always
bothering people to point out my mistakes. Grammar gave me plenty of
trouble and still does. Rhyme stumped me. Then I began to read all
kinds of poetry and saw that rhyme was not absolutely necessary. I also
discovered that a good deal of what is called poetry is junk. So from
the first I have tried to avoid echoing the things I have read, and to
bring an originality both of expression and thought.”
Pascal D’Angelo has taught himself French and Spanish and has read most
of the best poets of those tongues as well as of English and Italian.
At present he is living under the most difficult conditions, asking
no favours, and writing poetry which, though much of it is naturally
full of imperfections, occasionally strikes such notes as these in _The
City_:
We who were born through the love of God must die through the
hatred of Man.
We who grapple with the destruction of ignorance and the creation
of unwitting love—
We struggle, blinded by dismal night in a weird shadowy city.
Yet the city itself is lifting street-lamps, like a million cups
filled with light,
To quench from the upraised eyes their thirst of gloom;
And from the hecatombs of aching souls
The factory smoke is unfolding in protesting curves
Like phantoms of black unappeased desires, yearning and struggling
and pointing upward;
While through its dark streets pass people, tired, useless,
Trampling the vague black illusions
That pave their paths like broad leaves of water-lilies
On twilight streams;
And there are smiles at times on their lips.
Only the great soul, denuded to the blasts of reality,
Shivers and groans.
And like two wild ideas lost in a forest of thoughts,
Blind hatred and blinder love run amuck through the city.
TAP-ROOT OR MELTING-POT?
Recent American poetry is to recent British poetry somewhat as New
York is to London. Its colours are higher and gayer and more diverse;
its outlines are more jagged and more surprising; its surfaces glitter
and flash as British poetical surfaces do not always do, though its
substances are often not so solid or so downright as the British.
Nowhere in America have we a poet of the deep integrity of Thomas
Hardy, a poet so rooted in ancient soil, ancient manners, ancient
dialect. Nor has England a poet shining from so many facets as Amy
Lowell, or a poet resounding with such a clang of cymbals—now gold,
now iron—as Vachel Lindsay. Experiment thrives better here than there;
at least, our adventurers in verse, when they go out on novel quests
for novel beauties, are less likely than the British to be held in by
steadying tradition, and they bring back all sorts of gorgeous plunder
considerably nearer in hue and texture to the flaming shop windows of
Fifth Avenue than to those soberer ones of Bond and Regent streets.
Even John Masefield, most brilliant living poet of his nation, runs
true to British form, grounded in Chaucer and Crabbe, fragrant with
England’s meadows, salt with England’s sea. Edgar Lee Masters, as
accurately read in Illinois as Masefield in Gloucester, writes of Spoon
River not in any manner or measure inherited with his speech, but more
nearly in that of the Greek Anthology, by Masters sharpened with a
bitter irony.
In all directions such borrowings extend. Even the popular verse men
of the newspapers play daily pranks with Horace, fetching him from
the cool shades of wit to the riotous companionship of Franklin P.
Adams and George M. Cohan. China and Japan have been discovered again
by Miss Lowell and Mr. Lindsay and Witter Bynner and Eunice Tietjens
and a dozen others; have been discovered to be rich treasuries of
exquisite images, costumes, gestures, moods, emotions. The corners
of Europe have been ransacked by American poets as by American
collectors, and translators at last are finding South America. Imagism
has been imported and has taken kindly to our climates: H. D. is its
finest spirit, Miss Lowell its firmest spokesman. Ezra Pound is a
translator-general of poetic bibelots, who seems to know all tongues
and who ransacks them without stint or limit. With exploration goes
excavation. Poets are cross-examining the immigrants, as T. A. Daly the
Italian-Americans. The myths and passions of Africa, hidden on this
continent under three centuries of neglect and oppression, have emerged
with a new accent in Mr. Lindsay, who does indeed see his Negroes too
close to their original jungles but who finds in them poetry where
earlier writers found only farce or sentiment. Still more remarkably,
the Indian, his voice long drowned by the march of civilization, is
heard again in tender and significant notes. Speaking so solely to his
own tribe, and taking for granted that each hearer knows the lore of
the tribe, the Indian must now be expanded, interpreted; and already
Mary Austin and Alice Corbin and Constance Lindsay Skinner have worked
charming patterns on an Indian ground. At the moment, so far as
American poetry is concerned, Arizona and New Mexico are an authentic
wonderland of the nation. Now poets and lovers of poetry and romance,
as well as ethnologists, follow the news of the actual excavations in
that quarter.
