Part 16

Alastor and Epipsychidion are matchless records of his fruitless quest for the phantom of desire. DeQuincey’s fantasies are “filled with perishing dreams, and the wrecks of forgotten deliriums.” The Lady of Shalott and The Palace of Art testify to Tennyson’s reluctant renunciation of the life of illusion. Swinburne characterised himself in A Nympholept, while his friend, the author of The Earthly Paradise, strove to

“build a shadowy isle of bliss Midmost the beating of the steely sea.”

With this background in mind, let us see to what extent the American story-tellers’ hope for a paradise of supernal beauty coincides with the idyllic, indeterminate hope of the English romanticists. In The Author’s Account of Himself, Irving, our first master of the short story, states his Old World longing “to escape, in short, from the common-place realities of the present,” to “the shadowy grandeurs of the past,” the “earthly paradise” of “Bellissima Granada” and the legend-haunted Alhambra. The Legend of Prince Ahmed al Kamel, dealing with the quest for the phantom of desire, illustrates the idyllic quality of his imagination. The Prince, called the “Perfect” on account of his “super-excellence,” receives from a dove tidings of a fair princess--“no flower of the field could compare with her for loveliness.” In the Spanish spring-time the Prince, a “pilgrim of love,” resolves to “seek this unknown princess throughout the world.” Guided by a parrot and an owl, he eventually finds her in the court of her hostile father. The lover produces his “silken carpet of the throne of Solomon,” and after confessing his devotion, “the carpet rose in the air, bearing off the prince and princess ... and then disappeared in the blue vault of heaven.” Irving, however, sought “escape ... from the common-place” not only in the picturesque fantasies of Old Spain but also in the glamorous aspects of the American past, as illustrated in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. In “a remote period of American history,” among “some of the goodliest scenes of the mighty Hudson,” Ichabod rides on a “fine autumnal day” through the “rich and golden livery” of a natural paradise to win the “peerless,” “ripe and melting and rosy-cheeked Katrina” and her “unimaginable luxury.” Introduced by lines from The Castle of Indolence, The Legend illustrates Irving’s somewhat sentimental and humorous continuation of the merely recreational Arcadianism of earlier days. And the ruse of the Headless Horseman, in connection with the “twilight superstitions” of one who was “a perfect master of Cotton Mather’s History of New England Witchcraft,” suggests the interesting tendency of the native Puritan interest in things unearthly, with the waning of faith, to become a subject for the æsthetic imagination as in the case of Hawthorne and Poe.

Unlike Irving, Poe takes the idyllic dream seriously. He defines the Poetic Principle as “simply the Human Aspiration for Supernal Beauty,” manifested “in an elevating excitement of the Soul.” Of course, as every one knows, his vigorous reason controlled the decadent imagination and emotion of the earlier Gothic school and made him perhaps our greatest master of the short story technique. But let us illustrate and define the content of his “aspiration,” his “elevating excitement of the Soul.” Where does he seek happiness? One thinks of the “delirious bliss” of “the Valley of the Many-Coloured Grass” in Eleanora. We might better, however, turn to The Domain of Arnheim, where Ellison, with “a fortune of four hundred and fifty million dollars,” seeks to satisfy his passion for an exclusively “physical loveliness,” his “four elementary conditions of bliss,” which are “free exercise,” “the love of woman,” “contempt of ambition,” and “an object of unceasing pursuit.” After a four year quest he finds in the “luxuriant nature of the Pacific Islands” “an elevated tableland of wonderful fertility and beauty”; it was the “Paradise of Arnheim,” combining everything rich and voluptuous. Ellison, however, sought to gratify the “one passion of his soul, the thirst for beauty,” “above all ... in the sympathy of a woman, not unwomanly, whose loveliness and love enveloped his existence in the pure atmosphere of Paradise.” Thus the content of Poe’s aspiration, as well as his references here to the “chimera of the perfectionists” “Turgot, Price, Priestley and Condorcet,” to “Fonthill,” the birthplace of Vathek, and to the “rapt day-dreams of De Staël,” suggest that his aspiration is essentially one with that ceaseless and aimless sensuous longing already illustrated in the English romanticists. Or take The Island of the Fay, which deals with the contemplation of “the glory of God” in “natural scenery”--“all within the Spirit Divine”--in a “rivulet and island,” “all one radiant harem of garden beauties.” Shelley-like, he sees approach the “enchanted” island a gentle Fay in a “fragile canoe” with a “phantom of an oar.” This vision of loveliness, however, passed “disconsolately with her boat into the region of the ebony flood,” and “darkness fell over all things and I beheld her magical figure no more.” Thus, as Professor Foerster has so finely said, Poe gives us only “shuddering harmonies of the murky subconscious, and roseate harmonies of sensuous longing posing as spirituality.... His vision oscillated not between the earthly and the supernal, but between the infernal and the Arcadian.” But what did Poe report regarding the success of his aspiration for supernal beauty? “To be thoroughly conversant with Man’s heart,” he concludes, “is to take our final lesson in the iron-clasped volume of Despair.” Thinking of writing a book on his life, he said: “No man will ever dare write it. No man could write it, even if he dared. The paper would shrivel and blaze at every touch of the fiery pen.”

