Part 17

“We have no princes, for whom we toil, starve, and bleed: we are the most perfect society now existing in the world. Here man is free as he ought to be.”

Our first novelist who sought a paradise of American nature was James Fenimore Cooper. Revolting against both the feudalism of aristocratic Europe and the crude democracy of Jacksonian America, Cooper sought refuge in projecting his ideals in the character of Leatherstocking and also in such a Utopian paradise as in The Crater. Whatever one may think of Cooper’s Indians, his “females,” his woodcraft, or his rhetoric, Leatherstocking remains a great contribution to the fiction of the world, “perhaps,” according to Professor Paine, “the greatest embodiment of native character in American literature.” He is strangely compounded of Cooper’s memories of his old hunter-friend Shipman, of the heroic saga of the early frontiersman as synthesised in Daniel Boone, of the Rousseauistic-Wordsworthian myth of the natural man spiritualised by contact with forest and stream, and of the idealism of American manhood. According to Cooper’s summary,

“... His feelings appeared to possess the freshness and nature of the forest in which he passed so much of his time, and no casuist could have made clearer decisions in matters relating to right and wrong.... In short ... he was a fair example of what a just-minded and pure man might be, while untempted by unruly or ambitious desires, and left to follow the bias of his feelings, amid the solitary grandeur and ennobling influences of a sublime nature.”

In 1828, however, we find Cooper disillusioned: “All attempts to blend history and romance in America have been comparative failures.... The baldness of American life is in deadly hostility to scenic representation.” And in The Crater (1847) we find him creating a Utopia in a fabulous mid-Pacific island in order to furnish a contrast to the wretchedness of contemporary American life. This is a story of how some folk, shipwrecked on a reef which is the crater of a volcano, succeed in causing vegetation to grow, of how they create a “settlement surrounded with a sort of earthly paradise” which is finally “buried beneath the ocean.” The story, as Cooper conceives it, is a parable: “Of such is the world and its much-coveted advantages. For a time our efforts seem to create, and to adorn, and to perfect, until we forget our origin and destination, substituting self for that divine hand ...” Already, in The Monikins (1835), born of bitter disenchantment, Cooper the former idealist had presented the world as a country ruled by a race of monkeys who laughed to scorn the Yahoo race of mankind. The hope of an American paradise of nature ended for Cooper in disillusionment; natural goodness, democracy, human ideals are revealed here as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals. Professor Pattee compares Cooper’s final pessimism with that of Mark Twain: “Both began as border-minded individualists, parochial-minded, intoxicated with American idealism; both by travel and by wide contacts with urban pessimism were educated into blasé cosmopolitanism ... and both went out at last in utter misanthropy.... It is an American evolution!”

The most significant history of our national quest for a material happiness is perhaps embodied in the work of Mark Twain, whose much-discussed pessimism may be explained mainly by the fact that, as the spokesman of frontier America living exclusively “in the present,” he served as the faithful mirror to a whole nation in which an Industrial Revolution, philosophic mechanistic determinism, and the collapse of illusions led to despair. His stories illustrate the changing importance of the two planes of consciousness in the frontier mind--the consciousness of a hopeful and radiant illusion, and the consciousness of a hopeless and sordid reality. Take three stories, representing three different periods. The Jumping Frog (1865), dealing with the winning of a bet by roguery, embodies in a humorous way the reckless exuberance and joyousness of the dawning West after the Gold Rush. To this type belong also the books which glorify the “natural man” and the free-born American--Roughing It (1873), Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and Huck Finn (1884). In contrast, his first book, Innocents Abroad (1869), represents the frontiersman’s life-long contempt for European tradition and Europe, “one vast museum of magnificence and misery,” groping “in the midnight of priestly superstition for sixteen hundred years.” A story of a second period, The Million Pound Bank Note (1893) mirrors a materialistic “gilded age” in which, lured on by a fabulous hope, men bowed to the Golden Calf while the spectre of reality haunted their thoughts. In this story the two planes of consciousness are in equipoise until the end, when the plane of illusion prevails. It is the tale, briefly, of how a poor tramp masquerades as the owner of a million pound bank note; grim poverty stalks behind him, but every one worships the illusion of his wealth, and he finally wins the girl of his heart as well as the million pounds. The story is a parable of the West: these were the days of illusory fortunes in transcontinental railroads, in iron and steel, the days of the Morgans and Carnegies and Fricks and Goulds. “I am,” said Mark Twain, “frightened at the proportion of my prosperity ... Whatever I touch turns to gold.” In 1895 he was bankrupt. But take a story representative of the third period--The $30,000 Bequest (1907). A poor book-keeper and his wife, learning of a promised fortune at the death of a relative, each night “put the plodding world away, and lived in another and a fairer, reading romances to each other, dreaming dreams, comrading with kings and princes.” They increasingly neglect realities and scorn their associates. “The castle-building habit, the day-dreaming habit--how it grows! What a luxury it becomes; how we revel in them, steep our souls in them, intoxicate ourselves with their beguiling fantasies--oh, yes, and how soon and how easily our dream life and our material life become so immingled and so fused together that we can’t tell which is which, any more.” Just as the Golden West was unable to keep its “dream life,” its illusions, triumphant over its “material life,” its stark reality, so with the brutal news that the “town had to bury” the deceitful relative, the poverty-stricken book-keeper and his wife “lived yet two years, in mental night, always brooding, steeped in vague regrets and melancholy dreams”--like the modern realists!

