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diff --git a/75524-h/75524-h.htm b/75524-h/75524-h.htm new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2d7e5c4 --- /dev/null +++ b/75524-h/75524-h.htm @@ -0,0 +1,7083 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html> +<html lang="en"> +<head> + <meta charset="UTF-8"> + <title> + The Roving Critic | Project Gutenberg + </title> + <link rel="icon" href="images/cover.jpg" type="image/x-cover"> + <style> + +body { + margin-left: 10%; + margin-right: 10%; +} + + h1,h2,h3 { + text-align: center; /* all headings centered */ + clear: both; +} + +p { + margin-top: .51em; + text-align: justify; + margin-bottom: .49em; + text-indent: 1em; +} + +hr { + width: 33%; + margin-top: 2em; + margin-bottom: 2em; + margin-left: 33.5%; + margin-right: 33.5%; + clear: both; +} + +hr.tb {width: 45%; margin-left: 27.5%; margin-right: 27.5%;} +hr.chap {width: 65%; margin-left: 17.5%; margin-right: 17.5%;} + +div.chapter {page-break-before: always;} +h2.nobreak {page-break-before: avoid;} + +table { + margin-left: auto; + margin-right: auto; +} +table.autotable { border-collapse: collapse; } + +.tdl {text-align: left; padding-left: .4em;} +.tdr {text-align: right; padding-left: 1em;} + +.pagenum { /* uncomment the next line for invisible page numbers */ + /* visibility: hidden; */ + position: absolute; + left: 92%; + font-size: small; + text-align: right; + font-style: normal; + font-weight: normal; + font-variant: normal; + text-indent: 0; + color: #A9A9A9; +} /* page numbers */ + +.blockquot { + margin-left: 5%; + margin-right: 10%; +} +.blockquotx { + margin-left: 20%; + margin-right: 10%; +} + +.center {text-align: center;} + +.smcap {font-variant: small-caps;} + +/* Images */ + +img { + max-width: 100%; + height: auto; +} +img.w100 {width: 100%;} + + +.figcenter { + margin: auto; + text-align: center; + page-break-inside: avoid; + max-width: 100%; +} + +/* Poetry */ +/* uncomment the next line for centered poetry */ +/* .poetry-container {display: flex; justify-content: center;} */ +.poetry-container {text-align: center;} +.poetry {text-align: left; margin-left: 5%; margin-right: 5%;} +.poetry .stanza {margin: 1em auto;} +.poetry .verse {text-indent: -3em; padding-left: 3em;} + +/* Transcriber's notes */ +.transnote {background-color: #E6E6FA; + color: black; + font-size:small; + padding:0.5em; + margin-bottom:5em; + font-family:sans-serif, serif; +} + +.fs80 {font-size: 80%} +.fs90 {font-size: 90%} +.fs120 {font-size: 120%} +.fs150 {font-size: 150%} +.fs300 {font-size: 300%} + +.no-indent {text-indent: 0em;} +.bold {font-weight: bold;} +.wsp {word-spacing: 0.3em;} + +p.drop-cap { + text-indent: 0em; +} +p.drop-cap:first-letter +{ + float: left; + margin: 0em 0.1em 0em 0em; + font-size: 250%; + line-height:0.85em; +} + +.upper-case +{ + text-transform: uppercase; +} + +h2 {font-size: 130%; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.6em; word-spacing: .3em;} +h3 {font-size: 90%; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.6em; word-spacing: .3em;} + +/* Poetry indents */ +.poetry .indent0 {text-indent: -3em;} +.poetry .indent1 {text-indent: -2.5em;} +.poetry .indent2 {text-indent: -2em;} +.poetry .indent20 {text-indent: 7em;} +.poetry .indent4 {text-indent: -1em;} + +/* Illustration classes */ +.illowp15 {width: 15%;} + +.lh {line-height: 1.5em;} + </style> +</head> +<body> +<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75524 ***</div> + +<div class="figcenter" style="width: 85%"> +<img src="images/cover.jpg" alt=""> +</div> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> + +<div class="chapter"> +<h1>THE ROVING<br> +CRITIC</h1> +</div> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> + +<div class="chapter"> +<p class="center no-indent fs120"><em>SOME BORZOI BOOKS</em></p> +</div> + +<div class="blockquotx"> +<p class="no-indent"> +FINDERS <em>by John V. A. Weaver</em><br> +POEMS <em>by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt</em><br> +INTO THE DARK <em>by Barbra Ring</em><br> +GOLDEN BIRD <em>by James Oppenheim</em><br> +LITERARY LIGHTS <em>by Gene Markey</em><br> +YOUR HIDDEN POWERS <em>by James Oppenheim</em><br> +FOX FOOTPRINTS <em>by Elizabeth J. Coatsworth</em><br> +THE STORY OF THE MIKADO <em>by W. S. Gilbert</em><br> +A LINE O’ GOWF OR TWO <em>by Bert Leston Taylor</em><br> +THE WORLD IN FALSEFACE <em>by George Jean Nathan</em><br> +</p> +</div> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> + +<div class="chapter"> +<p class="center no-indent fs300 wsp bold">THE ROVING<br> +CRITIC</p> +<br> +<p class="center no-indent fs150 wsp">CARL VAN DOREN</p> +<br> + +<figure class="figcenter illowp15" id="i_title" style="max-width: 39em;"> + <img class="w100" src="images/i_title.jpg" alt="Decoration"> +</figure> +<br> +<br> +<br> + +<p class="center no-indent wsp">NEW YORK<br> +<span class="fs120">ALFRED · A · KNOPF</span><br> +1923<br> +</p> +</div> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> + +<div class="chapter"> +<p class="center no-indent fs80 wsp"> +COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.<br> +<br> +<em>Published, March, 1923</em><br> +<br> +<br> +<br> +<em>Set up and printed by the Vail-Ballou Co., Binghamton, N. Y.<br> +Paper furnished by W. F. Etherington & Co., New York.<br> +Bound by H. Wolff Estate, New York.</em><br> +<br> +MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA<br> +</p> +</div> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> + +<div class="chapter"> +<p class="center no-indent wsp"> +TO<br> +<br> +GUY, FRANK, MARK, PAUL<br> +</p> +</div> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> + +<div class="chapter"> +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</span></p> + +<div class="blockquot"> +<p><em>These essays, sketches, and reviews +are reprinted, with the courteous permission +of the various publishers, +from</em> The Atlantic Monthly, The +Literary Review, The Nation, <em>and</em> +The Texas Review.</p> +</div> +</div> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> + +<div class="chapter"> +<h2 class="nobreak" id="CONTENTS">CONTENTS</h2> +</div> + +<table class="autotable lh"> +<tr> +<td class="tdl" colspan="2">I. TOWARD A CREED</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">A FOURTH DIMENSION IN CRITICISM</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_15">15</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">THE REVENGE OF THE BARDS</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_21">21</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">CREATIVE READING</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_27">27</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl" colspan="2"><br>II. THREE OF OUR CONQUERORS</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">THE POETICAL CULT OF LINCOLN</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_35">35</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">WHITMAN IN HIS CRISES</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_40">40</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">THE LION AND THE UNIFORM</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_45">45</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl" colspan="2"><br>III. TWO NOTES ON YOUTH</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">THE RELEASE OF YOUTH</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_59">59</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">YOUTH IS ALWAYS RIGHT</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_63">63</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl" colspan="2"><br>IV. HOWELLS: MAY 1920</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">EULOGIUM</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_69">69</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl" colspan="2"><br>V. NOOKS AND FRINGES</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">ON HATING THE PROVINCES</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_83">83</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">WHAT THE FATHERS READ</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_87">87</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">THE KIND MOTHER OF US ALL</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_92">92</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">MOCHA DICK</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_97">97</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">FOLK-LORE IN KENTUCKY</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_100">100</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">PAUL BUNYAN GOES WEST</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_105">105</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">THE WORST AMERICAN BOOK</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_108">108</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">AT THE SATURDAY CLUB</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_114">114</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">THE SILVER AGE OF OUR LITERATURE</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_121">121</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">JOHN BURROUGHS</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_125">125</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">BROAD HOUSE AND NARROW HOUSE</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_128">128</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">GOOD NAMES</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_133">133</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">PICTURES OF THE PAST</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_142">142</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">THE GREAT LABORATORY</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_146">146</a><span class="pagenum" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</span></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl" colspan="2"><br>VI. LONG ROADS</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">THE COSMIC IRONIES</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_153">153</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">JUSTICE