Indian and Negro materials, however, are in our poetry still hardly
better than aspects of the exotic. No one who matters actually thinks
that a national literature can be founded on such alien bases. Where,
then, are our poets to find some such stout tap-root of memory and
knowledge as Thomas Hardy follows deep down to the primal rock of
England? The answer is that for the present we are not to find it. We
possess no such commodity. Our literature for generations, perhaps
centuries, will have to be symbolized by the melting-pot, not by the
tap-root. Our geographical is also our spiritual destiny. The old idea
of America-making in its absurd ignorance demanded that each wave of
newcomers be straightway melted down into the national pot and that
the resultant mass be as simply Anglo-Saxon as ever. This was bad
chemistry. What has happened, and what is now happening more than
ever, is that of a dozen—a hundred—nationalities thrown in, each lends
a peculiar colour and quality. Arturo Giovannitti gives something that
Robert Frost could not give; Carl Sandburg something not to be looked
for from Edwin Arlington Robinson; James Oppenheim and Alter Brody
what would not have come from Indiana or Kansas. Such a fusion of
course takes a long time. The great myths and legends and histories of
the Britons lay unworked for centuries in Anglo-Saxon England before
the Normans saw them and built them into beauty. Eventually, unless
the world changes in some way quite new to history, the fusion will
be accomplished. But in the meantime experimentation and exploration
and excavation must be kept up. We must convert our necessities into
virtues; must, lacking the deep soil of memory, which is also prejudice
and tradition, cultivate the thinner soil which may also be reason and
cheerfulness. Our hope lies in diversity, in variety, in colours yet
untried, in forms yet unsuspected. And back of all this search lie the
many cultures, converging like immigrant ships toward the Narrows, with
aspirations all to become American and yet with those things in their
different constitutions which will enrich the ultimate substance.
X. IN THE OPEN
AUGUST NIGHTS AND AUGUST DAYS
At each new turning season I ask myself what annual phrase in the great
epic of the year most pricks the senses: the stir of sap in the maples,
the earliest robin coldly foraging across a bare lawn, crocuses or
cowslips or trailing arbutus in the muddy wood-lot, grass appearing
along a hundred borders, willow bark suddenly ripe for whistles, garden
soil warm and dry enough to risk seed in it, apple blossoms and lilacs
lifting the soul like music with their fragrance—the bright, young,
green procession from March’s equinox to June’s accomplished solstice;
or the higher pomps of summer, red and yellow—berries luxuriant on the
hills, wheat in the head, corn haughty with the pride of its stature,
meadow-larks that cry continually as cherubim, evenings spangled with
fireflies and alive with shrill bats and angry night-hawks and repining
frogs, the spare smell of mown hay, keen acrid dust flung through light
air by the lean hands of drouth; or golden, purple, imperial autumn—the
incredible blue of fringed gentians, apples compliant to hungry hands,
grapes dewy and fresh on tingling mornings, gardens bequeathing their
wealth to ready cellars, birch fires crackling on a hearth which had
nearly forgotten them, leaves so scattered underfoot that every
pedestrian sounds like a marching army, wild geese off for the south
with eager bugles, a frost transmogrifying the world in a night; or
white and black and dusky winter—sounds heard muffled over deadening
snow, the gorgeous privacy of long nights, the sweet, bitter coldness
of cheeks when the blast strikes them, blood triumphantly warmed by
exercise even in zero weather, the crisp flesh of fruit dug from pits
hid deep underground, the ringing blades of skates, the malicious whine
of sleigh runners, fat companionable snow-birds with an eye on the
pantry window, barns warm with the breath of ever-ruminant cows: which
is best? Is there any choosing? Should we all vote for the nearest?
Perhaps that is what I do when in this season I make my choice for the
sundowns of August, which, by some keenness in the winds that then
waken, clearly though not too brusquely prophesy, in the midst of a
consoling splendour, that the epic has an end: August of the blazing
noons, August of the cool nights.
* * * * *
The most blazing August on the heels of the most pitiless July has no
terrors for the man or woman who knows Herrick and can turn from torrid
cities to the meadows and brooks and hawthorn-guarded cottages of
Herrick’s dainty Devon. He rises for ever with the dawn and summons his
perennial Corinna, “sweet Slug-a-bed,”
To come forth, like the Spring-time, fresh and greene;
And sweet as Flora.