What did Mark Twain report regarding his early hope for a material paradise? In The Mysterious Stranger (1916) he recorded his final despair, his conviction that life is cruel and meaningless--a “wandering forlorn among the empty eternities”--and in that nightmare of the fancy cowardice, hypocrisy and slavery are all that man can hope for. After the death of his daughter the master of comedy said, “My life is a bitterness, but I am content; for she has been enriched with the most precious of all gifts--the gift that makes all other gifts mean and poor--death.” His What Is Man? and To a Person Sitting in Darkness express the same vein. “There is, of course, a Master Mind, but it cares nothing for our happiness or our unhappiness ... As to the hereafter, we have not the slightest evidence that there is any ...” To him man became “a poor joke--the poorest that was ever contrived!”

Although Hamlin Garland came to believe that “truth was a higher quality than beauty” and set himself down as “an unflinching realist,” one must recall that he comes of a race of “potential poets, bards, and dreamers,” that he traces in general the disillusionment resulting from an idyllic hope based upon an idealistic quest for an American paradise of nature. He records the “deep vein of poetry,” the illusion, through which the pioneer viewed a sordid reality, “the place of the rainbow, and the pot of gold.” “Beneath the sunset lay the enchanted land of opportunity.”

“When we’ve wood and prairie land, Won by our toil, We’ll reign like kings in fairy land, Lords of the soil!”

Here is Pater’s “Sangreal of an endless pilgrimage” transferred to prairie-land. Later he confesses, “I had idealised all the figures and scenes of my boyhood.” “This land of my childhood,” “its charm, its strange dominion,” he has to admit, “did not in truth exist--it was a magical world, born of the vibrant union of youth and firelight, of music and the voice of moaning winds.” Like Wordsworth’s early “light that never was, on sea or land,” Garland’s illusion “has all the quality of a vision, something experienced in another world,” covered with “a poetic glamour.”

However, if the Son of the Middle Border sought a pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow which did not exist, if he is pursuing fancifully a phantom of hope, he is honest enough to record the results of such a quest. As he grew up he noted a “growing bitterness”--“disillusionment had begun.” The Shelleyan rainbow of hope faded into the light of common day. What had been the “marvel of a golden earth before a crimson sky” became merely “Uncle Sam’s domain, bleak, semi-arid, and wind-swept.” “I perceived little that was poetic, little that was idyllic.”

“What purpose does a man serve by toiling like that for sixty years with no increase in leisure, with no growth in mental grace?... At the moment nothing glozed the essential tragic futility of their existence.... The essential tragedy and hopelessness of most human life under the conditions into which our society was swiftly hardening embittered me, called for expression, but even then I did not know that I had found my theme.... Now, suddenly I perceived the futility of our quest....”

It is clear, also, that Garland is attempting a serious generalised study of the outcome of frontier hope. The young orator, meeting his father, is shocked at his sudden appearance of age and gloom: “He had come a long way from the buoyant faith of ’66, and the change in him was typical of the change in the West--in America.” “The almost universal disappointment and suffering of the West was typical.” “All the gilding of farm life melted away. The hard and bitter realities came back upon me in a flood ... Every house I visited had its individual message of sordid struggle and half-hidden despair.” Garland, then, has given us a cross-section of our national history; he has faithfully recorded the “almost universal” despair which greets men who would “reign like kings in fairyland.”

Rolvaag’s Giants in the Earth, “A Saga of the Prairie,” is another impressive record of the Odyssey “Toward the Sunset” of the frontiersman and the finding of despair instead of the pot of gold. Per Hansa and his religious wife Beret, Norwegians, journey “straight toward the west, straight toward the sky line,” “deeper and deeper into a bluish-green infinity--on and on, ... for Sunset Land.” Finally they halt and raise a sod hut in “the endless solitude,” the “eternal, unbroken wilderness”; they plant crops, and winter sets in; Beret has a child. Here again we meet the two planes of frontier consciousness--idyllic hope built on illusion and the dread of a sordid and terrifying reality.

“That summer Per Hansa was transported, was carried farther and ever farther away on the wings of a wonderful fairy tale--a romance in which he was both prince and king, the sole possessor of countless treasures. In this, as in all other fairy tales, the story grew ever more fascinating and dear to the heart, the farther it advanced.... Ever more beautiful grew the tale; ever more dazzlingly shone the sunlight over the fairy castle.”