OR MELODRAMA</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_158">158</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">THE CORRUPTION OF COMFORT</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_162">162</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">“GOD IS NOT DEAD OF OLD AGE”</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_167">167</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl" colspan="2"><br>VII. SHORT CUTS</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">PETIT UP TO THIRTY</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_175">175</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">IN LIEU OF THE LAUREATE</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_180">180</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">“MURDERING BEAUTY”</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_183">183</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">CHAIRS</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_186">186</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">INISHMORE, INISHMAAN, INISHEER</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_189">189</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">SWEETNESS OR LIGHT</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_192">192</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">CROWNING THE BISHOP</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_195">195</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl" colspan="2"><br>VIII. A CASUAL SHELF</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">HONESTY IS A GIFT</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_199">199</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">GOLDEN LYRICS</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_202">202</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">THE CHRISTIAN DIPLOMAT</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_205">205</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">LAWYER AND ELEGIST</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_207">207</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">WOMEN IN LOVE</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_209">209</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">MOSES IN MASSACHUSETTS</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_212">212</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">BROWN GIRLS</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_215">215</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">INVENTION AND VERACITY</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_217">217</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">A HERO WITH HIS POSSE</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_219">219</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">MARIA AND BATOUALA</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_221">221</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">STUPID SCANDAL</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_224">224</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">THE MUSE OF KNICKERBOCKER</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_228">228</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl" colspan="2"><br>IX. POETS’ CORNER</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">GREEK DIGNITY AND YANKEE EASE</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_231">231</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">THROUGH ELLIS ISLAND</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_238">238</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">TAP-ROOT OR MELTING-POT</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_244">244</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl" colspan="2"><br>X. IN THE OPEN</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">AUGUST NIGHTS AND AUGUST DAYS</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_251">251</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">LAKE AND BIRD</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_256">256</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">FIREFLIES IN CORNWALL</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_258">258</a></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdl"><span style="padding-left: 2em">GARDENS</span></td> +<td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_260">260</a></td> +</tr> +</table> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</span></p> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> + +<div class="chapter"> +<p class="center no-indent fs150 wsp bold"> +THE ROVING<br> +CRITIC<br> +</p> +</div> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</span></p> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> + +<div class="chapter"> +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</span></p> +<h2 class="nobreak" id="I_TOWARD_A_CREED">I. TOWARD A CREED</h2> +</div> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> + +<div class="chapter"> +<h3>A FOURTH DIMENSION IN +CRITICISM</h3> +</div> + +<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">Criticism</span> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 <cite>Madame Bovary</cite> and <cite>The Faerie Queene</cite>—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;<span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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 <cite>Uncle Tom’s +Cabin</cite> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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 <em>is</em> what he <em>lives</em>. +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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</span></p> + + +<h3>THE REVENGE OF THE BARDS</h3> + +<p>“The natural desire of every man,” says Peacock +in <cite>The Four Ages of Poetry</cite>, “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.”<span class="pagenum" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</span> +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.”</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</span> +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!</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</span> +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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</span></p> + + +<h3>CREATIVE READING</h3> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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 <cite>The +Playboy of the Western World</cite> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</span> +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 <em>Faust</em>.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</span> +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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</span></p> + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> + +<div class="chapter"> +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</span></p> +<h2 class="nobreak" id="II_THREE_OF_OUR_CONQUERORS">II. THREE OF OUR CONQUERORS</h2> +</div> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> + +<div class="chapter"> +<h3>THE POETICAL CULT OF LINCOLN</h3> +</div> + +<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">When</span> 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 <cite>Horation Ode</cite> 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 <cite>Commemoration Ode</cite><span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</span></p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</span> +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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</span></p> + + +<h3>WHITMAN IN HIS CRISES</h3> + +<p>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 <cite>The Gathering of the Forces</cite> contain +after all only ephemeral material which Whitman +wrote for the Brooklyn <cite>Daily Eagle</cite> 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 <cite>The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt<span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</span> +Whitman</cite>. What Whitman wrote for the <cite>Daily Eagle</cite> +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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 <cite>Song of Myself</cite>, of his experience +with what he called his Soul:</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</span></p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> +<div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">“I mind how once we lay, such a transparent summer morning,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d over upon me,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet.</div> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers.”</div> + </div> +</div> +</div> + +<p>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 <cite>Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking</cite>. 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.”</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> +<div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">“Demon or bird! (said the boy’s soul,)</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Is it indeed toward your mate you sing? or is it really to me?</div> + <div class="verse indent0">For I, that was a child, my tongue’s use sleeping, now I have heard you,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Now in a moment I know what I am for, I awake,</div><span class="pagenum" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</span> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">And already a thousand singers, a thousand songs, clearer, louder, and more sorrowful than yours,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me, never to die.”