Perhaps the most vigorous and passionate Arcadian in American literature is Herman Melville, mariner and mystic. Descended from Dutch and New England parents proud and conservative, Melville was driven to “the water world,” he tells us, by “sad disappointments ... united with a naturally roving disposition.” He deserted his ship and found in the valley of the Typees “perpetual hilarity. Surrounded by all the luxurious provisions of nature,” the innocent natives enjoy the idyllic bliss “that springs principally from that all-pervading sensation which Rousseau told us he at one time experienced: the mere buoyant sense of healthful, physical existence.” This was before the missionaries and “the worst attendances of civilisation” drove “all peace and happiness from the valley.” In Mardi, frankly idyllic and nympholeptic, devoted to the savages “as they are not,” Melville’s nostalgic idealism and his hatred of reality become intensified. Here he creates a dream-girl, Yillah, “the earthly semblance of that sweet vision, that haunted my earliest thought,” and the book is a record of the allegorical quest for her through all the nations of the earth. It follows Unitarianism and Transcendentalism, with their hope for the infinite perfectibility of men; it is the quest of Alastor and Epipsychidion, the quest of Novalis for the Blue Flower. “But fiery yearnings their own phantom-future make, and deem it present. So, if after all these fearful, fainting trances, the verdict be, the golden haven was not gained;--yet, in bold quest thereof better to sink in boundless deeps than float on vulgar shoals; and give me, ye gods, an utter wreck, if wreck I do.” If Melville fled, however, “not so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern”--such as the “Babylonish brick-kiln of New York,” “Commonness and Conventionalism,” “mines and marts,” and Democracy, “the harlot on horseback”--his first-hand experience with the reality of a sea red in tooth and claw as well as “the mystery of iniquity” tended to clash with his dreams of Utopia. Moby-Dick was born of this clash between the hope of a paradise of supernal beauty and the sight of a malignant reality from the deck of a whaler. We have his own commentary on the final results of nympholeptic longing:

“Explain this darkness, exorcise this devil, ye cannot.... The truest of men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and the Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. All is vanity. All.... He who ... calls Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men.... And your only Mardian happiness is but exemption from great woes--no more.... Sadness makes the silence throughout the realms of space; Sadness is universal and eternal.”

Let us skip the realism of the later nineteenth century, most of which is essentially arid, and approach such a figure as Floyd Dell. Born of autobiographical revery, Moon-Calf is the history of a “lonely, unhappy, desperately desiring and bewildered child” in various Middle Western towns as he sought refuge in dreams from “the mysterious and troublesome real world which he feared and disliked.” The avenues of escape are two: the “gorgeous fantasies which were unrolled for him in the pages of books,” and the quest of the dream-girl. Lured by the hope of “freedom, of happiness, of a world altogether new and beautiful,” Felix becomes a Socialist, only to find later that “that garret Utopia had somehow lost its savour.” He becomes a factory worker--in the chaste language of his boss, “the messiest, absent-mindedest, God-damn carelessest person he had ever seen around a factory.” And then he tries newspaper work, and is again discharged. Then “he wanted, with a kind of nostalgia, to write that novel.” Like Shelley, he sought refuge from a world to which he refused to adjust himself by turning “his gaze inward upon a world of ideas and dreams.” As Wheels says, “The world itself is hideous. You can’t do anything with it. But you can dream beautiful dreams.... There is no other beauty.” An “incorrigible Utopian,” a member of the Agnostic Society, Felix escaped to poetry--an “enchanted land”--loving the “drug-like beauty” of “words, which were like a perfumed breeze out of nowhere, or out of some strange life lived before, affecting him with a strange nostalgia.”