On one side there is the “divine restlessness,” the “enchanting joyousness” of Per Hansa, on the other, Beret’s poignant yearning for human companionship and inner spiritual peace which her dread of the stark reality cannot satisfy. “Bleak, grey, God-forsaken, the empty desolation stretched on every hand ... How could one lift up one’s voice against such silence!” As winter came on Beret saw only the snow, and for her the day “died in a pitch-black night that weighed down the heart.” Her reflections give the key to the book:

“The country did not at all come up to her expectations; here, too, she saw enough of poverty and grinding toil. What did it avail, that the rich soil lay in endless stretches? More than ever did she realise that ‘man liveth not by bread alone.’... Even the bread was none too plentiful at times....

“But no sooner had they reached America than the west-fever had smitten the old settlements like a plague. Such a thing had never happened before in the history of mankind; people were intoxicated by bewildering visions; they spoke dazedly, as though under the force of a spell.... ‘Go west!... Go west, folks!... The farther west, the better the land!’ Men beheld in feverish dreams the endless plains, teeming with fruitfulness, glowing, out there where day sank into night--a Beulah Land of corn and wine!... Ever westward led the course, to where the sun glowed in matchless glory as it sank at night; people drifted about in a sort of delirium, like birds in mating time; then they flew toward the sunset, in small flocks and large--always toward Sunset Land.... Now she saw it clearly: here on the trackless plains, the thousand-year-old hunger of the poor after human happiness had been unloosed!”

As she expects to die in childbirth, she pleads with Per Hansa to take the other children back to civilisation: “Human beings cannot exist here!... They grow into beasts!” And the magic of a fairy tale turns out to be simply nature red in tooth and claw. In the last section of the book, entitled “The Great Plain Drinks the Blood of Christian Men and is Satisfied,” the story is told of how Per Hansa the faithful, the hopeful, the loving husband and father, is frozen to death while going for a doctor to help a neighbour.

“There was the Red Son of the Great Prairie, who hated the Palefaces with a hot hatred; stealthily he swooped down upon them, tore up and laid waste the little settlements. Great was the terror he spread; bloody the saga concerning him.

“But more to be dreaded than this tribulation was the strange spell of sadness which the unbroken solitude cast upon the minds of some. Many took their own lives; asylum after asylum was filled with disordered beings who had once been human.... Then, too, there were years of pestilence--toil and travail, famine and disease.”

The frontier is exhausted, but it should be carefully noted that the quest for a physical, external paradise lives on in the American machine-age, in the dream of an industrial Utopia. To take but one illustration recorded in our fiction, Sherwood Anderson’s Poor White--paralleling the frontier stories--traces the transition from the optimism born of untapped resources to the despair of a standardised industrialism. It is the tale of a stolid boy, Hugh McVey, who manages to invent machines from which every one hopes great things; it is supposed to be typical, to present a cross-section of American life.

“In every mind the future was bright with promise. Throughout the whole Mid-American country ... a hopeful spirit prevailed.... The youth and optimistic spirit of the country led it to take hold of the hand of the giant, industrialism, and lead him laughing into the land.... The thing that was happening in Bidwell happened in towns all over the Middle West. Out through the coal and iron regions of Pennsylvania, into Ohio and Indiana, and on westward into the States bordering on the Mississippi River, industry crept. Gas and oil were discovered in Ohio and Indiana. Over night towns grew into cities. A madness took hold of the minds of the people.... Wealth seemed to be spurting out of the very earth.... Farmers owning oil-producing land went to bed in the evening poor and owing money at the bank, and awoke in the morning rich.”

But Hugh McVey, “the poor white, son of the defeated dreamer by the river,” finds mere money and the satisfaction of physical needs insufficient. “He was unfilled by the life he led.” Conscious of “some indefinable, inner struggle,” “he fought to accept himself, to understand himself, to relate himself with the life about him.” For the sanctity of the individual personality America had substituted the worship of mass production, of material gain.

“It was a time of hideous architecture, a time when thought and learning paused. Without music, without poetry, without beauty in their lives or impulses, a whole people, full of the native energy and strength of lives lived in a new land, rushed pell-mell into a new age.”

In place of the free workman, joyously expressing with his own hands the dream of his own mind, came the factory-hand, blindly bitter from the machine-standardisation which thwarted the self-expression which even the farmer enjoyed. In the town of Bidwell, Jim Gibson exults in selling machine-made harnesses and ruining Joe Wainsworth, the old harness maker. Finally, in a fit of rage Wainsworth kills his tormentor. Clara, the wife of Hugh McVey, points the moral:

“In her mind the harness maker had come to stand for all the men and women who were in secret revolt against the absorption of the age in machines and the products of machines. He had stood as a protesting figure against what her father had become and what she thought her husband had become.... As a child she had gone often to Wainsworth’s shop with her father or some farm hand, and she now remembered sharply the peace and quiet of the place.... Everything worth while is very far away.... The machines men are so intent on making have carried them very far from the old sweet things.”

And we have Anderson’s summary indictment of industrialism:

“Modern men and women who live in industrial cities are like mice that have come out of the fields to live in houses that do not belong to them. They live within the dark walls of the houses where only a dim light penetrates, and so many have come that they grow thin and haggard with the constant toil of getting food and warmth.”