</div> + </div> +</div> +</div> + +<p>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 +<cite>Proud Music of the Storm</cite>. The poet lies in his +“lonesome slumber-chamber” haunted by the rhythms +of life:</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> +<div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">“Blast that careers so free, whistling across the prairies,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Strong hum of forest tree-tops—wind of the mountains,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Personified dim shapes—you hidden orchestras,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">You serenades of phantoms with instruments alert,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Blending with Nature’s rhythmus, all the tongues of nations.”</div> + </div> +</div> +</div> + +<p>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</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> +<div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">“Give me to hold all sounds, (I madly struggling cry,)</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Fill me with all the voices of the universe,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Endow me with their throbbings, Nature’s also,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">The tempests, waters, winds, operas and chants, marches and dances,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Utter, pour in, for I would take them all.</div><span class="pagenum" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</span> + <div class="verse indent0">Then I woke softly,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">And pausing, questioning awhile the music of my dream,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">And questioning all those reminiscences, the tempest in its fury,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">And all the songs of sopranos and tenors,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">And those rapt oriental dances of religious fervour,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">And the sweet varied instruments, and the diapason of organs,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">And all the artless plaints of love and grief and death,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">I said to my silent curious soul, out of the bed of the slumber-chamber,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Come, for I have found the clue I sought so long,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Let us go forth refresh’d amid the day,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Cheerfully tallying life, walking the world, the real,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Nourish’d henceforth by our celestial dream.</div> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">And I said, moreover,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Haply, what thou hast heard O soul was not the sound of winds,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Nor dream of raging storm, nor sea-hawk’s flapping wings, nor harsh screams,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Nor vocalism of sun-bright Italy,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Nor German organ majestic, nor vast concourse of voices, nor layers of harmonies,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Nor strophes of husbands and wives, nor sound of marching soldiers,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Nor flutes, nor harps, nor the bugle-call of camps,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">But, to a new rhythmus fitted for thee,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Poems bridging the way from Life to Death, vaguely wafted in the night air, uncaught, unwritten,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Which let us go forth in the bold day and write.”</div> + </div> +</div> +</div> + +<p>There was never a bolder conclusion to a poem in +the world.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</span></p> + + +<h3>THE LION AND THE UNIFORM</h3> + +<p>In <cite>The Ordeal of Mark Twain</cite> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</span> +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.”</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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 <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">sans-culotte</i>, became in most +outward ways a pillar of society, and he who was<span class="pagenum" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</span> +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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</span> +Brooks by mentioning it makes it look like a tiny +aspersion on Mark Twain’s courage. And once more, +this passage with regard to <cite>Huckleberry Finn</cite>, 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.”</p> + +<p>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:<span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</span> +“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 <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">force majeure</i>, 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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 <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">entourage</i>.” 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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</span> +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 <cite>King Lear</cite> 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 +<em>he</em> had walked such a fraying path.</p> + +<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</span> +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 <cite>Lettres Anglaises</cite>, +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.”</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</span></p> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> + +<div class="chapter"> +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</span></p> +<h2 class="nobreak" id="III_TWO_NOTES_ON_YOUTH">III. TWO NOTES ON YOUTH</h2> +</div> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> + +<div class="chapter"> +<h3>THE RELEASE OF YOUTH</h3> +</div> + +<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">John Fiske</span> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</span> +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?</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</span> +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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</span></p> + + +<h3>YOUTH IS ALWAYS RIGHT</h3> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</span> +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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</span></p> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> + +<div class="chapter"> +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</span></p> +<h2 class="nobreak" id="IV_HOWELLS_MAY_1920">IV. HOWELLS: MAY 1920</h2> +</div> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> + +<div class="chapter"> +<h3>EULOGIUM</h3> +</div> + +<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">Mark Twain</span> 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, +<em>Sustained.</em> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</span> +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 <em>real</em> 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 <em>documentary</em>; 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</span> +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.”</p> + +<p>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 <cite>Atlantic</cite> 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 <cite>The Innocents +Abroad</cite> to a point at which he was capable of writing +<cite>Huckleberry Finn</cite> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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 <cite>Son of the Middle Border</cite> +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 +<cite>Forty Years of It</cite>—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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</span> +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.”</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</span></p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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, <cite>Their Wedding Journey</cite>, 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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</span> +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, <cite>The Rise of Silas +Lapham</cite> or <cite>Literary Friends and Acquaintance</cite>. The +first is more intimate, because, as the characters were<span class="pagenum" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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;<span class="pagenum" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</span> +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—<cite>A +Modern Instance</cite>, <cite>The Rise of Silas Lapham</cite>, <cite>Indian +Summer</cite>, <cite>A Hazard of New Fortunes</cite>, <cite>The Kentons</cite>, +and that exquisite triumph of art and temper, <cite>A Chance +Acquaintance</cite>. (Of this last Howells himself said that +it made him more friends than any of the others; he +thought <cite>A Modern Instance</cite> the strongest, and he liked +<cite>Indian Summer</cite> 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.</p> + +<p>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 <cite>A Foregone Conclusion</cite>, “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 +<cite>The Kentons</cite>: “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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</span> +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 <cite>A Modern Instance</cite> and <cite>The Rise +of Silas Lapham</cite>; 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.