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diff --git a/75524-0.txt b/75524-0.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..abd315d --- /dev/null +++ b/75524-0.txt @@ -0,0 +1,5067 @@ + +*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75524 *** + + + + + + 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 + + + +*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75524 *** |