“Nay, I was sent a wanderer On Beauty’s desperate quest-- To go forever seeking Her, Nor, ere I find her, rest.”

And then there is the quest for the dream-girl. First there is Rose, the gardener’s daughter, whom he meets in the attic and to whom he reads Rousseau’s Confessions. One night they stay in the woods, watching the stars, and “awakened chill and stiff, a little before dawn.” In “the innermost caves of fantasy” she was the “Virgin Queen” of Atlantis, and he her Harper.... “She was ... hope that turns to despair.” And then there was Margaret, Helen Raymond, Daisy Fisher, Emily, Mrs. Miller, Lucy, and finally Joyce, with whom he spent the nights in the cabin. He explains to Joyce that he seeks “something better than just ordinary, everyday happiness,” that he doesn’t believe in private property, God, the home, or the support of one’s wife. He wants a companionship “at once light and gracious, irresponsible and sincere, generous and self-respecting!” Finally he felt “a discrepancy between her and a not very distinct ideal of his imagination.” He “clung to the memory of his shadow-land of ideas” in preference to the “world of desperate reality,” and when his beloved Joyce tells him she is to work out her human destiny with another the “world of his dreams fell shattering about him.” Obviously, Moon-Calf is the creation of the sort of hope which robbed Shelley of “peace within.”

Let us turn to Willa Cather, whose main theme is the struggle for æsthetic or emotional self-realisation amid the sordid environment of either the frontier or an industrial society. In O Pioneers! most piteous is the fate of the fair Marie Tovesky, murdered in the arms of her lover. In The Song of the Lark Thea Kronsburg develops her rare voice in spite of a gossipy Colorado town. “There is only one big thing--desire.” In My Ántonia the heroine says, “That is happiness--to be dissolved in something complete and great.” Her lust for richness of experience leads to her becoming an unmarried mother and finally the mother of a large family. In Youth and the Bright Medusa a typical story is that of Paul, whose longing for an æsthetic paradise in a flatly stolid industrial town led him to robbery and to suicide after a week’s fulfilment of his hopes. Most instructive, perhaps, is The Professor’s House, based on the fruitless struggle of the romantic spirit against materialism and convention. The Professor does not “think much of science as a phase of human development”; he resisted the new “commercialism” in education; he preferred his old dingy study to the one in the pretentious house which his worldly wife and daughters had planned; he loathes the petty quarrels of his daughters over fashions; and his wife accuses him of “shutting yourself away from everybody.” In place of materialism and convention, however, he seeks to substitute not a central interest in what is most richly and typically human but rather a refuge in the romantic past: in the pomp of the Middle Ages when man was “a principal in a gorgeous drama with God”; in the bygone glories of the Spanish adventurers; in reliving in revery his youth, “the realest of his lives”; in the loving study of many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore; and in his interest in his former student’s worship of the ancient Cliff-dwellers. The seemingly irrelevant interpolation of Tom Outland’s story of his inability to interest official Washington, “so petty, so slavish,” in his “religious emotion” regarding his discovery of the relics of the Cliff-dwellers is explained by its paralleling and under-scoring the Professor’s own struggle--the romantic spirit struggling in vain against materialism and convention. Finally, when the Professor’s family departed for Europe, he “thought of eternal solitude with gratefulness,” and “wanted to run away from everything he had intensely cared for.” One night while he is resting in his old study a storm blows out his gas stove and slams his window shut: he awakens to find himself “nearly asphyxiated”; he wished to die. “He hadn’t lifted his hand against himself--was he required to lift it for himself?” He cannot bear the thought of his wife’s return and the continuation of their way of life. Finally an old friend revives him, but he found that “he had let something go--and it was gone: something very precious.” He reflects that “his apathy” will not trouble a family “preoccupied with their own affairs.” No, the merely romantic devotion to what is picturesque in the storied past will never avail in the quest for peace in a conventional and materialistic environment.