</p> + +<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</span> +American boyhood has nowhere been more goldenly +recalled than in <cite>A Boy’s Town</cite>. Nowhere may there +be encountered more lovely records of a dreaming and +yet ambitious adolescence than in <cite>Years of My Youth</cite>. +<cite>My Literary Passions</cite> 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. <cite>My Mark +Twain</cite> is the most exquisite tribute yet paid by one +American man of letters to another. And <cite>Literary +Friends and Acquaintance</cite>, best of all pictures of the +classic days of Cambridge and Boston when Howells +was editor of the <cite>Atlantic</cite>, 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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</span></p> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> + +<div class="chapter"> +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</span></p> +<h2 class="nobreak" id="V_NOOKS_AND_FRINGES">V. NOOKS AND FRINGES</h2> +</div> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> + +<div class="chapter"> +<h3>ON HATING THE PROVINCES</h3> +</div> + +<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">Emerson</span> 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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</span> +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 <em>philosophes</em> 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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</span> +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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</span> +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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</span></p> + + +<h3>WHAT THE FATHERS READ</h3> + +<p>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....</p> + +<p>The Puritans in New England, indeed, knew or +cared little enough about Shakespeare. The late<span class="pagenum" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</span> +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 <cite>New England Courant</cite> 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 +<cite>Paradise Lost</cite> 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.</p> + +<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</span> +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. “<em>Old</em> +England,” says the <cite>Magnalia</cite> with pride, in 1702, after +the founding of Harvard “had more ministers from +<em>New</em>, than our New England had since <em>then</em> 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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</span> +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 <cite>History of the damnable Life and deserved +Death of Dr. John Faustus</cite>; the earliest play printed +in New England seems to have been Lillo’s edifying +<cite>George Barnwell</cite>, issued by James Franklin in the +<cite>Weekly Journal</cite> 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 +<cite>Arcadia</cite>, Head’s <cite>English Rogue</cite>, <cite>Pilgrim’s Progress</cite>, +<cite>Guy of Warwick</cite>, and <cite>Reynard the Fox</cite> 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 <cite>Gallantry</cite>.” 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 <cite>Watts’s</cite> Hymns.” And<span class="pagenum" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</span> +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 <cite>Spectator</cite> +and that Mather Byles,</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> +<div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">Harvard’s honor, and New England’s hope,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Bids fair to rise and sing and rival Pope,</div> + </div> +</div> +</div> + +<p class="no-indent">as a poetical friend neatly put it at the time.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</span></p> + + +<h3>THE KIND MOTHER OF US ALL</h3> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</span> +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</p> + +<p class="center no-indent fs90">see the rural virtues leave the land.</p> + +<p class="no-indent">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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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 <cite>The +Progress of Poetry</cite> Gray talked about the behaviour of +the Muse in Lapland and Chile; in <cite>The Bard</cite> 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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</span></p> + + +<h3>MOCHA DICK</h3> + +<p>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 <cite>Moby Dick</cite> 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?’”</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</span> +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.”</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</span> +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.’”</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</span></p> + + +<h3>FOLK-LORE IN KENTUCKY</h3> + +<p>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. +<cite>The American Credo</cite> 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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</span> +but these are superficial accidents. Otherwise it looks +as if the folk changes not much more rapidly than +mountains grow.</p> + +<p>The compilers of <cite>Kentucky Superstitions</cite> 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.</p> + +<p>The total result is an amazing palimpsest, as if each<span class="pagenum" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</span> +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.”</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</span></p> + +<p>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 <cite>Tom Sawyer</cite> and +<cite>Huckleberry Finn</cite> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</span> +than their outward manners. In <cite>Kentucky Superstitions</cite> +we have a document to help us in going deeper. +There is the germ of such another story as Hardy’s +<cite>The Withered Arm</cite> 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!’”</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</span></p> + + +<h3>PAUL BUNYAN GOES WEST</h3> + +<p>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 <cite>Paul Bunyan Comes +West</cite> and it should make all lovers of Americana and +all collectors of chapbooks snatch for it. What are +copies of the first <cite>Faustbuch</cite> fetching now?</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</span> +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.”</p> + +<p>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?</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</span></p> + + +<h3>THE WORST AMERICAN BOOK</h3> + +<p>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 <cite>The Bloody +Vendetta</cite>. 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.</p> + +<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</span> +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.”</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</span> +of misery, praying for the dreadful slaughter to be +stopped, and suing for happiness with the sunny side +of life in view....</p> + +<p>“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.”</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</span> +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.”</p> + +<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</span> +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.”</p> + +<p>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.”</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</span> +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.”</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</span></p> + + +<h3>AT THE SATURDAY CLUB</h3> + +<p>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 <cite>Atlantic</cite> dinners; the Saturday Club, for +which Ward had suggested a less didactic membership +and monthly dinners, was kept alive, clearly in no<span class="pagenum" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</span> +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.”</p> + +<p>Something more than the fact that the publishers +have made Edward Waldo Emerson’s <cite>The Early Years +of the Saturday Club</cite> somewhat in the likeness of <cite>The +Education of Henry Adams</cite> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</span> +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 <cite>Atlantic</cite>: “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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</span> +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.”</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</span> +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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</span> +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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</span></p> + + +<h3>THE SILVER AGE OF OUR LITERATURE</h3> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</span> +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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</span> +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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</span></p> + + +<h3>JOHN BURROUGHS</h3> + +<p>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 <em>Walden</em> 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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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?<span class="pagenum" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</span> +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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</span></p> + + +<h3>BROAD HOUSE AND NARROW HOUSE</h3> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</span></p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</span> +a happy accuracy Evelyn Scott, who called her first +novel <cite>The Narrow House</cite>, calls her second one <cite>Narcissus</cite>. +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.