Love itself cannot inflame his morning worshippers: they walk through
the early streets to the woods of May, courting one another exquisitely
with all the forms of a ceremonial which Horace might have sung or
Watteau painted. Here, in one bright season, are daffodils and violets,
primroses and gilliflowers,
Millions of Lillies mixt with Roses,
tulips, pansies, marigolds, daisies, the cherry and the oak, laurels
and cypresses, grapes and strawberries, spring standing side by side
with purple harvest and cozy winter. Here are all exquisite scents, new
rain on turf and tree, the smoke of quaint poetical sacrifices;
The smell of mornings milk, and cream;
Butter of Cowslips mixt with them;
Of rosted warden, or bak’d peare;
“the flowre of blooming Clove,” “Essences of Jessimine,” honey just
brought in by bees, spiced wines, incomparable possets; the perfumes
of youth and love and joy. Here, too, are delicate forms and precious
colours, smooth narratives of a hundred rural customs chosen because
they fit fine verses, and whimsical pious little odes and graces before
meat and thanksgivings and creeds and prayers such as no other poet
ever uttered. Nowhere else has adoration better lent itself to union
with politeness than in this counsel to children:
Honour thy Parents; but good manners call
Thee to adore thy God, the first of all.
Surely something ran in Herrick’s veins which was calmer than the
hot blood of his kind in general. He laughs at Julia, Sapho, Anthea,
Electra, Myrha, Corinna, Perilla, and at himself for having had and
lost them; he tricks out his raptures of devotion with the blithest
figures of speech:
Lord, I am like to Misletoe,
Which has no root, and cannot grow,
Or prosper, but by that same tree
It clings about; so I by Thee;
he takes his ease in his country Zion as if it would last eternally
and yet amuses himself with cheerful epitaphs for himself and with
advice to his pretty mourners. He could be passionate enough about his
calling; but he saw his world as images of marble, as pictures of gold
set in silver, as charming ancient stories come to life again yet still
with the dignity of remembered perfectness about them. It is a defence
against August to remember the happy commentary upon Herrick which
Dryden wrote when he imitated the lines to Perilla—
Then shall my Ghost not walk about, but keep
Still in the coole, and silent shades of sleep—
in that admirable invitation to another cool world:
When, tired with following nature, you think fit
To seek repose in the cool shades of wit.
LAKE AND BIRD
I had one perfect day during one imperfect weekend. I woke immensely
early to a morning full of birds on a rough hill sloping down from
an old Berkshire parsonage by many ways and windings to the devious
Housatonic. I went dabbling on my knees among innumerable daisies and
buttercups and black-eyed Susans to find enough wild strawberries for
my breakfast, and ate them with reckless oceans of cream kept the
night in a spring so cold that on the most tropic days vessels come up
from it clouded and beaded. I neglected the newspapers all day, hoeing
and joyfully baking in my garden in the confident expectation of a
blessed reward. And then at six precisely, by the sun, not the clock,
I slipped, with some splashing, be it admitted, for my dive was eager,
into the cool, sweet, quiet, well-sunned, but still tonic waters of an
unforgettable lake. Repaid by the first keen shock for the whole day’s
scorching, I shouted and ploughed to a deeper pool I know, where the
water is never troubled and where now its crystal loneliness was broken
by nothing but a few pink laurel-blossoms wind-shaken down upon it.
Here I drifted, halcyon for that day, and waited. Not too late it came,
the timid challenge, the flaunting confession, the liquid lament, the
whistled prayer of the hermit thrush, pulsing through the replying
air. I let the spell take me, and lay for a long while at the summit of
rapture, not quite sure which was I, which was calm lake, and which was
radiant bird.
FIREFLIES IN CORNWALL
As I hurried down the muddy road I saw fireflies ahead of me splashing
the new darkness. And then suddenly the scene widened. On my left a
broad meadow rolled away up the mountain; on my right lay a broader
region of marshy ground sacred to flags and frogs. I knew that over
all that green meadow buttercups were contending with daisies which
should make it white or yellow, but now it was black with the night
though somehow brightened by the gleaming mist. In the swamp, too, I
knew there would soon be irises blooming, though now it had nothing
but the paler iridescence of the quiet drizzle. And yet the night was
alive with an uncanny and unaccustomed splendour. The fireflies were
holding some sort of carnival, it seemed, moving up and down the meadow
slope in glimmering processions and swarming thickly over the marsh
which they almost illuminated with their fitful and inclusive flashes.