Like Poe, Joseph Hergesheimer strives to escape “the dreary and impertinent duty of improving the world” in his worship of an unattainable beauty. His friend Mr. Cabell finds “in all the Hergesheimer novels” “men labouring toward the unattainable, and a high questing foiled.” For example, in Linda Condon, based on this theme, Peyton, a sculptor, seeks in vain to win the beautiful Linda, who marries another. The sculptor endeavours to sublimate his passion in the creation of a great statue, which is destroyed by a mob, and he dies in forlorn desolation.

“Love was the supreme force, and its greatest expression a desire beyond the body.... The endless service of beauty. Of course, a woman--but never the animal; the spirit always. Born in the spirit, served in the spirit, ending in the spirit. A direct contradiction, you see, to nature and common sense, frugality and the sacred symbol of the dollar.... The old gesture toward the stars, the bridge of perfection, the escape from the fatality of the flesh. Yet it was a service of the body made incredibly lovely in actuality and still never to be grasped. Never to be won.”

This spiritualised beauty, however, is of course dependent upon sensuousness, and Mr. Hergesheimer asserts that “the whole discharge of my responsibility was contained in the imperative obligation to ... put down the colours and scents and emotions of existence.” And, like Keats, like all who found life on a merely sensuous beauty, he is haunted by the dread of transience, by “that sharp sense of beauty which came from a firm, delicate consciousness of certain high pretensions, valours, maintained in the face of imminent destruction ... in the category none was sharper than the charm of a woman, soon to perish in a vanity of array as momentary and iridescent as a May-fly.” He tells us that he creates ideal beauty as a result of “the assault of a persuasive discontent.” Nothing matters but an unattainable sensuous beauty; and this merely impresses him with its evanescence. This transient beauty can be arrested only by art, and he begins a later essay on art with the words, “I am getting damned tired of art....”

Perhaps the endless and aimless longing for the unattainable has received most elaborate treatment at the hands of Mr. Hergesheimer’s friend, James Branch Cabell. In Beyond Life, a series of essays, he outlines his literary creed, his hostility to realism. Holding that “veracity is the one unpardonable sin,” he “perceives this race ... to be beyond all wording petty and ineffectual,” and he follows the “instinct of any hurt animal to seek revenge ... in the field of imagination” by retreating to Poictesme, “that fair country ... which is bounded by Avalon and Phæacia and Sea-coast Bohemia, and the contiguous forests of Arden and Broceliande, and on the west of course by the Hesperides.” Let us examine the quality and success of Mr. Cabell’s aspiration as embodied in The Cream of the Jest. Felix Kennaston, the hero, is actually a conventional novelist, a conservative property-owner, a Presbyterian, and a good husband. Inwardly, however, he is a dreamer who seeks to escape from the thralldom of actuality in his quest of “Ettarre, who embodied all Kennaston was ever able to conceive of beauty and fearlessness and strange purity, all perfections, all the attributes of divinity, in a word, such as his slender human faculties were competent to understand.” “It is the cream of a vile jest,” he says, “that I am forbidden ever to win quite to you, ever to touch you.” These magic dreams of Ettarre are induced by a sigil--a broken disc which Felix found on one of his walks. Finally, near his death, it is discovered that this magic sigil is only “the metal top of a cold cream jar,” and his dreams become a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing. This is perhaps the blackest pessimism in American literature--the conviction that reality is a “dragging nightmare,” and the discovery that the illusion which alone makes life bearable is founded on nothing more sacred than the broken “top of a cold cream jar.” And it should be noted that, all Mr. Cabell’s books being parts of a “Biography,” Felix is nothing less than a symbol of “humanity.” “His history was, in essentials, the history of our race thus far. All I advanced for or against him, was true of all men that have ever lived.”