</p> + +<p>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 <cite>Narcissus</cite> 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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</span> +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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</span></p> + + +<h3>GOOD NAMES</h3> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</span> +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 +<cite>Tom Jones</cite> and <cite>Amelia</cite>, by Mr. Justice Fielding, than +in <cite>Joseph Andrews</cite> and <cite>Jonathan Wild</cite>, written while +the old Harry Fielding was not so far away.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>After Smollett, whom Sterne called Smelfungus, +there were many to practise the punning trick, which<span class="pagenum" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</span> +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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</span> +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 <em>screw</em> +and <em>gouge</em>, and Wardle of <em>warden</em> and <em>waddle</em>, but +they commonly elude analysis and seem new words for +new persons.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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!</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</span></p> + + +<h3>PICTURES OF THE PAST</h3> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</span> +<cite>Salammbô</cite>, 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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</span></p> + + +<h3>THE GREAT LABORATORY</h3> + +<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>The claim frequently made, that we cannot find in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</span> +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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</span></p> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> + +<div class="chapter"> +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</span></p> +<h2 class="nobreak" id="VI_LONG_ROADS">VI. LONG ROADS</h2> +</div> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> + +<div class="chapter"> +<h3>THE COSMIC IRONIES</h3> +</div> + +<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">The</span> 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>“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.”</p> + +<p>If any heard him, at least there was no sign. The<span class="pagenum" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>“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.”</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>“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.”</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</span> +speak next, but, settling upon no one, they mingled in +the centre and there rested quietly, splashing the pavement +with gorgeous colours.</p> + +<p>“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.”</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</span> +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?”</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</span> +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.”</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>The Solar Irony stepped forward and sat down between +Canis Major and Canis Minor, who unhesitantly +made room for him.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</span></p> + + +<h3>JUSTICE OR MELODRAMA?</h3> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>The mood which followed the war was the mood of +melodrama, on a larger scale, perhaps, than ever<span class="pagenum" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</span> +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 <em>Lusitania</em>, 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.</p> + +<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</span> +for one can never be sure at what point in it one is +standing. When the <em>Lusitania</em> 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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</span></p> + + +<h3>THE CORRUPTION OF COMFORT</h3> + +<p>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 <cite>Thousand Nights and a Night</cite> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</span> +hundred tricks and secrets which gave them power +over earth, air, fire, and water, endowing them with +human riches without human discipline.</p> + +<p>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;<span class="pagenum" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</span> +long hungry, they stuffed their bellies till they were +sick with surfeit; long home-bound, they ran wild till +they were lost.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</span> +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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</span></p> + + +<h3>“GOD IS NOT DEAD OF OLD AGE”</h3> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</span> +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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</span> +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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</span></p> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> + +<div class="chapter"> +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</span></p> +<h2 class="nobreak" id="VII_SHORT_CUTS">VII. SHORT CUTS</h2> +</div> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> + +<div class="chapter"> +<h3>PETIT UP TO THIRTY</h3> +</div> + +<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">From</span> 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 <cite>Blossomes</cite> Cowley +bore midway his second decade? And Chatterton!</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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 <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">toga poetica</i>, 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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 <cite>Thanatopsis</cite> 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. <cite>Poems by Two Brothers</cite>, Poe’s <cite>Tamerlane</cite>, +<cite>The Blessed Damozel</cite> (unanswerable challenge), drove +him ashamed and passionate to his rhyming. But +once again he found out a defence. If Pope’s <cite>Ode +on Solitude</cite>, written at twelve for lasting honour, was +a prank of genius, why not <cite>The Blessed Damozel</cite>? +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.</p> + +<p>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 <cite>Culprit Fay</cite> mocked +him; Holmes’s <cite>Old Ironsides</cite> roared at him; Campbell’s +<cite>Pleasures of Hope</cite> enticed him; Milton’s <cite>Nativity</cite> +ode submerged and cowed him. “No, no,” Petit<span class="pagenum" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</span> +cried, as he read again these resonant strophes, “I +will be a minor poet and never strive with Milton.”</p> + +<p>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 <cite>Alastor</cite>, +fruit of twenty-three.</p> + +<p>But the years would not cease, nor would they +bring Petit’s summons. At twenty-two he thought +of <cite>Götz von Berlichingen</cite> and thrust his boundary +back. Twenty-three taunted him with <cite>Paracelsus</cite> +and <cite>Endymion</cite> and Milton’s wistful <cite>On his Being +Arrived to the Age of Twenty-three</cite>. Petit passed +twenty-four sickly conscious of <cite>The Defence of Guenevere</cite> +and <cite>Tamburlaine</cite> and those cantos of <cite>Childe +Harold</cite> 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 <cite>The Ancient Mariner</cite>, +Collins’s pure <cite>Odes</cite>, and the fair, the fragrant, the +unforgettable <cite>Arcadia</cite>. Nor was twenty-seven better: +what could Petit’s numbness say to <cite>The Strayed +Reveller</cite>, <cite>The Shepheardes’ Calender</cite>, and <cite>Poems, +Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect</cite>? With twenty-eight, +<cite>The Lyrical Ballads</cite> and <cite>Atalanta in Calydon</cite> saw +his hopes begin a slow decline, which dropped off, the +next year, amid contracting ardour, past Johnson’s +<cite>London</cite>, Crabbe’s <cite>Village</cite>, Clough’s hospitable <cite>Bothie</cite>, +into thirty’s hopeless wilderness. After thirty poets +are not made. And Petit was thirty.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</span></p> + +<p>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!</p> + +<p>Still, Scott found himself at thirty-four.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</span></p> + + +<h3>IN LIEU OF THE LAUREATE</h3> + +<p>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.”</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> +<div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">Awhile the frowning Lord of arms</div> + <div class="verse indent2">Shall yield to gentler Pow’rs the plain;</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Lo! Britain greets the milder charms</div> + <div class="verse indent2">Of Cytherea’s reign.</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Mute is the trumpet’s brazen throat,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">And the sweet flute’s melodious note</div> + <div class="verse indent2">Floats on the soft ambrosial gale;</div> + <div class="verse indent0">The sportive Loves and Graces round,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Beating with jocund step the ground,</div> + <div class="verse indent2">Th’ auspicious nuptials hail!</div> + <div class="verse indent0">The Muses cease to weave the wreath of war,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">But hang their roseate flow’rs on Hymen’s golden car!</div> + </div> +</div> +</div> +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</span></p> +<p>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:</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> +<div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent20">The Mother weeps</div> + <div class="verse indent0">At that white funeral of the single life,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Her maiden daughter’s marriage; and her tears</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Are half of pleasure, half of pain—the child</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Is happy—even in leaving <em>her</em>!