There must have been thousands of them, for the usual intervals of
darkness never came, and every instant was spangled. But the marvel of
the occasion was not the number of lights but the magnitude of them.
By some trick of the mist, some reflection from the particles of water
suspended in the air, every firefly shone not as a vivid speck but as a
slow, large, bland splotch of mellow light. Over the swamp they were
so crowded and cast so many reflections upon the water and wet earth
and dripping flags that they had created the perfect semblance of a
lake on which numberless canoes rode softly with dancing lanterns. Up
the mountain meadow they seemed, and doubtless were, less numerous,
but the wonder continued, for they glowed here and there on the rising
hillside like searchers beating through the grass for something lost.
And, most exquisite of all, now and then on the high ridge of the hill
behind the meadow a lantern would flash and move down into the carnival
or up out of it. This hollow of the hills was a cup of light, filled
to the brim, which continually spilled over only to be replenished by
these bright creatures of the dark.
GARDENS
In any winter of our discontent let us think of gardens. The sun
looks north again, March is stirring somewhere, and in a few stubborn
weeks there will be another green spring with loud, cheerful robins,
insistent grass, and buds ready to turn pink or white at the warm touch
of the advancing season. We have lived long enough on the stores we
laid up from the harvest of last year. Like bears, we have grown thin
in our hollow trees and must resume our occupations. Too much winter
can destroy the genial sap that spring annually renews in the veins of
men as surely as in trees. Cities, which have built strong barriers
against the seasons, forget them, but they bring morals no less than
weather. The seasons are teachers that never cease teaching, and
examples that never fail to move us. Our tempers follow the sun.
Though it is true that the senses relax and ripen in a garden, a garden
is more than a sensual delight. Roses grow there, and radishes; so
does patience. That man who puts seed into a furrow at the same moment
tucks his hand through the crooked elbow of Time and falls into step.
He knows he must abide the days, must endure hot and cold, wet and dry,
the ups and downs of immeasurable nature. Infected almost at once with
peace, he feels his will surrendering its fretful individuality to the
ampler cause with which he has involved his fortunes. He sees that he
cannot profitably scold the rain; he cannot wear a chip on his shoulder
and dare the wind to knock it off. The stature of his will shrinks when
he learns how little he means to the rain or the wind, and the stature
of his wisdom increases. Vigilant of course he must remain. He must
take quick advantage of sunshine, as sailors do of the tides. He must
foreknow the storm by its signs. In the long run, his prosperity will
depend upon his eyes and hands, but he will be aware that he thrives by
virtue of the patience with which he tends a process which is ageless
and immortal.
Nor will he be patient merely for hours or months. As the seasons
depart and recur year after year, he will begin to realize what
centuries mean, epochs, and aeons. It is the weather which varies, not
the seasons. The gardener in his little plot looks out less feverishly
at elections and revolutions than other men. He has seen clouds before
and has lived through them confident of the sun. From an experience
stronger than dogma he knows that just after night there is dawn, and
that every winter is succeeded by a spring. What in another might be a
shallow optimism is in him a faith rooted in subsoil and bedrock, bred
and nourished in the vast, slow, undeviating habits of soil and sky. He
is conservative because he has seen the seasons perennially pass one
into the other without convulsions. He is radical because each spring
he has had to set the spade into his sleepy ground, has had to tear it
open and establish the new harvest on fresh seed. Others may stutter
about the strife of old and new, but the gardener sees old and new
eternally linked together with human toil. He perceives that history
continues, for he has observed the grass. He understands, not dimly but
certainly, that the tread of armies or the din of melting dynasties
and shattered governments may indeed touch him in his garden, may even
drive him forth into desolation, but that the work of the garden and
the duty of the gardener will go on. To the end of the world there must
be seed and toil and harvests.
Transcriber’s Notes
pg 21 Changed: the successful chief becames a king
to: the successful chief becomes a king
pg 88 Changed: possessed the Vision of Pierc Plowman
to: possessed the Vision of Piers Plowman
pg 131 Changed: the narrow house cannnot endure unlikeness
to: the narrow house cannot endure unlikeness
pg 146 Changed: studies has been due less to the deficiences
to: studies has been due less to the deficiencies
pg 193 Changed: fire which uses the air merely as it medium
to: fire which uses the air merely as its medium
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