Jurgen may be said to deal mainly with the poignancy of the realisation of the contrast between the veiled loveliness of youthful illusions and a cold and ugly sensuous reality; relief is sought through an escape from this reality in dreaming of these illusions now shattered, or in dreaming of new illusions. In actuality, Jurgen is only a dirty little pot-bellied pawn-broker of the Middle Ages married to a shrewish, cowardly wife. Through magic, however, he is enabled to pack into one year “the follies of a quarter of a century,” to seek through a land of fabulous loveliness the phantom of desire. There he meets Dorothy la Désirée, “in all things perfect,” as he had loved her in the “garden between Dawn and Sunrise”; in reality she was a “horrible lascivious woman.” And there in her robe of flaming silk is the young Guenevere, “the fairest of mortal women”; there is the Queen Sylvia Tereu of pallid charm who vanishes at dawn; there is Anaitis, the personification of a nature myth, with her ecstatic rites and sensual orgies; there is the plump Chloris, loveliest of Hamadryads; there is Queen Helen, for whose fabulous beauty he hungered even in childhood; there is the proud Dolores, “lovely as a hawk is lovely”; there is Florimel who dwelt by the Sea of Blood; and there is Phyllis, Satan’s wife, “the loveliest little slip of devilishness.” Of one and all Jurgen tires. His remark that his “tender heart and tolerably keen eyes” force him “to jeer out of season” to avoid “far more untimely tears” reminds us of the Bohemian Byron who finally confesses with infinite sadness:

“If I laugh at any mortal thing, ’Tis that I may not weep; and if I weep, ’Tis that our nature cannot always bring Itself to apathy.”

And in the end we have Jurgen’s Shelley-like admission of the futility and hopelessness of his aimless longing:

“Oh, nothing can help me, for I do not know what thing it is that I desire!... For I am Jurgen who seeks he knows not what.... I have gone romancing through the world, ... nowhere have I found what I desired.... I am compact of weariness and apprehension, for I no longer discern what thing is I, nor what is my desire, and I fear that I am already dead.”

It is evident, then, that in the hope for a paradise of supernal beauty Americans have been lured as by a Siren to an abyss of despair of which the English romanticists, who experimented with this idyllic hope, warned us over a century ago. The Edward Young who sported in his paradisiacal “empire of chimeras” “cast the total” of his life as “despair.” Keats reported that in the romantic “Temple of Delight”

“Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine.”

And Shelley of the iridescent dreams, who would

“Hope till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates,”

confessed in the end:

“Alas! I have nor hope nor health, Nor peace within nor calm around.”

Very beautiful are these rainbow visions--but they are conjured out of night.

Let us turn to a second sort of hope--the hope of an American paradise of nature. Although the paradise of nature appears in Vergil, in Renaissance pastorals by Lyly, Sidney, and Spenser, in Perdita’s shepherd home and in the sylvan cave of Cymbeline’s sons, its use was mainly either decorative or allegorical until the eighteenth century. In 1711 Shaftesbury proclaimed the natural man benevolent, compassionate, and altruistic; and as such he appears in Ossian. Pope said, “The state of Nature was the reign of God.” Rousseau broadcast the doctrine that civilisation had tended to corrupt the morals of mankind, while he described the enchanting life of man in a natural paradise. Cowper united literary simplicity, religious emotionalism, and the naturalistic humanitarianism of Rousseau. Burns glorified the simple peasant close to nature. And Coleridge and Southey dreamed fondly of an American Pantisocracy--“A Dell of Peace and Equality”--on the banks of the Susquehanna. In 1771, Philip Freneau, our first man of letters, deriving his radical democracy and his devotion to the indigenous scene from naturalism, envisaged “The Rising Glory of America”:

“A new Jerusalem, sent down from heaven, Shall grace our happy earth, ... Thence called Millennium. Paradise anew Shall flourish, by no second Adam lost ... No tempting serpent to allure the soul From native innocence.”

Indeed, it is interesting to speculate upon the extent to which this English romantic faith in the “native innocence” of mankind, transplanted to the inexhaustible resources of the American frontier, has under these unique conditions furnished philosophic sanction for an unbridled materialism which has become so characteristically national. Frontier isolation tended to breed self-confidence, equality, self-reliance, optimism, contempt for artificial distinctions and a dependence upon the material world. Crèvecœur in 1782 defined “an American” as a “new man who acts upon new principles.”