</div> + </div> +</div> +</div> + +<p>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:</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> +<div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">Lo! the fam’d isle, which hails thy chosen sway,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">What fertile fields her temperate suns display!</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Where Property secures the conscious swain,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">And guards, while Plenty gives, the golden grain....</div> + <div class="verse indent0">These are Britannia’s praises. Feign to trace</div> + <div class="verse indent0">With rapt reflections Freedom’s favourite race!</div> + <div class="verse indent0">But though the generous isle, in arts and arms</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Thus stands supreme, in Nature’s choicest charms;</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Though George and Conquest guard her sea-girt throne</div> + <div class="verse indent0">One happier blessing still she calls her own—</div> + </div> +</div> +</div> + +<p>and that happier blessing was of course the bride.</p> + +<p>I find myself coming back to the bride, as one does<span class="pagenum" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</span> +when mortals are married. Here suddenly the homely +muse of one of our republican poets overtakes me:</p> + +<div class="blockquot"> + +<p>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!</p> +</div> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</span></p> + + +<h3>“MURDERING BEAUTY”</h3> + +<p>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.”</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</span> +stripped it of its finest heroes because they chose death +by the delicate headswoman rather than life at any +less exquisite hands whatever?</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</span></p> + + +<h3>CHAIRS</h3> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</span></p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</span> +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:</p> + +<div class="blockquotx"> +<p class="no-indent">Men in chairs<br> +Put on airs.</p> +</div> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</span></p> + + +<h3>INISHMORE, INISHMAAN, INISHEER</h3> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</span> +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 <cite>Cymbeline</cite> and <cite>The Merchant of +Venice</cite>, tales known elsewhere in the words of Boccaccio +and of the <cite>Gesta Romanorum</cite>. 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?</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</span></p> + + +<h3>SWEETNESS OR LIGHT</h3> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</span> +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?</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</span></p> + + +<h3><span class="smcap">Crowning the Bishop</span></h3> + +<div class="poetry-container"> +<div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent2">Apse, altar, architrave,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Chasuble, rochet, pyx, chimere,</div> + <div class="verse indent2">Clerestory, nave,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Throne, mitre, incense, sheer</div> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent2">Surplices like snow,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Choir boys carolling like throstles:</div> + <div class="verse indent2"><em>It was not so</em></div> + <div class="verse indent0"><em>With Jesus and the lean Apostles</em>.</div> + </div> +</div> +</div> +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</span></p> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> + +<div class="chapter"> +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</span></p> +<h2 class="nobreak" id="VIII_A_CASUAL_SHELF">VIII. A CASUAL SHELF</h2> +</div> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> + +<div class="chapter"> +<h3>HONESTY IS A GIFT</h3> +</div> + +<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">A good</span> 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 <cite>This Simian +World</cite> it was his fancy which perhaps did most to +get him a hearing. In <cite>The Crow’s Nest</cite>, 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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>He is primarily an anthropologist, as he showed in +<cite>This Simian World</cite>. 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</span> +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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</span></p> + + +<h3>GOLDEN LYRICS</h3> + +<p>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, <cite>The Song of Songs</cite>. 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 <cite>Song of Songs</cite> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</span> +Jewish Saadia, writing in the tenth century, detected +in the <cite>Song of Songs</cite> 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</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> +<div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">“That Solomon sang the fleshly Fair</div> + <div class="verse indent1">And gave the Church no thought whate’er,”</div> + </div> +</div> +</div> + +<p class="no-indent">but they were generally outside the beaten track of +doctrine.</p> + +<p>Mr. Jastrow brought to his labours on the <cite>Song of +Songs</cite> at once the erudition and common sense with +which he had already edited <cite>Job</cite> and <cite>Ecclesiastes</cite> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</span> +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 <cite>Song of Songs</cite> 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 <cite>Song of +Songs</cite> than all the rest of literature.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</span></p> + + +<h3>THE CHRISTIAN DIPLOMAT</h3> + +<p>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 <cite>On the Manner of Negotiating with Princes</cite>. +“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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</span> +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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</span></p> + + +<h3>LAWYER AND ELEGIST</h3> + +<p>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, +<cite>Farmington</cite>. 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 +<cite>Farmington</cite>, 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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</span> +Such dreams do not lie. They are the foundations +on which truth mounts above facts. To <cite>Farmington</cite> +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 <cite>Hannibal</cite> never +sounds through Mr. Darrow’s softer pages: herein +lies a limitation of <cite>Farmington</cite>, 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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</span></p> + + +<h3>WOMEN IN LOVE</h3> + +<p>The hunger of sex is amazingly set forth by +D. H. Lawrence, whose novel <cite>The Rainbow</cite> was +suppressed in England and who has now brought +out his <cite>Women in Love</cite> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>If references to Greek Cults come naturally to +mind in connection with <cite>Women in Love</cite>, 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</span> +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; +<cite>Women in Love</cite> belongs to the metaphysics and the +mystical theology of love.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</span></p> + + +<h3>MOSES IN MASSACHUSETTS</h3> + +<p>More than thirty years after Brooks Adams first +flayed his ancestors in <cite>The Emancipation of Massachusetts</cite> +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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</span> +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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</span></p> + + +<h3>BROWN GIRLS</h3> + +<p>The ardours celebrated in <cite>Coloured Stars: Versions +of Fifty Asiatic Love Poems</cite>, 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, <cite>Black Hair</cite> +and <cite>Lover’s Jealousy</cite>, or the Kurdistan <cite>Vai! Tchod-jouklareum</cite>—full +of raptures as barbarously naked +as the girls they praise. Out of the same fury comes +the Altai <cite>War Song</cite>, 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 <cite>My Desire</cite>, only a little less passionate,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</span> +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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</span></p> + + +<h3>INVENTION AND VERACITY</h3> + +<p>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 <cite>Peter Whiffle</cite> Carl +Van Vechten has crossed the two literary forms fascinatingly. +His hero has a <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">fin de siècle</i> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</span> +by <em>Sister Carrie</em>, 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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</span></p> + + +<h3>A HERO WITH HIS POSSE</h3> + +<p>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 <cite>The Last +Thirty Days of Christ</cite> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</span> +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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</span></p> + + +<h3>MARIA AND BATOUALA</h3> + +<p>The face of <cite>Batouala</cite> 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 <cite>Maria Chapdelaine</cite>: 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. <cite>Batouala</cite> +is no primitive piece of art: no naïve ballad of +the people; no saga, remembering the harsh conflicts<span class="pagenum" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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. <cite>Batouala</cite> +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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</span> +to explain: it states.” Being a genuine work +of the imagination, <cite>Batouala</cite>, 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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</span></p> + + +<h3>STUPID SCANDAL</h3> + +<p>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 <cite>The +Paternity of Abraham Lincoln</cite>, 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;<span class="pagenum" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>All this is sheer gossip, motivated partly by an +ugly desire to hurt Lincoln’s fame and partly by a<span class="pagenum" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</span> +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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</span></p> + + +<h3><span class="smcap">The Muse of Knickerbocker</span></h3> + +<div class="poetry-container"> +<div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">We guiterman a volume when,</div> + <div class="verse indent2">Though but one pen can rightly do it,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">We view it reasonably, then</div> + <div class="verse indent2">With ripe and rippling rhymes review it.</div> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">(How delicate should be the eye,</div> + <div class="verse indent2">How deft and definite the hand</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Of the audacious poet by</div> + <div class="verse indent2">Whom Guiterman is guitermanned!)</div> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">This Arthur with the nib of gold,</div> + <div class="verse indent2">The quaintest of the critic carpers</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Who sang New York, has sung the Old</div> + <div class="verse indent2">Manhattan now in ballads (Harpers).</div> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">The color of his music moves</div> + <div class="verse indent2">From Dobson’s to our Yankee Doodle’s;</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Assay his mixture, and it proves,</div> + <div class="verse indent2">However, Guiterman in oodles.</div> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">He sings the founders: “Kips, Van Dorns,</div> + <div class="verse indent2">Van Dams, Van Wycks, Van Dycks, Van Pelts,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Van Tienhovens, Schermerhorns,</div> + <div class="verse indent2">And Onderdoncks and Roosevelts.”</div> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">Of Tappan Zee, of Nepperhan,</div> + <div class="verse indent2">Of Hellegatt, of Spuyten Duyvil,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Of’t Maagde Paetje, Guiterman</div> + <div class="verse indent2">Here rhymes in rings around each rival.</div> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">Adieu vers libre, adieu the news,</div> + <div class="verse indent2">Adieu the horrid shilling-shocker;</div> + <div class="verse indent0">We hail the marriage of the Muse</div> + <div class="verse indent2">To Mynheer Diedrich Knickerbocker.</div> + </div> +</div> +</div> +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</span></p> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> + +<div class="chapter"> +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</span></p> +<h2 class="nobreak" id="IX_POETS_CORNER">IX. POETS’ CORNER</h2> +</div> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> + +<div class="chapter"> +<h3>GREEK DIGNITY AND YANKEE EASE</h3> +</div> + +<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">The</span> single solid volume of Edwin Arlington +Robinson’s <cite>Collected Poems</cite> 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, <em>Dear Friends</em>:</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> +<div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">The shame I win for singing is all mine,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">The gold I miss for dreaming is all yours;</div> + </div> +</div> +</div> + +<p class="no-indent">that he from the first deliberately chose the path of +stubborn thought rather than of genial emotion +appears from his unforgettable <cite>George Crabbe</cite>:</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</span></p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> +<div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">Whether or not we read him, we can feel</div> + <div class="verse indent0">From time to time the vigour of his name</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Against us like a finger for the shame</div> + <div class="verse indent0">And emptiness of what our souls reveal</div> + <div class="verse indent0">In books that are as altars where we kneel</div> + <div class="verse indent0">To consecrate the flicker, not the flame.</div> + </div> +</div> +</div> + +<p class="no-indent">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.</p> + +<p>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 <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">passé</i> or the merely mediocre. +Consider Bewick Finzer,</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> +<div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">Familiar as an old mistake,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">And futile as regret;</div> + </div> +</div> +</div> + +<p class="no-indent">consider Miniver Cheevy, who wept that he was ever +born because he could not stand the present and longed +for the colours of romance—</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</span></p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> +<div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">Miniver Cheevy, born too late,</div> + <div class="verse indent2">Scratched his head and kept on thinking;</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Miniver coughed, and called it fate,</div> + <div class="verse indent2">And kept on drinking;</div> + </div> +</div> +</div> + +<p class="no-indent">consider the Poor Relation, who has perforce outstayed +her welcome and on whom</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> +<div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">The small intolerable drums</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Of Time are like slow drops descending;</div> + </div> +</div> +</div> + +<p class="no-indent">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—</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> +<div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">Who died because he couldn’t laugh—</div> + </div> +</div> +</div> + +<p class="no-indent">and Calverly and that incomparably futile Tasker +Norcross whose</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> +<div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent4">tethered range</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Was only a small desert,</div> + </div> +</div> +</div> + +<p class="no-indent">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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</span> +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 <cite>Ben Jonson Entertains +a Man from Stratford</cite>, likens men to flies for +brevity and unimportance:</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> +<div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">Your fly will serve as well as anybody,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">And what’s his hour? He flies, and flies, and flies,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">And in his fly’s mind has a brave appearance;</div> + <div class="verse indent0">And then your spider gets him in her net,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">And eats him out and hangs him up to dry.</div> + <div class="verse indent0">That’s Nature, the kind mother of us all.</div> + <div class="verse indent0">And then your slattern housemaid swings her broom,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">And where’s your spider? And that’s Nature, also.</div> + <div class="verse indent0">It’s Nature, and it’s Nothing. It’s all Nothing.</div> + <div class="verse indent0">It’s all a world where bugs and emperors</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Go singularly back to the same dust,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Each in his time; and the old, ordered stars</div> + <div class="verse indent0">That sang together, Ben, will sing the same</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Old stave tomorrow.</div> + </div> +</div> +</div> + +<p class="no-indent">And in his great flight into legend, in <cite>Merlin</cite> and +<cite>Lancelot</cite>, 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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 <cite>Uncle Ananias</cite>:</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</span></p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> +<div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">His words were magic and his heart was true,</div> + <div class="verse indent2">And everywhere he wandered he was blessed.</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Out of all ancient men my childhood knew</div> + <div class="verse indent2">I choose him and I mark him for the best.</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Of all authoritative liars, too,</div> + <div class="verse indent2">I crown him loveliest.</div> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">How fondly I remember the delight</div> + <div class="verse indent2">That always glorified him in the spring;</div> + <div class="verse indent0">The joyous courage and the benedight</div> + <div class="verse indent2">Profusion of his faith in everything!</div> + <div class="verse indent0">He was a good old man, and it was right</div> + <div class="verse indent2">That he should have his fling....</div> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">All summer long we loved him for the same</div> + <div class="verse indent2">Perennial inspiration of his lies;</div> + <div class="verse indent0">And when the russet wealth of autumn came,</div> + <div class="verse indent2">There flew but fairer visions to our eyes—</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Multiple, tropical, winged with a feathery flame,</div> + <div class="verse indent2">Like birds of paradise....</div> + </div> +</div> +</div> +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</span></p> + + +<h3>THROUGH ELLIS ISLAND</h3> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>“In this country immigrants from the same town +stick together like a swarm of bees from the same hive<span class="pagenum" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</span> +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.”</p> + +<p>One of the finest lyrics of his which I have seen +thus gives a picture of the world in which he then +moved:</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> +<div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">In the dark verdure of summer</div> + <div class="verse indent0">The railroad tracks are like the chords of a lyre gleaming across the dreamy valley,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">And the road crosses them like a flash of lightning.</div> + </div> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">But the souls of many who speed like music on the melodious heart-strings of the valley</div><span class="pagenum" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</span> + <div class="verse indent0">Are dim with storms.</div> + <div class="verse indent0">And the soul of a farm lad who plods, whistling, on the lightning road</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Is a bright blue sky.</div> + </div> +</div> +</div> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</span> +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.”</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</span> +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.”</p> + +<p>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 <cite>The City</cite>:</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> +<div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">We who were born through the love of God must die through the hatred of Man.</div> + <div class="verse indent0">We who grapple with the destruction of ignorance and the creation of unwitting love—</div> + <div class="verse indent0">We struggle, blinded by dismal night in a weird shadowy city.</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Yet the city itself is lifting street-lamps, like a million cups filled with light,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">To quench from the upraised eyes their thirst of gloom;</div> + <div class="verse indent0">And from the hecatombs of aching souls</div> + <div class="verse indent0">The factory smoke is unfolding in protesting curves</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Like phantoms of black unappeased desires, yearning and struggling and pointing upward;</div> + <div class="verse indent0">While through its dark streets pass people, tired, useless,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Trampling the vague black illusions</div> + <div class="verse indent0">That pave their paths like broad leaves of water-lilies</div> + <div class="verse indent0">On twilight streams;</div><span class="pagenum" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</span> + <div class="verse indent0">And there are smiles at times on their lips.</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Only the great soul, denuded to the blasts of reality,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Shivers and groans.</div> + <div class="verse indent0">And like two wild ideas lost in a forest of thoughts,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Blind hatred and blinder love run amuck through the city.</div> + </div> +</div> +</div> +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</span></p> + + +<h3>TAP-ROOT OR MELTING-POT?</h3> + +<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</span> +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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</span></p> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> + +<div class="chapter"> +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</span></p> +<h2 class="nobreak" id="X_IN_THE_OPEN">X. IN THE OPEN</h2> +</div> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> + +<div class="chapter"> +<h3>AUGUST NIGHTS AND AUGUST DAYS</h3> +</div> + +<p class="drop-cap"><span class="upper-case">At</span> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</span> +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.</p> + +<hr class="tb"> + +<p>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,”</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</span></p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> +<div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">To come forth, like the Spring-time, fresh and greene;</div> + <div class="verse indent0">And sweet as Flora.</div> + </div> +</div> +</div> + +<p class="no-indent">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,</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> +<div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">Millions of Lillies mixt with Roses,</div> + </div> +</div> +</div> + +<p class="no-indent">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;</p> + + +<div class="poetry-container"> +<div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">The smell of mornings milk, and cream;</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Butter of Cowslips mixt with them;</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Of rosted warden, or bak’d peare;</div> + </div> +</div> +</div> + +<p class="no-indent">“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</span> +ever uttered. Nowhere else has adoration better lent +itself to union with politeness than in this counsel to +children:</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> +<div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">Honour thy Parents; but good manners call</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Thee to adore thy God, the first of all.</div> + </div> +</div> +</div> + +<p>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:</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> +<div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">Lord, I am like to Misletoe,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Which has no root, and cannot grow,</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Or prosper, but by that same tree</div> + <div class="verse indent0">It clings about; so I by Thee;</div> + </div> +</div> +</div> + +<p class="no-indent">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—</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</span></p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> +<div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">Then shall my Ghost not walk about, but keep</div> + <div class="verse indent0">Still in the coole, and silent shades of sleep—</div> + </div> +</div> +</div> + +<p>in that admirable invitation to another cool world:</p> + +<div class="poetry-container"> +<div class="poetry"> + <div class="stanza"> + <div class="verse indent0">When, tired with following nature, you think fit</div> + <div class="verse indent0">To seek repose in the cool shades of wit.</div> + </div> +</div> +</div> +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</span></p> + + +<h3>LAKE AND BIRD</h3> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</span> +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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</span></p> + + +<h3>FIREFLIES IN CORNWALL</h3> + +<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</span> +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.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</span></p> + + +<h3>GARDENS</h3> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</span> +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.</p> + +<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</span> +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.</p> + + +<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop"> + +<div class="chapter transnote"> +<h2 class="nobreak bold fs150" id="Transcribers_Notes">Transcriber’s Notes</h2> + +<table class="autotable lh"> +<tr> +<td class="tdr">pg 21 Changed:</td> +<td class="tdl">the successful chief becames a king</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdr">to:</td> +<td class="tdl">the successful chief becomes a king</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdr">pg 88 Changed:</td> +<td class="tdl">possessed the Vision of Pierc Plowman</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdr">to:</td> +<td class="tdl">possessed the Vision of Piers Plowman</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdr">pg 131 Changed:</td> +<td class="tdl">the narrow house cannnot endure unlikeness</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdr">to:</td> +<td class="tdl">the narrow house cannot endure unlikeness</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdr">pg 146 Changed:</td> +<td class="tdl">studies has been due less to the deficiences</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdr">to:</td> +<td class="tdl">studies has been due less to the deficiencies</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdr">pg 193 Changed:</td> +<td class="tdl">fire which uses the air merely as it medium</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td class="tdr">to:</td> +<td class="tdl">fire which uses the air merely as its medium</td> +</tr> +</table> +</div> + +<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75524 ***</div> +</body> +</html> + |